RAF Harrier Ground Attack - Falklands by Jerry Pook

Author:Jerry Pook
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783031573
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2013-03-27T16:00:00+00:00

Wednesday, 26 May 1982

John Rochfort and I were scrambled from the first five-minute deck alert, after sitting for just over an hour on deck. Our task was an Armed Recce mission, and during the departure we discovered to our disgust that neither of us had a serviceable IFF. We turned back and landed on with our weapons. Bob and Tony Harper were next off, with a task to attack the troop concentration that John and I had found and photographed at Port Howard on 23 May. We had been trying without success for some days to get permission to attack this lucrative target – the response from Flyco had been zero. Of course, it was ludicrous to wait so long before attacking such a target – by now the troops could have gone anywhere. After a successful sortie Bob reported an easy attack, making use of my ‘stand-off’ photos to aid target acquisition. Tony said that the whole thing had been far too easy and clinically efficient: ‘A bit like murder’ were his words. Less concerned with the moral aspects of killing an enemy who was so obviously determined to kill us, I was angry that we were not able to take more photos of targets before we attacked them. We had learned long ago that just one recce photo of a target was worth its weight in gold when it came to putting the weapons in the right place. Once again, it seemed to us that both the Navy and our tasking agencies had forgotten a basic principle of Ground Attack operations.

At about 1500 hours John and I were tasked to carry out an Armed Recce of a mostly flat area on East Falkland in front of our most forward troops. The only information we had was that our troops had advanced ‘several kilometres’ eastward from the Ajax Bay landing area and that they wanted any enemy artillery found and neutralised in the area immediately in front of them. The area to be covered was given as a square with 10 km sides, a ridiculously large area in which to search for camouflaged targets. (In peacetime exercises you would be tasked for Armed Recce on an area one fiftieth of this size: this was all you could be expected to cover in one pass. It would have been much more sensible to have tasked a photo recce mission on this area.) During the mission there was no choice but to keep on flying up and down on parallel tracks until we had covered the whole area. The flying was exhilarating but tense, as we were both uncomfortably aware of our vulnerability to ground fire, with no element of surprise on our side. Flying as low as we dared, we could skyline the most insignificant feature on the horizon. Every small lump on the ground ahead was a possible target and we called to each other constantly on the radio as each suspicious feature was investigated. As you approached you climbed to release height, finger poised over the bomb button.

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