S.A.S. breaks silence on S. Georgia action

Press, 7 June 1982, Page 6

S.A.S. breaks silence on S. Georgia action

NZPA London The full story of how the Special Air Service paved the way for the recapture of South Georgia was told at the week-end.

S.A.S. men braved paralysing cold, 161 km/h winds, helicopter crashes, raging seas, and a minefield to set up the victory, Max Hastings a British correspondent, reported.

Fifteen men were flown in by helicopter on April 21, but the weather was so appalling that they had to be taken straight out, back to the task force.

Two helicopters brought in to ferry them to safety crashed soon after take-off, and eventually a third got them away. But a few hours later another 15 S.A.S. men were on their way back to South Georgia, this time in five rubber craft struggling through the gales. Two were swept back to sea but three reached their objective. Hastings reported this series of amazing events: The S.A.S.’s war began in earnest on the night of April 21.

While most of the British amphibious force was still many thousands of kilometres away and the Argentines considered themselves all but immune from ground attack, 15 men were taken by helicopter on to the Fortuna Glacier. Their mission was to move into positions from which they could observe the Argentine garrison on South Georgia.

But the conditions in which they immediately found themselves defy description.

Beyond the paralysing cold they met winds of more than 161 km/h. Such bivouacs as they possessed were swept away. Movement was unthinkable, they could achieve nothing. Reluctantly the next morn-

ing they were obliged to ask to be withdrawn to try again by another route.

A Wessex helicopter flew in through a white-out to recover them. The men piled aboard. Within a few seconds of take-off they had crashed.

A second helicopter flew in. The survivors clambered in. A few minutes later it too had crashed. Lieutenant Commander lan Stanley was left to bring in a third Wessex. By brilliant flying he took aboard a gross overload of 17 men, including the crew from the crashed helicopters, and lifted them away to the ships.

Yet only a few hours after that epic series of mishaps, S.A.S.’s amphibious troops went in to try again. Fifteen men set out in five Gemini rubber craft powered by temperamental outboard engines, to land on Grass Island, within sight of the Argentine bases.

One Gemini suffered almost immediate, engine failure and whirled away with the gale into the night, helpless with its three men aboard. A second suffered the same fate. Its crew drifted in the South Atlantic all through the darkness before its beacon signal was picked up the next morning by a British helicopter and the crew recovered.

The remaining three boats reached Grass Island and the nine S.A.S. men set up observation points from which they reported back to the ships on the lethargy and’ carelessness of the Argentines they were watching ashore.

Men of the Special Boat Squadron were landed on a similar mission by helicopter further south on the mainland.

On the morning of Sunday April 25, naval helicopters sighted and engaged the Ar-

gentine submarine Santa Fe which was en route to reinforce the South Georgia garrison. On board a destroyer nearby, the S.A.S. squadron’s commander urged the Navy that, instead of waiting to stage their planned set-piece attack, the British should seize the advantage gained by crippling the submarine, and stage an instant .landing. By mid-afternoon, 30 S.A.S. men under the command of Major Guy Sheridan of the Royal Marines, and followed by the Marines of the warships, landed skm from Grytviken and dashed for the Argentine positions.

No resistance was offered. The S.A.S. ran up their Union Jack on the flagpole while a bewildered enemy officer complained: "You have just run through a minefield.” The Argentine garrison at Leith refused a radio demand to surrender and swore to fight to the last man. But the next morning S.A.S. men accompanied by a Marine detachment landed at Leith to receive the enemy’s immediate capitulation. They had seriously changed their minds about resistance. In normal circumstances no publicity of any kind is given to S.A.S. activities, but in the tragic Sea King crash on May 19, 18 of the noncommissioned officers and men were killed, and the regiment's most brutal loss since the Second World War, a punishing blow to such a small and tightly-knit unit. Hastings said that the 22 Special Air Service Regiment had decided that it owed it to the families of those men, if no-one else, to tell the story of some of the extraordinary things that they have been doing since this war began.

“This once, the veil of secrecy is being lifted to tell a little of the astonishing tale,” he wrote.