At 0930 on 21 April Ian Stanley lifted off from Antrim to find a landing site. Taking Cape Constance on his port side he flew SE over Possession and Antarctic Bays and saw no military activity. After vetting Fortuna Glacier he returned to Antrim and loaded up his passengers from Mountain Troop. Accompanied by the two Wessex from Tidespring that carried the rest of the troop they made for Fortuna only to be turned back by a snow squall near Possession Bay. Bear in mind that it is not only distance that is critical in such insertions but the weather between helicopter and landing site. Five hundred yards behind a snow squall that prevents accurate navigation is as good as a hundred miles in preventing a safe landing. Stanley took Delves and Hamilton on a second recon, this time in deceptively decent weather and Delves ordered a second try. Day light was slipping by and it was best to land the troop and to get off the glacier onto firm ground by darkness. The second try at landing succeeded. By early afternoon sixteen men from Mountain Troop and three pulks (sleds) were safe on Fortuna Glacier. Just after the landing the weather worsened and the troop progressed barely a half mile before darkness forced a halt to the their tortuous slogging.
The night of 21/22 April 1982 saw the worst of South Georgia's weather. Off shore Antrim lashed down its gear as winds rose to one hundred miles per hour. A Force11 sea broke waves over the tired old ship and the barometer registered 965 millibars, lower than most seamen experience in a lifetime. Even worse the helicopters secured to Antrim's and Tidespring's decks shuddered almost to their break points. On the glacier Hamilton's men and their kit were safe but buried cold in the snow. Winds wrent tent poles and fabric alike. The horrendous weather continued and the men's physical condition began to deteriorate. Military operations even passive reconnaissance became impossible. At 1100 on 22 April 1982 Hamilton radioed Antrim: "Unable to move. Environmental casualties immanent."
Snow squalls delayed Stanley's rescue attempt for forty-five minutes. Even then storms made him order the two Wessex 5s to wait on Cape Constance eight kilometers from the glacier while he found the SAS men and a landing site from which it was safe to rescue them. The weather foiled even Stanley's sophisticated navigational gear and his helicopter's air frame began to take on ice. Stanley scrubbed the mission and all three helicopters returned aboard Tidespring and Antrim.
Refueled, the three helos took off at 1330 for a second rescue attempt. This time breaks in the weather and orange smoke grenades brought rescuers and exhausted soldiers together. Tidd, the first pilot to land, quickly loaded his Wessex 5 with six SAS men and their kit and took off. A few minutes later he ran into the dreaded whiteout and without Stanley's helo to guide him crashed into the glacier. His unwanted landing site was cushioned in snow and while the helo was destroyed its occupants emerged by a fluke of fate shaken but alive. Ian Stanley in his Wessex 3 guided the second Wessex 5 to the crash site. The crash's survivors minus their heavy equipment crawled into the two helos and took off for the ships' warm bunks. The Wessex 5 flew close astern Stanley's mother hen but lost sight of it over the glacier's rim. By ill chance it flew into another whiteout and crashed. Stanley's helicopter already fully loaded had no choice but to head back to Antrim. As the thin Arctic sunlight disappeared two helicopters were lost, two of the SAS men had been rescued and two helo crewmen joined the fourteen SAS men stranded on the glacier. Sixteen valuable men found themselves unharmed but unable to perform any military mission and facing another night on the glacier in ever worsening weather. Any hope of completing the reconnaissance had ended. Young the amphibious force commander (until the land forces were firmly established ashore) knew no more about his target at the end of the day than he had at its beginnning. He did know that some troops under his command were in mortal straits, that he, a senior and experienced aviator, had lost two helicopters and that the goal of seizing South Georgia was in jeopardy. Sheridan the land force commander could do nothing unless and until the SAS problem got ressolved. Upon being told of the men marooned atop Fortuna Thatcher commented: "My heart was heavy.....How was I to conceal my feelings? I wondered if the task we had set for ourselves was truly impossible." On Endurance Captain Nick Barker was more direct: "In military terms the whole operation had become a monumental cockup."
Young and his operations crew aboard Antrim faced calamity. A two man emergency rescue team from the Royal Marines' Mountain and Arctic cadre was alerted on Tidespring where another problem surfaced. "I... had checked through their kit with them. In my view it wasn't very good. It was standard army issue - not as good as our stuff. There are recognized techniques for getting yourself out of a crevasse......it was my opinion those guys just didn't have that sort of gear, that they would not be able to haul themselves up the insides of a crevasse."
By now a reconnaissance operation had degenerated into an odds against rescue operation. Stanley had few assets: a battered helicopter, the only Wessex left, and two hours of daylight to fly through awful weather in order to rescue sixteen men in terminal condition. Taking a new route to the glacier he found the survivors huddled inside inflated rafts used as tents and landed, the last hope for rescue that day. As the weather worsened he piled in all sixteen men --- the SAS men reluctantly left their kit and weapons except for sidearms --- and took off fifteen hundred pounds above the helicopter's maximum design weight. Stanley made his way back to Antrim, his sixth trip from Fortuna Glacier, and landed on Antrim's pitching deck in a controlled crash.
Military operations succeed or founder on judgments made about the enemy his size, equipment, numbers and location. Not so the Fortuna Glacier affair because no opposing forces were involved. Delves and Hamilton misjudged the data they possessed about Fortuna and overestimated their own capability. A clandestine insertion had become an air-ground mob scene, its central purpose compromised, its participants in jeopardy. This most unusual episode occurred despite the fact that Special Warfare operatives rank among the best intelligence gatherers and the most realistic analysts of tactical situatio. No military objective had been reached during the preceeding twenty-four hours but Stanley had delivered Young and his force from disaster, saved sixteen lives and spared Margaret Thatcher another acute embarrassment. Stanley received a DSO for his extraordinary feat of technical flying and for his bravery. His passengers concluded that was little enough.
Cindy Buxton and Anne Price2 SBS came south on Endurance and it was their turn to reconnoiter Sheridan's possible landing sites from south of Leith and Grytviken ie from across Cumberland East Bay. Hound Bay, at the seaward neck of Barff Peninsula, was the insertion point for three SBS patrols. They were to make their way on foot half way up the peninsula, pick up two Gemini rafts dropped from helicopters and cross the bay to Brown Mountain. That low mountain was one of the two pieces of vital ground whose seizure was necessary for any attack on Grytviken. The mountain also provided a point from which Argentinean activity, if any, could be closely scrutinized. That two BAS men, Myles Plant and Tony North lived in the proposed patrol area and had seen no Argentine military activity did not deter the SBS leader from mounting his operation. He was of course safe from superiors' direct advice and criticism because Sheridan and Young were on Antrim many miles away. Ellerbeck flew his helicopter from Endurance to Cindy Buxton and Anne Price's hut on St Andrew's Bay to warn them of incipient military activity. They too had seen nothing of the Argentinean invaders.
Ellerbeck delivered only one patrol, four men and their kit, before bad weather prevented more flying. The ashore SBS patrol met the two BAS men, Plant and North, who reaffirmed that no Argentinean military lurked in the vicinity. The SBS patrols still on Endurance were not to be thwarted and went ashore by Gemini courtesy of Captain Nick Barker who brought his ship as close to shore as prudence allowed - under 1000 meters. The Geminis' motors then failed the three patrols as they tried to cross Moraine Fjord to get to their lookout point atop Brown Mountain. The night of 22/23 April 1982 the marines slept a frigid sleep behind rocks on Dartmouth Point. In the morning the patrol leaders reluctantly concluded that their unreliable outboard motors and ice-punctured Gemini hulls had ended their military mission. They decided on exfiltration.
A confluence of untoward events occurred here. The SBS patrols on Dartmouth Point could not reach by radio either Antrim or Endurance. They could not return to Endurance nor could they complete a military mission. Unproven reports of an Argentinean submarine's presence had prompted Young to withdraw Antrim beyond the SBS' radio's range; Endurance lacked the code books to decrypt SBS messages anyway. True they could go to ground for days if necessary but the fact was that the SBS men were stranded.
Santa Fe's Flag"South Georgia op seems bogged down for fear of Arg submarine (conventional, Sante Fe)."Santa Fe's torpedoes were a potential risk for Young's force but they did not present a clear and present danger. Santa Fe's submerged speed approximated Tidespring's thirteen knots; its sustained surface speed just that. The tactical offense posed by two twenty-five knot destroyers and their embarked helicopters with active sonars in use against an ageing diesel submarine with generic electrical problems is lethal. Because of its low top speed and the noise it would emit at that speed it was extremely unlikely that Santa Fe could gain a position that allowed a high probability of a successful attack on any of the British ships. True Endurance's radio crew had intercepted messages from an overflying Argentinean aircraft giving that ship's position to an Argentinean submarine. That coordination made sense because Endurance's loud diesel engines could be easily picked up by the submarine's sonar and because Endurance had no sonar of its own to warn of impending attack. Worse Barker's ship could not turn handily to avoid an observed torpedo. Yet a quick read of the tactical situation showed that a submarine attack seemed very improbable; Santa Fe's job was to land troop reenforcements on South Georgia and not to brawl with British surface ships and ASW helicopters. A diesel submarine manned by an unblooded crew and burdened by a motley crowd of landsmen is most unlikely to prosecute an attack, risky in itself, that would draw the mortal attention of a British nuclear submarine captain trained to hunt down Soviet nuclear boats.
In fact one overriding reason should have prevented the undeserved deference that the Royal Navy paid to Santa Fe. Amphibious ships, purpose built or not, are meant to sail in harm's way in order to get the troops to the assault area. Men of war that carry amphibious forces cease being independent military assets and become ancillary to the troops' mission. Such ships become subordinate to the specific military task of occupying defended ground. Whatever Young's assessment of the risk to his own ship and crew putting Sheridan's marines ashore was his sole reason for being in South Georgia's waters. Then too excessive caution breeds its own potential for disaster. If any British ship had sunk fifty miles NE of South Georgia the crew and passengers would all have drowned. If disaster had occurred close aboard Grytviken or Leith some at least might have lived. Many seafarers still believe that a ship sunk going towards the fight causes no dishonor but that damage suffered away from the conflict raises questions about sound planning and tactics.
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