Newsletter Sept 2025
Newsletter for September 2025
EXCURSION to the Firestation Kerikeri
We all met (17 of us) beside the Firestation at 11am, a bit later than normal.
The station master Len welcomed us and led us to the more cosy lounge for a talk.
He explained a bit about the structure of the Fire-stations in NZ and highlighted that most of it is on a voluntary basis. Only Auckland has some professional employees but also many unpaid people.
NZ Fire Services has many sections (red painted vehicles), and also the rural fire fighter (yellow painted vehicles) falls under their jurisdiction. They are dotted around the country. The Kerikeri branch (Northland) reaches over a big area down to the Brynderwyns and up to Kohukohu or close by.
They respond to a variety of emergencies in our local area. These include:
• Fires
• Medical emergencies
• Motor vehicle accidents
• Search and rescue
• Civil defence
• Natural disaster responses
Questions were thrown at Len, left right and centre which he answered calmy and in detail.
How do you communicate and call in when there is an emergency?
The Siren is often heard around town, but they use pagers and mobile phones too.
As soon as call (111) comes in volunteers are notified and they make their way to the station.
(no speeding is allowed though.)
To get a fire truck on the road it needs to have 4 burly men to make it operational. It can’t go on the road with only 3 though.
Kerikeri has 3 fire trucks (a tanker, pumper and an emergency tender). There is also a command van at their disposal.
Is there a fire pole one sees so often in the movies?
No sorry there aren’t any here was the answer, so no pole dancing for the ladies.
Finally, Len let us look at the Fire Trucks everybody wanted to see.
Nice big trucks ready to go are located behind 2 big doors. They are cleaned every time they come back to the depot. They are fairly new and will be replaced every so often up to the newest standards.
However, to be allowed inside the cabin for a call out the fire fighters must dress up to the hilt with their special suits, boots, helmet and safety equipment. That has to be done very quickly to be ready for the job ahead. See the picture.
At the end of the tour around we thanked Len for such an interesting talk.
See below a few pictures of the scene, truck and equipment.
SEPT Meeting Talk
The main speaker was Guy Slocum.
His talk was his recollection of the Falkland War.
Attached are an AI text and an AI summary of his speech.
A quick outline of what happened from a history point of view.
The Falklands War was a ten-week undeclared war between Argentina and the United Kingdom in 1982 over two British dependent territories in the South Atlantic: the Falkland Islands and its territorial dependency, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands. What happened in a short chronological order to put some light on what had occurred, then “GUY SLOCUM” presentation of what he experienced during that time. On 2 April 1982, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, a remote British colony in the South Atlantic. The UK, which had ruled the islands for nearly 150 years (though Argentina had long claimed sovereignty), quickly chose to fight and Britain's Navy sailed south to retake the Falklands. In response to the invasion, the British government under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared a war zone for 200 miles (320 km) around the Falklands. The government quickly assembled a naval task force built around two aircraft carriers, the 30-year-old HMS Hermes and the new HMS Invincible. On April 25, while the British task force was steaming 8,000 miles (13,000 km) to the war zone via Ascension Island, a smaller British force retook South Georgia island, The British landed on the FALKLAND island unopposed on May 21, but the Argentine defenders, some 5,000 strong, quickly organized an effective resistance, and heavy fighting was required to wear it down. From the beachhead at Port San Carlos, the British infantry advanced rapidly southward, through forced marches under extremely adverse weather conditions, to capture the settlements of Darwin and Goose Green. The British succeeded in taking and occupying the high ground west of Stanley. With British forces surrounding and blockading the capital and main port, it was clear that the large Argentine garrison there was cut off and could be starved out. The Argentine garrison therefore surrendered on June 14, effectively ending the conflict.
SYNOPSIS OF GUY’S FALKLANDS PRESENTATION
Guy gave us an interesting presentation on the Falklands War from a British perspective. He covered the planning phase as well as the sea, air and land combat phases. Throughout the presentation we were able to feel that we were intimately involved for he covered significant detail in all aspects of his presentation. To that end he talked, in the planning phase, about the difficulties of locating where the enemy were dispersed throughout the islands and the secret landing of special forces to discover these facts and communicate with the planning staff in London. He also touched on the difficulty of deciding, from half a world away, where the troops would be best landed when the eventual retake took place. In covering the air war he touched on both the Air Defence tactics and the difficulty of finding ground targets in such a barren landscape. In this regard he enlightened us on the use of forward air controllers on the ground talking the ground attack pilots onto the target. In covering the sea war he was able to give us some insight into the dispersion of ships in order to optimise the defence of the beach head. He ended his presentation by highlighting aspects of the ground offensive culminating in the battle for the mountains on the way to Stanley and the sacrifice of many young men in taking that objective which, ultimately, persuaded the Argentinian occupying forces to surrender. Altogether an enjoyable and insightful presentation.
Meeting recording 5
Andreas
Sorry we missed the first few sentences of GUYs speech.
Guy's speech
And looking at the map, we figured that would be absolutely splendid because it would protect the ships, it would protect the troops.
And so we sent the SPS in to have a look.
The SPS Special Boat Service are the naval equipment of the SAS.
And they crawl around beaches, amongst other things, looking at the condition.
For those that were around when the Normandy invasions took place, these guys had been mapping out the beaches of Normandy for about a year before the invasion took place.
They didn't have that time with us, but very quickly they found that the sand in Teal Inlet was very soggy.
It wasn't quite quicksand, but people would sink in, certainly up to their ankles.
And more importantly, the ground from Teal Inlet to Stanley, which is where we knew we had to go, was very boggy.
And so Teal Inlet became a non-starter and we had to move back to looking at the map.
And as you know, probably by now, we chose San Carlos Water, which is where it says Port San Carlos.
I was particularly in favor of that personally because I felt that we could position a Type 42 air defence frigate down at the bottom of the Falkland Sound here and another one at the top and we could catch the Skyhawks coming in up the Sound.
The Skyhawk, Argentinian Skyhawk pilots
were basically anti-personnel.
They were there to destroy the ships and the people on the land.
And by putting a couple of Type 42s, which have air defence missiles, I thought that we could protect that area and protect the troops.
And that worked reasonably well on the day.
San Carlos Water wasn't ideal, but it had a very good beach.
nice and lots of stones, and more importantly, the land that, and I'll show you a picture a little bit later, the land that they had to traverse to get to the mountains before Ford Stanley was soggy but negotiable.
Next thing we had to think about was what we were going to do with the casualties.
So we commandeered A civilian liner,
put a couple of red crosses or more on it, decked it out with a load of nurses.
Now that happened when we were setting up.
And it's because the HDMI link with your wall is a bit unstable.
You can say that.
So just bear with me a second.
Right.
There you go.
It's still working, so it seems to be.
Right.
Okay, can you pull it out and put it in again?
Yeah, sure.
As you say.
Okay.
Are you going back to the New York Times?
It looks like I may have to.
Oh, wow.
Stay with it, Andrea.
There we go.
No, but we're halfway there.
Halfway, yeah, that's whatever you can find me.
Can I ask a question once before?
Yeah, give me a couple of seconds.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, please do.
The people that were sent ashore to do the reconnaissance, SAS and SVS.
SVS, yes.
How long were there?
around on the islands, trying to find out where the Argentinians were.
I mean, how do they disguise themselves?
How do they how do they maintain themselves?
How long were they on the land for?
Because it was a pretty difficult job to do.
Just in case you couldn't hear the question, it was an excellent one.
It was the people we put on land, SBS and SAS, how did they sustain themselves?
Well, they carry
80 kilo Bergens, which are huge, tall, I suppose we'd call them rucksacks or backpacks.
And that has enough to sustain them for 4 1/2 weeks.
And nobody detected them, nobody saw them?
Well, as far as concealment is concerned, they are very good.
You saw in the picture how they dug themselves into the land and they carry camouflage.
I've actually flown over a lump, as they call a hole in the ground, a lying up point.
And I knew they were there and I couldn't see them.
So they're extremely good at concealing themselves.
It's what they do.
Right.
Fascinating.
But the short answer to your question is they've sustained themselves and kept themselves hidden.
I mean, it's not like they were...
100 yards away from the enemy.
And they had binoculars and things.
So they were...
To give you an example, I'll show you a little bit later about a clandestine mission where they blew up some aircraft.
They actually went onto the airfield, placed a grenade in the cockpit of every single aircraft with a delay fuse, departed the airfield, and they were never spotted.
That's amazing.
And they didn't make themselves known to the Falklands.
Well, there is a, there is a.
You mean the Falkland Islanders?
Yeah, Falkland, no.
there's an interesting story that I'll come to a bit later where they were looking for a lorry to transport goods around.
And they went to this guy and said, an islander, and said, we need to borrow a lorry.
He said, **** ***.
So they tied him up, left him in his office and sent a message to his wife.
Yeah, go on, have another go.
And I'm sorry, but this is, as they say, beyond my control.
Any more questions while we're waiting for the technician to sort himself out?
So I was going to ask you,
We were talking about it right at the beginning, the planning period.
The planning period, yeah.
How long was that?
How long was the planning?
The total planning period was about 4 1/2 weeks, but we were able to implement bits of it before we got to the end of the plan.
planning.
For instance, we were able to send assets S.
We sent both aircraft carriers plus some frigates S before we actually really knew what we were going to do with them.
Can you see anything up there?
No, but let me fiddle with this end.
It may be coming up.
Just bear with me now.
OK, I'll shift with that cable and without some.
You don't understand that with it in your hand, do you?
Unfortunately, the link relies on the cable being well connected.
That's just another picture of troops being moved.
later from the aircraft.
Moving on to the air war, we were operating Harriers and Sea Harriers, a mixture of RAF and RN personnel of two aircraft carriers.
When I finally got down there to leave the squadron, one of the problems the Navy were creating for us.
Anybody ex-Navy here?
you all know, gentlemen, that the Navy love their ships, and their ships are more important than anything else.
I've seen them shovel aircraft over the side to protect the ship.
Now I wanted to land the Harriers going through transition, as we call it, which is moving from being supported by the wings to being supported by the jets.
I wanted to go into transition over the back of the ship
into the hover over the deck and then land vertically.
And the Navy said no, because if you screw up transition, which is to be fair, entirely possible, you'll crash on the ship and that will hurt our ship and we don't want that to happen.
So you must go into transition at the side of the ship and then you must transit sideways to go over the deck, which was a bit of a challenge.
But, you know, we were all working together.
We were using
unguided rockets, which frankly are desperately inaccurate.
As you can see there, we would fire in salvos against the ground target.
And that's because the harmonisation between the gun sight and where the rocket went was not matched.
In other words, you could aim perfectly
with the gunsight and the rockets wouldn't go there.
So we sprayed the place with six at a time and hoped to hit something.
And the other challenge we had in the air war was that the terrain is very bare and very difficult to navigate, as you would say in the UK, from hill to hill and bump to bump.
And
To do that, or to overcome that, we put into the islands forward air controllers.
You can see how sparse the land is.
A forward air controller is a member of the special forces who has been trained to talk a fighter bomber onto a target.
So we, in planning the mission,
we would pick an easily identifiable feature.
It might be a headland, it might be a road river crossing, something you really can't miss.
And we'd call that the IP, the initial point.
And as we're running into the IP, we would call the forward air controller and he would literally talk us onto the target by saying, you know, steer 1502 miles from the IP, they're hiding behind a bush.
It was that precise and they were very, very good at it.
They occasionally lapsed into humour.
I was running into a target one day, called the four-wheeler controller on the designated frequency, and I said something like 2 minutes to the IP.
And he said, fine, from the IP, steer, and I can't remember what, and turn right at the next sheep.
And I said,
Don't cheat, move.
And he said, not this one, it's dead.
And Julie, what was the disposition of the Argentine troops?
Largely Goose Green and the mountains before Stanley.
There were a few outposts, but they were pretty well mopped up.
The main contingent was at Goose Green, which I'll talk about in a moment.
And of course, they had the vast majority of their troops in the mountain range just before Stanley, because they knew if they could repel us penetrating the mountains, Stanley was safe.
I'll try hard not to stand on the troops.
We lost one Harrier, and that's it.
interestingly enough, we found out after the war that that was an extremely lucky shot.
The Harrier was running in from the IP to the target, and a little conscript, 18-year-old conscript, holding his rifle up and went bang.
And the bullet happened to go through the engine.
And when you snap a blade off in a turbine compressor,
It goes back to the engine and completely shreds the thing.
And that was the result.
And the guy that flew it ended up as a prisoner.
Now, the other aspect of the air war was protecting the fleet against that.
is a super Edendard, as it says there, a wonderful French aircraft with that white telegraph pole underneath being an Exocet.
Now that exocet could be launched 20 miles away from the ship target.
And the way that the Argentinian pilots would do it would be to lock their radar onto the ship.
Automatically that would convey data to the exocet.
They'd get a green light in their cockpit when the data had been fully transferred.
They'd squeeze the trigger.
The exocet would go off
and they would, the pilot would have to play no further apart.
He could turn away and the Exocet would go wherever he had pointed.
Wonderful system.
We had a bit of a trouble with a socialist system.
president of France called Mito, who is a miserable little **** to be as nice as I possibly can.
And he hated Thatcher, and Thatcher hated him for that matter, and he kept supplying the Argentinians with Exocets, and I think Mirage, but I'm not sure, certainly Exocets, until Reagan
said to me to him, if you don't stop doing that, we're going to recall the loan we gave you.
And that stopped him.
But I felt quite sorry for these guys because by the time I got down there fighting them, they were operating 400 miles away from base.
And they were really, really strapped for fuel.
what we had to do, of course, we would mount what's called CAPS, combat air patrols, which is basically an oval flight path across the intended, or what we thought was the intended path of the Argentinians.
And we would aim to catch them, of course, before they released the exocet.
And
We were relatively close to our airfield because it was down there on a little bit of steel.
But they had to keep fuel for another 400 mile transit back.
And that's quite difficult to engage in combat and watch your fuel to ensure that you retain enough to get home.
And a number of them didn't.
Some of them ran out of fuel.
Some of them were shot down.
We found it quite easy to shoot them down because although the Harrier itself
is no match for the if I can ask you to imagine that is me, and I've been caught by an Argentinian who's closing me from behind.
We found that, well, you will imagine that if we could stop in the air, which of course we can't, he would fly through, we would reverse, pop a missile off, and ruin his entire weekend.
But we can't do that.
But what we found was that by breaking the rules and using the nozzle lever, the lever that normally controls the nozzles to get you into the hover, we could virtually stop in the air.
And then by shoving the lever forward to put the nozzles in a conventional jet pipe condition, he would fly through, we reverse, chase him, lock on, and shoot him down.
It really became, I don't want to sound flippant, but it really became quite easy to get rid of them that way.
I mean, I was only down there for about 2 1/2 weeks and I got rid of fire.
And I talked earlier to Reagan helping us by modifying, or helping us to modify the sideline and the missile that equipped the Harrier, which we had originally bought off the Americans.
Now, again, if I use my hands,
The side wonder, this is me this time and that's my target.
Now I have to bring the nose normally round to point at the jet pipe because it's an infrared seeking missile, get a growl in my headset which tells me that the missile can see the infrared coming out of this one and then I squeeze the trigger.
But the etondars could turn tighter than us.
So we would often end up in a lag situation like that, and it was impossible to pull the nose onto the scenario that I just outlined.
Reagan gave us a modification and gave it to us, which enabled us, if we're in that situation there, and I'm in this Harrier, I can lock my radar onto the target, press a button on top of the stick,
and the head of the missile will go where the radar is pointing.
So in other words, we could get the missile to acquire the target without having to point it at the jet pipe of the enemy.
And that made a huge difference.
I'm delighted to be able to say that although we shot down a lot of them, we didn't lose a single Argentinian pilot.
Helicopters picked up every single one of them.
We had to build a jail on board.
I think it was illustrious, but I can't be sure.
And it proved such a useless jail, they kept breaking out.
And we said, well, let's be honest, where the hell are they going to go?
So we actually got them all together and said, look, if we give you the run of the ship, will you promise not to sabotage or whatever?
And they all signed a piece of paper because they were saying, we're going to be picked up.
Basically, they were our tests.
Another aspect of the air war was a desperate concern that I personally had long before I left London for the South Atlantic.
And that was once they realized that we were going to go for an invasion,
they would get serious and land a lot of extra troops on the runway at Port Stanley and reinforce the garrison to a point that we couldn't possibly win.
And so that gave us a planning requirement to put some holes in that runway to deny reinforcement by the Argentinians.
And the only aircraft that could do that
was the Vulcan.
Now, I say that because, of course, I'm talking nonsense when I say the Vulcan can do it.
The Vulcan was a strategic nuclear bomber designed, and its bomb bay was designed to hold nuclear weapons.
And we wanted to drop conventional bombs on the runway at Fort Stanley.
So we had to modify a number of Vulcans
and send them off to Ascension Island, which was basically our forward operating base for operations in the Falklands.
But as you can see there, still 6,000 away from the Falklands.
And therefore, the only way that we were going to succeed was to first of all do something that we learned a long time ago, and that is triple the assets.
If you think you need one,
anything to do something you have free.
And some of you may remember the American hostages held at the embassy in Iran.
Remember that?
Yeah.
Well, they came to us for advice on how to get them out.
We had people in the planting team there.
And one of the things we said to them was, you've got to triple your assets.
God dammit, no, not necessary.
American assets are wonderful.
So, what did they do?
Instead of taking six helicopters, they took two.
They took off, crashed into each other, and the entire rescue failed.
So all with tripled your assets.
And that's what we did, both with the Vulcans and the tankers, that were going to support three of them on the way to the Valkans.
And the idea was that you basically get through redundancy until you end up at the limit of your fuel
with one that's working better than the others.
And the picture you're looking at the moment is the final Vulcan that was chosen and the final tanker that was due to tow the Vulcan as close to the Falklands as fuel would allow.
And then the tanker would turn down and come back to Ascension and the Vulcan would go on and bomb the runway.
Now that final
or end play tanker was captained by a bloke called Bob Tuxford.
And when the Vulcan captain of the last Vulcan, the one that was going to do the work, said, OK, we're ready to take on our final fuel and we can return to Ascension.
And the bomber told the Victor how much fuel he needed.
And the Victor, Bob, said, we haven't got it.
or at least we've got it, but if we give it to you, we're not going to get back to ascension.
And the way Bob tells the story to me, he said, we had a committee meeting.
And of course, he's got two pilots up front and three in the back.
He said, we had a committee meeting.
We decided that the mission was so important that we were going to give them the fuel.
We were going to turn around, head back, get as close to ascension as we could, and put the aircraft into the sea.
very brave decision really, because I don't think a victor would do very well landing on water.
Anyway, that's what they did.
They gave the Vulcan the fuel they needed.
The Vulcan went on and made five very big holes on the runway and then diverted to Montevideo and Uruguay, which was a friendly nation at the time, picked up some fuel before returning to Ascension.
Bob and his crew, meanwhile, turned around and headed back to Ascension.
Now, in Ascension, in the very early days of the planning process, we had decided that we were going to extract one of the station commanders from the UK operational airfields, put them into Ascension as force commander for one month, and then we would change them over.
While Bob was doing his work with the Vulcans, the force commander in Ascension changed, and the new one was the station commander from the Victor base.
And therefore, he understood Victor operations very well.
And to cut a very long story short, he went down to the Met Office, talked to the meteorologists, and they concluded that the winds which had caused the problem with the fuel
the winds were going to be much stronger than had been forecast.
And so he went round the tanker crews who had just landed and were sleeping and said, get up, you're going again.
And they said, but we're out of hours.
And he said, **** *** this is war.
Get yourselves filled up, you're going to go and meet Bob and his crew.
And they scrambled 3 victors with half fuel because that's all the fuel they could get in.
in the time available, and they met Bob, topped him up, and all four aircraft returned to ascension.
So nice little story there, and a good bit of courage from this man here, who got himself a DFC for it.
Now somebody asked me earlier where the troops, the Argentinian troops, were dispersed.
And I mentioned that one of the major areas was Goose Green.
And while
the Special Forces were mapping the number of people in Bruce Green, they discovered two things.
One, that there was a sizable force of Argentinian land forces who would cause us considerable problems with the invasion.
And there was a squadron of Pucara aircraft at Bruce Green Airfield.
The Pucara is a splendid little aircraft.
It's like a poor man's A-10.
It's very slow, very manoeuvrable, and very good at destroying troops on the ground.
And as I mentioned earlier, I think 4, 8, 12, no, 8 special forces crept onto the airfield one night, popped a grenade in each cockpit with a delayed fuse, legged it, and
Nobody ever saw them.
The Archer Indians never saw them.
And they left a note pinned to the door of the barracks that said, and I think I'm pretty accurate with the words, but I certainly convey the meaning.
This place is a ****** call yourself soldiers.
And they linked it.
And then the Archer Indians found the next pin to the door in the morning.
But at the same time, through power,
or detachment of Two Power that had been landed, went to, no, I'm sorry, this is after the invasion.
So it's the full contingent of Two Power, went to engage the troops in Goose Green.
And it was important to contain them because if they, the Argentinian troops at Goose Green,
had been allowed to engage our troops on the way to the mountains before Gold Stanley.
It would have been a disaster for us.
So we needed to neutralize that force.
And it was a fierce battle.
And some of you may remember that the colonel of the regiment, called H.
Jones, was killed in the first combat.
His #2 was a major, took over.
And the way he describes it is,
He went to see the Argentinian commander under a white flag and said, look, we outnumber you hugely.
If we're going to have another battle in the morning, your young boys are going to die, some of mine are going to die, but we're going to wipe you out.
Why don't you surrender now?
And the Argentinian commander said, I don't believe you.
And so under a white flag, they took him around the camp, the British camp, and showed him.
not only the armament they had, but the number of troops.
And the Argentinian commander said, and this was late evening, the Argentinian commander said, no, we will fight you in the morning at dawn.
And he went back.
About 2 o'clock in the morning, a message was received.
Could he speak to the new CO, the major, under a white flag again?
And they met under a white flag, and the Argentinian commander surrendered.
And so by the actions of that British commander, saved a lot of lives on both sides.
And really is to, you know, that for me is as much a heroic action as the actual combat itself, because he took a big chance.
I mentioned that one of my own personal desires was to put an air defence frigate at the bottom and top of the Falkland Sound to defeat incoming skyboards.
And that's the picture of a Type 42 frigate.
Basically, the only thing you need to know about that is it's equipped with anti-air weaponry and therefore you can take out low flying aircraft.
So I was very pleased that was a good decision that I personally made.
A bad decision that I personally made was to put the rapier on the cliffs above San Carlos Water.
The rapier air defence system was state-of-the-art at the time.
That little dustbin houses a perfect radar and it spins around
And if it sees an aircraft locks on immediately, the missiles swivel to where the radar is pointing, and the operator can release a weapon all within about 2 1/2 seconds of acquisition.
Very, very good system.
And I decided that if we put on the cliff above San Carlos Water, they could shoot over the top of the
invading troops and protect them from the Skyhawks.
What I had not envisaged was that the Argentinian Skyhawk pilots were so good, they were down about 5 to 10 feet above the water, and the regular could not depress down from the cliffs.
So I had to move the regular down to, or in fact, I didn't make the decision because I was flying by then.
move the rapiers down to the beach where they became successful, because they look at them.
And then the landing itself, we thought it was going to be quite heavily opposed, but it was completely unopposed.
The other problem we had once we actually landed the troops was resupply...
Sorry, is that a question?
No, just a comment.
No, just a comment.
Oh, let's share it.
But it was only a couple of weeks ago we were hopping off a landing craft like that onto Makataya Island in French Polynesia, and I was just reminding Howard of it.
What sort of weaponry did you have with you?
I bought a flask and a backpack.
I'm sure the girls felt you had a lot more.
I was about to talk about resupply of the ships and that's a resupply of fuel at sea.
One of the problems we had once we landed was moving goods around to the various locations because by now the special forces self-sustaining had run out and needed to be
replenished with chanooks.
And we had three chanooks down there.
One was working, the other two were unserviceable and needed spare parts.
Some of you may remember Atlantic Conveyor, a merchant ship with, I don't know if you had it here, there used to be an advert for Birdseye Fish Fingers.
And the advert contained a man called Captain Birdseye.
And he had a lovely white beard and white bears.
Yeah.
And the captain of Atlantic Conveyor looked exactly like that.
So we called him Captain Birdseye.
Unfortunately, he was about 220 miles north of the fleet, bringing Chinooks, bears, and other stuff down to the troops, who had by now landed.
And he was acquired by an inbound Etandar with an Exocet.
And because it showed on the radar of the Argentinian aircraft that it was a flat top, they thought it was an aircraft carrier.
And that was always their aim, to destroy the aircraft carriers.
Because they destroyed the aircraft carriers, they destroyed the air defense.
And so they shot a couple of Exocets at Atlantic of Air and destroyed it.
which meant that we ended up with just one Chinook, not very serviceable, but just about capable of flying.
And it did a wonderful job of resupply around the islands.
I mentioned earlier about acquiring a lorry.
And if you look at the extreme right of the picture, you can just see a lorry sticking out there.
That was the lorry that was stolen by our troops from the guy who wouldn't help him.
They tied him up and then popped a note through his wife's door asking how to go and untie him.
And he tried to sue the British government afterwards, not very successfully, I might say.
Were the British troops the regular army or were they Marines or what were they?
were Marine commandos, the British troops.
Marine commandos to power, they were the main contingent, as I recall, but I'm sure I'm missing some notifications.
So once we had the bridgehead established, a bridgehead, as many of you will know, is where you land troops in a very narrow area, and then you spread them out into a wide arc, and that wide arc is the bridgehead.
Once we had the bridgehead established, we set off for the mountains.
And I talked earlier about why we had rejected Steel Inlet for the soggy ground.
Well, you can see it's pretty bloody soggy there, but still capable.
And that is the night before the mountains assault.
And that is the regimental sergeant major.
And he is briefing the troops.
And the way he told the story later,
In fact, we got it from many of them.
He actually said to them, write your letters home, because some of you are not going to be here in the morning.
And of course, he was quite right, because there was quite a big burial party the next morning.
Now, I make no apology for showing that picture, because I do this presentation to youth groups, and I want them to
realized that war was not a game.
People die and lose their lives at the age of 18, 17, 20.
And the fight for the mountains went pretty well.
And by about 8 o'clock in the morning, we had secured, or our troops had secured, most of the pockets of Argentinians within the mountains.
I was actually sitting in the cockpit on what's called Readiness 02, which means that if you're told to, if you're scrambled, you can be airport in 2 minutes.
And two of us were sitting at 02, waiting to zap pockets of Argentinians still resisting in the mountains when a message was broadcast on what's called Telebrief.
Telebrief is a sort of closed circuit TV that's, TV, closed circuit telephone that's plugged into the back of the aircraft and it links everybody, all the aircraft that are connected to it on the ground, ops, commander air, everybody.
And the message came through from the governor, the British governor of the Falkland Islands who had been imprisoned by the Argentinean invaders and his message said,
the Union Jack flies over Port Stanley again.
And that was because the troops having won and very obviously won the Battle of the Mountains and were about to storm down into Stanley, the Argentinians had surrendered.
And that brought the war to an end.
There's an interesting postscript about 18 years later.
I remember it was out of the airport.
And as soon as the war was over, I went back to Ascension and called a Hercules back home and was back into the reserve and out of the Air Force.
And of course, they found a permanent squadron commander to run the squadron.
And one of the reasons I was working when I was called back, 2 miles down the road, I was working for a merchant bank, learning
So you may wonder why I'm stupid enough to keep the phone on when I'm talking to you.
It's because I need the app to make my hearing aids work so I can talk to you.
I established an international investment company that ultimately went to 18 countries.
And I was in Sao Paulo in Brazil, establishing the office there.
And I wanted to establish one in Buenos Aires.
And one of my best clients in Sao Paulo was the head of Kellogg's Cornflakes in South America.
And he said, oh, my brother-in-law is a real estate agent in Buenos Aires.
He will have lots of contacts for you.
I'll put you two in contact and you can go and talk.
Anyway, I was off to Buenos Aires.
And this real estate agent was an ex-Ethel Dar pilot for the Falklands War.
Wow.
And you might think that we wanted to kill each other, but in reality, just like happened after the Second World War with Stanford Tuck and Adolf Galland, 2 Scotland Commanders, or two Wing Commanders actually, from the Second World War became great friends.
we became great friends.
And every time I went across, we had a party event on Dar, Skyhawk pilots, and we drank lots of beer and told uprageous stories, anything of the truth.
So that concludes me for today.
I've been very happy to take any questions.
So the British Navy sacked one of the, I think it was a battleship.
of the Argentinian Navy.
And there's some controversy as to whether it was in international waters or within Falkland waters.
What's the truth of that?
It was a question of the exclusion zone, I think, wasn't it?
was outside the exclusion zone?
Yes, it was.
For those that didn't hear the question, it was that we sank the Belgrano, which was an Argentinian cruiser.
It was the Argentinian cruiser.
And
It was quite interesting because we had one of our nuclear subs with conventional torpedoes shadow the Belbrano from the beginning of the war.
We had also declared A 200 mile exclusion zone, which is the point you're making.
And we had said publicly, anybody that comes inside that stands a very good chance of being destroyed.
Now, this
cruiser was cruising around outside that inclusion zone, so yes, definitely in international waters, but turned suddenly towards the fleet and started to head in that direction.
The war cabinet, which consisted of Thatcher, a guy whose name escapes me, who was the defence minister, and the three chiefs of staff,
and were consulted.
Within 15 minutes, they made the decision, if he continues in the direction of the fleet, destroy.
Now, when you're given instructions, whether it's in the air, on the ground, or seaboard, like that, you are given what's called an authentication, because all forces
carry a little pad, it's about A5 size, and it has across the top letters of the alphabet, and down the left-hand side it has numbers, and then in between, in the matrix in between, it has letters.
And so if you want to make sure that the message is genuine, you say, repeat that with authentication alpha 6.
it would be, let's say, Golf 6 for G.
So Golf, come down to where 6 is, whatever, wherever it interconnects is a letter.
And so the other person is going to say, yes, I confirm destroy Zulu, because Z is the one at the intersection.
Anyway, they've tried that authentication.
The submarine commander said, understand, destroy Belgrano, authenticate, dooby-doo.
And they got it wrong.
So we tried it again.
And they got it wrong again.
The third attempt, they got the authentication right.
And he couldn't believe it.
The way he tells it, he says, I couldn't believe it.
So I asked them to do it again.
And the 4th time they got it wrong.
And so he released a couple of torpedoes.
Interestingly enough, the captain of the Belgrano has fairly recently, and certainly in the last 10 years, he's a very old man now, made a statement and said if he'd been in that position, he would have destroyed the ship as well, because it was clearly an obvious threat.
So to come all the way back to your question, it was in international orders, but it was assessed to be a threat and therefore a legitimate target.
You can argue both ways.
Thank you.
Did Special Forces land on the Argentinian coast to bring surveillance onto the airfields of the Argentinians?
Yes, they did.
They did, but not quite the way you say.
We actually got them into Chile.
If you look at the map of South America, you've got the two countries that go down.
Chile on the...
western side, and Argentinia on the eastern side.
And we actually were able to put troops into, with helicopters, into Chile, which was entirely friendly to us throughout the conflict, and then implant them over land to sit above the airfields of the setup, super-Etandas.
And when the communications worked, and they didn't work very often, we actually got forewarning that they'd just launched.
And so we were able to sit up when the 02, actually probably when the 05 at that stage, launch and be out on CAP, Combat Air Patrol, by the time they got there.
But it didn't always work.
But when it did, it worked a dream.
There wasn't serious British losses, though, weren't there?
I mean, I think it was AGMS Sheffield, was it?
Yes, Sheffield was lost.
Should never have happened.
Basically, if you listen to the tapes of the operations world, they misidentified the inbound threat.
They thought it was friendly.
They didn't take the action they should have done.
And Co-ord Captain Salt, who was the commander of Sheffield,
was quite severely disciplined.
I mean, it's so easy to criticize him because he made a decision.
And with hindsight, it was the wrong one.
But there were reasonable reasons why he made a decision.
I think there was a guards battalion which lost a lot of men too.
Yes, the guards battalion was on Sir Gallahad.
Yes.
If you go back to, if I can.
with you back to that.
So Gullah had, and I think it was some Christian, but Christian, but I'm not Christian, but I'm not sure, was in the process of bringing troops down to reinforce the bridgehead.
And Julian Thompson, the brigadier who was commanding the
the land forces, was not told.
And by the time he got to hear about it, he said, well, we can't take them right now.
Go park yourself in one of the bays over here.
And by sheer stroke of luck, a Skyhawk pilot, Argentinian, who was lost, saw them, reported them, and
a whole squadron of Skyhawks went after both ships and there were some quite brave actions because both ships started smoking quite badly when they were on fire and the Sea King helicopters were just inching their way into the smoke until they were over the deck and able to take some of the wounded and some of the burnt off
the ship, but they lost a lot of people, as you say.
And that was one of the unfortunate aspects of war when you don't plan for people.
Were you in the same physical location as the planning for the Navy and the Army?
I'm sorry, say again?
Were you in the same physical location as the planners for the Navy and the Army?
Yes, we had a central planning team.
By then, of course, we had a unified Ministry of Defence.
We no longer had Admiralty, Air Force Ministry, and War Office.
I mean, those buildings still existed, but they housed personnel from the Ministry of Defence.
So we had representatives from the Air Force, Army, and Navy.
In the Ministry of Defence, the option room is on the 6th floor, and that's the option that runs things in peacetime.
but there is an emergency option for a nuclear war in the basement, or at least there was in my day, and we occupied that simply because it was there with all the communications we needed.
And yes, it was a combined opt said.
Yeah, I'm sorry, I've seen the questions here, but the war was fought ostensibly on the principle that this is British, we're looking after a British community, we can't have
that lost without, defending or whatever.
But there's other reasons behind the scenes that one hears about the possibility of oil and other things that the British wanted.
No, we didn't know about the oil that is now being discovered.
So that was not a reason.
No, I've been asked what the real reason why we reinvaded, if you like, the Falklands.
And the answer is that every five years, and it still happens today,
The people of the Falklands are asked to vote, a referendum, basically, on do they want to stay British or do they want to become Argentinians?
And it's always, more than 90% want to stay British, including Argentinians who live there.
So basically we were retaking on their behalf.
Nowadays, of course, it's become even more lucrative because there is a very good chance that on the shelf off the island,
There was one over here.
Yes, is it true that the ships, when they were hit, that the structure melted?
It depends what they were hit with.
I think I can ask that.
In those days, there was a lot of
aluminium used in the construction of the Falklands War, all new construction doesn't use aluminium at all.
Yes, but you're absolutely right in what you've just said, but it did depend on what the weapon that penetrated the hull was, because some of the Exocets had a vicious little incendiary charge in there, and put that in the aluminium you speak of, and the result is always...
Anything else?
Did you ever meet the officer commander of the Rapier Battery?
I'm sorry?
Did you ever meet the officer commander of the Rapier unit?
No.
I don't think so.
Yeah, a guy called Mike Bowden.
I wouldn't meet him anyway because I was at the planning stage, I was just in the business of deploying troops.
And by the time I was down there, I was in the air, of course.
And unless he'd shot one of his missiles at me, I wouldn't have much interaction with him.
Well, it's been a wonderful pleasure to speak to you all.
I hope you've enjoyed it.
Andreas
A small gift for you …..
We appreciated this very interesting presentation.
Big applause for Guy Slocum please…………
