Harry Benson - Scram!

I spent ages trying to work out how to take a load of interviews and make a story out of it. I am very grateful to Rowland White, author of Vulcan , who allowed me to grill him for an afternoon on the technical side of writing. I also had to work out how to organise telling my own first-person story alongside the third-person stories of my colleagues. What I hope I have produced is a book with the personal feel of what it was like to be a young Royal Navy junglie pilot at war.

Without a war diary to work with, and with very fallible memories of events nearly thirty years ago, I’ve had to assemble a jigsaw puzzle of individual stories and reconcile them with the available records. Oddly, the least useful have been the official squadron records, only some of which were available, but which provided only the barest outline of events. Perhaps this was because they were written by squadron junior officers like me. I am grateful to Anna Clark at the Fleet Air Arm Museum, Yeovilton, for providing me with a great starting point. More accurate and interesting were the few official reports of proceedings submitted by commanding officers. These gave a good flavour and some fascinating details. Thank you especially to Mike Booth for lending me his report of Wessex squadron activities and to Bill Pollock for his report of the incredible Sea King night-flying missions. And to those who dusted off their old action photos for the book, especially Arthur Balls, Mark Brickell, Stewart Cooper, Rick Jolly, Pete Manley, Jerry Spence, Tim Stanning and Simon Thornewill.

Pilots’ log books were generally a very accurate source for dating particular sorties. Yet even these had inconsistencies. Two pilots flew their first sortie together in the Falklands but recorded it on different days. Another pilot managed to record the wrong airframe number for much of the war. By far the best written record is the extraordinary book The Falklands Air War by Rodney Burden et al (1986). It is dripping with details of the squadrons and individual aircraft on both sides. Without this resource I would have found it much harder to put together a timeline of events. By comparing this secondary source, official records and log books, I have been able to turn forty-five interviews and literally hundreds of vignettes into the story of the helicopter war in the Falklands.

I’ve also drawn from the following excellent works: Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins’s still fresh and gripping Battle for the Falklands; Richard Hutchings’s highly recommended personal account of the 846 Squadron night-flyers Special Forces Pilot; Rick Jolly’s story of the Red and Green Life Machine ; Nick van der Bijl’s insightful view of the land campaign, Victory in the Falklands ; Max Arthur’s collection of heroic deeds, Above All Courage ; and Roger Perkins’s detailed account of Operation Paraquat: The Battle for South Georgia .

There are many more terrific junglie stories in John Beattie’s wonderful collection The View from a Junglie Cockpit , published by and available from the Fleet Air Arm Museum. All of the interviews, records, spreadsheets, timelines, aircraft and combat details used for this book are now preserved in the Fleet Air Arm Museum’s archives. If you visit the Museum – and you should – you will see half of the Wessex that I flew in the war (painted Zulu Mike on the side, it was coded X-Ray Lima in the Falklands). Pete Manley, Ric Fox and Dave Greet’s Wessex, Yankee Sierra, is still intact and gets wheeled out on display at the Museum from time to time. It was the second Wessex to arrive in the Falklands.

A few final but crucial thankyous: to my agent Annabel Merullo for finding me a publisher; to Trevor Dolby at Random House who thought it good enough and then covered it in post-it notes telling me how to do it better; to Kate Johnson who edited the manuscript; to Nicola Taplin for putting it all together and finally to my family, for putting up with my erratic moods. It’s been emotionally exhausting spending so much time with half of my brain stuck in 1982 revisiting my own and everybody else’s experiences. I hope you enjoy reading our stories.