‘We came second,’ admitted Major Norman, ‘but we won the body count.’
Shrapnel littered Liz Goss’s backyard. The brick wall that stood between her house and her neighbour’s was pitted with bullet scars. As she and her kids had huddled inside their wooden house they’d been just beyond the protection afforded by the wall. She shuddered at the thought of how close it had been.
Her house was searched three times. Each time the soldiers ordered the family outside and held them at gunpoint – their weapons trained on the children. Liz found it almost unbearable. Later in the day, as she and the children moved into town to stay with her husband’s parents, she felt overcome by a feeling of utter hopelessness.
At 8.30 in the morning local time, Lieutenant Colonel William Bryden, USAF, commander of Ascension Auxiliary Air Force Base, had a call put through.
‘What support’, asked the reporter from the London Evening Standard, ‘is Ascension Island going to provide for the British fleet being prepared to sail for the Falkland Islands?’
Bryden didn’t have a clue what the man was talking about. He’d heard of the Falklands, but knew little about them – he’d certainly heard nothing about any threat of an invasion. As the two men spoke, the Argentine Amphibious Commando Company were using tear gas to clear the buildings of the Royal Marines’ Moody Brook barracks.
The reporter persisted. ‘How far is it from Ascension to the Falklands?’
Again, Bryden didn’t know, but he wanted to help. ‘If you hold on a minute, I’ll take a look,’ he offered and got up to check the map pinned to his office wall. He quickly gauged the distance and got back to the phone. ‘About 4,000 miles?’ he told the reporter but, from the reaction, knew that he was helping rather less than had been hoped for. The reporter carried on as if Bryden were trying to keep something from him.
Bryden had been on Ascension for nearly a year, and he and his wife loved it. A navigator who’d seen combat flying AC-119-K gunships in Vietnam – a vital mission in a bad aeroplane that the crews labelled ‘The Flying Coffin’ – Bryden had twisted people’s arms to get a posting that had proved to be every bit as unique and satisfying as he’d hoped.
Just 34 square miles in area, the British colony of Ascension is an extinct volcano stranded in the mid-Atlantic 1,200 miles from Brazil to the west and northern Angola to the east. Rising sharply out of the sea towards the 2,817-foot summit of Green Mountain, she’s part of a sub-oceanic ridge that also broaches the surface further south in the shape of St Helena and Tristan da Cunha. The British first established a settlement there in 1815, when a garrison was stationed to guard against any attempt by the French to rescue Napoleon, imprisoned on St Helena, 700 miles away to the south-east.
Now, though, she was home to little more than an airfield, radars, listening posts and relay stations for NASA, Cable and Wireless and the BBC, who for a brief period had even been responsible for the island’s administration. The routine work of sending and receiving data from orbiting spacecraft was punctuated by intercontinental ballistic missile tests from submarines sitting off the coast of Florida. By day the missiles were too fast to see. At night, though, you could trace them coming in as you heard the sonic boom following re-entry. The missile’s impact, as close as six miles away, was all the excitement Ascension needed.
Although the island was British, Wideawake airfield – named after a seabird, also known as the sooty tern, that returns to Ascension every eight months to lay and hatch its eggs – was leased to the Americans. Under the terms of the lease, the British could use the airhead and expect ‘logistical support’. The arrangement worked well. The British simply never used Wideawake. Perhaps it was hardly surprising, after the reception given to the first British visitors from the air.
On 29 March 1942, over 1,000 officers and men from the US Corps of Engineers came ashore, unimpressed by Ascension’s barren volcanic appearance. They carried with them the road-building machinery and supplies necessary to build an airfield that would be an important stepping stone to Europe. Both the Stars and Stripes and Union Flag flew above the capital, Georgetown, and a draft agreement formalizing the status of the new American base was drawn up. By 12 June their commander, Colonel Robert E. Coughlin, was able to telegraph Washington to tell them their runway was ready.
Three days later, a Royal Navy Swordfish torpedo bomber from the escort carrier HMS Archer approached the island. Her crew, the pilot Lieutenant E. Dixon Child, RN, Sub-Lieutenant Shaw, RN, and Petty Officer Townson bore grim news. A merchantman, the SS Lyle Park, had been sunk near St Helena by a German raider and her survivors machine-gunned in their rafts. Archer’s Captain realized it would be suicidal to break radio silence and instead sent his Senior Pilot to drop a message bag with a raider warning for the Cable and Wireless office in Georgetown. Dixon Child was unaware of the US presence but saw no reason not to use the unexpected and by now nearly complete runway. He fired a recognition signal and began his approach. As he descended to 400 feet US engineers blocked the runway and opened fire on his unfamiliar biplane. Dixon Child felt a hard thump on his shoulder as he dived out to sea, his swearing ringing in his Observer’s ears. Out of range, the crew tried to decide whether they were thought to be German or Japanese. They decided to give it another go. Making sure to fire a second recognition signal out to sea to avoid making things worse, he was relieved to see them clear the runway of vehicles. Dixon Child managed to get his ‘Stringbag’ down without casualties. As he jumped down off the wing, a bullet, stopped by the buckle of his Sutton harness, fell to the ground.
But if, since that first visit, British aircraft had not visited Ascension as often as they might have done, forty years later they were about to make up for lost time.
By midday on 2 April, Bryden had received a message from the Eastern Range Headquarters at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida. He was brought up to speed about the international situation. Soon afterwards, at lunch with the heads of all the island’s various organizations – including the British administrator – what information they had was shared. It was clear that Ascension was going to be involved. Bryden had already been asked if he could support three RAF C-130s over the next five days. There was an embassy support flight due in from the US imminently. It’s going to be cramped, Bryden thought, but we can handle it. None of them really had the slightest inkling of what was about to hit them.
Bryden usually asked for three days’ notice of any incoming flights. That luxury was the first thing sacrificed to necessity. The first British Hercules was already on her way. Loaded with stores, she’d left RAF Lyneham in Wiltshire hours earlier. Sir Michael Beetham’s ‘big effort’ was under way. And, unlikely as it seemed at lunchtime on 2 April, Ascension Auxiliary Air Force Base was about to displace Chicago O’Hare as the busiest airfield in the world.
Flight Lieutenant Jim Vinales and his wife Jean were in the kitchen of their new house in the picturesque Lincolnshire village of Colby when they heard news of the invasion on the radio. Vinales joined the Royal Air Force as a Navigator in 1965 after hitch-hiking through Europe from his Gibraltar home to demonstrate initiative to the recruiting officers. His Spanish mother hadn’t approved. Growing up, on the Rock, English hadn’t been Vinales’ first language, but he spoke it now with the fruity vowels and precise diction of a Shakespearean actor. Now bilingual, he couldn’t help but take an interest in Latin-American affairs, and the mess Argentina was getting herself into concerned him greatly. The couple watched what news they could on television and, on Saturday the 3rd, tuned in to the emergency parliamentary debate called to discuss the invasion. They heard the Prime Minister tell a febrile House that something would be done, but it wasn’t clear to him what, exactly, could be done. It certainly never occurred to him that he might be involved. A full-blown war seemed unlikely and a possible role for his Vulcan squadron even more remote.