MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency
Falkland error destroyed British helicopter
The British Ministry of Defence has been accused of attempting to keep secret during the 1982 Falklands War the fact that a British army helicopter was shot down by a missile from a Royal Navy warship, killings its four occupants.
More than twenty years since it happened, details of the cover-up have been disclosed in a British television documentary about various conflicts in which men have died from "friendly fire", killed by their own side.
For years the British Ministry of Defence hid the truth from relatives of the four men killed in the helicopter, two crew and two passengers, one of them the Brigade Signals officer tasked with trying to sort out a communications shambles. Ironically it was a lapse in communications which caused this mistake.
The television documentary concentrated on two of them, the pilot and observer, Lance Corporal S.J. Cockton of the Army Air Corps and Lance Corporal Brett Griffin of 3 Commando Brigade Air Squadron. They were flying at night on an urgent mission when a missile from the guided missile destroyer HMS Cardiff blew their helicopter out of the sky.
Relatives were told lies The Task Force Commanders suspected almost immediately what had happened. But the misleading account given to the relatives was that the helicopter had crashed into the ground in poor visibility. One man who knew that this official account was inaccurate was the Royal Navy Surgeon, Rick Jolly, in charge of the front-line hospital at Ajax Bay. Examining the bodies, he knew their wounds were consistent with a missile attack not a crash, as he explains in the television documentary, which did not interview any of the senior commanders, nor the Captain Mike Harris, commanding HMS Cardiff, who later became an Admiral.
Cardiff's action was defended as the only military decision that could have been taken. The Task Force Commander, Admiral Sir John "Sandy" Woodward, explained several years later that Captain Harris had no option but to fire his missiles, because there was no signal indicating a British aircraft was in the area. It had arrived unannounced, breaking the golden rule to prevent what the military call "Blue-on- Blue" mistakes.
Admiral Woodward said Cardiff's operations room was jolted into action at 0400 hours by an unidentified air contact moving slowly across East Falkland south of Wickham Heights, which they speculated could have been an Argentine Hercules heading into Stanley, an Argentine Special Forces helicopter, or, they asked: "Could it be one of ours?"
It was two investigations and three years later, prompted by appeals for the truth from relatives, that the Ministry of Defence finally confirmed what had happened. It was the only "Blue-on-Blue" incident in the whole war, which Admiral Woodward said, "however ghastly for the relatives, was some kind of world record for safety, care and organisation".
What the television documentary did not reveal was that only an hour later, Cardiff came close to an even more ghastly mistake, which could have killed hundreds of British soldiers, when her radar detected four small surface boats heading towards her, believing at first they were Argentine patrol boats about to attack. This time HMS Cardiff fired some star shells to illuminate and identify four landing craft ferrying 600 Scots guards towards Bluff Cove. A horrendous mistake had only marginally been avoided in what could have caused the highest casualties of the whole war, even more than when the cruiser Belgrano was torpedoed.
Harold Briley,(MP) London
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