SAN CARLOS WATER, FALKLAND ISLANDS, MAY, 1982
COLD WAR ANTI-AIRCRAFT GUN
A little more than a month after the South Georgia Island battle in which 22 British Royal Marines shot down an Argentine SA 330 Puma medium helicopter and slugged it out with an Argentine Navy corvette, primarily with 7.62x51mm small arms, a British landing force, escorted by frigates and destroyers, occupied a bay on East Falkland Island known as San Carlos Water. There, British Royal Marines and Paras went ashore to re-take the islands from the occupying Argentine forces. To British seamen who would undergo days of low-level bombing attacks by the Argentine Air Force, San Carlos Water quickly became known as “Bomb Alley.”
When the British began landing their own invasion force at San Carlos Water during the Falklands War, Argentine forces had their turn at bat and once more proved how deadly ground fire could be to helicopters.
First Lieutenant Carlos Estoban was in command of a platoon of men from C Company of the Argentine Army’s 25th Infantry Regiment. Argentine Army infantry regiments were, at the time, composed almost entirely of conscripts, young men required to serve their one-year stint in the military to form a solid base of reservists. The conscripts had only begun their year of training in February and thus had only a few weeks of a real military training and service before their unit was rushed off the Falklands.
Estoban’s platoon numbered approximately forty men and, with the exception of his NCO squad leaders, they were all young, inexperienced, and only partially trained. They were armed entirely with Argentine versions of the FN FAL. The standard rifle was the FM FAL, FM designating the Fabrica Militar de Armas Portátiles Domingo Matheu, the small arms factory in Rosario where the Fabrique Nationale design was license-built. This standard FAL had polymer furniture and full-auto capability. They also had as their Squad Automatic Weapons the Argentine version of the FN Model 50.41 heavy-barreled FALO known as the FMAP. All weapons used the standard 20-round magazine.
The Royal Marines No. 3 Commando Brigade Air Squadron had Aérospatiale/Wessex AH1 Gazelle helicopters operating from the landing pads of Royal Navy ships. Successor to the famous Alouette series of light helicopters, the Gazelle entered service in 1973, was used by at least 23 countries around the globe, and up-graded versions remain in service to this day. Specifically for the Falklands conflict, these light 5-seat multi-role (utility, reconnaissance, attack) helicopters had been hastily fitted with improved armament and survivability features that were tested off Ascension Island en route to the Falklands. These included 12-tube pods for French-manufactured SNEB (Societe Nouvelle des Etablissements Edgar Brandt) 68-mm (2.68-inch) spin-stabilized unguided air-to-ground rockets, pairs of forward-firing 7.62x51mm GPMG machine guns, flotation gear for ditching at sea, and the addition of some armor plating to protect critical components. With a maximum payload of just over 2,000 pounds, however, the Gazelle could not carry much armor and for the sake of visibility the nose of the bird remained essentially a large plexiglass bubble and the sides of the crew cabin were largely plexiglass panels as well.
On 21 May, Gazelle XX411, crewed by pilot Sergeant Andy Evans and gunner Sergeant Eddie Candish, was escorting a Royal Navy Sea King HC4 helicopter that was carrying an Army Rapier anti-aircraft missile launcher via sling load to be emplaced ashore. The helicopters drifted too far inland towards Estoban’s position. Realizing the mistake first, the pilot of the Sea King banked back away towards the bay.
Before the Gazelle could follow suit, Estoban’s platoon opened fire on it with their 7.62x51mm automatic rifles and SAWS, scoring numerous hits all over the aircraft. Only the skill of Sergeant Evans as a pilot kept the bird from crashing. Although wounded himself by the small arms fire, he managed to limp the mortally wounded Gazelle back down to the bay where he was able to bring the chopper down quite gently onto the surface of the water. As Sergeant Candish helped to pull the wounded pilot towards shore, Argentine rifle fire splashed the water around them.
While Lieutenant Estoban pulled his platoon back up the hill to higher ground, another escort Gazelle, XX402 flew in along the hillside, parallel to the ridge, and unexpectedly approached to within 50 meters of the Argentine infantrymen. Again, the platoon raised every weapon skywards and unleashed a hail of fire at the helicopter and, at such close range, shattered the bubble canopy and peppered the entire airframe and engine with 7.62mm bullets, and most likely killed both pilot Lieutenant Francis and gunner Corporal Giffen in their front cockpit seats. The riddled Gazelle fell from the sky like a rock and crashed heavily onto the hillside, almost at the feet of the Argentine soldiers. The chopper’s low altitude and self-sealing, crash-resistant fuel tanks prevented an explosion or fire.
Soon after, a third Gazelle, XX412, appeared. The pilot spotted the Argentine infantry and banked quickly away; again, Estoban’s platoon blazed away at the helicopter. Although the engagement range was much longer, and the Gazelle was soon out of range, it was still badly damaged, even though it was hit by a grand total of only fourteen 7.62mm rounds.
A British after-action report noted: “He lost a blade off his tail rotor, had twelve shots all the way down his tail boom, and one through the cockpit as well but managed, remarkably, to struggle back to Gallahad [ship they were flying from], vibrating like hell, to give us our first, very good and accurate, contact report.”
21 May 1982. A platoon of Argentine infantry armed only with FN FAL rifles and heavy-barreled SAW versions of the same shot down two British Royal Marines’ Aérospatiale/Wessex AH1 Gazelle helicopters and heavy damaged a third in a matter of minutes.
Once more, as with the Royal Marines on South Georgia Island, all this damage was done entirely with only 7.62x51mm FAL rifles and lead-cored M80 ball ammunition, and the riflemen were not crack Marines or Commandos but ordinary conscripted infantrymen with only about 45 days of military training. These losses and damage on the first day of battle led the British, who were soon to be desperately short of helicopters after the MV Atlantic Conveyor was sunk, to use their remaining Gazelles to haul supplies for the ground troops and evacuate casualties. They were deemed too vulnerable to small arms fire to be used as attack helicopters and the pilots had already reluctantly admitted that they did not think that their unguided 68-mm SNEB rockets were accurate enough to be used in close proximity to friendly troops.
JETS
Expecting to face Argentine Air Force attacks, the British ships and landing force were to protect themselves primarily with surface-to-air missiles, in which great reliance was placed. The majority of the Royal Navy destroyers and frigates protecting the landings were still armed with Seacat missiles. Introduced in 1962, these slow, subsonic, manually-radio-guided missiles were considered obsolete against modern jet aircraft by the end of the 1970’s. Only the destroyers carried the newer, faster radar-guided Sea Dart missile, which performed much better against fast and/or low altitude targets. Ashore, the British Army emplaced a battery of their new Rapier missile launchers. The terrain offered poor sites for these weapons, most of them experienced unserviceability problems with their somewhat delicate electronic systems after the launchers had been pounded as deck cargo for weeks in the stormy South Atlantic, and virtually all of the spare missiles were lost when Argentine aircraft sank the MV Atlantic Conveyor. The other British Army missile system ashore was the Shorts Blowpipe shoulder-fired MANPAD, which was one of the worst weapons of this type ever fielded.
Additionally, the Argentine Air Force pilots were well-trained and aggressive and adopted tactics designed to negate the effectiveness of the British SAMs. The aircraft came in over the land, low and fast, to mask themselves from radar and missile tracking until the last minute when they reached the bay, and these close-in approaches left the defenders a very short time to react. They also came in numbers and in waves intended to confuse or overwhelm the tracking and guidance abilities of the defensive missile systems. The Royal Navy suffered considerable losses from these attacks.
On the first day, 21 May 1982, Argentine Air Force Douglas A-4 Skyhawks and Dagger Mirage-5 jets mounted seventeen sorties against the British ships, hitting and damaging HMS Ardent and Argonaut. Bad weather prevented strikes the next day, but Argentine low-level attacks continued for the next four days after that. Two Type 21 frigates, Ardent and Antelope, and the Type 42 Destroyer HMS Coventry were sunk, and eight other ships were damaged in the air attacks. On May 25th, an Argentine Super Etendard fighter hit the roll-on/roll-off container ship SS Atlantic Conveyor with two Exocet missiles and sank her as well. Lost with the ship were vital supplies, ammunition, spares, and a large portion of the British invasion force’s heavy-lift helicopters, including one Lynx, six Wessex, and four Chinook helicopters.
If not for some problems with the fuses on the Argentine Air Force’s 500- and 1,000-pound bombs, British ship losses would have been far heavier. Since the aircraft attacked at such low levels, the bomb fuses had to carry delays long enough to allow the planes to clear the blast zone before exploding. Several bombs penetrated into one side of British ships and flew out the other before exploding, and a total of thirteen bombs that achieved direct hits failed to explode entirely. If even half of those duds had exploded, the course of the war could have been dramatically changed.
When it quickly became apparent that the surface-to-air missiles alone could not protect the fleet, the handful of old 20-mm Oerlikon and 40-mm Bofors automatic cannon left on the warships almost as an afterthought were suddenly worth their weight in gold. After the first few air raids, the rails of both the naval and merchant vessels in San Carlos Water were lined with Royal Marines and sailors armed with every last available machine gun. The vast majority were belt-fed 7,62x51mm GPMGs (FN-MAGs), although a handful of magazine-fed L4 Brens are also seen in photographs, and even some L1A1 SLR rifles. In one account, a sailor noted that the SLR could be used with a 30-round L4 Bren magazine and that the safety sear could be jimmied with a small piece of metal to make the SLR fire on full automatic. The frigate HMS Argonaut (F56) was equipped with Seacat missiles and two single-barrel 40-mm L/60 Bofors anti-aircraft guns. Before the air attacks had even begun, Captain Kit Layman had the crew bolster these air defenses with an additional seventeen weapons, a few 20mm Oerlikon light anti-aircraft cannons and the remainder GPMGs, mounted wherever possible and manned by midshipmen, cooks, signalers, and anyone else who could be spared. Ashore, the Paras and Marines set up their GPMGs and a handful of Browning .50-caliber heavy machine guns on anti-aircraft mounts.
May 1982: Argentine Air Force tactics, numbers and low-level flying often befuddled the surface-to-air missiles used on British Royal Navy warships defending the British landings at San Carlos Water. After the first few attacks, the railings of the British ships in the sound were soon lined with every available 7.62x51mm NATO GPMG General Purpose Machine Gun.
The Argentine pilots’ low-level strikes, while befuddling some of the missiles, also brought them within small arms range. In video footage of these attacks, one can hear the slow thudding of the 40mm and 20mm cannon first, then, as the aircraft get closer, a rapidly swelling crackle and stutter of machine gun fire as the planes come within small arms range. Other footage shows shells and bullets kicking up white geysers of water around Argentine jets racing in at wavetop height.
Instead of the usual mix of 1-in-4 tracer to ball ammunition, the belts and magazines of the British machine guns and rifles were loaded at the maximum ratio of 1 tracer to 1 ball round. For the Argentine pilots, flying through long streams of highly visible tracer bullets was at least distracting if not intimidating, forcing them to resist the urge to evade the fire while trying to line up on their targets. It was in fact demonstrated that any kind of flying pyrotechnics were distracting to attacking pilots and decreased their efficiency in delivering air-to-ground weapons, so that even hand-held signal flares were fired off in front of attacking aircraft.
Two Argentine Air Force A-4 Skyhawks make a low-level attack run on British ships in San Carlos Water. Bullets and shells can be seen striking the water around them and the black puffs of exploding 40mm shells and tracer bullets are visible in the air.
It was for this reason that, in the late 1940’s the U.S. Air Force developed the M21 “headlight” tracer bullet for the .50-caliber BMG. The standard M1 tracer bullet was modified by replacing the usual tracer composition entirely with a strontium peroxide igniter compound, increasing visibility from the front by a factor of three and giving the appearance of a ball of fire. The intention was to make the enemy think that he was under fire from a much larger-caliber weapon, such as a 20-mm cannon, rather than just small arms, and, it was claimed, “…the psychological effect is pronounced.”
During the 10-week course of the Falklands War, British small arms fire, entirely 7.62x51mm in caliber, was credited with shooting down six Argentine aircraft: three SA 330 Puma medium helicopters, an FMA IA 58 Pucará (an Argentine armored turboprop ground-attack aircraft), as well as two “fast-movers”, a Douglas A-4 Skyhawk and a Dagger Mirage-5. This is an impressive score considering the short duration of the conflict and the fairly limited number of aircraft used by either side.
A course put out by the US Army Air Defense Artillery School at Fort Bliss, TX, noted: “While your intent in firing is to kill the attacking aircraft using small arms, it will result in a low probability. However, the use of coordinated group firing, using all organic weapons to make the pilots aware that they are under fire, can disturb their concentration and cause them to miss their target or abandon their attack. The pilots should be made aware that they are under fire from the ground.
Nothing is more disturbing to a pilot’s concentration than flying into a hail of tracers, and if practical, tracers should be used.”
These aircraft were technically not “shot down” by small arms fire, but evading tracer fire from the ground still caused the destruction of four helicopters and 21 deaths.
For engaging hostile vehicles and aircraft, especially with a 7.62x51mm battle rifle, one or two rifle magazines, readily identifiable on the exterior and/or kept in a separate ammo pouch, can be carried loaded with a mix of AP, API, and tracer ammunition. While still far from a real anti-aircraft weapon, such an ammunition mix at least ensures that any actual hits on an aircraft are more likely to damage it since such rounds penetrate deeper and have a greater chance of reaching something vital, in addition to the incendiary action and the psychological effect of the tracers.
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