Britain's Bombay Take-Away
Four years ago the British Ministry of Defence rubbished
Celtic League claims about deals to procure junk helicopters to
support its air operations in the Six Counties - new details
however have emerged which indicate that in a bizarre deal the
MOD considered buying back £65 million worth of helicopters the
British taxpayers had provided to India, and which Indian pilots
refused to fly on safety grounds.
``The nation rejoices,'' Margaret Thatcher announced as British
ships returned from the Falklands/Malvinas in July 1982.
Initially humiliated, the British had rallied and dispatched a
rapidly assembled task force half way round the globe where it
had snatched victory in the face of adversity.
Many in the Celtic countries had welcomed Britain's discomfiture,
less out of enthusiasm for the Argentinian junta, more because of
the slap in the face administered to the reawakened imperialism
epitomised by Thatcherism.
With the war over however, the Union Jacks and the uniformed men
lining the rust-stained ships cheered by the waiting crowds said
it all. Britain triumphant, Britain as ever a major military
force on the international scene.
But it was not that simple. The ramifications of the Falklands
excursion would have a curious footnote a decade later in the
green fields of South Armagh and in a scrap-yard in the steamy
suburbs of Bombay.
On 25 May 1982 as the British fought hard to establish their
foothold in the Falklands a surprise attack by two Argentinian
Naval aircraft hit the merchant ship Atlantic Conveyor, sending
12 men and her cargo of heavy lift helicopters to the bottom of
the South Atlantic. Over the next few days the British paid
dearly for this surprise victory as other helicopters struggled
to provide the logistics support Atlantic Conveyor's
irreplaceable cargo was to have provided. Attrition was high and
after the conflict analysts revealed that this factor cost the
British many lives as they advanced to the Falklands Capital,
Stanley.
In the years after the Falklands War it also became apparent that
the British armed forces would never recover the helicopter lift
capability that it needed to meet the expanding commitments
pressed upon them as Margaret Thatcher sought to retain her, and
the United Kingdom's, position on the world stage. The cost of
building and maintaining garrisons in the reclaimed Falklands,
the conflict in the Six Counties, UN duties in the Balkans etc
meant that procurement of basic equipment, always a low priority,
was made more difficult.
Towards the end of the 80s it was clear that not only was there a
serious deficiency in both medium and heavy lift support
helicopters but that the MOD had neither the strategy or the
funding to rectify it.
Nowhere was the paranoia over this logistical deficiency more
critical than in the Six Counties. Twenty years of sustained
guerrilla war in the rural areas had virtually made prisoners of
garrisons in isolated areas and due to landmines and sniper
attack, logistics support by road was impractical.
The British Army Air Corps and the RAF had adapted to sustain
these garrisons and the light reconnaissance machines initially
deployed were joined by medium and heavy lift capacity. But there
was always a deficit; machines were damaged by ground fire, in
accidents, and as always there was operational depreciation and
obsolescence.
The procurement by the IRA of considerable quantities of arms
from overseas and the quality of their heavy automatic weapons
from the early 80s was a major cause of concern as helicopter
attrition mounted. However, the clearest indicator of the
paranoia the British military had was the periodic assertion in
the media that the IRA were on the verge of procuring small
portable surface-to-air missiles. This, in effect, was the
doomsday scenario the British Army feared.
To meet its perceived difficulty the Minister of Defence set in
train one of the most bizarre sequence of events in the annals of
their military adventure in Ireland. In 1992 MOD officials
started to scour the world for additional helicopters to support
British operations in the Six Counties. In tandem, steps were
taken to upgrade and up-armour machines already in use. To this
end a joint services co-ordinating group was set up.
The main criteria for overseas procurement was that both medium
and heavy lift type helicopters should not be costly and should
be available for early delivery.
One of the first batches of equipment looked at was lying
abandoned on the edge of a Bombay slum. The MOD sent inspectors
with a view to buying the 21 Westland W30 helicopters. These are
civilian updated versions of the Lynx helicopter operated in the
Six Counties.
The MOD were apparently initially unaware that the machines had
been supplied as part of a £65 million Overseas Development
Agency project to help develop offshore oil installations.
However, shortly after delivery there was a series of fatal
crashes in which nine people died. Indian pilots thereafter
refused to fly the machines and they were grounded in 1989,
eighteen months after delivery.
In 1993 the Celtic League revealed details of the bizarre
shopping expedition which at the time the MOD denied. The story
resurfaced recently when the new British government started to
analyse the overseas aid programme of the previous government and
discovered that a scrap dealer in Sussex was negotiating to buy
the £65 million pounds of helicopters for just £900,000. In
September this year The Guardian newspaper repeated our claims
and the UK defence ministry was said to be ``checking its files''.
They have made no further comment.
In tandem with the Bombay excursion, other efforts were made to
procure heavy lift Chinook helicopters. At the time the RAF's
existing machines were going through an upgrade programme and
this was encountering difficulties. The MOD sought to buy seven
second-hand HC1 machines from the Royal Australian Air Force to
augment its own Chinook fleet in the short term until problems
with the HC2 could be rectified. Again, when the Celtic League
revealed this `shopping trip' in 1993 the MOD denied that it had
occurred. However, new evidence has now been revealed that the
MOD did have problems with the RAF Chinook upgrade, and the House
of Commons Defence Select Committee established in October that
the MOD concealed the fact that they had to sue the manufacturers
of the engine system for negligence.
The Australian deal, like that in Bombay, appears to have fallen
through and modified RAF Chinook HC2s were pressed back into
service despite concerns from aircrews about engine-control
system reliability.
Some believe this premature move resulted in the crash in Kintyre
which killed 29 people, including most of the senior intelligence
hierarchy in the Six Counties.
As revealed in An Phoblacht (July 1994) the British military fear
about the security of air support operations was indeed tested
but not as they had feared by surface-to-air missiles but by
multiple ASUs deploying heavy automatic weapons, to devastating
effect. In fire fights, the most successful of which occurred in
South Armagh in September 1993, the IRA raised serious
question-marks over the British army's ability to maintain its
logistics support operations in the border areas. Within days of
the South Armagh battle urgent moves were made to improve air
support and units of the Royal Navy with Sea King helicopters
were deployed, the first time such units had been used for over
fifteen years.
As the first IRA ceasefire was declared, in 1994, there seems
little doubt that the British military support operation was at a
critical stage. Indicative of this is that in the months
following the ceasefire the question of the decommissioning of
IRA weapons was catapulted to prominence. Significantly, the
usual British media mouthpieces, like Micheal Mates and the
Unionist leaders, were calling for the decommissioning of ``some
heavy weapons'' as a first step.
Hopefully, the new peace process will deliver a lasting
settlement that restores to Ireland the territorial integrity it
seeks. The peace process should also remove the clatter of
British military helicopters, and their noise and nuisance, from
the people of South Armagh, Tyrone and the north generally.
The Celtic League however are cynical enough to believe that
peace will not lead to the British revealing the secrets of their
shopping excursion for the unsuccessful ``Bombay Takeaway''.
To do so would reveal the fact that the British were prepared to
expose their own service personnel to risk, operating helicopters
boycotted by Indian civil pilots and helicopters scrapped by the
Australians. It would also lift some of the mist that surrounds
those 29 deaths at Kintyre.
Bernard Moffatt is the General Secretary of the Celtic League.
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