RAF Regiment - The 1980's era

The RAF Regiment From WWII to the Present Day

The Flak Air Defence cell on shore was manned by the army and although an additional Regiment squadron leader was u1ised as the RAF representative there, he was not included in the subsequent move of the cell from San Carlos to Port Stanley. Despite The largely avoidable difficulties, the usual Regiment energy and initiative were successfully employed to gather the Rapiers and their supporting equipment on shore and to deploy them operationally in the shortest possible space of time. 63 Squadron replaced the Rapier defence of the San Carlos airhead. which had until then been carried out by The Light Air Defence Battery of the Royal Artillery.

Terrorism in Germany
As a part of widening the IRA campaign of death and destruction beyond the boundaries of Northern Ireland and undoubtedly because of the need to find softer targets than those in UK a terrorist campaign was mounted against British Service personnel and their bases in Europe. Inevitably, innocent civilians were to be killed and injured as well in these indiscriminate actions. In May 1988 two groups of off-duty

RAF Regiment personnel were attacked in Holland, by a car bomb in one instance and by fire from automatic weapons in the other. In one attack, two airmen from I Squadron were killed, and another injured, when their car was blown up. In the other, two airmen from 16 Squadron and one from HQ 4 wing were shot, One Fatally.

Events in eastern Europe in general, and in the USSR in particular, transformed the international scene by ending the cold war. In the euphoric situation which followed, the British government lost no time in reducing its armed forces summer had come, and chimneys which were no longer needed could be pulled down. Unfortunately, the international stability which had been one of the results of great-power confrontation was soon to be replaced by outbreaks of instability in areas outside Europe.

“Options for Change”, as the unilateral restructuring of the British Services was termed, cut more deeply in some areas than others but the main result was the loss of large numbers of skilled and experienced personnel. There was an understandable decline in the morale of those who remained in uniform, wondering what they were being retained to do and how long it would be before they would be declared redundant.

Whatever doubts may have lingered about the cost-effectiveness of retaining the RAF Regiment in an RAF which was under continual financial pressure were soon dispersed by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 and the consequent threat to the stability of the Middle East. With the prospect of having to deploy combat aircraft to forward bases in another country, SHORAD and the ground defence of RAF assets became the first priority, with NBC defence and ground defence training for all deployed RAE personnel following close behind.

Operation Granby resulted in the deployment of RAF aircraft and equipment to Cyprus, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. RAF Regiment officers and NCOs were distributed throughout the force, carrying out a range of duties which included NBC monitoring, ground defence advisers and other specialised tasks. The mobile field laboratory responsible for identifying any biological or chemical agents used by the Iraqis deployed a number of field learns, each of which was commanded by a Regiment NCO, while the helicopter squadrons took their own Regiment personnel with them into the desert.

The RAF Regiment units in the theatre were deployed at Akrotiri, Muhurraq, Dharan, Riyad and Tabruk as part of the Allied operation Desert Shield and included four wing headquarters three Rapier squadrons four light armoured squadrons and one field squadron All in all, RAF Regiment personnel made up 19% of the total RAF force deployed to the Gulf.

The Iraqi Air Force made no attacks on targets in Kuwait, Bahrain or Saudi Arabia - to the great disappointment of the Rapier squadrons. While the other light armoured squadrons were utilised for airfield defence tasks, 1 Squadron deployed in support of the RAF helicopter squadrons operating with 1st (UK) Armoured Division. Once operation Desert Storm began, and the ground forces advanced, it was not long before 1 Squadron was once more back in Iraq, where it had been formed some 70 years earlier! With the abrupt ending of the campaign, the Regiment squadrons were withdrawn from the Gulf and returned to their parent stations in the UK and Germany. Nevertheless, the RAF Regiment was able to notch up another “first into...” to add to the list of places which Regiment units or individuals had entered ahead of the main bodies of British forces.

Flight Lieutenant Bell and Sergeant Baldwin had been tasked with locating chemical weapons left behind by the retreating Iraqi forces. Moving independently of other British forces, they were halted at a US Army checkpoint outside Kuwait City and told that only Arab coalition forces were allowed beyond this point and that they should rejoin the British Army, twenty miles down the road. Bell replied “we’re not British Army we’re RAF Regiment” and the American officer in charge waved them through the checkpoint. They were thus the first western allied military personnel to enter Kuwait City and reached the airport just before the first RAF Hercules landed there.

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The 80's and Beyond

In World War Two the RAF Regiment had managed to be among the first if not the first British troops to enter a variety of interesting places and this tradition was continued in the Falklands when a Spanish-speaking Regiment officer Flight Lieutenant G H Bransby who had been deployed to assist in the interrogation of prisoners of war, was among the very early arrivals in Port Stanley. He was an even earlier arrival at Government House then the residence of the Argentine army commander and one of the results of that is the handsome bronze statuette of General San Martino which now resides in the Depot officers’ mess.

Lightening the Load

As a result of the decision to reduce the Regiment front-line to only ten squadrons, the demands made on this small force were such that it could not meet the war roles laid down for it. In Germany, the ground threat to airfields and to Harrier squadrons deployed off- base from Soviet special forces trained specifically to neutralise NATO airfields and aircraft was such that another squadron had to be provided to fill the obvious gap in the RAF’s defences. 58 Field Squadron, which had been disbanded in Aden in 1957, was accordingly re-formed as a Rapier squadron in 1974 and added to the order of battle.

However, a study of the more sophisticated ground threat revealed that the soft-skinned Land Rovers and the sections travelling in them outside the airfield perimeter would be extremely vulnerable to ambush by small groups of special forces. Furthermore, the field squadron’s main support weapon the 81mm mortar an indirect fire weapon with a slow reaction against unregistered targets was unlikely to be effective against the expected threat.

The solution was to re-equip the field squadrons with light armoured vehicles of the Combat Vehicle Reconnaissance (Tracked) range manufactured by Alvis. This gave the squadrons excellent mobility across any terrain, protection against enemy fire and the capability to engage targets directly with 76mm turret-mounted guns and 7.62mm cupola-mounted machine guns in armoured vehicles. The range of CVR(T) equipment for each squadron included armoured vehicles (Scorpions) with turret-mounted 76mm guns capable of firing a wide variety of ammunition, armoured personnel carriers (Spartans) for the rifle sections, an armoured command post (Sultan) for squadron HQ and an armoured recovery vehicle (Samson).

This enabled a single squadron to dominate the large area of ground from which stand-off weapons could be fired against airfields and aircraft as well as providing the rapid concentration of firepower and manpower to deal with enemy incursions onto the airfield itself The armoured car this time with tracks had returned into RAF service after a gap of more than thirty years and gave the Regiment back the capabilities of the wartime field squadrons.

The training task for the conversion of the field squadrons to the light armoured role was a formidable one but with the ready co operation of the Royal Armoured Corps Centre at Bovington and the RAC training regiment at Catterick garrison, the Regiment squadrons began to re-equip in 1981 and the conversion was completed by 1983. Two light armoured squadrons were deployed in Germany and Cyprus, but the strategic reserve wing remained based in the UK.

Unfortunately, it was to prove increasingly difficult to maintain the necessary levels of CVR(T) skills when the light armoured squadrons were continually committed to contingency tasks in the infantry role. These constant interruptions to the very demanding training cycle of maintaining, operating and tactically employing armoured vehicles inevitably degraded operational capability in the war role in favour of internal security tasks of the type on which the Regiment squadrons had routinely been employed since 1946.

Operation Corporate

The British reaction to the Argentinean seizure of the Falkland Islands in 1982 was to mount an improvised recovery operation under circumstances in which success would have been considered improbable — if not impossible — by any respectable military staff college.
One of the first steps was to establish a staging post at Wideawake airfield on Ascension Island and in order to provide the necessary level of defence there against the possibility of an attack by Argentine special forces, HQ 33 Wing was deployed, with a field flight under command, for this task.

63 Squadron, equipped with Blindfire Rapier, was at seven days readiness at RAF Gutersloh; it was given forty-eight hours notice to embark on the Queen Elizabeth 11 which sailed for the Falklands on 5th May with an Army brigade on board. What air defences there were on the QE I — .5” machine guns and Blowpipe missiles — were manned by the Regiment whose existence was otherwise largely ignored by the embarked Army contingent.

Meanwhile, the first RAF Regiment gunners to reach the Falklands were those in 18 Squadron, whose Chinook helicopters landed there on 6th May. These gunners were to be the first Regiment personnel to see action in the Falklands when they manned the side- mounted machine guns of the Chinooks on operational flights. There were, of course, other Regiment gunners with 1 (Harrier) Squadron, as well as those embarked on the merchant ships principally the
North Sea ferries which carried troops to the war zone. As the vessels approached the Falk the threat of air attack increased and the gunners participated in manning their GPMGs in the anti-aircraft role when the occasion demanded.

When 63 Squadron came ashore at San Carlos, there were obvious difficulties in locating, and unloading, their Rapier equipment and vehicles from the Atlantic Causeway while the squadron personnel, who had transhipped from the QE II in South Georgia to the Canberra and the Norland, did not land as a formed unit. These were not unlike the problems which Regiment LAA flights and squadrons had encountered in Operations Torch and Husky almost forty years earliest It took over 12 hours to land 59 Land Rovers and 57 trailers including the Rapier equipment by Mexefloats from the Atlantic Causeway and another 24 hours before the last of the squadron personnel was ashore from the passenger vessels. The squadron commander had received no briefing on his tasks, no preliminary reconnaissance of fire unit sites had been possible and the logistic and administrative support left something to be desired there were, for example, only twenty-four sets of Arctic clothing for the whole squadron.

The RAF Regiment.net web © site and The RAF Regiment from 1984 © Web site have been created by Glen Beavis, both sites contain pictures and information gathered from many sources, including my own personal knowledge.

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