The Navigator
Account taken from the book WITH GOD IN THE SOUL AND ALCOHOL IN THE HEART
Narrated by: Captain Pastran – Canberra Pilot
Date: Night of 13 June 1982
At the aircraft flown at II Air Brigade, based in the city of Paraná, camaraderie and team spirit are vital, for the Canberra’s crew consists of a pilot and a navigator. A team was precisely what we became throughout the whole war—my course-mate, friend, and navigator, Captain Fernando Juan Casado, and I. For nine years we served together at the same postings: six years at II Brigade and three at the Military Aviation School, until we returned to Paraná in December. We also went to war together.
Our callsign that day was “Baco”.
On the final armed raid carried out by the Argentine Air Force, on 13 June 1982 at 22:55 hours, once the mission had been completed and the bombs released—only six hours before the ceasefire—our aircraft was struck by a British missile and fell into the sea. I managed to eject; he remained forever in our Malvinas. Sadness overwhelmed me, yet I accepted God’s will, for only He knows what awaits each of us.
When I hit the water, the shock of the cold was tremendous. My hands froze almost instantly, making it extremely difficult to inflate the life raft. My reactions were slow, even though my mind urged haste, for I knew my life depended on it; without the anti-exposure suit I would not have survived more than a minute before suffering cardiac arrest. By God’s grace I managed to inflate my life jacket and raft, free myself from the parachute, and climb onto my fragile little means of salvation. In the moment when I could not inflate the raft, I thought God had abandoned me, but I later realised that was not so.
Then came that terrible night, shivering with cold and navigating by the light of the flares fired during the final battle for Puerto Argentino. I knew that, even if only slightly, the bombs I had dropped on a concentration of British troops and equipment had delayed the final assault.
Everything unfolded just as we had been taught in our survival classes. When I finally reached the coast, it was extremely hard to get out of the water due to the exhaustion of the mission, the strain of ejecting, and the supreme effort of navigating through the night in a tiny raft upon the immensity of the sea.
I searched for shelter to avoid freezing during the night. Soon I found a crevice between some rocks and covered myself with the rubber dinghy. I kept my hands and feet moving constantly while fighting against sleep, fearing that I might never wake again. In the morning of 14 June, I began to walk; the disorientation and cold were intense, until I managed to orient myself by the sight of a helicopter flying from Darwin towards Puerto Argentino.
As I walked, I sang and whistled, trying to keep my spirits up—already greatly diminished by the loss of my closest friend and the situation I was enduring. Later I was taken prisoner by the British, who already held control of the entire island. They truly treated me very well; I could almost say as though I had been one of their own.
That same night, General Moore informed Brigadier Castellano that I had been rescued, though the news only reached my home on the 15th; for two days my family lived with the sole information that I was “missing in action”. After that came the uncertainty of captivity.
I was told that when General Moore spoke to Brigadier Castellano in Puerto Argentino, he asked how we managed to bomb with such accuracy with the Canberra, and how we knew the location of his command post, as it had been hit twice. He had survived only because he happened to be inspecting British positions at the time. That was a source of pride for our Group.
Lastly, I wish to pay tribute to Captain Casado and, through him, to all the brave and devoted navigators of the Argentine Air Force.
Before 1 May, the Canberras carried out reconnaissance and exploration sorties over the Islas Malvinas.
During the war they executed 35 combat sorties, 25 of them at night, performing low-level and high-altitude bombing runs and dropping nearly 100,000 pounds of bombs.
Among their honoured dead in combat were Captain Casado, Lieutenant De Ibáñez, and First Lieutenant “Coquena” González.
No comments:
Post a Comment