By the evening of the 25th, we had 5,500 troops ashore and the air raids had become more sporadic. The carrier group was now standing nearly 200 miles to the ENE of the is;lands, in order to keep away from the Exocet threat. This meant that we had very little time available for CAP given transit times of around 40 minutes.
On the 26th, the ground forces broke out of the beachhead and 2 Para headed south to take Goose Green. This was meant to be a 12-hour night attack but became a very hard-fought, bloody battle lasting 36 hours. 1(F) flew numerous sorties in support of the Paras in low cloudbase and poor visibility and on one of these, they lost another aircraft to AAA. The pilot ejected very low and fast and managed to hide in an abandoned farmhouse for several nights before being picked up by a Gazelle.
On the 28th, a flight of 3 x GR£s attacked the 35mm Oerlikon at Goose Green that was holding up the advance and silenced it with well-placed CBUs and rockets. Ex FJ will be able to give details of that but it broke the stalemate and allowed 2 Para to convince the Argentine garrison that they should surrender the following morning.
All I managed to do was to observe the fire-fight from high level, as I transited to CAP over West Falkland.
Mog