Forces TV - 1st Gulf War 1991
 

Dear fellow Ppruners,

I am involved with Forces TV making a new series called "We Were There" - an hour long programme which brings together military personnel from an iconic incident to discuss their experiences. Rather than a 'normal' documentary style interview, the programmes are a round-table discussion involving about 6 'veterans' with everyone contributing.

So far, we have made episodes about: Korea and the Battle of Gloster Hill, The Falklands and the sinking of HMS Sheffield and Northern Ireland and the bombing of 2 Para at Warren Point.

I am investigating the possibility of doing an episode covering the air war during the first few nights of Op Granby in 1991 and I'd be interested to hear from any of you fine gentlemen who were out there at the time - if you DM me a few basic details and an email address, I'd be happy to hear from you.

best to all
John Nichol

Sorry John, touched a nerve, it was 2 Para at WP (Edited to tone down post)

A good friend who lost his leg in the incident (One of his colleagues came out with the now famous "No you haven't mate, it's over there") sadly died of a heart attack fairly recently after working tirelessly for many years with BLESMA and other service charities. He was in hospital following breaking his other femur during a charity bike ride when he succumbed. He had also recently had the other leg taken off after years of pain from the original incident. RIP Paul B

Many thanks for pointing out my error & you are quite right TBT - a slight slip of the keyboard on my part.

& your friend Paul was mentioned on a number of occasions by the guys I interviewed. Indeed I met him a couple of times when doing some work with BLESMA.

JN

How about covering the lesser known parts of Op GRANBY that started in August 1990? I was the Sqn Duty Officer the night the FLASH signal came in for the F3s of 5/29 Sqns to deploy immediately from Akrotiri to Saudi Arabia. Some very worried looking faces the next day as the int came in that Saddam was preparing to roll further South and that we would be standing on our own, with the Saudis and a few Americans, until the cavalry arrived...:ooh:

Whilst I was non-CR at the time, there were some interesting stories coming back from the crews that deployed. Flying CAPs in small numbers against a numerically superior foe in the first few days/nights in a barely combat capable jet with no defensive aids took a lot of guts, in my opinion. No CSAR, no preparation and making it up as they went along.

The build up to the '91 Air War might make an interesting 5 minute intro to your planned program. It shows, in my opinion, the very best of the RAF whilst it was still a force to be reckoned with in its own right (about 27 fast jet sqns, if I recall correctly?).

LJ

It's a very good point LJ, and made by the F3 guys before. Thanks for the reminder.

With the format of the programme as it is - filmed "as live" with half a dozen guests talking about a single incident, it might be quite difficult to bring in another storyline. But I'll see who comes forward with personal accounts.
cheers
JN

John, sounds like a great project. Very good luck with it.

Here you go, this will bring back some memories:


:ok:

Found this on your YouTube feed JN:


Splice the 2 together and job done! :ok:

ah yes - one of the classic GW1 vids.
I put a copy of the TVAM one up on Youtube a while ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfdsMwg-XmQ

Happy days.

Beat you by 1 minute! :ok:

I doubt that a full and frank discussion of the merits (or otherwise) of Saudi-Arabian compound-hopping (and 'furniture' constructed from slabs of tonic water) whilst waiting for the initial aluminium overcast to clear before we could take Albert off on a series of jolly adventures would make for riveting viewing. However, every luck with it.

Actually, having just looked at the schedule for this evening, it would probably qualify as 'appointment TV'.

You know what, it would be nice to see one covering the coldwar from a RAFG and BOAR viewpoint.

A very interesting point Nut......& already under consideration - you'll have to watch this space (or more accurately, a new thread!)

But I need to get this GW1 programme off the ground first.

Thanks for posting the Sky News vid, B. Video of the battle damage to "Delta Hotel" on the 24th of January 91. I was on the ABDR team that got that frame back as a war goer less than two weeks later.. It did another 8 raids before a cracked canopy hinge saw its return to Bruggen (and two years of Cat 3 repairs!). Could talk about that for 30 minutes very easily.

Hi John, I did Op Granby at Muharraq with an outfit called XV Sqn (groundcrew)..... you might have heard of them. From memory, you and JP didn't stick around for long ;)

I do remember it was the 17(F) Sqn groundcrew that saw you off and when the XV Sqn boys came on shift at 0700 to find out that you and JP were missing, the mood was so dark. It had been a bit of an adventure up to then with our fancy 5* hotels. The reality brought us all down to earth. The other dark time came later on when Steve Hicks didn't come back.

Nice to see you post here occasionally. Hope you are well and good luck with the programme.

Just to add a bit of balance in terms of types of ac involved I make no apologies for my favourite video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwieL2O2Nn8.
25 years on and no chance of operating on such a scale again.

LJ, you reminded me, I took a couple of F2 guys down to Metropole Building for a special brief about 1988 prior to their visiting Q8. I wonder if they were still involved come 1990.

LJ,

Yes, the initial deployment was a very interesting time for mud movers as well. The most dissapointing thing to me, particularly in retrospect, was that it took so long to get a useful air to ground capability in place. Yes, Heaven and earth were moved from the off but, we were supposed to be ready for WW3! Thank our lucky stars the big shooting war did not start any earlier.:O

Good luck with the prog John, I am certain this subject will become more seriously exposed as time goes by.:sad:

OAP

M8, within 12 hours of the arrival of the first GR1s in theatre, there were 4 on QRA loaded with JP233s.

Yes, I know there were no maps, or targets and it was a political QRA as much as anything else but still, it was a capability.

The PGM capability took longer but then it was still in its infancy on the still-young GR1 in 90/91. But we showed the world how to do it and the GR1/TIALD combination was second only to the F117A on bombs dropped vs DHs. :ok:

OAP

Yes, I think the first muds (Jags) arrived in far off Thumrait about 3 days after the Lincolnshire Land Sharks touched down in Dahran.

JN

Thanks mate. I think that seeing as it is 25 years ago this coming August, that there might be enough for a documentary series on the UK's efforts for GW1 (similar was done for the Falklands War). Your planned program may well be leading the charge. Also, the transition from the 'thirty year rule' to the 'twenty year rule' might see classified info being released earlier under FOI.

Good luck with your project matey and I look forward to being one of the armchair critics if the TV production try to add their own falir to the final product! :ok:

LJ

PN

There were all sorts of 'special briefs' in 1990 to which you refer when some of the ex-Soviet equipment belonging to former East Germany fell under the gaze of the NATO Allies...:eek:

Some of this came at a very good time as Saddam had gone to the USSR to buy his arms after the West stopped selling him anything of use (apart from the French, with Mirage and Roland). If the Berlin Wall hadn't fallen in 1989, I wonder if the outcome of the Air War would have been slightly different?

LJ

Hi JAJ,

Yes, but they were a GR1 pair with 4x1000ret on Q the first night we had any jets at Bahrain, 28 Aug 90.

OAP

Another favourite from the time:


Plus, if I recall correctly, the GR1s arrived about 2 weeks after the F3s and the Jags.

PS. Wasn't there a good story about how the Pilot Officer became a Pilot Officer at 3:54 into the video? Always heard a rumour that there was, as it is highly unusual to make CR as a Pilot Officer on the Jag.

JaJ. How short our memories are. I think you will find that the GR1/pavespike combination was marginally better than the GR1/TIALD combination. About 51% vice 50.5%

History of the Royal Air Force here seems about right from what I remember at the time

Whatever happened to the 'out takes' version, complete with 'Buxton Mineral Water', "that crew drank my hospitality budget" etc? Someone taped a rugby match over my copy... would love to see it again...

Hmmm, at odds with my recollection but at this distance, I'm not going to argue.

Not sure where you get your figures but at the end of the war, the US put out the figures and it was definitely TIALD 2nd to the F117A. If I had access to my library, I'm sure I could find a reference.

From the link at post 25

Having left the RAF I was involved in the repaint of the Ferranti 125 that had been involved in the development of the TIALD pod, they were operating out of Turnhouse and when setting up the TIALD on the aircraft they were presented with a feint image of the word FERRANTI in reverse across the screen, the engineer was telling me it took them ages to find out the cause. The jet was facing their ( closed I believe) metal hanger and it was detecting the thermal differences on the far hangar wall which had Ferranti painted in big white letters on the outside facing :)

Pavespike and TIALD results were pretty much on a par during GW1. The TIALD pod rushed into service under UOR was still a developmental pod but still managed to guide approx 200 PW IIs against Pavespike, which designated 746 PW IIs with an overall accuracy of 51.34%.

JN,

Someone mentioned BAOR/RAFG, whilst there are some book about BRIXMIS nobody as far as I know has undertaken a documentary. Same amazing stories in the books.

The second one is about the teams and crews in the MERT/IRTs and CCAST and their development in Iraq and Afghanistan. Saved many a life and nobody except you and your co-author in 'Medic' has written about them. They so deserve their history becoming far more widely known as the award of the ARCC to Sqn Ldr 'Charlie' Thompson-Edger PMRAFNS will have passed so many on the 'outside' by without a thought. She was involved in moving up to 600 causalities. An outstanding achievement.

Interesting link in post #25 that is referred to in post #28...

By this time it was clear that the weapon-carrying capability of the Buccaneers was being under-utilised and that mixed Buccaneer and Tornado formations raised some inevitable coordination problems. Thus, in the last ten days of the war, Buccaneers using Pave Spike and Tornados using the newly arrived thermal imaging airborne laser designators (TIALD) increasingly carried out self-designating attacks. A brand new system, TIALD offered important advantages over the day-only, manually controlled Pave Spike laser designator used by the Buccaneers. TIALD was more reliable, fully integrated into the Tornado's navigation and bombing system and could be used at night. As a result of this newly acquired night/LGB capability, the Tornados were tasked to help the US F-117A Stealth fighter with its attacks on Iraqi HASs, and thus for the next two weeks Tornado packages hit Iraqi HASs by night and bridges by day. At this stage of the war over 60% of Tornado sorties were using laser-guided bombs.

My bold above; I'm not sure about more reliable but then PaveSpike may have been quite unreliable??? but to claim that the 2 TIALD pods in GW1 were integrated into the nav & bombing system is a bit of a stretch. It was only after GW1, during the work-up and deployment for the return to the Gulf in 92 that they started to become integrated.

Still, let's not have a pi$$ing contest over who a few %age points....both systems did incredibly well.

JAJ

No problem. The JP233 was not sent until much later.

JN

You must be deep into research. Do you know what has been released 540 wise for the Bahrain deployments or Auth sheets? Cheers

OAP

thanks for the replies guys - always appreciated.

If there are any more chaps (from any aircraft type!) out there who'd like to put themselves forward, I'd be more than pleased to hear from you.

OAP - I'm not looking too deeply into the paperwork trail as this is very much a "personal reminiscence" type of programme - & most certainly not a documentary reconstruction of the war.

If you want to know about TIALD, "DunIan" who has occasionally posted on here is the man to speak to. He had a beard you could hide a badger in.

John's project concerns the first few nights of the air war. Pave Spike didn't arrive until the Buccs entered theatre on 26th Jan - and TIALD arrived on 6 Feb. Thus JN's project will probably focus on the time before PGMs were available, when only JPs, dumb bombs and ALARM were being used by the Tornados.

I was over at Tabuk on 19th Feb and was fortunate enough to see some TIALD imagery - an excellent piece of kit. The destruction of whatever had been in the Iraqi HAS which it had been designating was very impressive, causing a massive secondary. Unfortunately our evening mission was cancelled due to a Tornado unserviceability after we'd launched, so we flew back to KKIA instead.

We may well have bumped into each other.

It certainly was a game-changer, esp the ability to debrief the crews when we got back. For the first time, they could actually see what their bombs were doing. The debriefs were usually crowded, guys who hadn't been flying that night coming in to watch the recordings.

Don't forget to invite the panelists to bring their hotel loyalty cards and they can compare points accrued during the period :)

Hmm...not sure I'd be that keen to claim 'loyalty points' for the Sahara at KKIA as it doesn't feature too highly on my list of preferred holiday destinations....

Waiting in the foyer for the engineer and navigator to turn up (as usual...), one of the recently arrived French Air Force Transall crew came up to me and asked "Where is ze bar?"....

The look of total shock on his face when I told him that not only was Saudi dry, but it was also a serious offence for anyone to be caught with alcohol was quite remarkable!

Tut tut, such a second-rate establishment, you should have been downtown in the Sheraton (or was it the Hilton?)
Great sport lobbing the complimentary shampoo over the balcony from the mezzanine level into the ornamental fountain next to reception, and then listening as the noise of the water was muted somewhat some seconds later.. :E The not-so-secret local police didn't know what to make of it either...
And the Gingers driving their minibus into the hotel garage behind another one - unfortunately not realising that theirs had the a/c unit on the roof, and didn't quite fit... oh how we laughed!!