Lynxes versus Hinds
Anthony Mockler
Hildesheim, West Germany 'I suppose the Spectator will give your article its usual left-wing slant,' said, with jovial suspicion, the colonel in charge of press relations at joint headquarters. Ap- parently he had only just started doing the job at Monchen Gladbach, but it still seem- ed an unpromising start. Fortunately, however, they were reassuringly more erudite in the regimental mess at Hildesheim, discussing Auberon Waugh's recent commentaries on the RAF in Ger- many with detached aplomb. 'Quite favourable in your weekly, rather less so in Private Eye,' said a young officer seconded to the Army Air Corps from the 9th/12th Lancers. 'Who exactly,' chipped in a brother officer, 'is Taki?'
It was an impressive building at Hildesheim, taken over by us from the Luftwaffe after the war, its cellars adorned with caricatures of Reichsmarschall Goer- ing and other eminenti that gave it a rather charming period flavour. I was not at all clear what the Army Air Corps was or what was its role. Its 1st Regiment, my hosts, boasted a female assistant adjutant of con- siderable charms. This seemed a bit playboyish until I learnt that it was not a special privilege of the Corps. All army units are now, like trendy Oxbridge col- leges, going bisexual. In the Army Air Corps they fly helicopters and drink Pimm's. I was relieved to see that the major booked to take me up that afternoon drank nothing but water. Less relieved to hear, in response to my searching questions, that he was the only one of the six officers at the table who had actually crashed and lost a helicopter — in Hong Kong harbour, I think.
The helicopters themselves were rather
small and unimpressive. I am not an expert on helicopters but I remembered the fear- some American monsters in Vietnam that seemed at times to fill the whole sky with their sound and fury. Ours were in no way comparable. They were not, I was told, assault helicopters or troop-carrying helicopters like the Chinooks and the Cobras. They would not rain rockets down on gooks or land hordes of heavily-armed troops behind the enemy lines. The regimental 2 i/c rather wistfully implied that he had been hoping when he joined the Army Air Corps for something of the sort. But clearly it was not to be. The army's helicopters are defensive helicopters and comparatively cheap. There are two sorts: the tiny Gazelle — cost fully equipped, they reckoned, about £1.2 million; and the more formidable Lynx — £3.2 million. The Gazelles are for reconnaissance and are unarmed; the Lynxes are for hunting tanks.
We went out on an exercise — one Gazelle and three Lynxes. The Gazelle is the eyes and ears of the troop, nipping along ahead, spotting the enemy armour, itself unseen. Then come the Lynxes. They have a crew of only two: the pilot and the gunner. They hover on tree-tops, and though their missiles have a range of almost two miles are, to the untrained eye at least, extremely difficult to spot even a mile away. Each Lynx is equipped with eight TOW missiles — Tube-launched, Optically-tracked, Wire- guided. The wire guidance sounded a bit Heath Robinson but apparently works well. I saw for myself the optical tracking, which makes gunnery very easy — though the cross-sight must be held on target until the missile hits. But this can be done without difficulty even when the missile has been fired and the Lynx is swinging away at an angle. (Hughes Helicopters in America have just come up with a refinement, a sort of subarborine periscope for the gunner that will enable the Lynx to hover below the tree-line.) With eight missiles, each Lynx could theoretically account for eight Russian tanks. A troop could therefore knock out 24 tanks, zoom back to base, pick up another load of missiles, come back to the attack, knock off another 24, and so on. It seems to even the odds — 7,000 Nato main battle tanks against 17,500 of the Warsaw Pact. But would theory correspond with practice? Not quite. Yet apparently the missile 'hit-ratio' is over 60 per cent and the `survivability factor' — one soon falls into army jargon — is reckoned to be one helicopter for about eight tanks. As a modern fully-armoured battle tank costs roughly the same as a helicopter, this looks like extremely good value. On the other 'What idiot chose School for Scandal?'
The Spectator 24 September 1983 hand we do not have many LY1,/1". helicopters. There are now three ArmY Air Corps regiments in Germany, one with eac", of BAOR's three armoured divisions; NI' each regiment has only 18 Lynxes. BY TY arithmetic that means 432 Russian tanks lkansotsc.ked out while the Army Air Corps Not exactly knocked out, either. As A everyone freely admits, the Red ArmY's T64 and T72 tanks now have very strong ar- mour, particularly frontal armour. Even ,,a direct hit might only disable a tarm., However, a disabled tank and a wounded crew would, as a liaison officer put it, be h `more of a drain on the Russians than ,a wrecked tank and a killed crew, which an would just bypass; so more of a plus to our side, inhuman though that may sound'.
To me, helicopters looked desperatoY
easy to shoot down. Not apparently by enemy planes, though. 'They're not the danger, they fly too high, they can't come down to our levels', said my pilot, the Ma" jor. `It's all a matter of fieldcraft.' Not by tanks. 'Yes, we could be shot down by tanks if they range in on us, but we move too quickly — we hope. We fire, ta"e cover, and by the time they know we 'r
there we've gone.'
There had, it seems, been a lot °f criticism of the vulnerability of helicoPters' particularly of the Gazelles, in the t Falklands where two or three had been , down by small arms fire. 'But, you se to said the major, with almost desperarr eagerness to convince, 'there was no cover in the Falklands, no cover at all. And of were advancing. Fortunately there's a cover in the north German plain and t d be fighting a defensive battle over gr°' we know well. They advance over that he gesticulated down at a vast field of sal° ble — 'and we catch them from over thereti from behind cover. See that Lynx there' couldn't) 'sitting on the top of those treat' A bit high but that's to avoid raising rills Good fieldcraft.'
'No', the major added, 'the real danger
the Hind.' The Hind? 'A Russian attire helicopter, very big, custom-built. They.r1 used to protect their troop-carrYAIte helicopters but they could easily be useu vhuulnnteraubsi.e.And Gazelles are partiodar'Y At the debriefing sergeants, officers am° men allgave their views without any c°,1; punction or regard for rank. Too Illnw'e be radio chat, we were flying too hig„hi'd forgot to simulate artillery fire. It wr fes.. a platitude to say they were clearly Pro .„ sional. They were clearly erliot7 themselves as well. The whole ArMY r" Corps (headquarters: Middle "Is: squadrons or sections in the Falklands' Ulster, Hong Kong) is only about 2, n. strong. It has its eye on the RAF's trn'd carrying Wessex helicopters. 'That w°1re be a logical extension to our role. Bur cw7e at very new' — they were founded in 191)„,nd the time principally as a recce corps — 'do we're still searching for the best things.' Way to
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