Mortal enemies in war learn how to be brothers in arms

FEW war veterans get to meet and much less shake the hand or befriend those who were their adversaries in combat. But Neil Wilkinson knows the smile, the handshake and the welcoming embrace of a man he thought he had definitely killed 30 years ago during the short war that broke out when Argentina laid claim to and occupied small islands 8,000 miles away in the South Atlantic.

Having been convinced that the pilot he shot one day in May, 1982 had smashed to the ground with his plane, former gunner Neil found out five years ago that Mariano Velasco had actually ejected when his Skyhawk was smoking and clearly going down.

Neil, who lives in Leeds, recently went back to the Falklands for the first time since the war. There he saw the impact crater and a few fragments of Mariano’s plane still scattered across a field in West Falkland. He travelled onward to Argentina and, with some trepidation, despite exchanges of friendly emails with his former adversary, met Mariano and his family at their home. It’s an extraordinary story, which has been followed by the BBC for a documentary being shown this evening.

Neil Wilkinson was a 22-year-old gunner who’d been in the Navy for three years, wanted to see the world, and hadn’t seriously expected to see service in a war. When he was called to serve on HMS Intrepid in the Falklands, the ship’s key role was defence of the beachhead at San Carlos Bay. On May 27 1982, Mariano Velasco, a 33-year-old hot-shot flight lieutenant left Rio Gallegos in Argentina with three other Skyhawks intent on making a raid on British ships in San Carlos Bay.

“As the planes approached I fired off six rounds at the first one, and a lot of smoke came from it as it disappeared over the hill,” says Neil. So accurate was his shot that he assumed the pilot must have perished. Both sides in the 74-day war took a pounding, more than 900 deaths including 255 British servicemen, 655 Argentines and three islanders.

Around the time of the 25th anniversary of the Falklands conflict in 2007, Neil Wilkinson saw a TV documentary which raised his suspicions that he had not killed the pilot after all. In it Mariano Velasco described his part in the sinking of HMS Coventry with the loss of 19 British lives and the subsequent raid on HMS Intrepid, in which his plane was shot down. Military record checks revealed that Neil Wilkinson’s gun was the only one that had shot that day from the ship, and that the pilot whose plane he brought down was Velasco.

In the film Velasco describes how he ejected and despite serious injury managed to walk for days before finding an abandoned farmhouse with food and fuel supplies in it. After resting there he alerted three passers-by to his predicament and they contacted an Argentinian base. Mariano spent the rest of the war back in Argentina and went on to have a long and distinguished career in the Navy, retiring as a commodore.

For a quarter of a century the image of that plane going down in a plume of black smoke haunted Neil Wilkinson. “Your job is to deter them to protect your ship. I thought about it many, many times. It’s not something I gloat over. I just see the aircraft every day in my brain.”

Despite some discussion of the story over a period of years before Neil travelled to Argentina, it was still a highly emotional journey, he says. The two embrace when they meet, and the Englishman can’t hold back the tears as the Argentinian welcomes him to his home. “For all this time I’ve had the build-up... not knowing he was alive for 25 years, then finding out he was alive, then eventually getting here after five long years of trying... I’m ecstatic. He welcomed me with open arms and that’s all I wanted.”

For his part Mariano believes good solders should be able to forgive each other and even become friends.

“These are important things in life. When you go through such bad times, to be able to meet and forgive each other. But there’s nothing to forgive really – each one of us had to fulfil our duties.”

He shows Nail the portable compass and clock he carried on board with him that day in May. The clock stopped at 4.50pm, the moment at which Neil’s gun hit the plane.

The two men have vowed to maintain their friendship across the continents, even though they’ve agreed to disagree on Argentina’s continuing claim on the Falkland Islands.

Neil feels he has finally a ghost to rest: “(For me) part of it is closure. I know that he is alive, and we are friends.”

Inside Out, BBC1 Yorkshire, tonight, 7.30pm