COMMANDOS SENT TO JOIN KOSOVO FORCE By Andrew Gilligan, Defence Correspondent
A Sea King helicopter aboard the British aircraft carrier HMS Invincible is to send an entire battle group of commandos and the Special Boat Service to the seas off the Balkans next week in a sign that Nato commanders are preparing for a land war.
More than 1,000 Green Berets of 40 Commando, Royal Marines, and other units will sail from Plymouth on May 11 aboard Ocean, the Navy's newest and largest warship. Also on board will be artillery gunners, a "significant proportion" of the SBS and up to 15 giant Chinook or Sea King helicopters.
The commandos' deployment is to be announced by George Robertson, the Defence Secretary, this week.
Ocean - 1,000 tons bigger than the aircraft carrier Invincible - is designed as an offshore "platform" for launching a massive helicopter-borne invasion of enemy territory. She has been diverted from planned exercises off the east coast of the United States to sail to the Mediterranean, close to the tip of Italy. This is within helicopter range - and less than a day's sailing - of the Albanian coast.
Once in the Mediterranean, the marines will begin practising exactly the sort of "helicopter-borne assaults" behind enemy lines that may prove to be part of any eventual invasion, if one is authorised. Helicopter landings are one way to help overcome the mountainous, heavily defended terrain on the Kosovo border and the poor roads in the area.
Ocean will be joined by the assault ship Fearless, which can help mount an "across-the-beach" invasion using small landing craft. The operation is also expected to include logistic ships which, with Fearless, can accommodate thousands more troops.
Britain's contribution to any ground force may, however, be strictly limited. The Telegraph has learned that the Royal Green Jackets, the unit due to replace the British battalion in Macedonia, will have to be padded out with an entire company - 100-strong - of TA soldiers because it is so short of men. The TA unit concerned is one which is to be substantially cut in the Government's defence review. "Given the need for soldiers, it is essential that they put the cuts to the TA on hold until the war is won," said Julian Brazier, a Tory MP.
Senior naval sources were adamant last night that Ocean's deployment was not a prelude to invasion but that the massing of multinational forces will send a clear signal to Slobodan Milosevic, the Serb president. "It is another means of piling the pressure on Milosevic," said a Ministry of Defence official. Conscious that the air campaign is proving slow to achieve its objectives, military chiefs hope that signs of a ground build-up may cause Milosevic to crack.
Milosevic has freed three US soldiers held prisoner in Yugoslavia, the state-run news agency Tanjug said yesterday. The soldiers will be handed over to the American civil rights leader Reverend Jesse Jackson, who is visiting Belgrade to seek their release.
But the Serbs reacted furiously yesterday as a Nato missile slammed into a civilian bus on a bridge in northern Kosovo. Tanjug claimed that at least 23 people were killed. Alliance officials were urgently investigating the reports of the attack at the village of Luzane, 12 miles north of the provincial capital Pristina.