Battle for the Falklands: The Winter War

Battle for the Falklands: The Winter War
Patrick Bishop

John Witherow

‘Boldly planned, bravely executed and brilliantly accomplished’ was Margaret Thatcher’s assessment of the Falklands campaign. But what did the war mean to the men in the trenches and below decks?This gripping first-hand account of the Falklands War, written by bestselling military historian Patrick Bishop and Sunday Times Editor John Witherow, reveals the true experiences of the British soldiers and seamen on the front line. The authors, then rookie reporters, lived alongside the fighting men, experiencing the daily realities of a British task force that was hugely outnumbered on a barren island 8,000 miles from home. The Falklands: The Winter War looks at the covert role of the SAS and the heroic death of Colonel ‘H’ Jones at Goose Green, and considers just how close Britain came to defeat.This is an extraordinarily frank and unsparing account of a military campaign that has held a defining place within the British national conscience since victory in 1982.

Battle for the Falklands

The Winter War

Patrick Bishop

and

John Witherow

Contents

Cover (#ulink_739846f6-c4e7-5793-8221-8f410d276565)

Title Page

Maps

Authors’ Note

Prologue: One Small War

1 The Empire Strikes Back

2 Sailing

3 D Day

4 ‘Follow Me’

5 Life on the Mountains

6 The Last Days

7 Surrender

Epilogue: Going Home

Acknowledgements

About the Authors

Copyright

About the Publisher

Maps

Authors’ Note

We started writing this in the summer of 1982, within a few weeks of returning from the South Atlantic. It was not intended as a considered historical study but as a piece of extended reportage, designed to satisfy the curiosity of a British public still fascinated by such an extraordinary and unexpected national drama. It carries some of the demerits of the haste in which it was written, but also, we would like to think, some of the virtues of freshness and immediacy. In this edition we have left the manuscript much as it first appeared, the unvarnished testimony of what two young reporters saw, felt and thought, all those years ago and all those miles away.

Prologue

One Small War

It was a while before anyone realized that the guns had stopped firing (writes Patrick Bishop). We were standing on a rock ledge on the east face of Mount Harriet looking down towards the town. The crags around were chipped and smashed by the fighting of the last two days and the pathetic debris of the Argentinian defenders lay strewn all around. At three o’clock there were some uncertain cheers from the Marines on the rocks above. ‘That’s it,’ one of them shouted. ‘They’ve surrendered.’ One of the officers, Major Mike Norman, who had been captured and sent back to England by the Argentine invaders ten weeks before, laughed and shook hands with an officer standing next to him, but the rest of us wanted the news to be true too badly to rejoice until we were sure.

The commanding officer, Colonel Vaux, went over to the radio and called up Brigade. ‘It’s not confirmed,’ he said. ‘It’s just something they got from fleet.’ It started to snow again. Colonel Vaux went back to the radio. ‘They’re falling back from Sapper Hill!’ he said. ‘There are white arm bands and flags all over the place.’

The same news was travelling fast across the battlefield. The Welsh Guards scarcely had time to take it in before being ordered forward to Sapper Hill, the last Argentine stronghold before Port Stanley (writes John Witherow). Tired soldiers staggered out of their ‘bashers’ pulling kit into rucksacks and piled into Sea King and Wessex helicopters to be ferried the last few kilometres to the foot of the hill. Inside the aircraft the soldiers gave each other nervous grins. The elation at the news that the Argentinians were retreating had been replaced by uncertainty as to whether they were flying to witness a surrender or to fight the final battle. The helicopters shuddered to the ground by a jagged outcrop of rock on an unmetalled road running by the side of Mount William. The men jumped out and scrambled into the heather looking for cover. There were no Argentinians in view. ‘Get back on the road, those surrounds are mined,’ shouted an officer.

The men returned to the track and set off towards the outline of Sapper Hill. Their faces were dark with camouflage cream and tiredness but the pace as they walked got faster and faster. The intelligence officer, Captain Piers Minoprio, was called to the radio. ‘There’s a white flag over Stanley,’ he shouted. We were trotting down the road now, passing soldiers struggling along with enormous packs and heavy machine guns. The order came down the line to ‘close up’ and ‘unfix bayonets’. The defenders’ abandoned possessions littered the sides of the road: kit bags, blankets and helmets. Mud-stained comic books and letters from home skipped about in the wind. We passed an artillery position still smoking from the battering it had received from the British guns. The ground around it was churned up like a newly ploughed field. Two Marines were lying by the side of the road. One had a dark red patch spreading across his trouser leg and the other had a bloody blotch on his head. Medical orderlies were hunched over them murmuring reassurance. We climbed on to a Scorpion tank and caught up with the forward Commandos who were skirting the base of Sapper Hill. They had been fired on by the retreating Argentinians as they ran out of their helicopter and there had been a firefight that lasted twenty minutes. It was probably the last skirmish of the war.

We rounded the bend and came within sight of Stanley. An Argentine corpse was lying face down in the middle of the road. The soldiers peered at the body, full of curiosity. ‘Spread out lads!’ shouted one of the NCOs. ‘Take care, this is too easy.’ The troops moved up the muddy path on to Sapper Hill, scouring the ground in front of their feet for signs of mines. We knew the name of the hill well from numerous intelligence briefings and it had been the Guards’ objective in the renewed assault due to take place that night, but now the machine gun positions and trenches were empty. A vehicle lay abandoned at the side of the road and there were ration tins and biscuits trodden into the mud around the dug-outs. The only sound was the wind and the tramp of boots. Down below in Stanley, smoke swirled away from shelled houses. The Argentine soldiers stood by their dug-outs staring at the approaching troops. The capital looked suburban and insubstantial in the watery light, a smattering of green-and red-roofed houses. The large red cross on the roof of the hospital stood out in the middle of the town. A white helicopter buzzed across the bay carrying casualties to the Argentine hospital ship Bahia Paraiso. The Welsh Guards’ commanding officer, Lt.-Col Johnny Rickett, stood on the crest of the hill taking a swig from a whisky bottle that was passing among the officers. Brigadier Tony Wilson, the commander of the 5th Infantry Brigade, joined him looking down on the town. ‘It seems an incredibly long way to come for this,’ he said.

The troops were told to wait outside Stanley while negotiations were started for a surrender, so we both decided to go in ahead of them. We stripped off our camouflage kit, piling it next to one of the 155mm guns that had been shelling us the night before, and started to walk the last half mile into town. It was difficult to know what attitude to strike with the Argentine soldiers who sat by the road in trenches pointing their guns towards us. We tried to be as ostentatiously harmless as possible, waving and calling greetings, but there was no response and it was hard to stop speculating about how it might feel to be struck by a bullet. As we reached a cattle-grid on the edge of town three Argentine conscripts approached. They were unarmed and grinning and insisted on shaking our hands. For the first time we felt that the battle for the Falklands was all but over.

The speed of the Argentinian collapse that Monday morning astounded everybody. The British had been appealing to them to surrender for four days without receiving any sign that they were prepared to do so and most of the soldiers were expecting to fight through Stanley street by street. As the news of the surrender came through, the commander of the land forces on the Falkland Islands, Maj.-Gen. Jeremy Moore, had ordered an air raid on Sapper Hill to blast the Argentinians with cluster bombs. ‘I heard on the radio that the Argentine soldiers were all walking about and I had a Harrier strike due to go in,’ he said. ‘I grabbed the radio myself and did all the talking for the next two hours. The strike was due within minutes and if it had gone ahead it may have meant the whole war continuing.’

Considering the war ended in a reasonably neat and satisfying way for Britain it is easy to forget that it began in muddle and semi-farce. The slide into conflict started on 18 March 1982, when Constantino Davidoff, a Greek Argentine scrap metal merchant with a contract to dismember an old whaling station on South Georgia ran up the blue and white Argentinian flag to remind the world of Argentina’s claim to the territory, which had been acquired by Britain at the beginning of the century. It took time for the consequences of this small coup de théâtre to develop. When diplomatic representations met with calculated indifference in Buenos Aires it became clear that Davidoff’s action was a deliberate test of Britain’s will. Up until then the dispute over the ownership of the Falklands had, in the eyes of Britain at least, shown a capacity to be stretched, painlessly, into infinity. But on 2 April, a day late it was said to exploit the full irony of the situation, Argentina invaded the Falklands, expelled the British garrison of Royal Marines and declared them the Islas Malvinas. Britain reacted first with indignation and then with force.

Even when the Task Force set sail it was hard to take the business too seriously. ‘See you in a week,’ said one of our editors at the time as preparations were made to join the fleet at Portsmouth. The predominant feeling during the first few days at sea was that this show of might was a faintly ludicrous reaction to a dispute that would almost certainly be resolved by diplomatic means. The Argentinians would soon realize the extent of their effrontery and their isolation from the rest of world opinion, and withdraw.

We comforted ourselves with the thought that powerful diplomatic machinery was available to shift the protagonists off a collision course before the crash happened and there was, it appeared, plenty of time. The newspapers seemed confident that if it did come to a fight the odds were almost embarrassingly unfair. It was a contest, they said, between the first and the third division. In this buoyant atmosphere some of the soldiers felt that the worst outcome would be if a diplomatic solution was arrived at before a shot was fired and we all had to turn round and come home. The Navy was more cautious. At least the soldiers had some idea of what sort of conflict they might be going into. The Navy had never been in a missile war and had a healthy fear of the horrors it might involve.

The Falklands campaign had many of the characteristics of a nineteenth-century military encounter. It was in essence an old-fashioned punitive expedition and the cause of the dispute concerned territory not ideology. It was a short war with a beginning, a middle and an end. Apart from the missiles, modern technology played a minor part and the basic weapons would have been familiar to any veteran of World War II. Most of all it was, unusually for the twentieth century, a remarkably two-sided war. Both sides had to rely, fundamentally, on their own soldiery and stocks of weapons without any decisive military assistance from an outside power.

The British could reasonably claim to have done almost everything for themselves. They took a pride in their ability to mount such an operation, at such a distance, at a time of economic feebleness and national self-doubt that will probably look excessive in years to come. Even the accounts of the war were two-sided. The press corps of thirty journalists who travelled with the Task Force was exclusively British. For once the ubiquitous camera crews of NBC and CBS were absent and the world was forced to watch events unfold through the eyes of the two protagonists.

A few hours before the Welsh Guards were due to start an attack on a force of 250 Argentinians dug in below Mount William, one of their officers was asked what the strategy was for the action. ‘We’ll sneak up on them, open fire and give them cold steel up their arse,’ he replied. Every newcomer to the battlefield was struck at what a primitive business it was. Tactics seemed to have changed little from the last war or indeed the Great War. The basic tools for fighting were artillery, mortars and machine guns. Several of the mountain-top battles ended with the British soldiers lunging at the departing backs with bayonets. Because the Argentine armoured vehicles played no part in the fighting, many of the more modern weapons were never used for their original purpose. The Paras’ ‘Wombat’ anti-tank guns stayed on the ships and the Milan wire-guided missiles were used almost exclusively and with horrific effect for firing into Argentinian bunkers.

The anti-aircraft missiles were employed with mixed results. The Blowpipes, under suspicion from the outset, turned out to be cumbersome and – it seemed to us watching – to miss the jets with depressing frequency, although they were more successful against the piston-engined Pucaras that hopped around the islands terrifying the helicopter pilots. Naval visitors to the battlefield were surprised to see that so much of it was still a matter of trenches and artillery bombardments and that the first thing you did when you stopped was to start digging a hole. The battle on Mount Longdon proved that a single sniper could still hold up a company of men. The planes were fast and sophisticated but they could still be brought down by small-arms fire. The well-tried tactics of military warfare were the ones that succeeded; diversionary raids, surprise attacks and night operations. This approach also had the benefit of keeping down the number of casualties. The British equipment was no better than the Argentinians’. In some cases it was the same, but unlike the Argentinians, the British looked after it. The troops kept up the habit of stripping and cleaning their self-loading rifles, even on top of the mountains, so that at the end of the campaign they were oiled and spotless in comparison to the rusting and battered piles of weaponry left behind by the Argentinians. Despite the helicopters and the Volvo tracked vehicles, it was a war where most of the troops marched into battle. 3 Para walked all the way from Port San Carlos to Port Stanley. The ability to move long distances loaded up with equipment and weapons was something the Argentinians had not accounted for and part of their reasoning for not attacking the beach-head at San Carlos at the beginning of the landing appears to have been because they believed that the Task Force would soon get bogged down and fall vulnerable to the Argentinian Air Force.

The marches were forced on the troops by the shortage of helicopters but they took a masochistic pleasure in the ordeal. It was not any great belief in the justice of the cause that propelled them along. Most of the argument about the rights and wrongs of the affair had ended a few weeks before the landing. If anything, the case for going to war over the Falklands diminished rather than grew the more you saw of the place and its inhabitants. Mostly it was pride in themselves and their organizations that motivated them. Many of the men were from Britain’s economic wastelands: the Clyde, Ulster, the North-East, and they had better experience than anyone else in the country of its imperfections and injustices. They joined up in many cases because there was nothing else to do. The war was not won on the playing fields of Eton but on the tarmac playground of a Glasgow comprehensive. The soldiers showed an extraordinary capacity for pain and discomfort. By the time they arrived in Port Stanley many of them had spent seventeen days in the open. That meant an existence of continual dirt, wet and cold. It was not always necessary for them to have been quite so uncomfortable. We sometimes asked why the soldiers did not carry tents, which seemed much more sensible and less time-consuming than the usual business of building a shelter out of a waterproof poncho and bits of string, but no one ever had a convincing explanation. We got the impression that tents were somehow regarded as ‘sissy’. In the last days of the war, when the Task Force commanders began to get worried about the state of the troops on the mountains, some tents were found and sent up to them.

The soldiers met all these privations with an uncomplaining acceptance which seemed almost unnatural. Their reaction to the horrors of the campaign was usually to make a joke and laugh. At one level this was simply a case of laughing because otherwise you might cry; humour was the balm of tragedy. The Welsh Guardsmen who staggered ashore from the Galahad, blackened and shocked, spent their first moments on the beach joking about what had happened. A motorcycle messenger in the Welsh Guards was killed when he ran his bike over a mine after bringing rations up to the front line. ‘At least he copped it on the way back,’ someone said.

This flip callousness was a feature of most of the humour. Brigadier Julian Thompson, commanding officer of 3 Commando brigade, said the funniest moment of the war for him was watching an officer caught in a small boat in San Carlos Water during the middle of a bombing raid. The outboard engine had broken down and he was paddling frantically to get ashore. People were unsentimental about the dead, at least during the time the fighting was going on. The death of Colonel ‘H.’ Jones, commanding officer of 2 Para, who was undoubtedly popular produced only formal expressions of regret when the news came through that he had been killed.

For all that, the soldiers were not unfeeling people. The military operated an ‘oppo’ system where each soldier had a best friend upon whom he could rely and who would look after him in turn when necessary. The system worked. In battle the men risked their own lives to patch up their wounded friends and carry them back to the regimental aid post. They sometimes got horribly injured doing so. Two Scots Guards had their feet blown off carrying their injured ‘oppos’ out of a minefield.

After the victory there was much talk about how well the Argentinians had fought but most of the soldiers had a fairly low opinion of the soldiering abilities of their opponents. ‘Military pygmies,’ was how one SAS officer described them. Some of the British troops had a tendency to ghoulishness. A seventeen-year-old Argentinian conscript who was shot through the mouth during the battle for Mount Harriet and buried where he fell was dug up by a ‘bootie’ – one of the slang words the soldiers called themselves – who wanted to photograph him for his album.