Battle for the Falklands: The Winter War. Patrick Bishop
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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