Battle for the Falklands: The Winter War. Patrick Bishop
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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.
It is extraordinary the extent to which people behave in a war in the way that the war films would have you believe. In the middle of the battle for Mount Tumbledown, John Witherow saw a young Guards lieutenant from the Blues and Royals wandering down the road from the fighting looking fiercely indignant. ‘The swine have gone and blown up my tank,’ he said. Earlier on, while wandering around in the darkness in the worst weather of the war looking for a trench, he came across a lone figure hunched against the wind, his cape flowing behind him like a cartoon character. ‘Who was that outside?’ he asked when we found some shelter. ‘Oh, that will be Lord Dalrymple,’ said a sergeant. ‘He’s always out there.’ On the day after the battle for Mount Longdon a pair of Harriers swooped along the side of Mount Kent on their way to a bombing raid on Port Stanley and as the troops cheered and shouted they switched on their vapour trails and climbed into the sky leaving a perfect victory ‘V’ in their wake.
People spoke in war comic clichés. They really did say, ‘We’re going to knock the Argies for six.’ A Marine lieutenant heading off on a night patrol to draw the enemy fire and locate their positions said: ‘Looks like we’re set for some good sport tonight.’ Perhaps because it had been so long since Britain had fought a conventional war a lot of the language and images were borrowed from American literature and films about the Vietnam war. ‘It’s just like Apocalypse Now,’ said a Marine in awe watching the tracer crackle over the side of Mount Harriet. Soldiers predicted that if the Argies were ‘zapped’ heavily enough they were bound to ‘bug out’.
The doctors and medical orderlies in the gloomy field dressing station at Ajax Bay and on board the hospital ship Uganda half consciously modelled themselves on the heroes of ‘MASH’ although the best words and expressions were their own. ‘Yomping’ was an almost onomatopoeiac term for trekking heavily-laden over difficult ground. It described the activity perfectly. No one knew where it came from, though exhaustive research by John Silverlight of the Observer seems to suggest it has its origins in the Norwegian skiing term for crossing an obstacle.
Significantly, there were two terms for acquiring pieces of equipment dishonestly. One was called ‘proffing’, the other ‘rassing’, derived from the naval shorthand for Replenishment At Sea. Looted items were known as ‘gizzits’, short for ‘give us it’. ‘Proffing’ was a way of life. One of us left a pair of ski gloves to dry out on top of a boiler in a settlement farmhouse and within half an hour they were gone. A little later a Guardsman walked by wearing them. He swore he had found them elsewhere and already his name was inscribed across the back in large black letters. Some of the most sought-after articles were the waterproof overboots that were much prized as a means of preventing trench foot. To take them off and leave them unattended was taken as an indication that you no longer had any further use for them. Courage was measured in two ways. First there was the extent of your ability to ‘hack it’; to keep going in adverse conditions. That you failed to hack it was almost the worst thing that could be said of you. Second there was the size and quality of your ‘bottle’. This was really old-fashioned daring. People who charged machine gun posts armed only with a fixed bayonet had a ‘lot of bottle’. That you ‘bottled out’ was definitely the worst thing that could be said of you. The most useful military word was ‘kit’. The military applied it to everything from a comporation tin-opener to a Hercules transport plane. This could be carried to extremes though. We heard one officer referring to his girlfriend as ‘a good bit of kit’.
When it came to the nastier side of their trade the military tended to go in for euphemisms. Apart from the SAS who invariably used direct terminology, you rarely heard people talk about killing Argentinians. They ‘took them out’, ‘wasted’ them or ‘blew them away’. Troops were never shelled. They were ‘malleted’, ‘banjoed’ or ‘brassed up’. It did not sound too alarming to hear over the ship’s tannoy that there was some ‘air activity’ thirty miles away until you realized that it meant some Argentine aircraft were minutes away from bombing you. To make the experience less harrowing, the incoming raiders were often called ‘dago airways’ in the running commentaries that went on during the attacks on Fearless. ‘We have some good news and some bad news,’ said a naval officer over the tannoy one day. ‘The good news is that four Argentinian aircraft are approaching from the west presenting excellent targets for our Harriers and missiles. The bad news is that they are Super Etendards carrying Exocet.’ Nothing was known by its real name. Food was ‘scran’ or ‘scoff’. The sea was the ‘oggin’ and our cabins were ‘pits’ or ‘grots’.
One of the reasons all this terminology sounded so odd was that the military was a foreign country to most of us. Because the days of national service were long gone few of the journalists knew what sort of men they were and how the Army and Navy operated. Having worked in Northern Ireland was not much of a help as it has been recent government policy to shield the Army from publicity and to prevent the emergence of any military ‘personalities’. In the absence of a conventional conflict for so long, the picture the public has of the upper reaches of the military has grown so faint as to be almost invisible. The heads of the services who sprung to prominence during the conflict were unknown to most people.
In view of this lack of information we tended to make crude assumptions about what these men would be like. Most of the battalion commanders had been educated at the better-known public schools and had gone straight into the Army. The Para and Marine commanding officers tended to be practical, spartan men who shared all the discomforts their men had to put up with. We were surprised when we went ashore to see 42 Commando’s CO, Lt.-Col Vaux, carrying a pack not much smaller than those of the ‘booties’ around him.
Although the officers shared the lives of the men and a close relationship grew up between them, at the end of the day they were still separated by an almost unbridgeable divide. Officers might call the subordinates by their Christian names when they were on their own together but it would never happen in public. The officers joined the forces as a career, the men as a job. The great majority of the soldiers knew when they joined up that they were in the ranks for the duration of their army lives, and for most of them it did not matter. To make the leap from the ranks meant taking examinations, including a knives and forks test to gauge your suitability for the rigours of the officers’ mess. ‘There are occasions when it is permissible, almost desirable, to throw a pint of beer over your neighbour’s head at dinner,’ a Marine lieutenant explained. ‘There are other times when it is not.’ The Parachute Regiment was the keenest to commission good NCOs and at least three majors in the campaign had joined the Army as privates.
We knew little about the men at the top of the chain of command, for Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse, Commander-in-Chief Fleet, ran the war from the Navy’s operations’ headquarters, an underground bunker at Northwood, in north-west London. The Task Force commander was Rear Admiral John Woodward, who was based throughout the war on HMS Hermes, the older of the two aircraft carriers with the fleet. He was called ‘Sandy’ because of his reddish hair and was the primus inter pares among the Task Force commanders. Both he and General Moore answered to Fieldhouse, but although Moore was in charge of the land forces, the local operation came under Woodward’s control. He was a retiring man, who played chess