Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (32 page)

For this reason, the Argentines left unguarded the area where the British decided to land. San Carlos Bay was a barren settlement on the western side of East Falkland, approached by sea through
Falkland Sound, the deep-water channel that separated the two main islands. Certainly, it was a good spot to park an invasion fleet. The problem was what to do once the troops got ashore. From San
Carlos, Stanley was fifty miles away, not in itself an insurmountable distance but for the fact that there was no road, nor even a proper track for most of the way. The terrain that would have to
be crossed was wholly unsuitable for carting heavy loads on even the most robust of four-wheel drives – what the peat bogs did not lay claim to, the rocky outcrops and boulders surely would.
The British plan, therefore, was to overcome these obstacles by ferrying the heavy loads by helicopter. The plan envisaged that Chinook helicopters, which were being brought on board a container
ship,
Atlantic Conveyor
, would do the job, but even with these there would scarcely be sufficient numbers to ferry enough artillery pieces and ammunition to hammer the Argentine positions
embedded in the ring of hills guarding Stanley. If – as transpired – the Chinooks never arrived, the fall-back was to use Sea King helicopters, at the risk of enormous strain on a tiny
number of aircraft and pilots. It would take around seventy-four Sea King sorties just to move into position a single six-gun battery with men and enough ammunition for a single night’s
firing.
⁵⁴

The commander of land forces, Major General Jeremy Moore, was firming up plans with Admiral Fieldhouse at Northwood and would not arrive at the Falklands until 30 May. On the spot, the landings
were directed by Commander Michael Clapp and Brigadier Julian Thompson of the Royal Marines. Alarmingly, history offered no precedent for a successful amphibious operation without air superiority,
and this the British did not have. To try and mitigate the worst of this disadvantage, on 14 May a 45-strong SAS raiding party had landed on Pebble Island off West Falkland, where they launched a
hit-and-run mission against the airfield, knocking out an Argentine radar station and eleven aircraft. Given its proximity to Falkland Sound, the airfield would have posed an especially grave
threat to the invasion fleet sailing towards San Carlos Bay. As it happened, the Argentines did not make the connection. The other worry was that the Argentines might
have
mined the approaches to the landing ground. There was only one way to find out. In the night darkness of 20 May, HMS
Yarmouth
, followed by eighteen ships carrying five battalions of men,
sailed silently and with all lights out into Falkland Sound and began their approach towards San Carlos Bay. With no available minesweepers, it fell to the frigate HMS
Alacrity
to test the
waters. It hit no mines. One after another, the other ships followed. And again no mines were struck. A gap in the Argentine defences had been probed and was about to be opened wide.

The men were ferried to the shore in landing craft almost identical to those that had hit the Normandy beaches on D-Day, thirty-eight years previously. By mid-morning, the bridgehead was
established. The crucial element of surprise had been gained, even though a company of crack Argentine troops had moved up from Goose Green on a reconnaissance mission, observed the landings and
managed to bring down two Gazelle helicopters before beating a retreat. As each hour passed, the prospect of the massed Argentine army arriving to drive the landing party back into the sea
diminished. The day before the operation commenced, Sir Frank Cooper, the permanent under-secretary at the Ministry of Defence, consciously misled the British press into reporting that the most
likely form of attack would be not the establishment of a single bridgehead but a series of smash-and-grab raids. Picking up on these reports, the Argentines could not be sure whether the landing
at San Carlos represented the major thrust of an invasion or merely a diversionary tactic, intended to lure them into a trap.

When it came, the counter-punch was delivered not by Argentina’s soldiers but by its airmen. All available Sea Harriers were deployed to screen the skies around San Carlos Bay, but there
were not enough to protect the fleet from wave after wave of attacks. Waiting their turn to unload and unable to manoeuvre in the narrow straits of Falkland Sound, the ships were sitting ducks,
trying to repel air strikes with machine guns strapped to their deck sides. Most vulnerable of all was the huge, easily identifiable, cruise liner
Canberra
, which brought four thousand
troops to what was about to be christened ‘Bomb Alley’. The surrounding hills provided a partial shield since they hampered the Argentine pilots’ vision and ensured they could
only lock on to their target at the very last minute before releasing their load. But even this was a mixed blessing because the hills prevented radar operating properly, giving the ships very
little warning of an incoming attack. While Rapier batteries were quickly established on the surrounding rises, they proved unsuitable to the terrain and the low-level flight paths against which
the missiles had to be manually directed. By coming in low, the Argentine pilots successfully dodged much of the missile barrage, though they often failed to prime their bombs accurately to take
account of the shorter drop. Had they got their priming calculations right, the damage inflicted would have been
potentially game-changing. Likewise, had they been able to
hit the ships ferrying the troops to the beachhead rather than the frigates on picket patrol, the amphibious operation would certainly have ended in catastrophe. How close this came to happening
was demonstrated on the fourth day of the landings, when Argentine Skyhawks attacked the logistical support ships: a 1,000-lb bomb struck
Sir Galahad
and two others hit
Sir Lancelot
.
None of the three bombs exploded and, in
Sir Lancelot
’s case, it took a tense twenty-two hours to extract the most inaccessible of the bombs from the wreckage and lower it safely over
the side. That these bombs did not go off was one of the war’s hinges of fate, upon which depended the lives of three hundred men of the Commando Logistics Regiment and the Royal Corps of
Transport, along with vital stores and provisions for the ground campaign.

By then, it was mostly the frigates that had taken the brunt of the Argentine assault, which began, as soon as the landings were confirmed, on 21 May. Strafed by cannon from Dagger jets, HMS
Brilliant
managed to carry on. Three more Daggers strafed HMS
Antrim
with forty cannon shells and hit her with a 1,000-lb bomb. Fortunately, the latter failed to explode and was
defused, but the damage to the frigate’s capabilities, including her radar, was enough to make her virtually inoperable and she was reduced to the role of decoy duty. The same fate befell HMS
Argonaut
, which was hit below the waterline by two 1,000-lb bombs. Again, the bombs were defused, but not before the damage they had wrought had claimed two lives and left the ship, without
power, effectively crippled. HMS
Ardent
was less fortunate. One of the two bombs that careered into her hull exploded, killing twenty-two men on board. What remote chance she had of
surviving this assault was removed when a second wave of Skyhawks bombed her again. Belching fire and smoke, she took her time to sink, but go down she did. By the end of the first day,
Yarmouth
and
Plymouth
were the only escorts in San Carlos Water that remained undamaged. While the Argentine air force had lost six planes in the attacks, if they could keep up their
strike rate then they could yet claim victory. The problem for the British, as the military historian Hugh Bicheno has put it, was ‘a reversal of the usual charge that armed forces prepare to
fight the last war. The Royal Navy was, albeit inadequately, prepared to fight World War III – it simply was not equipped for the World War II-style, low-level bombing attacks it faced around
San Carlos.’
⁵⁵

Nevertheless, five battalions were safely brought ashore in the first twenty-four hours and they began furiously digging in in order to defend their toehold. Over the following days, many more
men and much more materiel needed to be landed if this vanguard was ever going to be able to break out of the beachhead. It was the weather that intervened to save them on the second day, 22 May,
with low cloud cover preventing Argentine sorties. But the skies cleared the following day and the attacks recommenced. This time
HMS
Antelope
was hit twice by bombs
which failed to explode. The reprieve was short-lived, though. That night one of the devices went off, killing a bomb-disposal expert who was valiantly trying to defuse it. The order to abandon
ship was made just in time, for the fire soon ignited the magazine, the resulting fireball turning
Antelope
into a firework display that lit up the night sky. Charred and mangled beyond
recognition, she went down the next day. As her cracked hull slowly sank beneath the waves it closed up into a V-sign. It could hardly stand for victory, so it was interpreted as a parting gesture
to the Argentines.

Back at command headquarters at Northwood in Hertfordshire, it was not just the loss of ships that was causing concern. There, Admiral Fieldhouse was impatient at the slowness with which
Brigadier Thompson was getting his forces away from the San Carlos beachhead. From an 8,000-mile distance, the logistics doubtless looked easier than they did to those clinging to the windswept
turf of East Falkland. Yet, whatever the hurdles, Fieldhouse was impatient for them to be cleared, believing that they were not greater than those that would be introduced by further delay. There
was a twofold rationale for moving on and scoring a quick and striking victory: getting bogged down in an apparent stalemate would encourage the UN to intervene with new demands for an extremely
inconvenient ceasefire; and there was the danger of Argentina air-dropping reinforcements in Lafonia (the southern part of the island and perfect terrain for a mass parachute landing). Lafonia was
connected to the rest of East Falkland by a narrow isthmus where there was an airstrip and two settlements, Goose Green and Darwin, already garrisoned by one thousand one hundred Argentine troops.
Potentially, they could sever the lines of communication of a British advance on Stanley. Indeed, if Thompson did not get a move on there was even the possibility that the Goose Green force could
strike up towards San Carlos and drive the bridgehead-holders back into the sea. Thompson thought otherwise. His instinct was that diverting troops for a frontal assault on Goose Green, a
well-defended position, was more trouble than it was worth. A raid could disable its airstrip, after which the garrison could be bottled in on the isthmus by a relatively small detachment of
troops, leaving the main thrusts to get on with the more urgent objective of marching across East Falkland towards Stanley. This holding strategy, however, was overruled. On 25 May, Buenos Aires
sent messages to Stanley, ordering General Menéndez to move from the defensive to the offensive and to drive the British back. The following day, Fieldhouse ordered Thompson to attack Goose
Green.
⁵⁶

Thompson’s apprehension was understandable. Supported by heavy artillery, the Argentine garrison was dug in, protected by carefully laid minefields and benefiting from the natural
advantages provided by a series of ridges and by the narrowness of the isthmus, which limited the routes through which
they could be attacked. They outnumbered by almost two
to one the six hundred men of 2 Para assigned to make the assault. With initially no air support and only two mortars, 2 Para could only bring whatever firepower they could carry on their backs.
There was not much margin for error and disaster might not just rebound on the paratroopers alone, for the fighting could spill into the settlement of Goose Green itself, threatening the lives of
112 islanders whom the Argentines had locked up and were holding hostage in a community hall. To make matters even worse, an unforgivable slip-up back in London imperilled the whole endeavour.
Eighteen hours prior to the designated launch of the attack, loose talk emanating from the Ministry of Defence had led the BBC World Service to broadcast the speculation that 2 Para was massing for
an assault on the Goose Green and Darwin area. Both the Paras and the Argentines heard the broadcast. The former were incandescent that their cover had been blown. By a stroke of luck, the latter
may have incorrectly assumed that the BBC was spreading deliberate misinformation. Nevertheless, they were ready and waiting for 2 Para when, under the cover of early morning darkness of 28 May,
the assault was launched.

Lieutenant Colonel H. Jones, 2 Para’s commanding officer, was forced to alter his plans at short notice as his orders changed and the size of the opposition was adjusted alarmingly upwards
by a covert SAS patrol tasked with watching enemy movements. The attack began towards Darwin with supporting shelling provided by HMS
Arrow
, firing from off the coast in Grantham Sound. Far
from running away, the Argentine defenders proved difficult to dislodge and showed themselves determined to stage, at worst, a fighting retreat. As dawn broke, the Paras were well short of their
objectives while communications were hampered by their radio batteries running low. They were also already short of ammunition for their two mortars. The morning attack on Darwin Hill especially
was hampered by well-sited Argentine machine-gun nests deployed along a ridge. A hail of gunfire forced back the Paras’ assault, killing three. His offensive stalling and finding himself
pinned down in a gorse gully, ‘Colonel H’, as Jones was popularly known, decided to lead by example and restore some momentum. With the exhortation ‘Come on “A”
Company, get your skirts off,’ he rose up, sprinted round the spur of the hill, stopping briefly only to reload his sub-machine gun and proceeded to charge an entrenched machine-gun post. Hit
once, he picked himself back up and carried on before being shot down only yards from his objective.
⁵⁷
It had been a headstrong and reckless action
by a commanding officer which in less desperate circumstances would have been a needless sacrifice. But it demonstrated the real meaning of leadership and as ‘A’ Company surged forward,
valuable ground was gained from which they could at last direct their anti-tank rockets accurately. At this, the
Argentine resistance crumbled and the defenders began to
emerge from their trenches with their hands in the air. Darwin Hill was captured.