The Making Of The British Army (70 page)

AT THE ARMY STAFF COLLEGE IN CAMBERLEY TOWARDS THE END OF 1981, A
Royal Marines officer asked a visiting government minister about the growing Argentine sabre-rattling in the South Atlantic. The minister’s reply, delivered with a dismissiveness bordering on disdain, was that it would be dealt with by diplomatic means. A few months later, during the final map exercise in which the Royal Navy and RAF staff colleges also took part, the techniques for an amphibious landing on the coast of north-west Africa were studied. Throughout, the admiral directing the exercise was at pains to emphasize that this was a theoretical study only, for the purposes of practising inter-service staffwork: the United Kingdom, he repeatedly pointed out, did not have the capability to launch such an operation – even just round the corner from Gibraltar, as this one was. Barely nine months later the Argentinian officer on the course, who had by then become the military assistant to the commander of the Argentine invasion force, was taken prisoner at Port Stanley, the Falklands’ capital.

At the beginning of the 1980s the Argentine military junta led by General Leopoldo Galtieri faced mounting economic problems and social unrest. In their view, acquiring either by peaceful or warlike means the Falkland Islands – or Las Malvinas as the Argentinians called
them – would be a welcome distraction, a much-needed boost to the junta’s popularity. Foreign military conquest had, after all, worked for many a Roman emperor. Argentina had long laid claim to the islands, and with the 150th anniversary of British rule in 1983 looming, as early as July 1981 the Foreign Office judged that in the intervening months there would be mounting Argentinian diplomatic activity; direct military force, however, it judged to be likely only if diplomacy were to fail completely. In the event, the junta’s invasion of the islands came as a complete strategic and tactical surprise – only marginally less of a surprise, indeed, than the astonishing improvisation which retook them for Britain. The Foreign Office had not seen it coming;
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the foreign secretary, Lord Carrington, who had won an MC with the Guards Armoured Division on Operation Market Garden, at once resigned. The Ministry of Defence had even been running down its presence in the South Atlantic and had just announced that the ice patrol ship HMS
Endurance
was to be withdrawn from service in 1982 without replacement. On the whole, joint (tri-service) staff opinion was that retaking the islands, which were beyond the range of land-based air cover (except of course from Argentina), was not feasible. The defence secretary, Sir John Nott, who had himself been a National Service officer in the Gurkhas, had serious doubts too; and according to Admiral Sir Sandy Woodward, who would command the Falklands Task Force, the US Navy considered it downright impossible.
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Fortunately, the chiefs of staff were of the opinion that unless British forces
were
able to retake the islands, the future was not worth contemplating. The first sea lord, Admiral Sir Henry Leach, who had joined the Royal Navy as a 13-year-old cadet in 1937, put on full uniform and marched to the House of Commons to tackle the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. She asked him if retaking the islands was possible, to which he replied, ‘Yes, we can recover the islands. And we must!’ Thatcher asked why ‘must’, to which Leach, whose father had been captain of the
Prince of Wales
and had gone down with his ship in 1941,
replied: ‘Because if we don’t do that, in a few months we will be living in a different country whose word will count for little!’ Mrs Thatcher agreed with him, and the task force was at once cobbled together.

When the task force set sail it was in something of a carnival atmosphere, although few could have doubted that if it came to a fight – as it clearly must if there were no political settlement in the interim – it would be bloody. The atmosphere was in part due to the commandeering of the two luxury liners
QEII
and
Canberra
as troop transports.
QEII
’
s
departure was particularly festive,

The carnival atmosphere did not last beyond the harbour moles, however, as the troops on board got down to the serious business of preparation and training. Commanded by a Royal Marine, Major-General Jeremy Moore, the landing element was in effect a (very) light – and very ad hoc – division. It comprised two brigades: 3rd Commando Brigade Royal Marines reinforced by two battalions of the Parachute Regiment; and 5th Infantry Brigade, consisting of two Guards battalions (2nd Scots and 1st Welsh) hastily recalled from ceremonial duties, and 7th Duke of Edinburgh’s Gurkha Rifles.
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All the combat support
– principally artillery and engineers – was army. Together they would have to deal with some 6,000 Argentinians defending Port Stanley, plus various outposts at key points throughout the islands, and the long cruise south, with a stop in the Ascension Islands to stretch legs and test weapons, did at least give the unfamiliar mix of commanders and staff officers a chance to work out what they might do.

Why battalions were pulled off public duties rather than sending others who were more combat-ready has never been entirely convincingly explained. There again, so much of the army’s response was desperately improvised (and some say amateurish) that it invites comparison with the way the Crimea expedition was thrown together – not least in that the failings of commanders and logistics would in the end be redeemed by the sheer fighting courage of the field officers and soldiers. There had been no serious fighting anywhere in over a decade, but Northern Ireland had sharpened basic soldier-skills and junior leadership. Two distinct armies had developed, however: the army in Germany, and the army elsewhere. And the irony was that although there had been no fighting in Germany for more than
three
decades, yet because of BAOR’s organization and rigorous training regime, the expertise in organizing for war (battle procedure and logistics on a large scale) lay with the ‘petrol feet’ not the ‘brown knees’. The Falklands was simply not the sort of operation that the non-BAOR army had envisaged; yet that alone cannot account for the general dislocation. There was an unaware complacency from political top to military bottom, in part, no doubt, a result of the distraction of Northern Ireland – ironically, the very experience that had given junior leaders and soldiers their edge.
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The initial landings were to be at San Carlos Bay on East Falkland, 50 miles across the island from Stanley. With Argentine air superiority these landings were always going to be perilous, and indeed a number of ships were hit and sunk, but the Royal Marines were able to secure the beachhead with little opposition on the ground. With the islands now effectively isolated from Argentine reinforcement (the sinking of the
Belgrano
by HM submarine
Conqueror
had demonstrated that coming by sea was not an option) the intention was to build up
strength ashore before beginning the advance on Stanley. But London wanted action quickly (as indeed did some officers, who were dismayed at the loss of momentum): despite the Falklands’ being sovereign territory, with the absolute right under the UN Charter to defend itself when attacked, Mrs Thatcher feared that growing international pressure for a truce might become irresistible – or, at least, politically damaging. Off went the Commando Brigade, therefore, with its two battalions of the Parachute Regiment, to ‘yomp’ across the island towards Stanley through a wet, wind-blown landscape, sparse in cover and devoid of all charm.

Fifteen miles to the south, at Darwin and Goose Green on the narrow isthmus linking the northern and southern halves of the island, was an Argentine garrison of 1,400 men with close support from Pucara aircraft: the only substantial threat to either the landing area or the flank of the brigade’s march across the rain-lashed moorland. The 2nd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Herbert (‘H’) Jones, was ordered to capture the position. He had limited fire support – his own mortars, three 105 mm howitzers from 29 Commando Regiment Royal Artillery (with fewer than 1,000 rounds), and HMS
Arrow’s
single 4.5 inch (semi-automatic) gun – plus the battalion’s few ‘Milan’ anti-tank missiles, useful against bunkers even if there were no armoured vehicles to fire them at. The Argentinians were rather better-armed, and though most were conscripts some of them were well trained and motivated; and they outnumbered the Paras two to one. Nor was the ground friendly to an attacker: the isthmus was barely 2 miles across at its widest point, offering sparse cover and scant room to manœuvre.

The battalion’s attack began in the early hours of 28 May and was soon running into stubborn opposition, some of the fighting hand-to-hand. Lance-Corporal Gary Bingley won a posthumous MM tackling a machine-gun trench on his own and thereby allowing his pinned-down company to resume the attack. But now the Argentine main body began a determined stand along Darwin Ridge, and, with limited fire support and no opportunity to outflank the position, plagued increasingly by Argentine artillery and worsening weather, 2 Para’s attack stalled completely. What happened next is still the subject of as much conjecture as record. Soon after dawn (which was not until about ten o’clock) the commanding officer, ‘H’ Jones, frustrated by the stalemate, took himself and his small protection party forward to tackle an
entrenched machine gun on a low spur commanding the left-hand approaches to the ridge. They managed to work forward along a little re-entrant until Argentine fire drove them to ground; then in an instant ‘H’ sprang up and charged the trench, firing his sub-machine gun as he went. He was cut down by fire from a supporting trench, and died before he could be evacuated to the casualty clearing station. For this action he was awarded the VC.
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Some commentators have been critical of Jones’s action: his job was command of the battalion – fighting the battle, not individual machine guns. Perhaps, however, in airborne units expected to land beyond the front line and then to fight surrounded, things are not so clear cut. Right or wrong, Jones was doing what his Para forebears at Arnhem had done.

And it was not without moral effect. ‘A’ Company, commanded by Major (later Major-General) Dair Farrar-Hockley,
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had been repulsed three times, but towards noon they finally managed to clear the eastern end of the ridge, opening up the battle once again. By last light, and by dint of sheer determined fighting in which more gallantry medals would be won for a single battalion action than any since Korea, 2 Para had been able to close up to Goose Green.

At this point the acting commanding officer, the former second-in-command Major Chris Keeble, a deeply thoughtful man who had directed the battle with subtle skill after ‘H’ Jones’s death, called on the Argentinians to surrender, sending two of their captured NCOs with a carefully worded – and psychologically cunning – document which deceived, flattered, and exploited the Argentine commander’s pride and sense of duty. The following morning the garrison surrendered: 2 Para had forced the capitulation of more than 1,000 men and had killed a quarter of that number, in turn suffering 17 killed and 64 wounded. On his return to Argentina, the commanding officer, Colonel Italo Piaggi, was cashiered.

Writing up his thoughts as 2 Para’s sister battalion tabbed across East Falkland (Marines ‘yomp’, Paras ‘tab’) towards their own bloody battle on Mount Longdon, Lieutenant-Colonel Hew Pike, hard hit by the death of his fellow commanding officer, reflected on the spirit that now animated his battalion (and had animated 2 Para at Goose Green). He had received a letter in the field (the army’s postal services are ever
unsung heroes in their morale-sustaining work) from a former soldier of his, reminiscing about their time ‘up-country’ in Aden in 1964, which contained the injunction to ‘keep the old tradition up and give ’em some bloody hammer’. In his notes Pike writes,