Battle for the Falklands: The Winter War. Patrick Bishop

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 and solved mathematical problems as a hobby. Early on in the campaign his methods started to draw criticism from the Army. Most of it stemmed from Woodward’s preoccupation with the air and sea war and his determination to keep the losses of the fleet to a minimum. His nickname among some members of the land forces, and indeed some of the Navy too who were on the ships in San Carlos Water taking a daily battering from the Argentine jets, was ‘Windy Woodward’. He was awarded the ‘Burma Star’ for keeping the carriers so far east. It is hard to see what other course was open to him. For the British to win the war it was vital for them to have aeroplanes and if one or the other of the carriers was sunk the war would almost certainly have been at an end. Woodward’s first obligation was to keep Hermes and Invincible and the Harriers they carried safe, but by doing so he won few friends on the ground.

      In some ways Woodward personified the Navy’s aloofness compared with the more relaxed attitude of the Army, and its gaucheness in dealing with the press. Northern Ireland had taught the Marines and Paras the power of publicity. The Navy, on the other hand, rarely came across the media, except perhaps once a year when the local television station turned up to film the gun race. Soon after the taking of South Georgia Woodward told the reporters on Hermes that the Task Force was now ready for the ‘heavy punch’ against the invaders and issued a public warning to the Argentinians. ‘If you want to get out I suggest you do so now,’ he said. ‘Once we arrive the only way home will be by courtesy of the Royal Navy.’ This was rousing quotable stuff and it quickly earned him a rebuke from Northwood for appearing too belligerent. A meeting with him a few days after the incident gave the impression of a nice, slightly naïve man. ‘I don’t regard myself as the hawk-eyed, sharp-nosed hard military man leading a battle fleet into the annals of history,’ he said. ‘I am very astonished to find myself in this position. I am an ordinary person who lives in south-west London in suburbia and I have been a virtual civil servant for the past three years commuting into London every day.’ Whether this peace-mongering appeased Northwood we never learnt but after that Woodward stopped talking to the press.

      Maj.-Gen. Jeremy Moore was a small, lean man who bristled with energy. He was the Marines’ most decorated serving officer, having won a Military Cross in Malaya in 1950 and a bar twelve years later for commanding an amphibious assault against rebels in Brunei. Moore led a company of Marines in two small river boats in a surprise attack on 350 rebels who were holding British civilians hostage. They killed scores of them, lost five men themselves and rescued the prisoners. He was awarded an OBE for his part in Operation Motorman which ended the no-go areas in Northern Ireland. Moore was a religious man and liked to quote from Bonhoeffer as well as von Clausewitz. He was reputed to carry a Bible in his breast pocket. He liked to get around the battlefield and regularly flew up the mountains to check on the progress of the war from the front line, wandering around in a khaki forage cap and a kit bag with ‘Moore’ on the back. The lack of insignia on his uniform added to his air of authority. His role in the war was that of a logistician and administrator. He came out to the Falklands to act as a buffer between Woodward and Thompson and their masters in London and to smooth relations between the land force and the fleet. He said afterwards: ‘I had to take the political pressure off Julian’s back. He was involved in constant referring upwards to all levels in London and the fleet. It was his job to concentrate on the build-up for the attack on Stanley.’

      Julian Thompson was the most obviously intelligent of the commanders; quotable, brisk and amusing. Despite leading a sure-footed campaign, he claimed not to have derived much pleasure from it. Sitting in his office in Port Stanley, he said: ‘I’m always reminded of the saying of Robert E. Lee. “It is a good thing that war is so terrible otherwise we would enjoy it too much.”’ Among the half-dozen recurring military maxims of the campaign, this was one of the favourites. Thompson was the commander with the most claim to be the architect of the victory. It was his plan. He chose the landing site and the route that the troops would follow to Stanley, aided all along by the SAS and SBS teams who were helicoptered on to the islands on 1 May to reconnoitre around Port Stanley, San Carlos, Goose Green and Port Howard. It was a conventional plan but it had its subtleties and it worked.

      Rivalry between the components of the Task Force was endemic. It started at the very bottom of the military structure, with one platoon speaking disparagingly about the abilities of another, and spread upwards. One battalion in a regiment would try and outdo the other. At various points the rivals would come together against a common ‘enemy’ so that the Marines on occasion formed a united front against the Paras and in turn the whole of 3 Commando Brigade looked down slightly on the Guards and Gurkhas. At the top of the structure the Army would join forces occasionally to snipe at the Navy. The one thing everybody agreed on was that the RAF had not distinguished themselves. The Vulcan bombing raids on Port Stanley airfield provoked widespread hilarity. The Navy pilots on the other hand, got nothing but admiration and praise

      When the war was over General Moore, inevitably quoting Wellington, said it had been ‘a close run thing’. When the fleet set sail it seemed impossible the Argentinians could win. After it was over it was difficult to see how they had lost. Their weapons were just as good as those of the British and better in some cases. They had two months to prepare their defences and at the start of the war they outnumbered their attackers by three to one, a direct inversion of the odds that conventional military wisdom dictates as a prerequisite for success. They had nothing like the logistical problems that beset their attackers and right to the end they were getting nightly visits from C130 transport planes flying in from the mainland. The myth of starving and disease-ridden Argentine conscripts was one that rankled with Task Force troops when they discovered that the defenders were in fact rather better fed than they were. The mistake was letting the British establish a beach-head in the first place. In some ways the Argentinians were justified in thinking that their Air Force could drive the British back before the invasion took root. If the French had supplied more Exocets, if more of the bombs they dropped had exploded, then the course of the war could have changed utterly. The losses that the British did sustain shook the Task Force commanders. If every bomb which hit a ship on D Day had gone off, the momentum of the campaign would have been stalled and the return to diplomacy would have seemed the only option. The Navy’s view was that the fuses were set for one height but the Argentine pilots were dropping them at another, coming in too low to ‘arm’ them in an attempt to get underneath the canopy of missiles and small-arms fire that the fleet put up whenever the raiders appeared. If the fuses had been shorter, however, the pilots would have run the risk of blasting their own planes out of the sky.

      Once the British were ashore, the Argentinians had a rack of natural defences stretching all the way from the beach-head back to Port Stanley which, if properly fortified and defended, could have held up the advance for months. Yet they did give away almost all the ground up to the gates of Stanley. Mount Kent, which dominates the east end of the island, was abandoned without a fight. When the Argentinians chose to make a stand they often ignored elementary rules of infantry combat. They poured resources into Mount Longdon but neglected to push out advance patrols or train artillery in front of the stronghold so that the Paras were able to move up to their positions unimpeded. Both the Argentinian and the British commanders СКАЧАТЬ