Battle for the Falklands
The Winter War
Patrick Bishop
and
John Witherow
Contents
Title Page
Maps
Authors’ Note
Prologue: One Small War
1 The Empire Strikes Back
2 Sailing
3 D Day
4 ‘Follow Me’
5 Life on the Mountains
6 The Last Days
7 Surrender
Epilogue: Going Home
Acknowledgements
About the Authors
Copyright
About the Publisher
Maps
Authors’ Note
We started writing this in the summer of 1982, within a few weeks of returning from the South Atlantic. It was not intended as a considered historical study but as a piece of extended reportage, designed to satisfy the curiosity of a British public still fascinated by such an extraordinary and unexpected national drama. It carries some of the demerits of the haste in which it was written, but also, we would like to think, some of the virtues of freshness and immediacy. In this edition we have left the manuscript much as it first appeared, the unvarnished testimony of what two young reporters saw, felt and thought, all those years ago and all those miles away.
Prologue
One Small War
It was a while before anyone realized that the guns had stopped firing (writes Patrick Bishop). We were standing on a rock ledge on the east face of Mount Harriet looking down towards the town. The crags around were chipped and smashed by the fighting of the last two days and the pathetic debris of the Argentinian defenders lay strewn all around. At three o’clock there were some uncertain cheers from the Marines on the rocks above. ‘That’s it,’ one of them shouted. ‘They’ve surrendered.’ One of the officers, Major Mike Norman, who had been captured and sent back to England by the Argentine invaders ten weeks before, laughed and shook hands with an officer standing next to him, but the rest of us wanted the news to be true too badly to rejoice until we were sure.
The commanding officer, Colonel Vaux, went over to the radio and called up Brigade. ‘It’s not confirmed,’ he said. ‘It’s just something they got from fleet.’ It started to snow again. Colonel Vaux went back to the radio. ‘They’re falling back from Sapper Hill!’ he said. ‘There are white arm bands and flags all over the place.’
The same news was travelling fast across the battlefield. The Welsh Guards scarcely had time to take it in before being ordered forward to Sapper Hill, the last Argentine stronghold before Port Stanley (writes John Witherow). Tired soldiers staggered out of their ‘bashers’ pulling kit into rucksacks and piled into Sea King and Wessex helicopters to be ferried the last few kilometres to the foot of the hill. Inside the aircraft the soldiers gave each other nervous grins. The elation at the news that the Argentinians were retreating had been replaced by uncertainty as to whether they were flying to witness a surrender or to fight the final battle. The helicopters shuddered to the ground by a jagged outcrop of rock on an unmetalled road running by the side of Mount William. The men jumped out and scrambled into the heather looking for cover. There were no Argentinians in view. ‘Get back on the road, those surrounds are mined,’ shouted an officer.
The men returned to the track and set off towards the outline of Sapper Hill. Their faces were dark with camouflage cream and tiredness but the pace as they walked got faster and faster. The intelligence officer, Captain Piers Minoprio, was called to the radio. ‘There’s a white flag over Stanley,’ he shouted. We were trotting down the road now, passing soldiers struggling along with enormous packs and heavy machine guns. The order came down the line to ‘close up’ and ‘unfix bayonets’. The defenders’ abandoned possessions littered the sides of the road: kit bags, blankets and helmets. Mud-stained comic books and letters from home skipped about in the wind. We passed an artillery position still smoking from the battering it had received from the British guns. The ground around it was churned up like a newly ploughed field. Two Marines were lying by the side of the road. One had a dark red patch spreading across his trouser leg and the other had a bloody blotch on his head. Medical orderlies were hunched over them murmuring reassurance. We climbed on to a Scorpion tank and caught up with the forward Commandos who were skirting the base of Sapper Hill. They had been fired on by the retreating Argentinians as they ran out of their helicopter and there had been a firefight that lasted twenty minutes. It was probably the last skirmish of the war.
We rounded the bend and came within sight of Stanley. An Argentine corpse was lying face down in the middle of the road. The soldiers peered at the body, full of curiosity. ‘Spread out lads!’ shouted one of the NCOs. ‘Take care, this is too easy.’ The troops moved up the muddy path on to Sapper Hill, scouring the ground in front of their feet for signs of mines. We knew the name of the hill well from numerous intelligence briefings and it had been the Guards’ objective in the renewed assault due to take place that night, but now the machine gun positions and trenches were empty. A vehicle lay abandoned at the side of the road and there were ration tins and biscuits trodden into the mud around the dug-outs. The only sound was the wind and the tramp of boots. Down below in Stanley, smoke swirled away from shelled houses. The Argentine soldiers stood by their dug-outs staring at the approaching troops. The capital looked suburban and insubstantial in the watery light, a smattering of green-and red-roofed houses. The large red cross on the roof of the hospital stood out in the middle of the town. A white helicopter buzzed across the bay carrying casualties to the Argentine hospital ship Bahia Paraiso. The Welsh Guards’ commanding officer, Lt.-Col Johnny Rickett, stood on the crest of the hill taking a swig from a whisky bottle that was passing among the officers. Brigadier Tony Wilson, the commander of the 5th Infantry Brigade, joined him looking down on the town. ‘It seems an incredibly long way to come for this,’ he said.
The troops were told to wait outside Stanley while negotiations were started for a surrender, so we both decided to go in ahead of them. We stripped off our camouflage kit, piling it next to one of the 155mm guns that had been shelling us the night before, and started to walk the last half mile into town. It was difficult to know what attitude to strike with the Argentine soldiers who sat by the road in trenches pointing their guns towards us. We tried to be as ostentatiously harmless as possible, waving and calling greetings, but there was no response and it was hard to stop speculating about how it might feel to be struck by a bullet. As we reached a cattle-grid on the edge of town three Argentine conscripts approached. They were unarmed and grinning and insisted on shaking our hands. For the first time we felt that the battle for the Falklands was all but over.
The speed of the Argentinian collapse that Monday morning astounded everybody. The British had been appealing to them to surrender for four days without receiving any sign that they were prepared to do so and most of the soldiers were expecting to fight through Stanley street by street. As the news of the surrender came through, the commander of the land forces on the Falkland Islands, Maj.-Gen. Jeremy Moore, had ordered an air raid on Sapper Hill to blast the Argentinians with cluster bombs. ‘I heard