Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  In the tiny village of San Carlos, home to some thirty farm workers and shepherds, Royal Marine commandos were moving from house to house. In the farmhouse, the settlement manager opened the door warily, then exclaimed: ‘You’re British! We’ve been expecting you these last two or three nights.’ ‘We were getting fed up of waiting for you!’ put in his wife. ‘Every morning we’ve been saying, “Perhaps it’ll be today!”’ It was, in its way, the most British reaction imaginable. A few doors down, a bleary-eyed housewife offered Max Hastings a cup of coffee. ‘We knew somebody would turn up sooner or later,’ she said, ‘but we didn’t expect it to be here.’ Not far away, an elderly farm worker was offering soup in a Silver Jubilee mug to the Sunday Times’s John Shirley. ‘You a reporter?’ the man asked. ‘Tell me, did Leeds United get relegated?’51

  In London, Mrs Thatcher waited anxiously for news. As luck would have it, she had a long-arranged commitment in her Finchley constituency, opening a new warehouse for a company that specialized in – of all things – international removals. Her constituency agent recalled that she arrived dressed in black, with a ‘look of great depression’. With more than a thousand people there, including a Guards band, she was expected to make a speech. ‘What could I say’, she wrote, ‘but that 8,000 miles was really only a heart-beat away. And it was for all our people; not only those whose family were in the Task Force. One felt the whole audience with us. It was a matter of pride, respect, conviction and being free that meant we must restore the Falklands.’ Somehow she forced herself to inspect everything, ‘rode on a fork-lift truck, had lunch in an enormous warehouse and then fled to the office to see if there was any news. Not yet.’

  Late that afternoon, the Ministry of Defence contacted Number 10. All major infantry units had been landed safely, and the fleet were beginning to move artillery and heavy equipment ashore. In Mrs Thatcher’s constituency office, where she was resting before her next engagement, the call came through. When she put the phone down, her agent remembered, ‘she stayed motionless for a full thirty seconds. Then her whole body came alive again with a huge jerk, as she said: “That’s it. That’s what I’ve been waiting for all day. Let’s go!”’52

  By the time she arrived for her next appointment, a reception at a local school, the news had broken on television. The emotion, she recalled, ‘was overwhelming. The Union Jack was flying in San Carlos Bay. We had returned to the Falklands. My heart was full but desperately anxious about casualties.’ In fact, the first few hours of the landing had been a stunning success, without the loss of a single man. Once daylight came, however, it was a different matter. With Argentine warplanes screaming low over San Carlos Water (‘Bomb Alley’), two ships, Argonaut and Antrim, had been hit, while Ardent had been crippled with the loss of twenty-two lives. Even so, the general feeling in London was a mixture of optimism and relief. That night, Nott issued a public statement, confirming that ‘British forces have now established a firm bridgehead on the Falkland Islands’. And when Mrs Thatcher returned to Downing Street, a small crowd had gathered, cheering and singing. ‘These are nervous days,’ she told the cameras, ‘but we have marvellous fighting forces: everyone is behind them. We are fighting a just cause, and we wish them Godspeed.’53

  For Admiral Woodward, mourning his losses but immensely proud of his fleet, it had been ‘one of the most successful landings in military history’. ‘We had got our forces ashore,’ he proudly recalled. ‘Casualties to the land forces: Zero.’ And like Mrs Thatcher, Woodward thought back to the glories of Britain’s past. ‘What difference’, he wondered, ‘between Ardent, crippled and burning, still fighting and Sir Richard Grenville’s Revenge all those centuries ago. Or between this and that October day off Cape Trafalgar as Nelson and Hardy walked the quarter deck of the Victory shortly after noon.’ This was why he and his comrades had joined the Navy. Not ‘to attend courses and to make yourself a comfortable career’, but ‘for this day, the day of reckoning’.54

  ‘THE BRITISH ARE BACK!’ roared the Daily Mail the next morning, beside a picture of Marines raising the flag at San Carlos. The Sun’s front page, which carried the gigantic headline ‘WAR’, was a shriek of aggression: ‘Huge Battles Are Raging for the Falklands – Troops storm the islands – 5 Navy ships damaged – 14 Argy planes downed – 21 of our boys are dead.’ By this stage, however, the mood in San Carlos Bay was darkening. During the next three days, the Argentines kept up their air bombardment, putting the ships’ crews and Sea Harrier pilots under enormous strain. Then, on Tuesday 25 May, came the climax. It was Argentina’s National Day, and the junta’s pilots were naturally keen to give the crowds in Buenos Aires something to cheer.

  At two that afternoon, four Argentine planes swooped towards San Carlos Water. Moments later, three bombs tore into the side of HMS Coventry, like the Sheffield a Type 42 destroyer. ‘There was a vicious shockwave, a blinding flash and searing heat,’ wrote the ship’s captain, David Hart Dyke. ‘I felt as though I had been caught in a doorway and a heavy door had been slammed against me.’ When he came to, the air was full of smoke, his radar screen was in fragments and his headset and microphone had ‘disappeared – burnt off me without a trace’. All Hart Dyke could see were ‘people on fire, like candles burning’. Somehow he hauled himself up a ladder to the bridge, where he fell to his knees to get some air. With the power gone and the Coventry listing badly, his men were already abandoning ship. To their captain, still in shock, it was like ‘watching a film’. When he was sure they were all safe, he climbed down a ladder and jumped into the freezing water, and a petty officer dragged him into a lifeboat. It was the same man, Hart Dyke noticed, who had given him a card with a prayer of St Joseph on the journey south, promising that it would bring him luck. ‘There you are, sir,’ the petty officer said, smiling broadly: ‘it works.’55

  Nineteen men were killed on the Coventry, all but two of them instantly. That evening, Mrs Thatcher was working in her Commons office when Nott, perfectly cast as the bringer of gloom, materialised with the news. With casualty figures uncertain, they decided not to release the name of the ship, which, as Mrs Thatcher later admitted, meant that ‘every navy family was anxious’. But there was worse to come. When she got back to Number 10, the duty clerk told her that the 13,000-ton merchant ship Atlantic Conveyor, carrying nine precious helicopters and tents for the entire army, had been hit too, with the loss of twelve lives. Later, Denis Thatcher walked into the bedroom at Number 10 to find his wife in tears. ‘That’s what war’s like, love,’ he said consolingly. ‘I’ve been in one. I know.’ But for Mrs Thatcher this was the ‘worst night of all’. ‘How many more tragedies could there be?’ she asked herself. ‘How many losses could we suffer … We learned the deep sorrows of war, but we had to go on to complete the task.’56

  To the British commanders the events of 25 May came as a grievous blow. If they had another ‘bloody day’ like it, Woodward thought, they might lose the battle. ‘We can’t go on like this,’ Nott muttered to Sir Henry Leach, ‘losing all these ships.’ Yet the Argentines had taken losses too, with ten Skyhawk and nine Dagger jets having been shot down since the landings began. And above all, despite the black smoke billowing over San Carlos Water, they had failed to stop the Task Force from unloading its equipment. The Argentines had suffered a fair amount of bad luck, with many of their bombs failing to go off because they were not fused properly. But they were facing a better-trained and more skilful adversary, not least in the Sea Harrier pilots, flying at the limit of their endurance to protect the fleet. And in the next two days, the momentum tilted back in Britain’s favour. By the evening of the 27th the last ship, Sir Galahad, had almost finished unloading. More than 3,000 troops were safely ashore. The Battle of San Carlos was over. In the early hours of the following morning, in the tiny hamlet of Goose Green, the first land battle began.57

  For the young British soldiers on the islands, the first few days ashore were just as cold, wet and miserable as everybody had predicted. Their su
rroundings, wrote the Marine commander Nick Vaux, seemed like some ‘biblical wilderness’, a bleak desolation of waterlogged moorlands, ‘steep, slippery slopes’, rugged crags and ‘jumbled boulders’. Never had his men’s kit felt heavier, as they trudged for hour after hour across the broken terrain. Somehow they kept going, splashing through rivers, staggering up hills, ignoring the pain in their aching shoulders and bleeding blisters. Before long, many were suffering from trench foot, their socks sodden, their toes blue and aching. Looking around at his fellow paratroopers, Vincent Bramley thought they resembled a ‘rag-and-bone army’, their faces thin and drawn, their boots battered and leaking, their ‘uniforms matted and soaked’. Yet even as the sleet turned to snow and his boots filled with water, Bramley kept going. What drove him was not ‘Queen and Country’, nor even ‘home and family’. It was his dread of ‘letting the side down’, of disappointing the ‘lads you fight and work for … That fear kept me walking.’58

  With the troops ashore, the question was what to do next. Although most of the Argentine forces were concentrated around Stanley, a smaller contingent, about a thousand strong, had taken up position in the narrow isthmus connecting the two halves of East Falkland, around the tiny settlements of Darwin and Goose Green. This smaller Argentine force posed no serious threat to the British beachhead, thirteen miles away, and the acting land commander, Brigadier Julian Thompson, planned simply to mask and isolate it.fn4 His instinct was to move slowly and deliberately, husbanding his forces and waiting for reinforcements, rather than throwing lives away in the reckless pursuit of a quick victory. As he well knew, the Task Force had only ‘one shot’, and he did not propose to waste it.

  On the ground, almost all of Thompson’s senior officers shared his caution. But at Northwood his reluctance to leave the beachhead fuelled a growing sense of impatience. Given the international pressure for a ceasefire, it was imperative for the British to gain the upper hand and move against Stanley as quickly as possible. And, as Thompson later remarked, ‘after the hammering the navy had been taking, there was a need for a victory, a tangible sign that we could win’. On the morning of 26 May he received fresh orders from Northwood. ‘More action was required all round’, while Admiral Fieldhouse wanted to see the Union Jack ‘flying in Darwin’. And if Thompson refused to move against Darwin and Goose Green, the chiefs would find a new commander who would.59

  The battle for Goose Green, the most celebrated of all of the Falklands land battles, was chaotic from start to finish. Thompson envisaged the attack as a raid. But 2 Para’s commanding officer, Colonel ‘H’ Jones, had been renowned since his Eton days as a man of unusual energy, charisma, arrogance and recklessness. Thirsting for battle ever since the crisis had started, Jones saw Goose Green as his chance of glory. By the time he briefed his company commanders, at dusk on 27 May, what Thompson had described as a raid had turned into an all-out attack. And by the small hours of the following morning, Jones’s paratroopers, almost 700 strong, were in position at the top of the isthmus.fn5 Most felt a thrill of excitement; as one recalled, he was ‘electrified’ by the sound of his mates fixing their bayonets, ‘because I’m a soldier, and the thought of the fight to come and the idea of my mates out there preparing to do battle gave me a warrior’s rush’.

  At about two in the morning, the fighting started. To Jones’s immense frustration, the Argentines proved tougher adversaries than he had hoped, and his men made slow, spasmodic progress down the isthmus, often being pinned down by devastating enemy fire. By dawn they were still a long way from Goose Green, and their momentum seemed to have ground to a halt. At about 8.30, Jones decided it was time for a dramatic gesture. ‘Come on A Company,’ he shouted, ‘get your skirts off.’ Then, armed with his sub-machine gun, he charged up the hill towards the nearest Argentine trench. To his men, and to the newspapers afterwards, it seemed like something from military legend, the kind of thing they might have expected from Alexander the Great or Henry V. But Jones had clearly not realized that he was running directly into the line of fire of another Argentine position, up the hill and slightly behind him. He was hit only a few feet from the enemy trench. When his men caught up with him, he was already slipping into unconsciousness. He died soon afterwards.

  In reality, there had been no need for Jones to sacrifice himself. Although the British advance had stalled, it had not been reversed, and as the day wore on his men fought their way, inch by inch, along the isthmus. By nightfall they had the upper hand, and the following morning, after a battle that had cost eighteen British and about fifty Argentine lives, the Argentine commander surrendered. The British flag fluttered over Darwin; Northwood had its victory. ‘You have kindled a flame in land operations’, cabled a triumphant Admiral Fieldhouse, ‘which will lead to the raising of the Union Jack in Port Stanley.’60

  To the tabloids, Goose Green was a triumph to set beside Agincourt, Waterloo and El Alamein. ‘WE’RE WINNING!’ exulted the Mirror. ‘VICTORY’, screamed the Sun. The hero of the hour, naturally, was Jones, who was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross. ‘MY HERO’, read the Sun’s headline on Monday 31st, above a picture of his widow Sara and a suitably stirring quotation: ‘If he had to die, then I believe he would have liked to have died the way he did.’ For the press, Jones was the first authentic fallen British hero since the Second World War, a throwback to a vanished age of courage and gallantry, a symbol of the nation’s rekindled thirst for victory. The next day, remembering the sense of ‘complete and utter humiliation’ at the start of the war, Alan Clark could barely believe the transformation. ‘Now not only have we redeemed everything that was at stake then,’ he wrote, but Britain had ‘advanced immeasurably in self-esteem and in the status accorded to us by the whole world’.61

  Not everybody gloried in the advance of the British forces. Abroad, many people were horrified by the bloodshed, and Pope John Paul II, who was due to visit Britain at the end of May, called publicly for a ceasefire. Even President Reagan had not quite abandoned his vision of acting as a peacemaker. Two days after the Argentine surrender at Goose Green, he rang Mrs Thatcher to suggest a new peace initiative. From his very first words, he clearly knew he was on a sticky wicket, and Mrs Thatcher wasted little time in cutting him off. ‘I didn’t lose some of my finest ships and my finest lives,’ she said icily, ‘to leave quietly under a cease fire without the Argentines withdrawing.’ There was no question ‘of us quietly moving out of the island … I can’t lose the lives and blood of our soldiers to hand the islands over … Just supposing Alaska was invaded, it’s a long way away from you [and] you’ve put all your people up there to retake it … and you’ve lost a lot of men and your ships. You wouldn’t do it.’ ‘Margaret, I have to say that I don’t quite think Alaska is a similar situation,’ Reagan said mildly. ‘More or less so,’ she snapped. As the exchange went on, Reagan’s contributions gradually dwindled to ‘Margaret, I –’ and ‘Yes, well –’, while hers got longer and longer. ‘Well, Margaret, I know that I’ve intruded,’ Reagan said at last. ‘You haven’t intruded at all,’ she said, sweetly but firmly. ‘You know how you’d feel if you went through the same conflict.’62

  In Stanley, the Argentines sat and waited, the tension rising as their adversaries trudged grimly towards them. ‘The hour of the final battle has arrived,’ Brigadier-General Menéndez told his troops on 1 June:

  The adversary is getting ready to attack Puerto Argentino, with the rash and hateful intention of conquering the capital of the Malvinas … Not only must we beat them, we must do it in such a way that their defeat is so crushing that they will never again have the impertinence to invade our land. TO ARMS! TO BATTLE!

  Yet behind the rhetoric, Menéndez had already warned General Galtieri that without a massive air attack or a new landing behind British lines, he was doomed to defeat. No help came. He and his men were alone. Morale was abysmal. Most of Menéndez’s troops were young conscripts from the barrios of Buenos Aires, treated with casual brutality by their own office
rs. Cold, exhausted, poorly trained and desperate to get home, many had no idea why they were there. ‘I’d reached a point’, one recalled, ‘when I felt I was just falling apart from so much waiting and I felt that the sooner the British came the better because that way there would be some kind of definition.’ Indeed, some even doubted the justice of their own cause. ‘What, if anything, of all this really belongs to us Argentines?’ one conscript wondered. ‘The “natives” of these islands have shown us with their silence that we are the intruders.’63

  In the meantime, the killing went on. On the afternoon of 8 June, the Welsh Guards were waiting to disembark from their transports at Bluff Cove, seventeen miles south-west of Stanley, when four Argentine planes screamed out of the sky. There was just time for someone to shout, ‘Get down!’ before the bombs landed. Two ships, the Sir Tristram and the Galahad, were badly hit. On the Galahad, which had been carrying white phosphorus mortar bombs, a fireball ripped through the centre of the ship, the heat devouring men where they stood. One young Welsh Guardsman, Simon Weston, remembered that there was no bang, just a ‘ball of flame which came out of the wall at us’. With his body ablaze and his throat choked with smoke, Weston scrambled up the ladder, screaming with ‘shock and agony’, and collapsed on deck. ‘Nobody can tell you how blood smells, or what it feels like to be engulfed in the thick pall of burning flesh,’ he said later. ‘You can’t describe the sound of thousands of men all screaming at once … It was the colours that stayed with me the longest. The deep, swirling reds and oranges and yellows of the fire.’64