A very British war: the Falklands remembered

"There is no period so remote as the recent past," wrote Alan Bennett, a proposition of which the strange episode of the Falklands War is the elegant proof. Already after 25 years there is a sepia tinge to the whole enterprise. It seems to have more in common with Mafeking, the Malakand Field Force and the expeditions of Empire of a century gone than the post 9/11 wars in which British servicemen and women are now embroiled in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The war in the South Atlantic is now looked on by the media heritage industry headed by the BBC as something we "won" rather like the World Cup of 1966. It is now firmly in the nostalgia box, and thoughts of how close-run it was, and of the chorus of criticism at the time about the political wisdom of the whole enterprise, are now suppressed.

It was strange, unique even, for its time and looks even more so now across the vale of memory. Somebody like myself, being somewhat uncomfortably close to the action at times, is incapable of detached judgement, but several irrefutable considerations stand out.

It is likely to prove the last military operation of any scale that Britain will mount and execute alone, and it was the last footnote in the story of the wars of the British Empire. True, there was some assistance from the United States and France, but it was not quite as extensive as Washington and Paris now claim. From the US the main gifts were copious amounts of aviation fuel, the lease-back of the Ascension Island base and handy gizmos like the Stinger shoulder-launched missile. Curiously I saw the first of these fired in anger when the snake of the 2nd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment was puffing its way up from San Carlos beach on 21 May. A band of marauding Argentinian Pucara aircraft came to have a look, and suddenly I saw a puff of smoke, a vapour trail and a parachute drifting like a leaf down through the bright blue autumn sky.

Much has been made about the way the US helped with intelligence. But I must say I saw very little of this, as the general intelligence on the exact disposition of the Argentinians, and indeed how and why precisely they had ended up invading the Malvinas/Falklands in the first place, seemed less than profound. The only Americans I came across were US mercenaries serving as snipers with one of the Argentinian infantry battalions.

Most striking is the casualty rate in such a brief period. Officially 258 British servicemen died and three Falklanders. Some 700 Argentinians were killed. Hundreds of Britons were injured, and more reported serious psychological trauma and disturbance, some years after the event. More British servicemen died than the total number killed on operations in Afghanistan since 2001 and Iraq since 2003. Such attrition is unlikely to be tolerated today.

The way the campaign was reported - and here I cannot plead the innocent bystander - is unlikely to be repeated either. We were, in all, a party of about 32 to 34 (with comings and goings) - accredited journalists, photographers, television camera crews. We were all white, male and carrying British passports. There was no embedded reporter from Europe, the Commonwealth or the United States (though they tried hard enough), let alone from Latin America. Imagine trying to keep CNN or Al Jazeera out of British bases in Basra and Lashkar Gha today. And besides, who would want to?

Furthermore, the sheer physical circumstances made our band of fractious brothers more constrained than any accredited reporter of a campaign in living memory. The military and political powers were able to control who of the media they took with them, what they could see and do, and how they got their dispatches and reports back. In this, I have to confess, I ended up the winner. Being the correspondent for BBC domestic and World Service radio I was listened to widely throughout the Task Force (the British Forces in the Falklands), though not necessarily understood or believed. Artillery units, unless in action, always had one of their radio nets switched to the BBC, and so at least I was known before fetching up on a new position or trying to scrounge a ride on a helicopter.

The soldiers and marines got to know us, and we them, and the flow of information was pretty good. It got even better once we were in the thick of it together. Once the action started on the ground after the landings at San Carlos on 21 May, we moved into a remote realm of topsy-turvy. Throughout May the weather worsened as we headed into the depths of the southern winter; the battlefields and bleak landscape of peat and rock was blasted by killer winds and blizzards straight from Antarctica. On the last night of the war itself, 14 June, the Argentinian prisoners of war huddled in their thousands out in the open in temperatures approaching minus 20C.

It was striking then, and is even more so now, how thin the British lines of support were. At the long night and day battle at Goose Green there were about 450 combatant paratroopers against some 1,200 assorted Argentinians, many non-combatant, and that was about it. The paratroops were supported by three light field guns and two mortar tubes. There were no reserve forces in the vicinity and the number of support helicopters could be numbered on the fingers of one hand. Most of the helicopter force by then was doing other things, helping the main force of 43 Commando Brigade on its epic "yomp" across east Falkland towards Stanley, or were at the bottom of the sea, sunk with the Atlantic Conveyor the previous Tuesday.

Then as now, the paras and the marines got through by dint of superior training and fitness, and sheer determination - very often in defiance of the odds and a cool appraisal of the facts. Today in Afghanistan I have come across quite a few veterans of 25 years ago in 3 Para and 42 Commando. The same determination is there, and the same justified grumbles about the lack of helicopter support. But today the tempo of operations, with service for some in Afghanistan and Iraq coming round at six-monthly intervals, means that training is more hurried, or done largely on the job - which is hardly ideal.

Then there was the question of time. The whole operation was commanded by the Navy and a naval admiral, the immutable Rear-Admiral Sandy Woodward. And the Navy insisted that everything was done in "Zulu" time, or GMT to you and me. This meant that the sun didn't come up until between 11 am and noon "Zulu". The problem was made worse when the ground units decided to switch to more realistic Latin American time, so the Navy would be having lunch when the Army and marines were barely finishing their breakfast.

The fact that the Navy remained in overall command had more serious implications. It meant that the command was remote and apparently unaware of developments on the ground ashore. As things began to get sticky as the men of 2 Para advanced towards Goose Green, requests for ground attack support from Harrier aircraft was sent to the fleet. Famously, the reply came back that the aircraft were unavailable because of "fog at sea". The plight of the paratroops bogged down on the Darwin isthmus was a low priority. For this and other reasons, in particular the dispute over the command of the helicopter force in the aftermath of an amphibious landing, it is inconceivable that the Navy would have command over such a varied and complex operation again. As the present expeditionary missions suggest, the Navy and RAF are now supporting arms to the main operation of ground forces run by the Army or marines, uncomfortable though this may be to senior officers in light- and dark-blue uniforms.

Overall command was remote and quite episodic. Usually orders came from Woodward's carrier group well out into the Atlantic, or from a deep hole in the ground in Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse's Fleet Headquarters at Northwood, Middlesex. "Ground truth" had a different connotation for those operating on the Falklands, or down the hole at Northwood. I was asked to tell one of the subterranean officers at Northwood how Lt-Col H Jones had died at Goose Green, which I did in order to request that he somehow get a message to the BBC to expect a dispatch on the battle. "Good God, I can't do that!" he fulminated. "I'm running a war down here!"

The remoteness factor proved a boon to Mrs Thatcher, and its effect endures. It meant that the readers, viewers and voters never quite realised how close run, "bare arsed" as the soldiers put it, the whole thing was. There were several points, "decision points" the military calls them, at which the whole campaign nearly went pear-shaped and stopped in its tracks. From a long conversation I had with Lady Thatcher a few years ago, and with Admiral Lord Lewin a year before he died, I think she realised how tight things were - and quite close to the end, too. She feared most that the landings on the islands at San Carlos on May 21 would go wrong, and "we wouldn't make it", as she put it. Lord Lewin, the Chief of the Defence Staff at the time and one of the most accomplished and engaging to have held the post, said he expected early reverses and setbacks - he had been a midshipman at the Taranto raid in 1940 after all - but hoped these could be overcome.

The earliest near-setback was the recapture of South Georgia, which threatened to be defeated by bad luck and terrible driving blizzards. The next point of high risk was as the carrier group and the amphibious group met up to make the final run in for landing on the islands. Here Admiral Woodward really did show his mettle. The ships seemed at the time bunched horribly close together, as they bounced through a deep South Atlantic storm swell. Woodward calculated this was about the only way to do it: the threat from Argentinian submarines and aircraft firing Exocet missiles was very real, and the resources of antisubmarine helicopters and patrolling fighter aircraft pretty thin.

The landing of the marines and paratroops in San Carlos was a galvanising drama all right, but somehow I never thought it even got within a whiff of failure. There was action in every hour of daylight, but luck seemed to desert the sailors, troops and aircrew. The Argentinian air force concentrated on the Navy and not on the merchant vessels, least of all the MV Elk, which was carrying enough ammunition to blow up half the islands. Instead the brave action of Commander Alan West's HMS Ardent, with her sister ships out in Falkland Sound drew the Argentinian fire and the troops got ashore more or less in one piece.

The last time that the campaign could have been completely derailed was at Goose Green, which 2nd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment took between 28 and 29 May. The setback at Bluff Cove/Fitzroy, when the Welsh Guards were bombed aboard the RFA Sir Galahad and Sir Tristram, came later. It was grievous, with more than 55 dead and many terribly burned and injured. But it did not delay the final attack on the Argentinians around Stanley and the war's end - more it actually speeded up the plans for the final phase of operations.

With all the gift of subjectivity, prejudice and 20/20 hindsight, I believe that Goose Green was the tipping point in the campaign. Once it was over it was clear that the British forces had won the psychological initiative which they would never lose. If they had been checked at Goose Green, which they very nearly were, matters might have ground to a halt altogether. If there had been a reverse, the calls for ceasefire, UN resolutions and interminable arbitration might have come into play and dragged on for months. Like Jellicoe at Jutland in 1916, Lt-Col H Jones at Goose Green had the opportunity to lose the war in an afternoon. He didn't take it, and in doing so gave his life.

I think about what happened between the early morning of 28 May and mid-afternoon on 29 May 1982 more than any other episode in my life of 40 years in journalism. I wonder what really did happen, what I really do remember and what has been suggested consciously or subconsciously to me since, and why things turned out the way they did. Among acquaintances and friends, people I have got to know well in the marines and the paras, and their former foes among the Argentinians, I have yet to find anyone who can tell me precisely what happened, what the decisive moments really were. I only saw bits of it, and pretty mind-concentrating they were, too - showers of field artillery and mortar shrapnel, phosphorous shells in the dark, a para who had just lost a leg, the anonymity of the corpses, prisoners wandering through misty rain - but whole parts of the drama just passed me by. One of the severest critics of the conduct of the paratroops that day, and of Lt-Col H Jones, was Spencer Fitzgibbon, who accused me on a BBC show of "not really knowing what went on" in large parts of the battlefield, which after all was only the size of about two-and-a-half municipal golf courses. Too true. As Cavalié Mercer said of his memories of Waterloo: "Depend upon it, he who pretends to give a general account of a great battle from his own observation deceives you - believe him not. He can see no farther (that is, if he be personally engaged in it) than the length of his nose."

I remember that the initial attack seemed to go very fast, though by the hundreds of flares they fired into the dark to illuminate the British attack, the Argentinians were pretty well aware of what was coming. By daylight the British attack faltered, caught in low ground below a ridge of gorse running across the isthmus from Port Darwin (a cluster of about five houses) where the Argentinians were very well dug-in - so much so that had they been slightly better trained and motivated, they should never have lost those positions. This is where the first great drama of the day played out. Jones by this times was losing patience, and gave every indication he feared the worst and the attack could fail. His anxiety about his position had not been helped when the BBC World Service revealed the day before where his battalion was, stating wrongly it was about to attack Darwin, which it wasn't to do until the next day.

It contributed to Jones's anxiety, and his belief that his forward companies could not pause and wait for reinforcements. He became focused on one point in the battle, how to get on to high ground. He did it the best way he knew - which always, in life and in death, was to lead by example - and was killed in the attempt. I wasn't a witness to his charge, but was instead 500 or so yards behind with Maj Chris Keeble, who was to take command, under artillery bombardment. I don't think Jones's charge itself changed the battle, but it was the point that brought the others together to turn the action. It was a genuinely collective effort - officers, NCOs and paratroops, wresting the initiative back. The Argentinians, well equipped and highly motivated though many were, could not or would not manoeuvre, or shift position and tactics, as the battle changed - and the paratroops could.

I did witness a good bit of this happening, and I did witness the surrender of some 1,100 Argentinians at the grass airstrip the following morning, about the most surreal experience of the whole war. Talking to the Argentinian commanders about how they might surrender, I had thought there were only about 300 or so left in the settlement. In fact there were two groups - one of about 250 that gave up with due ceremony, and then a second one appeared of about 700 soldiers who had stayed behind and trashed the houses while Maj Keeble's command party talked terms. Lt-Col Jones thought the force ratios on the eve of battle was about one to one; in reality it was about two-and-a-half Argentinians to one British soldier.

Looking back at that strange war - which in outline has something of the Lewis Carroll logic of the War of Jenkins' Ear in the 18th century - I still have some pretty positive reflections. The Falklands War got rid of the hideous Argentinian military junta, and it is a pity that some of the more monstrous officers - like Alfredo Astiz, who was captured at South Georgia - weren't put on trial for their hideous deeds in Argentina's so-called "dirty war". The Falklanders are British citizens and did not deserve Argentinian military tyranny. But it's a pity it took a shooting war, 1,000 dead and several thousand injured and damaged to make a point.

Could it all happen again? I doubt it. The Argentinians are unlikely to be daft enough to try to take the islands again by frontal assault. If they did, the action would quickly spread to the Argentinian mainland, with satellite-guided remote bombs and Tomahawk submarine missiles and all.

Most significant for us to remember is the quality of the British forces in 1982. What they lacked in equipment and support was more than made up for by determination, tactical skill, courage and preparation. The paratroops and marines in Helmand today are just as good, but they, too, are having to make up for lack of support and equipment with training and skill. The contrast is that the Falklands saw six weeks of real fighting, and it came out of the blue. Now, servicemen and women face demanding and dangerous operations six months out of every 18 in front-line units. We risk burning them out, because the Government is trying to fudge funding and support for two war-like operations in Iraq and Afghanistan on the resources of peacetime forces.

Then, as now, the front line is thin and the lines of support even thinner. And if anything, the risks now, from attack at home and abroad, pandemic and natural disaster, are even greater.

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