The Battle for the Falklands by Max Hastings; Simon Jenkins

Author:Max Hastings; Simon Jenkins
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Europe, Great Britain, History
ISBN: 9780330536769
Publisher: Pan Books
Published: 2012-03-22T03:00:00+00:00

Below decks, men were priming grenades, checking weapons, loading linked-belt ammunition, dozing or reading. As the light began to fade, they knew that they had survived the first great risk. When they had seen the power of the enemy’s air force in the days that followed, they were deeply conscious of the blow that could have befallen them on 20 May. If the sun had broken through even for an hour, if the enemy had launched a series of sorties as determined as those that were to come the following day, something close to disaster could have overtaken the landing force. Sea Wolf and the ships’ guns would have accounted for some aircraft. But many more would have broken through, just as they broke through on 21 May. The loss of one or more troop-carrying ships would have been a terrible political blow before the outset of the land campaign.

But this was a moment at which the British reaped the fruits of boldness, of happy ignorance of the powers of the enemy air force. As most men slept for a few hours on the assault ships, the confidence of their captains was steadily growing. ‘The atmosphere seemed to be right,’ said Jeremy Larken. ‘The whole thing seemed to be working.’ They might get away with it. At around 10 p.m., most of the ships served their troops with an action dinner – steak on Canberra, stew on some of the naval ships where conditions were desperately cramped. Then the men began to pull on their heavy web fighting order, to ‘give the face a terrible aspect’ with black camouflage cream; close their huge bergen rucksacks; pull on helmets. On the assault ships, guides led them company by company down through the jungle of passages, hatches and ladders to the tank decks. Sailors muttered, ‘Give them hell, mate,’ as marines and paras clambered clumsily past their posts. The tank decks were in near darkness, lit only by a dim red glow from the deckhead. A thin chain of red lights such as one might find on a Christmas tree marked the path through the darkened mass of Volvos and Land Rovers to the dock where the landing craft lay, ramps down. The men filed in, and sat down on the cold steel deck, waiting for the dock to flood.

In each of the assault ships, four LCUs and four smaller LCVPs were loaded with the men of the first wave – in all, two battalions and eight armoured vehicles of the Blues and Royals. There was a brief, frightening moment when an air-raid alert sounded. Packed crouched in the hulls of the landing craft, the blackened figures cursed silently at the prospect of being trapped in the dock under attack. Then the alert was cancelled. There was a surge of water under the landing craft as the dock flooded, the great stern ramp was lowered. Then they were bumping and backing out into Falkland Sound, at the mouth of San Carlos Water. A slight navigational error had brought the ships in behind schedule.

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