Hugh McManners - Falklands Commando

I felt such a disaster was inevitable. There’d been so much flying, statistically something was bound to go wrong. I felt worse about this than the sinking of Sheffield , and from this point onwards was always nervous when in helicopters.

Antrim was a destroyer equipped with the Mark 6 gun system, and several varieties of missile. Being an older ship, her corridors were spacious with comfortable cabins and mess-decks. The crew clearly enjoyed having Special Forces on board, and were very confident after their success at Grytviken helping to capture the submarine Santa Fe, and coordinating the recapture of South Georgia. The food was also excellent!

All SB Squadron were based on board Antrim , having finished the first stage of their war – the thorough recce of all the Argie positions. They still had teams out, including one to the north of Willie McCracken’s location in the south of the San Carlos landing area. They’d had some narrow escapes, including a team getting separated, then losing one man for over a week. (They’d withdrawn the remainder of the patrol, then having got more rations and ammo, returned, found the missing member who’d followed procedures and was waiting at one of the pre-designated rendezvous points – an emergency RV).

Constant living in soaking-wet holes in the moss, wading rivers and eating snack food on these long recce patrols was already sapping their strength, and most were suffering the early symptoms of trench foot. As special forces units are able to order the equipment they need as opposed to having to make do with what they might be given, SB Squadron had ordered seemingly magical, waterproof, Swedish ski-march boots to replace the virtually useless Army issue boots – but they’d not yet arrived. Although our friends were visibly tired, they were quietly positive, now thinking well ahead beyond the complications and dangers of the landings with which everybody else was preoccupied.

We were part of what military planners call ‘Advance Force Operations’ – the shadowy world of concealed work that precedes all military operations. Their recce work for the main landings largely complete, the SBS had moved on to planning what they were going to do next, predicting what the main force might have to do once on land, and the reconnaissance missions necessary before those operations could be planned.

FO1 had been warned by signal from HMS Fearless to pack for a three-day operation, carrying all our radios but only light equipment scales. Once on Antrim we were told exactly what we were to do. A fighting patrol, to be landed the day before the first troops ashore, was being mounted with naval gunfire from Antrim as the key element in the plan. The purpose of this patrol was to ensure that the strait between which the warships would have to pass in order to enter San Carlos Water was safe.

The feature that commands the narrow entrance to San Carlos Water is called Fanning Head, a steep hill offering excellent views all round. SF patrols had reported considerable enemy helicopter activity and troop movement in the area. SIGINT, the top secret signals interception people, reported that a ‘heavy weapons company’ had been moved into the area, although they could not say whether this was located at Fanning Head or somewhere else around San Carlos Water. This lack of detail was because of initial uncertainty about the way the Argies transmitted map references – which was to be resolved immediately once we captured some Argie maps.

Our mission was to ‘neutralise the Argentine heavy weapons company’, which we were to achieve by bluffing them into surrendering to a numerically inferior force equipped only with small arms, but with a gunship in support. We aimed to look like an infantry battalion (which has some 650 men) by carrying a vast and disproportionate amount of firepower.

This rather strange mission was ordered, as is usual with Special Forces operations, from the highest level, where war planners needed to assess the resolve of our enemy. They’d already seen the Argentine garrison at Grytviken surrender without a fight after being shelled, and wanted to see if the Falkland Island troops would do the same.

This was to be a psychological operation, further complicated by having two aims: the assessment of Argentine resolve, plus ensuring the safe passage of the fleet through the ‘neutralisation’ of the enemy unit. It was left to me to decide how the ‘neutralisation’ was to be achieved, and indeed if it actually had been achieved. This was a far cry from standard military planning, where each mission has to have one clear aim with a few simple caveats. These were almost open-ended instructions.

There was also a strong humanitarian aspect to the mission we’d been given. I was urged to keep the naval gunfire falling beyond the enemy gun position, and move it slowly towards us to ‘herd’ them away from their guns. Once they were no longer able to fire at the fleet at sea, we were to attempt to take them prisoner. A Spanish linguist was coming with us, complete with a portable loudspeaker system, to get within loudspeaker range and call on them to give up. I was then to creep the shells up to them, and if in the end they still refused to surrender, I was actually to hit them.

The linguist was an RM officer, Captain Rod Bell, who’d been brought up in South America (I think Costa Rica). His Spanish was good enough to pass as a Cuban or Argentinean. He was not however in the Task Force as an interpreter, but as Adjutant of the Logistic Regiment, itself a very demanding, responsible and important job. It had taken Rod some time to encourage the system to ‘discover’ his abilities as a linguist, and he’d only recently been relieved of his many adjutantal duties.

With Rod’s extensive South American experience, he believed the Argentinians were alarmed by what they saw as a huge British over-reaction to their invasion, to which they thought Britain had acquiesced by default. (At Poole, before the Argie invasion, we’d regarded the proposed scrapping of Endurance as an encouragement to Argentine claims in the area). Rod, with strong emotional ties to South America and his knowledge of its people, had sympathy for the Argentine position and particularly for the plight of their individual soldiers.

All the Special Forces planning on Antrim was being done from the Admiral’s day cabin in the bow of the ship. This was a usually-splendid sitting room occupied by the Admiral when Antrim was used as flagship, for receptions, meetings and parties. Thick carpets were covered with military gear, and the magnificent oak table was protected by blankets, bearing maps, half-filled armalite magazines, notebooks and pencils, sellotape, scissors, bits of black masking tape (known as ‘harry maskers’), and map sheets embellished with chinagraph squares, triangles and arrows. Around the walls were piled bergen rucksacks, painted with black, green and brown paint, many open with their contents spread out over the surrounding area of deep pile Wilton. There were 9-mm pistols, several sorts of armalite rifle, rocket and grenade launchers, camouflage nets, shaggy camouflage ‘gilly’ suits, tent-poles, bags of tinned food, bars of half eaten chocolate lying on the table and chairs (everyone eating while they still could), boots, plimsolls, socks and waterproof suits – in fact, such confusion that one wondered if anyone would ever sort out who owned what.

But this confusion is all part of the process of really thorough preparation – each person knowing exactly what is his and where he carries it in his equipment. The piles of kit were in groups, the four-man patrol groups, and within those patrols each person knowing exactly where the other kept everything, being just as at home in each other’s webbing, pockets and bergens as their own. This intimacy is especially important when someone gets wounded or when vital things like food and ammo run short. Also, it’s not possible for each man to hump just his own kit and nothing else. There are always many other bits of equipment to be carried, shared out amongst the patrol to even out the weight of the loads.