The Making Of The British Army (71 page)
Read The Making Of The British Army Online
Authors: Allan Mallinson
A different approach to training, with common features nevertheless, would see the 2nd Scots Guards manage to overcome the same sort of determined opposition a fortnight later, on the final obstacle to victory – the bare ridge overlooking Stanley. Hew Pike’s 3 Para had taken Mount Longdon on the night of 11 June, winning the other VC of the war (again awarded posthumously, to Serjeant Ian McKay), and two Royal Marine commandos (battalions) had taken Mounts Harriet and Two Sisters to the south. Two nights later, having passed through the captured heights, 5th Brigade took over and began what was to prove the culminating action of the war, the capture of the second chain of heights – of which Mount Tumbledown, the Guards’ objective, was the most tenaciously defended – by troops of the 5th Marine Battalion.
The attack, against a well-entrenched enemy and with limited artillery ammunition available, soon ran into trouble: the textbook ratio in the attack is three to one, but the situation on Tumbledown was not in the textbook, and in the culminating phase of the battle the ratio of attackers to defenders was just about evens. But one of the platoon
commanders, Second Lieutenant James Stuart, not long out of Sandhurst and wondering what would now happen, spoke later of his realization that somehow all would be well: ‘We were the Scots Guards. There was no way that we were going to be thrown off that mountain.’ Or, as the regimental motto has it,
Nemo me impune lacessit
(No one provokes me with impunity).
One of the Argentinian platoon commanders recalled how
The British soldiers crept up on the platoon position just before midnight. Before long the platoon was completely surrounded and on the verge of being overrun so I decided that the 81 mm mortar platoon [under]Ruben Galluisi should fire on our platoon.
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At that moment Argentinean mortar bombs landed in the middle of the position, we had no other choice. The British had to withdraw and we started swearing at them. That was how the British were driven out during that first attack. I had up to then lost five of my own men [out of about thirty]. The British eventually got up and started attacking again. It was now around three in the morning and we had been trading fire off and on for nearly three hours.
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‘Left Flank’ Company of the Scots Guards (the Guards name their companies in the old Marlburian fashion) at last managed to get into position to make what with only two hours of darkness left would have to be the final attempt to take Tumbledown. It had taken a long time to get the artillery adjusted, but now the rounds were falling accurately on target. The company commander, Major John Kiszely, takes up the story:
I said to the platoon commander, Alasdair Mitchell, ‘Look, the rounds are on target now, so put in a platoon attack on the first ridge two or three hundred yards ahead of us’. I thought when I told him that, ‘This could be goodbye Alasdair Mitchell’. But they achieved it because the enemy’s heads were down … We moved forward to join Mitchell’s platoon which was three hundred metres up the hill. As I got to the ridge where they were busy finishing clearing the position, I saw [through a night-vision device] this next ridge about two to three hundred metres up, with no activity on it, because the Argentineans’ heads were still down … I looked around and there was a platoon down to my
right sorting out their objective so I realized that all I had to do was to get them going at right angles up the hill instead of carrying on down to the right. I also realized that only I could do that because I was the only one that could see the ridge. I started rather over-involving myself in the platoon’s battle and got the ones nearest to me moving by shouting at them and grabbing them, saying ‘Come on!’ But only about a dozen heard me. In the meantime I had run onto the next ridge only to find myself totally alone because those who were coming on had either lost direction [not all of them had night-vision aids] or were going other places, or were kneeling down, shooting, keeping the enemy’s heads down. But eventually in ones and twos they found me.It was absolutely pitch black and we couldn’t see anything. However we got to this next ridge and sorted out three or four sangars. Then again I looked up, and there was this other ridge about 200 metres ahead and I thought, ‘We’ve done it once; we’ll do it again!’ The same thing happened, except this time, of the twelve or so that were with me, one was shot dead, and another was shot in the chest and we had also taken some prisoners. So we had to leave somebody with them … After we had done this about three times and actually got up to the crest, there were only six people with me …
Just at that moment a machine gun opened up and three of the six who were with me were shot. Entirely, utterly my fault.
Three hundred years of fighting reputation had been at stake on Tumbledown, in the same way that the Parachute Regiment’s driving principle, embedded in its intensive four decades’ history – ‘far, fast and without question’ – had sustained its members in their gruelling march across East Falkland and in two bloody battles. The Guards’ approach to duty, whether ‘public duty’ (the ceremonial in London) or on operations, was one of instant, unflinching obedience to orders, to ‘the word of command’; and the words of command came from men who understood the ultimate demands of that duty. ‘Our officers were determined never to yield, and the men were resolved to stand by them to the last,’ Lord Saltoun had told the duke of Wellington after the Guards had held the chateau of Hougoumont against enormous odds. It was the spirit of Hougoumont and many a battle like it which through years of drill and training now got the Scots Guards to the top of the mountain – and the officers, ‘determined never to yield’: Major (now Lieutenant-General Sir) John Kiszely, who was awarded the MC for his bravery and leadership that night, himself shot two Argentinians and bayoneted a third. Reflecting on the Guards’ determination that night, he ascribes it
in no small part to ‘the regimental system and the competitiveness of it’, explaining how 2 Para’s victory at Goose Green in the first major action of the war had set the standard for the rest to follow:
H Jones set a standard of bravery; it was like a gauntlet being thrown down to other officers. In a way, 2PARA threw down the gauntlet to the rest of us and said ‘Match that’. Goose Green was a good tactical victory; hard fought, bloody good. 2PARA set an example to us and, I guess, to everybody else in the Falklands, even if they didn’t actually say so at the time. But they felt it subconsciously.
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As Adam Smith had written two centuries before, ‘In a long peace the generals, perhaps, may sometimes forget their skill; but, where a well-regulated standing army has been kept up, the soldiers seem never to forget their valour.’
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With the SAS already nosing about Port Stanley, and the dominating heights now in British hands, white flags started to appear in the town – much to the frustration of the Gurkhas, who were robbed of their battle of exploitation which was meant to open up the way into the town. Eleven and a half thousand Argentine prisoners ‘went into the bag’; nearly 700 more had gone only to their graves, half of them to the cold waters of the Atlantic when the
Belgrano
was sunk.
But the retaking of the Falklands had cost the task force heavily too – in both men and materiel. Warships, merchantmen and aircraft, especially helicopters, had been lost in alarming, even critical, numbers. The human toll was 1,000 killed and wounded, of whom 123 dead were army. To many, it was ‘Margaret Thatcher’s War’ – a none-too-approving epithet (her injunction to ‘Rejoice!’ when South Georgia had been retaken jarred especially with an increasingly defeatist minority in the country, although most people were indeed happy to rejoice).
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But there was some justice in the attribution of victory, for besides taking the strategic gamble of fighting to recover the islands it had been her government that had rapidly restored service morale on coming to
power in 1979 by, inter alia, substantial pay increases.
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In a very real sense, Thatcher made the army what it was in the 1980s – and continued to give priority to defence spending until the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The Falklands War had been a very near-run thing indeed. Nevertheless it had been the finest thing, too; and in June 1982 the standing of the British army in the eyes of the nation and of the world had probably never stood higher.
Europe, and its oilfields, 1945–2000
THE ROMAN MILITARY PHILOSOPHER VEGETIUS, WRITING AROUND THE YEAR AD
390 on the tendency to neglect defence spending, summarized his thoughts thus: ‘Therefore, he who wishes peace should prepare for war; he who desires victory should carefully train his soldiers; he who wants favourable results should fight relying on skill, not on chance.’ Fifteen centuries later, President Harry S Truman would add the doleful rider: ‘If you’re not prepared to pay the price of peace, you’d better be prepared to pay the price of war.’
Not long after the Second World War the British army, for the first time in its history, began to organize, equip, train and locate itself in peacetime to fight a specific war – a war, in Ismay’s memorable words on one of the purposes of NATO, ‘to keep the Russians out’ of Western Europe. The intensity of the effort to deter the ‘Group of Soviet Forces Germany’ from crossing the Inner German Border (IGB), as the heavily mined line between East and West Germany was known, and of being ready to fight if deterrence failed, was more than merely training, however: it was ‘Cold War’.
At the Yalta Conference and at Potsdam in July 1945 the allies had agreed that Germany, like ancient Gaul under the Romans, would be divided into three parts – or ‘zones’ – with, in addition, a small French sector adjacent to the Franco-German border (with all the best
vineyards). There were similar arrangements for Berlin, which was deep in the Russian zone (or the German Democratic Republic – ‘East Germany’ – a polity officially unrecognized by the West). The British zone consisted largely of the north German plain which the armies of George II had known so well – the
Länder
of Nordrhein-Westfalen, Niedersachsen and Schleswig-Holstein. And as the threat of Nazi resistance receded after the crushing defeat of Germany and the programme of ‘de-Nazification’, and that from the Red Army increased, the British Army of Occupation became the British Army of the Rhine and turned to look east. In 1952 BAOR became part of Northern Army Group (Northag) within NATO’s new command structure along with Canadian, Dutch and Belgian troops. When West Germany became a sovereign state once more in 1955 – when it was no longer necessary, in Ismay’s words again, ‘to keep the Germans
down
’ (indeed, their manpower was needed to keep the Russians
out) –
Northag was reinforced by a corps of the new West German army. And to complete Ismay’s purpose – ‘to keep the Americans
in’ –
Northag’s sister army group Centag (Central Army Group) was formed in the former American occupation zone with two US and two German corps.
BAOR numbered some 55,000 men for most of the Cold War, plus strong supporting elements of the RAF (a ‘tactical air force’) and 3,000 troops in the autonomous Berlin Infantry Brigade. With dependants and civilian staff – everything from schoolteachers to NAAFI storemen, welfare workers, broadcasters, journalists, the Salvation Army and all the other institutions of the home country – there were upwards of 200,000 people in ‘Little Britain over the Rhine’. Comparatively long tours of duty became the norm: infantry regiments were stationed in Germany for five years, armoured regiments rather longer (one regiment, the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars, remained in Paderborn for nine years during the 1970s); and artillery, engineer and logistic regiments were based permanently in their garrison towns, with soldiers posted in and out individually. However, even living in their English-speaking world of barracks, married quarters, schools, hospitals, shops and forces’ radio, the army took on a certain ‘German’ identity, just as those in India before the Second World War had taken on a distinctly Indian identity. It was not so much an embracing of German culture – from which BAOR largely kept itself apart, except from the legendary beer and
Bratwurst
– as a distinctive way of soldiering.
