Greenhill is shortly to publish With 3 Para to the Falklands, a memoir by Sergeant Graham Colbeck, paratrooper and self-confessed ‘footslogger’, who experienced the campaign in its entirety, and recorded the action with a diary and camera. The result is a sparkling and honest account of warfare by one committed to its aims, but equally able to evaluate the mistakes. The book will also contain Colbeck’s extensive and atmospheric photographic record of preparations at sea and manoeuvres around the island of East Falkland, many of which are in colour.
Here Colbeck reflects upon a ‘unique’ campaign, and considers its hard-won success on the ground in light of the current War Against Terror.
It is almost twenty years since I set sail with 3 Para from Southampton to expel an invading army from the Falkland Islands, eight thousand miles from home. I had been a professional soldier for twelve years and I had studied military history since before I joined the Army Cadets at the age of fourteen. I was conscious, therefore, as the SS Canberra slowly edged away from England, that I was following in the wake of countless thousands of British soldiers and sailors that had sailed from the very same port before me, bound for regions near and far on numerous campaigns and ‘expeditions’, many of them never to return.
What a grand adventure it promised to be; a unique episode in my life that I resolved to record with a diary and a camera. There was a half-hearted attempt made to ban the carrying of cameras by troops of the Task Force going ashore, but I heard of no such edict about diaries, which could also have been banned for the same reason - that if captured they could provide the enemy with valuable information. If press reporters and cameramen were to be allowed to go ashore with us, I reasoned, then why should I leave my diary and camera behind? I took them with me, and the results have formed the basis of my book.
Each war is unique, of course, but the Falklands War of 1982 seemed especially so, partly because of the very remoteness of the Islands and the amphibious nature of the operations, at a time when almost all our training (when it did not concern Northern Ireland) had been focused on defending Western Europe against a potential Soviet invasion. If the British were going to fight a major campaign in 1982, it ought to have involved vast formations of tanks, armoured personnel carriers and tracked artillery. It was not to be so: the very lack of armoured vehicles and the consequent sight of hundreds of men marching long distances over open terrain added to the unique nature of the conflict and is one of the reasons why interest in the Falklands Campaign remains strong to this day.
Fortunately, our training in the Parachute Regiment was such that we were well prepared for the type of operations that would be necessary to recapture the Islands: we took pride in the fact that we could move and fight on foot with what we could carry - the relative safety and comfort of an APC was not for us. The Marines shared a similar ethos to that of the Paras, and we were confident that 3 Commando Brigade, with its two parachute battalions and three commando regiments, could have finished the job without the later addition of 5 Infantry Brigade, which we viewed as an unnecessary distraction and the cause of frustrating delays.
Such confidence is the result of high morale, which is essential for success in battle. The battles for the hills around Port Stanley were the hardest-fought by the British Army since the Korean War, and our night attack against the well-prepared defences of Mount Longdon was won as a result of a confidence which is characteristic of paratroopers the world over. Our objective was captured not by the use of ingenious tactics, overwhelming force or superior technology; the battle was won by the dogged determination and bravery of the rank-and-file soldiers - the inheritors of a proud regimental tradition of aggressive attack and stubborn defence.
Mistakes were made at all levels during the campaign, and I have avoided the temptation to drag a camouflage net over them, or to omit them entirely from my account. I would not believe any man who was there if he told me that he made no mistakes, or that there was no aspect of his performance that he could not have done better. Errors are always made on training exercises, and the actual experience of warfare makes them more likely - it is part of what Von Clausewitz called ‘the friction of war - and I am suspicious of any military accounts that do not contain tales of human error and personal shortcomings.
The current trend in modern warfare, which became evident in the Gulf War, continued in the Balkans and is now a feature of the ‘anti-terrorist’ war in Afghanistan, is for overwhelming air-superiority and ground attack by aircraft with high-tech weapons. Nice if you can get it, and it minimises our own casualties (a priority these days in terms of keeping public support for a war), but air power alone is unlikely to win any war: that requires men on the ground carrying weapons, just as it always has.
Just over a hundred years before the 1982 Task Force sailed for the South Atlantic, Major-General Sir Frederick Roberts led a relieving column from Kabul to Kandahar, marching 300 miles in 20 days and defeating the Afghan Army there. The barracks that 3 Para occupied in Tidworth prior to our departure for Southampton was named, appropriately, Kandahar Barracks.”
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