Atlantic Troubles, Part 8
Holyrood Palace, Edinburgh. 1030 BST (0930 GMT), 26 June 1964.The news was, at best, confusing as far as Denis Healy was concerned. On the one hand, the Royal Navy’s Task Force South Atlantic had retaken South Georgia with no fatalities on either side, crippled Argentine air power over the Falklands and sank both the Argentine navy’s two submarines. On the other hand, First Sea Lord Sir Varyl Begg did not seem very happy about it. ‘The only reason we managed to dispose of these two submarines, Prime Minister,’ Begg reiterated, ‘is that we were dealing with old, outdated technology. Both these submarines are 1940s vintage and have been barely modernised since, yet one got within spitting distance of HMS Eagle. I’m worried about how well our anti-submarine forces would fare against a more capable force.’ ‘That’s something to work on when they come back, Sir Varyl,’ Healy sighed. He was distracted, that much was clear to even the most casual of political observers. The reason was that in a few hours’ time, RAF Bomber Command would launch a strike against the new seat of the Soviet government near Chelyabinsk, in a final warning to halt their advance through Iran and Iraq. No sane man would fight a war on two fronts, yet that is precisely what circumstances were forcing Healy to do. The Commonwealth garrison on Abadan Island had been reinforced as much as was humanly possible, and it was now just a question of whether the Red Army would turn around. As for the Argentine... ‘What sort of a timetable are we looking at for moving in ground troops?’ Healy asked eventually. ‘They should have a beach-head established by this time next week, Prime Minister,’ Begg replied. ‘We have the warships ships in place for support; we’re just waiting on the troopships and landing ships. Unfortunately, there’s no way we can take on the forces in place with the men aboard HMS Bulwark.’ Healy nodded. ‘What about this report of tanks being brought ashore?’ ‘Ah,’ Begg said eventually. ‘This could pose a problem. I think Field Marshall Hull would be better placed to explain our options than I. Sir Richard?’ ‘Thank you, Sir Varyl,’ Sir Richard Hull, head of the British Army, said by way of acknowledgement. ‘We currently have very little in the way of anti-armour weaponry in the South Atlantic. This was a mix of operational difficulties, by diverting everything we could to Iran, and the expectation that we would not be facing Argentine tanks. Consequently, we have a single battery of towed BAT anti-tank recoilless guns and one squadron of Humber Hornets, armed with Malkara missiles, both intended for breaching fortifications. Mercifully, they will be useful against the old Sherman Firefly tanks the Argentines are employing.’ ‘But what sort of damage could they do to our forces?’ Pat Walker, Healy’s Foreign Secretary, asked. ‘They’re equipped with the Royal Ordnance 17-pounder gun,’ Hull said with a sigh. ‘In layman’s terms, Minister, they will make a real mess of anything we’ve got. All we can hope to do is capitalise on our control of the airspace and pick as many of these tanks off with air strikes as we can.’ The War Cabinet collectively sighed. This was going to get difficult.* * *Quinta de Olivos, Buenos Aires. 1000 local (1500 GMT), 26 June 1964.President Arturo Illia had requested this audience with Admiral Benigno Varela, knowing full well that the old sailor was no fan of General Organia. There was a problem on the Malvinas and both men knew it. ‘Admiral, is there any way we can prevent the British from retaking the Malvinas at this point?’ Illia had asked, passionate desperation etched on his features. ‘No, sir,’ Varela answered honestly. ‘There is no hope. Unless the Americans decide to intervene or the FAA can somehow pull off a miracle and sink all their landing ships, we have lost this war.’ ‘I see,’ Illia sighed. ‘So what is to be done?’ ‘If I may say so,’ Varela said slowly, ‘the decision to invade the Malvinas was not ours. My people drew up two possible military operations intended to resolve old disputes and unite the population behind a common cause, but we did not recommend either one. You were essentially instructed to take this action by General Organia.’ Both men fell silent. As far as they could tell, the rooms at the presidential palace were not bugged, but there was no way they could be sure. ‘You assume the American advisors pressed the General to invade the Malvinas,’ Illia said eventually, more statement than question. ‘That would be a fair assessment,’ Varela replied. ‘I have received several reports from the islands via unofficial channels that Admiral Perez, the man I personally assigned as governor of the Malvinas, has largely had his authority usurped by the CIA’s “advisor”, on General Organia’s personal orders.’ ‘How likely is it that the Americans will intervene?’ Illia asked. ‘Unlikely,’ Varela replied. A single unspoken truth descended on the room. Both men, the politician and the sailor, implicitly knew what had to be done. Neither of them liked it, but it was required. General Juan Carlos Organia had to take the blame for this ill-fated adventure, and what’s more, the public had to know that he was to blame.* * *Government House, Puerto Argentina (Port Stanley), South Atlantic. 1900 local (2300 GMT), 27 June 1964.Admiral Carlos Perez was on the verge of tears. He had accepted this poisoned chalice of a posting, on the understanding that he could ensure a smooth transition of the islands to Argentine control. That had gone to shit within 24 hours of his Catalina seaplane arriving at the town’s harbour. An official letter had been passed to him, hand-written by General Organia, that ordered him to defer to his new “special advisor”, Mr Jaeger, whenever the latter saw fit. To that end, Mr Jaeger had the entire British Marine garrison executed as pirates, followed by eighty civilians as a reprisal for the sinking of the aircraft carrier Independencia. Neither of which Perez would even have countenanced, let alone authorised. Now the civilised world thought the Argentine military were war criminals and Mr Jaeger didn’t give a damn. In fact, the annoying little prick was now telling Perez – at length – how he should be mining the harbour and any beach around Puerto Argentina to prevent British forces from attacking. ‘We have already taken care of that, Mr Jaeger,’ Perez said through gritted teeth. ‘There is no way that the British forces will come ashore close to this city.’ ‘All the same,’ Jaeger continued, ‘it might be worth setting up some of the locals as a human shield. It worked wonders in Central America.’ ‘Out of the damn question!’ Perez spat. ‘I think I have authority here,’ Jaeger smirked. ‘And I have a firing squad waiting for you if you try to pull something like that massacre again,’ Perez snarled. ‘Now get out of my office!’As Martin Jaeger walked back to his room in Government House, he reflected that, yes, things were going just the way he wanted.* * *7.5km WSW of Port San Carlos, East Falkland, South Atlantic. 0800 local (1200 GMT), 29 June 1964.Capao Hugo Cruz awoke from a poor night’s sleep. His men and he had been bivouacked down on a point overlooking the entrance to San Carlos Water in the height of the southern hemisphere winter. In theory, standing orders were that the patrol was supposed to have three men on watch at all times; in practice, only one poor bastard that had drawn the short straw had to brave the cold as he stared into the unrelenting darkness. San Carlos had become an important position just after the British began their campaign to reoccupy and evict the Argentine forces from this handful of windswept rocks in the South Atlantic. From the moment troops went ashore, almost three months earlier, Cruz had been decidedly uneasy about the way his superiors had treated the British residents, or “colonial squatters” as some insisted on calling them. Even if this land was Argentinian, these people were still human beings deserving of basic decency. This sense of morality had seen him condemned to patrolling the hills, out of the way of the higher-ups. Since the British bastards had begun attacking any shipping approaching the islands with submarines, the shelter of San Carlos Water had made it a perfect anchorage for ships running the blockade. If they could make it here, then they were largely safe, rather than trying to traverse the coastline of the eastern major island and risking being torpedoed. A basic airstrip, capable of handling a force of T-28 Trojan and T-34 Mentor armed trainers, had been laid to the west of the settlement. Even C-47 transports had been landing here ever since the British bastards had bombed the runway he and many others had painstakingly laid on the old racecourse at Puerto Argentina. Now, Cruz had been awoken by one of the young conscripts he had been instructing on the finer points of frostbite on this godforsaken hillside. It took him a minute to recognise that it was Raoul Bonzo underneath the layers of insulation, the poor little shit they left on watch overnight. ‘Boss, you’d better take a look at this,’ Bonzo insisted, pointing at the brow of the hill with his M3 sub-machine gun. Cruz blinked at the sky. It was dawn, the damned sun hadn’t even risen yet, yet this prick that still wasn’t old enough to shave had seen fit to drag him out from under his tarpaulin. ‘This had better be important,’ Cruz grunted, too tired to even grind out an insult. As the pair reached the crest of the hill, Cruz looked at the entrance to the anchorage in pure, unmitigated surprise. There were ships there. Lots of ships. Destroyers of various sizes, a cruiser, three blocky-looking transport ships and an aircraft carrier, all slowly steaming out of the sea fret that hung over the deep channel between the main islands. ‘Looks like the Armada finally got its shit together and drove off those bastard British submarines,’ Bonzo said, grinning from ear to ear. Something was wrong with this, but Cruz couldn’t work out what. He was no expert on the Armada’s fleet, but the cruiser didn’t look quite right for some reason. There was something wrong, but his sleep-addled brain couldn’t piece together why. He squinted at the aircraft carrier... Aircraft carrier... ‘Get Ramirez and the radio set,’ the NCO growled at the young conscripted private, ‘hurry!’ ‘Capao?’ Bonzo said, his confused frown barely visible underneath his hat. ‘The Independencia was sunk weeks ago,’ Cruz blurted, a cold terror beginning to take hold of his heart. ‘The Armada doesn’t have an aircraft carrier anymore!’ ‘But...’ Bonzo began, still confused, as Cruz grabbed him by the lapels. ‘Those aren’t our ships!’ Cruz barked into his face. The suddenly terrified conscript scampered back down the slope to the bivouac to rouse his comrade with the field radio, while Cruz turned his attention back to the sound. What he saw next made his jaw sag open in shock, rendering the unshaven corporal speechless for the first time in his life. The biggest ship Hugo Cruz had ever seen in his life cruised serenely out of the fog. It made the aircraft carrier ahead of it look tiny by comparison: an enormous steel weapon of war with four truly huge gun turrets along its centreline. All of which were trained to port and elevated as if the behemoth was intending to shell San Carlos itself.Pacing the command bridge like an expectant father, Captain John Morrison turned to his superior officer for at least the seventh time since HMS Vanguard entered Falkland Sound under cover of darkness. ‘Sir, you are sure about all this?’ he asked again, causing Commodore Stuart Bramley to roll his eyes. ‘Yes, Jack,’ Bramley sighed, ‘I am sure that there are no mines in San Carlos Water and that the targeting co-ordinates provided by the SBS boys are correct. They’ve been laid up in the hills watching blockade runners sneak in here for an age; the Argentine couldn’t be doing that if the bay was mined, could they?’ Morrison bristled slightly at being spoken to like a first-year officer cadet, but in truth he was worried. He had been the Vanguard’s last commanding officer in 1956 when she paid off into reserve and had been brought out of retirement in the West Country to take the old girl into battle. She wasn’t quite the same ship as she was before, having been saved from the scrapman at the eleventh hour just after the October War. The secondary guns and anti-aircraft armament had been stripped out and were replaced with modern equivalents, while guided missiles, wonders of the modern world, had been added. In truth, Jack Morrison was as precious about his reconstructed baby as he was about his five-year-old granddaughter. Not that he was going to say that to old “Apple” Bramley, the man commanding the British amphibious landings at Port San Carlos. ‘Very well, sir,’ Morrison said, briefly snapping to attention. ‘I’ll be on the nav-bridge if you need me, all guns are loaded and awaiting your command.’ ‘Thank you, Jack,’ Bramley said vacantly, his concentration focused on the map table in front of him. Moments later, as the huge warship reached optimum firing position, he lifted the old-fashioned horn of the ship’s intercom and gave fire orders to the four fifteen-inch turrets. ‘That ought to make the bastards sit up, sir,’ a nearby midshipman said, his face cracking into a grin. ‘If they’ve got any sense, son,’ Bramley said wolfishly, ‘it’ll make them do the opposite.’As Privates Bonzo and Ramirez struggled back up to the crest of their hill, Cruz watched in stunned silence as the entire port side of the steel monster lit up with a terrifying eight-gun broadside that rocked the ship a good ten degrees off her axis. ‘Did the artillery boys hit it?’ Ramirez asked as the ear-splitting concussion rang off the surrounding hills. Before Cruz had a chance to respond, the airstrip to the western side of Port San Carlos exploded under the withering power of eight 879kg high-explosive shells. Thirty seconds later, the iron behemoth fired again. Eight more enormous explosions blossomed amongst the parked aircraft on San Carlos’s hastily laid gravel airstrip. On the hills across the entrance to the anchorage, a few puffs of smoke and flame dotted the barren grass as pack artillery opened fire. Seconds later a handful of splashes bloomed around the battleship’s wake. ‘Can the artillery land a hit?’ Bonzo asked, almost rhetorically. ‘Doesn’t matter if they can,’ Cruz grunted. ‘A 75mm shell would barely scratch the paintwork on that thing.’ ‘What the hell is it?’ Ramirez asked in shocked amazement. ‘It’s a dreadnought,’ Cruz replied. ‘Those two our Navy had, that they scrapped a few years ago? This is their bigger, angrier brother. I didn’t think the British had any left.’ ‘What can we do?’ Bonzo asked, unable to tear his eyes away as the monstrous ship lit up with a third broadside. ‘Nothing,’ Cruz said as the sound of the broadside subsided. ‘Only thing we’ve got that could hurt something like that is a submarine, and the Navy aren’t sending anything out, remember? Honestly, boys? I think this is the end.’ ‘We can’t surrender!’ Bonzo suddenly shouted, latent nationalism firing the young man into a frenzy. ‘What about the lives we lost liberating these islands from their colonial squatters?’ ‘Please tell me you aren’t that stupid?’ Cruz growled. ‘All this is just about trying to shut the opposition up in Buenos Aires. Maybe we have a claim to these islands. Maybe we’ve been paying for them in blood, but what about the British marines that were executed in Puerto Argentina? Or the civilians that were rounded up and murdered when the British sank the Independencia? How many dead justify us hanging on to a handful of rain-lashed rocks just because they’re here?’ Bonzo settled into a disgruntled silence, causing Cruz to release a long sigh. ‘Maybe if we hadn’t shot a load of POW’s and civilians, or let the Navy bastards rape their way through the local schoolgirls, then we might have won,’ Cruz said, a weariness eking into his voice that belied his young age. ‘Maybe if those geniuses on the mainland realised they weren’t trying to frighten some fucking Indians into compliance a century ago; maybe if they hadn’t put that Yankee bastard in charge; maybe if we’d offered to repatriate everybody on these islands without harm, the British might not have decided to fight back.’ ‘There must be something we can do,’ Ramirez said, his tone bordering on desperation. Cruz chuckled grimly. ‘We were finished the moment that thing left England.’ As Cruz gestured towards the battleship, Ramirez’s radio crackled into life. A man with a very English accent began reading a speech in Spanish that was not so much broken as shattered. He had apparently been given a speech to read that was written phonetically. “This is Commodore Stuart Bramley, Royal Navy,” the voice began. “I am speaking from HMS Vanguard, the ship you see now standing off the entrance to San Carlos Water. I am offering all Argentine military personnel in and around Port San Carlos the opportunity to put down their weapons and surrender. I can promise you that you will be treated fairly, regardless of what your officers may have told you. You have seen exactly how powerful and accurate our firepower is. I urge you, please do not throw your lives away.” The message began again. The three men stared at the field radio for a moment, then exchanged glances. It became readily apparent that, national pride or not, not one of them was willing to throw their lives away against the Vanguard’s massive cannon just to advance the careers of officers that had been party to the summary executions of over a hundred unarmed people. ‘Right boys,’ Cruz said eventually, ‘rouse the rest of the lads and let’s find something white to wave.’
dave-llamaman