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<text> <title> (1982) Final Act Of A Bitter Tragedy </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1982 Highlights </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> June 14, 1982 WORLD Final Act of a Bitter Tragedy </hdr> <body> The clash of two determined nations climaxes in Port Stanley With speed and effectiveness, the British slashed across the bleak interior of East Falkland Island last week and poised themselves for the final push into Port Stanley. Mudstained Royal Marines and paratroopers, their faces unshaven and blackened with camouflage cream, slogged through treacherous bogs and over small mountains, brushing aside sporadic Argentine resistance. Scorpion tanks and Snowcat personnel carriers rumbled through squalls of rain and sleet on crude, rutted tracks that quickly became soupy quagmires. Harrier jump jets flew mission after mission over the Falklands capital, dropping 600-lb. cluster bombs on Argentine troop concentrations. Offshore the 4.5-in. guns of Royal Navy frigates and destroyers kept up a steady pounding, adding to the crump of 105-mm artillery pieces firing from the heights ten miles or less from the city. Suffering only minimal casualties, and seeking to end as quickly as possible the bitter and improbable little war, the British force attacking Port Stanley had brilliantly carried out its assault across rugged terrain. Only a week after the British breakout from their invasion beachhead around Port San Carlos, the Argentine force of 7,000 troops was hemmed in by some 5,000 Royal Marine commandos and members of the 2nd and 3rd battalions of Britain's Parachute Regiment. An additional 3,500 men, chiefly Scots and Welsh Guards and the legendary Gurkhas of Britain's 5th Infantry Brigade, were expected to complete the siege. Said a senior official at Britain's Defense Ministry in London: "When our big attack goes in, we shall have superiority in numbers, guns and morale." But despite their perilous position, the Argentines showed no sign of surrendering. General Mario Benjamin Menendez declared that his forces were eagerly awaiting the major British attack. Said he: "We should not only defeat them, but we should do it in such a way that they will never again have the daring idea of attacking our soil." As the showdown approached, military experts from around the world praised the British air, sea and land operation that had isolated Port Stanley. After traveling some 7,800 miles to the Falklands. Britain's 40-ship military task force, led by the aircraft carriers Hermes and Invincible, had ferried ashore as many as 8,500 troops, plus their equipment, supporting armor, air defense missiles and other vital supplies. All last week the buildup of the British forces continued. Additional Harrier jets were flown in from Britain to increase the number of the versatile aircraft in combat in the South Atlantic from 37 to 52. The Harriers refueled from a "daisy chain" of Victor aerial tankers circling between Britain's military base at Ascension Island and the Falklands, 3,800 miles away. But apparently the chain can still break: late last week a Vulcan bomber on a maritime reconnaissance mission made a sudden forced landing in Rio de Janeiro; the British aircraft may have missed a rendezvous with the tankers. Both the original British landing and subsequent offensive depended upon meticulous planning. To ensure that precision, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's five-member War Cabinet had from the start delegated complete control over the Falklands fighting to Britain's commanders-on-the-spot: Rear Admiral John ("Sandy") Woodward, 50, aboard the aircraft carrier Hermes, and Major General John Jeremy Moore, 53, leader of the British ground forces on East Falkland. Initially, says a senior British official in London, "the only restraints placed on Admiral Woodward and General Moore were that casualties be kept to a minimum, that there should be no bombing of the Argentine mainland airbases and that the timing of the invasion should be a matter of political decision." The reason for London's flexibility, explained the official, was the troubling memory of how Sir Anthony Eden, then Britain's Prime Minister, had hampered the British task force during the ill-fated Suez invasion of 1956 by issuing a stream of contradictory orders to his commanders. Thatcher and her War Cabinet were determined that there should be no repetition of such self-defeating ministerial interference. Indeed, since approving the commanders' general war plan. London has not issued a single operational order or given any form of military advice to the fighting men in the Falklands. One of the key decisions made by Woodward and Moore, say military experts, was to choose the Port San Carlos area as a landing site. Sheltered from attacking Argentine aircraft by fingers of land, the site, says one Dutch military observer, "provided a kind of naval trench, a defense axis, that made the debarkation of troops practical." In particular, the inlet neutralized Argentina's use of the ship-killing Exocet missile that on May 4 destroyed H.M.S. Sheffield and two weeks ago sank the container ship Atlantic Conveyor. Unlike U.S. cruise missiles, the sea-skimming Exocet lacks the ability to dodge hills in order to reach its target. Although the British and Argentine forces on East Falkland were roughly equal, expert observers like Maxwell Taylor, former Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, believed that the British held a decisive advantage. In such a situation, Taylor told TIME last week, "what matters is the kind of men you have in the foxholes." NATO commanders agreed that the British troops, all volunteers, were far superior to the young and inexperienced conscripts who formed the main Argentine forces. The Royal Marines and the Parachute Regiment troops that have carried out the bulk of the offensive are Britain's best. Along with regular infantry training, the marines take courses in amphibious techniques, special commando tactics and an extraordinary series of physical fitness exercises. In addition, the marines, who have the permanent role of helping to guard the northern flank of NATO, had trained in the harsh climate of Norway; conditions there are similar in some ways to what they found in the Falklands. As for the Argentines, says one NATO official. "You can't expect conscripts from a warm country to be very effective on icebound rock." Before last week's military drive, British officers proudly referred to the fitness and esprit of their troops as a "secret weapon in the Falklands." The officers were right. The 2nd Battalion paratroopers were eager for combat as they moved out of the San Carlos redoubt and headed in predawn darkness for the narrow isthmus sheltering Darwin and Goose Green. Darwin fell easily, but the British were surprised by the Argentine garrison of some 1,650 men, nearly three times the expected number at Goose Green. At one point the British assault faltered as the paratroopers came under attack from an Argentine machine-gun nest. Lieut. Colonel Herbert Jones, 42, known to his men as "H," the commander of the 2nd Battalion and the man who had urged his supervisors to include his unit in the task force, led a platoon against the position and wiped it out. During the attack, Jones was killed. That evening a detachment of troops brought his body down a hillside from the battlefield. He was buried on the original beachhead with 16 other casualties in a spartan wartime ceremony. The fact that British casualties were being buried in the Falklands caused growing resentment at home, although the nation's dead in other wars had been buried on or near the battlefield. Responding to the concern, the British government was considering a plan to bring back any soldier if his family so requested. With 250 men killed, the Argentine force at Goose Green surrendered. The senior officer at the outpost, Air Vice Commodore Wilson Doser Pedroza, formally paraded his men and gave them a brief speech lauding their courage and their cause. The Argentine troops sang their national anthem ("O hear, yet mortals, the sacred call..."). They threw their helmets and guns to the ground, some showing obvious relief. The number of prisoners of war swelled to 1,600 as outlying Argentine detachments also laid down their arms. Despite their spirited defense at Goose Green, many of the soldiers were teenagers who had come into the fighting ill prepared. The wounded were taken to British hospital ships, the remainder to the landing ship Sir Percival and another British merchant vessel. The Argentines were herded to the ships' holds, which had been converted into huge barracks. There they crouched in rows while they were stripped, searched and documented. To satisfy the 1949 Geneva Conventions' injunction that P.O.W.s must be identified, the British scoured the civilian ship until they found labels left by the vessel's previous masters, the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co. (P&O), to use for name tags. In the gear left behind by the defeated Argentines was a stockpile of cigar-shaped canisters suitable for carrying napalm. London quickly denied a press report that two canisters had been dropped on British soldiers as they advanced on Goose Green. But the British did charge that during the fighting one group of Argentines had waved a white flag of surrender, then opened fire on the troops who went forward to take them prisoner. No deaths were reported as a result of the incident. For the 112 Falkland Islanders who had remained in Goose Green during the two-month Argentine occupation, some of them elderly and in poor health, the arrival of the British paratroopers was a true liberation. For the previous 30 days, the Argentines had kept them under armed guard inside the local one-story community hall. As British air attacks on Goose Green increased prior to the ground assault, the Argentine soldiers became increasingly nervous. Eric Goss, manager of the settlement, said that when the British bombarded the area before moving in, some of the younger Argentine troops "kicked doors down and shot off locks just to find places for shelter." Douglas and Teal Inlet were captured by British Royal Marines and paratroopers traveling the northern route toward Port Stanley. Some of the troops flew by helicopter, but most made the trip by "yomping," the marines' slang for their style of forced marching while weighed down with as much as 120 lbs. of combat gear. The 40-mile march apparently took the Argentines by surprise. Reported British Journalist Charles Laurence with the marine commandos: "Our intelligence indicates that [Argentine] attempts to move around the islands, too boggy for most military vehicles, have exhausted them. They did not count on the British force being able to move with speed." The marines marched by night for six hours or more through sleet, snow and torrential rain. Occasionally they took refuge in farm buildings, but more often they slept outdoors, eating cold meals to avoid the giveaway light of a fire. In short, it was a familiar picture of ground troops on the attack. Said one officer: "In the last war, the infantry walked from the Normandy beaches to Berlin. We can walk to Stanley." Disconcerted by the rapid British advance, the Argentines kept falling back from their positions in the direction of Port Stanley. The occupiers were especially leery of night fighting, a particular skill of the British. At Darwin and Goose Green, pointed out one Western European military expert, the British began their attack under cover of darkness against inexperienced Argentine conscripts "who don't know how to read shadows and fired their guns needlessly, giving away their positions and using up their ammunition." Some of the Argentines may have surrendered simply because of ammunition shortages. The British also exploited their air support. Early in the week, the attackers used helicopters to airlift men and weapons to Mount Kent (elevation: 1,504 ft.), the commanding height only ten miles from Port Stanley. According to one participant in the attack. British pilots flew their heavily loaded machines as close to the ground as possible, hugging the contours of the land for protection. The Argentines had neglected to defend the high ground in that area so vital to their stronghold. The British, working through the snow, overnight installed mortars and 105-mm guns on the mountain and established advance positions on two lesser hills known as the Two Sisters, four miles closer to the capital. By morning they had established a commanding position. Suddenly the sun came out, and the British could see Port Stanley and the South Atlantic. Gunnery observers began calling down fire on nearby enemy bunkers. That was not enough for the marine unit's commanding officer. Said he: "Let's get on with the targets that really matter. Start putting a few rounds into Moody Brook [a former Royal Marine barracks about two miles from Port Stanley that General Menendez had established as a forward headquarters]. Then every Argie between here and there will know that he is in range of our guns." The Argentine forces seemed unwilling, or unable, to respond to the British harassment. The British were spared even the expected daredevil attacks by the courageous pilots of the Argentine air force, known to their adulators at home as los condores (the condors), who had sunk three ships during the British landing on East Falkland. In previous attacks, the air force had lost some 40 pilots and, according to the British, nearly 70 aircraft. But the Argentines still had more than enough plans and pilots to make a final assault against the British troops besieging Port Stanley, provided the bad weather cleared. Some British military experts fully expected los condores to fly again before the battle was decided. The Argentines, probably short of aircraft and pilots, managed only two desultory raids against the British task force. In one, a Skyhawk fighter-bomber was believed to have been shot down. In the other, an Argentine C-130 Hercules transport aircraft tried to bomb a British tanker. Airmen on the makeshift bomber simply pushed the bombs out a cargo door. One projectile bounced off the tanker, causing no damage. Argentina was scrambling abroad for new weapons, particularly for its air force, as the pressure on Port Stanley increased. British officials last week said that the Argentines may have acquired a number of Israeli-made Gabriel antiship missiles that can be used by Argentina's Mirage fighter-bombers. Israeli Foreign Ministry Spokesman Avi Pazner insisted that his government had not made any new sales but did not deny that it might have been fulfilling past contracts that included such weapons. Libyan Strongman Muammar Gaddafi is also said to have offered arms to the Argentines. What Buenos Aires particularly wants is more of the French-built Exocet missiles, which have sunk two British ships. The British do not know how many Exocets the Argentines have left, but sources estimate they may have half a dozen. To counter the Exocet, British technical experts have adopted the World War II system of dropping thin strips of metal foil to confuse the target-sighting radar in the nose of the missile. Weapons are unlikely to solve the problems of the Argentine troops on the ground in Port Stanley. Their return fire at the British positions on Mount Kent last week was described by a British journalist with his country's troops as "sporadic and ineffective." He said that the Argentines appeared "disorganized and unbelievably badly placed to defend themselves." Trying to undercut the Argentine will to fight, British Rear Admiral Woodward last week had Harriers drop leaflets over Port Stanley urging the Argentines to surrender. One leaflet was in the form of a safe-conduct pass; on its reverse, Woodward sent an open letter to Argentina's General Menendez. Wrote Woodward: "We are both aware of the serious military situation which now confronts you and your men. There can be no prospect of your garrison being relieved. Matters have now reached the point where you must consider whether there is any further point in maintained resistance in the face of such overwhelming odds." Waiting for the assault. Menendez, sent back no reply. -- By George Russell. Reported by Frank Melville/London and James Wilde/Buenos Aires </body> </article> </text>