MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

A Commander Story. Part II

IN April 1982 a British Task Force began its journey South tasked with liberating the Falkland Islands from its Argentine invaders.
Sailing with that force was Julian Thompson, Commander of 40 Commando Royal Marines and 3 Commando Brigade.
He was joint commander of the amphibious landings and overall Land Commander until the arrival of Major General Jeremy Moore in the Islands at the end of May.
Julian Thompson's brigade saw action in most of the battles of the 1982 Falklands campaign.

THERE must have been many a landing plan conceived and then discarded; what were the strongest alternatives to landing and establishing a beachhead at San Carlos?

The strongest alternative was to land in Port Salvador. The problem about there was you could not have got landing ships in; you would have had to lower the landing craft outside and get vessels like Sir Galahadin (and indeed, did, come in as far as Teal Inlet). The other ships were too big so they would have had a very long run in and would have been extremely exposed. Third best if you like was the area of Cow Bay and Volunteer Bay and having just come back from visiting Volunteer Bay yesterday, I am very glad indeed that we did not land there, and I'm not just talking about the penguins, I'm talking about the problems of getting from there to here (Stanley) over what is some pretty appalling terrain.

And why the Port San Carlos area?

That had a lot of advantages; the principal one was that whatever the weather you could go on operating; you never get big seas or winds. Secondly it was a difficult place to attack from the air. Not impossible as we discovered but you could not attack the landings with Exocet. If, for example, you did a landing with all the ships in open water they could have flown Super Entendards with Exocets against the landing, but they could not do that in San Carlos because an Exocet missile picks up the largest target, and the largest target would have been a piece of mountain. It was easy to defend because once you are on the high ground around it this can be done. (We thought the Argentines would attack it once we were there but they didn't.) There are some very good beaches at San Carlos for landing and a lot of space behind the beaches. You need space to lay out your logistics, your ammunition, have a strip for helicopters and on some beaches there was not that space. San Carlos had all of those things.

Tell me about D Day - 2 Para were the first ashore followed by 40 Commando. How did it all work and what were the tasks on landing?

The original plan was that 40 Commando would land first and 2 Para would land second. But we then heard that there was a stronger force in D