MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency
Falklands Veteran returns to record the ?forgotten voices'.
“Within the Task Force there was no hatred of the Argentineans; there was just a feeling of the wastefulness of them not realising that they needed to give up until the bitter end.”
"???. it was only for the majority of people afterwards that they actually realised the true nature of what the Falklands represented and the fact that they were British people and that they had this tradition and they had this spirit, which we realised after the event was something very important. That's quite an important thing to understand, because the British forces attitude generally was a purely professional, non-personal attitude????? though as we had relationships with the Falkland Islanders, with time we realised there was more and more of a bond, more and more of an affinity between us."This was former Royal Artillery Captain, Hugh McManners talking to MercoPress on Wednesday, in Stanley. Interviews with ex-combatants are often poignant, but this was more so because McManners, as leader of a five man Forward Observation team, was in charge of directing naval fire on Argentine positions in and around Stanley in the final days of the 1982 conflict. A fault in the guidance system of one of the guns under Mc Manners' command was to cause the only civilian fatalities of the conflict, when a shell exploded over a house in which several civilians were sheltering, including his interviewer.
This tragic accident could not have been prevented by McManners, who, along with his group, was at this time concealed on Beagle Ridge to the north of Stanley, having been inserted by helicopter well ahead of the British forward positions. It is probable, indeed, had he not discovered immediately that something was wrong and called off the bombardment, the consequences would have been even more serious for the civilians still living in West Stanley at the time.
McManners never visited Stanley in 1982 and in his book, "Falklands Commando", which remains one of the best-written, first-person accounts from the British side, he says about the immediate post-conflict days: "I had no desire to go at all, having become so intimately concerned with the place through a telescope and especially after the tragedy of the civilian deaths in Port Stanley." Twenty-two years on, and now a TV producer, McManners is happy to have come back to make his first-ever peace-time visit to the Falklands and has spent three weeks, with his teenage son, William, exploring closely many of the places, like Stanley, previously only seen from concealment through high-powered lenses.
His impressions now are of "a place that has moved on enormously and, if one can say this, appears to have benefited very greatly from the traumatic experiences of 1982." The war had, he thought, increased the strong sense of identity of people in the Falklands, making them "far more determined to have their own political identity" and to see themselves as a separate country.
Asked about his attitude towards Argentina, then and now, McManners stated that he had never harboured any adverse feelings towards Argentinean people , "but my attitude towards Argentina, the country, is that it's been plagued with some rather unstable governments, who then, as all governments do, look to find some sort of focus outside their own borders to divert the peoples' attention away from problems which maybe they should be solving or problems which the government is unable to solve and I think that's what happened in 81/82" Aside from his personal reasons for visiting the Falklands, McManners is involved in a project for the Imperial War Museum in London, which is hoping to produce a book on the Falklands War in time for the 25th anniversary. This book will be based on the museum's sound archives and will make the third in a series, which currently comprises "The Forgotten Voices of the First World War" and "The Forgotten Voices of the Second World War".
Unfortunately, as McManners explained to Mercopress, the Museum's sound archives contain no interviews with Falkland Islanders and very few with Argentineans. The visit to the Falklands has given him the opportunity of making good the deficiencies with regard to Falkland Island civilians and he is hoping very much to be able to record the voices of Argentineans.
After making contact with the Argentinean Embassy in London and having received what he called "positive responses' Hugh McManners will shortly be meeting the Defence Attaché there and hoping shortly thereafter to visit Buenos Aires "to meet as many people as I can".
Readers in Argentina or elsewhere who would like to meet Hugh McManners and contribute to this project are invited to contact him at the following email address: hugh@hughmcmanners.com
John Fowler (MP) Stanley
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