'It’s going to be bloody awful': How Paras were made battle-ready for the Falklands War
The Paras by Max Arthur : From the Falklands to Afghanistan in their own words
29 OCTOBER 2017 • 1:19PM
Colonel H. Jones was the inspiration for making things happen in 2 Para. The way the unit was constructed, its morale, the training with an emphasis on speed and the offence, stemmed from him.
We were on leave prior to departure for the jungle in Belize, Central America, as the Falklands crisis blew up. Our sister battalion, 3 Para, had been selected to embark with 3 Commando Brigade, and it was felt that 2 Para should remain to fill the gap created by their departure. H was very impatient as we watched the Task Force depart, and more so when our overseas tour to Belize was cancelled. Despite these developments, we did not stop planning for the possibility of war.
It was clear the Falklands could only be recaptured by attack. We therefore made it our business, in the few days we had, to acquire what additional weapons and equipment we needed to increase our potential for offence. We also spent much time studying the topography, the Argentinian armed forces, and even working out how we could launch an airborne assault directly into the capital Stanley, such was our enthusiasm to go.
All this effort paid off when we heard we had been tasked to join 3 Commando Brigade at Ascension Island.
We were to be the best jungle-trained battalion in the South Atlantic. As soon as the battalion had been selected, H left to link up with the 3 Commando Brigade staff, leaving me in command. He said, ‘Chris, train up the battalion and bring it down to me. I’ll meet you at Ascension.’
We spent a week training in Aldershot, getting all the equipment, embarked the battalion on the troopship Norland and worked out a training programme for the remaining three weeks. So I spent four weeks commanding 2 Para in all.
There were several weaknesses in 2 Para, which I had seen on Salisbury Plain and at a major field exercise in Norfolk in January. These had to be put right.
The first was our ability to deal with casualties. The existing principle was based on patching up the injured and withdrawing them to expert help well behind the battle. We quickly appreciated that movement, other than by helicopter, would be too slow for casualty survival, so we decided to concentrate on battlefield resuscitation. In other words, to prevent the onset of shock and sustain the injured for as long as possible, at or near the site of wounding.
This was put into operation by our young medical officer, Captain Steve Hughes, RAMC, who had researched the medical experiences of various campaigns. He acquired 1,000 drips for intravenous infusion to cope with blood-loss and even bought a dummy forearm, veins and all, on which to practise.
The idea was that we would distribute these IVs to each man, along with the more usual morphine and shell dressings. A soldier would then have his own medical repair kit, which either he or a combat medic could administer at the site of wounding. During the journey south, we taught everyone how to set up a drip. As a result of these measures, we were able to reduce the loss of life dramatically.
The whole point of war is to apply violence to break the enemy’s will, not simply to destroy his weapons or his cities, but undermine his will to fight for what he believes in. How do you reinforce that will in a body of people who’ve never been to war? This is where our padre, David Cooper, was so marvellous. He took each section (nine men), the smallest fighting unit in the battalion, sat down in front of them and said, ‘Look, when we go on this battlefield, it’s going to be bloody awful. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ll tell you how I’m going to feel.’
Cooper attempted to penetrate that macho façade soldiers build around themselves in order to reinforce their own inner resistance to fear. By voicing their own fears to them, he got them to talk about how they would actually cope with the trauma of war. Being a padre, and to some extent apart from the military structure, he gave them the opportunity to share their emotions with each other, developing a ‘spiritual’ bond within the sections, which is essential if people are going to work successfully together - and, for the 2 Para team, to die for each other.
It was a tremendous contribution. In that week after the Goose Green battle, there was closeness between everybody – they were fused by fire. There was this tremendous brotherhood. It’s a word used frequently by people who fought in the Second World War – the Brotherhood of Arnhem, for example – and it is a brotherhood, too. War is a very emotional business – more than people realise, and much more than I’d ever anticipated and appreciated.
I was enormously attracted to the Parachute Regiment because of this wonderful feeling of comradeship. We all have to go through a traumatic selection process, which weeds out a great number of people. We are united in our hardship; by what we have done. It is a very good way of preparing for the actual trauma of war. Soldiers do not fight for Queen and Country, they fight for each other. But they need to know that their comrades would do the same. Selection produces that mutual trust.
I remember parachuting onto the Arnhem drop zone with our sister battalion, 10 Para, on their annual pilgrimage to the battlefield and war cemetery. We visited the Oosterbeek crossroads, the scene of fierce fighting in 1944, and listened to one of the very few survivors of the battalion describing the battle around the junction.
Someone in the audience asked, ‘What made you go on fighting when the battalion had been largely destroyed, the cause lost and defeat inevitable?’ He paused, looked across to the suburban junction, and with tears brimming up in his eyes, he said quietly and simply, ‘They were my friends.’
That’s how it was for 2 Para. We had spent our peacetime training fusing the individuals into a team together. The fire of war merely tempered that process. We would never have given up. We would have fought to the last man rather than compromise the trust that existed between us.
The Paras by Max Arthur is published by Hodder & Stoughton on November 2 (£25). To order your copy for £19.99 plus p&p call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
