With 3 Para to the Falklands

Graham Colbeck

• Publisher: Frontline Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781526713636
• eBook ISBN: 9781526713650
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

A veteran of the Falklands conflict vividly recounts the actions of his elite parachute regiment in this Cold War military history.
On Friday, April 9, 1982, a British task force set sail for the Falkland Islands. Three months later, after a short but brutal campaign, it had successfully ejected the Argentinean occupying forces. With 3 Para to the Falklands is the full story of that dramatic struggle from the point of view of a sergeant in the Third Battalion, Parachute Regiment (3 Para).
This elite battle group played a significant part in the campaign, marching from Port San Carlos to Port Stanley and fighting in one of its most crucial, yet often-neglected battles—the night assault on Mount Longdon. Graham Colbeck's vivid account reveals the stark realities harsh conditions of this stubbornly contested conflict.

1. AIRBORNE

I am a soldier,

A name that in my thoughts becomes me best.

William Shakespeare, Henry V

A chill wind blew across the rocky hillside where we had stopped to rest. Now that we were cloaked in darkness and free from the blistering heat of the day, we were able to move faster and use less of our precious water.

I unscrewed the cap of one of my metal water bottles and took a mouthful of refreshingly cool water.

I was still wearing my Airborne issue, camouflaged pattern ‘Dennison Smock’ next to my skin; this had made me far too warm during the day, but now I considered taking my shirt from my pack to wear as well. Being a new boy, or ‘crow’, I waited to see what the others would do. They remained dressed as I was – they knew that once we started tabbing again we would soon be warm enough.

As I observed my ‘arc of fire’ (each man faced outwards for ‘all-round defence’), I looked down on a small village in the valley below. A few lights were visible, but it was very late and most of the inhabitants would have been asleep. I thought about the life I had chosen for myself – so different from the lives of ordinary people, or ‘civvies’. I was seventeen. I carried a rifle, and with another four hundred or so armed men, moved unnoticed through the hills and valleys of a remote area of Cyprus, while ‘normal’ people were in bed.

I was taking part in my first field exercise with my Battalion, 3 Para. It was the summer of 1970 and I had recently ‘passed out’ of the Parachute Regiment Depot in Aldershot before joining 3 Para in Malta. In those days the tiny island of Malta was garrisoned by two British infantry battalions, and 3 Para was over halfway through a two-year posting to the island. Malta was too small an island for large-scale military training and so we had flown to Cyprus, arrived by parachute and were now approaching the end of a long ‘tab’, our ultimate goal being the destruction of an ‘enemy’ comprising scattered groups of wooden targets. There was no ‘live’ enemy force on this particular exercise, and so we carried live ammunition to be used in the planned attack.

The following day B Company advanced along a valley as part of a Battalion ‘Advance to Contact’. High on the slopes on either side of us I could see small groups of men; these were the patrols of D (Patrol) Company picketing the high ground to cover our advance.

This was my first experience of a military manoeuvre on this scale, and it made a deep impression on me. I was fascinated by the fact that although I was an individual human being, capable of independent thought and action, I was in fact subordinate to something much greater and more important than myself – the Battalion, and I was controlled by its command system. I was simply one of several hundred parts of this great bloodthirsty beast which lived and moved and fought as one entity, with a central nervous system all of its own; a creature which was able to survive the loss of one or many of its parts and carry on until its destructive mission was complete.

I knew then that I made the right choice when I had enlisted in the Parachute Regiment. This was what I was intended to be; this was my destiny – to be a necessary yet expendable part of this magnificent warlike animal that was certain of its superiority in a world of similar but inferior animals. Lord of the jungle. Challenge me if you dare – I will brush you aside and turn to face the next threat.

I had enlisted in the Army immediately after leaving school and having chosen to become a paratrooper I was sent to the Para Depot at Aldershot where I joined a recruit platoon to begin my basic training.

Why did I choose the Parachute Regiment? If asked at the time I would have probably said, ‘Because it’s the best regiment in the Army’, or, ‘Because I wanted a challenge’, or something equally misleading. The fact is that young men of a certain character are naturally drawn to the Paras; men who share a restless and reckless spirit; who are not yet ready, and perhaps never will be, to ‘settle down’ in a steady job with a safe and predictable routine. Men who are still boys with a taste for adventure – searching for something as yet unknown and elusive. Perhaps looking for an answer to the question, ‘What kind of man am I?’ Looking for an identity – or perhaps looking to lose one or cloak it in Army camouflage. Looking, in many cases, for a home and a family. Lost boys; diverse characters but sharing, to a greater or lesser extent, a need to prove something to themselves and perhaps to others; to put themselves to the test and to experience a way of life outside the accepted norm.

The military life was not ‘in my blood’ – at least there appears to have been little history of Army service in my family. My male ancestors had, for almost two hundred years, been Yorkshire coal-miners or mill-workers. My paternal grandfather served, reluctantly I believe, in the Great War for two years as a Royal Field Artillery gunner on the Western Front, and he still carried fragments of shrapnel around in his leg. He told me nothing about that time apart from the fact that he went ‘AWOL’ from training and was caught by Military Police in Ripon. If I inherited anything of use to me in my chosen career as a paratrooper it was a capacity for hard physical work.

My recruit platoon at Aldershot was, at the start of training after many hopefuls had been weeded out, 44 strong. Aged from 17 to around 25, of various shapes and sizes and from all parts of the United Kingdom, we assembled under a staff consisting of an officer, a sergeant and three corporals, who would all in their various ways attempt to reduce our number by all the means at their disposal – to weed out those who did not deserve to wear the famous red beret and parachute ‘wings’.

Sure enough, it was not long before men began to drop out of the training, either by choice or by failing to meet the standards in one way or another. The training, which took place in and around Aldershot and at the Para ‘Battle School’ in South Wales, consisted of a mixture of physical training, weapons and tactical training, map reading, radio communications, drill and ‘bullshit’, all combined with what could be termed, ‘indoctrination’.

We learned the Second World War battle honours of our young (for the British Army) Regiment, and we were shown films of past campaigns. I still remember a phrase used by the narrator of one of the films that described an action in the Radfan Mountains when 3 Para had come under fire from a rebel position: ‘being paratroopers they immediately attacked’. That phrase has always seemed to me to embody the ethos of the Parachute Regiment. We were also told that in order to become paratroopers we must possess a quality known as, ‘Airborne Initiative’, and be able to act without orders if necessary if we found ourselves alone when dropped behind enemy lines.

After about eight weeks of initial training those of us who remained in Recruit Platoon number 349 were ready to face ‘Pre-Parachute Company’, or ‘P Company’ as it was known; several days of gruelling physical tests. This was the stage of training when we infantry soldiers were pitted against men from other arms – gunners, medics, engineers, and so on, who aspired to join Airborne Forces and serve in 16 Para Brigade. A series of individual and team events such as the Log Race, the Steeplechase and ‘Milling’ (high-speed boxing with non-stop punching) took place.

At the end of each event the winning team would be presented with the P Company pennant to carry back to barracks, and after one of the events the honour fell to me. I ran at the head of the Platoon holding the staff with its maroon and blue pennant topped by the winged horse, Pegasus – carrying Bellerophon with his spear held aloft, the symbol of British Airborne Forces. I had never felt so proud.

Those of us who passed P Company were sent to RAF Abingdon in Oxfordshire to qualify as parachutists. We were trained by RAF PJIs – Parachute Jump Instructors – who wore badges with the motto, ‘Knowledge Dispels Fear’ – well, maybe.

After several days of rolling around on mats, jumping from plywood aircraft mock-ups and falling from various contraptions we were ready for our first ‘jump’ from a balloon. The helium-filled balloon, looking just like a Second World War barrage balloon (which it probably was) rose slowly to the height of 800 feet at the end of steel cable winched out from the back of a lorry on the flat green turf of Weston-on-the-Green DZ. Beneath the balloon hung a ‘cage’ – a square platform with small wooden walls around it, and an open ‘door’ in one side. Inside the cage as it lifted and swayed were five intrepid would-be paratroopers including myself – all fear, of course, by now dispelled by the knowledge instilled in us by our PJI, who nonchalantly leaned out of the door.

At 800 feet above the earth, when the winch motor had stopped and an eerie silence tended to concentrate the mind, the first man was called to the door after checking that his static line was firmly attached to the metal bar above. I would have preferred to go first, but waited in my corner and watched the parachute of the man in the door, finding that better than looking at the roofs of the tiny cars on the roads below. ‘GO!’ – and out from the womb he went, the cage swaying even more now as the PJI hauled in the limp umbilical cord, an empty parachute bag on the end of it. My turn. Trying to remember the simple drills, I edged forward to the door and positioned the toecap of my forward boot over the edge of the platform. He must have said, ‘GO!’ – because I found myself trying, but failing, to open my eyes as the contents of my abdomen tried to force their way through my diaphragm and my parachute rigging lines rattled the back of my steel helmet. After what seemed like about ten minutes of speeding earthwards I became aware that I could breathe again and I was gently floating beneath a great nylon umbrella. Someone on the ground was shouting instructions at me through a megaphone. I carried out the required drills and prepared to hit the earth, thinking the words I used on that and all subsequent jumps to ready myself for impact, ‘Head down, shoulders round, knees bent and watch the ground’ – not something my instructors had taught me but something I had read in a book somewhere (knowledge dispels fear). The grass rushed up at me and I collapsed in an ungainly sort of mimicry of a textbook parachute roll. Easy, really.

After a second jump, again from a balloon but with more apprehension beforehand, knowing what to expect (the same is probably true of fighting battles), we jumped from an Argosy aircraft and then from the ubiquitous C130 Hercules, by day and then by night, qualifying for our parachute wings before returning to Aldershot to complete our training.

On the whole, apart from some of the physical tests and part of the winter field exercises at the Parachute Regiment Battle School in Wales, I did not find my time at the depot very difficult. I was helped by the fact that I had been an Army Cadet and I had already learned the rudiments of infantry soldiering in the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry under tuition of instructors with Second World War experience. The KOYLI cap badge and proud motto, ‘Cede Nullis’ – ‘Yield to None’ – have long since disappeared from the Army through disbandment and amalgamations.

There were 11 recruits remaining in our recruit platoon, and I found that I had been awarded the trophy for ‘Champion Recruit’ as well as for ‘Champion Rifle Shot’. Having been mildly surprised to win two trophies I was then annoyed with myself for not doing better in the machine-gun competition – I was only one shot behind the winner of that trophy.

Proudly wearing our red berets and parachute wings we were sent to join 3 Para in Malta, returning to a chilly Aldershot six months later. The winter of 1970/71 is stuck in my memory as the time I endured the hardest field training I have ever experienced. A Battalion drop on to Sennybridge Army training area in South Wales was planned, followed by a tactical exercise lasting several days. Due to appalling weather the drop was cancelled, so we ‘jumped’ from coaches and trucks spread out along a road running through the DZ. There followed a succession of night ‘tabs’, or marches, interspersed with digging waterlogged holes and inhabiting them, all of it undertaken (at least in my case as a lowly ‘Tom’), with little idea why. There was no ‘enemy’ and no apparent point to the exercise, which became one of pure endurance. We were equipped and acclimatised for the Mediterranean area and after only two days the first exposure cases resulted, followed by men suffering from ‘trench foot’ – none of them allowed to be ‘casevaced’ to the training camp – they had to be treated in the field.

About the only information passed to us, rather boastfully, after several days in our muddy holes was that the SAS had been training in the same area and had gone back to barracks because of the severe weather. The worse the conditions became, and the more the men suffered, the more determined the Commanding Officer became to carry on with the ‘training’ – which ended, at last, after a long night march to camp in the continuing rain.

That night I awoke in my wooden hut in the training camp feeling as if the end of my mattress was on fire – my feet were red-hot and swollen, and I spent the rest of the night going to and from the showers to cool them down (the worst thing I could have done). At reveille next morning I found that my burning feet were so swollen that I had great difficulty putting on my boots. So this was trench foot.

I was determined not to ‘go sick’ and join the men in the over-crowded medical centre because I did not want to miss the rest of the training, which was in preparation for 3 Para’s first tour of duty in Ulster.

After being lectured on the background to the ‘Troubles’ and trying to understand why Protestants and Catholics hated each other so much, we got down to the practical side of ‘peacekeeping’, which seemed to require a lot of marching about in a box formation with a metal shield and a wooden stick. The tactics of the time were based on the Army’s experience in Britain’s troubled colonies around the world. Crowd control involved hitting a few rioters over the head and then, if that did not disperse them, an officer would shout a warning through his megaphone, the ‘ringleader’ would be identified and a soldier with a rifle would advance and shoot him dead. It seemed simple, except that we were given a list of rules based on ‘minimum force’ describing the circumstances in which we were allowed to open fire. Training for service in the Province would later become far more thorough and realistic, but in those early days each unit trained as it thought best – based on minimum experience and outdated drills.

We sailed to Belfast in early 1971, on one of the LSLs that would later be part of the Falklands Amphibious Task Group. B Company, to which I belonged, moved eventually to Ballymurphy and occupied a primary school and the adjacent Henry Taggart Hall, the whole complex having been recently surrounded by barbed wire and dotted with sandbagged sentry posts. In a rather bizarre arrangement, B Company slept in classrooms on the first floor of the school, and the children attended school as normal, using only the ground floor. My platoon lived in what had formerly been an art classroom, complete with all its art materials that we put to good use by painting elaborate and colourful pictures on the windowpanes to conceal our beds from the overlooking block of flats. The toilets and sinks were tiny, meant for young schoolchildren, and had the effect of making us feel gigantic. From this Lilliputian world we ventured out in Landrovers to be stoned by seven-year-olds, and stalked through the back gardens of the housing estates at night with blackened faces, earning ourselves the nickname, ‘Flowerpot men’.

The infantry regiment that had been responsible for that part of Belfast before our arrival had declared the staunch Republican Ballymurphy Estate a ‘no-go’ area – in other words they had not gone into it, leaving its population to do as it pleased. We were having none of that, of course, and made a point of patrolling every part of the Estate at all times of the day or night. Our predecessors at the school had left behind pairs of homemade scrap-metal shin-guards on our beds; they had used the armour when they were called to a riot, where they would stand in line to be targets for bricks and Molotov cocktails. On discovering the armour we immediately threw it in the dustbin.

Long hours ‘on stag’ (sentry duty) in the sandbagged emplacements listening to gunshots and explosions that rocked the city were interspersed with patrolling, filling sandbags and erecting more barbed wire.

I missed my first chance to fire my rifle in anger during our stay at Ballymurphy: our base had been fired at once or twice at night from the Estate across the road, and our Company Commander decided to do something about it. His plan was to send my platoon out to work our way behind the gunman to seal his escape route. In order to leave our base unseen by the enemy, we travelled inside two armoured ‘pigs’ (armoured personnel carriers, or APCs) that set up a routine vehicle checkpoint near the Estate. We then slipped unnoticed from our Trojan Horse through a hedgerow and into a field bordering the houses. As we ran through gardens and jumped over barricades a shadowy figure carrying what looked like a rifle appeared on the footpath ahead of us. The Sergeant leading our group opened fire with his pistol at close range and the figure fell – I could have opened fire also but hesitated, trying to remember whether the ‘Yellow Card’ rules of engagement permitted...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Maps
• List of Illustrations
• Glossary and Abbreviations
• Foreword, by Lieutenant-General Sir Hew Pike, KCB, DSO, MBE
• Prologue
• 1 Airborne
• 2 Spearhead
• 3 Voyage
• 4 Wideawake
• 5 Southward
• 6 Destination
• 7 Advance
• 8 Delay
• 9 Battle
• 10 Aftermath
• 11 Victory
• 12 Return
• Killed in Action on Mount Longdon
• Epilogue
• Last Words, by Vernon Steen, Lance-Corporal Denzil Connick, and Ailsa Heathman
• Plate section