Battle for the Falklands: The Winter War

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Battle for the Falklands: The Winter War
Patrick Bishop

John Witherow

‘Boldly planned, bravely executed and brilliantly accomplished’ was Margaret Thatcher’s assessment of the Falklands campaign. But what did the war mean to the men in the trenches and below decks?This gripping first-hand account of the Falklands War, written by bestselling military historian Patrick Bishop and Sunday Times Editor John Witherow, reveals the true experiences of the British soldiers and seamen on the front line. The authors, then rookie reporters, lived alongside the fighting men, experiencing the daily realities of a British task force that was hugely outnumbered on a barren island 8,000 miles from home. The Falklands: The Winter War looks at the covert role of the SAS and the heroic death of Colonel ‘H’ Jones at Goose Green, and considers just how close Britain came to defeat.This is an extraordinarily frank and unsparing account of a military campaign that has held a defining place within the British national conscience since victory in 1982.

Battle for the Falklands

The Winter War

Patrick Bishop

and

John Witherow

Contents

Cover (#ulink_739846f6-c4e7-5793-8221-8f410d276565)

Title Page

Maps

Authors’ Note

Prologue: One Small War

1 The Empire Strikes Back

2 Sailing

3 D Day

4 ‘Follow Me’

5 Life on the Mountains

6 The Last Days

7 Surrender

Epilogue: Going Home

Acknowledgements

About the Authors

Copyright

About the Publisher

Maps

Authors’ Note

We started writing this in the summer of 1982, within a few weeks of returning from the South Atlantic. It was not intended as a considered historical study but as a piece of extended reportage, designed to satisfy the curiosity of a British public still fascinated by such an extraordinary and unexpected national drama. It carries some of the demerits of the haste in which it was written, but also, we would like to think, some of the virtues of freshness and immediacy. In this edition we have left the manuscript much as it first appeared, the unvarnished testimony of what two young reporters saw, felt and thought, all those years ago and all those miles away.