Operation Tidespring Part 10/3
Port Stanley Airport, 30th April 1983, 19:55 local (23:55 GMT)
“Air Raid Warning Red! Red! Red!” came from the loudspeakers of the PA system even as the hand-powered sirens blared and the sound of Jet Engines could be heard coming in from the sea. With a routine born out of days of almost constant air attacks the Argentine soldiers and the British Civilians went for what cover there was and peered over the edges of cellars, slit trenches and sand bag bunkers. Just like during the last three days a group of specks came in from the sea, trailing smoke and soon it became clear that it was again a formation of four Buccaneers and everyone knew that their hardpoints and bomb bays would be full with 500 pound bombs in an effort to destroy the remaining Argentine Air power and to render the runway unusable, both tasks that the British had as of yet not fully accomplished even though only four A-4, two A-6 and three F-4s remained of the force that had landed here some weeks ago. The B-45 had failed to find the enemy and had landed here after running out of fuel, their wrecks were still smoking from yesterday's last raid.
Official Argentine news had merely told of a Naval Battle and that both sides had sustained losses, but the wrecks of several Navy Aircraft and the complete impunity with which the British had been bombing and were bombing the Argentine defences. As the Buccaneers from HMS King George VI released their bombs the surviving senior Air Force Officer on the ground thanked whatever deyities there might be that the Islands were out of easy bomber range, because that precluded the venerable Vulcan bomber Force from making an appearance and shower the base with ten times the bombload using half the aircraft.[1]
The Buccaneers slowed to sub-sonic speeds and scattered their bombload all over what remained of the airport and departed after setting most of the remaining infrastructure on fire and rendering the base unusable for days
How the Argentines see the Buccaneer
Major General Lizardo departed from cellar of Government House where he had established his headquarters and once again asked himself what on earth the British were waiting for. For the last three days they had systematically bombed the Argentine positions to smithereems, their Carrier fighters had cut the Islands off from reinforcements and resupply, and they could have landed their Marines at any point of the Islands with little interference from the Argentine troops defending them.
“Comrade General, we have news.”
Lizardo turned to his aide and merely stared at the man without saying a word.
“Comrade, the Army Company at Goose Green has reported enemy ships within the bay, some of our patrols have spotted enemy ships heading into Berkeley sound, our troops at San Carlos are under heavy gunfire and air attack.”
“Anything new from the mainland?”
“Nothing since yesterday's message, Comrade General.”
The message in question had been short and to the point, Lizardo was to hold until relieved or overcome, and he strongly suspected that the latter was going to happen before the former. The British were known to have enough amphibious capability with them to land a Division, and it seemed that they were planning to do that. Lizardo had used the last couple of days to concentrate most of his forces on East Falkland before the British made any movement on the waters around the Islands impossible, leaving only token forces on West Falkland which were now reporting that they were in almost constant contact with British Special Forces which had been clearly underestimated before the war.
Royal Marines going ashore at Goose Green
Mount Kent, 30th April 1983, 20:00 local
The sun had just gone down, but even then the men of “Naval Operations Company 22” could hear that for many this brought no relief. They could hear the booming sound of the British Naval guns in the distance and almost constant air activity overhead. Frantic and desperate radio messages spoke of the British coming ashore at three places at once and heavy naval and Air support. Luckily they here at Mount Kent were too far away from the beach to receive a '16 inch RN greeting card', so the men were in a relatively good mood even though morale of the Argentines was plummeting even faster than the one of the British living here soared.
“Comrade Lieutenant, the General wants a status report.....”
The Sergeant spoke no more as his head dissolved into a reddish mist as it was hit by a .303 round from a sniper rifle. The command post of the company was under attack as seconds afterwards a machine gun started firing into the positions of the company and several more men were killed by the sniper. The Lieutenant didn't know that the attack was nothing more than a diversion, and he led the defence against what he thought was a major attack by British special forces. Soon however he began to notice that something was wrong. While the British were trading fire with his men at a brisk pace, no actual push against his position was forthcoming. Clearly this was a diversion, but against what?
The answer soon came in the form of a sound that in the West[2] would be instantly recognized but was something almost totally unknown within the nations of the Seattle Pact. A mixture of a classical helicopter and a jet aircraft, it came from behind the mountain, facing Port Stanley and only weakly defended. The Lieutenant ran out he saw four Fairey Defender, the gunship variant of the Fairey Rotodyne come over the top of the mountain and descend on his position, while more of them began to unload Royal Marines on the top itself. The craft were armed the the usual assortment of guns, missiles and rockets and began to demolish the position of the Argentine special forces who by nature of their job travelled light and only had Redeye PAAM[3] as anti-aircraft weaponry, and the grey-green aircraft now destroyed everything that looked even remotely dangerous, hovering over the ground while door and rear gunners prevented the surviving Argentine Marines from doing too much, especially after the Lieutenant had been hit in the stomach by a 30mm shell from the chin-mounted Gatling gun of one the the 'Dynes'.
Had he still been alive he would have seen that the position of his men was now hopeless. Not only was the remainder of the Company now caught between the forty Royal Marines that two more Dynes had deposited on the top of the Mountain and the reinforced platoon of SAS and RM down below, but also that the remaining complement of HMS Gallipoli, the assault ship they were coming from and that had joined the Fleet only recently[4] was depositing small Marine parties on the other mountains and ridges around Mount Kent, chiefly Mt Harriet, Mt Challenger and The Two Sisters. On Mount Kent itself the battle was decided the moment the British had made the risky air assault on the summit and the 90mm field gun that constituted the whole of the Argentine Artillery outside San Carlos and Port Stanley itself had been taken out by a salvo from a rocket pod.
Even so the Argentine Marines had to be dug out of their holes the hard way.
One machine gun on the southern slopes that had covered the flank was so resistant to all attempts at taking it out that Captain Turner, the British OC on the scene had to call in a flight of Buccaneers on CAS duty to take it out while near the centre of the Argentine position a rock bunker proved resistant to the Mortars the Marines had with them and was taken out by the suicidally brave charge of a Marine Corporal who for this and other actions earlier in the day earned a posthumous Victoria Cross. It took the British Marines most of the night and the 1st of May to find and defeat the last defenders.
But even before then they were no danger to the main British operation any more.
All over East Falkland, 1st May 1983, 0:00 local to 5th May, 18:39 local
In spite of doomsayers in the Battlebridges and staff meetings the landings at Goose Green had cone off without a hitch, in fact the only resistance offered had come from logistics troops that had been busy cutting phone lines, while at San Carlos HMS Dreadnought had been needed to fight down a group of Argentine Artillery guns that were so well camouflaged that they couldn't be spotted by the Marines on the ground for hours, the majority of the casualties of the day being suffered there. The landings at Berkeley sound were remarkably unremarkable, minor resistance by the former crew of a nearby AAM battery that had lost most of it's vehicles and a Battalion of Argentine Army conscripts folded away rapidly after Thunderchild had started shelling their positions, with the Union Flag raised over Port Louis at 13:22.
San Carlos on the other hand was the scene of the fiercest battle the Royal Marines had fought in decades. Here the largest Argentine Force outside the Port Stanley defence perimeter, the 11th Regiment of the Argentine People's Marine Infantry had dug in as deep as was possible and directed a murderous artillery and machine gun fire onto the landing Marines, and by the time things were over San Carlos and much of the countryside surrounding the settlement made a good imitation of the stereotypical Western front of World War One. Fighting there would last for three more days, and after the war was over many would question the wisdom of landing there in the first place.
In the air and on the seas it was clear who had won. No less than seven separate attempts by the Argentine Air Force to support their troops on the Islands were broken up by the Fleet Air Arm so that for the remainder of the war no more Argentine Aircraft would come within a hundred miles of the Islands. When during the early evening hours of Communim's biggest and only universal holiday Lizardo looked at the map, he realized that it would be a matter of another day or two before his position became untenable. Unaware of the internal struggles within the Argentine Government and Military on the mainland he could only register the absence of Argentine Aircraft and the silence coming from High Command and believe that he and his men had been given up for dead. True they intercepted regular Radio reports about the valiant defenders, but no actual messages from the mainland were transmitted to them.
On the 2nd May two British Marine Battalions were landed on West Falkland. While this deprived the Royal Marine Division of almost all the reserves, but it did clear half of the Falklands within two days, so that West Falkland could be declared secure late on the 4th.
Marines advancing on Port Stanley
The first contact between the Main body of Marines coming in from Berkeley Sound made contact with the perimeter around Port Stanley late on the 3rd. The fourth was spent with heavy but inconclusive fighting along the main perimeter before shortly before midnight a message was transmitted on known frequencies of the Argentine Armed forces that encouraged Lizardo to surrender. No such thing was forthcoming. The Information Officer had long since died in a British Air Raid, he felt duty bound by his orders and fought on. The 4th brought more and very heavy fighting, but early on the 5th a message was received by General Burton, the Marine Commander, and some hours after that the Argentine Army and Marine troops left their foxholes without weapons and hands raised, just glad that it was over for them.
The war for the Falklands had been won, now all that remained to do was to convince the Argentine Government of that.
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Comments, questions, rotten tomatoes? It is incredibly rushed, but I always wanted to concentrate mainly on the air and Naval Battles anyway, partially to hone my own skills for the main story. Ending+Epilogue update should be out on the 31st. Anyway, I had to confine myself to black and white pictures because the beret colours aren't right. No Paras anywhere and TTL the Marines wear a dark Blue one anyway.
[1]TTL the later versions of the Vulcan have the ability to carry additional bomb pods under the wings, bringing the load up to 38.000 pounds Was proposed in OTL for the Phase 6 Vulcan.
[2] I've thought long and hard about a suitable term for this. “The West” as it was defined during the RL cold war wouldn't really work considering that the centrepiece of NATO is the big bad ITTL, while the Allied Alliance has a very strong (compared to real life at least) Republic of China and half of Japan in it. So after failing to come up with something suitable I've decided to stick with “The West” myself, figuring that it was a term initially coined by the Americans to describe what was then a mostly Euro-centric block + Asian and African holdings of the British, and eventually the term just stuck when the RoC and West Japan ascended to membership. All that will eventually be explained in more detail in the main story once I get around to it.
[3] Term for MANPADs.
[4] A good example of the unplanned and haphazard way in which I started this story. Had I planned it beforehand, the Gallipoli would have been listed as part of the task force from the start. I deeply regret this, guys. The next one, detailing the Middle Eastern War of the mid or late 1960s will have much more thought put into it, promised.
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