I want to thank you all for coming it's a-you know you always worry whether somebody have come to something like this and I appreciate you coming I appreciate the people that you know put the chairs in place and working the cameras right now I'm really honored to be here when I did that when I had responsibility for distribution operations for Department of Defense I was residing down here new government and I spent two and a half years there and you know I have come to love Pennsylvania and I'm happy to be back you got great food you got nice people and so it's good to be here people always ask me how did I get involved in the falklands wife and so I'll start off with that and I'll take that question right off the table in 1982 when this war went down I was a major in in Panama and I was a secretary the general staff down there I was privileged to a lot of classified information that came in to the general when when that war went down it just kind of fascinated me and when I left Panama I went to Leavenworth and went to school there when I was in Sam's I had to write some monographs and and I had to do one in the operational level of war one of the tack of level war and so I looked back and I said want to do it in the Falklands it was in 85 86 at that time there was not much written on the Falklands and and so I found myself corresponding with the people that fought the war and lo and behold the brits wrote back and that inspired me and so I wrote two monographs in Sam's and those monographs were eventually included in the curricula at Leavenworth and also at Fort Lee in logistics schools they're hopefully inadequate now but I did the best that I could okay I did the best that I could with what information was available slides just okay just if you can get them one way or the other okay well haven't started yet so we'll get to it anyway I wrote those monographs and so I remained very intrigued with this war and when I was then a fellow at Hoover I picked up my studies and my desire was to write a book I wrote half the book I actually started with chapter 2 because I couldn't figure out how to pull all these things together to start the book in chapter 1 and when you if you ever read chapter 1 you'll see that a lot of stuff comes together in chapter 1 well then I got sidetracked in the military and then I left the military in 2002 and I entered the industry I retired from the shipping industry in 2010 fully retired my wife looked at me instead finished the damn book now I had been out of that now for about 18 years and I can tell you it was really difficult getting back into what happened when I had had it resting out there by that time I had made three trips to the UK done a lot of interviews with a lot of people had a stack of about a hundred official documents at every book that had been written on the war and and I became immersed in it and then I wrote this book yet it is entitled logistics in the Falklands War it has been reviewed as an excellent history of the war what I do is come in and then talk about the logistics behind the scenes that made it happen so if you get a chance to look at it it's not just about logistics what I'm telling you it's the only book that is book laying study in the war that's been written by an American and it's amazingly the only book that captures the logistics behind that victory that always amazed me I was always fearful that somebody would tell would tell that story before I did but they remarkably they didn't do it and so here you have it I wanted to get it published in the UK I did and and with the publisher that I wanted and so that's that's what we have now tonight I'm going to give you I don't see it there's a clock okay I got about an hour so I'm going to go kind of quickly I'm going to give you an overview of the war but I'm not going to concentrate I'm going to tell you about the combat but I'm not going to get down on the weeds of the combat I'm going to tell you a lot of stuff about the war that you don't know about and I'll start off by saying that this this war is unique in military history no nation has ever done what the British did period we haven't even come close to it and I don't mean that drugget orally but they found themselves in a position where they had nothing they had to get stuff they had to make it happen and they did it and and I'm going to talk to you about how that happened so I'm going to talk off of one map here for a while and if if I can if you can't see it then I apologize for that but I'm going to start over here Falkland Islands also known as the Malvinas if you are Argentine ok they still call it the Melvina I've been to Buenos Aires three times I don't talk about the Falklands there's a bath there there's a couple hundred islands in the Falklands it's an archipelago but this is where the war is going to take place these are the two main islands East Falkland and West Balkan a couple things are going to happen on West Falkland but what is going to happen here is the Argentinians are going to invade in the capital there's there's about a thousand brits there actually they're not full-fledged bit Brits a lot of people don't know they could not vote but they wanted to be aligned with Britain about a thousand people there about 800 on all those other islands and stuff and so the the Argentinians are on April 2nd are going to invade here they're going to come in this way they're going to come in this way and they're going to capture Stanley and thousands of Argentines are going to pour in there and in the matter of days there's going to be eight or ten thousand and and they're going to essentially establish a fortress in Stanley and in the surrounding mountains because they think that the Brits are going to do an amphibious landing in this area if they come down and they didn't and it didn't imagine the Brits would respond but they thought they would strike at Stanley so the Brits do strike but what they do is your amphibious group comes over here and sets up in here in San Carlos waters and I'm going to take you through what happens in the cliff notes here so they struggle again ashore there's going to be a battle down here Darwin and goose green I'm going to talk to you about that at that point in time that people are going to start walking across the Commandos walk across this island 4050 miles no cover and eventually they're going to attack this way and take Stanley meanwhile another Brigade is going to come up here to Fitzroy and attack this way in some minor roles but a major disaster is going to occur right here at Fitzroy and I'm going to talk to you about that as well a little bit about 12 very tough place that that tree I've seen it I've been there twice this is a place where they always tell you if you get out of your car hold on to the door because 4050 sometimes stronger winds just about every day and it is not a hospital place to live now if if you're a logistician here and you have to think about supporting troops there's no roads there's very few buildings there's a half a million sheep on these islands and they've made the standing water and non drinkable there's no cover very few trees very nothing to hide beyond under or behind if you're an F dreamin and it's a god awful weather and it's going to be April turn into may turn into June and it's going to snow and it's going to get cold and if you're an instrument out there you're going to be in the open the whole time this is why people generally go to the Falklands that is cells very plain in South Georgia I've been there I've seen it that's what you see if you have good weather when you go to South Georgia South Georgia is going to be the catalyst for the war I'll talk to you about that this is a very dramatic place it's very difficult catabolic winds a sore through here at 100 150 miles an hour this is where Shackleton went over the mountain he's buried in great beacon tough place the world's highest population of black-browed albatross is in West Auckland and so nobody looked at that 1982 cruise ships didn't go there in 1982 but that was there and that's why people go there today there was no industry to speak of in the Falklands now you got a big tourist industry and so and so forth I talked to you about how we got involved here these were the military leaders in in Argentina at the time the latest succession of military dictators general Leopoldo Galtieri and the man at the top right Anaya Admiral and IO is probably to the right of Attila the Hun when it comes to the Balkans he has spearheaded a big buildup of military equipment in the late 1970s and it's a credible military they have a couple hundred planes if they got five super tenth our jets from from France they've got some Exocet missiles that are going to cause the Brits a lot of concern they have thousands of ground forces 200 planes capable of doing a lot of damage aircraft carriers like to be concerned about their 350 miles away from their homeland and so they can influence things relatively quickly the majority of their land force however is conscripts and so there's going to be a big difference between the Argentine soldier and the British Marine the British soldier when they when they meet in the Falklands now the war takes place in in 1982 but in December of 1981 these guys plan the invasion start planning the invasion the Falklands they do so because the economy in Argentina is really bad inflation's of approaching a hundred percent unemployment 25 35 percent everybody's not happy because these military hunters have incarcerated killed imprisoned made disappear 10 of thousands of people rumored to be 30,000 are gone and the families are angry and so they decide to invade really to shift focus from the unrest at home now they start to planning in December in January they publish a formalized directive that makes that official some of that leaks into the prends own newspaper and in Buenos Aires in February they start training for an amphibious assault in Patagonia all of that was under the radar of the British Embassy and British intelligence they knew nothing about it and and so this is a war machine that is capable and and starts well before the British get involved now from the British side of the house it the situation at home is not dissimilar from the Argentine's big economic crisis going on Margaret Thatcher is not the Iron Lady yet she's under a lot of pressure because of dire economic conditions and and there's a lot of cutbacks in the military and this gentleman the bottom left secretary John naught is despised by the senior military leaders because he's cutting back on the Navy he's cutting back on the Air Force and everywhere else the two aircraft carriers they have I have been commissioned to be sold at this time the only vessel in the Falklands has been told that it will relocate within months and and so there's a lot of things going on planned decommissioning of vessels that refueling tanker fleet is is really in decline there is no airborne early warning system the bigger thing here is Britain at this time was focused on NATO has focused on the Warsaw Pact and they didn't have any contingency plans for the Falklands zero now you can't go to the shelf and get a 5601 or something off it did not exist making matters worse there was no forward presence there other than a platoon of Marines 24 Marines the invasion is going to occur at a time when that rotation the annual rotation occurs and so there's going to be twice that so you got about 50 Marines there and that's it there's no supplies there there's no like I said roads in the island as you look down the coast of South America you're in hostile turf and and so there's a lot in there plate the the good thing here is the Brits are still capable and they have tough men now I don't say women they have those too but they didn't deploy except in the hospital ship so I don't mean to be sexist when I say men that's that's who fought this war the catalyst for the war occurs in the island of South Georgia where those king penguins were 900 miles east of East Falkland and this is how it happens there's a steal or there's a lot of abandoned whale stations there and they had the British had let a contract to a gentleman by the immigrant Constantino Davidoff who's pictured here to dismantle those whaling stations he had gone out there in previous months without the proper permission from the embassy and he was chastised and he apologized he said he wouldn't do it again but in March of 1982 he wanted to go out and start to work and he applied to the embassy the embassy didn't listen to him with any sense of urgency he got frustrated commissioned his own vessel in collaboration we now know with the Argentine Navy and they headed to to South Georgia without the embassy evening even knowing third week timeframe of March they show up there now the military presence and those ships become known they get off the ship and they raise the Argentine flag and then they proceed to shoot some of the local wild life for dinner and this is something you don't do there and and this rockets back up in to England where Thatcher is on her way into Belgium for a meeting and after a lot of discussions she decides to send three nuclear submarines south that's going to take him a couple weeks to get there but they announced it to the news a lot of bluster in the news and arch the Argentine Hunta infers they see this as a threat as everybody would be and they decide based on this to move up their invasion plan plans a couple things written about when the invasion was originally planned some people say may some people say September I really believe May because that would have been the hardest time for the Brits to respond because the winter coming in but they asked the planners when can we attack they said next week and that's what happens now I'm gonna back up a little bit the task force is going to leave Porto Madrid Argentina on the 28th of March presumably to rendezvous with an ERG when naval force for a joint exercise but instead they link up with a submarine that continued heading east and there their intent is to attack on April Fool's Day but bad weather comes in vessels have to communicate in an unsecure line that's picked up the Brits now know for sure that an invasion is going down and it so it's not really South Georgia a little bit of eggs two months of stuff below the radar screen on the 31st of April Secretary of Defense John not schedules a meeting with Thatcher to go over this urgent situation now now not does not want to go to the Falklands he's adamantly against it he doesn't think it's leap logistically feasible interestingly enough knots been travelling around the past week in the UK the other service chiefs one of them's in New Zealand one of them's in Israel the focus just isn't there but this guy saved the day Admiral Henry leach hears about the meeting he's not a friend of John not because he's just the Royal Navy he goes to the House of Commons knocks on the door and work Thatcher's having her meeting he's invited in and eventually he has his say and he says mrs. Prime Minister we do nothing then we won't be able to hold our head internationally for the next couple decades we must do something that's kind of what Maggie wanted to hear but no service chiefs mo D Minister of Defence was telling her that mr. e v s as well tell me more and she said he says well we kind of like Patton I can launch a naval task force within 48 hours I can start launching it within 48 hours and if push comes to shove we get down there we will win woo so she listened she says well I want you to proceed with your planning but I don't want you to execute well First Sea Lord of the Navy powerful guy God you might say to the Royal Navy goes back calls his ships and give some directives he's already got a couple ships moving okay Thatcher causing the next night to her quarters at 10 Downing Street asks for more information and and so she queries him on some things he says well what happens when the what will happen when the Royal Navy gets down there he says well that Argentine Navy damn sure better head back to port well you're gonna see that's exactly what happens okay she turns him well how long will it take our ships our boys to get down there well take about three weeks they says all three days you mean now ma'am it's 8,000 miles it's going to take three weeks of straight sailing time for us to get down there so not full knowledge of the situation at the high levels but this guy had he not stepped into the breach the Argentine flag surely would have waved much much longer than it did and yeah you don't know what would have happened okay so the invasion happens on April 2nd it's very quick the same day a Argentine general by the name of Menendez is put in charge he becomes the governor and the military leader he has some experience more governing than he does in military leadership eight nine ten thousand troops are flowing in here and they start renaming streets they start giving decrees to the to the residents of Stanley and a lot of those conscript soldiers were from northern Argentina where it's really warm they would show up here and within weeks some of the residents of Stanley and their writings say that they were soon stacked up but on the roadside like logs dead from from exposure but but the invasion is over very quickly and these are some of the pictures kind of like our Navy people on the Iran ship here recently that in raged the people back in the UK the next day after the invasion they went to South Georgia took control the British force that was there just a less than a platoon of men they repatriated all them through Montevideo back into the UK they were now in full control of of the Falkland Islands and they were starting to build up a defense around the Stanley area these are going to become the British commanders now to the picture on the right the gentleman in the middle is the sink commander-in-chief this is Admiral Fieldhouse looking over his right shoulder as Major General jeremy moore there's a street named after him now down there and stanley he's the two-star that is eventually going to become the land force commander when two brigades get involved initially there's only one brigade the guy in the top left is sandy woodward he is in an exercise in the mediterranean exercise spring train and on the 2nd of april he gets a phone call he has received an alert 48 hours before from leech to Field House to himself to get ready he gets the call to execute now we're going to form a carrier battle group and we're going to move south and and that happens and they start moving south Woodward did not have the capability to win the war but he had the capability to lose the war and and and he deserves some kudos for what he did the guy in the bottom left commodore michael clap was in charge of amphibious operations for the royal navy he had had that job for just a matter of a couple months he had just arrived back in his office early morning four four five o'clock in the morning on the 2nd of april he went to bed he was woken up by a phone call he says get up because we're going to the Falklands this guy had never conducted an amphibious operation in his life he's now going to command a live amphibious operation and he's going to command the amphibious be great guy a lot to learn but he's going to learn it the guy the right right you're right yeah brigadier Julian Thompson commander of 3rd commando brigade Royal Marines he's in bed in his and his quarters outside of Plymouth this phone rings about four o'clock in the morning it's Jeremy Moore he says get up you got 72 hours to bring your brigade to the ready they're going south now nobody at this time thought they were going to war they thought Al Haig and other people were going to work things out it didn't happen that way Thompson's got a particular problem here he's got three Marine Commandos now these are tough suckers ok they're tough infantry battalions all commando trained he's got it what we would say is a separate brigade he's got batteries of artillery he's got the fifty-ninth the independent Commando squadron Royal Engineers he's got got Special Forces attached to him he's got a lot of lot of stuff but a lot of it isn't around his staff is in Denmark on a staff exercise one of his three commandos is totally on block leave the other one is getting ready to go on block leave I'm going to show you is logistics it is getting ready to go on block leave it is Easter weekend you can't reposition any of the British Rail to help out any deployment because they don't have time and 72 hours to do that um he's got a he's got a lot of lot of work to do he's going to be plussed up with a parachute battalion 3rd battalion of the parachute regiment called three para and eventually he's going to get another one but on the initial voyage down he's got three para so he's got four combat battalions he turns around in headquarters there at hamos house and he says well let's put up some maps of the Balkans I guess what they don't have any okay well they got some maps but they don't have any gridded maps now if you're an artillery man or you're a soldier that's going to benefit from artillery man you need to have a gridded map and so the Royal Engineers have to literally make the maps they parachute the maps into them at sea so a lot a lot starts now let me talk about the logistics organization here there's there's never been a unit like this you know 1982 this unit was formed in the 70s it was formed ten years before we had our first forward support battalion those of you that remember that this is a multifunctional logistics unit it is it was at that time commanded still is two years rotational by the British Army two years rotational by a Royal Marine Commander this is a joint organization joint multifunctional navy marine and an army the commander here is pretty tough he's part of a successful team that summited Mount Everest he's an alpine climber all of these people are commando trained and they're able to fight well as in Freeman so he's got about a thousand people with his reservists he's going to deploy with about a third of those now get back to Olli channes manned a 248 hours it's it's good to have some ships that will transport you when you make such a declaration they don't have one transport ship we're now getting into a discussion of why nobody's done this so listen closely so you don't have a transport ship this is Canberra it's going to be known as the great white whale if it would have sunk in Falkland sound then it's a structure up above would be above the water it's that big and it's in the Mediterranean it's on a cruise you've got 2,000 people on board they go to port and and the ship Queen Elizabeth signs the decreed it to requisition ships on the fourth of April they get the notice on six of April or they get the notice that same day they arrived back in Southampton on 6 April and on the 9th of April three days later this ship sails with 3,000 men now this was the scene when it showed up on the 6th at Southampton all those lorries are full of supplies waiting on a ship they don't even know what who's going on the ship yet there's the supplies you got to fix this cruise ship and so in the space of those three days Canberra is converted into a transport complete this is these are steel decking over the pool that's where a seat that's where all the aircraft's are going to learn land and training is going to take place three days later this sails 3,000 people all of the rations never been done before in history okay well that's not the end of it as they say said in that previous slide 54 of these ships are going to be requisitioned and converted and the vast majority are converted 90% of the work within 72 hours this is jugando cruise ship it's in the Mediterranean it had a thousand schoolchildren on board they too went to an airport I'm sure this ship went to Gibraltar and within 68 hours it was inverted to a hospital ship 150 beds fully staffed nurses surgeons all the supplies and the medical markings big deal these are some of the commandos and paratroopers getting ready look kind of like they're going to the Bahamas nobody thinks they're going to war this is one of the two aircraft carriers Hermes and invincible this is invincible leaving the UK you can see there's a lot of proud Brits there but a lot of people don't know is that once the invincible got outside of British land it broke tin its main steering box went out now that's a major repair that you would normally do in a Dockyard they didn't want to live back in they brought they had divers divers went down and fix the ship that was the first capital casualty of the Falkland Islands Wars right off the shore well now you're a logistician your job is to load these ships right you're going to get everything off as they're needed and you know everything is going to be good but this is what you face there is stuff every which way on every ship there's one guy that has a computer that has the inventory they knew what they had in all these ships they just didn't know exactly where they were and so when when they left the logisticians proceeded to figure it out and it was a mess okay so they're going to go to a place called ascension island which is 4,000 miles away I'm going to talk to you a little bit about that these are some of the ships heading south these are some of the logistics ships this is a logistic ships they had six of them they're named after the knights of the round table this is Percival on the bottom and and oops it is about 400 feet long I want you to see what's attached to its side that's called a Mexico that is a diesel-powered raft and that is going to become very important in terms of moving stuff as or on the top picture a more modern picture you have three logistic landing ships next to a landing platform dock landing platform dock about twice as big it has a well inside and out of that floats landing craft and so the very important the the LP DS were command ships as well as carriers of the LCU's logistics ships were absolutely indispensable they had the capability of about discharge if they want a beach or a stern discharge and they also have their own internal cranes well as they headed south the troops start training and they have extensive medical training I don't remember exactly how many hours but it probably averaged out to two days total and when when the infantrymen with land they would each carry an ampule of morphine around their neck they knew how to take care of each other they knew buddy Aid and there are so there's examples of some of these men laying out in a battlefield one that I know of without a foot for 18 hours and and not being evacuated because of the lack of helicopters in the terrain but they receive great medical training not just the instrument all the sailors all the airmen everybody did now in the bigger picture the Falkland Islands these guys are heading south on the 12th of April Britain declares a total exclusion zone there's actually a maritime exclusion zone that is refined to be a total exclusion zone meaning that if you came within that you're subject to hostility some of the troops that are training weapons on board I want to talk about a very important Island Ascension Island near Saint Elena where Napoleon was incarcerated this is a hot area so these Marines are going to go into an area it's very hot they're going to fight where it's very cold the war could not have gone down without Ascension Island and I'll explain to you why that is but it's really a piece of volcanic rock it's got an important airfield that I'll talk about briefly for the for the log II what you're going to do is now you're going to try to sort out this mess a little bit more so now that you know where things are at you're going to shuffle things between ships but what's happened two days after the invasion is Admiral leach has directed that a support unit be established here and so British support unit Ascension Island starts being established on the 4th of April and thousands and thousands of tons of supply the flow into Ascension Island it is it is a logistician nightmare and so they have to sort out what's on the ships they have to get stuff from the ships from the from the shore to the ships in some cases these pallets are showing up Royal Marines Falkland Islands it have no idea where they're going and it's a real problem but but they start the Marines start training in this hot environment there's only one Beach on the island where they can they can have a you know landing training for amphibious operations this is wide-awake airfield it was extremely important Air Force lieutenant colonel was running it to facilitate deep space trap tracking and NASA they we were leasing it from the Brits at this time this is something you probably don't know about there were seven bombing raids in the Falklands War that went from Ascension Island down into the Falkland Islands they were called black buck black buck one two three four five six seven to get a bomber down to the Falklands you got a lot of refueling to takes place this chart on the right that appears in another book about the Falklands and that is the refueling diagram to get a single bomber to the Falkland Islands now I want you to focus on the picture in the bottom you got a prop aircraft c-130 and you got a jet refueling now behind the scenes story our pilots were generally pretty accustomed to air-to-air refueling in 1982 not a single Royal Air Force pilot and conducted air-to-air refueling from a c-130 as a matter of fact the c-130s did not have probes for air-to-air refueling and so a search went on to put probes on these c-130s one british team went to san diego to the museum and took a prop off of a museum piece permission from the government granted casper weinberger and they did that and they install these probes they train the pilots all this is happening within two and a half weeks because it's important you need air drops and things to sustain the task force at sea that's south of the Falklands to insert Special Forces and in one case to parachute in a battalion commander who's going to replace one that was killed at Goose Green and so they make the planes capable they train the pilots but now the challenge is still not done because if you're going to refuel a prop aircraft from a jet refueler one goes faster than the other one and that prop that prop airplane is refueled when it's in a dive dozens and dozens of times this happens many times the RPMs are at redline and there are examples when that c-130 was pulling out at redline at 2,000 feet I just think about that real behind-the-scenes heroes here about sustaining the task force well another very important thing about Ascension Island is it allowed for a meeting of the minds in terms of what would happen the ships showed up there in the 17th April on the 16th 17th April 17th April fieldhouse flies down a lot of contingent hundred people meet on the aircraft carrier Hermes and try to figure out what they're going to do well they make some decisions they say well it's pretty hospitable terrain we need to have more airlift cargo transport and so we're going to send some more helicopters down Wessex helicopters ch-47 heavy-lift helicopters and they're going to requisition a ship called the Atlantic conveyor to do that ships not going to come back I'll tell you about that second thing that they're they're going to decide is they're not going to decide about what the landing site yet so if you're a logistician you still don't know the plan you're trying to resort where the stuff goes on the ships they're going to decide that Thompson needs that second parachute battalion and two para is going to start moving quickly down to Ascension Island to marry up and it's going to arrive about the seventh of May he's going to sail the next day is not going to have much time to train and they decide that they need a second Brigade and I'm going to tell you about that Brigade later it was five infantry brigade and that's where Major General Moore comes into the picture because he's going to sail south with him he's going to link up with them as they pass Ascension Island and it's going to become a divisional force with two brigades but no plan a small group leaves Ascension and heads toward South Georgia it's called the para ket group and on that date they retake South Georgia it was a cakewalk the Argentine submarine surfaced in the area where the British parrot task force was and it was quickly disabled with helicopter fire it limped back into into South Georgia where the captain quickly surrendered his crew and the people on land about a hundred and thirty people this was a huge strategic win for the Brits a devastating humiliation for the Argentine's the South Georgia is now British again now the Belgrano occurs now you got a total exclusion zone I want you to imagine that I'm the Falkland Islands here total exclusion zone here's our gen Tina over here up here in this quadrant is a carrier of battle group of its own with a carrier VNT of Cinco DeMayo with escorts down here is the cruiser Belgrano and in Admiral Woodward is keeping his ships at bay because he's fearful of those Exocet missiles he's fearful of the airstrikes from those aircraft carriers he's fearing a pincer movement he calls back to field house he says I want to sink the Belgrano ooh big deal here the rumor has it that you're personally approved I don't know if that's true a nuclear submarine conquer fires a couple conventional torpedoes into the Belgrano and it sinks within 30 minutes quite an outrage here there weren't 1,200 Argentines that were killed there was 350 that's a picture of conqueror going back flying the Jolly Roger that that didn't sit well either but if I was the captain that concur I probably do it as well this was a very inflammatory event and not all of the world was happy with this one this was a watershed strategically the British did not expect this to happen after they sank the Belgrano but what leach had told thatcher happened the entire Argentine Navy would all why was it important strategically well if you're an Air Force pilot you have to now do the bombing you're going to fly from the mainland you're not going to fly from aircraft carriers Navy business Navy's not involved now Air Force pilots are involved and Air Force pilots contrary to what we army people think at times don't plan in hitting targets at sea they hit targets at land now there is a big difference okay so they go through a crash program of training these Argentine pilots they're going to do a heroic job of fighting the Brits but one out of five of them are going to get shot down when they come into the war zone well things aren't peachy keen because within two days one of the two French attend our Jets pick up on which is going to end up to be that the destroyer Sheffield they each fire Exocet missiles fire and forget goes down to the water shoots in ninety miles an hour or something like that you can actually see it come in because it's not that fast really one of them strikes the Sheffield that deal 16 sailors are killed this ship is brand-new it was commissioned five years prior it with a lot of you know glory and now they try to port pull it back to ascension and it sinks like a rock this war is now real the first naval battles have taken place it seizes World War two so if you're a lucky and you're on one of those logistic landing ships on the 30th of May you're sailing south because your ship is 17 knots and the carrier battle group is 21 knots and so you've got an escort but you're heading out first you're the teeth in this operation these are the seas this is a RFA auxilary ship refueling another ship this is a lynx helicopter in the back of a landing ship logistic now that's why misnomer I have been in the South Atlantic I have sailed this to Antarctica and I can tell you I didn't really care for it all the time these these Navy these sailors were out here in stuff like that for two months this is tough tough stuff and a lot of people don't realize and you'll see that the majority of casualties in the Falklands War weren't on land they were at sea talk about just generally what an amphibious operation is in case you don't know without going into too much detail these yellow areas are going to tell you where the commando elements and the paratroopers are going to land when they get to the Falkland Islands an amphibious operation is arguably the toughest military operation in the military exit lexicon why is that well because a lot of things have to go right and you have to have air superiority Porter builder Admiral Woodward had been told back at Ascension Island that he needed to establish air superiority but he's going to try hard but he can't do it so if you if you don't have air superior that's bad enough but what happens here is you have a synchronized operation where ships come together the troops get out of these ships generally military ships floating out from water wells and then you go to land and you do you get your objectives and it as this is going down the Navy guy is in charge Murray may not like it but Michael clap is in charge the Commodore is in charge of this operation he remains in charge until those Marines take control of that lodgement area make it secure and once they get all of their supplies on land so that they can break out command and control transfers to the ground force commander that is very complex okay and so broad-brush of what an amphibious operation is that's what they're going to execute the logistics plan so you understand it is to maintain the bulk of support afloat in the ships very small postage stamp ashore we're going to send it you know it's kind of a demand what you want we'll send it out of the ships it's going to all fall apart but that's what the plan is the amphibious group run the booze with the carrier battle group around the 20th of May remember that big white ship Canberra 3,000 people are on it and Mo Dee just decides that there's probably a great vulnerability there you know something hits that the war is probably going to be over real quickly and so they Michael clap receives the directive to cross load some of those soldiers into other ships and they do that in the South Atlantic they can't do it at first because the rough seas they can't get the landing craft out of the LP DS eventually the the water becomes flat and they're able to cross level the the men a tragedy happens Lynx helicopter over excuse me a cking helicopter loaded with Special Forces over loaded with Special Forces Crassus crashes in the South Atlantic and I think it was 20 special forces are killed horrible start to the war horrible loss of a helicopter in addition to the men the loss they didn't need these are men getting ready for the amphibious landing landing goes to Paris has trouble getting off of its commercial ship because it hasn't had time to Train ships go ashore daylight comes out everything's looking good Logistics ships come in this is Sir Galahad you're starting to unload now and then the planes come in and five [ __ ] more ships or hit that day only ardent sinks but a lot of ships are damaged a lot of bombs don't go off some bombs hit ships go through ships come out the other side they don't go off the BBC reports this in the days not good because the Argentine's are going to try to make those bombs work or a little bit better but it's not going to be immediately this is one of the ships going down that changes the plan now we've got to get a lot of supplies ashore very quickly you can't keep things afloat they're going to push things ashore as fast as they can and whatever is on top is going to go ashore and they're going to work around the clock and they've got a data spare because the clouds protect them for the next day but on the 23rd 24 May the planes come back up as I mentioned the Brits shoot down one other five planes but these brave pilots get in there and they they hit they hit more ships including three of the six logistics ships now bedivere just takes minor damage but I tell you a 500-pound bomb hits your ship it creates damage Lancelot's hit and it's out of act for weeks Galahad has hit 500 pound bomb lodges in Galahad VoD comes in diffuses it British ingenuity they bring in a rubber raft take cornflake packets out of the galley put them in the rubber raft crane the bomb over the side into the raft take it under Falkland Sun and dump it over okay Galahad is out so you've got two of the six logistic ships are out of action remember that ship Atlantic conveyor with all the planes or all the Harrier Jump Jets and the helicopters on the 25th of May it takes an Exocet missile it sinks as well fortunately the Harriers had already flown off to the aircraft carrier one of the of the five Chinook helicopters is doing a test flight all the other Chinooks all the other Wessex helicopters go down all the repair parts for that lone Chinook helicopter go down tending for 10,000 men goes down matting for the airfield goes down mergency fuel handling equipment goes down this is a major catastrophe it's not over same day destroyer Coventry goes down now at this point in time six British ships and some Thompson and clapper struggling to get the supplies ashore London not very knowledgable of amphibious operations has nonetheless had enough and they order Thompson get out of the damn beachhead and do something and when I talk to Thompson in the early 90s I said well what are they going to do says well they want to even relieve me I says well would they replace you there's only Lieutenant Colonel Bob I mean but he says I understood what I needed to do he had a plan to break out at that time and three of his units literally start walking across East Falkland 4550 miles on foot everything they owned mortars ammunition everything going with them but he dusts off what was going to be a raid on Goose grain and and he gives that mission to tu perra the commander here is going to be killed in the fight this is H Jones he's going to get the a the highest medal our Congressional Medal of Honor equivalent for that action this becomes a controversial award and a tough battle and the day that they are in their assembly area the brigade support area that I pointed out to you is bombed by the Argentine's so the artillery that is sling loaded to go to tu perra is now in flames a lot of the BSA is in flames two bombs are lodged into the hospital that are right there they're taking care of the the men a real mess has happened I want you to back up your in to para when you land it on East Falkland your landing craft was short of the beach you got off your feet got with you then walked up to the top of Sussex mountain and you establish a defense looking down that isthmus on the reverse slope you've been out there now for over a week your feet are still wet it's been raining it's starting to snow and you've just walked 8 to 10 kilometers to your start line carrying everything okay no roads there's no trucks out there it becomes a very tough plane because when they're leaving the BBC now reports that two pairs get ready to attack and Menendez reinforces goose green with about a thousand people they expect a couple hundred they get over a thousand and a tough fight occurs each Joneses is killed the fighting is so intense they're so low on ammunition the british paratroopers are crawling to their buddies and pulling ammunition out and it's really not good but a thousand argentine surrender let me tell you how it happened tank commander gets killed the two I see are equivalent the XO takes over he reassesses here he establishes a plan he reestablishes the initiative it gets down surrounds goose green now they've been fighting all day they've been fighting down about six to eight miles and they take an Argentine prisoner and they he scribbles a note on sends it into the Argentine's who are holding people incarcerated in a community hall he says you either surrender we're going to try as war criminals it was guys surrender three hundred three hundred paratroopers okay got to speed it up here I want to talk to you a little bit about fire brigade now the to parachute battalions came from fiber gate so this brigade commander is not very happy his brigade was formed in January of 1982 two of his units are gone he's got the Gurkhas they're very much feared and and and so he gets some some add-ons he gets the Welsh Guards and he gets the Scots Guards now they're very professor on their own right but their palace guards Buckingham Palace Windsor palace trained secondarily to be good infantryman and they were but they had no logistics units they were all plugs they had no command and control the intent was is for these company size Logistics elements to report to that logistics regiment but they start sailing south the picture on the right shows the ch-47 landing Major General more off Ascension that's the first time at ch 47th landed at qe2 I suspect they start unloading it South Georgia the Brits get concerned that an Exocet missile might find its way into qe2 so they tell it within 24 hours you got to leave and so it starts sailing back to the UK with 70% of the stocks they sail down big deal for your logistician okay we'll speed it up here or yet you know whoops this is where we landed this is where the people are marching this is where the Battle of Darwin goose green went around I want you to see the distances here to get an LS L that way look at it down here three times the distance something real tragic happens now the new brigade comes on he will Wilson flies it out to goose green meets with his new commander says hey I think we need to get up to Fitzroy because Morris told me to look at a southern route this place called Swan inland I want you to send some people up there see what's there they go up there there's nobody there they get on the phone they talked to the settlement managers daughter in Fitzroy which is right here you're now just about within heavy artillery is Stanley ain't nobody's here well good let's go and so they abscond with the single ch-47 helicopter and they take everybody up there by nights and to Paris sitting in Fitzroy now this is a big deal you don't even have communication there you don't have any supplies you got three times the distance going around lively island they struggle to figure out how they're going to get people there they eventually send some LS LS around and about six hours short of a Fitzroy they let off the scots guards in an open LC you to cross that open undefended waters to land it bluff Cove that's it right there that's the Scots Guards half of that battalion on the 9th of 8th of June they catch two LS LS in the open in the water off of Fitzroy this time the damage happens both ships are out of action fifty Brits were killed immediately one hundred are very sorely injured this is the worst event in the entire war casualties are immense and they're taken to this field hospital by all available means and the helicopters the red and green life machine anybody that entered that hospital alive stayed alive amazing achievement those surgeons operated while there are two 500-pound bombs lodged in the building okay fast forward into the attack now toward Stanley and we'll wrap up the the mount the mountains surrounding Stanley you had that you had to take those if you're ever going to get past them and and achieve the regain the capital there these are a picture some of the mountains some of the challenges that the logisticians faced getting supplies forward there's a poor guy you're filling jerry cans right there his name was potter and if the daily requirement for the first 10 days was 700 gas cans a day some of the rough terrain see that that picture up the upper right sera is a stone run if you're empty when you're walking over that with your full rock okay so as I look here these mountains you can see this pic this pictures in my book these are the mountains that are going to be taken by three para you got these down here that are gonna be taken by five brigade and and that battle is going to start on the 11th of June this is a rock drill you familiar with rock drills everything has led up to this point now all those people work in an ascension all the people back working in the UK all the work at San Carlos all the suffering to get to this point so the final battle could begin it begins on the 11th of of June it's over in three days it's a multi-phased operation that crossed down there is a regimental aid post that was at the base of mount long dune the bloodiest fight two dozen paratroopers from 3 para lost their lives they're tough fighting the war ends on June 14th a quick snapshot of how the war ends this is really incredible it's a fighting still waging British special forces established contact with the staff of general Menendez they pirate more in on the evening of June 14th him in one helicopter land in a soccer field outside a government house and Stanley 10,000 Argentines they walk to government house they meet general Menendez signs of surrender they spend the night in Stanley ok incredible story it's really a mess they're very very happy the Argentine's had not had slit trenches they had defecated over the entire town in the town Paul on the docks on the streets there are dead bodies some places in the streets this is part of the mess 10,000 more prisoners now if you're logging 10,000 more mouths to feed this remains an extremely serious problem the mines they could not determine where they were a couple months after the war they eventually found some of the maps you go to the Falklands today those minefields are still being cleared but the war is over ten days later the first c-130 lands on that runway after it's been fixed by the Royal Engineers and and the fighting troops start going home 3 commando brigade 1st the next month LIBOR dude so that's it before I take your questions I want to suggest that we hear a lot today about expeditionary warfare the Army's named a lot of units after the expeditionary experiences and anticipation they need to be prepared for this is an expeditionary war I would argue that we are ill-prepared as an army to take on this mission given our without a lot of training we had great people but I mean for the last 15 years we've been focused on a fixed theater where you have runways you've got porch you've got roads you've got infrastructure and guess what contractors are maintaining your equipment that's not the case here so a lot of lessons out of here big picture a lot of luck luck happens in war and they had some of those bombs gone off had that Heather had they not really attacked and in April had they waited till May and they waited till June a lot of things could have changed that's my presentation we'll take questions for a few minutes here at this time any questions I wasn't too bad yep yes sir if you humor Navy log II guy that is your book Linda how they fuel supported the ships on the way down just bound going to talk about it but not in great detail I mean you saw a picture of one yeah they front loaded about two million gallons of fuel from ascension onto RFA auxilary ships and they took it down and they refuel them at sea and there were at the border of the exclusion zone 200 miles out from the island there was a tug repair and logistics area and there was a logistics loitering area and it was there that a lot of that refueling took place or the ships would meet the individual ships and take care of it yeah did we learn anything no you talking to us we had Hockett oh there's was totally ad-hoc but the British had procedures in place very different procedures than we had in place and so they did not add Hockett they just had a mess in their hands and they were able to succeed because they had systems in place for doing all this now we have a agreements with our commercial carriers but we've never executed any of it when I when I left Alaska and went to the Pentagon I was given the pleasure of being in charge of the strategic mobility division for the army and I don't know if you ever heard of the large medium speed roll-on/roll-off ships but those were a direct result of Desert shield/desert storm we learned nothing from this but we learned a lot from Desert Shield Desert Storm when our ships broke down and whereas we have provisions in place to get through Transcom to get you know our ships if we need them it's really never been exercised and I can tell you that as part of Transco thanks that's a good question yep anything else the question is a little bit about the use of the Harrier jet so I didn't talk about there's about four dozen of them some were sea fighters some were ground fighters and extraordinarily great role those those pilots in both roles fighting fighting down the Argentine planes we Americans gave them the newest version of the Sidewinder missile we diverted a foreign military sale from Israel to their consternation gave it to the Brits and and it was very effective in the air combat I don't exactly remember what the number of planes that they were lost but it wasn't all that many and they were extremely effective in terms of supporting the ground force yeah yes sir the by the way this case study is key at the Naval War College they studied all the time but one of our recent did you research this find a point where a submarine from Argentine Argentinian submarine took a shot at one of the British aircraft carriers in the torpedo misfired yeah I'm not familiar with that I'm sure it might have happened well there the point that they teach up there is that yes they did take a shot however the torpedo reversed course because the guys had done some PMS on it and reversed some wires and the real what-if is had that torpedo taken out the carrier what would have been the follow-on impact would have had a tremendous impact you know it's hard to judge there's a lot of things if you're talking center gravity you can you can talk a lot of things you could talk those two aircraft carriers that's certainly what Admiral Woodward thought and he tried to protect them and the bigger scheme of things you would have taken out those LS LS you would have taken out Canberra you could have really brought the Brits to their knees at least for eight months or ten months by taking out some of these ships but by taking on an aircraft carrier Tate you're taking out of the punch up one half of what that Harrier fleet it would have been catastrophic to be quite frank and and Woodward realized it and and and some thought he was timid if you're a ground pounder you might have thought he was timid but he really saved war as I said he couldn't want it but he could prevent the beat yeah there is an interesting sidelight here the Exocet missile they had five of them the Brits were tracking them John not send sent some Special Forces or other types of agents into the black market found XO sets in the black market and made him n operable so the Argentine's couldn't get them yeah true story it's in my book but yeah and heard that about Submarino yep they want to have a recorded thank you sir it's clear a Navy took some pretty hard hits there was that because of the lack of clothes in any aircraft systems on the ships or just a lack air superiority yeah they had there's there's a couple opinions on that a couple of my British friends would say that the the sea dart system was not very effective on the ships they they thought that they should have had the sea wool system but I've I've talked that directly with with Michael clap and he says no is extremely effective and the history bears out the number of things that were shot down by those missiles so yeah they had they had an effective air defense system what was less effective was what was on ground it was a brand-new newly procured system called the rapier missile and I mean it was a albatross from the ground Force Commander they had never worked with it it was a huge everything that had to move would that generate and everything had to be moved around and so it ate up very critical assets it had a less stellar record in terms of shooting down the you know opposing aircraft yeah I didn't go into it in my book you'll see a chart of where the the ships are positioned and Falkland sound that is one of a kind map clap let me let you me use that thing the the defense that the defense of that anchorage was immense and those pilots flew from the mainland over West Falkland they hit the barrage of that fire and I mean it was heroic they had just seconds to make a decision of what to do with their bombs and the fusing was wrong a lot of them went down went out of five it was yeah pretty incredible yeah I would I would say that you've got they got good stars for air defense on the chair the other questions I've thoroughly enjoyed talking to you thanks for coming
In 1982, a lone admiral urged Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to deploy a military task force to counter Argentina's invasion of the Falkland Islands. The archipelago, 8,000 miles from the United Kingdom, was the source of dispute over sovereignty between the two nations for more than a century.
With no forward presence other than a tiny garrison on the islands, no allies in the area or intermediate support bases en route, and not even ships to mount the British military, Thatcher nevertheless decided to order deployment to retake the Falklands. The Prime Minister’s bold move sparked an expeditionary war, surprising many of the world’s other great powers.
The British deployed forces nearly half the world away to achieve a complete victory only 74 days after the Argentine invasion. In this lecture, MG (Ret) Kenneth L. Privratsky, author of the book, Logistics in the Falklands War, provides an overview of the war to include key actions leading to the victory, the aftermath, and most importantly, its relevance to the U.S. Army as it continues to focus on expeditionary warfare.
Length: 69 Minutes
Lecture Date: March 16, 2016