‘By God, you are welcome,’ priest tells triumphant paras

Press, 16 June 1982, Page 1

‘By God, you are welcome,’ priest tells triumphant paras

One of the first correspondents to arrive in Port Stanley yesterday was Max Hastings, of the London "Standard," who, in this pooled dispatch, writes: British forces are in Port Stanley. At 5.45 p.m. British time (6.45 a.m. New Zealand time), as men of the Parachute Regiment halted, pending negotiations on the outskirts at the end of their magnificent drive on the capital, I walked through the Argentinian lines with my hands in the air and met the first of the town’s civilian population.

“By God. you are welcome,” said the Rev. Daniel Spraggan, Stanley's Catholic priest, with delighted fervour as I told him of the British forces, a few hundred yards behind me. "It’s bloody marvellous as far as I’m concerned,” said lan Stewart, local manager of Cable and Wireless. As we talked, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dejected Argentinian troops marched in columns past us down the main street to prepare to surrender. I walked to the Argentinian civil administration building, and met their senior colonel on the steps.

“Are you ready to surrender West, as well as East Falklands?” I asked. “I think so,” he said, "but it is best to wait until your general meets General Menendez.” This story really begins last night (Monday) when men of the Guards, the Gurkhas, and the Parachute Regiment launched a big attack supported by an overwhelming British bombardment on the last line of enemy positions on the high ground above Stanley. At dawn the paras were preparing to renew their attack in a few hours after seizing all their objectives on

Wireless Ridge under fierce shell and mortar fire. Suddenly, word came that Argentinian troops could be seen fleeing for their lives in all directions round Port Stanley. They had evidently had enough. The decision was taken to press on Immediately to complete their collapse. Led by a company of the ‘ Parachute Regiment commanded by Major Dare Far- , rar-Hockley, son of the regi- ( ment’s colonel, British forces | began a headlong dash down j the rocky hills for honour of j being first into Stanley. , Our route was littered i

with the debris of the enemy’s utter defeat — clothing, ammunition, vehicles, weapons, food, and shell and bomb craters. We were already past the first houses of the town, indeed up to the war memorial beside the sea, when the order came through to halt, pending negotiations, and to fire only in selfdefence. The paras stopped on the race Course, where they raised their flag and we listened to the last shell and machine-gun fire from the hills above where the Guards and Gurkhas were mopping up.

The men, desperately tired after Uiree nights without sleep, exulted like schoolboys in this great moment of victory. Blackened, shaggy, unshaven, bent under' mudcoated equipment and ammunition belts, they knew that this was their achievement. As the road ahead stretched empty, I stripped off my military equipment and combat clothes, and walked into Stanley in a blue civilian anorak with my hands high in the air. At Port Stanley’s famous hotel, the Upland Goose, I met one of the few audiences

in my life willing to clap and cheer my coming, under false pretences since it was really the men of the British forces to whom they wanted to pay homage. They offered me a drink and began to talk about all that had happened in the last three months. The Falklanders said that the Argentinians did not behave intolerably badly towards them although there were moments when they were pushing civilians hither and thither at the point of sub-machine-guns. “The last few days were the' worst,” said the owner of

the Upland Goose, Desmond King, uncle of Mr Nicholas Pitaluga, a Falklander working on a Mid-Canterbury farm. The 600 civilians left in Stanley had been compelled to listen to the continuous roar of gunfire from the hills, apprehensive that the battle would soon be in their own streets. They revealed that the Argentinians had been beating the British blockade until the very end. Hercules aircraft had been flying on to the airfield as late as Sunday night, and much more serious, the huge container ship

Formosa had beaten the blockade around May 1 to unload huge quantities of food and ammunition. The civilians rejoiced freely in the British triumph. “Never for a moment did we doubt that British forces would come," said Mr King. Robin Pitaluga, Mr Nicholas Pitaluga’s father, described how he had been under house arrest in the hotel for six weeks since he made contact by radio with H.M.S. Hermes. He dismissed criticism of the Falklands Island Company representatives who had sold goods to the occupiers.

"We were all selling stuff," he said. "You had a simple choice — either you sold it or they took it. I rented my house to their Air Force people. They said: ‘Either you take rent or we take the house.’ What would you have done?" Adrian Monk described how he had been compulsorily evicted from his own house to make way for Argentine soldiers, who had then looted it. There appears to have been widespread looting in all the houses of Stanley to which the Argentinians had access.