Talk:Battle of Mount Longdon
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| Falklands War |
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| Argentinian Invasion–Pebble Island – Goose Green – Top Malo House – Mount Harriet – Two Sisters – Mount Longdon – Wireless Ridge – Mount Tumbledown |
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'Four or five bodies lay sprawled there, close together. This time they were our own men: the camouflaged Para smocks hit my eyes immediately. CSM [Company-Sergeant-Major]Wicks was standing over them like a guardian, screaming at some of his men to cover the further end of the path and a small crest... I turned and looked at our own lads, dead on the ground, mowed down when they tried to rush through this gap.'
On the face of it this vivid incident from Vincent Bramley's memoirs is confusing. Accounts of the battle and subsequent analyses do not record a group of four or five men being shot down, fatally, in one place. The two incidents that come closest were the burst of fire on the north west slopes of Fly Half which took out B Coy,4 Platoon commander and four or five of his men, one of whom was mortally wounded, and the crossfire that caught 6 Platoon on the south side of the summit where three men died in quick succession and eight were wounded. The other two 6 Platoon dead were farther forward. Bramley describes coming across the 6 Platoon dead still lying where they fell later the same day.
At the moment of the action quoted above, most of the 3 Para dead from the night action, scattered about 'Fly Half' in singly or in pairs, had yet to be collected, as shown by Bramley's own account and those of others (`Colbeck, 'With 3 Para to the Falklands'; Fuller, Weekes, 'Green Eyed Boys'). Possibly the men he saw were wounded being gathered by the CSM of B Coy, and Bramley, in his stressed, excited state and in the half light of a foggy dawn, believed them to be dead but this does not seem likely. Apart from the awful stillness of the dead, there would have been field dressings in evidence and people attending the living. He does not say he recognised any of the casualties. Most of the dead on Fly Half were known to him. Did he see dead Argentine Marines in US disruptive camouflage and believe they were British? Again, unlikely. His reference to 'the camouflaged Para smocks' is emphatic although the British uniforms had by this stage become so filthy, with the distinctive green background colour becoming greatly subdued, that they might, arguably, have been more easily confused with the Argentine camouflage (and vice versa).
It is hard to resolve these contradictions or account for what this vignette might actually be referring to. Memory of experiences under great stress are intense but sometimes strangely fractured but being his first view of what he took to be British dead the details must surely have been imprinted indelibly in Vincent Bramley's mind. While certainly vivid and written by an eyewitness, because the reference is contradicted by independent evidence it should perhaps should be removed until the question is resolved.JF42 13:17, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
