Building T Battery (III)

A fresh source

I recently ran across a memoir written by a soldier who served, during the Falklands War, with the crew of a Rapier anti-aircraft missile launcher. That’s the good news. The bad news is that this account, written in the impressionistic style of the straight-to-paperback war books of the 1970s, provided little in the way of the sort of nuts-and-bolts information that I seek. Nonetheless, the tales told by Tony McNally in Watching Men Burn provide a number of clues that confirm, complement, and contextualize facts I have found elsewhere.

The big surprise, at least for me, was the number of Land Rovers that T Battery took to the South Atlantic, and subsequently brought ashore. At first, I had thought that all of the many Land Rovers used by T Battery when serving with NATO had been left at home. Then, when I read an account in which a troop commander mentioned the helicopter delivery of a Land Rover during the landing at San Carlos, I assumed that the each of the three troops had brought one such vehicle with them. However, McNally makes it clear that each of the twelve fire units had brought one Land Rover to the Falklands and that, in addition, each troop had been provided with at least one additional truck of that type.

This revelation fit in nicely with McNally’s description of the sequence of loads carried by the Sea King helicopters that moved T Battery ashore on the first day of the landing at San Carlos, 21 May 1982. The first sortie carried the seven men of each fire unit: the sergeant, the bombardier, the lance-bombardier, and the four gunners. The second delivered the missile post, the third the Land Rover, the fourth the missiles, and the fifth miscellaneous supplies. (These would have included the gasoline needed by the generator that, except during hours of darkness, ran constantly in order to keep the missile post in operation.)

The only point made by McNally that contradicted information derived from other sources was the rather minor point of the naming convention for fire units. My analysis of the interviews conducted with veterans of T Battery in 1986 convinced me that there was no necessary connection between the number in the call sign for each firing unit and the troop to which it belonged. Thus, the call signs of the four firing units of I Troop were 33A, 31B, 32C, and 33D. McNally, however, explained that the designation of his own fire unit, 33A, indicated that it was the first (“A”) firing unit in the third troop of the third battery of the 12th Air Defense Regiment.

In doing this, McNally implied that this formula was used to create the call numbers of all twelve firing units in T Battery. However, if this had been the case, then the only other firing unit he mentions by designation, 31B of I Troop, should have been called “33B.” (By the way, he confirms the claim, made in the aforementioned interviews, that the missile post of Firing Unit 31B was landed on top of ground that was so soft that it could not be put into operation on D-Day.)