Battle of Mount Harriet
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The Battle of Mount Harriet was an engagement of the Falklands War which took place on the night of 11/12 June 1982 between British and Argentinian forces. It was one of three battles in a brigade-sized operation on the same night.
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The British force consisted of 42 Commando, Royal Marines under the command of Lt Col Nick Vaux Royal Marines (who later became a general) with artillery support from a battery of 29 Commando Regiment, Royal Artillery. The 1st Battalion, Welsh Guards and two companies from 40 Commando, Royal Marines were in reserve. HMS Yarmouth provided naval-gunfire support for the British forces. The Argentinian defenders consisted of the 4th Infantry Regiment (RI 4).
On the night of 30 May, K Company of 42 Commando moved forward of San Carlos to secure the commanding heights of Mount Kent, at 1,504 feet the tallest of the peaks surrounding Stanley, where the D Squadron SAS Troops had already established a strong presence. However when these arrived at their landing zone some 3 km (2 miles) behind the ridge of the mountain, the Marines were surprised to see the flashes and lines of tracer ammunition light up the night . After a fierce fight at close quarters the Argentine patrol (2nd Assault Section, 602nd Commando Company) melted away from the boulders and snow-soaked scrub and grass. By the end of May Major Cedric Delves' D Squadron had gained Mount Kent and Tactical HQ commenced patrolling Bluff Cove Peak which they took with a loss of two wounded.
The attack was preceded by many days of observation and nights of patrolling. Some night-fighting patrols were part of a deception plan to convince the Argentinians that the attack would come from a westerly direction. Other, more covert, patrols were to find a route through a minefield around the south of Mount Harriet. On 3 June Lieutenant Chris Mawhood's Reconnaissance Troop of 42 Commando encountered a fighting patrol on the lower slopes of Mount Challenger and were forced to withdraw, abandoning one of 3 Commando Brigade's laser target designators. Two privates of RI 4 were killed and an NCO wounded during this skirmish which went in the 4th Infantry Regiment's favour. The Royal Marines had withdrawn rather than mix it in close quarter combat with the RI 4 soldiers.
On the night of 8-9 June, action on the 4th Regiment line flared when Lieutenant Mark Townsend's 1 Troop (K Company, 42 Commando) probed Mount Harriet, killing two Argentines. At the same time Second Lieutenant Ian Moore's 2 Platoon (A Company, 3 PARA) attempted the same on Mount Longdon, but the Rasit ground surveillance radar there was able to detect Moore and artillery fire dispersed the force.
On the morning of the 11 June the orders for the attack were given to 42 Commando by Vaux; K Company were ordered to attack the eastern end of the mountain while L Company would attack the southern side an hour later, where it, if the mountain was secured, would then move north of Mount Harriet to Goat Ridge. J Company would launch a diversionary attack (codenamed Vesuvius) on the western end of Mount Harriet.
In the closing hours of the 11 June, K and L Companies moved from their assembly area on Mount Challenger (which lay to the west of Mount Harriet) and made their way south, around their objective, across the minefield, to their respective start lines. As they moved around the feature in the dark, J company launched their very loud diversionary "attack" from the west.
The battle for Mount Harriet began on the evening of 11 June with a blistering naval bombardment. John Witheroe, one of the British war correspondents, later recalled the softening up fire:
We were involved with one night attack on Mount Harriet, when the Welsh Guards were coming up as a back-up. This involved marching for several hours on a very dark night, through a minefield. Sporadic shellfire slowed our progress tremendously. Eventually we made the base of Mount Harriet, which was coming under incredible fire from a frigate ashore. The whole mountain seemed to erupt in flame. It seemed impossible that anybody could survive an attack like that. This went on for well over an hour, shell after shell whistling over our heads and hitting the mountain. Eventually this was lifted and the Marines went in. To our amazement there seemed to be an incredible amount of fighting going on. There was a lot of tracer fire. The whole night was being lit up by flares, which cast a dead, unrealistic, pall over the whole scene. (Speaking Out: Untold Stories from the Falklands War, p. 271, Andre Deutsch, 1989)
Captain Peter Babbington's K Company crossed their start-line first and proceeded up the mountain undetected. They remained undetected until they approached Second Lieutenant Mario Juarez's 120 mm Mortar Platoon positions and decided to engage them. They were assisted in the advance by HMS Yarmouth, artillery and mortars. During the engagement Corporal Larry Watts was killed. The British company captured most of the Argentinian heavy mortar positions relatively quickly then reported stiffening resistance from a well-trained platoon of Argentinian conscripts until Corporal Steve Newlands, working with Corporals Mick Eccles and 'Sharkey' Ward, silenced the platoon position but Newlands was badly wounded in the process.
L Company crossed their start line shortly after K Company and were almost immediately engaged by effective machine gun fire from Second Lieutenant Pablo Oliva's platoon defending the southern slopes. These weapons would not be silenced until being hit by several MILAN anti-tank missiles and six 105 mm artillery guns from Mount Challenger. There was, in fact, a comparison to be made with certain aspects of the delaying action against the Argentine Amtracs on 2 April 1982, and British veterans are full of praise for the Argentine platoon given the amount of artillery and Milan missiles at their disposal.
It was an arduous advance for L Company and it would take six hours for L Company to advance 600 metres and capture their objective. Before first light Lieutenant Jerry Burnell's 5 Troop of L Company proceeded to an outcrop of rocks to the north of their position. As they advanced the Royal Marine platoon came under heavy fire from Second Lieutenant Lautaro Jimenez-Corvalan's 3rd Platoon and were forced to withdraw. L Company requested artillery fire onto the Argentinian platoon position, then 4 Troop moved forward and found that the Argentinians had withdrawn. Further fighting went on throughout the morning of 12 June and a young Argentinian conscript, in a position just below the eastern summit, held up the Royal Marines with accurate shooting until killed by a Carl Gustav rocket fired at short range.
The battle was a textbook example of good planning and use of deception and surprise, and a further step towards their main objective of Port Stanley. British casualties were two killed and twenty-six wounded. Fifteen Argentine dead lay around the defences. Lance-Corporal Koleszar had the surprising experience of finding that two 'dead' Argentine soldiers, whose boots he was trying to remove, were very much alive and jumped up to surrender. Some British reporters were thus misled into depicting the Argentinians as hapless teenage conscripts who caved in after the first shots were fired, but Royal Marine Warrant Officer 2 John Cartledge who served with K Company during the battle corrected them, saying the Argentinians were good soldiers who had fought properly:
"They used the tactics which they had been taught along the way very well, they were quite prepared for an attack. They put up a strong fight from start to finish. They were also better equipped than we were. We had first generation night sights, which were large cumbersome pieces of equipment, while the Argentines had second generation American night sights that were compact and so much better than what we had. The one deficiency which we exposed was that they had planned for a western end of the mountain attack, and therefore had not bothered to extended their defensive positions to the eastern end, where we ultimately attacked’" ([1])
The bodies of eighteen RI 4 soldiers were found around the Two Sisters-Harriet line.
When J Company moved up the mountain on the bitterly cold morning of 12 June, the total catch was 300 prisoners, fifty of whom had been wounded.