Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Flash of genius captured spirit of the troops
Commando Pete Holdgate was an official photographer of the Falklands conflict and captured some of its most famous images. Over the next few pages, he tells Jackie Butler of his war experiences and his ‘cathartic’ return to the islands
THERE’S an extraordinary photograph that, to this day, sums up the dogged determination and hardy spirit of the British troops sent to reclaim the Falkland Islands in 1982.
In it, a line of Royal Marines commandos are snaking their way through a wild, boggy and frozen landscape. They march on, far into the distance, one after another, carrying the weight of a full kit on their backs. The chief focus of the picture is a single marine at the rear of the procession and the Union Flag flying from a radio aerial attached to his pack. His face can’t be seen, but he’s wearing the famous green beret of the elite commando force and striding forwards along the rough track, cold, tired and soaked to the skin, but still managing to walk tall and proud.
Forty years on, and the June day in 1982 when he took this image, known as ‘The Yomper’, remains indelibly etched in the memory of Devon photographer and former petty officer and Royal Navy Commando Pete Holdgate.
One of thousands of pictures he took during the war, it was a shot that involved a creative eye, patience, endurance and a few seconds of luck on what Pete describes as one of the longest days of his life.
As an official photographer it was Pete’s job to document the conflict, assessing where he needed to be depending on where the action was. Armed with his personal weapon and his precious pair of 35mm Nikon SLR cameras, one for black and white and the other for colour slide film, his action images included graphic accounts of onthe-ground combat, as well as ferocious air attacks.
On the night of June 11 and 12, he had been with 42 Commando at the Battle for Mount Harriet, but hearing that the men of 45 Commando were under orders to take Sapper Hill, behind Port Stanley, he got a helicopter ride to meet them at Two Sisters.
At first light they moved off towards the capital. British victory and the end of the war was just hours away, but the commandos didn’t know that yet as they began picking their way through scrubland dotted with Argentinian mines, each man treading carefully in the footsteps of the person ahead of him.
Pete, now aged 70 and living in the countryside near Newton Abbot, recalls: “Three guys ahead had been checking for mines and we were following in their footsteps. I looked behind me and saw in the distance a marine with what looked like a flag hanging from his radio antenna. Thinking it might make a picture, I stepped out of the line, letting everyone pass until this chap walked by, looking particularly miserable. The flag was just limp at that point, but I was hoping the wind would blow and fill it. I just dropped in behind him and I followed him for two hours before it happened. We could see Stanley smoking in the foreground and, as we went down the track, the wind suddenly filled the flag and it blew out in front of me. I had time just to take one black and white shot and one colour slide. Then the flag went limp again.”
That was the split second when that ‘yomping’ marine, a 24-yearold corporal named Peter Robinson, became the embodiment of the British campaign.
Pete, who went on to become the picture editor for The Herald and the Western Morning News, said: “I thought it was a decent picture, but when you envisage something and you have taken two hours to take it, it then becomes just another picture. At the time I was so knackered – I hadn’t slept for two nights. I had no way of processing the film, so I triple-bagged it in thick plastic with all the rest because everything in the war was soaking wet.
“The weather was arguably the worst thing of the lot. We had snow on the ground the whole time, and it was constantly on or around freezing.
“As Marines you are Arctic trained in Norway where it’s minus 30C, but that’s a dry cold. In the Falklands, it was wet, and once you were wet you stayed like it. In the morning you took off your damp stuff and put it in a plastic bag. You’d have to wring your clothes out sometimes.”
As the party walked on, rumours started coming in that the Argentinians were surrendering and that white flags were flying above the capital, and Pete was compelled to get to the scene.
“I knew I needed to get to Stanley. So myself, Sgt Dave Munelly and my boss, Capt Dave Nicholls, decided we were going to try and get there with the first Marines of
42 Commando. We were really hoping that ‘green berets’ were going to be the first there as opposed to the ‘red berets’ of the Paras.
“After this final ‘sprint’, which seemed to take forever, we could see all the abandoned artillery of the Argentine garrison. We were disappointed to find Paras had already taken up residence on the outskirts of Stanley.
“As dusk fell, we marched up to the war memorial which became the demarcation line between the Argentine and UK forces. My first priority then was to find somewhere to sleep and something to eat.
“The three of us went into an old building with the brigadier and there was an SAS major cooking. As it turned out, the world’s best meal consisted of several cans of Argentine beef in gravy with a bottle of red wine he had ‘liberated’. He was heating it in a big pot. We were all invited to dip in our mess tins. It was delicious – the best pot-mess I’d ever eaten.”
That night was Pete’s first chance to sleep in three days, bunked up with his two comrades on a filthy single mattress.
“We slept like logs and when we woke up we found out that the Argentines had signed a surrender at midnight.”
He was expecting to feel elated, but it was at that point that Pete and many of his fellow commandos hit a low, brains and bodies finally beginning to wind down.
“I couldn’t work out why I felt so down,” says Pete. “What it was is that you have been running on high adrenalin for two months, every day living on your wits and then all of a sudden, when they surrendered, it stopped.”
On the airfield at Stanley, there were 12,500 Argentinian soldiers waiting to be repatriated.
“I used to do stupid things like go on the airfield and look for souvenirs. We could just go out in the middle of all the Argentine soldiers and take pictures; the Argentine officers were still armed because they were afraid of their own men.”
Spirits lifted when the SS Canberra came into port a week later.
“I managed to find some cabins and flew on to Canberra and was met by the purser. I was absolutely stinking in my combat gear. He took me down to one of the state rooms and said: ‘Have a shower and leave your uniform here’. A couple came from the laundry and got my stuff, washed it and dried it. I had the best shower of my life and then I was taken for a slap-up meal.”
It was when Pete started processing his pictures on board the ship that he spotted The Yomper among them. He immediately recognised its symbolic significance. Wired back to the UK, the image made the front pages of nearly all the British newspapers.
Ten years after the war, Margaret Thatcher unveiled The Yomper statue, modelled on Pete’s iconic photograph and sculpted by Philip Jackson, which has now dominated the entrance to the Royal Marines Museum at Eastney, near Portsmouth, for three decades.
“To have a 12ft-high statue on the seafront based on your photograph is really something special,” he said.
The Yomper may have been immortalised in bronze, but it wasn’t the only one of Pete’s images that not only meant a great deal to him but also made a big impact at home in Britain. The first came just after he landed on the Falklands and also featured the symbolic Union Flag.
Pete had sailed from Portsmouth on April 4, 1982, on board HMS Fearless with his brigade, the Plymouth-based 3 Commando Brigade, and he was among those who made the crucial first landings at San Carlos on May 21.
He recalls: “I can still remember getting into the landing craft on the night of the 20th at midnight and it took an age. We were dancing around, packed in like sardines.
“The whole of Fanning Head was lit up by gunfire. It was so surreal. It was like being in a movie.
“We were bobbing around in these landing craft so we could hit any waves towards the beach. We had camouflage grease all over our faces so we couldn’t even recognise each other. It was reassuring seeing all those green berets, though, and we knew we were going ashore with the best fighting force in the world.
“I was carrying 80lb on my back. Everyone was leaning on everyone else and we were like that for four hours. At about 4.30am we actually