Reddit reviews The First Casualty: The Untold Story of the Falklands War
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Yes, but on Ancient Aliens...
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The book in question is "The First Casualty" and is thoroughly well researched from over 300 primary sources plus the Falkland Islanders' diaries and draws from the personal accounts of the Royal Marines, their Argentine opponents and those Stanley residents in the middle of it, to include the hospital staff at King Edward Memorial Hospital in Stanley and the hospital records. Here is a very good account by BFBS from an interview with myself (the author) and including a video with Royal Marine Jim Fairfield BEM where he also states that the Argentine forces took very heavy casualties and more than they ever admitted to and that the Royal Marines were told to say nothing about the truth:
https://www.forces.net/news/did-royal-marines-really-surrender-after-falklands-invasion
The words of many of these Royal Marines were also documented at the launch of The First Casualty on 28/3/17 by the Portsmouth News:
https://www.portsmouth.co.uk/our-region/portsmouth/revealed-untold-story-of-how-60-marines-battled-thousands-of-argentinians-1-7895621
I would also point to the Daily Mail article of July 2017:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4721140/Falklands-final-secret.html
It is apparent that the Argentine forces lost very heavily that day and covered it up. An LCVP Landing Craft was sunk that day, which only Martin Middlebrook mentions (and conjectured in another book, oddly) which has since been found and dragged up (its picture is in the first link) as part of the investigation. John Smith recorded it as early as 1983 in his book "74 Days" and actually, immediately after the invasion, the editor of the Penguin News went to London (having been deported by the Argentine forces) and reported via Reuters not only that a Landing Craft had been sunk but even a figure of 200 Argentine casualties. The MOD certainly knows about it but never mentioned it. General Julian Thompson is on record as saying "The official line if asked, is that it exploded due to some form of premature detonation." It existed then, it exists now, Sir Rex Hunt even mentioned it twice on FIBS Radio on April 2nd. This can be confirmed via the radio broadcasts on YouTube which are very easy to find. The LCVP Landing Craft had a capacity of 40 men and lots of bodies were seen floating in the harbour for days afterwards (again, direct quotes in John Smith and in The First Casualty) one very direct account from the latter states, "looking over the side into the harbour (April 3rd) three Argentine bodies were floating who had come up from the sunken landing craft. One of them, I remember, actually looked like he had his hands in his pockets."
Next is the LVTP-7 Amtrack APC, of which each one was carrying 25 men plus three crew. This was always officially denied and a mildly damaged one substituted to show that the Royal Marines must have thought they destroyed it but didn't. They never claimed this vehicle but the one before it. Amtrack 07 (The one used to show no damage) turned to its left across the front of the Royals' position, the one they always maintained they had hit turned right, away from them and became stuck on a bank.
LCpl Burt Reynolds hit it first with a 66mm LAW in the back left quadrant (he was farthest out on the right of the Marines' position with GPMG gunner Sean Egan) and then Mark Gibbs hit it just behind the Commander's Cupola as George Brown and Danny Betts hit it just starboard of the nose with an 84mm Carl Gustav. Gibbs is on record as saying, "It stopped, rocked on its suspension and blew a great cloud of black smoke and just died". This is in print and also on a BBC Radio 4 documentary "My Falklands War" with myself and Falkland Islander Rachel Simons.
Jim Fairfield (mentioned above) saw this vehicle six times in three days and described the damage exactly, even looking inside it. Stanley fireman Neville Bennett was tasked with hosing out the inside and his chilling words were "It looked like the inside of an Auschwitz oven". Jim Fairfield is on record talking about it when he saw it:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XVWivce8vzc&t=17s
Major Mike Norman listed Argentine casualties as "The most conservative figure possible of only what we knew we had got and could confirm around Government House, about which there was no doubt" and his official report, declassified in 2012, stated 5 killed, 17 wounded and 3 prisoners. Again, this is shown in the first link above.
Dr Daniel Haines actively described in his memoirs an operation performed on two men, one of whom died on the operating table, the other spirited away in a terminal condition, who were found exactly where Royal Marines Nick Williams and Marcus Bennett described shooting them. Sir Rex Hunt in his own memoir "My Falklands Days" also describes Argentine soldiers dragging two full body bags across his wife Mavis' rockery... bear in mind that Pedro Giachino, the only man Argentina admitted died, was alive when he went to hospital, and there are many photos of him being treated in a Land Rover, so neither was him.
Nurse Diane Roberts came to the hospital that morning after the battle and her first job was cleaning out the sluices in the morgue, where, she recalled, "There were three Argentine corpses laid out already. The others told me that there were two more before this but they had been taken away. I looked at them and they were certainly dead... very dead." Dr Alison Bleaney recounted how, as she arrived at the hospital, "I came in the back way and passed one of their big tracked vehicles. They were stuffing bodies in there on top of each other. I saw at least six but could see that there were more stacked behind them, all crammed in. The ward was chaos, there must have been 50-60 wounded in there, everyone was shouting, I left the dead and just tried to save the living. There was one man with a serious gunshot wound to the groin who I tried to help, but you'd turn around to get something and they would spirit the wounded away. I must have performed at least ten operations that morning."
Hospital records show 12 wounded men still in the hospital the next day who were too critical to move. None of these were the three confirmed wounded who were all evacuated on April 2nd. Corporal Williams in his account detailed "literally an endless ferry of medevac helicopters going from the hospital to the airport" and a stack of bloodied stretchers abandoned there. The hospital records show 100 stretchers from WW1 in their stores before the invasion and not one left after. All were at the airport.
Finally, recorded in John Smith and several other private diaries, 70-80 bodies were found stacked up on the Darwin Road outside of town a few days after. The Argentine soldiers burned them. A year after the war, families representing over 500 (and as many as 1,000) men still missing from the war petitioned the Argentine government for information and were lied to and told the British still held them prisoner on Ascension island. Of course there were none. They came back still asking in 1987 and were told we didn't have them:
https://www.nytimes.com/1983/04/08/world/around-the-world-no-clues-on-lost-troops-british-tell-argentines.html
It is evident that Argentina hid hundreds of deaths from the war, not just on April 2nd. The full account with all of the evidence from primary sources and showing the entire working method is in "The First Casualty" which, I should add, is NOT a self published book at all, but was published by Navy Books, from whom I bought the rights prior to their selling the business. It has sold in over 40 countries and has been a repeated Amazon #1 Best Seller, with reviews by the veterans themselves:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/1980585792/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1521706982&sr=8-3&pi=AC_SX236
I hope this answers the question.
Ricky D Phillips.
tiene un libro publicado
https://www.amazon.co.uk/First-Casualty-Untold-Story-Falklands/dp/1980585792/