Captain Hugo Santillán's review of The First Casualty

Cpn. Hugo Santillán is one of the Argentine Navy officers involved in the shooting against the Royal Marines in White City, he was onboard of VAO #05, and his portrayal of the incident is one of the main testimonies included in The First Casualty. As we'll see, he has serious objections over the conclusions reached on the book.


In several occasions Phillips had boasted about his friendship with Cpn. Santillán, and moreover, Santillán's approval and sponsorship of his book:
 


The first picture was taken in a hotel in London, were Santillán was on a holiday trip, and Phillips had a lengthy interview with him during the writing process of The First Casualty.
As seen, he quotes Santillán's review of the book as a positive reaction and an endorsement to it's contents. To be fair, that's an actual quote of Santillán's opinion piece published in the Bulletin of the Naval Center (a social club founded by Argentine Navy's officers in 1882), number 847:


Since it's only available in Spanish, I took the liberty to translate the whole review to show the true opinion of Cpn. Santillán, it's much more critical than Phillips likes to admit:

The author is a Scottish historian with special interest in what happened in the capital of the Falkland Islands on April 2, 1982.

He wrote this book after interviewing two members of the Argentine Navy who landed that day and several Royal Marines who faced to the Argentine landing force, and receiving the testimonies of various local residents.

Phillips recounts the preparations of the British Marines prior to the landing, the fighting that occurred on the outskirts of the town, within it, around the governor's house, etc.

British stories are surprising in that they differ markedly from what is known so far. For example, they refer to the supposed sinking of a landing boat with about fifty Argentine soldiers in the dark dawn of April 2, with total loss of life; the existence of British special forces (without the knowledge of the islands' authorities) before the Argentine landing; to the destruction of a tracked amphibious vehicle of the vanguard of the landing force without survivors; to a number of Argentine fatalities around the Governor's House that far exceeds the death of Captain Giachino and the wounded Lieutenant García Quiroga and Cabo Primero Urbina; to the cremation of dozens of corpses of Argentine soldiers using napalm on an island near Puerto Argentino; etc.

The author suggests that the Argentine and British governments of the time deliberately concealed certain facts for unclear reasons.

From reading the book, it seems that the defense of Port Stanley carried out by the Royal Marines and the local militia was epic, courageous and efficient, and that it caused many casualties to the Argentine landing force.

However, it must be remembered that the British garrison surrendered after a skirmish against the Argentine mechanized vanguard on the outskirts of the town and some exchanges of fire of varying intensity - with no casualties on either side - during the siege at the governor's house.

The author presents three factual issues that, materially, contradict incontrovertible evidence. His account states that there were at least a dozen Argentine deaths during the fighting around the Governor's House instead of the only loss, that of Corvette Captain Giachino; that some fifty Argentine soldiers died when a landing boat sank due to the effects of the British fire; that a British anti-tank weapon destroyed a tracked amphibious vehicle of the vanguard of the landing force, and that it killed the twenty-five Marines it was transporting.

There were not 10 killed among the amphibious commandos that surrounded the governor's house; No attempt was ever made to disembark fifty men by landing craft in the early hours of April 2, nor was the vanguard hit by any anti-tank weapon. The lists of participants in Operation Rosario allows to verify that such casualties simply did not occur.

Likewise, the accounts attributed to the Royal Marines who confronted the Argentine Marines and the inhabitants of Puerto Argentino who claim to have witnessed the events are, frankly, controversial.

For example, a British Marine claims that -as a special shooter- he personally killed more than one Argentine amphibious command; in fact, there were no deaths among the special forces when they surrounded the Governor's House, except that of Captain Giachino, and not by a special shooter.

Regarding the demonstrations by the so-called kelpers and also as an example, one of them states that, after the brief firefight on the outskirts of the town, an amphibious tracked vehicle supposedly part of the vanguard of the landing force Argentina was destroyed, caught fire, and remained where it was shot down for a couple of days... until the said villager put out the fire with a hose. It is idle to remember that there were no vehicles of the Argentine Marine Corps hit by enemy anti-tank weapons. They all returned to the Baterías Marine Base and can be individually identified to this day.

The alleged landing boat that sank and led to the death of fifty Argentine soldiers was not included in the landing plan for the amphibious assault, that is, it never existed. Tapping the inventory of assault boats from participating ships will show that no boat was lost. In that same sense, those fifty deaths never occurred; the mere verification of the lists of the personnel who participated in the operation would show that this episode rests only on the imagination of the person who claims it.

The testimonies that the author took to write the book seem to be affected by this phenomenon through which human memory makes, to some degree, what is perceived by the senses into something different, to the point that, after a certain time, these inaccurate perceptions become adopted as truthful. The preceding paragraph serves as a benevolent explanation for the divergence of what is reported at some points in the book with respect to what actually happened.

In several paragraphs, Phillips says that the episodes in which the Argentine and British accounts are totally opposite originate from testimonies that cannot be branded as liars, but from demonstrations in good faith ("nobody lies", he claims). In this aspect, the historian should corroborate the sayings of his sources by means of the verification, confirmation and correlation techniques that are usual in the reconstruction of the facts. In this work, the author limits himself to reproducing received statements and inferring conclusions from it.

Anyway, the structure of the story is excellent, entertaining and with graphics of very good quality. The testimonies of both parties are presented in a timely manner throughout the text.

The author shows a healthy respect for the Argentine position and on several occasions states that his intention is simple: to relate what really happened and that, until now, has remained outside the knowledge of the general public.

Hugo Jorge Santillán

Evidently, Phillips cherry picked only the few positive parts of the review and left out all of Santillán's objections to Phillips' theory, that's not the right thing to do, in my opinion.