The Falklands War and Dr Jolly

The 39th anniversary of the recapture of Port Stanley and the end of the Falklands War falls today, 14 June. It took only 74 days from the initial Argentine invasion for the British to gather ships, planes, men and material, sail 8,000 miles to the South Atlantic, prosecute a sharp war that cost over 900 lives, and return the islands to British control. More than a thousand books have been written about this extraordinary conflict, examining the war from military, political and diplomatic angles. But the best – and one of the finest and most moving books about war, full stop – is Doctor For Friend And Foe, by Surgeon Commander Rick Jolly RN (pictured below), senior medical officer of 3 Commando Brigade.

Jolly established and ran the field hospital at Ajax Bay, a former mutton slaughterhouse overlooking the initial landing grounds, and with a ringside seat for the relentless Argentine air attacks on the British ships gathered in San Carlos Water. One of Jolly’s team described it as “a huge low grimy coloured building with wriggly tin roof and the background was the classic Dartmoor type moorland with boulder runs…it was bleak as hell…you wouldn’t send your mother-in-law there on holiday”.

Shortly after Jolly and his Marines had moved their gear in, the Parachute Regiment’s medical team arrived. No matter that they were all British medics, and, for the purposes of this conflict, all part of 3rd Commando Brigade and under Jolly’s command. Soon the Paras and Marines, with their tribal loyalties and ancient rivalries, began arguing over access to supplies. Jolly – a big man and a powerful character – immediately called them to order with a short pithy speech. One of the chastened Paras suggested calling the hospital the Red and Green Life Machine after the colours of their respective berets, and someone painted that proud title on the side of the grubby building.

The incident typified the British armed services. For all their superb professionalism, there was something of a quarrelsome family about them. Rick Jolly understood the nature of the beast, indeed as a proud Marine, revelled in it. In 1972, against standard operating procedure, he had insisted on joining 42 RM Commando foot patrols in Belfast. But nothing interfered with his medical vocation or his intense patriotism.

Doctor For Friend And Foe is written in a lively diary form, starting with the invasion itself, on 2 April. Jolly was immediately involved in planning, and was part of a small group flown to Gibraltar to assess the practicality of converting the luxury P&O liner Canberra into a hospital ship. The episode is revealing for its human aspects – the immediate and unstinting cooperation of the Canberra’s crew, and their 1000 passengers – and for the extraordinary skill and imagination with which the necessary alterations were made for it to serve as a hospital. It was actually used to transport the bulk of 3 Commando Brigade to the South Atlantic before functioning as a floating hospital, one of two with the task force (the other being the educational liner Uganda).

However, when it became clear that Canberra was too big a floating target to be used as a forward hospital, it was pulled back 200 miles and Jolly was given 90 minutes to set up and run the field hospital ashore. He and his team did this with exceptional despatch, even as British ships in the nearby San Carlos Water were being sunk by the brave and skilful Argentine pilots. Jolly was on a helicopter visiting one of the store ships when he heard that three sailors from the stricken frigate HMS Argonaut were in the freezing water. He organised their rescue by the helicopter he was riding on, and himself went into the water to save the last man. An hour or two later he was back at work in his hospital.

The war was intensely personal. The day after the landing a British helicopter was shot down by Argentine fighters, with the loss of six men, including the pilot who was a family friend of Jolly’s. Despite all the other demands on him, he established, for the sake of the man’s family, that he had been killed instantly by a bullet while at the controls.

The Red and Green Life Machine presented the Argentine air force with a prominent target. His commanding officer Brigadier Julian Thompson ordered Jolly not to put up red crosses on the roof, because it was close to ammunition stores that were a legitimate target for the enemy. In due course the area was attacked, with five Marines killed in a trench nearby, and two unexploded 400-kilogram bombs lodged in the hospital’s roof. By this time the wounded were flooding in from the battle at Goose Green, and there was no time to do anything about it. The bombs remained in the roof until after the end of the war.

Jolly determined from the outset that casualties, whether British or Argentine, were to be treated in order of need. There was a little grumbling, but his orders were obeyed in the spirit as well as the letter. The first enemy they treated was a pilot with a broken leg and a badly dislocated knee. Jolly tried to explain to him in poor Spanish that they would have to give him a general anaesthetic, but they would save his leg. The man’s understandable reaction on coming round was to feel for the limb, but he and Jolly swiftly became friends.

Many of the wounded Argentines brought in after Goose Green were terrified that the British would simply execute them, and some had been told they would be eaten by their cannibal foes. At the Red and Green Life Machine they soon learned to abandon those fears.

When the British dead from Goose Green – including 2 Para’s commanding officer Lt Col “H” Jones VC – were brought to the hospital, it was Jolly’s duty as senior medical officer to strip and examine each man, before wrapping them for burial. As he performed this sad but necessary task, he was watched quietly but intently by Malcolm Simpson, the Paras’ regimental sergeant major, who had his own duty to his fallen comrades. Incidentally, Jolly’s examination disproved the conspiracy theory, which began circulating after the war, that H Jones had been shot in the back by his own men.

Inside the hospital the work was relentless. Casualties with high velocity bullet wounds needed particularly careful treatment. The British surgeons, with experience of Northern Ireland, knew that it was vital not to close up the wounds, because the pressure in the rapidly expanding cavity is lower than outside and contaminants are sucked in which result in gas gangrene. Instead, the wounds have to be kept open and cleaned at regular intervals before they are safe to sew up, often days later. The less experienced Argentine doctors seemed not to understand the phenomenon, and at Ajax Bay, Jolly’s team had to reopen the wounds of enemy soldiers who had been treated on the battlefield by their own side.

Casualties treated at Ajax Bay were supposed to be sent on as soon as possible to Uganda or Canberra, but the shortage of helicopters often meant they were kept ashore far longer than Jolly would have liked. Despite that, every one of the several hundred wounded men brought into the Life Machine left it alive. Only three men died later aboard the hospital ships. 

The story of the hospital lies at the heart of this extraordinary book, and Jolly writes up the butcher’s bill with clarity and compassion. There is one moment where he is uncharacteristically terse. In the aftermath of the sinking of the landing ship Sir Galahad, dozens of badly burned Welsh Guardsmen flood into the Life Machine. While their officers had gone ashore, these men had been left aboard the ship at anchor for eight hours of daylight, juicy targets for the Argentine air force. Jolly does not discuss that, but he does laconically note that no Welsh Guards officer came to Ajax Bay to check on the casualties.

The medical history of the Falklands War is in itself a riveting and moving read. But Jolly’s intelligence, connections and boundless energy allowed him to understand and describe the unfolding course of the war from a unique vantage point. He was also not averse to hopping on a helicopter to get close to the action as the fighting moved towards its conclusion. Three days after the surrender he got himself to Stanley, and strictly against orders bluffed his way into the room where the Argentine commander, General Menendez, was sitting quietly with two staff officers. They looked understandably alarmed when this tall, bearded man in a commando beret and a filthy uniform appeared in the doorway. Jolly stood to attention and saluted.

“General, on behalf of all my medical team, I would like to thank you for surrendering your forces when you did. The outcome was inevitable but by your humanitarian action you saved my doctors a lot of work, and you also saved a lot of young men’s lives and limbs – on both sides.”

In 1999, Prince Charles asked Jolly to accompany him on a state visit to Argentina, and it was on this trip that he reaped the reward for his humane and skilful treatment of 300 Argentine casualties. Ashamed though some Argentinians still were (and remain) of their defeat in 1982, the word had got around about Dr Jolly (or “Holly”, as they pronounced it). Buenos Aires awarded him the Orden de Majo, roughly equivalent to the OBE he had been given after the war. If that OBE seems a trifle mean, it may reflect Jolly’s failure to suffer fools gladly, especially in the upper reaches of the defence medical establishment.

But he was revered by the men who worked with him, and when in 2018 he died of a heart condition aged 71, more than 500 people attended his funeral at Portsmouth. Among them were the Argentine ambassador, and the Argentine defence attaché. 

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