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On the evening of June 11, 1982, 30-year-old platoon sergeant Manny Manfred was moving stealthily into position on Mount Longdon alongside the men of 3rd Battalion, Parachute Regiment (3 Para). Their faces streaked with camouflage paint and bodies laden down with grenades, anti-tank rockets and ammunition, the men moved like shadows at the foothills of the mountain, a 525ft curtain of rock overlooking the Falkland Islands capital of Port Stanley.

“We had been briefed it would be a silent night attack,” explains Manfred, to avoid alerting the Argentinian defensive mortar, artillery and machine gun nests heavily entrenched in the rocks above. “The wind was howling and the weather was raging so that covered up some of the noise… But then one of us stood on a mine and blew his foot off – and the silent night attack suddenly became very noisy.”

The attack on Mount Longdon was the beginning of a series of offensives planned by the British commanders to finally seize the initiative and win the Falklands War . Rather than advancing as expected on lower ground, the plan was instead to surprise the enemy by attacking a ring of mountains that surrounded Port Stanley, which had been occupied by the Argentinians for 10 weeks and turned into formidable defensive strongholds.

Over the course of the following three days, until the Argentinians surrendered on June 14, the British troops would battle through minefields, be pounded by artillery and mortar fire and clamber up rocky screes in horrific close quarter fighting.

The battle for Mount Longdon alone was one of the costliest battles in the 74-day campaign and featured some of the British Army’s bloodiest hand-to-hand combat since the Korean War.

These are the stories of some of the men who fought in those final battles, the memories of which 40 years on remain seared into their minds – haunting and filling them with pride in equal measure.

‘All hell broke loose’

The battle for Mount Longdon was one of three launched on the evening of June 11, with simultaneous attacks on Mount Harriet and Two Sisters Ridge to the west along the Murrell River.

The battle for Two Sisters was spearheaded by the Royal Marines of 45 Commando and on the morning of the attack, Phil Hill, then a 25-year-old section commander with Yankee Company, 45 Commando, was sitting in the shadow of the mountain sharing a final meal of ration pack chicken supreme and tinned fruit with a fellow Marine of Ukrainian descent called Michael “Blue” Nowak.

As they ate their food and checked their weapons, the pair told jokes and swapped war stories to distract themselves from what lay ahead. “Blue was a hell of a character,” Hill recalls. “An irrepressible bloke.”

As darkness fell they were moved to an eastern position to commence the assault. Hill, who today lives near Preston with Sam, his wife of 38 years, recalls how easy it was initially for the 300 or so men to move up the mountain without experiencing any contact with the enemy. Everything remained quiet until they were only about 300 metres from the summit. “And then all hell broke loose.”

The Argentine defenders rained mortar shells down on their position while the tracer bullets of their machine guns lit up the night. Nowak, one of the first hit in the initial flurry of fire, was killed. “I learned over the radio Blue was hit and dead but mentally I just pushed it out of my mind,” Hill says.

For the next two hours the men were pinned down, unable to move due to the sheer weight of enemy fire coming down the mountain towards them. In one mortar blast their troop commander was also badly wounded in the neck by shrapnel, a Royal Engineer attached to the troop to clear enemy booby traps was killed and a troop signaller received a scalp injury. Eventually the pace of fire slackened; the Marines regrouped and started to fight their way up the mountain.

‘We searched the bodies and found family photographs’

Back on Longdon, the casualties were also beginning to mount up (in total 23 members of 3 Para died as a result of the battle). Manny Manfred remembers that B company had fought their way about a third of the way up the mountain before sustaining such heavy losses that he and the men of A Company were ordered to move up through their position and continue the assault.

“They were skirmishing, hand-to-hand fighting in some instances with bayonets fixed,” he says from his home in Dyfed, Wales. “I was 10 to 15ft behind. My job was to keep the line and evacuate any casualties.”

About eight-and-a-half hours into the battle, nearing the top of the mountain, the Argentines broke ranks and, as dawn rose, started to run – not towards them but away from them. Manfred remembers seeing about 40 Argentinian troops streaming down the other side of the mountain in the direction of Port Stanley. “We engaged them with rifle fire and machine guns,” he says. “They weren’t surrendering. They were withdrawing and we would have to fight them again.”

After occupying the Argentinian defensive positions, enemy artillery fire from Port Stanley about three miles away started to rain down on them. Six men were killed in the subsequent shelling as they dug in.

The mountain top was also littered with the bodies of Argentinian troops, who Manfred says they buried in temporary graves. They covered the bodies of the fallen British soldiers with their waterproof ponchos until they could be evacuated back along the lines. “We always searched the [Argentine] bodies for information but an awful lot of them were carrying letters from home and family photographs,” he recalls. “That was quite upsetting.”

Despite their precarious position, being on the summit of Mount Longdon gave Manfred and his fellow troops a ringside seat the following evening for the assault on nearby Wireless Ridge by their sister battalion, 2 Para; a successful operation that came at a bloody cost of three killed and 11 wounded.

“We had a grandstand view watching them fight their position in the darkness,” he says with a tear in his eye. “It was regimental history in the making.”

‘I knew I was taking a massive great gamble’

With those early advances secured, on the night of June 13, consecutive assaults were launched on Mount Tumbledown and Mount William, to the south of Mount Longdon. Lieutenant Mark Coreth, then 23, was a troop leader with B Squadron, the Blues and Royals, attached to the Scots Guards. He and his men were to lead a diversionary attack, alongside a platoon of Scots Guards, to drive down a road in the direction of Port Stanley where the Argentinians had originally expected the British to advance. They would use their light Scimitar and Scorpion tanks to draw away enemy fire while the main assault on Tumbledown took place.

Coreth, now a sculptor based in Wiltshire, had been on a reconnaissance mission with a Scots Guards officer the previous day and knew the road was heavily mined and the area well defended. At first they proceeded unopposed but an enemy ambush lay in wait. Around 11pm, Coreth recalls, the whole sky around them lit up with enemy star shells to reveal their position and 155 and 105mm shells launched by howitzers started to rain down.

Despite the presence of enemy mines, Coreth instructed the driver of his Scorpion to turn off the road to try and navigate a huge shell hole. “I knew full well I was taking a massive great gamble,” he admits. They only travelled a few yards before hitting a 14lb anti-tank mine and were blown several feet into the air.

Incredibly, all three men in the vehicle survived, although it was left wrecked. They battened down the hatches and instructed the convoy behind them to fire on the Argentine positions until their ammunition ran out, while enemy shells whistled all around. “We became quite adept at working out where shells were going to land,” Coreth recalls.

Despite losing the tank, he describes it as an “extraordinarily successful” diversionary attack – and one it was a miracle they survived. “It took the enemy’s eye off the ball and enabled the Scots Guards to get in among the company position on Mount Tumbledown,” he says. “It was a very hard, sharp and dangerous night. We made a lot of noise and colour.”

‘We only had one focus – to kill the enemy’

Meanwhile it was clear the enemy resolve was beginning to collapse. After being dug in at the top of Two Sisters for two days, Hill and his fellow Royal Marines of 45 Commando were advancing towards Sapper Hill, a few miles away.

They had been expecting fierce defensive fire from Argentine positions dug into the bedrock of the hill, but as they advanced they instead came across abandoned enemy mortars and trenches.

“There were a lot more of them than there were of us,” Hill recalls. “I would never have imagined within our own forces morale and discipline collapsing like that. We would have died of old age out there if we had to. They just fell apart completely.”

The final assault on Mount William was due to be led by the 1st ^/ 7th Gurkhas. Among them was Rifleman Nick Tamang, a seasoned veteran of 15 years who was leading 12 Platoon, D Company. To even reach their position the Gurkhas had been involved in a gruelling two-day march carrying 90lb packs across the peat bogs of the island with no rations aside from some biscuits and chocolate.

Tamang, who now works as a security officer in Carlisle where he lives with his wife, says they had been planning to advance on Mount William the previous night but were delayed by heavy artillery bombardments (which caused eight casualties including two seriously injured) and the discovery of a minefield.

By first light on June 14 the Gurkhas were spoiling for a fight and advanced in full view of enemy artillery. “We could not allow hunger or fatigue to distract us,” Tamang recalls. “We only had one focus – to kill the enemy.”

However, as they progressed up Mount William they were astonished to find it deserted. “We found only dead bodies and abandoned weapons and backpacks,” Tamang says. “They knew the Gurkhas were coming for them and this was the final place to capture and they ran away scared.”

‘We were young – and had been through a hell of a lot’

By now the news of the Argentine surrender was spreading through the ranks and the surrounding British troops were starting to stream towards Port Stanley. Manfred and his fellow paratroopers were picking their way down through minefields on the southern slopes of Mount Longdon when news of the victory crackled over the radio. “The signaller was about two people in front of me and said ‘they’ve surrendered’,” he remembers. “We were cheering, but nobody dared to move.”

An hour or so later he made it into Port Stanley where the white flags of surrender were flying. He recalls shaking hands with his sergeant major. “It was only then that the penny really dropped,” he says. “It was over.”

Manfred remained in the military for the rest of his career, retiring at 60 as a major before transferring his commission to the Army Cadet Force from which he retired as a lieutenant colonel in 2017.

He says many of the men involved in those final 72 hours have struggled with the trauma of what they experienced and several members of the platoon have suffered PTSD . Given the scale of the casualties, he admits today’s commanders would probably have deemed such a daring assault as an unacceptable risk.

“It was very effective because we won but not something you would do today,” he says. “We took 23 killed and 50 wounded out of a force of probably less than 500. You could argue in today’s modern world those casualties would be unacceptable and they would have battered the mountain with artillery, rockets and drones instead. But at that stage it had to be to go forward and take the positions physically by force.”

Despite the sustained trauma and scale of the losses, on Tuesday 14 June, as the veterans of the Falklands War gather at the National Memorial Arboretum to attend the Royal British Legion Act of Remembrance service in honour of those who served, those impacted by the conflict, they will also reflect with pride on their contribution to the liberation of the islands.

“I remember very clearly thinking early on if I die here at least I am dying for a cause I believe in,” says Coreth, who later received a mention in despatches in recognition of his role in the war.

“When it ended there was just a huge feeling of relief. We were all young soldiers – and we had been through a hell of a lot.”

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