Razors Edge - Hugh Bicheno

Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. There are few books these days that I’ll take off the shelf once, read them and never touch them again. I feared that when I began this might well have been one of them. So far up his own arse he could clean his teeth from the inside. Stuffed full of political crap, backstabbing and downright treachery that I was thinking of offering this book to conspiracy theorists with an “This is how it’s done” sticker on it. Yes; politics, like it or not, infuses and sets the scene for everything, not least military moves but also no; some things are just too depressing for words. And when these words are printed in black type on a white page by Outraged of Ashdon-under-Lyme, the depression gets really bad. Turgid prose when describing it really does not help.

Well, those were my orginal thoughts.

Hugh Bicheno does know his stuff. He does. A former Intelligence Officer (cynical squaddies will claim that this is a contradiction in terms), fluent in both English and Spanish and a resident of the British Embassy in Buenos Aries provides ample background currency. So too does an outstanding bibliography of 22 pages, covering everything from Web sites to Videos and everything inbetween; as you’d expect from an Intelligence officer the research is painstaking and exquisitly detailed. But it suffers from the disease of bigness. There’s just no escaping it. At the risk of sounding flippant it’s somewhat like Vulcan 607 – we don’t need to know everything. Useful, certainly, but not strictly needed. But perhaps I’m missing the point; an unofficial history will hardly contain the brevity of a regimental or battalion war diary.
The good part is that politics takes up only a third of this book. The bad news is that that is still 84 pages or so. But once the politics are left behind and things move on to the actual operations, Hugh scores in spades. For here the detail becomes impressive instead of merely overwhelming. The maps are precise and rendered in simple style, the battles explained in detail, photos provide scale and clarity and the privations are readily apparent to anyone. If anything, here the previously stilted prose becomes an asset – it forces you to slow down, to reflect, to take pains to understand what’s going on. Never a bad thing for a retrospective account – this is how you learn things.
Bicheno’s great achievement however is that he doesn’t take sides. Partly this is due to his own experiences and outlook but also out of a scruplous sense of fairness – just as much trouble is taken to desribe conditions amongst the Argentine conscript garrisons in Stanley, viewing their officers and professionals with resentment and shivering on mountain tops as those of the British paras wading ashore at San Carlos, marching across bogs and huddled in wet dugouts under mortar fire.

The Falklands War was unique in many ways that conflicts since have not been; much of the weapons and equipment on both sides were the same – everyone had single shot SLR rifles, comparable artillery and mortar pieces (often made by the same company) and in an uncomfortable irony the Argentine Navy had the exact same Type 42 destroyers as the Royal Navy, built in the same shipyards…
There are always 3 sides in a war – attackers, defenders and the poor sods stuck in the crossfire who really don’t belong there. Hugh Bicheno describes all three but you need to wade through an awful lot of boredom to get there. Persevere though, and you might be surprised.

6 and a 1/2 out of 10