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Major Danny West
SAS veteran who played a key role in the Falklands and was one of the longest continuously serving soldiers in the regiment’s history
Danny West as an SAS troop medic in Oman during the Dhofar uprising in the 1960s. Below: on Mount Kent in East
Falkland on the morning of the Argentinians’ surrender. Behind him is Major Cedric Delves, the commander of D Squadronfrom where he could control the sup-
porting fire and reserve.
Five days later a Sea King helicopter
“cross-decking” men of both D and G
Squadrons from HMS Hermes to HMS
Intrepid plunged into the sea at high
speed. Twenty SAS men were killed, the
largest single loss since the Second
World War, and a serious operational
one for D Squadron in particular, whose
sergeant major was among the dead.
West now took over responsibility as
second in command and operations of-
ficer for both squadrons, and in addi-
tion the duties of squadron sergeant
major. It allowed D Squadron, with the
minimum redistribution of men, to
maintain their order of battle at four
operational troops, although Delves
was later to say that this appearance of
normality tempted people to think that
things were just as before. The losses
had undoubted operational impact,
and without West’s quiet resolve, the
ramifications would have been greater
still. Indeed, Delves was able to lead out
his squadron again within hours to
carry out a raid on the Argentine posi-
tions at Darwin to draw off enemy re-
serves from the task force’s real landing
place in San Carlos Bay.
They were able to put down so much
fire that the Argentinians radioed their
HQ that they were under attack by at
least a battalion.
With the successful landing of the
3rd Commando and 5th Infantry bri-
gades, Rose ordered Delves to “conduct
guerrilla action” against the Argentine
garrison at the capital, Port Stanley, 40
miles east across the bleak interior of
East Falkland. He intended this to “suck
the brigades forward” on to Mount
Kent, which he likened to “Montehimself waiting interminably for the
lorry driver to return from chatting up
a barmaid in the Locarno ballroom op-
posite the army recruiting office in
Sauchiehall Street.
He recalled the overpowering sense
of “pull” from the office and how ten
days later he was at Catterick, the Royal
Signals training regiment, marvelling
at being fed three square meals a day.
After training he served as a radio tech-
nician with the 10th Royal Hussars in
Aden. For a bright recruit, the Royal
Signals were an obvious choice, but as a
tough-minded and physically robust
one too, it was not long before he found
himself in the Signals’ SAS squadron.
Soon he volunteered for selection as a
trooper in the operational squadrons.
He subsequently served worldwide, in-
cluding a stint as personal protection for
the British ambassador in Buenos Aires,
where he learnt enough Spanish to
come in handy during the Falklands
conflict. He saw action in Oman during
the Dhofar communist insurgency, be-
coming a fluent Arabic speaker and
mastering the local Jebel dialect. He was
notably successful in training the Sul-
tan’s militia, the firqat (“units”), many of
whom were surrendered enemy
fighters recruited to take the fight back
to the insurgents. For this he was award-
ed the British Empire Medal (Military).
In 1968 he married Valerie Penson,
who ran a care home in Hereford. She
died in 1994. Four years later he mar-
ried Laura Nicholson, a friend of a
friend, who worked in development
banking. She survives him, along with
a daughter from his first marriage,
Jacqueline, a social worker in Hereford,
and two daughters from his second:
Madeleine and Olivia, both students.
West served on until 1995, making
him one of the longest continuously
serving soldiers in the SAS’s history.
After leaving the army he was much in
demand as a security consultant, but he
was also active in SAS veterans’ welfare
and Catholic-leaning charities, partic-
ularly Life and the Society for the Pro-
tection of the Unborn Child.
His parish priest, Dom Michael Ev-
ans of Belmont Abbey, who as a former
chaplain with the SAS had known him
for 40 years, said of him, “Danny was al-
ways keen to defend the little guy, part
of his philosophy as a soldier, and he
carried that battle into civilian life.”
In Across an Angry Sea, his account of
D Squadron’s war in the Falklands,
Delves writes of the problems that can
arise from the official policy of neither
confirming nor denying special forces
activity: “an information void, readily
filled by the unscrupulous to promote
sales of their creative conjecture or any
other agenda or interest”. Going in hard
was one thing, unjustifiable killing
quite another. It had indeed been the
ethos of Colonel David Stirling, the
SAS’s founder. West possessed “that
spiritual extra that makes all the differ-
ence: a fine-tuned moral compass”.
Sir Michael Rose described him sim-
ply as “one of the outstanding soldiers
of his generation”.Major Danny West BEM, long-serving
SAS soldier, was born on December 1,- He died of pneumonia while
undergoing treatment for leukaemia on
December 11, 2021, aged 78
The commander of D Squadron had
just finished giving his orders for the
attack on Grytviken, South Georgia —
the prelude to the campaign to recover
the Falkland Islands after the Argen-
tine invasion in April 1982. Captain
Danny West, his second-in-command,
commissioned only a few months
earlier after 20 years in the ranks of the
Special Air Service, asked if he could
say a few words. “Of course,” replied
Major (later Lieutenant-General Sir)
Cedric Delves, wondering what he had
missed out. West, a big, ginger some-
time Glasgow pugilist, told the squad-
ron that the Argentinians were just like
them — professionals, with families,
most with wives or girlfriends, children
too. They were just doing their job. “So
punch clean. No unnecessary use of
force.”
It belied the sometimes popular im-
age of the SAS as soulless killers, what
one Northern Irish republican lawyer
has called “a priesthood of violence”.
The Argentine invasion in the depths
of the South Atlantic winter had come
as a shock to Margaret Thatcher’s gov-
ernment, and its response had been at
first hesitant. What followed — assem-
bling a task force to retake the islands
— was an improvised affair, at times
almost chaotic, for there was no in-
place command structure to mount
and direct a tri-service operation. The
commanding officer of 22 SAS, Lieu-
tenant-Colonel (later General Sir)
Michael Rose, had a struggle to get the
regiment even included on the sailing
manifest.
Delves sensed that “we could be get-
ting into another hard fight with the
potential to turn ugly”, and contemplat-
ed his own mortality. “The squadron
might need someone to take over”, and
he wanted it to be the newly commis-
sioned West, who was in Germany with
the Royal Tank Regiment on what was
wryly called a “knife and fork course”.
Although West was technically junior
to the troop commanders, Delves
thought him “wise, sensible, notably
quick-witted, a seriously accomplished
SAS officer with bags of experience”.
War had come to South Georgia on
April 3, the day after the attack on the
Falklands, when Argentine troops
overpowered a small group of Royal
Marines at the old whaling station at
Grytviken. Thatcher’s cabinet wanted
an early demonstration of resolve.
The Royal Navy duly crippled the Ar-
gentinian submarine Santa Fe, which
then limped into Grytviken. In climatic
conditions described by Rose as “ex-
tremes which bordered on the limits of
survivability”, D Squadron, together
with a scratch force of Royal Marines in
about the same strength, then launched
a hasty assault by helicopter from HMS
Antrim and HMS Brilliant. The Argen-
tinians “did the decent thing — surren-
dered”, Delves recalled, and South
Georgia was recovered without loss of
life to either side. “There was some-
thing faintly old-fashioned about it,
chivalrous even. I like to think that it set
He was tough but
possessed ‘a fine-tuned
moral compass’
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Page 52the tone for the rest of the war, and
Danny had a part in that.”
Three weeks later, on the night of
May 14, West and the squadron were
again in action, on Pebble Island air-
field off the north coast of West Falk-
land, where Argentine aircraft, and re-
portedly radar, commanded the ap-
proach to San Carlos Water, the task
force’s intended entry point to East
Falkland. With everything against
them, including time, the squadron
managed to pull off one of the largest
SAS raids since the Second World War,
destroying 11 aircraft without loss —
the role for which the SAS had original-
ly been raised in 1941.
West had charge of the forward base,Casino on the road to Rome”. The Ar-
gentinians there were by no means in-
active, however, their special forces
carrying out aggressive patrolling. Nev-
ertheless, after ten days, D Squadron
were able to get a sufficiently firm hold
on the area for the two brigades to be
brought up.
If the task force had failed to take
Mount Kent, said Rose, “we would have
lost the war”. West was in the thick of
the action on Kent the night before the
Argentinians surrendered.
Aidan Neil West, always known as
Danny, was born in Glasgow in 1943,
the youngest of five children, one of
whom died in infancy. The family were
Roman Catholic and West wasschooled strongly in the faith at home
by his mother and at Our Lady of Lour-
des primary and secondary schools in
nearby Cardonald. His mother died
before his sixth birthday, just as his
brothers were leaving home, which left
his father, an electrician, struggling to
bring up him and his 11-year-old sister.
Glasgow in the 1950s was a tough
place, still the “No Mean City” of Kings-
ley Long’s novel of that name. At 12
West joined a local boxing club, gaining
medals as well as confidence on the
streets. Intelligent and inquisitive, he
managed to gain a few Scottish certifi-
cates, but money was tight, and he left
school at 16 to work as a delivery boy,
enrolling at night school to try to im-
prove his grades. One day he foundAt 12 he joined a boxing
club, gaining medals and
confidence on the streets