only other claim to fame is that it had been the location of an abandoned whaling station inhabited by a British Antarctic survey team. The determined metal gleaners landed unopposed and brazenly planted the Argentine flag — without informing the British authorities — and then started to aggressively collect metal whaling scrap. The British governor of the Falklands, Rex Hunt, had the scientists confront the scrap harvesters and ask them to have their passports stamped with a British landing permit.
Outraged over the proposed soiling of their passports, they refused, as it would acknowledge the despised British sovereignty. The British governor insisted that the flag be lowered. The Argentines agreed and lowered the flag but still refused to get their landing permits.
In response to the South Georgia invasion, a Royal Navy ice patrol boat, the HMS
Galtieri refused to dial down the macho. No self-respecting member of the junta, having successfully dominated millions of unarmed Argentines, would take orders from the British. The scrap-metal men stayed. The Royal Marines landed and confronted the Argentines. To the juntos this scene was a repeat of the humiliation they suffered in 1833, almost nine short generations ago.
Galtieri countered with an ice-breaker loaded with one hundred marines. They landed the first blows of the war by defeating the British force and occupying the barren island. Casualties during the short, cold fight were minimal, with one Argentine killed and no British deaths. Apparently the soldiers themselves were unaware of the necessity of risking their lives for the worthless islands.
Thatcher, feeling the phantom pangs of empire, assembled an armada to counter the Argentine navy steaming to the Falklands to invade. Meanwhile, the Americans, led by overreaching power-grabber Al Haig, the secretary of state, opened negotiations with the Argentines to forestall potentially embarrassing hostilities between one of its favorite democracies and one of its favorite military dictatorships. The United States also found itself in somewhat of a corner diplomatically: the Monroe Doctrine calls for resisting European aggression in the Western Hemisphere; America’s greatest ally and NATO treaty partner is the U.K., and the United States is bound to defend it if attacked, even if only on the toenail of its former empire.
But the Argentines were not to be deterred. On the eve of the invasion of the main islands, Galtieri refused to take Thatcher crony Ronald Reagan’s phone call until after the invasion had already begun. Take that!
On April 2, 1982, the Argentines moved boldly against the main city, Stanley, really just a small town that was home to about half of the island’s 2,000 people. To capture the island, which was defended by a few dozen troops, the Argentines sailed virtually its entire navy, including its lone aircraft carrier. The British defended with a garrison of seventy lightly armed marines. The British troops, apparently still not convinced that the Falklands were worth losing their lives over, managed to surrender while suffering only one casualty. The war was on, if just barely.
Al Haig was now dispatched to serve as a “shuttle diplomacist” to mediate the dispute. After two weeks of jetting between London and Buenos Aires, he failed to convince Thatcher to accept a deal that resulted in anything less than restored British sovereignty to the islands, despite the embarrassing fact that the Falkland Islanders did not in fact enjoy full British citizenship.
The idea of giving Argentina sovereignty and leasing the islands back from them was floated again. Since the 1970s the British had considered the idea a neat way to resolve the sovereignty situation without reminding the populace that the empire was evaporating. But the lease-back proposals had been rejected flatly by the Falkland Islanders, so the British government was forced to continue supporting yet another worthless overseas territory. In consequence the Falklanders returned to their forgotten existence. But now that the long-expected but completely surprising and unprepared-for invasion had taken place, the Falklands quickly moved from last to first on the importance scale, like a tiny English soccer team rampaging into first place. Thatcher’s view, that “the reputation of the Western world was at stake,” now virtually guaranteed that the conflict would hurtle toward a bloody conclusion unless the gang of Argentine dictators backed off. Fat bloody chance.
About to be outmatched by Galtieri, Thatcher raised her own giant naval armada, including an aircraft carrier battle group, to prove Britain was also capable of a grotesquely overwrought military response. The armada also included Prince Andrew, Duke of York, who was not only the third in line for the Crown but also a crack chopper pilot. The task force of more than one hundred naval vessels set sail for the bottom of the planet with the honor of the Western world — the glory of its World War II role notwithstanding — apparently hanging in the balance.
The severity of the overreaction by the British caught the juntos completely off guard. They had fooled themselves into believing that the British would simply ignore the invasion and let the whole situation fade away. They had no idea that the British were unaware that the limits of their empire were now the English Channel — not the shores of Antarctica.
Apparently, the juntos felt that intimidating their own people into submission would turn Thatcher into a weak-kneed girl. They had underestimated the victors of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Blitz. Throw in Thatcher’s concern that being pushed around by Argentina was akin to empire hara-kiri, and it becomes clear why she couldn’t resist bellying up to the bar with Wellington, Nelson, and Churchill and telling the world the Big Show was on the road again. The British, still mired near the bottom of their postwar malaise, loved it.
At the same time, the Argentines found a new love for General Galtieri. A hundred thousand cheered him, shining amid the glory of defeating a few dozen British marines. Galtieri, the son of poor Italian immigrants, bettered himself by joining the Argentine army as an engineer. He worked his way up the ladder by joining a coup against the government in 1976, stood on the balcony of the palace, and basked in their love. But perhaps underneath their cheering was the relief that the government was now trying to kill people from someplace else.
Following the capture of the islands, Argentina sent thousands of young, poorly armed and barely trained conscripts to defend their new land. They had little understanding of their role and without proper housing or food, they were highly motivated to simply survive. One would expect a military dictatorship to at least get the military part right, but apparently the bar had been set so low that military expertise was optional. The major qualifications were thick mustaches and high self-esteem.
The Argentines set about folding the islands into Argentina. They forced the 2,000 Islanders, who had staunchly held on to their British traditions, into horrifying acts such as driving on the right-hand side of the road and renaming everything in Spanish. The Islanders rebelled against this outrage by continuing to drive on the left side of the roads and speaking English. One must also assume they continued to drink a lot of tea.
The British task force assembled at the mid-Atlantic island of Ascension (a British territory containing a military base run by the Americans) to begin its execution of its boringly named “Operation Corporate.” Haig, still jetting over the Atlantic to tease some personal glory out of the growing mess, failed to secure an agreement.
On April 21 the British, now amped up to full empire mode, began the unnecessary mission of recapturing tiny, remote South Georgia Island and its abandoned whaling station with a force of seventy commandos.
In a preview of the difficulties to come in the last gasp-of-empire, this operation took four days. The first British assault had to be withdrawn when several helicopters crashed in heavy fog into the glacier that dominated the center of the island. The action was halted again when the support ship withdrew in the face of an Argentine submarine found lurking in the area. Finally, on April 25 the British commandos captured the Argentine garrison led by Captain Alfredo Astiz, known locally as the “blond angel of death.” He resisted savagely but managed to surrender without firing a shot. The Argentines were forced to abandon their precious scrap metal.
The British then started the main attack by sending over their long-range Vulcan bombers in something oddly called the “Black Buck Raids.” These bombers, due to Britian’s arthritic post-World War II status, were scheduled to be mothballed without ever dropping a bomb in anger. They required five in-flight refuelings on the way over, an aircraft ballet so complex that the refuelers needed to be refueled themselves, resulting in a total of eleven tankers flying to support two Vulcan bombers. This orgy of in-flight refueling resulted in a single hit on the tarmac of Stanley’s only paved airport.
This one-bomb barrage, however, proved powerful enough to spook the shaky Argentines into pulling all of their airplanes from the Falklands and winging them back to the mainland. Since the distance from the mainland to
