The Falklands War

Martin Middlebrook

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781781597637
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

A detailed history of the brief 1980s conflict between the UK and Argentina, from the author of The First Day on the Somme. With the surprise Argentine invasion of the remote Falkland Islands on April 2, 1982, the United Kingdom found itself at war. Due to the resolve of a determined Prime Minister and the resourcefulness of the Armed Forces, a task force, codenamed Operation Corporate, was quickly dispatched. Remarkably, just over two months later, the islands were liberated, and the invaders defeated. By any standards this was an outstanding feat of arms, cooperation made possible by political resolve, sound planning, strong leadership and the courage and determination of the British forces. Martin Middlebrook, the renowned military historian, has skillfully weaved the many strands of this extraordinary achievement into a fascinating, thorough and highly readable account. Thanks to his meticulous research he covers action at sea, on the land and in the air as well as providing the strategic overview. The author's use of many first-hand accounts reveals what it was like to be part of this audacious military endeavor. The experiences of the Falkland Islanders during the Argentine occupation are also included. Thirty years on, Middlebrook's The Falklands War is still an authoritative and thoroughly readable account of this historic enterprise. Originally published as Operation Corporate: The Story of the Falklands War, 1982. Praise for The Falklands War "The author's descriptions of confrontations in the air, on the sea and on the various battlegrounds are superb, as are his explanations of the use of new weapons, such as the Sea Harrier and the Exocet missile." — Publishers Weekly

CHAPTER ONE

The Issues

It started at Mullet Creek, one of the innumerable inlets on the coast of the large island of East Falkland. It was about 4.30 a.m. Falkland Island Time, when one of the toughest and best-trained units of the Argentinian armed forces landed at the creek and deployed on the open, level ground around it. The unit involved was the Argentine Navy’s Amphibious Commando Company, roughly the equivalent of the British Special Boat Service. The exact manner in which the Argentinians came ashore is not known; it is probable that an advanced party landed by small boat but the noise of helicopters was heard later. The Argentinian press claimed that the first men were ashore four hours earlier. The commander of the unit was thirty-four years old Capitán de fragata Pedro Giachino (although that exact grade of captain’s rank, also quoted in the Argentinian press, may have been a posthumous promotion, for Pedro Giachino would be one of the first to die in the war for the Falklands).

The sixty or so men (accounts vary) prepared to move. They wore neoprene overalls and dark woollen hats; their faces were smeared with black camouflage cream. They were liberally festooned with weapons and grenades but carried no large packs; their task was to be a brief one. Two assault teams were quickly formed. Lieutenant Bernardo Schweitzer led the larger party off to the north-west, towards the British Royal Marine barracks at Moody Brook; Captain Giachino’s group went north-east, in the direction of Government House at Stanley. The night was dry and calm and there were no obstacles to the progress of the Argentinians over the tough grass and heather which covers most of the Falkland Islands. It was about three miles to each of the objectives. The two parties passed either side of a small rise, Sapper Hill, upon which a solitary Royal Marine had been posted as a look-out. But the Argentinians were moving with professional silence and Marine Michael Berry, who might have made a name for himself for firing the first shot of the Falklands war, saw nothing.

Five hours later, after fierce exchanges of fire at several places, and with Argentinian troops still being landed in large numbers at Stanley airport, His Excellency Rex Hunt, Governor of the Falkland Islands and Commander-in-Chief of the British forces, ordered those forces to cease fire and surrender. Sixty-seven Royal Marines and eleven men of the Royal Navy became prisoners of war, either on that fateful day of 2 April 1982, or when they were rounded up within the next few days. What the Argentinians called Operativo Azul – Operation Blue – was over. Blue had been chosen because that was the colour of the sky and of the sea from where the invading troops descended upon the Falklands and it was also the colour of the robe of the Virgin Mary, the protectress of the Argentinian armed forces. A British crown colony had been seized by force. There had been no ultimatum or declaration of war. Several Argentinians were dead but no Falkland Islanders or British servicemen had been killed, a fact which enabled the Argentinians to claim that they had ‘liberated the Malvinas, peacefully and without bloodshed’. A disconsolate civilian population found their streets filled with armed troops and military vehicles, their governor and protective garrison expelled and a distinctly foreign and unwanted flag flying over them.

The issue, on the face of it, was that of sovereignty. Whose flag was to fly over Governor Hunt’s flagpole? Whose government was going to rule these islands whose population was too small to rule itself? The regular population before the Argentinians came was only about 1,800 people. Comparisons with European statistics are so wide as to be almost ludicrous. The average population density of the United Kingdom is around 600 per square mile; Ireland has just over 100, the Highlands of Scotland less than fifty. The average number of people in the Falklands was less than 0·4 per square mile, and even that figure is misleading because more than half of the Falklanders lived in their capital, Stanley. That two great nations should have fought a war and lost their young men in the 1980s for the right to fly their flag over this land was incomprehensible to most of the rest of the world.

What sort of place was it for which two modern armies fought? (The early history of the islands will be covered later.) The community which lived here before the 1982 war was directly descended from a mainly British stock which was established in the 1830s. The colony became an important coaling station and refuge for the many ships using the Cape Horn route to the Pacific. The men operating the coaling stations took up sheep-farming as a sideline and, when the Falklands coal trade declined after the Panama Canal was opened in 1914, sheep-farming became the main activity. That is why the largest landowner and trader in the Falklands, the Falkland Islands Company, is now a subsidiary of a coal company based in Yorkshire, and why many of the other sheep properties are owned by Yorkshire-based companies or families. There are more than 300 sheep for every Falkland Islander but, even then, the pasture is so poor that the sheep population is calculated in acres per sheep rather than sheep per acre. A good property can carry one sheep for every two and a half acres, but the poorer ones need three acres or more per sheep.

The first thing that a visitor to the islands is asked to explain to ‘the folks at home’is that the Falklands are not a group of storm-tossed rocks in the South Atlantic with a vile climate. It is understandable that anyone with the life-style of a London journalist who was forced to live outdoors for several weeks would paint a bleak picture – but the Falklands climate is none the less a temperate one. The weather rarely gets as cold as in a British winter nor does it get as hot in summer. There is a lot of cloud, but little rainfall (Stanley’s annual average is 25 inches) although there is plenty of what the Irish would call ‘soft weather’. But the wind blows strong and often (mean annual speed 17 knots, compared to 4 knots in Southern England). There is nothing to break the wind; the islands are quite treeless except for a few carefully nurtured specimens in gardens. When the weather clears, however, the scenery is beautiful and the air is crystal clear; there is no pollution.

But life for the Falklanders never was idyllic. All food except mutton and a few vegetables, all building materials except rock, all fuels except peat, had to be imported, some from Britain, some from the mainland of South America, and that usually meant from Argentina. Prices are high; the standard of living is low. The population was steadily falling. Even the sheep industry was in decline under pressure from rising costs, world recession and competition from synthetic fibres. The islands’ second largest source of income before the war was the philatelic ‘industry’, with a team of women in Stanley’s shabby post office (‘Too much wind and not enough paint’ could be Stanley’s motto) forever posting new issues of stamps to customers all over the world. This trade received a huge boost with the war and the income from postage stamps then overtook that of the sheep industry – more than £500 per year for every Falkland islander!

There had been several attempts by the British to stimulate the economy. An airport was built at Stanley, but with a runway only long enough to take medium-haul jets from South America. This allowed a modest tourist trade, with small groups of visitors flying in from Argentina during the summer months to look at the penguin beaches, the peat bogs and generally to enjoy the coast and hills around Stanley. The British Government provided most of the finance for a £1½ million refrigerated mutton-packing plant in a remote place called Ajax Bay so that the Falkland Islands Company and other landowners could send their sheep in for slaughter instead of wasting most of the meat as in the past. The plant was ready for production in 1953 but never worked to full capacity and soon fell into disuse as the men of initiative sent to run it lost heart and drifted away. Many a wounded British or Argentinian soldier would later bless the protection of that abandoned meat plant. There is plenty of fish in the water around the islands but attempts by the British Government to send part of the hard-pressed British fishing fleet to Stanley were rebuffed by the local people. The only fishing was done by Polish and Russian deep-sea trawlers permanently stationed off the islands. There is undoubtedly oil under the waters around the Falklands but no international company would risk an investment in an area where there has been political tension over so many years.

There were two types of community in the Falklands – the village capital of Stanley and the sheep-farming settlements. The local people do not like the term ‘Port Stanley’, so often used in the press; the true name is simply Stanley, although both the British and the local post offices insist on using Port Stanley.Stanley has been described many times as being like a Scottish fishing village, on its fine harbour, and that description cannot be improved. The officials who run the services are either local people or have been sent out from Britain under contract by the Ministry of Overseas Development. The locally born officials are steady, conscientious, decent people who form a stable factor in Falklands society, but they are handicapped by their lack of experience of the modern world. The Falklands, before the war, were really a ‘toy town’ community; the expenditure was little more than that of a parish council in Britain, although the problems were a great deal more varied. Most of the professional and technical expertise was provided by the contract personnel from Britain. The type of person drawn to a life ‘down the other end of the world’ varied. There were some dedicated people who fell in love with the islands, who renewed their contracts several times and who often settled permanently; there were also some duffers who could not get a decent job in Britain and were not much use in Stanley. Over all this ruled the Governor, appointed by the Foreign Office. When the Argentinian soldiers stormed Government House on 2 April 1982, the incumbent was Rex Masterman Hunt, C.M.G., a fifty-five-year-old former R.A.F. pilot (Spitfires, Tempests and Vampires), with thirty-four years in the Overseas Civil Service in Uganda, Borneo, Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaya behind him.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Falklands life is ‘the camp’, which is everything outside Stanley. The word ‘camp’ comes from the Spanish word campaña, meaning an open grassland prairie. The camp is composed entirely of sheep-farming properties. There are no villages; every acre of ground – the hills and coastland as well as the vast open grasslands – forms part of a sheep property, except for a small amount of common land near Stanley. Each property has boundaries of wire fences; these would prove to be useful navigational landmarks for the troops who fought in the war. The largest property – Goose Green – has 400,000 acres but a permanent population of fewer than a hundred people. The much criticized Falkland Islands Company owns nearly half of the Falklands. Most of the remaining properties are owned by the equally criticized absentee landlords abroad. The basis of the criticisms is that the Falkland Islands Company holds a monopoly over much of island trade and that the other owners are only interested in their investment, and return few of the profits to the local community. It is a delicate subject on which I am not qualified to comment but it is part of the background of the land for which Britain and Argentina fought a war. Ironically, two of the island properties in West Falkland – Weddell Island and Saunders Island – were partly owned by Argentinians.

The heart of each property is the settlement – and the names of some of the settlements are now part of Britain’s military history. The manager’s house, the store, the sheep buildings, the shepherd’s houses, a bunkhouse for the visiting workers in the shearing season (mostly from overseas) in the larger settlements, a few tracks between the house, a jetty, a grass airstrip – that is all there is to a Falklands settlement. The manager’s house always has spare bedrooms and most managers are given hospitality allowances for looking after visitors. Comparisons with ‘outback’ life in Australia or New Zealand are strong although the scenery and climate are Hebridean rather than Antipodean. By coincidence, the Falkland accent is very similar to that of New Zealand. There are no roads between the settlements, sometimes a Land-Rover track, but horses and, more recently, trials motorcycles are the best forms of overland transportation. There are plenty of horses ranging free over the properties and brought in for work as required. Radio was the everyday link with the outside world. Everybody heard everything; there are no secrets in the camp. The Falkland Islands Company coaster Monsoonen called every three months to restock the settlement store and take away the wool clip. The main lifeline for emergencies and for passenger travel was the government air service, which had two Beaver float-planes and an Islander for the short grass airstrips, but this form of transport was expensive. A visit to Stanley – for the races, for shopping, or to stay with friends – was a major outing.

There were many drawbacks to settlement life. Many of the communities are tiny, with perhaps no more than thirty people. Life, for the women in particular, was one of stultifying boredom, at least before the introduction of television videotapes, which are exchanged with great enthusiasm. The diet is boring in the extreme; the settlement shop stocks only basics. Meat is mutton ad nauseam, with each family being given one sheep per week; at the end of the week, when the best cuts have gone, the carcass is slung on a fence near the kennels for dog food. The average age of the settlement people is rising; few young men are prepared to accept the life-style. Bad workmen cannot be sacked; there are no replacements. There is no unemployment in the Falklands; most people in Stanley appear to have two or three jobs.

Education faces major problems. A few of the larger settlements have a resident teacher but teachers with good qualifications have been hard to find. Most children had to leave home and come into Stanley for the normal three school terms, living in a boarding house. Local education only goes as far as the O level stage. There is an official link with England whereby East Sussex County Council teach A-level students from the Falklands at a school in Rye, but few families manage to struggle over all the hurdles to achieve this and subject their children to the long absences from home, and fewer still go on to university. This means that the native Falklands population produces few qualified professional people, and many who do succeed are not willing to return home and become the leaders of such an isolated community.

So, that is the place in which the young men died. The village capital of Stanley, the scattered settlements. The wide open spaces with their mostly absent owners. A backward and declining economy, a falling population with few natural leaders and with little ambition to join the modern world. But there is a quality in the Falkland Islands that should not be overlooked. The people are quiet and slow of speech. Most of them are very deep and sincere people who have grown up in their own community where a slow pace of life is the norm, who have no desire to join the rat race, who are satisfied with a simple life and few possessions. They are fanatically pro-British. Their willingness to accept British aid and protection was sometimes derided, but there are as many names on Stanley’s War Memorial – twenty-two for 1914–18 and eighteen for 1939–45 – as on comparable English ones. They have preserved a most English way of life. To walk through Stanley is to walk through an English village of thirty or more years ago; an English visitor can feel far more at home in Stanley than in most large English towns or cities.

*

The claim to sovereignty over the Falklands is held by the people of Argentina with passionate and unswerving intensity. A timetable of events may help to an understanding of that passion. In its compilation, I have tried to be as impartial as possible but I realize that some points will be contested by one side or the other.^*

1540. Up to this date, the islands were uninhabited and undiscovered. There was a possible sighting in this year by a Spanish ship, now referred to as the Incógnita because neither the ship’s nor the captain’s name has survived. This ship was part of a small flotilla dispatched by the Spanish Bishop of Plasencia to trade in the Pacific. After losing her sister ship in the Strait of Magellan and running before a westerly gale, the Incógnita sheltered for ten months in a bay which its log called Bahía de las Zorras – Fox Bay – until the ship sailed back to Spain. It is assumed that a landing was made. The description in the log of the surrounding area is similar to that of the present-day Fox Bay area in the island of West Falkland.

1592. Possible sighting and landing by Captain John Davis in the British ship Desire. This is not accepted by the Argentinians, who say that the ‘sighting’ was invented to enhance Davis’s reputation and that the description of the sighting – by one of Davis’s crew – is full of inconsistencies.

1594. Sighting by the Dutch Captain Sebald de Weert of two outlying islands, the Jasons, to the north-west of the Falklands but forming part of the main island group. This claim is accepted by all parties.

1690. Captain John Strong, in the Welfare from Plymouth, landed in the islands and named the passage between the two main islands Falkland Sound after Viscount Falkland, Treasurer of the Navy (equivalent to the First Sea Lord) of the time. (The Falkland title came from a small village in Fifeshire.) The main group of islands were called Hawkins Land for a short period but then became known as the Falkland Islands.

1698 onwards. Regular visits made by French seal-hunters from Brittany, who named the islands ‘les Îles Malouines’ after their home port of St Malo.

1764. First French settlement under Louis Antoine de Bougainville, a diplomat and sailor who had obtained the permission of the French Government to colonize the islands. A fort and village were built at Port Louis on the main east island (still named Port Louis). A smaller settlement is believed to have been made on the Choiseul Sound in the south of the same island.

1765. Captain John Byron, sent by the British Government, made a landing at Port Egmont in a sheltered bay surrounded by islands just off the northern coast of the main west island and eighty miles away from the French settlement at Port Louis. Captain Byron landed on Saunders Island, raised the Union flag and proclaimed that the whole island group – ‘The Falkland Islands’ – were the property of King George III. He then departed.

1766. Captain Macbride established a settlement of a hundred people in Port Egmont, probably at the place now known as Saunders Settlement. It is believed that the British Government were not aware of the French settlement at Port Louis but a British ship did visit Port Louis soon afterwards and repeated the British claim.

1767. After learning of the French settlement at Port Louis, Spain objected to the French Government, presumably on the basis that the islands were what could now be called an offshore group of the Spanish colony on the mainland known as ‘The Royalty of la Plata’, which covers present-day Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay and parts of Brazil and Chile. The...