Ed Strosser - Stupid Wars - A Citizen's Guide to Botched Putsches, Failed Coups, Inane Invasions, and Ridiculous Revolutions

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 The first British as­sault had to be withdrawn when several helicopters crashed in heavy fog into the glacier that dominated the center of the island.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 the is­lands would prevent the Argentine planes from lingering over the battlefields for more than a few minutes, the cold and hungry Argentine conscripts hunkered down around Stanley could expect an unchallenged British blitz.

Building on this faint momentum, the HMS Conqueror , a British submarine, sank the Argentine light cruiser General Belgrano , killing 323 crewmen, just outside the exclusion zone Thatcher had created around the islands. The Belgrano was a World War II–vintage survivor (American) of Pearl Harbor and, perhaps fittingly, was sunk by World War II– vintage (British) torpedoes. Half of the Argentine casualties in the war were due to the sinking of the Belgrano . The Ar­gentine navy quickly followed its air force back to the main­land, never to reappear. Their ground forces, denied air support, were suddenly without assistance of any kind except for nighttime supply flights into Port Stanley’s airfield by C-130 Hercules planes, the American-made mainstay of junta air forces around the world.

The Argentines, now on the defensive, cannily rejiggered their air strategy: they would use their French Mirage fighter planes to distract the efficient British Sea Harrier fighters and press their attacks with fighters carrying dangerous French-made Exocet antiship missiles.

The French, normally unembarrassable, were actually ashamed of the fact that they had recently sold planes and missiles to the Argentines and promised Britain — to whom they owed much of their existence as a non-German-speak­ing sovereign state — they would provide intelligence about the Exocet missiles.

Pressing with their new tactics on May 4, a single Exocet missile fired from an Argentine fighter (refueled in midair by an American-made Hercules tanker) sunk the British de­stroyer Sheffield , which was part of the “picket line” protect­ing the aircraft carriers. The armada’s flagship, the aircraft carrier Hermes , narrowly escaped a similar fate. As a result, five nuclear submarines were posted just off Argentina’s shore to serves as a last-ditch effort at deflecting Argentina’s air attacks.

On May 21, 4,000 British commandos finally arrived in force on the northern shore of East Falkland Island in an am­phibious landing.

The Argentine air force responded by sinking three Brit­ish capital ships: the Ardent , Antelope, and Atlantic Con­veyor . The sinking of the Atlantic Conveyor was the worst blow: it was carrying all but one of the American-made Chinook helicopters that were to be used to ferry supplies to their counterinvasion troops. The counterinvasion was on, but just barely.

Meanwhile, back in England, the BBC, apparently badly out of practice since the Normandy operation of 1944, off­handedly announced to the world a day before the landing the first target of the British commandos: a position known as Goose Green. Goose Green contained an unpaved airfield on Eastern Falkland Island. The leader of the paratroopers making the assault, Col. “H” Jones, was reportedly incensed over this leak but was killed in the attack before he could file an official protest.

After the tough fight at Goose Green, the British comman­dos began to advance haphazardly across the fifty-mile-wide island toward the capital, Port Stanley, on the eastern shore. The British found themselves in trouble again due to the dif­ficulty of supplying the troops with the single Chinook heli­copter that was left. When some of the commandos commandeered the Chinook (like a stray puppy on a ship, it was referred to affectionately in the British press as “Bravo November”) to leapfrog ahead to occupy some vacant villages without orders, they found themselves strung out halfway to their destination without their equipment. Since the equip­ment was too heavy to be carried, the soldiers loaded it onto ships for ferrying around the island to their advance position within striking distance of Port Stanley — an inlet named Bluff Cove. A disagreement between British officers during unload­ing as to the exact debarkation point resulted in such a long delay that the troop carriers were caught unguarded by the highly opportunistic Argentine air force. Fifty British troops died in the bombing and strafing.

The Argentine fighters continually surprised the Royal Navy ships out of nowhere as the British, despite having in­vented radar, proved incapable of creating an effective air defense. The Argentines sank a landing ship, another de­stroyer (the sister ship to the Sheffield ), and badly damaged two frigates using plain old-fashioned bombs. The carnage could easily have been much worse except for the fact that the Argentine pilots had been dropping the bombs from too low an altitude, with the result that many failed to explode (bombs arm themselves in the air after release). This helpful tidbit of information was subsequently tucked into a British Ministry of Defense press release, and the Argentines, who despite other weaknesses were always good readers of their enemy’s press releases, adjusted the arming of the bombs with effective results.

Widely admired within the junta as one of Argentina’s best tortur­ers and known as the “blond angel of death,” Astiz was given command of the dozens of Argentine troops on South Georgia Island. When the British assaulted the island, Astiz turned into the angel of surrender. He fought savagely until the moment he surrendered to the British without having fired a shot. After his capture, Captain Astiz was separated from his troops and sent to the U.K. for questioning for his role in the Argentine crimes. He was sent back to Argentina a few weeks later after they decided not to prosecute him. In 1990, Astiz was convicted by a French court in absentia for killing potentially dangerous French nuns in Argentina during the 1970s. In 2001 he was placed on the world­wide Human Rights Watch, because Argentina refuses to extradite him to Italy. He remains at large and a threat to a free and British Falklands.

At this point, the British had lost six capital ships and still had yet to attack the main body of mostly green enemy troops protecting Port Stanley. Some leaders may have had second thoughts about the invasion. Not the Iron Lady. She remained undeterred in the face of the ongoing diplomacy to resolve the war. Galtieri still felt the love of his people as the juntos were still able to keep bad news out of the press.