The Falklands War

The final death throes of the British Empire and its legacy

It was forty years ago, I was a young man of 24, when the British Falkland Islands were invaded by Argentina’s military junta, desperate to prop up their own failing power base.

200 years of imperial history had claimed the Falklands as part of Britain. The three thousand islanders wished to remain under the auspices of the Union Jack, holders of British passports. The conflict began on 2nd April 1982 when Argentinian forces invaded the island. It ended on 14th June with their surrender of the capital, Port Stanley, to British assault troops. The conflict remains the largest air-naval combat operation between modern forces since the end of World War II.

Once British troops landed on the islands the fighting that ensued became vicious and hand to hand, as if the clock had turned back to 1914–18. Many of the Argentinian troops dug-in on the island were young, bewildered conscripts, shitting themselves as they were bayoneted by our elite professional soldiers and left to drown in the freezing waters that filled the trenches. At the end of the fighting the butcher’s bill amounted to 649 Argentines dead, 255 British dead and 3 islanders. A total of 907.

I remember certain words creeping into our vernacular over the course of that year, such as ‘yomping’ — to describe the long walk of British forces over the islands rough terrain to engage the Argentinian military dug in at various strategic places, and ‘Exocet,’ a type of French built missile that sunk a number of our ships. Names of places such as San Carlos, Goose Green, Bluff Cove, Mount Tumbledown and Port Stanley, hitherto unknown, now rolled off the tongue in bars and houses across the land.

Britain was gripped by a war fever. A jingoistic national pride fuelled the task force and swept it on a six week, 8000 mile voyage down to the South Atlantic waters to reclaim the islands for a small number of settlers. At its victorious conclusion, Thatcher proclaimed,

We have ceased to be a nation in retreat.

And many of the public rejoiced and saw Thatcher as their saviour and victorious war leader. She conjured up the ghost of Churchill, invoking an imperialist vision that…