The Falklands War

I’m overdue for another Obscure War Blog, but this one should be within most of my readers’ lifetimes and memories.  It’s certainly within mine. 

Why?  Well, I was at the clinic the other week taking my mom in for service, and the waiting room had a rare concession to male interest: the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine, which can be counted upon for at least one article on military weapons.  In this case, two:  the Krag-Jorgensen rifle and “weapons of the Falklands War” (maybe it was a 2012 issue). 

The K-J was the rifle most American soldiers carried in the brief Spanish-American War in 1898.  It proved so inferior to the Mauser rifles the “can we surrender quickly enough?” Spaniards carried that the US military was induced to copy that for the 1903 Springfield.  Copied so well, in fact, that Mauser sued – successfully – and we were forced to pay them a royalty.   The royalty was suspended during the hostilities with the Kaiser’s boys, during which we shot at them with Springfields and they shot back at us with Mausers.  Anyhow.

Equally humorous – at least to me – was this article, because it seems the Argentines had been heavily armed with FN FALs, Mirages and Exocets.   The former is the familiar British infantry rifle of the post WWII era, and the Mirages and Exocets came from France.

Back in 1833, the Brits kicked the Argentines off the islands and claimed them for themselves.  The islands, way down near Antarctica and off the coast of Argentina, aren’t particularly special in and of themselves, and even Captain Cook remarked that they were “not worth the discovery.”

Fast forward to March 19, 1982, and Argentine Junta General Leopoldo Galtieri decided to distract the otherwise unhappy Argentines by correcting this insult – and taking back these little islands.  Presumably he assumed that the Brits either wouldn’t notice or wouldn’t care.   WRONG.

The British Prime Minister, an iron woman we know as Margaret Thatcher, couldn’t let this stand.  She sent a task force down there to retrieve these lonely, desolate rocks back for England.   By June 14, the Brits had spanked the Argentines enough to surrender.

The overall situation was that it was only a matter of time before sufficient bad-ass SAS/Commando Brits were able to land on the island and overwhelm the Argentine conscripts unfortunate enough to bump up against them.  But some drama and inconvenience had been caused by the Argentine air force, equipped with French-made Dassault Mirages and some pretty nifty (and embarrassingly effective) anti-ship Exocet missiles.   Among other Royal Navy casualties, this force managed to sink the British ship the Atlantic Conveyor, which had all the helicopters the Brits were counting on to quickly go across the island.  With that ship down and the copters underwater, the Brits were forced to walk across the island on foot (“yomping”, they called it).  Nevertheless, despite lots of foul-ups, which appear to be from heavily “misunderestimating” the Argentines’ air capabilities – thanks to an accurate but misleading assesessment of the Argentine ground troops’ quality relative to that of the Brits’ all-volunteer commando units - the Brits got the job done.

I recall this in school – my friends Geoff and John made up a phony travel guide for a French class project.  We were all rooting for the British, of course, vicariously sharing their jingoism until our own turn came the year later with Grenada. 

Not all the Brits were excited about this little victory.  Roger Waters exhumed much of the substandard Wall material into a lavishly self-indulgent album, much of which was Falklands-related (“Galtieri took the UNION JACK!”) called The Final Cut, the last Pink Floyd album with his name on it.  The war itself, in addition to being briefly described in the American Rifleman article, also merits a chapter in the previously mentioned Stupid Wars book by Ed Strosser and Michael Prince.