Ten Weeks at the Bottom of the World
Two nations that had never declared war on each other sent fleets across thousands of miles of ocean to fight over a windswept archipelago few had ever visited. What began as an invasion ended in a surrender that toppled a dictatorship.
For decades, the Falkland Islands sat at the edge of diplomatic attention, a remote cluster of land in the South Atlantic that both Argentina and the United Kingdom claimed as their own. Argentina insisted the islands, which it called Malvinas, were rightfully its territory, inherited through succession from Spain. Britain maintained it had held sovereignty since 1841, and pointed to the Falkland Islanders themselves, mostly descendants of British settlers, who overwhelmingly wished to remain British. In 1965 the United Nations urged the two sides to settle the dispute, but talks dragged on fruitlessly for years.
Britain's own Foreign and Commonwealth Office privately saw the islands as more trouble than they were worth, a drag on trade ambitions in South America, and was willing to consider ceding them. When this leaked in 1968, a determined parliamentary lobby sympathetic to the islanders blocked the plan. Negotiators tried other routes, including a 1971 Communications Agreement that gave Argentina an airlink to the islands and later a monopoly for its state oil company, YPF, hoping economic dependency might soften islander resistance. It didn't work.
Tensions flared again in 1977, when Prime Minister James Callaghan secretly dispatched two frigates and the nuclear submarine HMS Dreadnought to the South Atlantic under the codename Operation Journeyman, responding to Argentina's occupation of Southern Thule. Talks resumed that December but went nowhere. In 1980, Minister of State Nicholas Ridley tried to sell islanders on a 'leaseback' scheme, an idea that collapsed under fierce local opposition. Ridley reportedly warned colleagues that night: if Britain didn't act, Argentina would invade, and there was little Britain could do about it.
In Argentina, the military government—known as the National Reorganisation Process—was collapsing under economic stagnation and civil unrest. In December 1981, a new junta took power, led by General Leopoldo Galtieri, Air Brigadier Basilio Lami Dozo, and Admiral Jorge Anaya. Anaya, the chief architect of a military solution to the sovereignty dispute, believed Britain would never respond with force. Galtieri's government saw an invasion as a way to rally patriotic sentiment and distract from domestic troubles.
On 2 April 1982, Argentine forces invaded and occupied the Falkland Islands; the next day, they took South Georgia as well. Britain responded on 5 April by dispatching a naval task force to confront the Argentine Navy and Air Force and to retake the islands by amphibious assault. The undeclared war that followed lasted 74 days. Britain secured strong diplomatic backing from the United Nations and the European Economic Community, while economic pressure was applied against Argentina.
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