Galtieri's seizure of the Falklands could not have been worse timed for Margaret Thatcher. Race riots in English cities, high unemployment and back bench grumbling had eroded her dominance over the Conservative Party and the House of Commons. After the Falkands fell she fired her Foreign Secretary, useful and necessary under the circumstances, but had to accept as a replacement Francis Pym(1) whose hawkishness towards the Argentineans remained in doubt until war's end. Thatcher and Pym shared a mutual dislike and mistrust. Her Foreign Office had commited that gravest of burocratic blunders, it had gestated a minor perplexity into a major crisis. She could not repose confidence in her intelligence community after its failure to assess accurately Argentina's overt preparations for war. A new political party, the Social Democrats, had risen to a 40% approval rating in nation wide polls and threatened a major victory over the Conservatives at looming local elections. Unlike Churchill, Hume or Macmillan she had never participated in a war let alone led her country in an armed conflict(2).
As soon as the very visible and expensive preparations for war were put in train allies and opponents alike clamored for quick results(3). But Galtieri and his captured kelpers were not Thatcher's sole points of concern. It was not altogether clear that Britain's professional military were of one mind about the repossession's chances of success(4). Senior military men abroad issued mordant warnings about an operation for which British forces had neither the equipment nor the expertise to complete. Setting aside her allies' skepticism and her enemies' hostility Thatcher plunged her dwindling political capital into a distant venture of whose causes and possible results few knew much(5). A war cabinet was formed(6) and the dogs of war began to bay.
Major fleet units homebound from spring exercises near Gibraltar reversed course, loaded war stores and sailed southwards. Other Royal Navy ships were put on four hours notice to move. The navy's tiny amphibious staff, moribund after cuts in its budget, cobbled together ships, men and plans for an opposed landing over unknown beaches. The Royal Marines' 3 Commando Brigade, Britain's sole amphibious force, was put on 72 hours notice to move and all its officers and men recalled from leave, schools and even a marriage. With all of that many weeks would pass before troops could assault Port Stanley. Meantime Thatcher needed a dramatic event to keep her cabinet with her, to put Galtieri on the defensive, to still her domestic opponents, to preserve US support, to rally the free world to her side and to convince the captive kelpers that they might get their freedom back. The cur dogs already nipped at her heels(7). James Callaghan, Labor's spokesman on defense, accused Thatcher of a "gross blunder" in letting the Falklands fall(8). From Thatcher's own party the Falkland Islands lobby shouted: "I told you so" so stridently that a Foreign Office spokesman was moved to retort that: "Air Commodore Frow (the lobby's spokesman) has no official standing whatever.The crisis is entirely a matter for the British government."(9) There was the Argentinean angle too. If despite his self-adulatory bluster Galtieri could be persuaded that Thatcher meant business he might heed the provisions of UN Resolution 502 and quit the islands before bloodshed began.
Anthony ParsonsBy 3 April 1982, Anthony Parsons, Britain's delegate to the UN, had shepherded through the UN's Security Council Resolution 502. That called for Argentina's immediate removal of its armed forces from the Falklands as a condition precedent to negotiation about Falklands' future sovereignty. Parson's brilliant diplomacy at the UN, a bare few hours after the Argentina's invasion, put the Falklands center stage in world affairs and convinced a heterogeneous assortment of 3rd world, industrialized and non English speaking states to oppose in public the junta's military adventurism. Parson's diplomatic triumph was complete. Absent Argentina's removal of its military forces Britain could now take military steps to retake the Falklands.The Soviet Union failed to veto the British resolution and non-aligned states mutely resisted the Argentinean ambassador's pleas for their help. Much to the surprise of Argentina's foreign office settlement of border disputes by armed force was not a precedent modern nation states could stomach. The reasons were clear. Even passive approval of Argentina's invasion would condone military initiatives almost anywhere else along the Amur River for example where China and the Soviet Union contested in a not always cold war(10). Thenceforth Argentina's diplomacy remained tentative and defensive.
Passage of Resolution 502 gave Thatcher room and time to maneuver, but not much. She could sequester Argentina's holdings in London, stop trade between the two countries and lobby for other nations' support. Yet no cheap or easy answers to repossession of the islands presented themselves. She could not attack Argentinean ships on the high seas because no war had been declared. She could not bomb the Argentinean mainland because so disproportionate a response would turn new found allies against her and she could not yet seize the Falklands because Britain's military was not in place(11). Parson's victory at the UN gave his Prime Minister a decaying asset that delay or a false step could quickly squander. Now that Thatcher had negotiating momentum she had to follow up Parson's triumph with military accomplishment that could not await the month long marshalling of Britain's invasion force. The British middle classes whose wrath at Argentina's theft the Prime Minister had so deftly exploited could not long exist on rhetoric; they needed blood. In twenty predominantly labor boroughs 24% of potential Tory voters considered the Falklands crisis as the most important or an important factor in the upcoming elections(12). Had it not happened Argentina's invasion of South Georgia would have to have been invented.
Captain James CookThe seismic forces that split South America from Africa eons ago forced layers of material upwards from the earth's crust; a few broke the oceans' surface. One such is South Georgia, a mountainous mass of 1450 sq. miles shaped like a North West to South East hot dog, half permanently covered in ice. Although a merchant captain, de la Roche, may have sighted the island in 1675 Captain James Cook RN in Resolution was first to set foot on it. He named that desolate mass and claimed it for the crown on January 17,1775. At 54 deg S and 36 deg W South Georgia falls victim to some of the world's worst weather. "The wild rocks raised their lofty summits till they were lost in the clouds and the valleys laid buried in everlasting snow. Not a tree or shrub was to be seen, no not even big enough to make a toothpick. I landed in three different places and took possession of the country in his Majesty's name under a discharge of arms(13)." Until the late 20th century no one else coveted the island and the name and ownership stuck.
South GeorgiaPitiless weather and jagged topography, many mountains surpass five thousand feet, make the island impassable for most of its length to all but the most intrepid. Storms with 100 MPH winds are common. Violent downdrafts swoop from peaks down to ground level with little warning and savage one part of the island while leaving others in frigid calm. Ice bergs calved from sheer cliffs compete in size and menace with their larger cousins floating up from the Antarctic. Because these formations do not always show on radar screens navigation inshore, especially at night when chunks of ice slink in unnoticed, is a hazardous affair. Rubble from the wind scoured mountain sides renders them unstable underfoot. Climbers are few. Trees do not grow. Tussock grass feeds rats and a few thousand reindeer while seals, penguins and a few dozen species of bird live off the riches of the sea.
By 1960 modern methods of capturing whales en masse ended South Georgia's only economic role because there were few whales left to kill and little whale blubber left to be rendered in Grytviken's giant stills(14). A benign if unintended consequence of this sad practice occurred here. Killing whales beyond their rates of reproduction caused an overabundance of krill, a nutritional bonanza for South Georgia's seals and penguins whose numbers have soared. By 1965 the whalers, mostly Norwegian some Japanese and Russians, had left for good; their machinery rusted into scrap. Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the odd lost mariner and a few daring travelers clustered around Grytviken, Husvik, Leith and Stromness, the only settlements worth the name. The Survey's head was the island's de facto chief magistrate, port captain, post master and immigration agent. All in all South Georgia was not a fortuitous place to begin a war.
Argentina's capture of South Georgia, its small Royal Marines party and scientists from the BAS was at first blush a public humiliation for Thatcher. (see The Argentine Invasion of South Georgia ). In fact Argentina's occupation presented her a needed benison because recapture of that island became an immediate possibility. The defeat of ten thousand Argentinean troops in East Falkland eight hundred miles to the north would take blood, treasure and time. A hundred or so unwary Argentinean troops skulking out of the wind in wooden houses was another matter. A good chance existed that South Georgia could be repurchased on the cheap.
Admiral FieldhouseThatcher ordered Admiral Fieldhouse on 7 April 1982 to reestablish British presence on South Georgia(15). The order was based on a false premise because British subjects, members of the British Antarctic Survey, remained at large in several posts around the island. A backward look at British military policy in the 1970's is needed here. It must be recalled that the costs of maintaining large ground and air forces on NATO's central front and ballistic missile submarines at sea had foreclosed solo British operations outside Europe. The men, equipment and planning for such ventures simply did not exist. Successive governments and their Treasuries had not given the Ministry of Defense enough resources to match commitments, a free Falklands for example, that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office had kept in place. As a consequence the fragile command and control structure for the forces intended to seize the Falklands was an unpracticed expedient. The recapture of South Georgia burdened an embryonic organization, itself unsure of its specific goal and the means at hand to achieve it, with a task that had not been tried since WW2, the expulsion of invaders from British territory(16).
On 7 April 1982 Colonel Richard Preston, Chief of Staff of the Royal Marines' Commando Forces, telephoned LtCol. Nick Vaux CO of the Royal Marines' 42 Commando to set aside one infantry company, equipped for Arctic warfare, with supporting elements for a move on six hours notice to Ascension Island(17). From there the tiny marine force, all arctic trained, with additions from the Special Boat Service (SBS) and the Army's Special Air Service (SAS) would sail south into winter waters in order to recapture an unfamiliar island from a hostile force of unknown size and capability. Vaux nominated his second in command Major J. M. G. Sheridan RM as land commander of this force.
Major J. M. G. Sheridan RMThough best suited for the job, Sheridan's absence from Vaux' command as it organized itself for the attack on Falklands deprived his unit and 3 Commando Brigade of a critical human asset. Vaux sensed that invasion of the Falklands, if it came to that, would be a boots in the mud affair and that victory would hang on basic soldiering in the wet and cold rather than on the high-tech gadgetry bought for combat on the North European plain. Vaux' 2nd in command fit Preston's requirements precisely. Sheridan, son and grandson of Indian Army officers, was the quintessential field grade infantry officer. He had entered the Royal Marines at age eighteen, received his commission and led troops in Aden, Borneo, Malaya, Oman and in the UK. He was a graduate of Camberly Staff College and had helped to organize and train a Commando for the Imperial Iranian Navy. A world class mountaineer and skier, he had been a member of the British Olympic Biathon team from 1969 to 1972.
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