It’s not justified at all. The Falklands aren’t all that close to Argentina either.
I meant, justified from the British perspective. Technically, the Falklands were British.
Still are. Falklanders are nowadays EU citizens too.
Worked for us (USA) throughout the 1700s and 1800s.:o
I always felt sad about the General Belgrano, above and beyond the tragedy of the trauma and casualties and human cost of the engagement. Nor out of any great sympathy with Argentina, or antipathy to submarine warfare in general… but because before she was Argentinian, she was an American World War II veteran… the USS Phoenix, a Brooklyn class cruiser with 11 battle stars for her combat service.
Quite possibly. Even beyond that they might have won if the Argentines had figured a way to retard their bomb fuses earlier than they did, as their planes were coming in too low to properly arm them before they hit. Antelope was lost while defusing an unexploded bomb. But by my rough count the UK could have potentially lost up to five more major surface combatants and maybe three more landing ships if all the unexploded ordnance had actually gone off as it should have. They definitely would have lost at least a few more - in one attack HMS Plymouth was hit by four different bombs, all of which failed to detonate.
At that I believe at least some of the Exocets failed to detonate as well - they still caused massive damage just by virtue of being giant 700 mph projectiles trailing burning jet fuel. The USS Stark didn’t fare much better against one and it is not like the getting-long-in-the-tooth Exocet is even the most dangerous anti-ship missle out there.
WWII-era General Belgrano was sunk by WWII-era torpedos. The nuclear-powered Conqueror had some onboard, and they were good enough to do the job. Hey ho. Galtieri’s junta got so many of their fellow citizens, and brave pilots, seamen and soldiers killed that they should have dangled from a lamp post.
To be honest I don’t see any degree of justification in Argentina’s claim, absurd or not. The Falklands are not a geographically contiguous part of Argentina or even, as others have pointed out, really all that close; they LOOK close if you’re looking at a map of the whole Atlantic but it’s three hundred miles. Falkland Islanders are determinedly British, and have been for generations.
“But it’s close to us” is a basis for territorial claim that would pretty much doom the world to unceasing war.
See how Maine sticks up between Quebec and New Brunswick? Obviously it’s so close to Canada that Canada should just be able to claim it, right? And don’t get me started on the North-West angle and Alaska. I mean, if a piece of land isn’t even connected to the US, Canada has the better claim, right?
The mk 8 was designed in 1927. *Conqueror *did have modern torpedos but I believe the Captain decided to engage with an unguided weapon because the early model Tigerfish was considered so unreliable.
Incidentally, this war was the beginning for countries like the USA to stop its general position of automatically supporting the military dictators of South and Central America just because they claimed that they were enemies of communism. Turns out that many dictators there did not concentrate on doing just that.
I have an Argentinian aunt (married to one of my uncles) who’s like that about it. She says that’s what she was always taught in school. But it’s not a subject that comes up among us all that often.
Won single-handed by Bill O’Reilly.
I have heard it said that the Argentine Army was poor, it Navy was worse and the Argentine Air Force nearly won the war on its own.
In fairness some of the “air forces” that performed so well were aviators of the Argentine Navy. The Exocet-launching Super Etendards, for instance, were Navy aviators.
There is little else the Navy could have done. They were defenceless against HMS Conqueror.
Gee, do you think?
Let’s see. The people were British subjects, they had been living on the islands for generations, they spoke English, and they lived in a country with a stable currency, an honest court system, and a centuries-long tradition of the rule of law.
And hey, they could exchange that for citizenship in a Spanish-speaking country, whose history is a dreary succession of military coups, with corrupt courts and a currency which periodically becomes worthless. What could possibly be not to like?
You must forgive me, I’m not up on the obvious, but it occurs to me that if Britain had but a single carrier, she would have steamed close to the Falklands tout suite (I love it when you talk French) and unleashed the necessary barrage from the deck rather than that very long, frequent-refueling, daredevil bombing raid.
So why didn’t she? No carriers? No friends with any?
That puzzled me as a teenager watching this whole thing play out in the news. Aren’t we all best buddies? Why didn’t the US and UK get together and kick butt?
I had filed that away as “probably politics” and “stuff a teenager can’t understand”
Nowadays it doesn’t seem much clearer, but I can understand why the US wouldn’t want to jump in on a totally UK concern.
The British deployed two (rather smallish) carriers during the war, HMS Hermes and HMS Invincible. The Black Buck raids were just one relatively small part of the war.
How big does a carrier have to be to carry a plane that can drop a bomb on an island just over the horizon?
Good thing that attitude wasn’t around in 1944.