THE FALKLANDS WAR
For all its horrors, the war triggered an extraordinary turnaround in the Falklands’ economic and political fortunes
On 3 April 1982, Margaret Thatcher stood before the House of Commons – its first meeting on a Saturday for 25 years – and announced that Argentina had seized the Falkland Islands.
A day earlier, Argentine forces – on the orders of a notorious and increasingly unpopular military junta – had launched an amphibious assault that rapidly overwhelmed a small garrison of Royal Marines and volunteers of the Falkland Islands Defence Force.
In response, Margaret Thatcher ordered a task force to set sail for the south-west Atlantic, despite the misgivings of several members of her cabinet.
As that task force assembled at its destination, numerous flashpoints erupted between the British and Argentine forces in the skies above and waters surrounding the Falkland Islands. These led to casualties on both sides, including the sinking of several Royal Navy ships and – perhaps most controversially, given its position outside the British-enforced exclusion zone around the islands – the sinking of the Argentine light cruiser the General Belgrano, with the loss of 323 lives.
British forces launched a perilous amphibious landing on 21 May on the beaches around San Carlos Water, a bay that became known as Bomb Alley due to the frequent bombing runs conducted by low-flying aircraft piloted by highly skilled Argentine officers.
Once ashore, the British engaged the enemy in land battles across the islands, at places such as Goose Green – arguably most famous for the death of Lieutenant Colonel H Jones while leading an attack on enemy positions – and summits around the islands’ capital, Stanley.
With the British closing in on the capital, Argentine forces surrendered on 14 June 1982, now known in the Falklands as “Liberation Day”.
The battle to reclaim the Falklands had exacted a heavy price: 649 Argentine dead, along with 255 British military personnel and three civilians from the Falklands. Yet the suffering didn’t end there: the conflict’s psychological toll continues to be felt by veterans, their families and Falkland Islanders to this day. And, as the three boxes on these pages show, the war has shaped the trajectory of Britain, Argentina and the Falklands Islands over the past four decades – in very different ways.
I n the final days of the Falklands
War, a shell slammed into a house during the Royal Navy’s bombardment of Argentine positions around Stanley in advance of the British assault on the capital. For the families sheltering inside, the results were catastrophic. Doreen Bonner and Sue Whitley, a domestic science teacher originally from Wales, were killed instantly. Mary Goodwin, 81, died shortly afterwards. Having struggled to recover from the shock of his wife’s death, Harry Bonner died on New Year’s Eve 1982
– a fourth, albeit unofficial, civilian casualty of the war.
For Falkland Islanders, the British military victory in the south Atlantic in June 1982 represented freedom and liberation from an occupying force. The 14th June is now celebrated as much as it is commemorated as “Liberation Day”. But as the fate of Harry and Doreen Bonner, Sue Whitley and Mary Goodman prove, this was a liberation that came at a cost.
In the days and months that followed the Argentine surrender, any sense of celebration was muted, initially perhaps by the enormity of the experience that islanders had endured, the scale of the rebuilding effort that was now required, and the material impacts of war. In his book Eyewitness Falklands (1982), the BBC radio journalist Robert Fox reported a conversation with fellow broadcaster Patrick Watts, in which the latter expressed the dislocation felt by many islanders after the war. “We’ve still got freedom, but I think we’ve lost the peace of these islands,” Watts said. “Maybe I’ll have to look for another place to find the peace that I’ve always enjoyed here.”
When the exiled governor, Rex Hunt, returned to the islands in July 1982, he observed the initial widespread reluctance of people to talk about their experiences. “For a good year after the war, the Stanley folk did not want to talk about it,” Hunt later recalled in his autobiography. “For the second year they talked of little else. By the third year they were beginning to look ahead.”
By 1985, for the first time in generations, the Falkland Islanders had good reasons to contemplate a more certain and prosperous future.
Before the war there were genuine, existential fears for the future of the Falkland Islands’ community. Years of economic and demographic stagnation had, infamously, prompted the Foreign Office and the British government to explore the gradual transfer of sovereignty to Argentina via “leaseback”.
The war changed all that. The Thatcher government, buoyed by nationalist sentiment at home and new strategic imperatives in the south Atlantic, implemented a raft of policies that would transform the islands. It accelerated land reforms, introduced a new constitution and local self-government, granted increased levels of direct aid, rebuilt Stanley airfield and constructed an entirely new RAF base at Mount Pleasant.
By 1986, the islands were reaping the benefits of an extensive and exclusive fisheries zone. This allowed them to issue licences, thereby creating an entirely new and highly lucrative pillar for the islands’ economy.
Today, that economy, when measured on a per capita basis, significantly outstrips the United Kingdom and is broadly on par with Switzerland or Norway – an extraordinary reversal of fortunes.
Walking the world stage
In their diplomatic relations, too, the Falklands have grown in self-confidence. Eschewing suggestions of a pre-1982 “colonial relationship” with the UK, Falkland Islanders now walk the world stage and represent themselves and their own national interests at the United Nations.
During the premiership of Cristina Kirchner, Argentina began reasserting its sovereignty claims (a process that peaked with the 30th anniversary year in 2012). In response, the Falkland Islands Government held a referendum – complete with an international monitoring mission to increase international acceptance – on the question of the islands’ sovereignty. The result was overwhelming: all but three voters (99.8 per cent) elected to remain a British Overseas Territory.
In this, the 40th anniversary year of the conflict, the Falklands finds itself in the position of both looking back and looking forward. This is not, in itself, an unusual position for a nation engaged in a significant anniversary. However, for the islanders, this means looking back to a brutal “colonial war” that they wish to remember and to commemorate, but which they are increasingly reluctant to be defined by.
The British government, buoyed by nationalist sentiment and new strategic imperatives, implemented a raft of policies that would transform the islands