The Argentines, now on the defensive, cannily rejiggered their air strategy: they would use their French Mirage fighter planes to distract the efficient British Sea Harrier fighters and press their attacks with fighters carrying dangerous French-made Exocet antiship missiles.
The French, normally unembarrassable, were actually ashamed of the fact that they had recently sold planes and missiles to the Argentines and promised Britain — to whom they owed much of their existence as a non-German-speaking sovereign state — they would provide intelligence about the Exocet missiles.
Pressing with their new tactics on May 4, a single Exocet missile fired from an Argentine fighter (refueled in midair by an American-made Hercules tanker) sunk the British destroyer Sheffield, which was part of the “picket line” protecting the aircraft carriers. The armada’s flagship, the aircraft carrier Hermes, narrowly escaped a similar fate. As a result, five nuclear submarines were posted just off Argentina’s shore to serves as a last-ditch effort at deflecting Argentina’s air attacks.
On May 21, 4,000 British commandos finally arrived in force on the northern shore of East Falkland Island in an amphibious landing.
The Argentine air force responded by sinking three British capital ships: the Ardent, Antelope, and Atlantic Conveyor. The sinking of the Atlantic Conveyor was the worst blow: it was carrying all but one of the American-made Chinook helicopters that were to be used to ferry supplies to their counterinvasion troops. The counterinvasion was on, but just barely.
Meanwhile, back in England, the BBC, apparently badly out of practice since the Normandy operation of 1944, offhandedly announced to the world a day before the landing the first target of the British commandos: a position known as Goose Green. Goose Green contained an unpaved airfield on Eastern Falkland Island. The leader of the paratroopers making the assault, Col. “H” Jones, was reportedly incensed over this leak but was killed in the attack before he could file an official protest.
After the tough fight at Goose Green, the British commandos began to advance haphazardly across the fifty-mile-wide island toward the capital, Port Stanley, on the eastern shore. The British found themselves in trouble again due to the difficulty of supplying the troops with the single Chinook helicopter that was left. When some of the commandos commandeered the Chinook (like a stray puppy on a ship, it was referred to affectionately in the British press as “Bravo November”) to leapfrog ahead to occupy some vacant villages without orders, they found themselves strung out halfway to their destination without their equipment. Since the equipment was too heavy to be carried, the soldiers loaded it onto ships for ferrying around the island to their advance position within striking distance of Port Stanley — an inlet named Bluff Cove. A disagreement between British officers during unloading as to the exact debarkation point resulted in such a long delay that the troop carriers were caught unguarded by the highly opportunistic Argentine air force. Fifty British troops died in the bombing and strafing.
The Argentine fighters continually surprised the Royal Navy ships out of nowhere as the British, despite having invented radar, proved incapable of creating an effective air defense. The Argentines sank a landing ship, another destroyer (the sister ship to the Sheffield), and badly damaged two frigates using plain old-fashioned bombs. The carnage could easily have been much worse except for the fact that the Argentine pilots had been dropping the bombs from too low an altitude, with the result that many failed to explode (bombs arm themselves in the air after release). This helpful tidbit of information was subsequently tucked into a British Ministry of Defense press release, and the Argentines, who despite other weaknesses were always good readers of their enemy’s press releases, adjusted the arming of the bombs with effective results.
Widely admired within the junta as one of Argentina’s best torturers and known as the “blond angel of death,” Astiz was given command of the dozens of Argentine troops on South Georgia Island. When the British assaulted the island, Astiz turned into the angel of surrender. He fought savagely until the moment he surrendered to the British without having fired a shot. After his capture, Captain Astiz was separated from his troops and sent to the U.K. for questioning for his role in the Argentine crimes. He was sent back to Argentina a few weeks later after they decided not to prosecute him. In 1990, Astiz was convicted by a French court in absentia for killing potentially dangerous French nuns in Argentina during the 1970s. In 2001 he was placed on the worldwide Human Rights Watch, because Argentina refuses to extradite him to Italy. He remains at large and a threat to a free and British Falklands.
At this point, the British had lost six capital ships and still had yet to attack the main body of mostly green enemy troops protecting Port Stanley. Some leaders may have had second thoughts about the invasion. Not the Iron Lady. She remained undeterred in the face of the ongoing diplomacy to resolve the war. Galtieri still felt the love of his people as the juntos were still able to keep bad news out of the press.
The British finally gathered their forces to press their attack on Port Stanley, supported by naval gunfire and artillery. The Argentine forces, lacking a major air force or navy to evacuate them, were surrounded but continued to perform wonders of dexterity with their Exocets, killing thirteen British on the HMS Glamorgan by launching one of the fifteen-foot missiles from the back of a truck. They also bombed the British troops at night with their British-made Canberra light bombers.
The British, undaunted by these setbacks and confident of their legendary ability to turn disasters into rousing victories, pressed home their attacks on the hilly outlying areas of Port Stanley on the nights of June 11 and 12.
The battles for Mount Harriet and Two Sisters were tough little fights that took naval gunfire and direct assaults to dislodge the Argentines from well-defended positions behind minefields. The Battle of Mount Longdon was the bloodiest with twenty-three British killed and forty-three wounded. The Argentines lost thirty-one and more than one hundred wounded in this fight.
The next night, the final two battles were fought for the hills directly overlooking Stanley. The Argentine defenders finally took flight but only after facing a British bayonet charge. The bulk of the Argentine conscripts, still cold and hungry from exposure, nearly 10,000 in number, defied Galtieri’s order to fight and surrendered en masse on June 14 without engaging the British at all. The Falklands were British once more.
WHAT HAPPENED AFTER
Back in Britain, everyone loved Maggie. The victory propelled the Iron Lady to new heights of power and popularity. British troops paraded through the streets of London as victors for the first time since the end of World War II. The military in Britain received the respect from the population that it had not seen in decades. The victory provided a muchneeded shot of optimism into the entire country, and Thatcher rode the victory to a huge Conservative Party majority in Parliament and nearly a decade as prime minister.
The defeat hit the Argentines hard. Little news of the impending defeat reached the public, and the surrender came as a blow to the country’s inflamed psyche. The same crowds that had cheered Galtieri now turned on him.