Stupid Wars : A Citizen's Guide to Botched Putsches, Failed Coups, Inane Invasions, and Ridiculous Revolutions

by Ed Strosser

  Galtieri countered with an ice-breaker loaded with one hundred marines. They landed the first blows of the war by defeating the British force and occupying the barren island. Casualties during the short, cold fight were minimal, with one Argentine killed and no British deaths. Apparently the soldiers themselves were unaware of the necessity of risking their lives for the worthless islands.

  Thatcher, feeling the phantom pangs of empire, assembled an armada to counter the Argentine navy steaming to the Falklands to invade. Meanwhile, the Americans, led by over­reaching power-grabber Al Haig, the secretary of state, opened negotiations with the Argentines to forestall poten­tially embarrassing hostilities between one of its favorite de­mocracies and one of its favorite military dictatorships. The United States also found itself in somewhat of a corner diplo­matically: the Monroe Doctrine calls for resisting European aggression in the Western Hemisphere; America’s greatest ally and NATO treaty partner is the U.K., and the United States is bound to defend it if attacked, even if only on the toenail of its former empire.

  But the Argentines were not to be deterred. On the eve of the invasion of the main islands, Galtieri refused to take Thatcher crony Ronald Reagan’s phone call until after the invasion had already begun. Take that!

  On April 2, 1982, the Argentines moved boldly against the main city, Stanley, really just a small town that was home to about half of the island’s 2,000 people. To capture the island, which was defended by a few dozen troops, the Ar­gentines sailed virtually its entire navy, including its lone air­craft carrier. The British defended with a garrison of seventy lightly armed marines. The British troops, apparently still not convinced that the Falklands were worth losing their lives over, managed to surrender while suffering only one ca­sualty. The war was on, if just barely.

  Al Haig was now dispatched to serve as a “shuttle diplomacist” to mediate the dispute. After two weeks of jetting between London and Buenos Aires, he failed to convince Thatcher to accept a deal that resulted in anything less than restored British sovereignty to the islands, despite the embar­rassing fact that the Falkland Islanders did not in fact enjoy full British citizenship.

  The idea of giving Argentina sovereignty and leasing the islands back from them was floated again. Since the 1970s the British had considered the idea a neat way to resolve the sovereignty situation without reminding the populace that the empire was evaporating. But the lease-back proposals had been rejected flatly by the Falkland Islanders, so the British government was forced to continue supporting yet another worthless overseas territory. In consequence the Falklanders returned to their forgotten existence. But now that the long-expected but completely surprising and unprepared-for inva­sion had taken place, the Falklands quickly moved from last to first on the importance scale, like a tiny English soccer team rampaging into first place. Thatcher’s view, that “the reputation of the Western world was at stake,” now virtually guaranteed that the conflict would hurtle toward a bloody conclusion unless the gang of Argentine dictators backed off. Fat bloody chance.

  About to be outmatched by Galtieri, Thatcher raised her own giant naval armada, including an aircraft carrier battle group, to prove Britain was also capable of a grotesquely overwrought military response. The armada also included Prince Andrew, Duke of York, who was not only the third in line for the Crown but also a crack chopper pilot. The task force of more than one hundred naval vessels set sail for the bottom of the planet with the honor of the Western world — the glory of its World War II role notwithstanding — apparently hanging in the balance.

  The severity of the overreaction by the British caught the juntos completely off guard. They had fooled themselves into believing that the British would simply ignore the invasion and let the whole situation fade away. They had no idea that the British were unaware that the limits of their empire were now the English Channel — not the shores of Antarctica.

  Apparently, the juntos felt that intimidating their own people into submission would turn Thatcher into a weak-kneed girl. They had underestimated the victors of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Blitz. Throw in Thatcher’s concern that being pushed around by Argentina was akin to empire hara-kiri, and it becomes clear why she couldn’t resist belly­ing up to the bar with Wellington, Nelson, and Churchill and telling the world the Big Show was on the road again. The British, still mired near the bottom of their postwar malaise, loved it.

  At the same time, the Argentines found a new love for General Galtieri. A hundred thousand cheered him, shining amid the glory of defeating a few dozen British marines. Galtieri, the son of poor Italian immigrants, bettered himself by joining the Argentine army as an engineer. He worked his way up the ladder by joining a coup against the government in 1976, stood on the balcony of the palace, and basked in their love. But perhaps underneath their cheering was the relief that the government was now trying to kill people from someplace else.

  Following the capture of the islands, Argentina sent thou­sands of young, poorly armed and barely trained conscripts to defend their new land. They had little understanding of their role and without proper housing or food, they were highly motivated to simply survive. One would expect a mili­tary dictatorship to at least get the military part right, but apparently the bar had been set so low that military expertise was optional. The major qualifications were thick mustaches and high self-esteem.

  The Argentines set about folding the islands into Argen­tina. They forced the 2,000 Islanders, who had staunchly held on to their British traditions, into horrifying acts such as driving on the right-hand side of the road and renaming ev­erything in Spanish. The Islanders rebelled against this out­rage by continuing to drive on the left side of the roads and speaking English. One must also assume they continued to drink a lot of tea.

  The British task force assembled at the mid-Atlantic island of Ascension (a British territory containing a military base run by the Americans) to begin its execution of its boringly named “Operation Corporate.” Haig, still jetting over the Atlantic to tease some personal glory out of the growing mess, failed to secure an agreement.

  On April 21 the British, now amped up to full empire mode, began the unnecessary mission of recapturing tiny, remote South Georgia Island and its abandoned whaling sta­tion with a force of seventy commandos.

  In a preview of the difficulties to come in the last gasp-of-empire, this operation took four days. The first British as­sault had to be withdrawn when several helicopters crashed in heavy fog into the glacier that dominated the center of the island. The action was halted again when the support ship withdrew in the face of an Argentine submarine found lurk­ing in the area. Finally, on April 25 the British commandos captured the Argentine garrison led by Captain Alfredo Astiz, known locally as the “blond angel of death.” He resisted savagely but managed to surrender without firing a shot. The Argentines were forced to abandon their precious scrap metal.

  The British then started the main attack by sending over their long-range Vulcan bombers in something oddly called the “Black Buck Raids.” These bombers, due to Britian’s arthritic post-World War II status, were scheduled to be mothballed without ever dropping a bomb in anger. They required five in-flight refuelings on the way over, an aircraft ballet so complex that the refuelers needed to be refueled themselves, resulting in a total of eleven tankers flying to support two Vulcan bomb­ers. This orgy of in-flight refueling resulted in a single hit on the tarmac of Stanley’s only paved airport.

  This one-bomb barrage, however, proved powerful enough to spook the shaky Argentines into pulling all of their air­planes from the Falklands and winging them back to the mainland. Since the distance from the mainland to the is­lands would prevent the Argentine planes from lingering over the battlefields for more than a few minutes, the cold and hungry Argentine conscripts hunkered down around Stanley could expect an unchallenged British blitz.

  Building on this faint momentum, the HMS Conqueror, a British submarine, sank the Argentine light cruiser General
Belgrano, killing 323 crewmen, just outside the exclusion zone Thatcher had created around the islands. The Belgrano was a World War II–vintage survivor (American) of Pearl Harbor and, perhaps fittingly, was sunk by World War II– vintage (British) torpedoes. Half of the Argentine casualties in the war were due to the sinking of the Belgrano. The Ar­gentine navy quickly followed its air force back to the main­land, never to reappear. Their ground forces, denied air support, were suddenly without assistance of any kind except for nighttime supply flights into Port Stanley’s airfield by C-130 Hercules planes, the American-made mainstay of junta air forces around the world.

  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.

  COMMANDER ALFREDO ASTIZ

  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.

  The military failure proved the undoing of the junta and Galtieri. The Argentines suffered 700 dead and 1,300 wounded in their bid to fight a major leaguer. The senseless waste of life and the ignominious s
urrender signaled the total failure of the junta in a way that the dirty war had failed to do and energized the cowed Argentine citizens into finally standing up to the junta.

  Strikes and demonstrations ousted Galtieri as president on June 17 when his fellow generals voted him out. This led to the end of the junta and the country’s descent into democ­racy. Elections were held in 1983. Eventually Galtieri was tried for his role in the junta’s crimes and sent to prison in 1986. He died in 2003.

  As for the people of the Falklands, their rocky islands fi­nally became a tourist attraction for Britons willing to travel to the ends of the earth for a faint taste of fading glory. In 1983 Falkland Islanders were restored to full British citizen­ship, and there have been no serious discussions between Argentina and Britain over sovereignty of the islands. A large garrison protects the islands from any further outbreak of Argentine macho.

  FIFTEEN.

  THE U.S. INVASION OF GRENADA:1983

  In 1980, the American people elected Ronald Reagan presi­dent.

  He was elected partly based on his promise of making America proud again after the long nightmare of the Vietnam War and the humiliation of the 444-day hostage drama in Iran. A former actor fondly remembered as playing a straight man to a chimp, Reagan felt empowered to accomplish his mission by attacking the Communists wherever they popped up using whatever means he could muster. He was busy.

  Reagan’s dream required a vastly expanded military. He spent billions to add ships, bombers, tanks, and missiles to the U.S. arsenal. Armed with these new toys, the military leaders could hardly wait to try them out for real on a “de­serving” country.