The scrap operation that triggered quite a scrap.
Britain eventually retook the islands, at a cost of 256 men killed.
Britain calls them the Falklands. Argentina knows them as Las Malvinas. In 1982 the centuries-old dispute between the two countries over the remote South Atlantic islands was heating up. Argentina’s ruling junta hoped to regain control of the British-occupied islands to help restore its fading popularity. But the possibility of war still seemed distant.
Then a wealthy Buenos Aires scrap dealer named Constantino Davidoff sent a group of workmen to salvage scrap metal from an abandoned whaling station on one of the southernmost of the contested islands. He had a contract with the owner and permission from the British embassy to be there.
But when Davidoff’s men raised an Argentine flag on the island, it caught the attention of scientists from the British Arctic Survey Team. They reported to British authorities that there had been an Argentine landing.
The British, suspicious that something was up, sent a note of protest to Argentina, and dispatched the warship Endurance to watch over the scrap dealers. Argentina sent a warship of its own. The British landed marines. The Argentines sent more ships.
Perhaps this was just the pretext Argentina was looking for. Perhaps it inflamed passions beyond the point of no return. In any case, less than a week later, Argentina invaded the islands.
The salvage operation was over. The war was on.
Nearly seven hundred Argentine troops were killed in the war. They are the only Argentines who have been allowed to stay on the windswept islands, which are still the subject of bitter disagreement between the two nations.
“IF I HAD NEVER BEEN BORN, ARGENTINA AND GREAT BRITAIN WOULD NOT BE FIGHTING.”
— CONSTANTINO DAVIDOFF, SIX WEEKS INTO THE WAR
The junta saw the invasion as a way to appeal to patriotic pride and distract people’s attention away from 600 percent inflation and other economic problems. They did not expect the British would be willing or able to conduct a major military effort eight thousand miles from London, over a group of windswept islands inhabited by only two thousand people.
The most well-known warrior in the British invasion force was HRH Prince Andrew, son of Queen Elizabeth II, brother of Prince Charles, and known to his fellow helicopter pilots simply as “H.”