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2 UK ships collided with eachother in Bahrain
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this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2024
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chapotraphouse
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I'll be honest here, the Falklands operation was one that Britain should not have won on paper against an opponent on the other side of the world with every single geographical advantage but it was executed incredibly well.
The Argentine dictatorship sent conscripts (some as young as 18) to fight against better trained and equipped soldiers. The Argentine junta thought that Chile (which was allied with the US and the UK and had a long history of border conflicts with Argentina) would take advantage of the Falklands conflict and invade southern Patagonia, so the best-equipped and best-trained Argentine soldiers remained on the border with Chile.
Argentina could have won this war if things had gone in their favor, such as if their bombs actually worked and blew up Royal Navy ships, instead of simply not working. They received support from practically all of Latin America + Caribbean nations such as Guyana, and even Cuba and Nicaragua gave money and weapons to Argentina. The same happened with Libya. Venezuela, Guatemala and Brazil, who were close to the Junta, said they would send soldiers to help, but the Junta refused, probably fearing that the US would intervene in support of the UK and because the UK was threatening to bomb Buenos Aires.
Right? Everything in the deck was stacked in favour of Argentina here but the UK successfully played it in a way that made them hesitate, fuck up their decisions, and ultimately lose. Call it hubris and luck or whatever but the UK executed a plan in a conflict it absolutely should not have won that worked very very well.
Scaring argentina into inaction and poor decisions is as much a part of winning the conflict as the material ships and men that were sent.
holy shit i knew Argentina's deployment to the falklands was shit, i thought it was reflective of the junta's terrible management & the whole military was like that. they had better troops and material aid and they just didn't use them ???
ridiculous
They thought Chile was going to invade southern Patagonia, Argentina actually had planned to invade the southern part of Chile if the border negotiations didn't went their way, which is why they were keeping their elite and cold-weather warfare there. Doesn't justify sending young men to die in a stupid war, but it explains why the Argentine Army fought so poorly compared to their Air Force and Navy who actually caused problems to the UK.
The entire army was practically corrupt, the air force actually hit some important ships with bombs, but they didn't explode due to poorly maintained equipment. They even tried to destroy the Royal Navy in Gibraltar using some left-wing guerrillas that the Junta had arrested. But I think they were caught by the Spanish police before they could act.
The whole war was badly planned because they thought that the United Kingdom would simply give up these random islands and everything would be resolved diplomatically. Most of these generals were imprisoned for this and for treating their soldiers badly, some of them literally had nothing to eat while they were freezing on the island, the Royal Army had night vision goggles, while the Argentine Army had nothing to see in the dark.
this is just me but id take my good troops to face the people actually at war with me and send the conscripts to defend against the possibility of war
I have this memory of watching the History Channel show about the Falklands when I was like 9. I was a patriotic empire fanboy back then so I distinctly remember a story from it. I've forgotten exact details and I can't find anything about it otherwise. Anyway, the story is:
Brits faked a radio transmission for the Argentines to intercept.
In the transmission, they pretended to be organising some huge attack with however many destroyers and tonnes of artillery bombardment support, when really they only had a few gunboats.
The Argentines buy the bluff and retreat from the position. A group of dudes wander on up to find it empty, and plant the flag unopposed.
Could be total propaganda, but I swear that's a faithful retelling of it. It was my favourite story for years.
It was backed up by several other ambitious things they did, like bombing the island runways ahead of time by using 9 long range air refuellers to get the bombers a much greater distance than they should have been able to go (something that hadn't been done before). Also the island defence weren't exactly expecting shit so those bombing runs happened completely unopposed as the island troops didn't really know if they were allowed to engage back.
By the time they got their act together the bombers were leaving and ditched into the ocean on the return to be picked up by ships.
A lot of British campaigns use weird tactics and strategies that pay off. They can be quite creative. Quite different to the massive overwhelming saturation tactics of the americans.