TRASHFUTURE - *UNLOCKED* Britainology 7: The Falklands War

Episode Date: August 26, 2021

On this unlocked Britainology we are joined by Alice to discuss the 1982 Falklands War. Why has it permanently lodged in the psyche of the Boomers? Why do people care about these rocks in the middle of the South Atlantic? Why did a British task force commander decide to explode himself in order to dislodge a machine gun position? You will be able to learn all of this and more by listening. If you want more Britainology, you can get one per month (along with regular bonus episodes) for $5 a month--and if you want 2 a month, you can get them on the $10 tier. Sign up here:  https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture If you’re in the UK and want to help Afghan refugees and internally displaced people, consider donating to Afghanaid: https://www.afghanaid.org.uk/ *MILO ALERT* see Milo perform in London here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/milo-edwards-voicemail-preview-tickets-167077291677 *TF LIVE SHOW ALERT* We have a live show in London on September 1! Patrons have a discount so check the posts if you are a subscriber! https://www.trashfuture.co.uk/event-details/trashfuture-live-at-vauxhall-comedy-club-1-9-21 *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello and welcome back to this we're not welcome back just welcome to this I guess welcome back to the series but welcome for the first time to this episode seven of Britannology where we're going to be talking about a subject very dear to our hearts into the hearts of boomers everywhere the the Falklands war I am my members and I'm joined as ever by my co-host Nate Bethay. Hello, thank you for having me on this momentous day to discuss some rocks in the South Atlantic. Yeah, some penguins and some inbred white English people sort of when the Royal Marines and two power raised a big flag with the crying laughing emoji over port Stanley and on this episode we're joined by a very special guest it's our co-host and dear friend Alice Paul Balcali. Yes, hello. It's a lovely day in the Falkland Islands and you're a horrible goose green. That's actually Alice's undisclosed location. Broadcasting from a from a laying up point on Wireless Ridge. Yeah, years ago I was looking at there's a website called MediArg and it's like they list job opportunities in media throughout the UK. And I saw one that really sounded really up my alley and it was a pretty good salary too. And it was probably like in like the 30,000 dish range, which I mean like for, you know, doing media stuff in the UK unless you're, you're going to be George Osborne writing for the race, the racism weekly, like you're just, you know, Okay, well the racism week. Yeah, we'll say yeah, nice workforce. Amazing. Yeah, the one, the one thing where there are actually four labor rights in Britain. But yeah, I saw this radio producer gig and I was like, Oh, sounds really good. And then I checked the location. It was literally port Stanley, because you were going to be working for like the civil armed forces radio, whatever the fuck they do down there. I think I'm okay with not living in the Falkland Islands. Nate, just like making a fucking commercial but like down a foxhole on South Georgia. See, if you're going to send me to remote British territory, it's got to be like, it's got to be banter. Like the Falklands isn't banter enough. It's got to be like Tristan or something like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Diego Garcia. It's like, Nate, you're going to go work on Edinburgh of the South Seas. Like literally you can only get there by boat. Like, and yet Amazon delivers there somehow. Awesome. That's what you, yeah, say what you like about Jeff Bezos, but he doesn't forget the colonies. That is true. So I thought like up top, this warranted a brief discussion of what the Falkland Islands actually are, which I think the British listeners will probably know American listeners may not. They are some very small islands that are about 300 miles off the coast of Patagonia in South America. And they've been British since like 1842. Yeah. And before the time on an expedient of sending British people there to farm sheep and be British.

Hang on, 1833 actually, apparently. So I checked my notes. And before that, they'd had also some like vague, like Spanish and French and Argentine attempts at having a settlement there. Although at that point an Argentine settlement was really just a Spanish settlement. Yeah, Spanish settlement because Argentina didn't become independent, I believe, until I want to say in the 1830s or 40s, maybe later than that. Because most of Spain's empire stayed part of Spain until the mid 19th century. But the British government, the empire was heavily, heavily involved in both Argentina and Chile, particularly in sort of establishing like a monopoly on buying resources and selling finished products. So they would just, they just did massive amounts of like sheep product dumping in, particularly in Chile, but also in Argentina. And also, and bought a bunch of corned beef, creating an enormous like slaughterhouse called the English complex in Frabentos, Argentina, which you may have heard of.

Ah, from the pie. There's also a place, a mysterious benefactor called Mr. S. M. R. E. Info. There's also a community in southern Argentina. I might think, I think it might technically be Patagonia. It is a Welsh speaking community. Oh yeah, the Argentine Welsh. Yeah, there's an Argentine Welsh speaking community because so many Welsh people moved there and Oh, that's a fucking cursed concept.

Unencumbered by the English for once, they were able to establish independence and now they are just Argentinian citizens. This is the future that Plutcomery wants. Absolutely. They want all of you to move to Patagonia. Yeah, that's right. Cool. I mean, you know, some of the least problematic people ever to emigrate to Argentina in my opinion. And I can say that with confidence.

Yeah. So I mean, my main point in this, this brief potted history of the Falkland Islands is that they are some fucking rainy ass rocks in the South Atlantic where like a few thousand people live who are like pretty much entirely British and they're just like incredibly like as we will discover in the rest of this episode, they are incredibly home counties, ass people who happen to live like 5000 miles from Britain. Very much so. And before this, these islands were completely uninhabited because like why would you inhabit them? And that is a question no one has ever answered. And so basically, like, there's no logical reason why they should be British, but there's no logical reason why they should belong to literally anyone. They're just like pointless islands in the Middle Atlantic.

Any claim to sovereignty over these islands is just like makes no sense. It's pure saber. I mean, when you get down that far south in South America, the borders are almost completely arbitrary. They stop corresponding to terrain features and start corresponding to just lines that have been drawn like straight lines. I mean, and obviously Argentina and Chile both have territorial responsibility, I suppose, over certain parts of Antarctica, for example. Yeah. I know I don't know as much about Argentine history. I know quite a bit about Chilean history.

And I mean, they were still trying to get people to populate, you know, those areas to colonize those areas, you know, into the... Yeah, it's like their big project. Brazil has like Amazonian settlement and Argentina and Chile have send everybody to live and pass it going. Yeah, because it's not, it's still kind of ongoing in a way. But this is more like, these were not areas, they were depopulated of indigenous people because of disease and just because of, in Chile's case, endless warfare. And... Well, that sounds good. Yeah, and at this point, like also they're just incredibly harsh environments.

So like it's not like a lot of people are just champing at the bit to be like, hell yeah, I want to live, you know, like at 60 degrees south latitude or whatever. Yeah. I guess the thesis I'm setting up here is I don't want any UwU's getting in my mentions saying it's woke to say that the Falklands are Argentine territory. It is not, Argentina is a bad country. Britain isn't necessarily better, but we will not be taking the Argentine side in this. Especially the Argentina of 1982, which was fully... The one fascist dictatorship in South America that Margaret Thatcher found she didn't like. I'll just say this to Argentinians or Argentines. Argies are very into the line. Orgies.

Orgies, yeah, sorry. Are very into the line that... They love biology. We don't give a shit. Send those people back. Those islands belong to us. Even to this day, you will meet people your age, Milo, or younger, who are just like, nope, Las Melvinas on Argentinas. Like that's 100%. So just understand that like there's a big amount of Argentine nationalism revolving around that. Too stupid rocks with some cheap.

But also, it's not the only manifestation of it because obviously like a lot of what you might call the same kind of energy is directed towards trying to seek redress for the crimes of the Galatieri regime, which we're going to talk about. Yeah, I mean, bad government. Something I will say is that I think that, you know, making no direct illusions, I would say that it is generally the facet of a slightly shit country to be incredibly concerned with like very stupid, like talismanic symbols of your national power. Oh yeah, totally. But that's why the big quote about the Falklands was that it's two bald men fighting over a comb, right? Pablo Neruda, the Chilean Stalinist poet who said that.

Yes, that's correct. And for example, certain nationalities and their nationalists who get very high up about whether you use certain definite articles in front of their country or not. I was going to say, well, as we famously know, there is zero contention or argument or even stress about whether or not Tsushima slash Dokdo is either Japanese or Korean. Legitimately, two uninhabited tiny rocks about the size of the building that we're in right now. And bro, they will fucking cut each other's shirts or that shit. I love to live on a concrete barge in the Paracel Islands, which is slowly creating a concrete thing on the Paracel Island. Where more of my friends can live. Francis Dokto.

Just so we can say we live there. Francis Dokto is Francis Wito's Wario. Check this shit out, Dokto twins. So let me just say this as a brief corollary before we... Actually, I don't think I use that word correctly. It's just an aside before we talk about... Just caveat what the commander said. Yeah, exactly.

Let me caveat off that for a second. All right, y'all just form a semi-circle. Let me have a caveat on that, Zoot. So to give you an example of the political culture of Argentina. Argentina was a very, very rich country in the early part of the 20th century. It's not rich anymore. And at one point formed what you might call like a sort of like social democracy with incredible amounts of cronyism and corruption. But then obviously like they suffered because so much of their income was based on commodities.

And like a lot of the reason why they were wealthy was because they were not affected by World War I or II. And so selling beef, for example, to Europe during the wars made them a ton of money. Anyway, if we have any listeners in the Gulf Arab states, don't worry about it. Yeah, this should be fine. But don't read into this. The point I'm trying to make is that... So in the aftermath of Juan Perón and his... Juan Perón reigned for a period of time and then left office and then came back.

Let me give you an example of things that happened in Argentina that were sort of part of the daily goings on in terms of politics. At one point, Perón gave a speech when he arrived after... I think he was in exile, I think, in Bolivia, but I can't remember where. He arrived at Aziza Airport, which is like about an hour, maybe half hour south of Buenos Aires. A sniper opened fire on the crowd and killed like 30-something people. Another time, he was giving a speech in the 50s, I believe. He was giving a political rally to shore up support. I remember correctly, he had been condemned for having a relationship with like a 13-year-old girl or something like that.

And then during the rally... Is that like the Falklands War? As like an act against continuity Peronism, the first and largest act of British non-tunting? It might, but if I remember correctly... Just two large men sit down on Juan Perón and hold in there until the police arrive. The non-tunting fleet has been disbanded. The sniper incident I'm talking about, I believe in 1971, but in the 50s, there was an incident where I think the non-speech was taking place,

where during his rally, two planes from the Argentine Air Force took off and then dropped bombs on the crowd, killing like 500 people and then defected to Uruguay. So that's the kind of... Just bear in mind that all bicameral presidential republics in Latin America are insanely unstable. So is America. Basically, every government setup in the New World, if you will, that uses that system is incredibly unstable. And in Latin America, it just has... There are more people...

Basically, America will tolerate it if you kill the Libs more than they'll tolerate if you kill the Libs in America. So by the time of the Falklands War, there had been a military regime in Argentina, I believe for about 10 years. I mean, it had been bad for a while. Yeah, 76 was one of the other three in Peru. Yeah, but basically, all was not well in Argentina. And there's an expression in Spanish that they call aguerra sucia, basically like a dirty war. And people were being disappeared.

People were being executed. Famously in the 90s, they were remodeling an old shopping arcade in Buenos Aires. And whilst remodeling it, they found graffiti of people who were like, we're imprisoned in this cell and we're going to be executed. Please save us or please remember us and stuff like that. And this was from the 80s. Needless to say, Argentina and Chile both, two very different... Yes, those are our fucking island.

It's two very different experiences. A lot of people know quite a bit about Chile because of Pinochet and like the way that like the helicopter and operation condor has become like a right wing thing. Fewer people I think know about Argentina, but it was like, it is not an overstatement to say that if you look at the governments of places like Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil in the 70s and 80s, that was fascism. Those were fascist governments. Ask an Argentinian what a dark green Ford Falcon means to them.

Yeah, absolutely. And so needless to say, this was not a country in which people could express dissent or in which things that were opposite to the government line were particularly tolerated. No, we will not be standing Argentina in this episode. So bring us to the war itself. It's 1982. Come on, Eileen is at the top of the charts. You've got a haircut that can only be described as Australian.

Mark Thatcher has recently disappeared for four days in the Sahara desert during an abortive attempt at the Paris-Dakar rally. His mother, Margaret Thatcher, is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. This is a quote from Simon Jenkins and Archon the Guardian from recently. The so-called wets were openly conspiring against her. Bets were being taken against her surviving into the new year, well behind in the polls and with the new Social Democratic Party challenging both Labour and Conservatives, she believed Thatcher would ever lead her party to another election win.

And she never did. We're going to wrap up the episode there. Does his hands theatrically? Yeah. Well, that's good news. So just in case you wonder what would happen if Corbett hadn't really had in the polls, just bear in mind that in 1981, Labour underfoot was polling at about 22 to 25 points ahead. Actually, 20 points ahead in the polls.

Yeah. A thing that no one has seemed to be able to reach, even though it has been promised. Thus, fomenting the SDPLP split in which they formed a spoiler party that somehow exists to this day. Yeah. Dedicated to both ruining Labour's vote under, first past the post, and murdering squirrels. And basically, if you look at the idea of like, ah, the left was destroyed because foot was so bad. No, fuck that. Foot was doing quite well.

Two things happened. One of them was the SDPLP split, and the other was, of course, the Falklands War. The Falklands War. Because on April 1st, 1982, Argentine forces landed in Port Stanley on the largely forgotten British territory called the Falkland Islands. Now, at this point, I think it's fairly safe to say that basically the Argentine military junta, based on the reading I've done, had assumed that the general level of chaos in Thatcher's government at the time would lead to the British government basically not doing anything. And they were basically sitting at the poker table and staring everyone down with, like, the world's shittest hand and just hoping that, like, going all in was going to work. Thatcher, however, correctly saw this as an opportunity to distract from how fucked everything was.

And despite Reagan telling her that she could not do this, she was just like, send the fleet. We're doing it. We're going in, lads. Yeah. Which is, I think, partly why this lives so deeply in the imagination of the British boomers is that it's kind of the last hurrah. Other than, like, the Suez crisis for actually going against what the U.S. wants. Yeah. If the Suez had worked, it would be this, but it didn't.

Yeah. And similarly... And also involved teaming up with the French, which we don't like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll also just bear in mind that the U.K.'s unemployment rate was, like, shockingly bad. Basically, in Thatcher's first premiership, I want to say that U.K.'s workforce was something along the lines of, like, maybe 18 to 20 million adults. I mean, the U.K.'s population was much smaller than it is now.

Every day, you had to go to work in the factory where a policeman hit you over the head with a truncheon, killing you. So basically, there were something like 3 million unemployed adults. Like, the U.K. had one of the highest, if not the highest unemployment rate in the developed world. There famously was a prediction from the IMF that the U.K. was going to regress into not being a developed country anymore. So things were very bad economically. Unfortunately, that never happened either. So there's no need to think anymore about that. So long story short, yes.

This was a prime opportunity. I remember reading somewhere that Thatcher, in 1981, when things were at their worst in terms of her polling, and just basically sat in the back garden of either the estate or 10 Downing Street, just in a daze, just being like, I'm the worst prime minister ever. I wish we could have maintained that energy. It's a terrible house. Many professional women have imposter syndrome, isn't it? It really is.

It made me a male prime minister who's ever felt that way. I mean, the one almost immediately prior to Thatcher, two prime ministers before Thatcher, did spend a lot of time convinced that MI5 was trying to kill him, and then it turned out they weren't. Correctly. That is the funniest possible outcome. It's been called mad for years. Yeah, and MI5 are not actually that good at killing prime ministers, it turns out. So they kind of try, but not really that hard.

All they can do is keep saying, what's all this then until you accidentally fall down the stairs. They're just buttering your staircase in the hopes of... You try to organize a military coup in Britain, and everybody agrees it's a great idea. All of the officers go straight into it, and then you get them all in the room, and the port comes out, and it's just bloody chundered everywhere. Yeah, exactly. Useless. I know, terrible.

This is actually where the story of the Falklands War gets a bit interesting, because I did some digging on this, because in the official version of events, which is the one that the British government still sticks to, basically there are a detachment of 60 Royal Marines garrisoned in Stanley, who were charged with defending the islands, which is basically just sit here and do nothing. Nothing's ever going to happen, right? So the Argentine landing force shows up, official version of events, the Royal Marines, who are under the command of a major,

basically just they exchange a few volleys of fire with the Argentinians, they kill like three or four of them, and then they take no casualties, and eventually they just surrender, because the governor orders them to. Apparently, what actually happened, because this guy wrote a book about this, and did loads of interviews with both British and Argentine vets, that just like is not what happened at all, but is like an official version of events, which the Crown like denoticed, like everyone to stick to.

So according to this book, based on these interviews, and also with Falkland residents and so on, they reckon that the Marines inflicted about 107 Argentine casualties, including sinking a fucking boat and destroying an APC in a battle that went on for like nearly 24 hours, until eventually like, the Marines had basically fired like 7000 rounds of ammunition, which was like more or less all they had. And so they surrendered, but had still not taken any casualties.

And then apparently the reason why they all got issued a denotice not to tell the press about this was because the British government wanted to put pictures of the Marines surrendering on the front of all the papers to generate enough outrage. So no one was like, why are we sending a fucking fleet? Yeah, that kind of loses a lot of its impact if you think, hey, these guys have just been doing like Omaha beach shit to the Argentinian landing force like 10 minutes earlier.

And this is where I think we kind of get to my initial thesis about this war, which is that it's basically the most dudes rock war that's ever occurred. It's just a bunch of guys who are like, on both sides, who are just like, this is a war that is ultimately inconsequential. And like it's the only war we're going to get. And so everyone is just kind of going hog, like trying to do like the coolest shit they can think of because like they're so excited that they're getting a war.

And so like, yeah, of course, of course the Marines went hog at the fucking a much superior because they're the Marines. They're fucking insane. That's how you get in the Marines by being mental. And if you joined the Marines to do some war, right? The only war you've gotten is, you know, you could have been in for 20 years and all you've got at is shot at in Northern Ireland, right? Yeah.

You've never gotten a capital W war in your entire career. You've shagged Father McMurphy, but that's it. Yeah, that's right. Also bear in mind that, I mean, the British military in the early 80s was far better equipped than the Argentine military by an order of magnitude. Most of the equipment the Argentine military was using was World War II vintage, like steel pot helmets and clip rifles and stuff like that. We were using very modern stuff from the 50s.

Like how dodgy rework of the FN foul. Yeah. And because they were fascists, they loved conscription. And so all of these guys who they sent to the Falklands were, you know, 16, 17, 18 and just, you know, waiting to get into college or whatever. Had no clue what they were in for. Didn't want to be there. And we're up against Psycho Baz who has been grinding his teeth in West Germany

for 25 years, waiting for the third guards tank army to come over the border. Yeah. You do want to come up against as a conscript some fucking green lids who have basically been deliberately bred to have no remorse or pity or any human emotions. Also bear in mind that like one of the famous sort of conundrums for the Argentine military in this war was that you had people in basically foxholes they'd dug with entrenching tools, you know, with medium, light machine gun, medium and light machine guns, maybe some heavy machine guns,

getting strafed at night by Harriers with night vision. And these guys are basically like just like shooting at sound, not knowing what the fuck is going on, just getting obliterated, you know, wearing like the kind of stuff that people would have worn like, you know, at the Incheon landings. Like, genuinely, there was a technical mismatch once the fleet got involved. And so it doesn't surprise me that a garrison, like a half company-sized garrison was able to inflict that many casualties

and taking no casualties of their own given the circumstances. Well, and also because like that's kind of, that's what the Marines are for. Like they train for that kind of shit because they're supposed to be like a small deployable force. So this is like, this is like their wettest ever dream, getting attacked in the night by a bunch of ill-equipped idiots and they get to like do like psycho-bazz shit. Yeah. This is basically tower defense, the fucking flash game, except in actual war.

Yeah. Anyway, this is the point where I would like to take us on a little digression because I'm sure Alice knows this, but I think Nate might not know this. The Royal Marines were not the only British forces deployed on the Falkland Islands. Cool boy, was there another British force that was even more psychotic than the Royal Marines? And I am talking about something called the Falkland Islands Defense Force. Yeah, real fucking snake eaters. Yeah.

You think Delta Force are tough? You think the SAS are tough? No, nothing on these guys. I cannot describe to you the face Nate is currently making, but it's one of intense trepidation. I mean, I'm envisioning kind of more weird and inbred dad's army. Yes, that's exactly what it is. It's hard to define like exactly legally where it stands, because it's like funded by the Falkland Islands government,

but it's like sort of part of the British army, but sort of not. It's basically like an official paramilitary organization. Sort of somewhere in the same chain of command as a public school cadet detachment. Pitched at about the same sort of level of military discipline. Exactly. But yeah, this is you're exactly right, Nate. This is what I had written in my notes is just this is dad's army shit. So I am going to read to you from a bit of Wikipedia

from the Falklands Defense Force. 1st of April 1982, alongside the Royal Marines Party, the FIDF was mobilized to defend the islands from the Argentine invasion. Many of its members lived in remote settlements. So given the limited notice of its approximately 120 men, some 23 turned out the following day, Sir Rex Hunt ordered them to surrender. The Argentines confiscate all of the FIDF's equipment

and declared them to be an illegal organization. For the duration of the war, some members of the FIDF were kept under house arrest at Fox Bay until the Argentine surrender. The FIDF was reformed in 1983. Now, most of them were kept under house arrest. That is all except for one man. A man that I will call dad Rambo.

Dad Rambo. Shooting down MI-24s with a bow and arrow. It's time that we learn a little bit about Terry Peck. So Terry Peck was an islander who worked as a policeman and served in the FIDF. Here's an excerpt from his involvement in a previous Argentine incident. On the 26th of September 1966,

an aero-linear Argentinist DC-4 flew low over Stanley before attempting to land at the racecourse. On its approach, it clipped telegraph poles and on touching down the undercarriage tank into the soft ground, bringing the aircraft to an immediate and jarring stop. Earlier that day, the aircraft had been hijacked while on an internal flight by right-wing Argentine nationalists known as the Condor Group,

who forced the crew to fly to the Falklands apparently unaware there was no airport. Islanders, including Terry, assumed the aircraft was in trouble and rushed to help only to be taken hostage by the terrorists. Despite the serious nature of this incident, there were many elements of fast, not least of which was Terry's escape hidden under the robes of a local priest acting as a mediator.

No, Father McMurphy. Can I just say that this is an extremely South American right-wing thing to do. This is incredible. I want to give a quick digression, and I know you got to get through your notes. If you are interested in the brain power of the guys who would do such a thing,

I strongly recommend to you a book entitled Nazi Literature in the Americas by a Chilean author named Roberto Belaño. Chilean Spanish. I mean, he spent most of his adult life in Spain. Basically, it's a fictional literary encyclopedia of fictional writers who are all right-wing in some capacity of different countries in the Americas,

and the ones about Latin America are fucking hilarious. The ones about South America. Because they are so insane, but also invariably have weird literary pretensions, these are the kind of people who are like, let's make a right-wing literary review for our soccer hooligan club. That is 100% real, and they are the kind of people

who are like, we're hijacking a plane to make a point about the Falklands and we're going to land it in a place with no airport. This is happening. I love that it's basically like carry on up the Falklands. That is so like who misses, having to be like, yeah, fucking, what's his face? Kenneth Williams is hiding you under his hassock

and like fucking smuggling you out. Yeah, so in my head, this guy Terry Peck is now played by Sid James. Oh, absolutely. Ideologies. Now, this is where it gets really funny, because it turns out that Terry Peck was literally on a list of people

to be immediately arrested by the Argentine military. Your name will also go on the list. I just love that they're like, they have like a list of like biggest nutters on the Falkland Islands and he is like number one arrested man. He says you would use Twitter to compile that, but like they didn't have that then, so you had to rely on prior intelligence.

Yeah, anyone with a crying, laughing emoji tattoo is immediately... I love getting a dossier that's just entitled Los Blokes Dupele Grossos or something along those lines. What is Spanish for flat nose geezers? I don't even know, man. Planos? Is that like...

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess you could say... Los Nossos Planos. No, no, no, no. Something along the lines of, yeah, like Tipos Conarises, planos or something along those lines, but yeah, I have no idea.

I'm going to read some more from, this time from Terry Peck's Wikipedia because I don't know who wrote this, but it's fucking incredible. Having prepared a possible escape plan for some time, immediately, what a fucking guy. Like this guy has a plan for this specific incident, which at the time was considered like vanishing the unlikely.

Terry armed himself with a semi-automatic pistol, borrowed a motorbike from the garage of an ex-patriot and fled Stanley. His first stop was Long Island Farm, home of Neil and Glenda Watson, where a party was in full swing, celebrating the Queen's birthday. Again, psychofucked anglovibe.

The people who live on the Forkman's fucking rule, man, they're all mental. This was nearly his undoing, as the party did not hear the approach of a Puma helicopter until it was too late. How loud were they celebrating the fucking Queen's birthday? Like, how loud can you sing, God Save the Queen?

And the house was already surrounded by Argentine soldiers. The search of the house was half-hearted, and he escaped detection by the simple expedient of locking himself in the toilet. Classic. Avoiding the fucking ticket inspector on the train vibes. He left for Green Patch to find locals expecting him. There, he acquired cold weather gear and rashes left there

by a party of Royal Navy sailors from HMS Endurance. It doesn't really say whether like deliberately or just discarded. This guy's doing Steve MRE info shit again. He then spent 10 miserable days camping in a remote part of the islands known as Geordie's Valley, where he had vanished before the occupation. Eventually, the cold sapped his morality,

risked a fire for the chance of a hot meal. Unfortunately, just as it was ready, he accidentally knocked it over. It was the lowest point of his escape, and demoralized he sought help from Trudy Morrison at Brookfield Farm. A warm meal and a bath improved his mood, and with the help of other islanders,

he recovered weapons hidden by the Royal Marines who escaped during the invasion. This is less of an insurgency and more, you're just camping by that point. Now I have a machine gun. I can't imagine anyone who'd be more concerned about this about like this man coming into the possession of Royal Marines weaponry

than the Royal Marines. Holy shit, do not give that guy a machine gun. We've met him before he's mental. On the 21st of May, he finally heard the news he had been waiting for. Isabel Short, a resident of Port San Carlos, issued the cryptic message. We've just received a lot of friends

over the shortwave radio. I assume this is a swingers thing. When the BBC confirmed the landing, Terry immediately set out to link up with British forces. He's living the boomer dream. He absolutely is. Nothing could be more your dad than this. You're basically doing shitty camping

for Queen and Country. 100%. I'm going to come back to Terry Peck later in the episode to find out what happens to him, the most Rambo dad who ever lived. Just to recap some early war stuff, there was a whole thing

where the Argentines had all these missiles and fighter jets that they bought off of the French, which was basically their only functioning military equipment. The French then found it quite embarrassing that the Argentines were at war with one of their major allies. The French began training the RAF to fight French fighter jets

and giving them all sorts of weird details on how to evade exoset missiles. I love the image of the French being like, we are very sloy about selling all these weapons to your fascist dictatorship. We did not know that you were going to have a war with them. Meanwhile, the Israelis were just

arming the Argentines, just fully at it. Agents of chaos, shit. I do respect that aspect of Israeli foreign policy. To just be like, yeah, no, we'll just do the most dudes rock thing in any given situation, which in this case is arming the fascists. Yeah, they're doing like epic mealtime, but for wars.

The Israelis just want to see more explosions. The British submarine HMS Conqueror sunk the general Belgrano. There was some controversy over this. The controversy was basically based around whether the Belgrano was leaving the theater of operations or maneuvering, and eventually the captain of the Belgrano

said that he was actually maneuvering, so it was like a legal sinking. It's kind of embarrassing that this was like the biggest left opposition to the war, was like Margaret Thatcher getting confronted on television by your actual mum,

as opposed to your actual dad who was out camping and trying to shoot down helicopters. He's trying to work out how a GPMG works. Yeah, your actual mum is on the TV, really laying into Margaret Thatcher about how the Belgrano was supposedly sailing out of the exclusion zone. And it was quite embarrassing for her.

Yeah, but also I think that one of the reasons why the sinking of the Belgrano wasn't necessarily a knock against Thatcher in the grand spectrum of British public opinion was that there was another ship named after a famous city in the north, the HMS Sheffield,

which was hit by an exocet missile. And if I'm not mistaken, it was sunk. Yeah, which killed quite a few people. And so, yeah, needless to say. I mean, exocets hit quite a few ships. They hit the Atlantic conveyor, which had all the helicopters on it, which destroyed all but one Chinook helicopter.

Chinook helicopter, yeah. And that was the one flown by Prince Andrew, Skynons. Yes, literally, yes. Skynons. Yeah, and one thing I would point out about that that is an interesting detail is that Chinooks have a much longer range than your typical helicopter

and can also carry a lot more things, people, et cetera. And so, if, for example, you were trying to, you know, conduct combat operations on incredibly remote islands in the South Pacific. Let's just say hypothetically we were. South Atlantic, yeah. There aren't really a ton of good options because, like, if you were dependent on aircraft carriers,

for example, or, like, a ship-borne platform, you know, like Blackhawk, a fucking, you know, a Huey, any things like that, they don't really have range. Like, they can basically go 90 minutes one way and then have to turn around and come back or Chinooks can go much further. So, like, if I'm not mistaken,

a significant amount of the whole yomp thing, which we'll get into later of the ground march was because they didn't have the range to land at Port Stanley because, like, they just couldn't fucking get there. Also, the lift capacity, which meant that, like, in order to set up a surface-to-air missiles on land,

the blowpipe missile basteries, they had to use this one Chinook helicopter to fly in the actual launching system and then each of the missiles, like, independently. Yeah, because there's one thing also to bear in mind, too, is that, depending on weather conditions, like, some helicopters just cannot function. One of the reasons why we flew so often on Chinooks

when I was in Afghanistan is to get over certain passes in Afghanistan. During bad weather, like, Blackhawks, Kayoas, other... Yipaches even can't really get over them. Like, they're just too high, the weather's too bad. But Chinooks are fucking school buses. They can basically...

Like, if you can do it in a helicopter, you can do it in a Chinook. And so, yeah, like, losing almost all of your Chinooks. Not a very good thing. Kind of bad. And that is something that is going to come up later. Who, boy, is it? Unless you're like,

I'm going to repurpose this Harrier as a cargo jet somehow. Yeah, I mean... Well, they did do this one field expedient thing to Harriers, which I remember, which is... They didn't have a way of deploying chaff, which is the, like, essentially, like, missile countermeasure. Yeah, to counterheat-seeking missiles.

But, like, the way they rigged this up was literally a Royal Navy, like, fleet-air-arm engineer baz fucking spot welding a bit of wire to fill the landing gear compartment with chaff. So you could just... So you could just open it and dump chaff out of it. Fuck it. Sick.

Hey, model through one way or the other. Again, dudes rock stuff, right? Like... That's incredibly British. It's an equipment that doesn't really do the job and finding some, like, slightly dangerous, probably Jerry Rig that sort of makes it work. Yeah.

There's a guy who's got, like, a drill from B&Q who thinks he can kind of sort it. Exactly. Gaz Baz has hooked you up. And so it's time for another digression because the Falklands wasn't actually the only theatre of war that was going on here. They did decide to send some flat nose geysers

to give some people a... Gibraltar. Sadly, no. To give some people a clump on the Argentinian mainland. I did not know this. Oh, yeah. So Gaz Baz and Donald MacDonald, right, from 22 SAS Hereford were fucking dispatched

to carry out preparations for a seaborne infiltration of, like, mainland Argentina. Like, they were going to go and destroy some, like, I think, aircraft batteries and stuff. So basically, they take off in this helicopter from the HMS Invincible on the 17th of May, and they're trying to get them to this place in Argentina, right, that bad weather they have to land.

And so the pilot flies to Chile and drops off the SAS team before the helicopter crew surrender to the Chilean police and basically get deported back to the UK and claim that, like, they were just an empty helicopter that had gone wrong. Meanwhile, Gaz Baz and Donald MacDonald are fucking fully armed, yomping across Chile

to try and get across the border into Argentina. Then what happens is they cross the border, they get into Argentina and they have to cancel their mission because the Argentines had suspected this and deployed 2,000 troops to look for them. Can I just say that one thing I point out is that there are about, there are two countries

in the world that thatcher's government had incredibly cozy relationships with that are slightly problematic to this day. One is South Africa, the other is Chile under Pinochet. There's zero chance that Pinochet did not know this. Oh, 100%. What I thought you were going to talk about other than this was Operation Al Jaceras

which was the reverse of this, where they send Gazio Bazio and his mate Donald. Literally, the Argentinian special forces tried to send dudes to Gibraltar to blow up a Royal Navy warship in harbour. Incredible. If you're getting your ships blown up in Europe

you're not going to send them all to the South Atlantic. What happens is they send them in through Spain they immediately get detected by virtue of being extremely obviously Argentinian. Get arrested by the Spanish police who let them keep their explosives on the way to the police station because they know how to handle them and the cops don't.

Absolutely incredible. There's a sort of logic to it. I love it when you show up to do my mission in Spain but my name is Joachim Pizzeria and they're just like, Are you sure you belong here? Jose Eichmann parachuting in to Gibraltar.

The SAS man, they just walked back to Chile and took a civilian flight back to the UK. There's only a guy in all black with night vision goggles just like boarding the air flight. Like carrying an MP5, just like, I want to get to London police. God. Have you got any idea?

I'm not allowed to identify myself legally. So then the next big hit of the war is basically the main British assault on the Falkland Islands. So here's some more Wikipedia. Really dense Wikipedia articles about this. I think there's a lot of nerds who are very invested in the Falklands world, which I do appreciate. I love a good Wikipedia.

So the 4,000 men of three-commando brigade Royal Marines were put ashore as follows. Second battalion parachute regiment 2 para on the Roro Ferry, and 40 commando from the Royal Marines from the amphibious ship HMS Phyllis landed at San Carlos. And then there were also some more paras

and some royal engineers and shit. But crucially, crucially, not the Royal engineers fuel handling detachment because... I knew you would know so much shit about this, Alice. The Royal engineers only specialized full-time like refuelling thing from like sea to land refuelling

was volunteer. It was the territorial army and they didn't give the call-up in time. Awesome. It was Marc Francois. Yes, Marc Francois was the crucial logistic link in this landing and he did not get there. Incredible.

So basically the next day, they established this secure beach head and then Brigadier Julian Thompson, a great name, his plan was to capture Darwin and Grew screen. Okay, in your grand spectrum of British military officers, I've never heard of this guy before, but he is 100% of the Jolly Good variety.

Like there's no way. This is the guy who gets too drunk on port to remember what the assault was going to be. And so let's just, let's just skip ahead to goose green because this is the most, this is the most I think dudes rock incident of the entire war. So basically between 27th and 28th of May,

to Para, which was about 500 men, along with some naval support and a bit of support from the Royal Marines artillery, they were stuck in this kind of pitch battle with the Argentine 12th infantry who were like dug in on a hill and the British are sitting in this kind of like gulch at the bottom and they keep just trying to run up the hill

and keep getting shot at, which is usually what happens to you in that situation. But I think that their plan was to just kind of like wait until the Argentines ran out of bullets, which was presumably going to happen at some point. I mean, Nate, you're the tactical expert here, but there was the commanding officer of like the entire force who decided that, no, we're not waiting for this.

We're going to do some dudes rock shit. The H stands for Herbert, by the way. You can see why he took the H. Lieutenant Colonel H from Steps Jones, who, true to the form of being a Para, absolutely fucking mental, like if you think the Marines are insane, I feel bad now for characterizing the Marines are insane.

The Marines are quite insane. The Paras are completely insane. Like the Paras is the Marines, but you also do boxing where you're not allowed to duck or block punches like that. Yeah, milling. Yeah, fucking normal shit. And so this guy's like, now I'm bored of this.

And he just runs up the hill and suicide bombs the Argentine machine gun position by like just pulling all of his grenades and jumping in there. This is the Lieutenant Colonel. Yeah, getting out of deflight because you were bored. Nate, would an American Lieutenant Colonel ever do this? No. Did he die in the process?

Oh, yeah. What, 100%? In a big way. I mean, this is the thing. They gave him the special parachuting hat that like sucks your brains out through the lining. And he just decided, yeah. That's why I'm gonna do this.

I'm sorry. But just the idea of the battalion commander, I presume, or something along those lines, the task force commander being the guy to do that is nothing is more British to me than that. That is insane. Yeah. Just taking the I wouldn't ask my men to do anything

I wouldn't do myself thing. One logical step too far. There's a reason why you're paid to be a Lieutenant Colonel and a task force commander. It's not that. I'm sure you're really good from fucking the knife and fork school at fucking digging trenches too. But there are other things you could be doing.

Yeah, absolutely. Also, I love British people so fucking much. I will point out one other fun orbit fact, which is that like, you were correct, Milo, that it was the 12th Argentine infantry regiment. However, their like nominal combat strength was like a thousand. Only 700 combat worthy. The rest were Air Force ground personnel,

mechanics, technicians, and some men from the Argentine Coast Guard. Yeah. What was the size of the British task force house? Do you know? 690. So like you're basically a one to one already. What the fuck are you doing?

Jesus Christ. Look at the stats from this though. Okay. 17 British soldiers and 1447 Argentine soldiers were killed. A total of 961 Argentine troops, including 202 Argentine Air Force personnel were taken prisoner. Like basically this guy runs up the hill, blows up a machine gun,

and the Argentinians like, Yeah, fuck this. These guys are insane. Wasn't that the battalion commander? Like fuck these guys. I'm just laughing because I'm just like, Surely you had mortars. Surely you had a mortar team.

You had something. Yeah. Like you just, I just feel like you, unless there's just like a really, really fucking patriotic Nishid playing, I don't understand why you would do, like it just doesn't make any sense.

Like tactically speaking, why would you do that? Three lines on a shirt began playing, but like on the oud. Yeah. I mean, this guy got the posthumous military across, which is like the British equivalent of a medal of honor. So it's like kind of, but this is like,

you have to be mental to get awarded one of those. That's the, we talked on the podcast before about Doughty Wiley, who got the Victoria Cross at Gallipoli for like beating Turks to death with his walking stick, while carrying a loaded revolver. Like he's just doing it for dude Rock Rees. I just,

That is, okay. I'm also finding out that the way in which H Jones died was he was shot by an Argentin sniper in the groin. Oh, that sucks. Damn. Yeah. Going out the hands mole man way. Man getting hit by,

man getting hit by SVD and groin. Yeah. Yeah. It's not what you want. What would you choose? So goose green then, obviously, I presume. Yeah.

Like once they actually, you know, got an assessment of the battlefield, it was like a couple of dead here and there, slightly more dead on the Argentine side, 79% of people are cold weather injuries. And there's just the battles over. It's awesome.

I mean, I love it when you, you literally, you take like 17 casualties, but one of them is the commanding officer of the entire who should have been sat at the back on a fucking field telephone. Amazing. Shit. Like 10 out of 10.

I mean, if you wanted to be, I'm just going to say, if you wanted to be insane as the senior person on the ground, you could go with the assault team to do that. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it, but you could go with them. You could, you could be maybe slightly,

maybe five paces to the rear of the guys who were putting down covering fire and fucking throwing grenades and shit, but you wouldn't go by yourself. That's literally like, I'm going to die cause it rules. Like there's no other reason to do that. Well, that's why normally it's fucking like lieutenants and captains

who do this shit in the British army. Cause they're just people who hate their dad. They have no interest in like leading the rest of their life. They just want to go out in a way that's like going to look cool on TV. By the time you're like a lieutenant colonel, like you've had opportunities to do this before. This is why it's such a dude's rock wall. Cause it's just guys being like,

you know what, fuck it. I'm just going to die. I mean, like, Yeah. They're fully the might as well. Die meme. Yeah. So let's,

let's go back to Terry Peck for a sec here. Cause he's, I wonder what he's up to. Yeah. Dad Rambo has not, he has not signed off. He is very much still in play. He is in the theater of operations.

He gets a whole piece to himself on the big operation. I'm just imagining like in the US army, we have this thing that's like a very 90s video game looking display for like tactical graphics and stuff that's linked up to GPS. And so I'm just imagining, we call it blue force tracker cause blue force, like blue force, which is red force is sort of like a training thing for like,

he gets his own counter. And I'm wondering what like, and you've probably seen these Alice, cause I know that you, you take an interest in this, but you know, like the mil, the military operational terms and graphics, like where you have like a rectangle with a cross through it

for like, that's like a, like a diamond is like an enemy unit. I'm just imagining what would be the Terry Peck tactical It's the crying laugh. Yes. Yes, it is. It's just like, it's like a battalion strength geezer. Like I don't know what it would be.

He's worth 500 less a man. Yeah. It's like one of the really obscure ones that's still technically on the books, like bicycle infantry, but it just says big laugh. My favorite, my favorite one is that for,

for looting, rape and pillage, if that's an observed activity, the icon is a Viking helmet in a graphic. I'm not joking. It's a helmet with horns. Incredible. Yeah.

Got to love operational terms and graphics. It's like selling for Eleanor Yonagur to get furious about. For this, for this thing we say the dark ages was not actually a period of relative porstacy of sources, but instead a disruption of learning. Yeah. That's right.

So anyway, this is from Terry Peck's Wikipedia again. Again, I do not know who wrote this Wikipedia, but it fucking rules. Coming over the ridge at Port San Carlos, he saw long lines of British infantry marching inland from the beach head. He was grilled for three days by intelligence officers anxious

to gather as much information as they could about the enemy and probably extremely confused as to who the fuck this guy is. On the second day, he was approached by Major Roger Patton of the third battalion, the parachute regiment, with a request to act as a guide for his troops and he had never had a bigger erection in his entire life. Yeah.

We're going to make you, we're going to put you in the army, but like for real. Yeah. You're going to get like incredible shit. Oh, Alice, there's some of that later. Terry volunteered without hesitation. He was attached to three Paris D patrol company.

His first major contribution to the campaign was to organize local farmers and their vehicles to help overcome the severe lack of military transport. I believe this is your Chinooks again. Yeah. So there's a bunch of people in like Land Rovers, but not even military ones. Just like,

No, like a county blue Land Rover with like cool white wheels. Because I mean, he's driven around a sheep farm. Realistically speaking, you could probably transport one, maybe two vehicles per aircraft, per lift. Yeah. So if you had, you know,

a whole fucking helicopter squadron's worth of Chinooks, you could move a lot of stuff and you could probably get people moving. If you have one aircraft, Yeah. You're basically, you're not really getting, you know, The aircraft's still in service, by the way.

That's amazing. You're probably not getting the company motor pool over very quickly. Yeah. So yeah. So there's this bit of an assignment where he talks about him. He basically was like guiding them around on these night patrols and stuff.

And at 43, he was twice the age of the soldiers he was guiding. Cashback. Now, Mount Longdon was attacked on the 11th of June, 1982. It was intended to be a silent attack, meaning that there was no artillery barrage to alert the defenders. But the element of surprise was lost

when one of the paras stepped on a mine. Classic para shit. What? Like the way you say that makes it sound like it was something he did voluntarily. Like he unearths this mine. It's like, well, got to get rid of it somehow. Someone's got to step onto mine private.

It's all right now. It's all right. It's not. There's no match for British boots. The commanding officer's already blown himself up in service to the Queen. So now it's you. So the battle of Mount Longdon proved to be

one of the bloodiest battles of the entire campaign, but Terry advanced all the way with British forces. When a soldier was shot near him, he volunteered to carry the man back down the mountain. Now, this is a direct quote from Terry Peck. We carried him down the slope, but sometimes we had to lie across him because of all the fire that was coming.

We were cashing it left right in center. It was lit up like blackpool. Really horrendous. We got this guy down in a crater caused by a shell. We had eight wounded in that hole with two medics. That's how big the hole was. I like the addition of that's how big the hole was. I feel like if you go into the talk page of this article,

all the edits are going to be made from Terry Peck's house in Port Stanley. Well, he's dead. That's the thing. So I don't know. He died in 2006, which is kind of like before I feel like people started editing it. I was doing bullshit edits of Wikipedia articles

to make jokes in 2005. So it's very possible that Terry Peck saw the promise of the world to us up on the fault. An early adopter, yeah. So anyway, this is a great bit. Terry remained with the battalion on Mount Longdon existing on toffees and food scavengers from Argentine trenches.

Sounds like it's a dog. It's a regimental mascot. This 42-year-old man. And the Paris just like tossing in bits of sand. He's like Sergeant Slaughter or whatever, like the dog in World War One. He went around biting German soldiers in the ass and like got some metal for it.

Yeah. The Polish army at Monte Casino had a bear, and then they have the British equivalent mascot of a 42-year-old man. It's just a really motivated geyser. Why did the Polish guy fucking bear from? No, Iran, Iran. Wait, excuse me.

Hang on a minute. The Polish had a bear that they got from Iran in a war they're fighting in Italy. His name was Wojciech, and they promoted him to corporal. I will find it and link to it. Imagine being outranked by the bear. Because I produced the lines by Donkeys podcast,

and Joe absolutely did an episode about Wojciech the bear and the battle at Monte Casino. Incredible. Yes, 100%. He did a whole episode on military mascots who actually go into battle. That's how I know about the fucking... The bear is quite a good one for that.

Stubby, I think, was his name. Sergeant Stubbs was the name of the dog who was like a little pit bull or some kind of small dog that went around by German soldiers in the ass. But yes, a real thing. So anyway, it says, Terry didn't return home until 3 power marched into Stanley

for his action-supporting British forces in the advance on Stanley. He was awarded an MBE in 1982. However, he considered the honorary membership conferred upon him by 3rd Battalion the Parachute Regiment, the greater honor, and wore his maroon beret and winged cat badge with great pride. Up there with Jimmy Savile being in the marines.

He's buried with that fucking hat. It does kind of rule, doesn't it? I mean, you get to be in combat with the Paris. You get to be an honorary member of the para, but you don't have to basically get, like, jumped into the gang when you're 19 and kicked in the balls for six months every day. All of these enormous men all say

that they think you're cool. That's the dream, right? That is the boomer dream. Every year after the war on 11th of June, he visited the memorial on the summit of Mount Longdon to pay his respects to fallen comrades. This is where it gets, like, quite Alan Partridge. I can just imagine him up there

just, like, solemnly, like, patting a trig point, going, like, yep, this was the place. Oh, shit, you guys realize it's the sad thing? The unfortunate thing? If he was 43 in 1983, in 1982, he's technically not a boomer. Yeah, he's a silent generation. He's a silent generation,

but he's such, such powerful boomer dad energy. It's just almost like he was an honorary para. He can be an honorary boomer, too. Exactly, yeah. Close enough as makes no difference. So this is a slightly weird epilogue about him. After the war, for a time, he became disillusioned with the prospects for the island's future

and left to begin a new life in Scotland in 1984, a famously upbeat place. He returned to the islands and stood for election to the Falkland Islands government, but failed to win back his seat. After standing again, he succeeded, standing from 1989 to 1993. He continued to express his reviews

in a forthright manner, lambasting the British government for a lack of aid and castigating Margaret Thatcher for allowing Argentines to visit the graves of his warden. Fucking hell. Yeah, extremely normal stuff. This is like the, I remember the episode, I think it's-

He also managed the local YMCA. Fun plans. Didn't know this guy was gay. I was gonna say, you know, if he had just been, if they hadn't colonized the Falklands, he could have just lived a normal life of getting told. For nonsing reasons, his access to the Boy Scouts had been revoked and he could have shot up a school in Scotland,

but instead he actually wound up fighting a war against the Argentines. I was also gonna say, this does remind me of the episode of The Crown, I think it's in season two, where a guy, like someone who's like a, I think a journalist or something, makes comments critical of like The Crown or like of how the Queen is going about things

and someone patriotically punches him in the face and like the Queen's entourage or thinking maybe they should just like give this guy a medal, like he's a member of some society. It's like the society for the restoration of Rhodesia or something like that, like completely out of his mind. Amazing. Rhodesia is a whole other episode.

Like it's not quite Britonology, but it's quasi-Britonology or maybe even like hyper-Britonology. I like the Queen as a door, simple as. Exactly. So the point being here that... I'd like the Queen as the door, simple as. I was chased off my farm

by some criminals. This is just, there is obviously such a profoundly British energy here, even if these guys have... I was going to make the joke when he said about lit up like blackpool. It's like, you've never been to blackpool. You're from the Falklands.

My favorite detail is that, he said after it was lit up like blackpool that it was absolutely horrendous. And if you pass that the wrong way, it isn't like a comment on the intensity of the gunfire, but like a very Trump-like criticism of blackpool. And it's just like, it's lit up like blackpool. Terrible.

Shritchacky, why do you have all those lights? No one likes it. Very bad casino. I went in there, did the girls, were not hot. Not hot at all. Yeah. Well this is like an absolutely incredible thing. Just, yeah, like these really like

bland blackpool reference where he hasn't even been to blackpool, but I can tell you one thing. This man is absolutely in-chips in the rain while wearing a raincoat, like that. In that respect, he has spiritually been to blackpool. So that's, that's my number one candidate

for the most dudes rock incident of the war is Terry Peck, just being mental. Here is my number two candidate for the most dudes rock incident of the war. Technically not on the Falklands, but part of the same conflict. The Argentines also invaded South Georgia, which is a separate British territory,

and it's time for some more gas-bazz action. They feel left out when they don't get to do something like this. Because once exactly, Alice, because once again the boys, the boys from Hereford were given a job and they decided to go fucking hog. So this is again from Wikipedia.

For the British, the first order of business was to carry out reconnaissance of Argentinian positions, whose forces and dispositions were unknown, though there was no evidence to suggest they'd been reinforced since the initial occupation of the island on April 3rd. The plan called for the insertion of three SBS, which is a special boat service,

which is like the SAS, but boats, who would then travel by land. However, the SBS tend to be slightly less insane because they're basically all ex-marines, and the marines are extremely disciplined, whereas the SAS tend to be ex-paras. Well, we know things about the paras. We've learned about that.

The SBS nicknamed Superbooties. It's weird to me because... It's normal. It's weird to me because a lot of the things that you describe about the way you become a pair and what the paras are like reminds me of the rangers, but the rangers are famously like incredibly... They are special ops now, but they're really by the book,

where it's like, to find something this completely insane, you have to go to the Navy Seals. So it's sort of like, if the Seals were paratroopers, I mean, they are, they do airborne shit, but if they were an army unit, they killed people with knives. Yeah, exactly. The climb anchor cables, stab people, et cetera.

One fun detail about this South Georgia operation is that when they were prepping for this, when they were briefing for this, on Diego Garcia, they fucked the supply line that was going to the Falklands because Gaz and his mate just nicked a bunch of stuff that they saw lying around in crates. Amazing. Like rifles and ammunition and stuff,

but it didn't get to the Falklands because they had just lifted it. Again, dudes rock. Yeah, exactly. Lovely gear. Yeah, this is 100%. Paras are seals. That's just how worse now.

I mean, the seals would be like hiding cocaine in it. That is true, yes. So anyway, basically, the SBS, along with like some Marines officers who were attached to them, came up with like quite a reasonable plan of doing like a fast boat insertion onto the beach and taking up an OP to like do some reconnaissance,

which is what they were actually supposed to fucking do. And the SES were like, nah, we're not fucking doing that. That's gay. Reconnaissance is for puffs. Yeah. Again, I directly quote from the Wikipedia, the SAS plan was somewhat more ambitious.

It called for a helicopter insertion and the SAS had chosen Fortuna Glacia as a point of entry because it was sufficiently far from enemy positions so as to preclude detection. The Argentines would not expect an attack from that direction, that being the direction of the glacier. Nate, just off the top of your head, what problems do you foresee with this particular plan?

If you're not already trained up on alpine shit and have all the kit you need, which you probably won't have because you need very specialized equipment for doing alpine stuff, which ice climbing is absolutely part of, you are probably going to encounter way more problems than advantages when it comes to,

I mean, honestly, given the amount of risk involved with doing an insertion, that way you would probably be, you could probably do one-to-one risk comparison between inserting via a glacier and just having the helicopters just fly over and do a fucking, just immediate airborne assault. Because there's so many opportunities for shit to go wrong.

And let's be honest here, if you're doing SAS shit, it's probably a small unit. One guy going down means everyone's fucked because you have to deal with the guy who's fallen down a crevasse or something. Oh yeah, it was like 15 men. So now it's interesting that you say that

because there were some people who said that at the time, such as the officer commanding on the ship, Captain Nick Baker, and also members of the British Antarctic Survey who happened to be there who were like, yeah, you can't just walk across a glacier. That's not a thing. What do they know about the Antarctic?

However, the SAS major, who was in charge of D Squadron SAS and braced for a name here, Major Cedric Delves. Overruled their objections on the basis that dude's fucking rock. And the SAS had strong political backing within the British government. Again, just everyone loves the SAS

because of the Iranian Embassy. Yeah, because Maggie loved them to pieces. Yeah, a guy called Donald MacDonald with a moustache as big as my head swinging in through a window dressed in all black. It's a dude's rock image. It's just killing me. It's just like, they don't have night vision.

There's so much stuff you can do. You have night vision and you have all the kit in the world that you need. Why would you make it harder on yourself by deciding that you're going to just, you're like, hey, I have plus 50 dexterity. I'm going to become an expert on fucking climbing ice, walking across ice.

I would also say that they put this together. The assault force was made up of the command element, the mortar troop and like whatever else they could scratch together from the SAS. They had some men from Mountain Troop, which is the actual like walking across glaciers, SAS guys, but like not enough. So they've got this cobbled together, 15 men,

like five of whom are actual mountaineers. Now notice the major Cedric Delves, despite deciding to dude's rock is like, yeah, I mean, Captain Hamilton's going to be leading this one. I'm going to stay on the boat. I'm confident that dude's rock, but I'm not that confident. I'm hoping that Captain Hamilton is a mountaineer,

but I'm guessing probably not. I don't know. The 15 men of Mountain Troop, led by Captain Gavin Hamilton, were airlifted onto Fortuna Glacier by two Wessex helicopters. They were immediately confronted with extreme conditions, including 100 mile an hour winds and freezing temperatures. Deep crevasses slowed the advance

and when the men attempted to set up camp and wait out the storm, their tents were swept away by the wind. Finally, after 15 hours on the glacier, Captain Hamilton requested evacuation with the message, unable to move environmental casualties imminent. Three Wessex helicopters were dispatched from task force and basically they tried to airlift them out. Unfortunately, in the white out conditions,

one pilot became disorientated and crashed his helicopter. A classic helicopter pilot move. The passengers were loaded onto the two remaining helicopters, but soon afterwards one of these hit a ridge and crashed. Once again, without any serious casualties. The last glacier and after two failed attempts, managed to retrieve the downed SAS and aircrew, though their equipment had to be abandoned.

The pilot, Lieutenant Commander Ian Stanley, managed to nurses overloaded aircraft back to the HMS Antrim and made an emergency landing on the flight deck. They basically at the loss of two entire helicopters, managed to rescue an SAS operation that only made it 15 hours into walking across the glacier. I'm a seven year army veteran who never did alpine shit and I could have told you that like, hey, that's a bad idea.

Like, I mean, 100 mile an hour winds, huge hunks of ice, shit that melts, bad weather. Like helicopters, flying a helicopter has been described as basically like learning to ride a bike with an additional dimension involved. And it's like, can you imagine riding a bike in 100 mile an hour winds? Probably not easy to keep your balance.

Unlike a bike, if you fall over, you die. So, I mean, you can die on a bike too, but you know what I mean. So, yeah, not a good plan. Yeah. And what's also interesting about it, right, is that they're trying to do this like epic move where they like, you know, fucking pick up a spear and like throw it over the mountain

and nail the Argentine commander in the head when they've just got like a huge fucking hammer of the entire all Marines who are just sitting there. Which of course is what they end up doing. Yeah, there's an extent to which like, this is everyone's first actual war and possibly only war. They just, they're just like, they spent their entire lives reading like fucking boy's own.

And they're just like, all right, we're just going to do it all. We're just going to send in Ronan Keating. Yeah, we're just, we're just, we're just... It's wild, man. Holy shit. Yeah. Like a child Ronan Keating getting sent over the ridge. Yeah. So basically they just landed like,

thousands of Royal Marines in the harbor and then the Argentines just surrendered because of course they did. What actually happened, right? The Marines and the rest of the parrots and some of the guards as well, who are like, again, slightly below in the psychostandings, but still the guards are like, so that's your Irish guard, Scott Scott's Welsh guard.

That's your posh psychosis. Yeah, exactly. Rather than your like, gas psychosis. They're not... I recommend the movie Tumble Down, which is about a guards captain who gets shot in the head by a sniper and like does not let this deter him at all.

They're not dudes rock, but they're extremely like, oh yeah, well I started out. Chaps. Chaps rock. I was, well, of course, my father was in the household cavalry and when I was playing Raga at Edinburgh, you know, it just seemed like the natural progression for me really. And really get the conversation started about mental health.

And his name's like Captain Tontin Tintin. You know, like that kind of shit. The guards are really known for being like, not necessarily like majorly combat effective, but just like psychotically disciplined. There's that famous story about how at Dunkirk, like the guards were the only people like standing on the beach in fucking formation.

It's like getting fucking dive bombed and like, stand there, man. Stand up straight. I mean, it's just all genuinely... Yeah, they are the most marching up and down in the square kind of formation. So everything about this is just a parody of Britishness. Like I swear to God, like if you told me that this was like invented as like a spitting image style early 80s parody

of the Falkland Wars and you're like that you had just been taking the piss this entire episode, I would believe you. To be fair, to be fair to the guards in this instance and also to the Royal Marines. The Royal Marines and the guards throughout this conflict from what I can understand are just guilty of just doing good normal soldiering, like just being effective. And being handcuffed to Psychobaz the para.

Yeah, and Psychobaz Gazz and Donald MacDonald from 22 SAS. Yeah. They're being dragged along behind them. It's just, it's basically like marine officers just like rubbing their temples as they attempt to explain to para officers that like, no, that isn't a good idea. You all fucking have them.

Anyway, so basically they managed to lay siege to Stanley which was like many miles from where they landed. Like something in the region of I think about 60 miles from where they landed. And by virtue of the tab or yomp depending on which you speak. And so, but yeah, as Alice rightly points out because there was only one Chinook

and no land vehicles, they had to fucking walk. And fortunately, both for paras, but especially for the marines. This is once again, their wettest actual dream. I mean, like the paras kind of like doing this, but like the marines are particularly famed for. Also, the territory of the Falklands is absolute wet dream for this shit

because it looks like a flatter version of Wales. Like it looks like Sandy Bridge. It looks like the place where you train to do all of this shit anyway. It's just windswept bare grass and rock scree. It's perfect. Yeah, because like that is like kind of the big thing you do at the end of Royal Marines Training

is this like 30 mile speed march. The one that Jimmy Saville famously completed to earn his honorary Green Beret. Thereby putting these guys in the hallowed, you know, right raking. So people like Jimmy Saville. Jimmy Saville yomping across to nonce the kids of Stanley.

Fuck. Coming over the ridge is like into Argentine machine gun fire. Now, then, now, then, now, then. Let me ask you how long did it take them to yomp 60 miles? I think they basically did it in like a day and a half, which is I mean, that's good. That sucks.

But that's good. Yeah. Yeah. I guess at a certain point we're like, we're just fucking doing this. We're just fucking doing this. But let me like, yeah, like when they do like the rules, I cannot stress this enough.

This is their wettest dream. They're into this at this point. They covered 56 miles in three days carrying an average of 80 pounds in load. Yeah, that sounds about right. I was going to say because I mean, that's that that like nine Megan and they recreate the nine Megan March.

Like it's like 25 miles per day for 100 miles total. Like, yeah, that sounds like doing 25 miles a day ish 2025. That sounds about right. Yeah. Man, that sucks. That fucking sucks dick. But like that's that's at least survivable. Whereas making people do combat load,

do 60 miles all in one go like this. Yeah. You're going to have a bad time. Really going to be able to do a lot of fighting when you actually get there. Yeah. And they take this famous photo where one of the Marines ties a big crying laughing emoji.

A big, a big union flag to his radio aerial. And there's this photo of them like yomping, I suppose, over this like totally windswept landscape. And that I saw that last week when someone tweeted a gas bath type tweeted that and say, so he said, Maradona is dead and the Falcons are still British happy days. And it was that photo.

It was just like nothing could encapsulate the relation between those two things somehow. Yeah. Anyway, they laid siege to Stanley. Basically like the battle, the actual battle of Stanley itself is quite uneventful. There were two British casualties and 18 Argentine casualties. And then the Argentines surrendered because they

correctly worked out that they were surrounded by absolute fucking psychos. Oh, the RAF did get one dude's rock moment in this whole conflict. Hit me. Which is Operation Black Buck. Don't ask me. They're chosen randomly, I think, which was the Vulcan,

the Avro Vulcan bombers, which were the last like nuclear capable bombers they have. They tried to do a very nearly like transatlantic bombing mission launching from fucking Diego Garcia or something. A Tristan da Cunha. And then bombing the airfield that the Argentines had constructed in Stanley and flying home. And it took like three sequential things of like aerial

refueling to do that. Yeah, you're asking a say. For like no real gain. But they could all say, hey, we, you know, we did this thing. We have justified our budget. We also rocked. You know.

Yeah, we all, we too rocked. Some, some rocked all, but all rocked some. Yeah. This is kind of like, and that is the element of this war that I sympathize with the most. Like if you're in the, if you're in the army in the 1980s, like this is your big opportunity to like do your dudes rock. Like what else are you going to be doing?

Like getting drunk in West Germany? I mean, when I was in Afghanistan, we had the whole thing with Private Berkdahl going missing, but he was, that was my battalion, but had that not happened, I'm not joking. My battalion commander and battalion operations officer were in the process of planning an airborne mission in which we were going to do a parachute insertion into like one of

the districts in the province we were in. Why? Because you could. And it's sort of those things where it's like, when you, when this kind of thing happens, it is like unprecedented, you know, for the British military in that generation. It's just sort of like every single idea is actually a

potentially viable idea. And so it's just like, if someone's like, hey, let's, can we do three in-flight refuels and make the pilots just like shoot speed nonstop and bomb Argentina, like while flying from a territory that's basically next to India? Sure. Why not? Fucking why not?

Why the fuck not? We can do it, right? I mean, technically feasible. Okay. Fucking do it. And so like, yeah, there is an extent to which all of these are just sort of ideas cooked up in the brains of people who are basically getting to do GI Joe shit for real for the

first time in their lives. Yeah. And they, they crucially forget things that like, that weather exists because they're so into this. And it really exists on the Falklands. Cannot stress that enough places with bad weather. Imagine Scotland, but worse. Like, yeah, it's not what you're looking for.

And so my final, before we do final thoughts, my last code of this is like, I had a vague memory of this and I Googled it and it did actually happen when Argentina had that mental woman president in 2012, Christina. Fernandez de Kirchner. Yeah. Kirchner, that doesn't sound very Spanish. I wondered how you would end up with a German sounding last.

Anyway, no, no need to think about that. She, there was a weird, there was a weird period of like saber rattling about the Falklands again in, in 2012. And, and she referred to the British government as Conquistadors, which I just thought was extremely funny. Like leaving the colonial past of Britain aside, a bunch of people who are like white Spanish speaking people who live in Argent fucking Dina,

calling someone else Conquistadors. Deeply like her biggest like way to claim not being Conquistador is that she's actually descended from Nazis. Like that is her best hope of not being a Conquistador. It's going to say. Yeah. But then the Argentines like healed from this because Diego Maradona punched in a goal, a hand of God,

and then scored another one perfectly, legitimately beating and everything was fine. Also, we just found like the possibility of massive offshore oil deposits on the Falklands. So, you know, it's all going to happen again. Looking forward to seeing my lieutenant colonel blow himself up and fucking, we all get, you know,

deployed under Nate's command as junior officers to the Falklands. I'm so excited. Trash Future Battalion. Nate just throws all of this wisdom to the winds. And it's like, lads, I've come up with this fantastic idea. What we're going to do is we're going to parachute in. Yeah.

Intelligence Officer Hussain Kizvani. It's going to say. Obviously, Riley is going to be in charge of procurement for rations. And like, damn, day 19 of combat ops, having wine and oysters. Yeah. How is this fucking feasible?

How are you getting this fucking, I'm on America. Yeah. We get the like French rations with duck, cassoulet and like cognac in them. Yeah. That's the dream. Riley is like going through the MRE,

just checking it's all vegetarian. Alice, last night you weren't on the stream, but we actually watched Steve MRE Info eat the infamous four fingers of death. MRE from the early 80s. Oh, God, I'm so sad you deleted the VOD. I kind of want to see it. The beans of Frankfurters.

Well, there was a problem, obviously, because they couldn't, nobody on the stream, the stream could hear, the viewers could hear it, but no one in the cast besides me could hear what the videos were saying, because as it turns out, streaming from a Mac sucks dick, but we probably want to wrap up.

Yeah. Well, anyway, does anyone have any final comment to make on the Falklands War, the most dudes rock crying, laughing, emoji-ass war to ever occur? Like, we're going to be dining out on this one forever. It's like our last thing of national prestige,

and we'll die hugging it to our chest. Yeah. It's insane. I do find it funny that America told Britain, don't know you can't, because a year later, America decided to invade Grenada, and even the Thatcher was like,

oh, surely that's fucking excessive, isn't it? They were just like, what? I believe Grenada was like a British colony at that point, too, still. They basically were like, you're going to go to war and invade an island nation, because you're convinced that a couple of American medical students are being detained

by the evil communist government, when the American medical students were like, no, we're fine. Wasn't the code name for that, something like Acid Gambit? It might have been. It was Operation Urgent Fury was the mission, but I don't remember what acid was.

It was almost BAZ's name for an operation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, got an operation highly illegal. If we did a reverse Britonology on Grenada, it would be hilarious, because like... Acid Gambit was Panama, but like... Well, Acid Gambit, that was early, because just cause was Panama, the actual combat out,

but Acid Gambit might have been the prep phase, yeah, in the way that like Desert Shield was the go hang out in Saudi Arabia for six months, and Desert Storm was the actual war. But yeah, I mean, honestly, this is just... I get it now. There's a lot of other stuff that I didn't understand, about why it was so revered,

and like no one could ever shut the fuck up about it, because I mean, it's 38 years ago. Like, you know, at this point, I mean, you don't hear a lot of Americans talking about Desert Storm, or Just Cause, or Urgent Fury that much anymore, because like other stuff's happened, and the British Army's been involved in the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan.

But this is just enough of a like actual war, without doing any counter-insurgency that seems unfair or boring, or is like difficult to be inspired by you have like something with like people lining up and shooting at each other. That's what they crave. That's what they want these days.

What if it had gone differently, and that the Falkland Islanders had realized the cultural superiority of the Argentines, and so like they were fighting against like the Falkland Vietnamese who really wanted to be Argentine. Yeah, we've got the Secure Climate Program, but yeah, that's right. It's like, we reject your tripe.

We eat Trasco. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, I think that's, I think that would be an interesting timeline in which to live. But we are left simply with the Doos Rock timeline. We are into it. I think one of the more like uncomplicatedly enjoyable bits of British military history,

in my view, we're not colonizing anyone. Yeah, the highest proportion of Fass to war crimes. I think the highest proportion of guys being hidden under a priest's robe. Yeah. Yeah. Also true.

Best moustaches by far. Oh, absolutely. And when those days everyone had a fucking moustache in the army, that was just the vibe. So I think that's, I think that's about it for this episode of Britonology. It leaves me only to say thank you very much for listening, and thank you to Alice for joining us.

Oh, thank you for inviting me on. I had a great time. Always a pleasure. All right, we'll see you all next time.