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Mortabis
Jul 8, 2010

I am stupid
Presumably they thought the British would just capitulate.

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Nostalgia4Infinity
Feb 27, 2007

10,000 YEARS WASN'T ENOUGH LURKING

drgitlin posted:

They were ruled by an unpopular and bellicose military junta and not a representative democracy?

They underestimated the Iron Lady :britain:

Vasudus
May 30, 2003
They also probably figured that no empire would want to spend the amount of money it would cost to reclaim some meaningless land on the other side of the world for the sake of ARE EMPIRE. Especially when they were in rough economic times. Boy, were they loving wrong.

Mortabis
Jul 8, 2010

I am stupid
Weren't the British inclined to just hand them over beforehand? Now the existence of a British colony on the Falklands is a symbol of their geopolitical muscle and they'll never give it up.

Limp Wristed Limey
Sep 7, 2010

by Lowtax

Christoff posted:

But I mean what were they thinking the first time? That they'd win?

They came very close to winning. One exocet hitting the right ship would have meant a complete loss. Losing the Atlantic Conveyor was pretty devastating but losing the Hermes or Invincible would have been game over. Granted they would not have been able to land any more men or equipment by sea because of the submarines but we would not have been able to provide any air defence.


Vasudus posted:

They also probably figured that no empire would want to spend the amount of money it would cost to reclaim some meaningless land on the other side of the world for the sake of ARE EMPIRE. Especially when they were in rough economic times. Boy, were they loving wrong.

Granted it was ARE EMPIRE but it was the right thing to do to fight the junta.


Mortabis posted:

Weren't the British inclined to just hand them over beforehand? Now the existence of a British colony on the Falklands is a symbol of their geopolitical muscle and they'll never give it up.

There were talks in cabinet of handing it over, but I think talk would have been about it. The Falklands are a pain in the arse and it would be a real blessing if the Argentinian government wasn't such a bunch of stupid tossers. 98% of the people on the islands voted to stay a British protectorate earlier this year so its going to be a long time before Argentina gets a sniff.

Limp Wristed Limey fucked around with this message at 22:43 on May 13, 2013

Red Crown
Oct 20, 2008

Pretend my finger's a knife.

Limp Wristed Limey posted:

They came very close to winning. One exocet hitting the right ship would have meant a complete loss. Losing the Atlantic Conveyor was pretty devastating but losing the Hermes or Invincible would have been game over. Granted they would not have been able to land any more men or equipment by sea because of the submarines but we would not have been able to provide any air defence.


Maybe, maybe not. We were fully prepared to give them the Iwo Jima crewed by American "contractors" in the event one of their carriers got knocked out of the fight. It wouldn't have been a 1:1 replacement, but it would have been enough if it had been deployed rapidly.

Elendil004
Mar 22, 2003

The prognosis
is not good.


Since I think the book club thread disappeared, can anyone recommend a good (kindle) book about the Falklands? Preferably something Mark Bowden style with views from both sides of the conflict?

dr cum patrol esq
Sep 3, 2003

A C A B

:350:
Everybody always talks exocets when the Falklands comes up but another interesting thing is that the only nuclear submarine to ever score a kill was during the conflict. The aptly named HMS Conqueror.

mokhtar belmokhtar
May 8, 2013

by T. Finninho

front wing flexing posted:

Everybody always talks exocets when the Falklands comes up but another interesting thing is that the only nuclear submarine to ever score a kill was during the conflict. The aptly named HMS Conqueror.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehime_Maru_and_USS_Greeneville_collision

Your move hot shot

movax
Aug 30, 2008


Never stop posting

Godholio
Aug 28, 2002

Does a bear split in the woods near Zheleznogorsk?

Elendil004 posted:

Since I think the book club thread disappeared, can anyone recommend a good (kindle) book about the Falklands? Preferably something Mark Bowden style with views from both sides of the conflict?

This doesn't meet your requirement but is an excellent book and gives a bit of insight into the mindset of the civilian population at the time: War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges. Hedges was a war correspondent (and he's CLEARLY got issues as a result) and got a good look at things during several wars, including the Falklands. It's a pretty small portion of the book, but his poo poo on Bosnia is interesting as hell.

Nostalgia4Dogges
Jun 18, 2004

Only emojis can express my pure, simple stupidity.

Was there a Military book club?!

Hate to derail but any recommendations about why we hate communism so much? I mean I have the rough idea we all learn in High School but I'd like something that goes much deeper and further back in history. I just have a hard time wrapping my head around it all. Considering everything it's caused.

Vasudus
May 30, 2003

Christoff posted:

Was there a Military book club?!

Hate to derail but any recommendations about why we hate communism so much? I mean I have the rough idea we all learn in High School but I'd like something that goes much deeper and further back in history. I just have a hard time wrapping my head around it all. Considering everything it's caused.

Here's a super super simple explanation of communism courtesy of Animal Farm: Some people are more equal than others.

dr cum patrol esq
Sep 3, 2003

A C A B

:350:

Christoff posted:

Was there a Military book club?!

Hate to derail but any recommendations about why we hate communism so much? I mean I have the rough idea we all learn in High School but I'd like something that goes much deeper and further back in history. I just have a hard time wrapping my head around it all. Considering everything it's caused.

It's an extremely complex issue that stretches all the way from the depression through current day. Each decade all saw various different reasons as to why (all under the pretext of hurf durf, freedom).

The extremely over simplified version is that nobody really cared about communism and socialism prior to WWII. We had socialists run for president, communism was quite active. Even Vice President Wallace was a public Soviet sympathizer (he's a pretty cool guy overlooked by history, look him up). But when the USSR emerged as a world power, an antithesis to the US, the justification was hatred of communism. Which makes sense, in order to energize a war weary populace against a country that pretty much had it worse than anybody in WWII to include the Jewish people took you'd have to fabricate a serious ideological schism.

It worked out well because it turned out that Stalin and the USSR were pretty corrupt and evil. However, the common reason for average Americans hating them (being communist) is a little shortsighted. It could've just been because they're evil.

Woof Blitzer
Dec 29, 2012

[-]


Nothing wrong with a little communism

Snowdens Secret
Dec 29, 2008
Someone got you a obnoxiously racist av.
Prior to WWII the Western exposure to the Soviet Union was largely from sympathetic journalists (Duranty et al) and other bigwigs visiting Potemkin villages and eating propanda. Stuff like the Great Purges, Trotsky's murder, the famine of '33 etc just weren't told to or talked about in the West. People who leaked out and told horror stories were written off as nuts or discredited political dissidents. Remember, back in the '30s especially pretty much the whole world, including the US, thought the future lied in some mix of fascism/national socialism/communism (the differences were recognized as largely semantic.)

It's a completely different matter to look back in hindsight as much of what we know of the Soviet suffering and cruelty didn't really come out until the '80s and '90s, and some of it still is being unearthed today. Same goes with the Chinese under Maoism. As it drifts back into history you have more and more people buying the Potemkin stories again.

iyaayas01
Feb 19, 2010

Perry'd

Christoff posted:

But I mean what were they thinking the first time? That they'd win?

Like Limp Wristed Limey pointed out, it was a lot closer run thing than people think. If they had a) effectively reinforced their forces on the islands during the initial stages of the assault (before the British submarine threat cut off the islands from the mainland), b) conducted effective joint ops (seriously, the Argentinian military was basically fighting three separate wars), c) gotten luckier with the Exocets, d) had better fuzes for their bombs, and/or e) targeted the British supply/landing vessels in San Carlos Water instead of warships, they quite possibly could've sent the British forces home with their tail between their legs.

Vasudus posted:

Here's a super super simple explanation of communism courtesy of Animal Farm: Some people are more equal than others.

Orwell got it right.

Also gently caress Duranty.

e: Since this is the photo thread, the Atlantic did one of their photo features last year on the 30th anniversary of the war:











One more:

iyaayas01 fucked around with this message at 04:22 on May 14, 2013

Vincent Van Goatse
Nov 8, 2006

Enjoy every sandwich.

Smellrose

I will never stop thinking how funny it is that there was a minor scandal in Britain over the sinking of the Belgrano. I mean, seriously some housewife berated Thatcher a couple years later when she appeared on some call-in news interview show because :downs: if a warship is sailing away from the Falklands it can't possibly be dangerous therefore TORY WAR CRIME BLARGH :downs:

And people still cite that call as a triumph of the news media.

Nelson wept.

iyaayas01
Feb 19, 2010

Perry'd

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

I will never stop thinking how funny it is that there was a minor scandal in Britain over the sinking of the Belgrano. I mean, seriously some housewife berated Thatcher a couple years later when she appeared on some call-in news interview show because :downs: if a warship is sailing away from the Falklands it can't possibly be dangerous therefore TORY WAR CRIME BLARGH :downs:

And people still cite that call as a triumph of the news media.

Nelson wept.

Say what you will about The Sun, but their initial headline about the Belgrano sinking was loving hilarious. Also I'm reminded of the people who got pissed at Sharkey Ward for shooting down that Argentinian C-130 near the end of the war.

Oh yeah, and I almost forgot...add "if their Navy had been halfway competent and not a bunch of pussies and had still deployed their carrier to engage the British fleet instead of forcing their entire naval aviation arm to attack from the limits of their range with very limited intel" to the list of things that might have tipped the balance in their favor.

Casimir Radon
Aug 2, 2008


Argentina is a lovely country that had it coming.

Vincent Van Goatse
Nov 8, 2006

Enjoy every sandwich.

Smellrose

Casimir Radon posted:

Argentina is a lovely country that had it coming.

Not according to some prize English crazies. Somehow it's the fault of the British that Argentina decided to launch a surprise invasion of the Falklands.

TheArmorOfContempt
Nov 29, 2012

Did I ever tell you my favorite color was blue?

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

Not according to some prize English crazies. Somehow it's the fault of the British that Argentina decided to launch a surprise invasion of the Falklands.

Because White People and Imperialism...duh.

Limp Wristed Limey
Sep 7, 2010

by Lowtax

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

Not according to some prize English crazies. Somehow it's the fault of the British that Argentina decided to launch a surprise invasion of the Falklands.

Thats because they are idiots. I have seen people on the left weep about the injustice of Israel taking Palestinian land and then in the next sentence complain about how awful Thatcher was for fighting a poor helpless military junta that murdered 20,000 of their political opponents.

There was talk of US carriers helping if things got out of hand but again it was just talk and rumours. I would love to find out what the US would have done if the UK had been defeated. The Reagan administration was not happy with the conflict at all. They did provide a new version of the sidewinder though and they did provide satellite intelligence.
The Frence surprisingly provided assistence, they gave us a lot of information on the exocet.

iyaayas01
Feb 19, 2010

Perry'd

Limp Wristed Limey posted:

There was talk of US carriers helping if things got out of hand but again it was just talk and rumours. I would love to find out what the US would have done if the UK had been defeated. The Reagan administration was not happy with the conflict at all. They did provide a new version of the sidewinder though and they did provide satellite intelligence.
The Frence surprisingly provided assistence, they gave us a lot of information on the exocet.

I think people overestimate the amount of overt support the US would've been willing to provide had things gone terrible. Yes, we gave you guys the Lima and a shitload of satellite pictures, but I have my doubts that the whole "give you a carrier if the Hermes and/or Invincible got sunk" thing would've really gone down, because if you listen to Lehman talk about it, him and Weinberger were just going to casually give a loving US Navy aircraft carrier to a foreign government to use in a war based on the verbal authorization of the President and somehow were going to keep this a secret from literally everyone else in the Cabinet (most notably Al Haig), because Lehman and Weinberger were the only two who thought arming a foreign government with a US warship was a good idea.

Also the French, in hilariously typical French fashion, also had a team on the ground in Argentina that was providing technical assistance with maintaining and prepping the few Exocets that the Argentinians had.

dr cum patrol esq
Sep 3, 2003

A C A B

:350:
We would have sided with Argentina because Monroe Doctrine, that's why :colbert:

Vincent Van Goatse
Nov 8, 2006

Enjoy every sandwich.

Smellrose

front wing flexing posted:

We would have sided with Argentina because Monroe Doctrine, that's why :colbert:

That and supporting every single pissant anti-Communist gang of thugs south of the Rio Grande meant we couldn't exactly condemn the idiot Argentines for launching an unprovoked invasion of an actual ally's territory. Even if it's the stupid punkass Brits.

Thank you Ronald Reagan, your legacy is intact!

Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 07:54 on May 14, 2013

Limp Wristed Limey
Sep 7, 2010

by Lowtax
Someone mentioned above that the carriers would have been supplied with "contractors", thats something I had not heard of. Talk of handing over a carrier sure but like you said I dont think it would be a simple case of handing them over.
Also the logistics and training of manning the carrier with a Royal Navy crew. I have not served in the Navy but I dont think getting a ship you have never trained on and suddenly taking it into a warzone would be a very good idea.

Packed Lunch
Jul 25, 2007

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

Not according to some prize English crazies. Somehow it's the fault of the British that Argentina decided to launch a surprise invasion of the Falklands.

If I recall correctly, the kickoff of the conflict was over some dude bringing in work crews without visas/passports to disassemble an abandoned whaling station. (his contract for the dismantlement had expired, but he went ahead anyway.)

A couple of weeks later Argentina invades and captures a group of unfortunate SAS who had been dropped off by submarine. poo poo just gets weird after that.

Heid the Ball
Nov 2, 2005
Gordon's ALIVE?!?!?

Packed Lunch posted:

If I recall correctly, the kickoff of the conflict was over some dude bringing in work crews without visas/passports to disassemble an abandoned whaling station. (his contract for the dismantlement had expired, but he went ahead anyway.)

A couple of weeks later Argentina invades and captures a group of unfortunate SAS who had been dropped off by submarine. poo poo just gets weird after that.

The SAS tried to liberate South Georgia by landing covertly on a glacier, but that didn't go well.

The Navy disabled an old Argie sub (using helicopters!), then carried out a bombardment demonstration on the hills beside the whaling station, and the Argie marines surrendered after 15 minutes.

The signal sent to notify London of the liberation was the best part:

"Be pleased to inform Her Majesty that the White Ensign flies alongside the Union Jack in South Georgia. God save the Queen."

:britain:

Nostalgia4Dogges
Jun 18, 2004

Only emojis can express my pure, simple stupidity.

Limp Wristed Limey posted:

Someone mentioned above that the carriers would have been supplied with "contractors", thats something I had not heard of. Talk of handing over a carrier sure but like you said I dont think it would be a simple case of handing them over.
Also the logistics and training of manning the carrier with a Royal Navy crew. I have not served in the Navy but I dont think getting a ship you have never trained on and suddenly taking it into a warzone would be a very good idea.


Yeah the giving them a carrier with retired sailor contractors familiar with the ship is just verbatim from Wikipedia. Not saying that's where he got it but yeah

drgitlin
Jul 25, 2003
luv 2 get custom titles from a forum that goes into revolt when its told to stop using a bad word.

Limp Wristed Limey posted:

Thats because they are idiots. I have seen people on the left weep about the injustice of Israel taking Palestinian land and then in the next sentence complain about how awful Thatcher was for fighting a poor helpless military junta that murdered 20,000 of their political opponents.

There was talk of US carriers helping if things got out of hand but again it was just talk and rumours. I would love to find out what the US would have done if the UK had been defeated. The Reagan administration was not happy with the conflict at all. They did provide a new version of the sidewinder though and they did provide satellite intelligence.
The Frence surprisingly provided assistence, they gave us a lot of information on the exocet.

There were serious disagreements between Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Weinberger, but Weinberger won, and US support was more than just AIM-9Ls and satellite images, the war wouldn't have been possible without using Ascension Island and the USAF base there.

Brown Moses
Feb 22, 2002

Some Syrian pilots having a bad day

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZjgqpQrL_4

Here's what did it,can anyone spot what is special about it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXGuUXbS3eo

Casimir Radon
Aug 2, 2008


Vincent Van Goatse posted:

Not according to some prize English crazies. Somehow it's the fault of the British that Argentina decided to launch a surprise invasion of the Falklands.
What's funny about the Falklands is that by the time the British showed up there was nobody to steal them from. Other than being an overseas colony they've got nothing to say. Of course this is also one of those exceptions freshmen sociology students will make when saying everyone has the right to self determination.

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

Brown Moses posted:

Here's what did it,can anyone spot what is special about it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXGuUXbS3eo
External power supply?

Brown Moses
Feb 22, 2002

evil_bunnY posted:

External power supply?

That's right, they've jury-rigged the battery to accept an external power supply, overcoming the limitations of thermal batteries.

Limp Wristed Limey
Sep 7, 2010

by Lowtax

drgitlin posted:

There were serious disagreements between Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Weinberger, but Weinberger won, and US support was more than just AIM-9Ls and satellite images, the war wouldn't have been possible without using Ascension Island and the USAF base there.

Granted Ascension was important but I am not sure you could class it as mission critical. It looks like a lot of the fuel released for our use was used in the Black Buck raids. I would not say these were a huge success.

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

Brown Moses posted:

That's right, they've jury-rigged the battery to accept an external power supply, overcoming the limitations of thermal batteries.
10 points to griffindor.

Loving Africa Chaps
Dec 3, 2007


We had not left it yet, but when I would wake in the night, I would lie, listening, homesick for it already.


The Argentines named their top football league the belgrano first division recently :laugh:

Limp Wristed Limey
Sep 7, 2010

by Lowtax
Its also worth noting that the Belgrano was sailing out of a warzone with its water tight doors open.

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Red Crown
Oct 20, 2008

Pretend my finger's a knife.

Christoff posted:

Yeah the giving them a carrier with retired sailor contractors familiar with the ship is just verbatim from Wikipedia. Not saying that's where he got it but yeah

No, I've read that somewhere reliable, I forget exactly where, though. The plan was actually very Cold War style probably-technically-legal: The entire crew of the Iwo Jima would be "retired" and then immediately re-hired as "contractors", I forget if they would be U.S. government employees or work for a shell company. Basically, it would have been the flimsiest of pretenses to deploy the Iwo Jima under command of whoever was in charge of the British task force. As I recall, we had the paperwork ready and everything.

Someone was asking after a good read on the war, I recommend Max Hastings' The Battle for the Falklands.

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