‘That little ice-cold bunch of land down there’

Abstract

On 19 March 1982, a party of Argentine ‘scrap metal merchants’ landed on the Falklands’ dependency of South Georgia without permission from the British authorities and raised the Argentine flag. The Governor of the Falklands was right in suspecting that these were Argentine naval personnel. The British Defence Secretary, John Nott, had announced plans to withdraw the sole British naval vessel, HMS Endurance, from the South Atlantic. But the ship was now sent to remove the Argentine party from South Georgia.