The Argentinian battle group had orders that were 20 hours old to return to port.

It is a pity the Belgrano didn’t carry out its orders with ‘utmost despatch’.

The Belgrano didn’t pose a credible threat – the ships that supported her did.

…the carrier was very limited in what it could do and in many ways was a liability.

So what were they doing there then?

Are you suggesting that some greater purpose would have been served by torpedoing one (or both) of the escorts? The object of the exercise as far as HMS Conqueror was concerned was to return all the major Argentine surface ships to port; it wouldn’t have really mattered which ship, or ships, were sunk.

Either of the escorts ARA Piedra Buena and ARA Hipolito Bouchard would have made a difficult target (at only 2200 tons displacement) but loss of life would have been extremely heavy among their crews.

My personal view is that sinking belgrano was very sensible even just for the secondary effect of scaring off the carrier group.

It is ok armchair historians saying that the carrier was not much of a threat…

You are absolutely right of course; there is a world of difference between being sure that the Argentine carrier strike would blunt itself against the Sea Harrier CAP / Sea Dart / Sea Wolf missiles of the British carrier battle group from the safety of you armchair and actually having to take that decision with people’s lives. At some point the stand-off must be brought to a head; better to do it quickly when the outcome is as much under your control as possible.

The submarine Santa Fe was attacked and captured in South Georgia, which is something like 500 miles outsie of the Exclusion Zone.

The Argentinians cannot claim that adequate warning of hostile naval action was not given.

A very good point. The tiny Royal Marine garrison of South Georgia also shot down a Puma helicopter and peppered the frigate ARA Guerrico with small-arms fire plus a few anti-tank rockets when the Argentines originally invaded the islands.

The Junta clearly wasn’t learning from their early experience of contact with the British.

Shame on any government that actively discourage honoring their dead soldiers.

I’m not sure our present government gives a toss about the living ones! :rolleyes:

…their Mig 29’s are classed as aerobatic and stored, whatever that means.

Yikes! 😮

I didn’t even know they had any…..I thought it was just Mirage III and (newer but still second-hand) A-4 Skyhawks! 😮

Why not apply the ‘What if’ to the present.

As the islands are defended by 4 F-3’s that from comments in previous threads can’t fight their way out of a paper bag, and were swamped by Argentine fighters, what next.

I think even a pair of Tornado F3s would ‘shoot to ribbons’ anything and everything the Argentines could put into the air and even the threat of a nuclear sub would be enough to keep their Navy in port.

Still, Argentina is a big country and the way our defence spending is going… :rolleyes:

I seem to recall that the carrier was also at sea at the time but returned to harbour after the Belgrano was sunk and never sailed again for the duration of the conflict. So the sinking of one ship actually took two out of theatre, reduced the threat to British forces and actually saved lives in that the carrier wasn’t sunk as well with the attendant casualties that would inflicted.

Exactly…

…and also I believe, exactly as the British intended (although the carrier’s aircraft did later operate from land and sink British ships).

Yes, Chile, they wanted British support, they helped us in a limited (although very important) way, and im sure they would have helped us more.

I’m not disputing that Chile wasn’t keen to help Britain against their traditional enemy and also in return for British assistance (such as the ‘sale’ of the Canberra PR9 to Chile) but I don’t think it could have extended to allowing British combat operations to be launched against Argentina or the Falklands. If so, why wasn’t it done? Maybe Britain wasn’t desperate enough?

As for your explanation of not crippling Argentina because of destabilising it, that just seems unlikely. Like the Belgrano action, you are only looking at this from one point of view.

As I said it is just my opinion but for the reasons I’ve explained I find the official explanation of ‘losing contact’ difficult to accept.

My suggestion was that both the ARA Veinticinco de Mayo and the ARA Belgrano were capable of being sunk by British submarines in the first few days of the war and the political decision was taken to sink the ARA Belgrano. Possibly because it was thought there would have been less loss of life but I think also it would have been a great blow for Argentina to lose their flagship.

Remember at that point there had been no significant losses on either side and very few casualties (no British dead) so the ‘shooting war’ hadn’t really started. This was also much of the controversy over the Belgrano at the time…

…imagine if it had been their flagship carrier?