Falkland Quotes

But the up-front reason is that he was reclaiming rightful Iraqi territory. Look, it happens all over the world. India took Goa, China took Tibet, Indonesia has taken East Timor. Argentina tried for the Falklands. Each time, the claim is retaking a chunk of rightful territory. It’s very popular with the home crowd, you know.

Where it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.

Rearden sat in his room at the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, fighting an enemy more dangerous than weariness or fear: revulsion against the thought of having to deal with human beings.

You ever wonder why an East Eng girl like me hasn't got much in the way of family? Well here's the reasons Petra. World War 1. World War 2. Falklands War. Gulf War 1. Gulf War 2 and the War on Drugs. You can take your pick because I've lost whole bloody chunks of my family in all of them.

My good friend the Governor said I could settle down at Port Stanley and take things quietly for a few weeks. The street of that port is about a mile and a half long. It has the slaughterhouse at one end and the graveyard at the other. The chief distraction is to walk from the slaughterhouse to the graveyard. For a change one may walk from the graveyard to the slaughterhouse.

When the First Sea Lord, Admiral Leach, told the Prime Minister and her cabinet colleagues that it would take three weeks to sail the Task Force to the Falklands, he was met with the incredulous response ‘surely you mean three days?

En ese sombrío día de diciembre de 1542 en el que nace en el castillo de Linlithgow, su padre, Jacobo V, yace al mismo tiempo en su lecho de muerte en la vecina fortaleza de Falkland, con sólo treinta y un años de edad y sin embargo ya quebrado por la vida, cansado de la corona, cansado de luchar.

At the time, Charles Sumner still chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and made preposterous demands upon the English. Not only did he want all of Canada but a total British withdrawal from the Western Hemisphere, including its Caribbean islands and the Falkland Islands off the Argentine coast.

Diplomacy without politics is ultimately impotent.

From thence we proceeded to Oxford. As we entered this city, our minds were filled with the remembrance of the events that had been transacted there more than a century and a half before. It was here that Charles I. had collected his forces. This city had remained faithful to him, after the whole nation had forsaken his cause to join the standard of parliament and liberty. The memory of that unfortunate king, and his companions, the amiable Falkland, the insolent Goring, his queen, and son, gave a peculiar interest to every part of the city which they might be supposed to have inhabited. The spirit of elder days found a dwelling here, and we delighted to trace its footsteps. If these feelings had not found an imaginary gratification, the appearance of the city had yet in itself sufficient beauty to obtain our admiration. The colleges are ancient and picturesque; the streets are almost magnificent; and the lovely Isis, which flows beside it through meadows of exquisite verdure, is spread forth into a placid expanse of waters, which reflects its majestic assemblage of towers, and spires, and domes, embosomed among aged trees.

Have you ever remarked, that people who live the most by themselves, reflect the most upon others: and that he who lives surrounded by the million, never thinks of any but the one individual,—himself?

We have out-sourced the fighting of our wars to a tiny fraction of the population. The reality is that virtually nobody in our country suffers when we go to war: nobody, except the families of those who go.

A country like my own, Britain – which still occupies Gilbraltar captured in the 18th century, the Falklands captured in the 19th century and the Channel Islands which belonged to France until 1468, and rightly so in each case – is being absurdly hypocritical when it criticises Israel for retaining territory vital to her survival, which Gilbraltar, the Falklands and the Channel Island certainly aren’t to Britain’s.

We piled aboard the small chopper and after a bit of map pointing to the pilot we lifted off. "I love the RAF," said Jed. "I love them too, sir," said I. After a short flight the chopper landed. We all got out and waved our thanks and farewells to the crew and Major Jenner checked his map. After a quick examination he announced that we had been dropped in the wrong place. "I fucking hate the RAF," said Jed. "I fucking hate them too, sir," said I.

Units with a history and tradition of close-combat, hand-to-hand killing inspire special dread and fear in an enemy by capitalizing upon this natural aversion to the “hate” manifested in this determination to engage in close-range interpersonal aggression. The British Gurkha battalions have been historically effective at this (as can be seen in the Argentinean’s dread of them during the Falklands War), but any unit that puts a measure of faith in the bayonet has grasped a little of the natural dread with which an enemy responds to the possibility of facing an opponent who is determined to come within “skewering range.” What these units (or at least their leaders) must understand is that actual skewering almost never happens; but the powerful human revulsion to the threat of such activity, when a soldier is confronted with superior posturing represented by a willingness or at least a reputation for participation in close-range killing, has a devastating effect upon the enemy’s morale.

Humans out there are grotesque: Scrooges and Jellybys and filthy orphans in the caverns of blacking factories, in lonely depopulated homes, a blight called television like tiny Plato's caves in every room. It is grimmer in the Outside. There is a war in the Falkland Islands, there are Sandinistas and Contras, there are muggings and rapes, terrible things he has heard the adults talking about, has read about himself when he can find an old wrinkled paper in the Free Store. The president is an actor, placed in power to smoothly deliver the corporations' lies. There are bombs among the stars and murders in the inner cities, red rain over London, there are kidnappers and slaves even now, even in America.

serviceman or woman agrees to go at no notice to a place one can’t find on the map; and can’t pronounce when one does find it: to risk life and sanity fighting with barely adequate resources, against an enemy whose politics one has no strong feelings about; with a plan one doesn’t think much of; alongside coalition partners whom one does not hold in high regard. We

That July, on a flight to the Republican convention in Detroit which nominated him as the party’s presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan had chatted with his political guru, Stuart Spencer: ‘Spencer asked the question all political pros learn to ask their candidates early on. “Why are you doing this, Ron? Why do you want to be President?” Without a moment’s hesitation Reagan answered, “To end the Cold War.

In 1831, the Royal Navy sent the ship HMS Beagle to map the coasts of South America, the Falklands Islands and the Galapagos Islands. The navy needed this knowledge in order to be better prepared in the event of war. The ship’s captain, who was an amateur scientist, decided to add a geologist to the expedition to study geological formations they might encounter on the way. After several professional geologists refused his invitation, the captain offered the job to a twenty-two-year-old Cambridge graduate, Charles Darwin. Darwin had studied to become an Anglican parson but was far more interested in geology and natural sciences than in the Bible. He jumped at the opportunity, and the rest is history. The captain spent his time on the voyage drawing military maps while Darwin collected the empirical data and formulated the insights that would eventually become the theory of evolution.

In 1831, the Royal Navy sent the ship HMS Beagle to map the coasts of South America, the Falklands Islands and the Galapagos Islands. The navy needed this knowledge in order to tighten Britain’s imperial grip over South America. The ship’s captain, who was an amateur scientist, decided to add a geologist to the expedition to study geological formations they might encounter on the way. After several professional geologists refused his invitation, the captain offered the job to a twenty-two-year-old Cambridge graduate, Charles Darwin. Darwin had studied to become an Anglican parson but was far more interested in geology and natural sciences than in the Bible. He jumped at the opportunity, and the rest is history. The captain spent his time on the voyage drawing military maps while Darwin collected the empirical data and formulated the insights that would eventually become the theory of evolution.

We also had some fun with another hard-drinking and know-it-all reporter from one of the ‘red top’ tabloids. I solemnly informed him that his luck was in, because one of our trainee surgeons was a real wizard at organ transplantion. We told him that, if he was shot through the belly, we would try to exchange his worn-out liver for a new one – and then he could start his prodigious drinking career all over again. While that was sinking in, we even asked if he had any objection to receiving an Argentine donor organ if one became available. It was all a bit of military black humour of course, but the poor chap went white-faced, and tried to make me swear on the Bible that I’d never arrange such a procedure, and would finish him off with a lethal injection instead. Transplant surgery in a Forward Dressing Station? Come alongside, Jack…

One soldier picked up a dead Argentine, supported the corpse's weight underneath his arm, put a cigarette in the dead man's mouth, then one in his own. He then held a lighter under the corpse's cigarette and his friend took a photograph. They both laughed. I also laughed. This was foolish ― smoking can kill.

Only people that have never been to War think War a good idea.

He, too, began as a mountain of greatness, was tempered and shaped by the wind of life, cracked into smaller pieces, and he would finally become a grain of sand on an endless beach.

Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.”―Tennessee Williams

Duty is the essence of manhood.”—General George S. Patton

A Brazilian, talking to one of the R.A.F. men, said that he could not understand two major nations fighting over the tiny Falklands; it was, said the Brazilian, ‘like two bald men fighting over a comb’.

However, he initially saw no moral issue with Falkland and dismissed any criticism of the work as faux outrage and contended that he was content to attract readers to his works by any means, including controversy. Leslie George Mitchell states that Bulwer-Lytton, or just Bulwer as he was known at that time, considered his poetry to be his finest work and wished to increase its readership through his novel writing and reputation.

In our society, where conscription no longer exists, very few people have any conception of what it is like to be a serviceman or woman. Notwithstanding new conflicts elsewhere in the world, even fewer still know what it is like to bear any burden of war whatsoever, beyond a theoretical financial one. We have out-sourced the fighting of our wars to a tiny fraction of the population. The reality is that virtually nobody in our country suffers when we go to war: nobody, except the families of those who go. While our soldiers on active service must have our encouragement and support, it is their families who carry the real burden of war and who are far less likely to receive the help and succour they need and deserve. Neither

From Tudor to eighteenth-century England, there are many instances of women writers with no place or room of their own. The life-story of the play-wright Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland (1585-1639) gives us a dramatic and, lately, much-studied example. In the hagiographical 'The Lady Falkland: Her Life', written by one of her daughters, we hear how the prodigious Elizabeth learnt to read very soon and loved it much... Without a teacher, whilst she was a child, she learnt French, Spanish, Italian [and] Latin... She having neither brother nor sister, nor other companion of her age, spent her whole time in reading; to which she gave herself so much that she frequently read all night; so as her mother was fain to forbid her servants to let her have candles, which command they turned to their own profit, and let themselves be hired by her to let her have them, selling them to her at half a crown apiece, so was she bent to reading; and she not having money so free, was to owe it them, and in this fashion was she in debt a hundred pound afore she was twelve year old.

Innocence does not find near so much protection as guilt.”―Francois de La Rochefoucauld

As Churchill said: ‘If you’re going through hell, keep going.

Villain!” cried he, “what has brought you here?” I hesitated a confused and irresolute answer. “Wretch!” interrupted Mr Falkland, with uncontrollable impatience, “you want to ruin me. You set yourself as a spy upon my actions; but bitterly shall you repent your insolence. Do you think you shall watch my privacies with impunity?” I attempted to defend myself. “Begone, devil!” rejoined he. “Quit the room, or I will trample you into atoms.” Saying this, he advanced towards me. But I was already sufficiently terrified, and vanished in a moment.

Ese mismo año, a la altura de las Falkland, el Endeavour, un barco de noventa metros de eslora, estuvo a merced de un fenómeno que la ciencia conoce como «las Tres Hermanas»: tres olas sucesivas, pegadas, de treinta metros de altura cada una. El Endeavour sufrió serios daños, pero logró llegar a puerto.

Born on March 20, 1971, she celebrated her 100th birthday this past March. During the war she toured the battle zones, where British forces were fighting by giving concerts for the troops. The songs most remembered from that era are We'll Meet Again, The White Cliffs of Dover, A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square and There'll Always Be an England. During the Second World War she earned the title of “the Allied Forces Sweetheart.” And in 1945 she was awarded the British War Medal and the Burma Star for her untiring devotion to the Crown and the men in uniform. As a songwriter and actress, her recordings and performances were enormously popular. This popularity remained solid after the war with recording of Auf Wiedersehen Sweetheart, My Son, My Son and I Love This Land, which was released to mark the end of the Falklands War. In 2009, at age 92, she became the oldest living artist to top the UK Albums Chart, with We'll Meet Again, The Very Best of Vera Lynn. Commemorating her 100th birthday she released the album Vera Lynn 100, in 2017, which number 3 on the charts, making her the oldest recording artist in the world and the first centenarian performer to have an album in the charts. Vera Lynn devoted much time working with wounded ex-servicemen, disabled children, and breast cancer. She is held in great affection by veterans of the Second World War and in 2000 was named the Briton who best exemplified the spirit of the 20th century.

At Falkland Palace, Andrew Melville famously reminded James VI in 1596 that: [t]hair is twa Kings and twa Kingdomes in Scotland. Thair is Christ Jesus the King, and His kingdom, the Kirk, whase subject King James the Saxt is, and of whase kingdome nocht a king, not a lord, not a heid, but a member.

Why did the sheep bells of the Falkland Islands ring louder than the church bells of Jerusalem?

Why did the Argentine dictatorship invade the British Falkland Islands in 1982? The great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges dismissed the entire Argentine–British dispute over the isolated, windswept rocks as a pathetic fight between “two bald men over a comb.

As a result of her steadfast determination she kept faith with both the Falkland Islanders and with the will of Parliament. It is hard to believe that any other politician would have remained so straightforward in purpose and so single minded in commitment. It was the force of her personality and the strength of her certainty that enabled her to stand firm. The people who appreciated this most were the men who were about to do the fighting.

It’s a little known fact that the Falklands task force was in fact heading to Paris when the Argentines invaded, and was diverted at the last minute to the South Atlantic. One week later and she would have been flying the Union Flag from the top of the Eiffel Tower.

Falkland Islands in a conflict most expertly described by Jorge Luis Borges as ‘two bald men fighting over a comb’;

I had the winter at the back of my mind. The Winter. What will the winter do? The wind, the cold. Down in South Georgia the ice what will it do? It beat Napoleon.” —Margaret Thatcher

Imagine yourself, eating dinner with your family or maybe a boyfriend/girlfriend, etc. Soldiers break your door down, take your mother and are gone in 30 seconds—and you will never see the ‘suspect’ again. Ever.” —Anonymous witness to the Dirty War

Britain had a small number of troops stationed near Stanley on East Falkland. These included a company sized garrison of 69 Royal Marines

one Mirage was damaged and shot down by friendly fire when it attempted to make a forced landing at Stanley Airfield.

union boss. There is a widespread feeling in the country that the Conservative Party has not defended these ideals explicitly and toughly enough, so that Britain is set on a course towards inevitable Socialist mediocrity.

I now accept that football has no relevance to the Falklands conflict, the Rushdie affair, the Gulf War, childbirth, the ozone layer, the poll tax, etc., etc., and I would like to take this opportunity to apologise to anyone who has had to listen to my pathetically strained analogies.)

suspect that highly sensitive exclusives have in the past and are now being carefully drip-fed to selected, compromised outlets by Blairite / Brownite / Cameronite / Mayite / Johnsonite governments and are timed for the greatest advantage within the managed control of information. With all this mutual back scratching, no journalist exists with the ability or courage needed to blow the whistle – Assange-like – on such a sordid situation.

My deep misgivings occurred to me firstly as a schoolboy, continued later as a sailor, developed further as a civilian employee, 197and have been evolving in my semi-retirement. What started initially as a gap in trust has become a yawning gulf. We are where we are, and as the situation

Why did the sheep bells of the Falkland Islands ring louder than the church bells of Jerusalem?’ —

The Royal Navy had deployed a large surface task force 8,000 miles from home without effective protection from air attack. Listening to false prophets, they had retired their large aircraft carriers as obsolete, depriving the fleet of airborne early warning and supersonic interceptors. To save money they had not funded the installation of existing cruise missile defenses nor made the investment in three-dimensional air defense radars for their ships. Now they began to pay a mounting price in blood and treasure.

...de Gurkha’s de meest doorgewinterde gevechtseenheden van het Britse leger. Bij de jaarlijkse rekrutering in Nepal dingen circa 11.000 kandidaten in loodzware toelatingsproeven mee naar de slechts 170 beschikbare plaatsen. In de Tweede Wereldoorlog werden ze naar het Midden-Oosten en Italië gestuurd. Maar in de voorbije halve eeuw vochten ze ook op de Falklands, in Irak, Joegoslavië en Afghanistan.895 Zowel in Nepal als in Engeland bezitten de Gurkha’s een mythische status: ze heten uitzonderlijk dapper, loyaal en onversaagd te zijn. Dertien van hen zijn zelfs dragers van het Victoria Cross, de hoogste militaire onderscheiding van het Verenigd Koninkrijk.896 Men zou ook kunnen zeggen: als voetvolk afkomstig uit arme, geïsoleerde en traditiegetrouwe dorpsgemeenschappen van een onherbergzaam land deden de Gurkha’s (en doen zij nog steeds) het vuile werk waar westerse soldaten niet langer toe bereid waren.

No one knew the Sounder could drive so hard. Her decks trembled with the straining throb of her engines and the hull shuddered as it pounded into the swells. Launched at a shipyard in Boston during the summer of 1961, she had spend almost three decades chartering out to oceanographic schools for deep-water research projects in every sea of the world. After her purchase by NUMA in 1990, she had been completely overhauled and refitted. Her new 4,000-horsepower diesel engine was designed to push her at a maximum of fourteen knots, but Stewart and his engineers somehow coaxed seventeen out of her. The Sounder was the only ship on the trail of the Lady Flamborough, and she stood as much chance of closing the gap as a basset hound after a leopard. Wartships of the Argentine Navy and British naval units stationed in the Falkland Islands might have intercepted the fleeing cruise ship, but they were not alerted.

In 1891 Ade discovered a tiled archway in the shadows of the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul, and returned with great golden disks she claimed were dragon scales. She visited Santiago and the Falklands, contracted malaria from Léopoldville, and disappeared for several months in the northeast corner of Maine. She accumulated the dust of other worlds on her skin like ten thousand perfumes, and left constellations of wistful men and impossible tales in her wake. But she never lingered anywhere for long. Most observers told me she was simply a wanderer, driven to move from place to place by the same unknowable pressures that make swallows fly south, but I believe she was something closer to a knight on a quest. I believe she was looking for one particular door and one particular world. In 1893, in the high, snowcapped spring of her twenty-seventh birthday, she found it.

...Rearden sat in his room at the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, fighting an enemy more dangerous than weariness or fear: revulsion against the thought of having to deal with human beings.

Israel is being forced to self-destruct by setting indefensible borders with an entity that has sworn to destroy her. No other country on earth has been, or is being, forced to do this. India will not grant political independence to eight million Sikhs, despite the Sikh terror campaign which included the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Sri Lanka will not allow an independent state in the north for the Tamils, in spite of Tamil terrorism. Iran, Iraq, and Turkey will not grant the Kurds autonomy despite the ongoing revolts. The Flemish and the Walloons, ethnically different, are in a cultural struggle in Belgium but no one suggests dividing the country. Look at the Spanish and the Basques, the Rumanians and the Gypsies, etc. Only Israel must divide in two. Only Israel must give its enemies the means to destroy her. There has never been a case of a nation winning a defensive war and then ceding territory to the vanquished. Only Israel is expected to put this absurdity into practice. No nation in the world would ever agree to such a thing. The United States never considered returning California and New Mexico to the Mexicans. England is still laying claim to the Falkland Islands off the coast of Argentina, thousands of miles away from Great Britain.

After that message of 23 April, the entire South Atlantic was an operational theatre for both sides. We, as professionals, said it was just too bad that we lost the Belgrano.

Few records exist to establish a definitive date as to when the first ships were built in the Piscataqua region. Fishing vessels were probably constructed as early as 1623, when the first fishermen settled in the area. Many undoubtedly boasted a skilled shipwright who taught the fishermen how to build “great shallops”as well as lesser craft. In 1631 a man named Edward Godfrie directed the fisheries at Pannaway. His operation included six large shallops, five fishing boats, and thirteen skiffs, the shallops essentially open boats that included several pairs of oars, a mast, and lug sail, and which later sported enclosed decks.5 Records do survive of the very first ship built by English settlers in the New World. In 1607, at the mouth of the Kennebec River in Maine, the Plymouth Company erected a short-lived fishing settlement. A London shipwright named Digby organized some settlers to construct a small vessel with which to return them home to England, as they were homesick and disenchanted with the New England winters. The small craft was named, characteristically, the Virginia. She was evidently a two-master and weighed about thirty tons, and she transported furs, salted cod, and tobacco for twenty years between various ports along the Maine coast, Plymouth, Jamestown, and England. She is believed to have wrecked somewhere along the coast of Ireland.6 By the middle of the seventeenth century, shipbuilding was firmly established as an independent industry in New England. Maine, with its long coastline and abundant forests, eventually overtook even Massachusetts as the shipbuilding capital of North America. Its most western town, Kittery, hovered above the Piscataqua. For many years the towns of Kittery and Portsmouth, and upriver enclaves like Exeter, Newmarket, Durham, Dover, and South Berwick, rivaled Bath and Brunswick, Maine, as shipbuilding centers, with numerous shipyards, blacksmith shops, sawmills, and wharves. Portsmouth's deep harbor, proximity to upriver lumber, scarcity of fog, and seven feet of tide made it an ideal location for building large vessels. During colonial times, the master carpenters of England were so concerned about competition they eventually petitioned Parliament to discourage shipbuilding in Portsmouth.7 One of the early Piscataqua shipwrights was Robert Cutts, who used African American slaves to build fishing smacks at Crooked Lane in Kittery in the 1650s. Another was William Pepperell, who moved from the Isle of Shoals to Kittery in 1680, where he amassed a fortune in the shipbuilding, fishing, and lumber trades. John Bray built ships in front of the Pepperell mansion as early as 1660, and Samuel Winkley owned a yard that lasted for three generations.8 In 1690, the first warship in America was launched from a small island in the Piscataqua River, situated halfway between Kittery and Portsmouth. The island's name was Rising Castle, and it was the launching pad for a 637-ton frigate called the Falkland. The Falkland bore fifty-four guns, and she sailed until 1768 as a regular line-of-battle ship. The selection of Piscataqua as the site of English naval ship construction may have been instigated by the Earl of Bellomont, who wrote that the harbor would grow wealthy if it supplemented its export of ship masts with “the building of great ships for H.M. Navy.”9 The earl's words underscore the fact that, prior to the American Revolution, Piscataqua's largest source of maritime revenue came from the masts and spars it supplied to Her Majesty's ships. The white oak and white pine used for these building blocks grew to heights of two hundred feet and weighed upward of twenty tons. England depended on this lumber during the Dutch Wars of the

One of the problems with writing about Room 40, especially as a pioneer for Bletchley Park, is that Hall was operating, not just outside the law, but outside all conventions. He kept his ruses in his head, managed them by force of personality and his own charm, and wrote very little down. In the years after the war, he tried to deflect the real story over and over again by inventing little untruths and obscurities. So we will probably never know, for example, if it was Hall’s fake signal to Admiral Maximilian von Spee’s squadron in the Pacific which lured them so disastrously to the Falklands, where the battlecruisers Invincible and Inflexible lay in wait.

But we do know more about the fleet action that so nearly took place a few days after the battle of the Falkland Isles in December 1914, because it was the first naval action of any kind where one side was able, and with some clarity, to listen in to the thoughts, preparations and orders of the other.

Two days after the incident, the commander of the task group, Rear Admiral Sandy Woodward, signalled ships with a list of 15 lessons learned.

War is full of clichés, because only clichés can match the drama of the moment.

Arguments for war based on the principle of 'setting the world an example' are always dangerous. They can be used to justify quite disproportionate responses, as occurred in South-east Asia in the 1960s and 1970s. They tend to be selective: why for instance did Britain not use force in 1965 to uphold the concept of majority self-determination in Rhodesia?

Nations are fortunate to have such leaders in time of conflict, but there are also advantages in leaders who avoid conflict in the first place.

I am lonely, of course. I’m so lonely I could make a map of my loneliness. In my mind it looks like South America, colossal, then petering out to a jagged little tip. Sometimes I’m so lonely I’m not even on that map. Sometimes I’m so lonely I’m the fucking Falklands.

At Government House, Tony Hunt, the governor's son, watched a trusted retainer named Mary Fullerton prepare to leave with what valued possessions she could carry, a portrait of the Queen in one hand, two bottles of gin in the other. Tony thought she had her priorities about right.

The world’s largest peatlands are Canada’s Hudson Bay Lowlands, Russia’s Great Vasyugan Mire, the Mayo Boglands, America’s Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, Indonesia’s peat forests, the Magellanic Tundra Complex of Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego and the Falkland Islands, the marshes of Mesopotamia and the Central Congo Basin’s Cuvette Centrale.