Argentina less restrained during the Falklands War

[Derek Pullem]

Sorry, you're wrong. A D9 with a ripper would make very short work of a runway.

Got a source for that - D9 + ripper = dead runway

D9 + ripper = excavator not demolition. They can knock down Palestinian houses ok but 24" military spec concrete runways is a different game.

BTW - which one of the Marines is the expert and how did they know the equipment was at hand. Or is it just lying around at Ascension

 

[Andrew Hudson]

As others have pointed out it wasn't a feasible option and they would be operating out of range of land based aircraft and riskibg a confrontation with the United States. The only way they would have shown less restraint would have been to treat the Islanders as hostages, they had no qualms about killing their own political prisoners. However if they had gone down that road they would have alienated international sympathy. The reason they didn't shows they were unsure of the outcome and were hoping that Britain would accept their invasion as a fait accompli.

 

[Rickshaw]

All you do is set your dozers at one end and rip down the length of the runway. Alternatively you do it at diagonals. All you need do is disrupt the surface. Any attempt to land on it would rip the undercart off the aircraft. Remember, the Argentines do not need to completely destroy this airstrip, merely damage it sufficiently to make repairs difficult and take time.

Rounding up the civilians I agree, does take time and resources. Easier to simply warn them that if they interfere they will be treated as Francs-tireurs and will suffer the usual fate reserved for such under International Law.

The military personnel would be treated as EPWs and accorded the full protection of the Geneva Conventions and interned and removed from the Island to the ships off shore. Of course this would be publicised for the information of the world and particularly the UK Government.

 

[Rickshaw]

Got a source for that - D9 + ripper = dead runway

D9 + ripper = excavator not demolition. They can knock down Palestinian houses ok but 24" military spec concrete runways is a different game.

BTW - which one of the Marines is the expert and how did they know the equipment was at hand. Or is it just lying around at Ascension

Read the thread. You'll find the answers to your questions.

 

[Derek Pullem]

Not had much experience with plant, have you? 4 feet thick? Wow. Never seen a runway or hard standing that thick. 30 cm is the norm in my experience.

It would not take weeks to either unload across the beach or to undertake the work.

The "loyal islanders" would be rounded up. I suppose the Boy Scout group could be considered a threat, along with the 17 RAF staff.

As to what could the British do in a space of a few days except a few long range bombing missions. It would be ironic that they would be bombing and damaging the very installation which is so vital to their plans.

What experience?

http://www.iprf.org/products/IPRF Accel Guide Vol I Planning Guide.pdf

15" minimum PCC for fast installations - possibly much more for a runway that was designated as an emergency Space Shuttle landing site.

 

[Grimm Reaper]

A good portion of the Argentine navy surrendered to Brazil without a shot being fired? Someone's going to be upset...

 

[Rickshaw]

A good portion of the Argentine navy surrendered to Brazil without a shot being fired? Someone's going to be upset...

Internment is not surrender.

 

[Grimm Reaper]

For the duration of the war it is and there's no guarantee Argentina will get the ships back after the war.

 

[Derek Pullem]

Read the thread. You'll find the answers to your questions.

Ok - so you're sending military engineers plus their equipment to Ascension Island. So now you need to dock at the port or actually the single pier at Georgetown. You need to get to the airport and then tear up the runway.

As others have identified - how long is this going to take?

 

[Thande]

The reason they didn't shows they were unsure of the outcome and were hoping that Britain would accept their invasion as a fait accompli.

It would actually be interesting to see their approach taken to the other extreme by emphasising this and trying to get world opinion on their side. For example, only taking over the Falklands and not South Georgia.

 

[SunilTanna]

It would actually be interesting to see their approach taken to the other extreme by emphasising this and trying to get world opinion on their side. For example, only taking over the Falklands and not South Georgia.

I think if they want to minimise response, it's the other way round. Take South Georgia first.

There's no real inhabitants on South Georgia - and no permanent garrison - just some British Antarctic Survey scientists who could have been left alone, and there probably have been little response if they just run up a flag there, maybe even setup a weather station.

It would be similar to what already happened on the South Sandwiches: The British didn't even notice an Argentine military weather station on the South Sandwich islands, for several years.

The thing is though, the junta needed and wanted some kind of acknowledgement, even if not actual war, because they wanted to parade a victory in front of the Argentine people.

 

[Intosh]

Rounding up the civilians I agree, does take time and resources. Easier to simply warn them that if they interfere they will be treated as Francs-tireurs and will suffer the usual fate reserved for such under International Law.

Do you realized what this mean ???

Military executions of civilians after their capture and the Argentinians will become the new nazi war criminals...

You will see images of european Resistance members executed on TV to remember the comparison.

You add to that the infamous "Navy torture center" and the entire world will want argentinian blood...

 

[Don Lardo]

Then of course, nice, noisy nuclear submarines, travelling at high speed underwater. Mmm, wonder what the ASW assets will be doing?

You're referring to the ASW assets which in the OTL didn't even realize the Belgrano had been torpedoed until hours after the fact? Or failed to detect Conqueror when she'd shadowed them for days, sprinted in and out of firing positions, and even raised a comm mast to call London twice? Those ASW assets?

Sure, whatever.

 

[Alien and Sedition Bat]

Think about it: the Argentineans have just launched an armed assault on and occupied and begun to dismantle a USAF base. This is war. Expect U.S. warplanes to savage the Argentine forces before the latter can get the airfield fully destroyed, and expect arrival of USMC promptly thereafter. So the Argentinians grab some civilian hostages? I think the US could very quickly catch the attention of Galtieri with a demonstration attack on one of his command and control centers, and with a message that if he doesn't order his forces on Ascension to release the hostages and stand down, more retaliation will follow on a massive scale. Also expect one or more US carriers to join the Brits and provide air cover for Goose Green. Finally, expect Reagan to fire his crazed neo-con UN ambassador Jean Kirkpatrick, who was running her own unofficial foreign policy and gave the Argentineans the idea they could get away with just about anything as long as they kept on killing and torturing America's Cold War enemies.

 

[Don Lardo]

Think about it: the Argentineans have just launched an armed assault on and occupied and begun to dismantle a USAF base.

Funny how some folks either can't realize that or wish it can just be waved away.

I'm not going to pretend I know what was being discussed at the highest levels of the US political and diplomatic establishment during the period. I do know, however, what was believed in the military: We thought we were going in.

At the time, I was serving aboard a cruiser being overhauled in the now-shuttered Charleston Naval Shipyard. That ship was normally stationed in Mayport as part of the USS Forrestal battlegroup. When the war began work on the ship increased in pace, leaves and school assignments were canceled, and other steps taken because it was understood that the Forrestal was going to the South Atlantic. This wasn't just mess decks scuttlebutt, the command of the yard directed that pace of repairs increase and the command of the ship took steps to keep the crew on hand. That meant those commanding officers either "knew" or "believed" or "guessed" the ship would be needed.

We all "knew" we were going in and we acted accordingly. An Argentine attack on the USAF base on Ascension would have seen US forces already preparing to intervene.

 

[Don Lardo]

So, the claim that they could out run the Argentine carrier force is somewhat dubious IMHO.

It only gets worse and worse. First treating the islanders like "franc-tireurs" and now this.

The RN SSNs had an admitted top speed of 28 knots, a speed we know is low by several knots thanks to known departure and arrival times/dates. de Mayo on the other hand had a top speed of only 24 knots when she was launched in 1948 and an operational speed in the 1980s which was a few knots shy of that as evidenced by her inability to launch Skyhawks without a certain amount of wind speed.

Suggesting that RN SSNs won't be able to overtake the ARA carrier is as ludicrous as nearly everything else you've suggested in this thread.

 

[TheMann]

Super-coordinated, well-planned Argentine military, led by intelligent on-the-ball leaders?

The entire Argentine military had no real institutional memory or experience of fighting wars... and they're not going to get that over-night or come out the gate as the best. Let's remember that until that point their leadership's main experience and institutional memory was in murdering civilians and over-throwing elected governments.

I actually find it surprising they did as well as they did. Their airforce at least was revealed to be pretty ballsy, even if borderline incompetent in terms of planning and so forth.

This is true, and some of Argentina's antics proved their balls more than anything, but if Argentina was planning this, they should have been prepared for it, and as everyone points out here, they simply weren't.

@ Rickshaw - the Argentine ASW guys would have been hard-pressed to find British SSNs. The British sub fleet was designed with the goal of killing tooled-up Russian SSNs and dodging their ASW patrols and ships. If they can run with the Russians, the Argentines haven't a prayer. Don Lardo is right about the attack as Ascension, too. I think that is where the US would have called in their Navy to go down with the British, at which point the Argentines are kinda screwed.

 

[Byzer Bob]

D9 + Ripper

Without going into the detailed mathematics (which I will if absolutely neccessary) as an engineer involved with earthworks construction there are certain problems with ripping a runway pavement.

On the back of cig packet calc....

Take a standard pavement, subgrade will be 12" to 48" Imp or 300mm to 1200mm of compacted material covered by 6" to 12" 150mm to 300mm reinforced slab approx 8m by 18m so approx 43 cube by sg of material is a slab weighing 100 tonnes. A D9 weighs 48 tonnes and has a draw capacity of nearly 72 tonnes... not going to rip a runway

 

[MacCaulay]

As a counterpoint to the thread about the British restraint during the Falklands/Malvinas War, this thread can discuss what might have happened if the Argentines had been less restrained.

So you mean like...if the Argentine marines had peed and taken a dump in the main gymnasium in Port Stanley?

 

[Cook]

There was time to establish a serious defence of the Islands between the time that it was clear the Task Force was being prepared and would be sent south and its arrival in the South Atlantic.

Certainly it would have been better had some thought gone into planning a defence earlier but there was still time to plan and deploy a good defence of the islands even in that time.

Some closer co-ordination between the Argentine Army, Navy and Air Force would have greatly improved things.

Had the Pebble Island raid not taken place or not been successful would the Pucaras based there been able to play a significant part in operations?

More logically if the Pucaras had been based at more than one airstrip and in more defensible locations.

In some ways even more important than the loss of the runway would have been the loss of the hard standing. Have you ever seen pictures of how crowded Wideawake was at the height of the operations there? Loss of the hard standing would have slowed operations considerably. No place to park aircraft. No place to unload and transload.

Hardstand is actually the easier thing to provide for military aircraft. Perforated Metal sheet was used to build hardstand and runways in the Pacific in WW2.

Internment is not surrender.

Internment is for the duration of the conflict. The British would be more certain that the Argentine Navy could not interfere with events that they were with the ships tied up alongside in Buenos Aires.

So you mean like...if the Argentine marines had peed and taken a dump in the main gymnasium in Port Stanley?

Given the very poor sanitation habits practiced by the Argentinean troops around their positions that would have probably been an improvement.