All For One, One For All - Argentine Navy Operations During the Falklands/Malvinas War

‘Know thy enemy’ is the oft-quoted saying of the legendary Chinese general and philosopher Sun Tzu. The Royal Navy did not have time to do so as it scrambled for up to date maps of the South American littoral and copies of Jane’s Fighting Ships while embarking for Operation Corporate in the Spring of 1982. Nor did the Argentine Navy, according to this book. Operation Rosario came as a complete surprise to all but a tiny number of the ruling Junta which left the Navy struggling to prepare for a conflict with a major world naval power in a state of general unpreparedness equipped with much obsolete or malfunctioning materiel. This is an important work, evidently the first book-length English language account of the Falklands War written by an Argentinian with life-long, close associations with his country’s navy. And this is no panegyric: Jorge Bóveda does not defend his country’s political decisions or its leaders. Nor does he seek to exaggerate the ability or performance of the Argentine Navy: he is equally praiseworthy and critical of both sides. The author introduces a further element in this short book which provides the reader with a deeper understanding of the decision-making underpinning many of the events during that short but deadly conflict. Bóveda explains the institutional culture within the Argentine Navy which had developed since its inception in the early part of the 19th Century. In this respect he pays tribute to Alistair Finlan’s excellent 2004 comparative study of the influences of culture and strategy in the British Royal Navy during the Falklands and Gulf Wars. He portrays the Argentine Navy as rigorously doctrinal in its officer training which was matched by a steeply pyramidal hierarchy, the top brass almost exclusively drawn from the ranks of its surface fleet. At the time of the war the fleet air arm and submarine branches were subservient in terms of funding and status, bound by a strategy fixated on a future surface fleet engagement. In that important respect, as Bóveda acknowledges, his Navy’s thinking by 1982 had fallen woefully behind contemporary nations. Some of the information in this scrupulously researched work is novel and revealing. The fact that the Argentine Navy possessed two Type 42s, exact copies of the RN destroyers, enabled their navy pilots to avoid the radar ‘envelopes’ of the AAW pickets. Only one of their five submarines, ARA San Luis, was operational but handicapped through lack of practice with live ammunition, inexperienced command appointments and faulty wire-guided torpedoes - all due to neglect or gross underfunding. Surprisingly, the surface fleet’s withdrawal following the sinking of the cruiser General Belgrano was not wholly accounted for by the continuing presence of the RN’s SSNs. It needed to be held in check in the expectation of a future clash with the Chilean Navy in their long-running territorial dispute over the Beagle Channel. The overriding importance of an imagined engagement with their Southern Cone neighbour underlines the Argentine Navy’s ingrained and outdated strategic culture. Thus, historic claims to the Malvinas appear to have been of subsidiary importance within the bastions of the Puerto Belgrano naval base. All for One, One for All is a well-illustrated, large format book whose superficial, rather ‘light-weight’ appearance belies the quality of its content. It provides an excellent counterbalance to the very large number of British accounts available on a conflict which this year marks its 40th anniversary.