Individual accounts from soldiers who fought in wars can give new insights into the conduct of a war and the execution of military strategy and thereby serve as a valuable tool for the military historian. According to Edmundo Murray, ‘translation was one particularly skilled service rendered by many Irish Argentines during the Falkland / Malvinas War’ (Murray 2005: 3:6) Irish-Argentine soldiers contributed in many and varied ways to the conduct of the war. It is not possible to ascertain the actual number of Argentine troops of Irish ancestry who participated in the war, but merely focusing on those with Irish surnames would suggest that their representation among the troops was broadly proportionate to the estimated number of Argentines of Irish descent in the general population (approximately 0.7 per cent). Similarly, on the British side, there were also numerous soldiers who were either Irish-born or of Irish descent. Many Irish-Argentines fought in the war, either as professional soldiers or as conscripts. In the end, more than one thousand Argentines and two hundred and fifty British lost their lives in the short but bitter conflict. This action led to a full-scale war with Britain, which ended with Argentina’s surrender on 14 June 1982. The event ultimately led to the Argentine invasion of the Falklands / Malvinas on 2 April 1982, code-named ‘Operation Rosario’.

The tension escalated on 19 March 1982, when a group of Argentine scrap-metal dealers hired by Argentine businessman, Constantino Davidoff, to dismantle an old whaling base, raised the Argentine flag on South Georgia Island, an uninhabited island 1,287 kilometres northeast of the Falklands / Malvinas. The Falkland / Malvinas Islands have long been a source of friction between Argentina and Britain. Cemetery on East Falkland, where 237 soldiers wereīuried.

Falklands war 1982 casualties