« Cassandra's Song » James Philip

The waters around the Falkland Islands have turned into a windswept, storm–tossed killing ground as the troops have gone ashore. In the absence of the Hermes, half–crippled eight hundred miles away at Leith Harbour, South Georgia and the its screening nuclear submarines, an astonished world has seen the Argentine Navy and Air Force hurl itself at the South Atlantic Task Force in a paroxysm of near suicidal violence. Thousand are dead, the politics of the Americas are dissolving into chaos and the shaky Anglo–American ‘special relationship’ is in tatters…yet again.

Meanwhile the tragedy in the South Atlantic seems to be only gathering pace as politics and war jockey for victory; is the killing over, or has it only just begun?

In Puerto Argentino the siege is complete. What will become of the women and children, hundreds of them, trapped on the Malvinas? In London and Washington war to the knife and peace at any cost balance precariously on the scales of history. In Buenos Aires, as euphoria turns to despair and riots rage on the streets the generals and the admirals play a deadly game of musical chairs in the Casa Rosada. And the men on the battered surviving ships of the Task Force, and ashore on the cold, wet ground of the Camp know that the aircraft and the war supplies that might have enabled them to win the war against an enemy that still outnumbers them two, perhaps three to one on the ground, may be lost forever.

Now as the final act of the last tragedy of the decade in which the October War has already claimed hundreds of millions of lives, British forces find themselves fighting a war to re–conquer a remote archipelago eight thousand miles from home that until April 1964, hardly any of them had heard of, and…cared less.

The race is on; between the steady erosion of support at home and the physical deterioration of the troops ashore exposed to the damp, the cold and the Austral winds, and an enemy who has had five–and–a–half long years to prepare for exactly …