10/05/2026
2nd April The Falkland Island
The men of NP8901
Twelve rockets against twenty Argentine Amtracs. Sixty-eight Royal Marines against an amphibious task force of 2,800. Three hours of fighting at Government House — for a Governor who, hours before, had read the cable from London, summoned his Marines, and said: "Sounds like the buggers mean it." On 2 April 1982, the Falklands War began. And the men who fought its opening battle have spent forty years being told they did not.
Argentina invaded because its government needed a war.
By March 1982, General Leopoldo Galtieri's military junta was facing economic collapse and the gathering pressure of the Dirty War atrocities that would eventually break the regime. He needed a national triumph. Britain's 1981 Defence White Paper had proposed scrapping HMS Endurance, the only Royal Navy ship permanently stationed in the South Atlantic. Whitehall had signalled the islands were a low priority. To Galtieri it looked like permission.
Defending the Falklands was Naval Party 8901 — a small Royal Marines detachment rotated annually from the United Kingdom. Major Mike Norman had arrived only days before to take command. Major Gary Noott, the man he was relieving, was due to fly home. The annual handover meant that for one week in the year, the islands had two NP8901s on station — sixty-eight Marines instead of the usual thirty-four.
At three thirty in the afternoon of 1 April 1982, Governor Rex Hunt opened a cable from London on his desk in Government House. The Foreign Office had reliable intelligence that an Argentine task force was off Cape Pembroke and would invade at dawn. Hunt summoned Norman and Noott and laid the cable on the desk.
"Sounds like the buggers mean it."
Norman had 1,200 kilometres of coastline and sixty-eight men. He could not hold it.
He could only choose where to make the Argentines pay. He concentrated his force around Stanley. The defence was not designed to win — it was designed to bleed the Argentines enough to force a political response from London.
The first Argentine boots ashore belonged to eighty-four Comandos Anfibios under Lieutenant Commander Guillermo Sánchez Sabarots, whose force came ashore south of Stanley near Mullet Creek and marched through the night to Moody Brook. At six oh five, Sabarots's men hit the barracks with phosphorus gr***des and submachine guns.
The buildings were empty. Norman had pulled the Marines out hours before.
A second Argentine group — sixteen commandos under Lieutenant Commander Pedro Giachino — moved on Government House. Giachino was thirty-four years old, second-in-command of the 1st Marine Battalion, and an officer Rear Admiral Carlos Büsser would later remember as one of his finest. At about six thirty, with four men behind him, he vaulted a low garden wall and pushed toward the rear annex with orders to seize the Governor.
Four Royal Marines were waiting on the other side.
They opened fire. Giachino fell wounded and refused medical aid from the Marines who tried to reach him, threatening to detonate the live gr***de in his hand. He died later that morning at King Edward Memorial Hospital — the first serviceman killed in the Falklands War.
On the airport road approaching Stanley from York Bay, twenty LVTP-7 Amtracs were rolling inland from the main Argentine landing. Marines George Brown and Danny Betts shouldered an 84mm Carl Gustav recoilless rifle behind a low peat berm. They hit the front of the lead Amtrac with their 84mm round.
The column halted.
For three hours, the Royal Marines held Government House. They fired six thousand four hundred and fifty rounds and twelve rockets. The Argentines ringed the building with armoured personnel carriers and brought up reinforcements. Tracer fire crossed the lawn. The white-painted upper storey was punched through with bullet holes.
Then Rex Hunt looked out of an upstairs window and saw what was about to happen to Stanley.
Beyond the Amtracs surrounding Government House — a hundred yards down the slope — were the painted houses and corrugated iron roofs of the town. The civilians had been ordered to stay indoors. Many had not. A protracted firefight in the residence would mean rounds going through walls, fires in the wooden buildings, casualties among the families he had been sent to govern.
Hunt gave the order to lay down arms.
The Marines did not want to. Norman had to go room by room and tell them.
They were marched out into the paddocks beside Government House under armed guard, hands behind their heads. As they walked, they sang. Rule Britannia first. Then, because Royal Marines have always known the value of a joke at the end of a bad morning — Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. One of them turned to an Argentine officer and said four words.
"We will be back."
Three days later, the Royal Navy Task Force sailed from Portsmouth. HMS Hermes. HMS Invincible. The men of NP8901 were flown home via Montevideo. Many re-embarked with the recovery force. Some retook the ground they had been driven from. Seventy days after the Task Force sailed, the Falkland Islands were British again.
For forty years the men who fought on 2 April 1982 have lived with a quiet libel — that Britain's first defenders surrendered without firing a shot. They fired six thousand four hundred and fifty rounds. They killed the commando who came over the wall. They stopped the lead vehicle of an armoured column. They held until ordered to stop. And then they came back.
That is how the Falklands War actually began.
Credit to "The Stoic English" page
Further to this post
Ricky Philips historian.
As many people know, I'm the historian who first wrote the story of - and with - the Royal Marines of Naval Party 8901 in the book "The First Casualty".
In this sense, it's an honour to have their story told, although I'd like to make a couple of corrections if I may. The least of these being that it's "York" bay not "Yorke" but the biggest omission is in repeating "20 Amtracks" because there were not ... There were 21.
Argentina had bought all 21 vehicles from the United States, numbered 01-19 plus R1 the Recovery Vehicle and C1 the Command Vehicle: all 21 were sent to the Falklands.
The vehicle hit was Amtrack 17 which received an 84mm Carl Gustav across the nose and two 66mm LAWs; one through the top hatch and one to the rear left quadrant around the light cluster.
Argentina has consistently denied that Amtrack 17 went to the Falklands, but it did: I have two photos of it there. It was taken out and of the three crew and 25 occupants, barely anyone made it out. Amongst the dead occupants, twelve intact men were brought to the hospital from the vehicle, each suffering from severe shrapnel wounds and heat overpressure. Several were dead when they arrived and most of the rest didn't make it either... Yet Argentina claims just one man killed that day: Pedro Giachino - the ideal martyr.
Having taken out Amtrack 17 the Royal Marines had three Amtracks swing across their front to deploy; 07 was closest, then 05 and finally 19, all some 500 yards distant from the smoking hulk of Amtrack 17.
Having run out of anti tank rounds and rockets, they hit 07 with a lot of small arms fire. She had 97 bullet marks and her gunner's scope shot through: Argentina was quick to present this vehicle as "the one the Royal Marines thought they'd hit but didn't" when in fact, the guys who shot it were never in any doubt that it was two entirely different vehicles in two separate locations and engaged entirely differently, 500 yards apart.
The fact that Argentina lied about casualties on that day is well known: veteran historian Martin Middlebrook put the Argentine death toll at 20-30, and the Royal Marines themselves stated five killed which they'd seen and 17 wounded whom they'd hit but couldn't confirm killed... The occupants of the Amtrack were not part of this figure.
The tale of a "token defence" and even "shameful surrender" lingered until I put them all together and worked with all of the participants and witnesses - British, Argentine and Falkland Islander - to tell the full story of the Falklands invasion.
On the whole, a great job as an article, and I hope to have provided some much needed and very useful information to it. Oh, and "Don't get too comfortable, we'll be back" was said by Murray Paterson, an Edinburgh man like myself
