![]() ![]() The approach adopted here could certainly be described as multi-disciplinary, as it combines primary sources, published memoirs, landscape studies and archaeology. 3 The present writer is broadly in agreement with these two principles, particularly when it comes to considering the impact of the islands’ landscape and environment on the 1982 conflict and the role physical remains of that event have in enhancing our understanding. It has been suggested that it is impossible to study the Falklands conflict through the lens of a single discipline, and that the islands cannot be written about convincingly without visiting them. Drawing on the experience of four visits since 2012, eyewitness accounts and memoirs, military records and archaeological remains, this article explores the islands as both imaginary spaces and as an environment in which men strove to fight the elements and one another, and in doing so presents a fresh perspective on the relationship between people and places in time of war. But how did troops on the ground view the islands when they were up close and personal with them, when the islands formed the battlefields over which they fought? During the Falklands-Malvinas War the surface of the land was bombed, it was shelled, it was picked apart and dug into to create fortifications, minefields and graves, and in places it still carries those scars. By way of contrast, Argentine troops had grown up believing they were part of their birth right stolen from them by British ‘pirates’. Some in the British military thought the islands were off the coast of Scotland when they first heard of them, in most cases just before deployment. ![]() To the British, including the islanders, they were of course the Falklands, but to the Argentines they were the Malvinas. There were two sets of Falkland Islands fought over in 1982. ![]()
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