133 - Beyond Endurance by Nicholas Barker (Book)

Beyond Endurance

Few wars can have been so comprehensively documented in so short a time as the campaign to re-take the Falklands Islands in 1982, which itself must be judged, by any standards, as one of the most remarkable and improbable episodes in the long history of British overseas adventures. However, nearly all the books that have appeared in the ensuing years have dealt with the campaign itself.

Nicholas Barker takes a rather different view, concerning himself more with the reason why the British had to fight what, as he says, has justifiably been called 'a totally unnecessary war' than with the actual fighting or the successful outcome.

No one is better placed than he to blow aside the many smokescreens that have, in his view, been deliberately fanned to obscure the reasons why the war was fought. For Nick Barker was at the time Captain of the Endurance, the then only British presence in the South Atlantic. The Government's decisions to dispose of the Endurance was, in the eyes of many who were in a position to know, a clear signal to the Argentinians that Britain was not prepared to underwrite the clearly stated wish of the Falkland Islanders to remain British subjects.

Nick Barker's vivid account of his fight to save his ship, of life in the South Atlantic and of the part that Endurance played in the Falklands makes enthralling reading.


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