Publisher's Synopsis
On the morning of 3 April 1982, when Parliament hastily assembled in response to the Argentinian invasion of the Falkland Islands. The previous day the Librarian of the House of Lords placed on the reading tables, photocopies of Samuel Johnson's pamphlet concerning the Falklands in 1770 - the first time Britain prepared to fight over the islands. "The Little Platoon" based on Michael Charlton's radio series of the same name, traces the long history of Falklands diplomacy through interviews with those directly involved in the decades of diplomatic exchanges which preceded the war - former heads and other senior officials at the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence, the successive Foreign Secretaries and other British Ministers together with their counterparts in the USA, Argentina and the United Nations, and the admirals. The testimony of such distinguished figures as Alexander Haig, Francis Pym, Costa Mendez, Caspar Weinberger, John Nott, Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Perez de Cuellar makes the book a source for the diplomatic background to the most controversial episode of recent British history.
