Jew World Order

But June 11 brought a request from Major Roger Patton, the Paras’ commanding officer, for her most daring contribution at the start of the final offensive to re-take Stanley.

“Major Patton came to me and said ‘Trudi, things are getting serious. The big push is tonight and we need a volunteer’,” Miss McPhee, now 59, recalled from her kitchen table at the family farm where she has spent her whole life.

“All the civilians had to sit down and write a letter home in case we didn’t make it. Writing that message to my parents was the hardest thing of the whole war. I told them I loved them, I hoped I had not put them through too much, but that I had to do this.

“They had a convoy ready but they needed a civilian guide in the dark as they were very worried about vehicles getting bogged down. So I volunteered.

“I wore the white woollen gloves and walked with my hands behind my back so that the first driver could see them. We came under fire several times and the danger of landmines or booby traps was always on my mind.

“It was tough going, typical camp, bogs and marsh and some of the Rovers and tractors got stuck, but we reached our destination.”

Even then, her work was not finished for the night. “Roger Patton asked three of us to go back 1,000 metres to set up torches for the choppers to land to pick up the wounded. The men were coming in with bullet and shell wounds, there were guys with their legs blown off.

“I finally got home to our farm at 7am. It was my mother’s birthday and she said that best present she could have had was that I was alive.”

The team of farmers provided knowledge of the terrain, winter driving skills and even vehicles which proved a crucial element of the gruelling cross-country push to reclaim the islands – not least as British military resources were stretched to near-breaking point 8,000 miles from home by the loss of several helicopters when the Atlantic Conveyor supply ship was sunk by Argentine missiles.

Miss McPhee’s actions earned her a commendation for bravery after the war from Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse, the commander-in-chief.

But they were typical of the defiance, courage and, when possible, resistance to occupation displayed by her fellow islanders during the 74-day war.

There was the nurse at the hospital who smuggled a Union flag under her smock past the Argentine guards and unfurled it for the birth of Sian Davies, one of three “war babies”, so that she entered the world under British colours. And Argentine military police were continually infuriated by locals who ignored their orders to drive on the right in Stanley.

Gerald Cheek had been doing his part before he was detained and sent into internment for much of the war. As the head of civil aviation, he blockaded the runway of the small airport with lorries and tractors on the orders of Governor Rex Hunt on April 1st as the Argentines approached.

And, as a sergeant in the Falkland Islands Defence Force, his unit was deployed with orders to shoot down incoming helicopters that night before Gov Hunt ordered the hopelessly-outnumbered and out-gunned home guard to surrender the next morning.

“We were all stunned. It seemed unreal that we had been occupied. There were some real concerns about how they’d treat us and whether we’d be rounded up and shot. This was a junta that had killed 30,000 of their own people.”

Mr Cheek recalled how, one day, an Argentine naval intelligence officer stuck a gun in his back when he was near the airport. “He must have thought I was a spy but I was furious,” he recalled. “I told his English-speaking colleague: ‘Please tell him that around here, we don’t stick guns in people’s backs’.”

In mid-April, Mr Cheek took a teacher from Britain, who was about to be evacuated, around the town so that he could take a mental note of Argentine positions to report back in London.

“We committed small acts of resistance when we could. The Argentines had miles of wire everywhere and we snipped the wires behind the hospital one day when I was on duty as a volunteer fireman.”

The occupation forces initially insisted that life would continue “as normal” on the islands. But, as the Task Force sailed south towards them, their mood soured.

“They rounded a bunch of us up on April 27th,” said Mr Cheek. “We were taken to the airport and it passed through my mind that we might get the treatment they doled out to their own people – have our stomachs slit and be dumped out over the Atlantic.

“But we were taken to Fox Bay [an outlying settlement] by chopper and spent the rest of the war there. There were 1000 Argentines stationed around the settlement and we came under heavy shelling from the Brits.

“We hid under the floorboards and we had some lucky escapes. One time, a Harrier hit a ship next to us that was packed with ammo but it didn’t go up. Another time, a shell canister came through the roof of the house but didn’t explode.”

“We heard about the surrender when an Argentine major hammered on the door and told us to put up the Union flag. He bought some wine and toasted the victory and remembered the dead. It was pretty incredible really.

“I naively thought the Argentine problem was sorted that day, but now they are causing all sorts of trouble again.”

Biffa Tuson spent much of the war locked up in a farmhouse with 25 others after the SAS staged the first British land attack of the war, blowing up 11 Argentine aircraft in dramatic raid reminiscent of the type of operation carried out by their predecessors in the Second World War.

She was one of 25 living on Pebble island, where the Argentines established a temporary air base. “It was in the early hours of May 15th when we heard the explosions on the air strip,” she said.

“I remember my husband commenting on what good aim the British ships had to be hitting the aircraft from the sea. We only found out later that the SAS were on the island and had planted charges on each plane. They destroyed all 11.

“The next morning, they wouldn’t let us out of our houses. We were locked in the farm manager’s house with two armed guards. One of them was a kid who’d grown up in America and spoke English. He was okay to us, but the whole attitude changed after the raid.

“They broke into the homes and raided the island store. They were starving by the end, they dug up all the vegetables and ate all the chickens.

“It was a great moment when they left. These islands will always be British. Why would they think we’d ever want to be Argentine?”

Her brother, David Pole-Evans, is a sheep farmer who owns Saunders Island, the site of Port Egmont where the British first landed on the archipelago in 1765, half a century before Argentina declared independence from Spain.

“Argentina didn’t even exist when the Brits were building this,” he said, pointing to the stone and peat ruins of that British garrison. “These were unpopulated islands when we arrived. That’s more than can be said for Argentina where they killed off the indigenous people. And then they have the nerve to lecture us.

“We kept expecting them during the occupation as we thought they’d want to raise the Argentinian flag over the site of the first British settlement. But although we saw their planes and boats, they never came ashore. Perhaps their history is not that good.

“I was really disappointed as I was waiting for them. I would have loved to kill an Argie. It would be no different to killing a sheep, just grab them and slit their throats.”

Despite the long historical ties, few servicemen in the Task Force had any feel for where they were heading in 1982. John Adams was an exception – not only had he served on the Falklands in the small Royal Marine detachment in 1974-75, but he also met his wife Marj, a sixth-generation islander, there and most of her family were still farming in “camp”.

Now a corporal signaller, he was sailing back as the radio man for Lt Col Nick Vaux, the commanding officer of 42 Commando. “I knew as soon as we set off that we’d be continuing all the way to the Falklands, whatever the talk of a diplomatic solution,” he said from his home overlooking Stanley harbour where he has lived with Marj since 1983.

“Maggie Thatcher was determined that something had to be done and I really didn’t think the Argies would back down. It’s bred into them from kindergarten that the islands are theirs.

“We arrived on the Canberra, which we called the great white whale. It was an easy target and as the air attacks were getting intense, they wanted to get us ashore quickly. We landed at Port San Carlos and stopped at the settlement for a cup of tea and a chat with the local farmers. They were pretty chuffed to see us.”

His hairiest experience came when they were called back to one of the ships for a briefing and their helicopter had to dodge and weave to avoid fire as they inadvertently headed straight into an Argentine air raid.

They escaped unscathed. But Corp Adams later witnessed the bloodiest day for British casualties in the war from his vantage point on Mt Kent, from where Lt Col Vaux was preparing for an assault on Mt Harriet that was conducted with such precision and success that it is still taught in military colleges.

“We watched the attacks on the Galahad and Sir Tristram on June 8th. They were the heaviest losses that we sustained in the war, 200 men. It was a terrible day.

“We saw the vessels sitting out there in the water and it was ridiculous that they were so far forward, undefended and isolated, with no air cover.

“As the signaller, I got the air raid ‘warning red’ on the radio. We saw the planes, then the bombs. We were spectators, helpless bystanders. Instinctively, I knew there was going to be a dreadful loss of life. Nick Vaux just said: ‘Those bastards’.”

Corp Adams was among the first British troops into Stanley on June 14 and went straight to the house of one of his wife’s close friends who was the agent for the British Antarctic Survey.

“Remarkably he still had a telex link back to Cambridge so she was able to send a message to be forwarded to Marj in Plymouth that I had reached Stanley safe and sound.

“I often joke that Maggie Thatcher was the first person in Britain to know that Stanley had been liberated and Marj Adams was the second.”

The couple decided to move back permanently after the war. “It was a different way of life, quiet and peaceful and clean,” said Mr Adams, 60, who recently retired as a fisheries protection officer.

“I didn’t think the Argentines would be sabre-rattling again like this 30 years later. Some people here are worried that if they think the UK is stretched, now that we have no aircraft carrier and no Harriers, they might just chance it militarily.”

Despite the posturing of President Cristina Kirchner, however, there seems little of renewed military action. If there is, Trudi McPhee is ready.

“Carol Thatcher visited the farm for the 25th anniversary. She wrote ‘You remind me of my Mum’ in our visitors’ book. I appreciated that.

“I’d do it all again. I thought at the time ‘There is no way I am going to miss this. I need to do my bit.’ I was just so cross that they had come and invaded our islands. Argentina is such a big beautiful place and they wanted us too.”