Operation Tabarin Britain's Secret Wartime Expedition to Antarctica 1944–46

In 1943, with Rommel's Afrika Korps in full retreat after El Alamein, Churchill's War Cabinet met to discuss the opening of a new front. Its battles would be fought not on the beaches of Normandy but amidst the glaciers of the Antarctic. Intended to safeguard the Falkland Islands from Japanese invasion and to deny harbors in the sub-Antarctic territories to German surface raiders and U-boats, the expedition also sought to reassert British territorial rights in the face of Argentine provocation. This would achieve its ultimate expression four decades later in the Falklands War-but the British bases secretly established in 1944 would also go on to play a vital part in a global "conflict": the Cold War. Based upon contemporary sources,
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