Operation Tabarin

Britain's Secret Wartime Expedition to Antarctica 1944-46

Full of extraordinary characters, this tale of a secret mission is based upon previously unpublished diarires, letters, and reportsIn 1943, with Rommel's Afrika Korps in full retreat after El Alamein, Churchill's War Cabinet met to discuss the opening of a new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, Operation Tabarin tells for the first time the story of the only Antarctic expedition to be launched by any of the combatant nations of World War II and one of the most curious episodes in what Ernest Shackleton called "the white warfare of the south." The expedition leader was the redoubtable "Scout" Marr, who had sailed with Shackleton. James Murdie was a key figure, a veteran of the Endurance expedition. Captain Victor Marchesi spent three seasons looking for U-boats armed with a revolver and sent letters with British Falklands stamps to embassies all over the world to establish British sovereignty.