Hope Bay incident

During the 19th century there had been increasing interest by various countries in the uninhabited, largely unexplored, and unclaimed continent of Antarctica and its many off-shore islands.

[3] In 1943, Britain began establishing bases in the region to protect Allied shipping using the Drake Passage from attacks by German raiders during the Second World War.

This coincided with attempts by Argentina, a country sympathetic to Germany, and to a lesser extent by Chile, to establish bases of their own to strengthen their claims to this section of Antarctica.

The Governor of the Falkland Islands and its dependencies, Sir Miles Clifford, sent a telegram to the Colonial Office in London, saying: "this presumably constitutes an act of war".

[9] However, the real reason behind the incident was its likely propaganda value, as part of the Argentinian leader, Juan Peron's, nationalist Antarctic Dream.