El 'Imposible' Submarino Que la Royal Navy Hundió Dos Veces — ARA Santa Fe

April 25, 1982. 6:55 a.m. South Georgia. The ARA Santa Fe is seventy minutes away from safety. Captain Horacio Bicain has just landed twenty marines and tons of supplies at Grytviken. He only needs to cross the shallow waters and submerge. Seventy minutes. At 6:55 a.m., the Wessex "Humphrey" helicopter from HMS Antrim detects it on radar five nautical miles away. What happens in the next four hours would be the first instance of helicopters destroying a submarine in combat since World War II. Depth charges. Torpedoes. AS-12 missiles. Machine gun fire. The Santa Fe endures all of it and still reaches the Grytviken dock. But it would never submerge again. Its story didn't begin in 1982. It began in 1944, at the Electric Boat Company shipyards in Connecticut, as the USS Catfish. It made its only war patrol in the Pacific three weeks before the Japanese surrender. It was transferred to Argentina in 1971. And that dawn in South Georgia, thirty-seven years after its launch, it fought its last battle. It was sunk at the Grytviken dock. It was sunk again while being towed east of the Falklands. And it was finally sunk in deep water in 1985. Three times. The same submarine. This is the complete story of the ARA Santa Fe — the oldest submarine to fight in the Falklands War and the last of its type to see action in any war. ⏱️ CONTENTS 00:00 — 06:55. The radar detects a contact. Seventy minutes too late. 2:30 AM — South Georgia: The War Before the Falklands War 5:00 AM — USS Catfish 1944: The Origin of the Oldest Combat Submarine 7:30 AM — The Night Reinforcement Mission to Grytviken 10:00 AM — The Seventy Minutes Bicain Didn't Have 12:30 PM — The Wessex "Humphrey" and the Two Depth Charges 3:00 PM — Lynx, Wasp, and AS-12 Missiles: The First Multi-Helicopter Attack 5:30 PM — The Crew Leaves the Submarine at the Grytviken Pier 8:00 PM — The 76 Men Who Captured South Georgia in Hours 10:30 PM — Alfredo Astiz's Surrender 12:00 AM — The Tow That Ended at the Bottom of the South Atlantic 12:30 AM — 1985: The Third and Final Sinking of the USS Catfish 📌 SOURCES AND REFERENCES — ARA Santa Fe (S-21) — Wikipedia, complete submarine records. — Operation Paraquet — Wikipedia, records of the recapture of South Georgia. — WWII After WWII — Last voyage of ARA Santa Fe 1982, July 2020. — MigFlug — Helicopter vs Submarine: Attack on ARA Santa Fe, Falklands, June 2026. — Royal Marines History — Operation Paraquet South Georgia, April 2022. — Imperial War Museums — Argentine Submarine Operational Procedure Log, Santa Fe. 🔔 If you found this story as extraordinary as we did, give it a like and subscribe. It helps us more than you can imagine to continue producing this type of content. And if there's a battle, operation, or war story you'd like us to analyze in the next video, tell us in the comments. See you in the next video.