Re English sources on Falkland War: see Chapter 6 of No Such Thing As Society by Andy McSmith (2010) for example.
Amid the mountainous waves and freezing fogs of the South Atlantic, 8,000 miles from Great Britain, is a cluster of about 100 small islands known to European sailors since the sixteenth century, but avoided because of their treacherous shallows and jutting rocks. ‘The islands are empty, bleak, desolate, inhospitable. I never saw a single tree,’1 a visiting soldier recalled. It was no-man’s-land until 1833, when English settlers made their permanent home on the main island, which they called East Falkland.
In 1980, the total human population of all the islands was 1,813, more than half of whom lived in Port Stanley on the eastern tip of East Falkland. The other 800 or so lived on scattered farms where they raised about half a million sheep. Sheep-rearing was the only profitable activity on the islands, and the only market for Falklands wool and hides was Britain. In 1980, exports came to £2.8m; the budget of the Falkland Islands government that year was just under £2.3m.2 Most of the inhabitants had been born on the islands, with little prospect that they would ever leave, even for a holiday. A boat left Port Stanley for Tilbury Docks in London once every three months, and there were occasional flights by light aircraft to Buenos Aires. Otherwise, contact with the outside world was by radio, which worked when the weather was good. Girls born on the islands looked to the small British garrison for husbands who could take them away, although the islands could not afford to lose anyone. The population fell by at least a hundred in 1980 alone.3 At that rate, the islands would have been emptied of their human inhabitants before the end of the century. Almost every adult on the islands was employed either by the Falklands administration or by the Falkland Islands Company (FIC), which owned most of the arable land. The FIC was itself an asset on the books of one multinational company after another. In 1982, it was a subsidiary of the coal company, Charringtons. The farms that were not owned by FIC belonged to nine other absentee landlords, all residing in Britain. This left no scope for enterprise or self-advancement for the islanders, with predictable effect on their morale. In 1978, Major Ewen Southby-Taylor, the officer commanding the small marine detachment on the islands, thought that the majority of the islanders were ‘a drunken, decadent, immoral and indolent collection of dropouts’.4
Indolent they may have been, but they were defiantly British. Unlike the English and Welsh settlers on mainland Argentina, the Falkland islanders acknowledged no affinity with the South American continent. They wanted only to speak English and to be ruled by a governor appointed from London. However, the British claim to the islands, which were classed as a ‘dependency’, had never been sanctioned in any international agreement. The Treaty of Utrecht, of 1713, assigned them to Spain. When Argentina obtained independence from Spain, its government considered that they had also inherited ‘Las Malvinas’. They appointed a governor, but he became embroiled in a violent conflict with American seal hunters. The Argentine government sent a warship to restore order, but it was intercepted by two warships from London. Having arrived in January 1833, the British never left , while the Argentinians never ceased to claim that the islands were theirs.
The Foreign Office maintained a sneaking suspicion that the Argentine claim was, to quote an internal memo written in 1910, ‘not altogether unjustified’ and that the British occupation in 1833 had been, to quote another memo dated 1946, an ‘act of unjustified aggression’.5 In the 1930s, thought was given to recognizing Argentine’s sovereignty in return for a ‘lease-back’ deal that would keep the islanders under British rule. Negotiations began when Argentina raised the issue with the United Nations in 1965, and dragged on inconclusively. In 1977, when it appeared that Argentina had lost patience and might resort to force, the Labour government quietly dispatched a nuclear submarine and two frigates to deter them.
Negotiations resumed, but had got nowhere when, in 1979, responsibility passed to a newly appointed minister of state at the Foreign Office, Nicholas Ridley. He was not interested in foreign affairs. Mrs Thatcher had placed him there as a counterweight to Lord Carrington, the foreign secretary, and his deputy, Ian Gilmour, who were both in the aristocratic One Nation Tory tradition she so distrusted. Ridley, too, was an old Etonian and the brother of an earl, but unusually for someone of that background, he was also a Thatcherite, whose loyalty to her never wavered. He was also the last British minister to attempt to resolve the Falklands issue. He twice made the 16,000-mile round trip to Port Stanley, hoping to persuade the islanders of the merits of a lease-back deal. They were not persuaded, and neither was Margaret Thatcher, who had already had enough grief from the Tory right over allowing Rhodesia to become Zimbabwe, but Ridley bravely insisted on putting the idea to the Commons in December 1980. The result was a display of the Commons at its self-righteous worst. MPs from the Labour Party, the Liberals and the Tory right, fired up by an efficient lobbying campaign paid for by the Falkland Islands Company, combined to give Ridley the kind of parliamentary roasting that could have destroyed a minister’s career. To one Tory MP, Sir Bernard Braine, the very idea of conceding sovereignty was ‘an insult to the Falkland islanders’; another, Julian Amery, called it ‘profoundly disturbing’; and it caused ‘grave disquiet’ in the breast of the aristocratic Viscount Cranborne. Another Tory, John Farr, experienced such ‘intense dissatisfaction’ that he announced that he was going to force a second debate a few days later. Opposition MPs were every bit as indignant. ‘Why can’t you leave the matter alone?’, the former Labour cabinet member Douglas Jay demanded, instead of concocting what a Liberal, Russell Johnson, described as ‘shameful schemes for getting rid of these islands’.6
South America at that time was a playground for military dictators, and of all the murderous and unstable regimes in the continent, Argentina’s was one of the worst. The country had been under direct military rule since March 1976, when President Isabel Perón, third wife and widow of Juan Perón, was bundled off to exile in Spain. Even before that coup, Marxist revolutionaries, union organizers and other left-wing activists had begun ‘disappearing’ without trace. In 1979, Amnesty International calculated that the number of ‘desaparecidos’ abducted, tortured and possibly killed by government agents in four years could be as high as 15,000. This grisly operation seems to have begun with the tacit approval of Washington, where the Republican administration certainly believed that a military takeover was preferable to a Marxist revolution; but Democrat President Jimmy Carter, who took office in 1977, was more particular about human rights. By 1979, the junta felt the need to try to improve its international image by releasing some prisoners and reducing the rate at which new victims disappeared. It also supplied bookshops across Europe with complimentary copies of a book called The Strategists of Fear, by a well-known French historian and anti-communist, Pierre de Villemarest, which attributed Argentina’s bad reputation to poison being spread by rich Jews living in Buenos Aires, aided by their co-religionists in Europe and their contacts in the White House.7
In 1981, this much criticized regime suddenly found itself back in the sunlight because Ronald Reagan had taken office in Washington. His foreign policy adviser during the election had been Jeane Kirkpatrick, author of a theory that differentiated between ‘totalitarian’ and ‘authoritarian’ dictatorships according to whether they interfered with or permitted free enterprise. Whereas the Nicaraguan government was totalitarian, the Argentina junta was merely authoritarian. Relations between Buenos Aires and Washington were suddenly so good that there was talk of Argentina being the first South American government to supply troops to fight insurgents in El Salvador.
Also in 1981, the British made two announcements the significance of which was over-interpreted in Buenos Aires. Going against advice from the Foreign Office, John Nott, the defence secretary, decided as an economic measure to scrap the only naval ship patrolling the South Atlantic. At about the same time Home Secretary William Whitelaw introduced an immigration bill to prevent the residents of Hong Kong from flooding into Britain as the colony prepared to be returned to Chinese rule, which also incidentally deprived 800 Falkland islanders of their British citizenship. Each minister had his reasons independent of the Argentine claim over the Falklands, but in Buenos Aires it seemed that Britain had lost interest in its South Atlantic dependency, especially when British MPs who visited Argentina showed less interest in the islands than in helping to re-equip the Argentine navy, which of all the branches of the Argentine military was the one pushing hardest for the recovery of Las Malvinas. Back in England, the Tory MP Neville Trotter indicated to his local newspaper that there might be work for the Tyne shipyards building warships for Argentina. He declared, ‘The Navy are very pro-British. They have a British atmosphere.’8
On December 1981, Argentina swapped one military junta for another, headed by General Leopoldo Galtieri. The head of the navy, Admiral Jorge Anaya, gave his support on condition that the junta reclaim the Falklands, by diplomacy or by force, before the 150th anniversary of the British occupation. Talks between British and Argentinian diplomats resumed in New York. In March 1982, a group of Argentinian scrap-metal dealers landed on South Georgia, an island 800 miles southeast of the Falklands, which Argentina also considered to be part of its sovereign territory. The dealers had a contract from a Scottish firm to clear away scrap whaling material littering the island. They raised the Argentine flag, refused to observe the normal courtesy of contacting the island’s chief magistrate, and generally behaved as if they were on home soil. The British government decided that military intervention was required. HMS Endurance, which was supposedly on its last voyage, was dispatched from Port Stanley, with thirteen Royal Marines and nine men from the Falklands garrison, and reached South Georgia’s main settlement, Grytviken, on 24 March. A week later, having seen off the scrap-metal dealers, the ship headed back towards Port Stanley, and so was in neither one place nor the other, but uselessly at sea, when Argentinian troops landed on the Falklands. The junta had not intended to launch its attack yet, but fearing that the precipitous action of the scrap-metal dealers would have alerted the British, they brought forward the date.
On Wednesday evening, 31 March, John Nott was disturbed in his Commons office by the breathless arrival of intelligence officers bearing intercepted messages that showed that the Argentine navy was at sea, heading for the Falklands. Nott went straight along the corridor to Margaret Thatcher’s room, where a meeting was convened with civil servants and two junior foreign ministers. After what had happened to Ridley, Thatcher knew that she could expect a very rough reception from the Commons if, as feared, the Argentinian troops were disembarked on East Falkland, but no one in the room had a sensible suggestion as to what she could do next, other than ring Ronald Reagan.
That might have been all that resulted from the indecisive meeting in Mrs Thatcher’s Commons office had a messenger not looked in to announce that there was an admiral in full dress-uniform in the corridor. It was First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff , Sir Henry Leach, or ‘First’ as he was known, who had scuttled over to Parliament hoping to speak to the prime minister. He had been held up by a policeman in the central lobby and might have got no further had a government whip not passed by and stopped to ask why he was sitting alone on a bench in the corner. ‘First’ was on a mission. His life had been devoted to the Royal Navy, and now that he was senior enough to have to deal with politicians, he judged them solely by their commitment to the senior service. Francis Pym, Thatcher’s first defence secretary, had ruined his relationship with her by opposing all cuts in the defence budget, but had still not been nearly zealous enough to satisfy Sir Henry. When Sir Henry’s secretary informed him that Pym had been shifted sideways and replaced by John Nott, in January 1981, Sir Henry’s response, recorded in his memoirs, was: ‘“Well,” I replied, “at present we have a charming man but one for whom decision making does not seem to come easily. I know nothing about Nott, but it must be a change for the better.” How wrong I was.’9
Sir Henry was not the only senior naval officer who had learnt to despise Nott. The Second Sea Lord Admiral Cassidi, would not speak to him but ‘just scowled’; the Vice-Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Staveley talked to him often enough, but Nott thought he was stupid.10 Rear Admiral Sandy Woodward, who would command the Falklands battle group, thought that ‘John Nott possessed the cold heart of the career banker.’11 Right-wing Tory MPs agreed. Alan Clark spluttered in his diary about ‘that fucking idiot Nott, and his spastic “Command Paper” which is effectively running down the entire Royal Navy to keep the soldiers in Rhine Army happy’.12
The admirals, obviously, loved their impressive, expensive ships that patrolled the surface of the sea, whereas Nott, like Ridley, was an unsentimental Thatcherite, and a banker, looking for the most cost-effective way to defend the UK. The only war in which he could envisage the Royal Navy being involved was against the Soviet Union. Surface ships were vulnerable to Soviet submarines and, in Nott’s estimation, they were the least cost-effective weaponry the services possessed. There was also the book-keeping question of how to account for Trident. Nott reckoned that since Trident was carried in submarines the entire cost should come out of the navy’s budget. The navy called him the ‘hatchet man’ and briefed against him to any journalist who would listen, including Hugo Young of the Sunday Times, who wrote: ‘In more reflective moments, First would muse, “I don’t think I actually hate John Nott – but then perhaps I am not a hater.”’13
Now Sir Henry had a chance to get his own back. A war in the Falklands would have to be fought with surface ships; it was exactly the sort of operation that would be rendered impossible when Nott’s economies came into effect. Once admitted to Mrs Thatcher’s room, Sir Henry told her that in forty-eight hours he could assemble a task force large enough to take on the Argentinian navy. He also exceeded his authority by telling her that they not only could retake the islands but, in his view, they should. It was the sort of talk she wanted to hear. ‘Margaret, very much an impressionable lady, was always impressed by men in uniform,’ Nott claimed, in his account of the meeting.14 First was given the go-ahead.
Before dawn on Friday, 2 April, the Falkland islanders had a noisy awakening. One recalled:
In London, the Foreign Office waited anxiously for news, but heard nothing. At 11 a.m., a minister assured the House of Commons that the invasion had not begun, when in fact it had, but bad weather had prevented the radio message from Port Stanley from getting through until the captain of a vessel carrying out a survey in the Antarctic picked up a ham radio broadcast from one of the islanders, and passed the message to the Foreign Office. The diplomats’ first reaction was to downplay the crisis. They were concerned that if the British government overreacted someone might be killed, that there might be repercussions for British expatriates in Argentina or that there would be damage to Britain’s position internationally. This was consistent with the fears felt by some of the islanders, such as Jim Burgess, a carpenter from Port Stanley, who told The Times: ‘There will be a bloodbath here if the navy tries to recapture Stanley. If they try to take Stanley, they will destroy Stanley. Everything is made of wood here. Half a dozen fires and a good wind and the town will be gone for ever.’16 But such words of caution were to be ignored. The tone was not set by the people who understood the problem but by the House of Commons, which met for a three-hour emergency session the following morning.
For MPs to be called back from their constituencies on a Saturday morning is rare indeed. The last time had been on 3 November 1956, during the Suez crisis. The very fact of being back in Parliament on this unusual day created a sense of momentous crisis reminiscent of the national humiliation Britain had suffered during Suez. The competition among the tabloids to out-jingo one another had already begun, with the Labour-voting Daily Star taking an early lead. ‘Britain must go into the Falkland Islands now and throw the invading Argentinians into the sea’ was the opening paragraph of its editorial.17 The Sun was the first to raise the possibility of a nuclear strike on Argentina – in a report stating that there had been a spontaneous demonstration outside the Argentine embassy in London by youths singing ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina, We’re going to Nuke You’.
For Margaret Thatcher, that Saturday Commons debate was ‘the most difficult [she] ever had to face’.18 For Michael Foot and other opposition politicians, it was an opportunity. After eighteen miserable months leading a divided, fractious Labour Party, Foot at last had an opening to reprise the role he had played when he was young: excoriating the Tories for appeasing fascist dictators. He declared:
The islanders had been betrayed, he said, and words were insufficient to absolve the government of the charge of betrayal; it required deeds.19
With hindsight, this was one of the most foolish speeches Foot ever made, but at the moment of delivery, it seemed to be his finest hour, perhaps the one occasion when he looked like a leader who could truly lead the nation. The next speaker, Edward du Cann, an eminent Tory MP who chaired the highly powerful 1922 Committee, thanked Foot for the way ‘he spoke for us all’. Alan Clark thought that Foot was ‘excellent’, in contrast to ‘poor old Notters’, who ‘stammered and stuttered and gabbled, faltered and fluttered and fumbled . . . against a constant roaring of disapproval and contempt’.20 At the end of the three-hour debate, Labour’s defence spokesman, John Silkin, in a slip of the tongue, referred to Michael Foot as ‘the leader of the nation’; when barracked, he remarked with utter confidence, ‘he soon will be’.21
The ‘debate’ was almost over before the Speaker called anyone who dissented from the general belligerence. The first note of caution came from a Conservative MP named Raymond Whitney, a former diplomat and chairman of the backbench committee on foreign affairs, who suggested that being led by the attitudes of tabloid writers and ‘the people in the pubs’ was not always the highest form of courage, an inference that outraged his fellow Conservatives. He was interrupted no fewer than six times in a ten-minute speech, each time by a right-wing Tory. When he refused to give way to any more, John Biggs-Davison, the MP for Epping Forest, rose to demand of the Speaker: ‘If defeatism of this kind is to be spoken, should it not be done in secret session?’ Struggling to be heard above the commotion, Whitney replied: ‘It’s not a question of defeatism – it is a question of realism.’22 Whitney, incidentally, was also on the right of the Tory party; he thought that CND was run by Communists and believed in good relations with anti-Communist regimes.
After that lead from the Commons, it was no surprise that the first opinion poll, broadcast by ITV on the Monday night, 5 April, showed that 70 per cent of the public thought the distant islands worth fighting for, even if that meant sinking Argentine ships and putting British lives at risk. Only 5 per cent thought they were no concern of Britain.23 A quarter thought that Margaret Thatcher should have resigned, but that was hardly surprising, given her general unpopularity. For the present, her position was secure, which was more than could be said for either Minster of Defence John Nott or Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington, who were identified by the Daily Express as the ‘guilty men’. Carrington and the department he headed came in for particularly ferocious attack. ‘If he has not the grace to resign, she should sack him,’ said the Daily Mail. Both ministers offered Thatcher their resignations. She prevailed upon Nott to stay, but Carrington did not need the job; he was the sixth baron in his line and a landowner, Humphrey Lyttleton had been his fag at Eton; and he was fed up with being traduced for something that was not his fault. ‘I have been responsible for the conduct of the policy; I think it is right that I resign,’ he informed Thatcher, by letter. Two junior foreign ministers who could less afford to lose their positions went with him. The Sun celebrated their departure with an editorial that took up a whole page attacking the Foreign Office as a ‘nest of appeasers’, but James Reston, of the New York Times, observed, with more wit: ‘The British are not very good at holding their empire together, but at least their officials know what to do when they let the side down; they resign in style and retire to their houses in the country.’24
Carrington’s departure took some of the political pressure off Thatcher and seemed to sober up the Labour Party front bench. Having goaded Thatcher into going to war, they now woke up to the possibility that she might do just that – and that people would die. The Daily Mirror argued consistently, from the day the task force set sail, that the islands were not worth fighting for and that the islanders could be paid to settle somewhere else. The Labour Left took the same line, with Tony Benn, in particular, arguing forcefully for the recall of the task force. When the Commons debated the Falklands again on the Monday, Denis Healey argued so insistently for a negotiated solution that the right-wing Labour MP Bob Mellish wanted to know what he was proposing the task force should do if it reached the Falklands before a settlement had been agreed – should it turn around and go home? He did not get a straight answer.25
As the task force made its slow way to the South Atlantic, the US administration made strenuous efforts to resolve the conflict between its two allies. The US Secretary of State Al Haig flew thousands of miles in every direction trying to find a means to prevent war. If American diplomacy had taken its normal course, it would have tilted in favour of the Argentinians. Successful US governments from Franklin Roosevelt onwards had treated the former British Empire as an anachronism that was not worth defending. The Reagan administration would demonstrate this the following year by sending US marines to overthrow the Marxist government of Grenada, in October 1983, without troubling to consult the British government, although Grenada was a former British colony and a member of the Commonwealth. The first priority of US foreign policy during the Reagan era was to eradicate or contain any left-wing movements in Central or South America, and in this struggle the Argentine junta was a valuable ally. As Argentinian troop-ships were heading towards the Falklands, Jeane Kilpatrick, now the US Ambassador to the United Nations, had dinner with her opposite number from Argentina, and did not mention the Falklands. From this the junta naturally deduced that the Americans were not interested in a quarrel over some sparsely inhabited South Atlantic islands. They were shocked to discover that they were wrong when Ronald Reagan, having been spoken to by Margaret Thatcher, phoned Galtieri, but by then it was too late to call off the invasion without a serious loss of face.
On 24 April, the day that the task force reached South Georgia, Haig found a peace formula acceptable to the new British foreign secretary, Francis Pym, who went back to London to put the Haig formula to Mrs Thatcher. Pym had been placed in this sensitive position because he was the only available cabinet minister with adequate experience of foreign affairs, and not because Mrs Thatcher trusted him. Only the previous year, she had demoted him from the post of defence secretary for arguing with her over the defence budget. When she heard what Pym and Haig had agreed, she refused to countenance it because the agreement would have given Argentine citizens the right to settle and acquire property on the islands, making it inevitable that they would eventually outnumber the Britons. Pym and Thatcher took their differences to the war cabinet. She did not say so then, but she had decided that if the decision went against her she would resign.26 That was never likely. The other war cabinet members were Nott, Whitelaw and Thatcher’s new protégé Cecil Parkinson, none of whom was going to cross her on a matter of such importance. Parkinson’s inclusion was a significant pointer. He was the chairman of the Conservative Party, in charge of planning how to win the next election. The chancellor, Sir Geoffrey Howe, a far more senior figure, was excluded. In this crisis, no attention would be paid to expense, but minute care would be taken over the interests of the Tory party.
On 25 April, South Georgia was retaken without a shot being fired, a small success that produced one of the most memorable images of the war, when Thatcher and Nott stepped out of Downing Street to announce the good news. Irritated by the reaction of journalists, who were more interested in whether a war was about to begin than in the recapture of a barely inhabited island, Thatcher told them: ‘Just rejoice at that news and congratulate our forces and the marines.’27 For the rest of the war, the nation still seemed to hear that voice ringing in their ears, ordering them to rejoice.
At the end of April, Ronald Reagan called a halt to Haig’s shuttle diplomacy and declared the USA’s support for Britain. He introduced sanctions against Argentina, while Britain unilaterally imposed a Total Exclusion Zone (TEZ) for 200 miles around the Falklands, warning that any Argentine vessel or aircraft inside the zone would be attacked. On Saturday, 1 May, Port Stanley was given a deafening awakening, when twenty 1,000 lb bombs fell out of the sky, from an altitude of 10,000 feet, smashing the runway to pieces. They were dropped by a Vulcan bomber that had made a 7,860-mile round trip from Ascension, a journey that required repeated refuelling in flight. On the same day, a dozen Sea Harriers took off from a nearby aircraft carrier to attack Argentinian planes. An unknown number of Argentinian pilots and ground staff died that day, including Captain García Cuerva, who skilfully flew his damaged aircraft back to Port Stanley, only to be shot down and killed by Argentinian ground troops who thought his plane was a Harrier.
Out at sea, Admiral Woodward was nervously aware that the Argentinians were on both sides of him: the land forces on the islands and, out at sea, a battleship and two destroyers. It was an old US battleship that had come out of Pearl Harbour undamaged, and had been bought by the Argentine navy in 1951 and renamed the General Belgrano. The Belgrano was outside the TEZ, but Woodward sent an urgent message to London, requesting that the orders be amended so that the HMS Conqueror, a submarine that was tracking the ship, could sink it. The war cabinet, meeting at Chequers at 10 a.m. on 2 May, agreed. That evening, HMS Conqueror fired three torpedoes at its quarry, at close range, and escaped before the accompanying destroyers could retaliate.
News of the Belgrano’s destruction inspired the most infamous newspaper headline of the campaign, when the Sun, frantically competing to be ‘the paper that supports our boys’, ran a single word in huge type: ‘GOTCHA!’28 At that time, the newspaper was being brought out by a small number of executives, during a journalists’ strike. As they saw the enormity of the possible death toll, which could have been as high as 1,200 (it was in fact 323, after hundreds of survivors had been rescued by Argentine ships), the newspaper’s editor, Kelvin MacKenzie, had second thoughts and wanted to pull the headline, but Rupert Murdoch liked it and it stayed.29
The sinking of the Belgrano became the single most controversial incident of the war. It transpired that not only were the Belgrano and its accompanying destroyers outside the exclusion zone, they were sailing west, back to Argentina, having been withdrawn from action. The ship’s commander, Captain Hector Bonza, clearly had no idea that his ship was under any threat. Even some of the task force officers wondered if the action was justified. The commander of HMS Coventry, Captain David Hart-Dyke said: ‘I feared that our action had been politically damaging. By sinking it, we had risked losing much of the international support which London had been working so hard to win on the diplomatic front.’30
The previous day, Fernando Belaúnde Terry, the president of Peru, had suggested to Haig a possible compromise that involved the Argentinians withdrawing from the islands so that negotiations could begin over their long-term status, but that initiative sank with the Belgrano. The Labour MP Tam Dalyell suspected that Thatcher gave the order to fire precisely because she wanted a war; he would spend years pursuing the issue remorselessly. Mrs Thatcher’s most uncomfortable moment during the next general election came when she faced questions about the Belgrano from Diana Gould, a grey-haired geography teacher from Cirencester, during a live televised phone-in programme. Thatcher was asked why she had given the order to sink the ship when it was sailing away from the Falklands. Her immediate reaction was to deny that it was sailing away, but Mrs Gould had the precise coordinates to hand and refused to let her get away with it. Sue Lawley, who was moderating the programme, said that afterwards Thatcher was ‘white with fury’.
Argentine retaliation came quickly. On 4 May, three destroyers named after British cities – Coventry, Glasgow and Sheffield – were on picket duty in the dangerous waters between the task force and the Argentine air force when the seaman who was watching the radar screen aboard HMS Glasgow sounded a warning that he had picked up two blips that appeared to be enemy aircraft. The Glasgow sent up chaff – a huge cloud of radar-reflective metal bric-à-brac that fills an area larger than the ship, in the hope of fooling either the pilot or his missile. It was unnecessary; after a few anxious minutes they knew that the missile fired from the aircraft was not aimed at them.
Aboard HMS Sheffield Captain Sam Salt was in his cabin, not the operations room. The Sheffield did not see the blips on the radar and did not send up chaff. Two lieutenants up on the bridge saw a trail of smoke six feet above the water, about a mile away, heading in their direction at 700 miles per hour. Five seconds later, the Sheffield became the first British ship torpedoed by an enemy since the Second World War, as an Exocet ripped a hole measuring four feet by fifteen feet in its starboard side, just above the waterline; twenty-one men were killed and twenty-four injured.
By the end of that day, the BBC had picked up rumours in London that a British ship had been hit, but could not get confirmation before the start of the Nine O’Clock News. Suddenly, in the middle of that bulletin, they cut live to the Ministry of Defence press room, where Ian McDonald, the acting head of public relations, was sitting at a desk like a newscaster. The war had turned McDonald into a familiar figure through the televised briefings that he read out. He had no training in dealing with cameras, but someone had advised him to speak slowly, and he did – very, very slowly. It was said that he was the first person ever to speak in Braille. Viewers found his lumbering amateurishness reassuring. On this occasion, live in front of 12m viewers, McDonald was so nervous that it was touch and go whether or not he would get through the announcement, but with a struggle he revealed that the crew of HMS Sheffield had been forced to abandon ship. It was not known how many casualties there were. The author Robert Harris recalled:
In the Cavalry Club in London, Admiral Woodward’s wife was dining with relatives when she noticed a waiter moving quietly from table to table, spreading the news. Charlotte Woodward declared, ‘As from that moment, I rather stopped regarding the Argentinian navy as something out of Gilbert and Sullivan.’32
The whole affair had seemed more like a comic opera than a war, particularly in the first three weeks, when the task force was on its way south but nothing appeared to be happening. The mood was captured by a cover of Private Eye in which Nott was depicted giving Admiral Lewin his battle orders: ‘We launch a surprise attack, in three weeks’ time.’33 The Sun, which had a correspondent aboard the HMS Invincible, offered its readers invincible knickers. They sold so well that the paper was soon reporting: ‘We’ve already said knickers to the Argies. Now its Garters to those Tartars.’34 As the death toll began, the joviality ended and opinion polarized. On the home front, a hunt began for traitors. Very soon, the BBC was in the firing line. As the first reports of casualties came through, a BBC defence correspondent, Peter Snow, reported on Newsnight that the British and Argentinian governments were giving conflicting figures, and added that ‘until the British are demonstrated either to be deceiving us or to be concealing losses’ their version should be believed. John Page, a Tory MP and former artillery officer, heard this comment and denounced it as ‘almost treasonable’.35 A few days later, on 6 May, he intervened at Prime Minister’s Questions in the Commons to invite Mrs Thatcher to join him in his condemnation of the BBC. She replied: ‘I understand that there are occasions when some commentators will say that the Argentines did something and then “the British” did something. I can only say that if this is so it gives offence and causes great emotion’.36
Early the following week, the BBC ran a short film on Panorama by the journalist Michael Cockerell, who had interviewed two Labour and two Conservative MPs opposed to the war. The switchboard was overwhelmed by calls from angry viewers. Tory MPs tabled a Commons motion accusing the BBC of ‘anti-British bias’. Mrs Thatcher accused the BBC of failing to put Britain’s case ‘with sufficient vigour’, and George Howard, the BBC’s chairman, and Alasdair Milne, managing director of programmes, appeared at a crowded meeting of the Tory Media Committee, which turned into a shouting match. Panorama’s presenter, Robert Kee, wrote to The Times disowning the broadcast, for which he was dropped from the programme. He resigned from the BBC later in the month.
Taking its cue from the prime minister, the Sun ran an editorial headed ‘Dare Call It Treason’, levelling the charge of treason at Peter Snow, the Guardian and the Daily Mirror on the basis that ‘a British citizen is either on his country’s side – or he is its enemy’.37 The Mirror retaliated with an editorial headed ‘The Harlot of Fleet Street’, accusing the Sun of sinking ‘from the gutter to the sewer’.38 Overtaken in the jingo stakes, the Daily Star tried to recover ground with a broadside against ‘this evil enemy at home . . . the odious group of Labour MPs who, in effect, voted for Galtieri . . . led by power-mad Tony Benn’.39
The mood on the streets was also volatile. For most of the British public, it had become a straightforward story of British servicemen risking their lives for the cause of freedom. At a funeral in County Durham for a young sailor killed in action in late May, the local Labour MP, Giles Radice, was deeply impressed by the ‘strong vein of working-class patriotism’ displayed by the huge congregation.40 In Newcastle upon Tyne, on match days, you would hear the crowds on their way to St James’ football ground singing ‘if you hate the fucking Argies, clap your hands’. Margaret Thatcher was thoroughly in tune with the mood of the mob. Called back on 17 May to discuss the final negotiating position that Britain was going to present to the UN, it was noted how ‘the PM veered the whole time towards being uncompromising, so that the rest of us, and in particular the Foreign Office participants, constantly found themselves under attack from her for being wet, ready to sell out, unsupportive of British interests etc.’41 The belligerence on the street was not necessarily born out of any accurate knowledge of the geography of the conflict. A woman cheerfully distributing anti-war leaflets in Gosforth, a middle-class suburb of Newcastle, was told by a police officer that she would stop laughing when ‘the Argentinians are here, raping and looting’.42 Even Denis Thatcher needed to reach for his atlas at the start of the crisis to find out where the Falklands were.43
For the government, there was always a danger that they would take the blame when British servicemen were killed, but during May, any Tory fears on that score were put to rest by two tests of popular opinion. Two days after the sinking of the Sheffield most of the country voted in local council elections; instead of the anticipated swing against the government, the Tories picked up seats and took control of Birmingham council. On 25 May, the navy had its worst day since the loss of the Sheffield, when HMS Coventry was hit by two 1,000 lb bombs. Captain Hart-Dyke recalled:
When he came to, he saw men on fire. The ship went down with nineteen of its crew killed. On the same day, the container ship, Atlantic Conveyor, which was being used to transport aircraft , had to be abandoned after being hit by an Exocet, with twelve dead. Two days later, there was a parliamentary by-election in Beaconsfield, near Slough, which, remarkably, was the only by-election in the entire eighteen years of Conservative government in which their share of the vote was higher than in the preceding general election.45 This had nothing to do with the quality of the candidates: the victorious Conservative, Tim Smith, had an undistinguished career that ended in scandal when it was revealed he had accepted thousands of pounds in cash in return for asking parliamentary questions; the defeated Labour candidate was Tony Blair. Blair absorbed his lesson; in his ten years as prime minister, he never let himself be out-jingoed by the Conservatives or the tabloid press.
On 3 June, the task force landed at Fitzroy at the southern end of East Falkland. To strengthen the beachhead, HMSs Sir Tristram and Sir Galahad were sent with equipment, ammunition and troops. Five days later, the sight of these two ships sitting unprotected in broad daylight, crammed full of troops, horrified Major Southby-Taylor, the same officer who held so low an opinion of the islanders on whose behalf he was fighting. He demanded that the troops be disembarked, but regulations did not allow troops and ammunition to be shipped ashore in the same craft. The major went angrily to staff headquarters, where they refused at first to believe that there were still troops on board ship, but then agreed to send more landing craft. Before that order had any effect, an Argentine Skyhawk had hit Sir Galahad, setting it on fire. Captain Hilarian Roberts of the Welsh Guards was on deck:
Simon Weston, a twenty-year-old guardsman, was trapped below, also staring at his hands. ‘I watched, transfixed by horror, as they fried and melted, the skin bubbling and flaking away from the bone like the leaves of a paperback burning on a bonfire.’47 To escape he had to run through a wall of fire, leaving behind other young soldiers too badly injured to move. As he ran, he heard the sound of guns going off, suggesting that some may have killed themselves to escape the hideous pain of burning to death. The death toll was forty-eight, with many more injured. Weston survived 46 per cent burns, but reached Britain so hideously injured that his mother did not recognize him. His scarred, mask-like face would become a familiar memento of the war.
However, once the British troops were on land, there could be no serious doubt of the outcome of a firefight between professional soldiers from one of the world’s best-equipped armies and conscripts with inferior weapons. The first land battle, at Goose Green, on 28–9 May, saw 12 British and 50 Argentines killed; the last was on the night of 13–14 June, when British troops stormed Mount Tumbledown, the high ground above Port Stanley. The death toll was 10 Britons and 30 Argentines, with more than 150 wounded. Port Stanley was taken on 14 June, at which point Argentina admitted defeat. The crisis had lasted two-and-a-half months. The serious fighting had been concentrated into six weeks. The total death toll was 255 Britons and 649 Argentinians.
There was no material gain for the United Kingdom. It is sometimes suggested that Britain’s real motive for going to war was to secure mineral rights in the South Atlantic. The UK had a disputed claim for a triangular wedge of the Antarctic measuring about 600,000 square miles, which was first staked out in 1908 and was based on the possession of the Falklands and South Georgia. That claim did not include the right to explore for minerals, for which the technology did not exist. In October 2007, the Foreign Office indicated for the first time that the UK was going to claim sovereign rights over the seabed, in anticipation of a time when oil and gas exploration became technically feasible.48 Drilling started in October 2009, setting off a new diplomatic feud. The fact that Argentina had become a democracy did not alter its claim to sovereignty over the islands, and the arrival of an oil rig that had been towed from Scotland to the South Atlantic provoked a complaint to the United Nations and a threat to boycott British firms. But there is no evidence that oil exploration was on Thatcher’s mind, or anyone else’s at the time in 1982, when it would have saved the British taxpayer considerable sums if the government had abandoned the islands.
In 1982, no community under British rule was more welfare-dependent than the Falkland Islands. The cost of supporting it was a running sore for the Department of Overseas Aid, who were obliged to pay annually £850 per capita to the islanders. Even the Treasury does not know how much it cost to retake the islands and hold on to them in the years that followed, because the information is scattered between forty and seventy separate paper files,49 but it would include £624m added to the defence budget in 1983–4 to replace equipment lost or destroyed in the fighting and to maintain a garrison on the islands, plus £684m the following year, and £552m in 1985–6, making £1,860m in just the first three years.50 There was also a one-off bill of £500,000 in 1982 – nearly £3,000 per islander – to add to the already generous overseas aid they received.51 The smashed-up runway at the Port Stanley airstrip was repaired and extended. In place of the garrison of about twenty, they were granted a permanent air base at Mount Pleasant, employing up to 2,000 military and civilian personnel. So much cash went into developing fishing and tourism that by 1992 the islands had achieved self-sufficiency in everything but the huge cost of maintaining the garrison, which in 2008 worked out at about £150,000 per islander, per year. GDP had reached £75m or £25,000 per head by 2008. The 2006 census gave the population of the islands as 2,478, not counting the personnel on Mount Pleasant. More than 2,000 of them lived in Port Stanley, now a much enlarged village with 930 houses. Yet while Port Stanley has survived, the drift of the population out of the rest of the islands has not abated. In 2006, there were 363 people living in the outlying islands, all but 42 of them on the two main islands.
Another gainer was the Royal Navy, whose precious surface ships were saved from the scrapyard; HMS Endurance was given an extra ten years of active service. However, the greatest beneficiaries of all were Mrs Thatcher and the Conservative Party, who had secured a poll lead that would see no fewer than 100 new Conservative MPs elected the following year, giving them the biggest parliamentary majority any party had enjoyed since the Second World War. The Falklands made an international celebrity out of Mrs Thatcher. She, of course, fully intended to put her new status to use. Speaking to a rally of Conservative Party activists in Cheltenham, less than three weeks after the Argentine surrender, she used the ‘Falklands Factor’ to warn the railway workers’ union to abandon industrial action and the NHS employers to drop their demand for better pay:
In January 1983, as the islanders marked 150 years of British rule, Mrs Thatcher descended for a three-day visit to ‘shabby shell-shocked Stanley’ – as the governor, Rex Hunt, termed it. ‘You were all marvellous,’ she told the surprised, delighted islanders. One of them, Mike Bleaney, standing nearby with his son on his shoulders, replied: ‘You didn’t do so badly yourself, M’am.’53 Her visit was no doubt a great morale booster on the islands; it also furnished great pictures for the voters back home.
The impending general election was perhaps already won by then. Certainly, once those happy images had been seen back home, the Labour Party did not stand a chance, though during the campaign they tried to knock the shine off her image as a war leader. Neil Kinnock called for an inquiry into the sinking of the Belgrano and Denis Healey accused Thatcher of ‘glorying in slaughter’, but given that the Labour Party had called for and supported military action, their protestations sounded feeble. A more effective attack, because it was so unexpected, came from Robert Runcie, Archbishop of Canterbury, who during the war had defended the principle that sometimes military force was necessary and justified. When he presided over the official thanksgiving service in St Paul’s Cathedral, instead of the victory celebration that the Conservatives demanded Runcie and other clerics insisted that the service should be on the theme of peace. ‘War is a sign of human failure, and everything we say and do in this service must be in that context,’54 Runcie said in his sermon. Mrs Thatcher attended, but reputedly left fuming. That afternoon, Denis Thatcher was escorting some paratroopers on the terrace at the House of Commons: ‘The Boss was livid,’ he told them. So was the Tory MP Julian Amery, who said: ‘I was very shocked. There were no martial hymns like Fight the Good Fight and Onward Christian Soldiers, and there were none of the great prayers. I thought it was a deliberate counterattack against the mass of opinion of this country on the part of the pacifist, liberal wet establishment.’ Fellow Tory Sir John Biggs-Davison thought: ‘it was revolting for cringing clergy to misuse St Paul’s to throw doubt upon the sacrifices of our fighting men’.55
Mrs Thatcher’s government allowed no bad news stories from the Falklands to spoil the sweet taste of victory. It was essential, for instance, that no one should know that four of the British dead had been killed by ‘friendly fire’. On 6 June, as troops were landing on East Falkland, a Gazelle helicopter was dispatched to Goose Green to collect two passengers. Seven minutes later, it was shot down, killing everyone on board. An inquest held in Southampton in December was told that it had been hit by an Argentine missile. This was not true, as the Ministry of Defence well knew; fragments found at the scene showed that the fatal missile was a Sea Dart fired from HMS Cardiff The truth was quietly slipped out in answer to a written question in the Commons four years later.56 When the navy eventually held an inquiry in November 1986, it established that the helicopter did not have its identification system switched on, so the navy assumed, without checking, that it must be Argentinian. The findings were kept secret until the Ministry of Defence released them in July 2008.57
Another incident quietly passed over was the killing of an unarmed Argentinian PoW, Suboficial Primero Felix Artuso, the first fatal casualty of the war. He was killed almost a week before the sinking of the Belgrano, when it still seemed possible that the crisis might be resolved without further bloodshed. When the task force retook South Georgia on 25 April, they captured a damaged submarine, the Santa Fe, and ordered its Argentinian crew to move the vessel the next day, under the eyes of armed British guards. The Argentinians were so pleased that no one had been hurt in this first encounter with the British that they were friendly and chatty, but the man guarding Artuso, in the lower control room, could not understand a word his prisoner was saying. He used sign language to tell Artuso not to touch a lever that the guard believed controlled the submarine’s torpedoes. His gesticulations must have bemused Artuso, because he was actually pointing at a lever that controlled the ship’s buoyancy. Artuso was given an order by telephone to switch on the air system, and made straight for the very lever that he had been banned from touching. The guard shot him five times. The navy held an immediate inquiry and exonerated the man who fired the shots, while mildly criticizing his commanding officer. Their findings were also held back for 25 years.58
Another shocking internal report that was withheld from the public for a quarter of a century was into the seaworthiness of the SS Atlantic Conveyor. This ship was laid up in Liverpool when the Falklands were invaded and was rapidly converted into a ferry ship and aircraft carrier. On 25 May, it was hit by two Exocets. Three crew members died in the fire and nine drowned. The Board of Inquiry discovered that its firefighting equipment was inadequate and that its internal communication system was so ‘rudimentary’ that ‘at least six people were below decks when the missile struck, completely unaware that the ship was at emergency stations’.59 Evidently, there was also a scramble for the life-raft s, which might explain why more men died in the sea than in the fire, but even when the report was declassified in 2007 the description of what happened as the men struggled to safety in the chilly water was blanked out.
Perhaps the most serious question of all was whether or not the sinking of the Sheffield could have been avoided. The lengthy report by a Board of Inquiry was peppered with comments such as ‘at this point, matters started going severely wrong’; ‘Sheffield, perhaps lulled into a sense of security by the false alarms and subsequent inactivity still did not carry out acknowledged and practised procedures’; and ‘if all the right reactions had been taken very quickly indeed and particularly if chaff had been fired . . . it might have been possible to frustrate this determined and very professional Super Exocet attack’.60 The clear implication is that the Sheffield’s crew underestimated the Argentines and carelessly allowed their ship to be destroyed. Sandy Woodward’s memoirs suggest that he would have had some of the crew court-martialled, but was overruled because there was to be no ‘souring the general euphoria’.61
There was also the strange, sad tale of an eighteen-year-old private, Philip Williams of the Scots Guards, for whom the war did not end until seven weeks after the Argentinian surrender. He was a stretcher-bearer during the battle for Mount Tumbledown and was either knocked out or got lost. He wandered about in atrocious weather, sleeping in a shepherd’s hut, and saw no one other than dead Argentinians, until he stumbled into a remote farmhouse on 1 August. His family had been told that he was dead. His return was reported worldwide, first as a good-news story, until it became apparent that he was not in a fit mental state to act out the role of a returning hero. A whispering campaign then began. Somebody tipped off the Daily Mirror that the teenager would face a regimental inquiry ‘that could lead to a court-martial’.62 That did not happen, but he returned to Chelsea Barracks isolated, vulnerable and a target for bullies. He went AWOL, had a breakdown and was discharged.63
Another young Scots Guard, Alexander Findlay, also acted as a stretcher-bearer on Tumbledown. He saw one friend shot in the throat, and a fellow stretcher-bearer cut in half by a mortar. He stayed in the army, though he was so traumatized that his wife found him one day hiding in a fox hole that he had dug in the garden. In 1990, when he was serving in Northern Ireland, he had had too much to drink, pulled a gun, threatened to kill two fellow soldiers, threatened suicide, fired into a television set and surrendered. Instead of sending him for treatment, a court-martial sentenced him to two years in prison.64
In November 1988, after some hesitation, the BBC broadcast the play Tumbledown, the story of Lieutenant Robert Lawrence, a Scots Guard who had half his brain blown away by a bullet in the final battle of the war. The film, which combined fact and fiction, was based on Lawrence’s account of the treatment he received back in Britain. Paralysed on one side of his body and confined to a wheelchair, he was an ugly sight that the government, he believed, wanted to hide away. ‘The government seemed to do their best to massage and manipulate the images of the war to ensure they did not show the real costs of it and the real harm it had done,’ he said, in one interview.65 Other wounded survivors backed his account, but the army and the Ministry of Defence were offended by it. The film was dropped from the schedules in 1987, in case it impacted on the general election. One twelve-second sequence was cut on the army’s insistence and the rest went out in May 1988 to a storm of controversy. The fire was inadvertently given fuel by the film’s director, Richard Eyre, who admitted in a question and answer session that it was ‘deeply political’, which gave a Home Office minister, Lord Renton, occasion to denounce the film in the House of Lords as ‘the product of a pacifist who has declared that all his work is subversive’.66 John Stokes, a Tory MP said:
One claim made for the Falklands is that it brought democracy to Argentina by bringing down the junta – not that Margaret Thatcher had any general objection to Latin American military dictators, as she demonstrated through her enduring friendship with Chile’s murderous ruler, General Augusto Pinochet.68 Actually, the age of military dictators in South America was coming to an end, anyway. Ecuador reverted to civilian rule in 1979; Argentina in 1983; Uruguay in 1984; Brazil in 1985; Chile in 1988; and Paraguay in 1989. The most that could be said about the Falklands War is that it may have nudged Argentina a little further up the queue. While a democratically governed Argentina is unlikely to launch a sudden attack on the islands, it has not surrendered its claim to them, and the billions that the UK government has sunk into the islands has not shortened the 8,000-mile journey from London to Port Stanley. The problem has been suppressed but it has not been solved.
