by Andy McSmith
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:
It was a dramatic piece of television – the sombre, dark-suited McDonald with his funereal parody of an announcer’s voice . . . The news was heard simultaneously all over the cou
ntry: by the wives and families of men who had been on board the Sheffield, by fellow naval officers in the wardroom at Davenport, where McDonald’s statement was greeted by a stunned silence followed by swearwords, and by MPs at the Palace of Westminster.31
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:
In the operations room there was a vicious shock wave, a blinding flash and searing heat. I felt as though I had been caught in a doorway and a heavy door had been slammed against me: the force and the impact shook my whole body to the core. I was stunned into unconsciousness.44
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:
I experienced an extraordinary slow-motion feeling of being burnt, and watched my hands become the colour of those rather sticky white-grey washing-up gloves. Under the intense heat my hands enlarged and the skin peeled off like talons of wax. And then I found my hair on fire and with these useless hands I was trying to put my hair out!46
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.