I took the Prime Minister aside … Just the two of us. And I said to her … ‘Look, we’ve been through this for hours now and we’ve been through it in such detail that maybe, in examining each tree with such microscopic intensity, we’ve lost sight of the wood. Do you realize what the whole thing amounts to, in terms of concessions, which take us a long way from our original negotiating position? You, you are content with what I’m taking back to New York?’ And she said, ‘Yes, I am content. I understand the full implications of it. You go ahead and do your stuff.’105
In her own private account, Mrs Thatcher effectively confirmed this version of how she saw the matter: she did not expect (or want) a deal, ‘But we thought it possible that the Argentines might accept it. It would after all be very wise for them to do so. The world would then congratulate them on an act of statesmanship and the pressure would be on us to negotiate with them on sovereignty.’106 The War Cabinet had gone as far as it felt it should, perhaps further.* As Parsons said to Pérez de Cuéllar when he sold him the package the following day, there could be no substantive alteration of the offer because ‘The existing draft would already be extremely difficult to defend in Parliament.’107 It certainly did not feel like it to the participants at the time, but the day at Chequers proved a successful, and for the Prime Minister a rare, exercise in compromise and consensus. Mrs Thatcher may have been right when she later wrote: ‘I am glad that Chequers played quite a part in the Falklands story. Winston had used it quite a lot during World War II and its atmosphere helped to get us all together. It was a wonderful example of how odds can be overcome with singleness of purpose and total cooperation between the political and military aspects.’108
While the British package went back to Pérez de Cuéllar the following day, the War Cabinet had to consider yet another threat to the moral high ground. The onset of full-scale (albeit undeclared) war would, it was said, prevent the Pope’s visit to Britain. The idea upset Mrs Thatcher very much indeed: ‘After all the eager and detailed preparation of our Roman Catholics and the keen anticipation of many other people to see this good man who was such a courageous leader, I very much wanted the visit to go ahead.’109 Her solution, derived from what had been reported to her about the attitude of the Vatican, was to take politics out of the visit: ‘I suggested that all Cabinet Ministers should refrain from being involved’ and that the visit should be purely pastoral. This solution was eventually accepted, and the Pope, as was his custom whenever he arrived in a new country, kissed English soil on 28 May 1982.
Britain’s show of willingness certainly helped the diplomacy. The EEC voted to extend its sanctions, though allowing dissenters such as Ireland to opt out. Pérez de Cuéllar professed himself delighted with how far Britain was prepared to move in its final offer, and presented it to Argentina. In the hiatus before the response from Buenos Aires, the War Cabinet met on the morning of 18 May to make the key decision – whether or not to authorize the military repossession of the Falkland Islands. ‘It was perhaps the crucial moment,’ Mrs Thatcher recalled.110 ‘If this is not authorised,’ said her preparatory briefing document, ‘part of the narrow window of opportunity will be lost.’111 She was advised to nail down the positions of each and all of the Chiefs of Staff, and of ministers. It was particularly important to get the clear views of the Chiefs because they had not been present on Friday 14 May when the War Cabinet had been presented by Admiral Fieldhouse with the plan of landing. Besides, only they could speak with authority for their respective services. Unusually for Cabinet or Cabinet committee minutes, therefore, she was urged to record the individual replies. If the casualties turned out to be ‘controversially high or if the operation fails’, her Cabinet Office briefing advised her, ‘no one should be able to argue that the Chiefs were bullied by the politicians into undertaking it against their better judgment, or that they were forced to accept political restrictions of a militarily dangerous nature.’112 Her briefing also recommended that she get estimates from the Chiefs of the likely number of casualties. She ‘got rather ratty’ at being asked to do this, since ‘they could only guess.’113
At the meeting, the Force Commander’s plan for landing was recapitulated by Admiral Lewin, and views were invited. There were shades of difference between the Chiefs. Leach, always the most set on battle, said that although there was a significant threat from the air, the troops must get on because of the danger of attrition and because of ‘the erosion of her [Britain’s] national standing’. Bramall, the Chief of the General Staff, and always the least optimistic of the group, warned that air superiority was ‘one of the modern principles of war; and it had not yet been achieved.’114 He was ‘really very worried that it might not work’.115 However, he endorsed the plan. The anxieties were clear, and common to all present: ‘we should be vulnerable on landing, had we enough air cover [no question mark], British ships would be in range and their positions known.’116 It was agreed that the danger from the air should be fully exposed to the full Cabinet at its meeting two days later. It was also agreed that the purpose of the landing, if it did not produce an immediate Argentine collapse, was not just to sit still, but to achieve the complete repossession of the islands. There would be tremendous pressure for a ceasefire once the troops had landed, and so there would be an urgent need for them to hurry to secure the whole of the Falklands before they could be held hostage to politics and diplomacy. The attack would take place by night, and ‘we could stop it until late Thursday.’117 The precise timing was for the Force Commander.
Mrs Thatcher went to bed at 2 a.m. on the night of 18/19 May and rose at 6.30. The daily Foreign Office ‘sitrep’ (situation report) produced at 7.30 informed her that ‘The differing units of the Task Force have now joined up.’ A telegram from Parsons reported that Argentina had in effect rejected the British final offer and that Pérez de Cuéllar accepted this as a fact.* At 8.30, Mrs Thatcher had an appointment with her doctor, John Henderson. She attended the War Cabinet at 9.30, which agreed that she should place the British draft before Parliament the following day. Then she appeared on The Jimmy Young Show on Radio 2, had drinks with Lord and Lady Carrington, and then lunch with Robert Mugabe, who by this point had become the internationally accepted and apparently respectable President of Zimbabwe. In the afternoon, she made a statement in Parliament about the EEC’s vote on farm prices, which had taken advantage of the awkward moment to isolate Britain on the subject. In her room in Parliament, she received the Liberal leader David Steel and David Owen of the SDP to discuss the Falklands situation on Privy Council terms.* She then went back to Downing Street, but returned to Parliament to vote at seven. In the evening she saw Robert Muldoon, the extremely supportive Prime Minister of New Zealand, and gave a large dinner for him and the Duke and Duchess of Kent, at which she spoke.† She then spent five hours preparing her speech for the Commons debate the following day. Mrs Thatcher’s PPS, Ian Gow, was interviewed on television that day about her work habits. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I don’t know whether she needs less sleep. She certainly gets less sleep. But I think it’s really a triumph of the spirit over the flesh.’118
In the course of Wednesday 19 May, Mrs Thatcher also spoke to Pérez de Cuéllar. Following the earlier Argentine rejection the Secretary-General had rung Galtieri, whom he found to be drunk,119 but who now expressed a general willingness to continue negotiations. When the Secretary-General reported this to Mrs Thatcher she told him that nothing final would ever be forthcoming from Argentina, and so the process was pointless. Unfortunately, by way of courtesy in thanking Pérez de Cuéllar, Mrs Thatcher allowed herself to say that she would look at any ‘totally fresh proposals’.120 Parsons cabled later in the day: ‘the Secretary-General has dropped an extremely embarrassing bombshell.’ Over-interpreting Mrs Thatcher’s readiness to talk, he had produced a new paper of his own and had even hinted publicly at its existence.121 Pérez de Cuéllar’s intervention, though made in good faith, risked throwing the British government into confu
sion in the debate in the Commons the following day and wrecking the military timetable.‡
Sure enough, Haig told Nicko Henderson that this was a plan Britain could live with. Francis Pym thought the same, and recommended acceptance in order to improve Britain’s chances of getting an American guarantee of the islands.122 But the War Cabinet, meeting on the morning of 20 May, decided that the military operation would go ahead as planned. Notice that Argentina had rejected the British offer would be published at lunchtime, once Parsons had informed Pérez de Cuéllar that, while Britain did not reject the Secretary-General’s ideas, it did not want to get into further textual discussions at this stage. The faltering UN effort alarmed Argentina’s friends within the US administration, who argued that the President should now call publicly for a ceasefire. ‘There is now an immediate and urgent need for a dramatic new effort on the part of the United States in order to prevent huge losses on both sides with grave consequences for the entire free world’ read one internal memo, which suggested that Judge Clark personally launch a last-minute peace initiative.123 Fortunately for Mrs Thatcher, these ideas went nowhere. Meeting after the War Cabinet, the full Cabinet heard from her that Argentina’s response to the final British offer had been ‘tantamount to total rejection of our proposals’,124 and that the authority for landing had been given two days before. By her own account, her told colleagues that the Secretary-General’s proposals were ‘sketchy and obscure and we would have been right back at the beginning again … there could be no question of holding up the military timetable. It would be fatal for our forces.’125 All agreed that Britain had been strung along enough, and no one jibbed at the idea of landing. Lord Hailsham captured the situation by saying: ‘We are where we always expected to be. Now it’s military.’ Armstrong noted Mrs Thatcher’s summing up: ‘All agreed. This is the most difficult time we have ever faced. Our job to stick together, and keep up morale. Total confidence in Task Force and every good wish.’126
In Parliament that afternoon, Mrs Thatcher set out the British proposals which Argentina had rejected, explaining that, as a consequence of rejection, they were no longer on the table. This had been the seventh set of proposals, she said, and Argentina clearly was not serious about any of them. The Falklands crisis had entered a ‘new and even more serious phase’. She played down Pérez de Cuéllar’s aide-memoire as merely ‘a number of formulations and suggestions’. The tactic of publishing the British proposals paid off. Those who had been arguing for a negotiated settlement were forced to admit that the British suggestions were reasonable, and those who had not wanted Britain to make concessions now felt relieved because they had been rejected by Argentina and removed from the table. Michael Foot pressed Mrs Thatcher to keep negotiating through Pérez de Cuéllar, and the anti-war Tam Dalyell warned of ‘a military defeat of the first magnitude’, but she had no difficulty in carrying the House. She did not say that a British landing was imminent, but this was understood. She avoided detail. All she would say was that ‘Difficult days lie ahead,’ but ‘our cause is just.’127
By the end of the day, having received no response from Argentina to his aide-memoire, Pérez de Cuéllar decided to tell the President of the Security Council that his peace efforts were at an end. Even Jeane Kirkpatrick, looking back, believed that Argentina was to blame: ‘I think the fault was almost entirely Argentine from start to finish. I tried to persuade them as they went into the quicksand and as they sunk in it. All they did was sink in it. They dug themselves deeper and deeper.’128
On 21 May 1982, British troops began to land at San Carlos Bay.
The location for landing was, in some ways, an odd choice. Although on the main island of East Falkland, San Carlos Bay was rather far – 50 miles – from Port Stanley, which was therefore very hard to reach over the wet and roadless terrain. In the view of some, notably General Bramall,129 this was a major drawback. But the site was rightly chosen, despite this disadvantage, because of the danger of adverse winds and much higher casualties if a landing near Port Stanley were attempted, and because of the overriding need to prevent Argentine naval attack and minimize Argentine air attack. As well as being too remote for the 10,000 or so Argentine land forces to defend in any numbers, San Carlos Bay was considered to offer the best protection from both these threats. Once within its high surrounding cover, ships could be well protected: submarine attack was very difficult and Exocet attack impossible. Enemy aircraft would have only a very short time to take aim. Nevertheless, as senior officers kept warning one another and ministers, air superiority would not be achieved in advance. Brigadier Julian Thompson, the Commander of the Landing Force, had emphasized early on (and repeated later) that ‘the politicians should be quite clear that if we are ordered to land without air and naval superiority, we risk very heavy casualties, possibly even before any landing takes place. Indeed if, for example, Canberra [a large, white, civilian vessel adapted as a troopship, carrying more than 1,500 men] is sunk, any landing is out of the question.’130 There were also the elaborate problems of ‘cross-decking’ – the transferring of men and equipment from ship to ship in order to enable them to land. ‘I suppose I knew’, wrote Admiral Woodward, ‘that on the morning of 21 May 1982 the Royal Navy would be required to fight its first major action since the end of the Second World War.’131
Mrs Thatcher was as clear as Thompson could have wanted about the risk, and in agony about it. As with the recapture of South Georgia, the start of actual operations left her superfluous to requirements and extremely anxious. On the day of the landing, a Friday, she kept a series of engagements in her Finchley constituency. Twelve hundred people and a military band gathered to watch her open an extension of Gersons storage company, and a speech was expected:
What could I say but that 8,000 miles was really only a heartbeat away – And it was for all our people … It was a matter of pride, respect, conviction and being free that meant we must restore the Falklands … Somehow I inspected everything, rode on a forklift truck had lunch in an enormous warehouse and then fled to the office to see if there was any news – Not yet. Of course there was more to do than let us know what was happening.132
At her constituency office she learnt ‘in concealed language’ that ‘events had happened but no more news … Then it was given on TV and the emotion at a reception at Woodhouse School that night was overwhelming. The Union Jack was flying in San Carlos Bay. We had returned to the Falklands. My heart was full but desperately anxious about casualties. We had landed on a hostile coast on a winter’s night with a fleet of ships full of men and equipment. Was it possible we had not been detected.’133 She returned to Downing Street, where cheering crowds had gathered. There John Nott informed her that there had been no casualties on landing, but the situation had grown worse in daylight. HMS Argonaut and HMS Brilliant had been badly damaged by air attack, and the frigate HMS Ardent had been lost, with twenty-two men dead. At that rate of attrition, Woodward calculated, his destroyer and frigate force would have been wiped out in two more days. Fortunately, he also calculated, the Argentine air force could not stand their rate of loss either.134 At 2025Z hours, Nott issued a statement saying, ‘British forces have now established a firm bridgehead on the Falklands.’ Five thousand men had landed. It was, wrote Admiral Woodward, ‘one of the most successful landings in military history’.135
This was true, but the protracted business of unloading gave many more opportunities for Argentina to attack. Mrs Thatcher was in a fever of impotent anxiety. She had very little to do and, on Bernard Ingham’s advice, had decided not to make any media appearances until events were clearer. With Thompson’s warning in mind, she worried particularly about the fate of the Canberra. While the ship was being unloaded, the Prime Minister could hardly bear it: ‘You couldn’t find me some decisions to take, could you?’ she asked Wade-Gery. ‘I find all this waiting around very difficult.’136 On the Saturday, 22 May, she visited Northwood to see what was going on. This did not please Admiral Fie
ldhouse, despite his excellent relations with the Prime Minister. ‘Keep that woman away,’ he said to Wade-Gery. ‘I’ve got a war to fight.’137 When she was at Northwood, Mrs Thatcher was sufficiently worried by the Argentine air attacks to ask Fieldhouse, ‘Can we still win?’138 In writing her memoirs, she did not want such a strong expression of doubt recorded. Instead, she quoted herself as saying, ‘How long can we go on taking this sort of punishment?’139
Favoured by clear weather, the brave and skilful Argentine pilots began numerous daring attacks on the British forces, reaching maximum intensity on 24 and 25 May. The Rapier missiles, on which Admiral Woodward had set much store, had been shaken up in transit, and could not, for the most part, be fired. The burden of repelling Argentine air attack fell heavily on the Sea Harriers. The Harriers exploited their manoeuvrability with great skill, and enjoyed the decisive bonus of Sidewinder missiles, supplied, thanks to Weinberger, by the United States.* Without the Sidewinders, Mrs Thatcher wrote, ‘we could not have retaken the Falklands.’140
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