Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  The next day, Haig sent Reagan a telegram summarizing the position. Mrs Thatcher, he wrote, ‘has the bit in her teeth … She is clearly prepared to use force, though she admits a preference for a diplomatic solution.’ Even to Haig, however, it was obvious that Francis Pym was desperate for a deal. Indeed, he was astonished how far the Foreign Secretary went ‘in showing this in her presence’. (‘He’s not long for this world,’ Haig muttered to one of his aides.) But Mrs Thatcher was ‘convinced she will fall if she concedes on any of three basic points’: the immediate withdrawal of Argentine forces, the restoration of British administration and respect for the self-determination of the islanders. On this, Haig thought, there was little room for manoeuvre. Still, he was now off to Buenos Aires, where perhaps the Argentines would prove more conciliatory.44

  In reality, Mrs Thatcher was more pragmatic than Haig realized. Although she found him annoying, his efforts were very useful, keeping the Americans on side and showing the public that she was willing to consider a settlement. But she had no intention of making it easy for him. And when Haig got back from Buenos Aires on 12 April, having encountered an extraordinarily frosty reception, she was in fighting form. When he suggested that the British fleet might hold back, she exclaimed: ‘Unthinkable, that is our only leverage, I cannot possibly give it up at this point, one simply doesn’t trust burglars who have tried once to steal your property! No, Al, no, absolutely not, the fleet must steam on!’ Pym, clearly embarrassed by her hard line, was almost literally ‘wringing his hands in anguish’. But Nott was determined to stand firm. ‘I wouldn’t [hold back], Prime Minister,’ he said, ‘I’m against it, we’ve really conceded too much as it is.’45

  Even so, on 14 April, after a great deal of toing and froing, Mrs Thatcher presented Haig’s plan to her Cabinet. Both sides would pull out their troops, while the Falkland Islanders would run their own affairs until the end of the year, under the aegis of a joint British, Argentine and American commission. By that time, Haig wanted the two countries to have reached a lasting arrangement. Some ministers thought they should go for it: both Pym and Howe thought they were unlikely to get a better deal. But Lord Hailsham and Nigel Lawson were more hawkish. ‘Britain had been the victim of unprovoked aggression,’ recorded the minutes. ‘The wider principle was even more important than the fate of the Islanders. If aggression was shown to pay, it would be a disastrous precedent for the world as a whole.’

  Remarkably, though, Mrs Thatcher was less intransigent. She might have presented an unbending face to the world, but she was nothing if not a realist. The Argentines, she told the hawks, would only be getting ‘one-third of a commission’. Summing up, she told her ministers that ‘a diplomatic solution on the lines outlined would be a considerable prize. The withdrawal of Argentine forces would have been secured without military action … Repugnant as it was that the aggressor should gain anything from his aggression, this seemed an acceptable price to pay.’46

  Acceptable to her, perhaps, but not to General Galtieri. For when Haig flew back to Buenos Aires the next day, he found the junta totally inflexible. Not only did they want the British fleet to turn back immediately, they demanded an Argentine governor for the islands and an Argentine flag, as well as a guarantee that negotiations would end with Argentine sovereignty. To the exhausted Haig, this was patently unrealistic. What was more, the Argentines treated his team with ostentatious contempt, his aides complaining of orchestrated jeering by crowds, poor treatment by Galtieri’s staff and ‘excessive rudeness’ from his guards. The whole thing was a ‘charade’, Haig muttered to his aides the next day, ‘a fucking charade – these guys are diddling me’. ‘Of course they are,’ the American ambassador said, ‘they aren’t hearing us, we can’t negotiate with them, our relationship means nothing.’

  By now Jim Rentschler was pressing Haig to ditch the talks and support Britain, ‘our most important and forthcoming ally’. ‘The Argies’, he added, were not ‘nice people’. Haig made a last effort, meeting Galtieri the next day, the 17th, and imploring him to compromise. But Galtieri was trapped, both by his own nationalist bombast and by his people’s frenzied excitement. He had no intention of withdrawing his troops unless the British agreed to recognize Argentine sovereignty. In that case, Haig said, ‘you are leaving us no choice but to break off our effort and throw our full support behind the British’.

  Grimly he laid out the scenario. ‘Within a matter of days, the British fleet will be upon you. These forces are capable of inflicting severe damage on yours. I do not for one moment question Argentine courage. But it cannot prevent your systematic defeat by sophisticated British surface, sub-surface, and air power.’ Such a war, he said, would be ‘ruinous for Argentina – politically, economically, and militarily. The British will not bear the onus, for you were the first to use force, and they made a reasonable effort to reach a peaceful settlement. There is no escaping historical responsibility for what now seems inevitable.’ He was right. But he was wasting his time.47

  Meanwhile, the Task Force sailed south, armed with its gigantic Sun pin-ups and mountains of letters from enthusiastic well-wishers. As they approached the Equator, the weather was getting hotter. As the Canberra ‘ploughed through the vast emptiness of the ocean in warm evening sunshine’, Max Hastings sat among a crowd of tanned young soldiers, listening to the band playing ‘Rule Britannia’, ‘Hearts of Oak’ and, inevitably, Rod Stewart’s ‘Sailing’. He thought of ‘millions of people at home in Britain and around the world consumed with wonder and doubt about where we were, and what we were doing’. Writing home, he told his wife and children how much he missed them. But ‘what man in England’, he asked, ‘would not give anything to be sailing with us into the South Atlantic today?’48

  For the young men on board, though, life was becoming increasingly tedious. Every morning Vincent Bramley and his comrades pounded around the deck of the Canberra in full kit, sometimes doing twenty-four circuits in all, the equivalent of about six miles. They listened to endless lectures about the islands, the Argentines, the conditions, their weapons; they gossiped and bickered; they watched violent films and wrote letters home; they cracked dirty jokes and stared out to sea. Most had spent years training for this moment. Far from being frightened or reluctant, they were desperate to get on with it. What they really feared was that the politicians would reach a deal and call them back. ‘Fuck the bloody twats sat there arguing,’ Bramley thought. ‘Let’s get it done and over with. We love Maggie for giving us the chance to kill some Spicks. Just let’s hope we get back in time for the World Cup and summer leave.’49

  In Downing Street, Mrs Thatcher watched and waited, one eye on Haig’s attempts to find a solution, the other on the colossal armada heading south. On 16 April, Hermes reached Ascension Island, midway between Britain and the Falklands. Most of the rest of the fleet – in total, some 127 ships, carrying just under 10,000 men – began to arrive in the next few days. All the time the clock was ticking. Yet the landings were still weeks away, and Mrs Thatcher was painfully aware that she needed some kind of success to satisfy the public and show that she meant what she said.

  Almost from the moment the Task Force sailed, Mrs Thatcher’s defence chiefs had agreed that the first objective would be South Georgia, where a small group of Argentine Marines had landed to reinforce the so-called scrap-metal dealers. If nothing else, recapturing South Georgia would please the voters and provide Britain with a possible bargaining chip. As Nott remarked, the operation was ‘pure politics’. So, at Ascension, a small force of some 150 Royal Marines and seventy SAS men was detached from the main fleet, before secretly heading south towards South Georgia. The plan, drawn up at Northwood, was for them to strike on 21 April. But this raised a problem: should they attack while Haig was still trying to find a deal? On the afternoon of the 19th, the War Cabinet met to discuss the dilemma. On the proviso that the assault team would keep Argentine casualties to a minimum, they decided to go for it.50

  Two days la
ter, amid towering waves, driving snow and howling winds, helicopters dropped the first SAS team on South Georgia’s Fortuna Glacier. The conditions, even for elite soldiers, were horrific. Lugging all their kit, it took them five hours to advance little more than 500 yards. When they tried to put up their tents, the first was ripped away by the blizzard, while the poles of the others snapped almost instantly. A handful of men forced their way inside, taking turns to crawl out and shovel snow away from the entrance; the others huddled together in the freezing night. The next morning, with the weather deteriorating, they decided to call it a day. But as the first Wessex 5 helicopter took off after picking them up, the pilot lost control and crashed into the snow. Somehow they all managed to scramble out and get aboard a second helicopter. But no sooner had the second helicopter taken off than it, too, smashed on to the glacier.51

  News of the crash reached London that afternoon. There was no word of any survivors. For Nott, it was ‘the worst moment of the war’. When he told Mrs Thatcher, she wept. Her aide Clive Whitmore said quietly: ‘There’s going to be a lot more of this.’ It was an extraordinarily highly charged moment. As her biographer Charles Moore points out, this was not merely the first British action of the war, it was the first time Mrs Thatcher had sent troops into a situation where they might lose their lives. Not a shot had been fired, yet already it seemed to have ended in disaster. It was, she recalled, ‘a terrible start to the campaign … My heart was heavy as I changed to go to a dinner at the Mansion House to support the Civic Trust, and to speak. I wondered how I could conceal my feelings, whether this was an omen and was there worse to come. Was the task we had set ourselves impossible.’

  Then came the twist. ‘Just as I reached the bottom of the staircase’, she wrote, ‘Clive came rushing out of the office.’ A third Wessex helicopter had gone back to the glacier, found the men and got them out. They were alive. For Mrs Thatcher, it was one of the sweetest moments of the war. ‘I went out walking on air,’ she remembered. ‘Nothing else in the world mattered – the men were safe.’ As so often, she had proved a supremely lucky politician.52

  But there was no let-up in the pressure of events. Two days later, on the morning of 24 April, Francis Pym flew in from Washington with momentous news. After more talks with Alexander Haig, he had agreed a deal. In effect, it was almost exactly the same deal that Haig had been pushing all along, requiring Argentine forces to pull out and the British fleet to withdraw some 2,000 nautical miles from the Falklands. Meanwhile, the islanders would run their own affairs subject to the approval of a joint British, Argentine and American authority, until Britain and Argentina had sorted out the sovereignty issue. Mrs Thatcher was aghast. Contrary to everything she had promised, the document omitted to say that the islanders’ wishes were paramount, rewarded Argentina for its aggression and carried the obvious implication that the islands would end up in Argentine hands. Haig had ‘got at him’, she thought – as indeed he had.

  According to Pym, Haig had made it clear that if Britain rejected the deal ‘we might be on our own’. But Mrs Thatcher thought Haig was bluffing. The terms were a ‘complete sell-out’, which would ‘rob the Falklanders of their freedom and Britain of her honour and respect … I repeated to Francis that we could not accept them.’ Pym wanted to put the terms to the War Cabinet that evening. Mrs Thatcher was appalled, but she could not stop him. ‘A former Defence Secretary and present Foreign Secretary of Britain recommending peace at that price,’ she recalled in disbelief. ‘Had it gone through the committee I could not have stayed.’

  At about six that evening her colleagues gathered outside the Cabinet Room, with Pym audibly ‘trying to get their support’. If they overruled her and backed him, her premiership could be over within hours. She called Willie Whitelaw into her study and told him how she felt. She knew her man. An officer to the last, Whitelaw nodded. A few moments later, the meeting began. Mrs Thatcher got stuck in straight away, going through Pym’s draft ‘clause by clause’, tearing holes in the plan. Then John Nott suggested an elegant solution. They should simply acknowledge Haig’s plan, without accepting, and encourage him to put it to Buenos Aires. It was, Nott argued, ‘virtually impossible’ that the Argentines would agree to pull their troops out. Galtieri would get the blame, and Reagan would be free to back the British. ‘So the crisis passed,’ wrote a relieved Mrs Thatcher, ‘the crisis of Britain’s honour.’53

  But it was not quite as simple as that. Mrs Thatcher always remembered that meeting as one of the turning points of the campaign, in which she saved the islanders from being betrayed by her Foreign Secretary. Yet only ten days earlier, she had told the Cabinet that a deal along these lines would be ‘an acceptable price to pay’ for peace. So why the outrage? Charles Moore suggests two reasons. One is that, in the immediate aftermath of the South Georgia helicopter rescue, she had become completely absorbed by the drama of the campaign. Having almost lost her young men on the glacier, she identified more closely than ever with the Task Force, and had no patience for the fudging of the Foreign Office. The second reason is rather simpler. For the past two years, people had been saying that she was doomed and that Pym, the old-school paternalist, was the favourite to replace her. Now he was putting himself forward as the peacemaker, while she would get the blame for betraying the islanders. There was no way she could ever accept it. Even at the height of a national crisis, she was still a politician.54

  The next day, Sunday 25th, found Mrs Thatcher at Chequers, working as usual. But in South Georgia, the British forces were again preparing to strike. They began with a helicopter attack on the Argentine submarine Santa Fe, which had just unloaded reinforcements at Grytviken. Now, fatally crippled, it was forced back into port. A few hours later, while British naval guns pounded the shoreline, an improvised company of some seventy-five Marines, SAS and Special Boat Squadron commandos landed by helicopter. General Galtieri had boasted that his men would defend South Georgia ‘to the last drop of blood’. But the Argentine Marine commander knew it was pointless. Having radioed Rear Admiral Büsser for approval, he wasted little time in raising the white flag. South Georgia had been reclaimed, and the British commandos had not fired a shot. Later, as dusk fell, in what looked like a ‘scene from some ancient ritual’, some three dozen dishevelled men appeared over the horizon, chanting songs and carrying makeshift torches. After more than a month on the island, cold, miserable and hungry, Constantino Davidoff’s scrap-metal workers were ready to go home.55

  Mrs Thatcher heard the news of South Georgia’s recapture late that afternoon, just before she left for Windsor for an evening audience with the Queen. ‘It was wonderful’, she recalled, ‘to be able personally to give her the news that one of her islands had been restored to her.’ Then, back at Downing Street, she prepared to tell the world. With remarkable generosity, she decided that Nott, whose reputation had taken such a battering, should be the man to do it. At 8.45 that evening the door of Number 10 swung open and the two of them, flanked by policemen and aides, walked towards the flashing cameras.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Mrs Thatcher said, ‘the Secretary of State for Defence has just come over to give me some very good news and I think you’d like to have it at once.’ With that, Nott, who looked thoroughly miserable, unfolded a piece of paper:

  The message we’ve got is that British troops landed on South Georgia this afternoon, shortly after 4 pm London time. They have now successfully taken control of Grytviken; at about 6 pm London time, the white flag was hoisted in Grytviken beside the Argentine flag. Shortly afterwards, the Argentine forces there surrendered to British forces. The Argentine forces offered only limited resistance to the British troops …

  So far, no British casualties have been reported. At present we have no information on the Argentine casualty position.

  The commander of the operation has sent the following message: ‘Be pleased to inform Her Majesty that the White Ensign flies alongside the Union Jack in South Georgia. God save the Queen.’r />
  At that, Mrs Thatcher allowed herself a small smile. Then, as they both turned towards the door, one of the reporters called out: ‘What happens next?’, and her eyes flashed. ‘Just rejoice at that news’, she said imperiously, ‘and congratulate our forces and the Marines.’

  ‘Are we going to declare war on Argentina, Mrs Thatcher?’ the reporter asked. She was almost through the door, but there was time for one last word: ‘Rejoice.’ As the door closed, one of the reporters muttered: ‘Hallelujah.’56

  33

  The Day of Reckoning

  Never again ask the British, ‘Where did it all go?’ We never lost it. Or, if we did, in six weeks we’ve tooth and clawed it all back. Not our Empire. Not yet, the Falklands. But we’ve re-raised and unfurled our spirit, self-respect, comradeship and guts.

  Jean Rook, Daily Express, 19 May 1982

  I have never known a more bleak, windswept and wet place in my life … To be quite honest once we have given them a hammering and put them back in their place the Argentines can have the place. It really is fit for nothing.

  Sergeant Ian McKay to his parents,

  8 June 1982, quoted in Jon Cooksey,

  Falklands Hero: Ian McKay – The Last

  VC of the Twentieth Century (2012)

  Mrs Thatcher told the press to rejoice; and they did. ‘Britain Seizes South Georgia … Now Britain Is Striking Back’, roared the Express on Monday 26 April, urging its readers to rally behind ‘all-action Maggie’. ‘VICTORY’, read the single-word headline in the Sun, beside a large photo of Admiral Woodward: ‘We Didn’t Lose a Man – Heroes Win at the World’s End’. Thousands of miles away, even Woodward, talking unguardedly aboard his flagship Hermes, allowed himself to be caught up in the excitement. ‘South Georgia was the appetiser,’ he said. ‘Now this is the heavy punch coming up behind. My battle group is properly formed and ready to strike. This is the run-up to the big match which, in my view, should be a walkover.’1