There were, of course, sceptical voices, who pointed out that Britain was still a long way from landing on the Falklands, and that a short skirmish with an outgunned Argentine garrison was not exactly the relief of Mafeking.fn1 But they were drowned out by the cheers of relief and delight. Indeed, if there was one moment when public opinion definitively shifted in Mrs Thatcher’s favour, it was the reconquest of South Georgia. A Gallup poll before the landing had put the Conservatives on 31½ per cent, Labour on 33 per cent and the Alliance on 35 per cent. But once the island was taken, the trickle back to the Tory banners became a flood. By 30 April, five days after the landing, the Tories had surged to 43 per cent, while the Alliance share had fallen to just 25 per cent. Almost overnight, the political atmosphere had been transformed.2
Even to experienced observers the new mood seemed barely credible. ‘Somehow, after nearly four weeks of it, the crisis still has a dream-like quality. Is it really happening?’ wondered Frank Johnson in The Times. As he noted, what made even an operation like the retaking of South Georgia so startling was that it was completely at odds with the national narrative since the 1950s. What had happened to post-imperial decline? What had happened to the ‘Sick Man of Europe’? ‘Those of us who are essentially creatures of the world as it has been post-Suez’, Johnson wrote, ‘had been assured all our adult lives that Britain was no longer capable of doing this sort of thing. All the best people said so.’
And what was more, the public were all for it. For although polls found that people were still anxious about the prospect of British casualties, attitudes were hardening. In a poll for The Economist, three out of four people said they approved of Mrs Thatcher’s handling of the crisis, yet approval for Labour’s approach, which emphasized negotiations rather than conflict, had fallen to just one in four. More people than ever wanted to see British troops land on the Falklands; more people thought regaining the islands was worth the loss of British lives; and more people than ever, four out of ten, thought Britain should bomb the Argentine mainland.3
In the Commons, the atmosphere had changed completely. When MPs debated the war on 29 April, the anxious, friendless Mrs Thatcher of a month earlier now struck observers as ‘confident and relaxed’, pledging to ‘intensify the pressure on Argentina’ until its forces withdrew. And although Michael Foot had slightly retreated from his formerly aggressive position, the mood was clearly with her. Even Jim Callaghan told the House that she ‘spoke with restraint and put her case in a way that I found unexceptionable’. ‘He is just an old Tory warmonger,’ fumed Tony Benn, who made a passionate speech claiming that this ‘Victorian imperialism’ was merely ‘a diversion from the issues of unemployment and the destruction of the Welfare State’. In a sign of the new mood, however, Benn could barely finish a sentence without being interrupted by Conservative hecklers. ‘The right hon. Gentleman is quite mad,’ shouted John Peyton. ‘On a point of order, Mr Speaker,’ said Tony Marlow. ‘Is it in order for the right hon. Gentleman to act as apologist for the Argentine junta?’4
For Mrs Thatcher, the danger of a parliamentary revolt had completely evaporated. What did still worry her, though, was the continuing ambiguity of the American position. With Alexander Haig’s peace deal still on the table, she and her ministers were still very nervous that General Galtieri would change his mind and accept it, which would put her in a tricky position. But she need not have worried. On 29 April, in the latest in a series of calamitous diplomatic miscalculations, the junta formally rejected Haig’s peace plan. ‘Argentines have been told & told & told,’ recorded an official after Haig briefed Reagan’s chief advisers.
In a letter to Mrs Thatcher that evening, Reagan promised that he would ‘leave no doubt that Her Majesty’s Government worked with us in good faith and was left with no choice but to proceed with military action based on the right of self-defence’. He was as good as his word. In the next two days, Haig told the world that while the British had been ‘reasonable and easy to deal with’, the Argentines had been completely intransigent. To Britain’s tabloids, this was almost as great a victory as the taking of South Georgia. ‘YANKS A MILLION’, declared the next day’s Sun. Inside, a cartoon showed Reagan being presented with a celebratory T-shirt, with the words ‘You’ve earned this, Mr President!’ The legend on the T-shirt read, inevitably, ‘STICK IT UP YOUR JUNTA’.5
For Mrs Thatcher, these were extraordinary times. For the first time since the beginning of her premiership, she was no longer fighting the tide of public opinion, but being carried along by it. She was no longer a beleaguered domestic reformer; she was an international war leader, her image plastered on the front pages of the world’s papers for day after day. The evening after she got Reagan’s message, she went to Bedford, where she had promised to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Mid-Bedfordshire Conservative Association. The turnout was enormous, the mood almost euphoric. Speaking off the cuff, confident that she was among friends, Mrs Thatcher unburdened her soul. Her critics talked about peace, she said, but there was ‘one thing in the world more important … It is liberty and justice and duty.’
As a schoolgirl, she said, she had written an essay about Kipling, and she had loved his poems ever since. From memory, she quoted the final lines of his ultra-patriotic poem ‘The Heritage’ (1905), which celebrates the sacrifices made by Britons of old to defend their native land:
Dear-bought and clear, a thousand year,
Our fathers’ title runs.
Make we likewise their sacrifice,
Defrauding not our sons.
That spirit, she said, still burned in British hearts. And ‘we are still, still, the third largest naval power in the world. Those things haven’t changed.’ There were cheers and applause at that. Britain, she went on, had always been a land of ‘might, right and majesty … We still have the right, and we’re not half bad when it comes to might either.’ The Falklands crisis had united ‘people of all politics, of all backgrounds’, who ‘weren’t going to have this. This country was a free country and we weren’t going to have other people walking all over British citizens even though they were 8,000 miles away.’ More thunderous applause. She ended by recalling Dean Acheson’s endlessly quoted remark, not long after Suez, that Britain had lost an Empire and not yet found a role. ‘I believe Britain has now found a role,’ she said fervently. ‘It is in upholding international law and teaching the nations of the world how to live.’6
As a glimpse into Mrs Thatcher’s patriotic imagination, this was unsurpassed. By her own account, she was ‘given a rousing reception – but more than that. It was a very emotional time – Britain was being tested and the odds of weather & distance were difficult to overcome.’ For what she knew, but could not say, was that even as she was speaking, the RAF’s Vulcan bombers were preparing to launch their first air attacks from Ascension Island against Argentine positions in the Falklands. The next morning, having breakfast with the veteran Tory MP Sir Stephen Hastings and his wife amid the grandeur of Milton Hall, she was called to the telephone. ‘Everything all right, Prime Minister?’ Lady Hastings asked when she returned. Mrs Thatcher said nothing, but inwardly she was euphoric.
Later, writing to thank her hosts, she explained that the call had been to tell her that ‘the air-strip at Port Stanley had been bombed by the Vulcans successfully’.fn2 In fact, the raid was largely symbolic, since the Vulcans never managed to knock out the airfield completely. As a feat of sheer courage and ingenuity, though, it was unsurpassed: with the Vulcans covering a staggering 6,000 nautical miles, they had been refuelled several times in mid-air, which in itself was an almost dementedly risky undertaking. And for Mrs Thatcher, living every moment as if she were on the front line, it was a moment to savour. ‘During the last week,’ she told Sir Stephen Hastings, ‘there has been an activity and tenseness I never thought to experience – but this has happened throughout history and it falls to us to make our contribution to liberty under the law.’ As thank-you letters go, it could hardly h
ave been more Churchillian.7
When Mrs Thatcher left Milton Hall on Saturday morning she made immediately for Chequers, listening intently for news on the car radio. She arrived for lunch, had meetings with the Attorney General and the naval commander-in-chief, Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse, and worked late into the night. The next day, as members of the War Cabinet were arriving for their afternoon meeting, Admiral Fieldhouse and the Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Terence Lewin, asked to speak to her urgently. They had received a request from Admiral Woodward in the South Atlantic, who was becoming increasingly agitated about the threat to his ships from a circling Argentine task force. A few days earlier, he had already contacted them about the Argentine aircraft carrier Veinticinco de Mayo, requesting permission to attack if necessary. Now Woodward had ordered the nuclear-powered submarine Conqueror to sink another Argentine vessel lurking to the south. The order was immediately countermanded, as Woodward knew it would be, but he wanted to force his superiors into making a quick decision. The ship in question, an ageing cruiser carrying more than a thousand men, was the General Belgrano.8
To understand the sinking of the Belgrano, context is everything. After the recovery of South Georgia the government had declared a 200-nautical-mile Total Exclusion Zone around the Falklands, in which any Argentine ships would be ‘regarded as hostile and liable to be attacked by British forces’. Contrary to what is often thought, however, this did not mean that Argentine ships could only be attacked if they were caught inside the Total Exclusion Zone. Indeed, the Ministry of Defence always made it very clear that any Argentine ships, even outside the exclusion zone, might be seen as hostile and treated accordingly. What is true, though, is that Admiral Woodward’s rules of engagement did not allow him actively to attack Argentine ships outside the exclusion zone, which is why he had asked permission to sink the Veinticinco de Mayo. That was also why he had been forced to ask about the Belgrano, which was deliberately loitering just outside it.9
There was never any doubt that the Belgrano, a cruiser supported by destroyers with Exocet anti-ship missiles, posed a severe danger to the Task Force. After all, it was hardly sailing around the South Atlantic on a pleasure cruise. It later transpired that the Argentine fleet commander, Rear Admiral Jorge Allara, had planned a kind of pincer movement, with the Belgrano’s formation acting as a decoy to the south while the Veinticinco de Mayo’s group moved in from the north. Indeed, in the early hours of that morning Britain had intercepted signals suggesting that the Argentines were preparing a massive surprise attack against Woodward’s fleet. This was a moment of maximum danger. The Task Force only had two aircraft carriers: to lose even one, as was eminently possible in an Exocet attack, might mean losing the war. Woodward himself was in no doubt. Neither was Mrs Thatcher. Cloistered with her senior ministers and military chiefs, she made up her mind in just twenty minutes. ‘You don’t wait’, she later remarked, ‘for them to get at your ships.’10
The slight complication is that by the time Woodward got the go-ahead the Belgrano had changed course. The wind had changed, and the planned Argentine strike on the British fleet had been called off. In the small hours of Sunday morning the Belgrano’s captain, Hector Bonzo, had been ordered to head west towards the mainland to ‘await further orders’. But this obviously did not mean the Belgrano had ceased to be a threat: the next day it might easily head back again. So when, later that afternoon, the Conqueror glimpsed its quarry, its captain, Chris Wreford-Brown, did not hesitate. For two hours he worked his way into position. Twice the Belgrano seemed to be in his sights; then he lost contact. But at almost 3.15, local time, Wreford-Brown moved into firing position and ordered his crew to action stations. At 3.57 the Conqueror opened fire. Moments later, two colossal explosions ripped through the Belgrano.11
Three hundred and twenty-three men lost their lives that afternoon. About a third of the dead were conscripts, some still in their teens. Probably 200 were killed immediately by the explosions and the fireball that blazed down the ship’s companionways. The others drowned. More than 700 men survived, drifting in life rafts until they were rescued late the following day. In human terms it was a tragedy. In military terms it was a triumph. With the Belgrano gone, Admiral Anaya ordered his fleet to return to port. In one action, the Conqueror had completely neutralized the threat of the Argentine Navy.12
Later, the sinking of the Belgrano became the stuff of various deranged conspiracy theories. The most common holds that Mrs Thatcher ordered the attack in order to torpedo a peace plan being drafted by the Peruvian government. According to the Labour MP Tam Dalyell, Mrs Thatcher ‘coldly and deliberately gave the orders to sink the Belgrano, in the knowledge that an honourable peace was on offer’. But this is nonsense. The request for authorization came from Admiral Woodward, who knew nothing about a Peruvian peace plan and was interested only in protecting his fleet. If Mrs Thatcher had turned him down and the Belgrano had gone on to sink his ships, her name would still be reviled today in every port and harbour in Britain. What is more, she and her ministers did not even see the Peruvian peace plan, which was basically a reincarnation of Haig’s proposed deal, until after they had given the go-ahead. And as the next few days proved, far from undermining the case for peace, the sinking of the Belgrano put Mrs Thatcher under immense pressure to accept it – as indeed she did.13
The real test, surely, is what the Argentines themselves thought. And, by and large, most Argentine officers thought Britain was well within its rights to sink the Belgrano. One senior officer, speaking anonymously, told the journalist Jimmy Burns that it ‘was sunk because I think it was a threat. And there’s nothing more to it.’ Similarly, Rear Admiral Allara told the historian Martin Middlebrook that his men knew perfectly well that the ‘entire South Atlantic was an operational theatre for both sides. We, as professionals, said it was just too bad that we lost the Belgrano.’ Even the ship’s captain, Hector Bonzo, maintained to the end of his life that there had been nothing illegitimate about the British attack. And as late as 2005, the former head of the Argentine Navy, Enrique Molina Pico, complained to a Buenos Aires newspaper about an article that had called it a war crime. ‘It was not a war crime,’ he wrote, ‘but a combat action … The Belgrano and the other ships were a threat and a danger to the British … It was not a violation of international law, it was an act of war.’ No doubt Admiral Molina Pico, too, was part of Mrs Thatcher’s conspiracy.14
Back home in Britain the sinking of the Belgrano left many people open-mouthed in shock. Watching television in the lounge of a grimy bed-and-breakfast in Deal, Kent, the travel writer Paul Theroux was struck by the embarrassed silence when the news broke. ‘Those poor men,’ one woman said softly. ‘They won’t stand a chance in that water.’ From Romford, Carol Daniel told Mass Observation that the sinking was wrong, partly because of the terrible death toll but also because Britain would lose ‘the world’s support’. ‘I feel like crying thinking of those young Argentine men killed on the ship,’ wrote Mary Richards the next day. ‘Not a lot of people want to talk about what is going on, it was not mentioned once in work this morning.’
Even the men in the Task Force had mixed feelings. Ken Lukowiak recalled that he and his fellow paratroopers cheered when the news was announced over the Canberra tannoy: ‘It was party time. Open the bars. “That will teach the fuckers to mess with us, a thousand less of the bastards for us to worry about.”’ But another paratrooper, Vincent Bramley, remembered that the news ‘wasn’t greeted with total enthusiasm. In the bar that night most of us were solemn. We now knew that war was inevitable.’15
Kelvin MacKenzie’s Sun, which produced perhaps the most infamous headline in British newspaper history, had no such qualms:
GOTCHA
Our lads sink gunboat and hole cruiser
The Navy had the Argies on their knees last night after a devastating double punch.
WALLOP: They torpedoed the 14,000-ton Argentine cruiser General Belgrano and left it a useless wreck.
WALLOP: Task Force helicopters sank one Argentine patrol boat and severely damaged another.
At this stage, Sun executives insisted afterwards, there was no news of any casualties. Later, after a change of heart, MacKenzie hurriedly redesigned the page around the marginally less tasteless ‘DID 1,200 ARGIES DROWN?’ But by then it was too late, since thousands of copies of the first edition were heading for Scotland, Northern Ireland and northern England. Even Sun executives admitted it had been an awful mistake, with which their paper would be forever associated. And as Ken Lukowiak later recalled, the ‘GOTCHA’ headline was the only time he and his mates felt genuine animosity towards the newspapers. It would have been all right, they thought, for soldiers and sailors to say it. ‘But a person 8,000 miles away from the war has no right to write such a thing because they are risking nothing.’16
Nemesis came swiftly. On the afternoon of 4 May, two days after the sinking of the Belgrano, the destroyer Sheffield spotted what seemed like an aircraft approaching very swiftly from the west. Barely two minutes later, the officer of the watch exclaimed: ‘My God, it’s a missile.’ Five seconds after that, the Exocet smashed into the ship’s side. Because the Sheffield was at a state of heightened readiness, the corridors were clear and casualties were relatively light: of the crew of 281 men, only twenty were killed and twenty-six injured. But with acrid black smoke pouring from the hull and fires burning uncontrollably, the captain had no choice but to abandon ship. It was the first time the Royal Navy had lost a ship to enemy action since the Second World War, and across the Task Force the news brought gasps of disbelieving horror. In the bar of the Canberra, Vincent Bramley wrote, there was an ‘almost sickening silence. Everything stopped.’ All that mattered now, he recalled, was revenge. ‘We all thought the same. What’s the fucking brass up to now? Why can’t we go in now?’17
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