Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (31 page)

In the mind of the Scottish Labour MP Tam Dalyell, patriotic death was the conscious policy of a government genuinely wanting to give war a chance. Dalyell was an independent-minded Old Etonian
socialist who had resigned from the shadow cabinet because of Foot’s support for the war (Foot even endorsed the decision to torpedo the
Belgrano
). Dalyell began a lengthy campaign in
which he claimed, as he put it in a speech to the House of Commons, that Thatcher ‘coldly and deliberately, gave the orders to sink the
Belgrano
, in the knowledge that an honourable
peace was on offer and in the expectation – all too justified – that the
Conqueror
’s torpedoes would torpedo the peace negotiations’, which, at that moment, were
being organized by the Peruvian government.
³⁹
That Thatcher deliberately engineered a war that killed a thousand servicemen was a serious charge and
that it gained some traction was evidence of just how loathsome many judged their prime minister to be. It rested upon a number of assumptions. The first was that the War Cabinet should have
disregarded the opinion of the carrier group commander, Sandy Woodward, that the
Belgrano
presented an extreme
danger to the task force. The reality was that the
previous day British signals intelligence had intercepted a message sent from the Argentine admiralty to the
Belgrano
ordering it to attack the task force.
⁴⁰
Indeed, no less an authority than the
Belgrano
’s captain, Hector Bonzo, later testified that his ship was poised to go on the offensive when it was
hit.
⁴¹
Dalyell’s second assertion was that but for the sinking (and ignoring the
Belgrano
’s aggressive intent), the conflict was
containable. Here, the MP for Linlithgow perhaps took a more sanguine view than the crew of HMS
Glamorgan
, which Argentine Mirage jets had struck and attempted to sink only two days before
the
Belgrano
met its fate. Third, Dalyell’s conspiracy theory rested upon an assumption, unsupported by the testimonies of the diplomats closest to the negotiations, that Thatcher
ordered the
Belgrano
’s sinking because she feared the Peruvian plan was about to secure peace. At the time the War Cabinet gave its approval to sink the
Belgrano
, it had not
even seen the detail of any such plan.

What was true was that the Argentines were able to cite the
Belgrano
’s sinking as a reason for turning down the Peruvian initiative. In reality, the plan was similar to the
Pym–Haig proposals of 27 April, which Buenos Aires had already rejected. The Peruvian deal called for both sides to withdraw their forces and proposed ‘the immediate introduction of [a]
contact group composed of Brazil, Peru, the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States into the Falkland Islands’, which would have ultimate authority to administer the islands,
pending a final settlement. There was another vaguely phrased acknowledgement of the islanders ‘aspirations and interests’, but not of their right to self-determination.
⁴²
Far from ensuring this initiative was shelved, the
Belgrano
’s sinking led to the government in Lima intensifying its efforts. What was more, with
international opinion increasingly hostile to Britain after the loss of the
Belgrano
, on 5 May the War Cabinet – including Pym and, more surprisingly, Thatcher – was even, with
qualifications, minded to accept the Peruvian deal.
⁴³
The full Cabinet was all but unanimous in supporting the proposal, with only Michael Heseltine
and Lord Hailsham adopting a more hawkish posture.

It was Argentina that again rejected this compromise, the junta calculating that its position would be strengthened if negotiations could instead be passed to – and drawn out by –
the UN. Alexander Haig’s assessment was that the Argentines ‘believe that time is on their side, that Britain’s diplomatic support will dwindle and that with the onset of winter
in the South Atlantic and possibly the sinking of another ship, we [the Americans] will buckle’.
⁴⁴
With the failure of the Peruvian plan,
efforts to broker peace were duly taken up by the UN secretary general, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar. This development presented particular difficulties for Thatcher. Britain could not be
seen to disregard the efforts of the UN secretary general for fear of putting
herself in the wrong as far as international opinion was concerned, but every additional week
spent in negotiation threatened to push back the date for a ground invasion beyond what the deteriorating weather would permit. Pym and Pérez de Cuéllar worked together on a proposal
that envisaged putting the islands beyond the reach of either interested party by handing them over – at least in the short term – to the UN’s jurisdiction. However doubtful it is
that Thatcher would have acquiesced to this solution, her energy secretary, Nigel Lawson, later wrote that he thought it would have been supported by the majority of the Cabinet. In the event, the
question – and the consequent prospect of Thatcher’s resignation – never arose, because on 19 May the Argentine junta rejected the plan. As far as Buenos Aires was concerned,
‘
Las Malvinas son Argentinas
’, and not the property of an international and diffusely accountable talking-shop based in New York. Demonstrating a level of dogged fortitude that
even Neville Chamberlain lacked, Pym refused to see the latest rejection as a reason to stop searching for a formula. When he made it clear that he wanted to try again, his colleagues finally told
him enough was enough. Argentina was never going to agree to anything that did not cede it sovereignty as a precondition. Diplomacy had failed and the weather would soon be turning for the worse.
It was time to get a move on with the forcible liberation of the islands.

The following day, the debate in the House of Commons presented few problems for the government. In defiance of their party whip, opposition came from only thirty-three Labour MPs, led by Tony
Benn, Tam Dalyell and Dame Judith Hart. Writing in his diary, Benn despaired at the rest of his colleagues, in particular what he described as that ‘old Tory warmonger’ James Callaghan,
offering ‘absolutely naked support for Mrs Thatcher’.
⁴⁵
Meanwhile, the failure of two Tory ‘wets’, Ray Whitney and Sir
Anthony Meyer, to follow their leader was easily swept aside as the action of a couple of eccentric backbenchers with past careers in the diplomatic service. In her Commons speech, Thatcher adopted
a Churchillian mantle in which the crisis was an instalment in the great narrative of history: ‘Britain has a responsibility towards the islands to restore their democratic way of life. She
has a duty towards the whole world to show that aggression will not succeed, and to uphold the cause of freedom.’
⁴⁶
What was most evident was
the extent to which the British public, at first apprehensive and resentful, was swinging determinedly behind military action. An opinion poll for the
Sunday Times
on 2 May (conducted before
either the
Belgrano
or the
Sheffield
was hit) showed as many as 60 per cent opposed to reclaiming the islands at the cost of the lives of British servicemen. Confidence in the cause
came only with confidence in the prospect of success – a clear example of how opinion is moulded by leaders who lead rather than react to what market research tells them is the popular will.
By the time the diplomatic channels were exhausted,
support for war had hardened and become far more unconditional. Opinion polls suggested 55 per cent supported the war on
20 May, and 76 per cent the following day. Indeed, far from being fair-weather fighters, by then, 53 per cent of respondents agreed that even heavy casualties were a price worth paying for retaking
the islands.

In retrospect, it was the stance of
The Sun
as the newspaper most stridently committed to a military response that came to be seen as the embodiment of this strengthening desire to risk
all in combat – going, in one easy move, from bingo to jingo. To the prospect of a peace proposal,
The Sun
responded with the memorable headline ‘Stick It Up Your Junta’. A
spoof reader offer, promoted with the promise ‘Kill an Argie and Win a Metro’, was actually the fantasy of
Private Eye
magazine, but it not unfairly satirized the glib tone with
which
The Sun
went to war. Yet the tabloid’s ill-concealed excitement at the prospect of giving some Latin Americans a good hiding found few echoes elsewhere in the media. Its
Labour-supporting rival, the
Daily Mirror
(which still claimed over ten million readers) opposed the war. Unease widely pervaded the broadsheet column inches. The
Financial Times
argued against dispatching the task force, lecturing that Britain should not defend an ‘anachronism’ but instead adapt to the modern world – an international solution should be
found, perhaps by turning the islanders into wards of the UN.
⁴⁷
Where the
FT
’s opposition was technocratic, the
Guardian
was
passionate and outspoken. In the judgement of its celebrated columnist Peter Jenkins: ‘We should have no wish to become the Israelis of Western Europe.’
⁴⁸
Even keener to turn the other cheek was the influential left-leaning weekly magazine, the
New Statesman
. It splashed its front cover with a close-up photograph of a
somewhat demonic-looking Thatcher, across which ran the indictment ‘THE WARMONGER’. It was not the quasi-fascist junta in Buenos Aires against which the magazine’s editor, Bruce
Page, riled but ‘the thing we still have to call our government – the United Kingdom state . . . so long as it has its dominion over us it will betray us – and make us pay the
price of betrayal in our own best blood’.
⁴⁹
Among the daily broadsheets, only the
Daily Telegraph
and
The Times
unambiguously
backed going to war from the first. A much-cited
Times
leading article, ‘We Are All Falklanders Now’, written by its editor, Charles Douglas-Home, pointed out that the junta well
knew how to handle its opponents – ‘the disappeared ones’ – and that now ‘it intends to make a whole island people – the Falklanders –
disappear’.
⁵⁰
There was, nevertheless, no unified line from the Murdoch press. The
Sunday Times
was far less hawkish, warning that a
military operation to retake the islands was ‘a short cut to bloody disaster’.
⁵¹

Getting accurate news quickly from the South Atlantic was extremely difficult. Journalists travelling with the task force could only send back their
reports via the Royal
Navy’s ship-to-shore transmission system, and copy was often officially vetted as many as four times before being released for publication, usually several days later.
⁵²
Nevertheless, the Falklands War was the last major conflict in which newspaper reports provided more immediate news than television coverage. The war zone was outside
of any broadcaster’s satellite coverage so video footage had to be flown to Ascension Island from where it could be fed back to London, a process that could take twenty-three days to reach
British television screens (three days longer than it took newspaper readers to find out the fate of the Charge of the Light Brigade in 1854).
⁵³
There were no ‘impartial’ journalists from non-combatant countries able to get anywhere near the war zone, and the slowness with which the Ministry of Defence cleared British
journalists’ reports inevitably left the BBC seeking other sources of information. This led to them citing ‘Argentine claims’ against ‘British claims’ in a manner that
suggested the latter were no more credible than the former, an attempt at even-handedness that
The Sun
and some Tory backbenchers found offensive.
The Sun
, in particular, identified
‘traitors in our midst’ in the BBC and the Labour Party, in a campaign that risked degenerating into a witch hunt. Perhaps most memorable of all was the starring role accorded to a
Ministry of Defence civil servant, Ian McDonald, who was conscripted to read out, in slow, measured, sonorous tones, the official version of events, in a manner that harked back to the Reithian
dawn of broadcasting. The contrast could not have been greater with the rolling news programmes and live satellite link-ups that provided instant coverage of the Gulf War less than nine years
later.

White Flags over Stanley

General Mario Menéndez had dispatched his Argentine army to three main areas. The most diffusely distributed were spread across West Falkland. While there was only a
small population of islanders to be guarded on this island, garrisoning it prevented the British task force from using it as a ground base from which to launch operations against the real prize,
East Falkland. Menéndez’s far larger East Falkland garrison consisted of a 1,100-strong force at Goose Green, a village with an airstrip on a narrow isthmus connecting the two halves
of the island, and almost ten thousand troops deployed across the approaches to Port Stanley. This concentration of strength at the key strategic points made far more sense than a scattered
dispersal all over the island. The most obvious line of attack by the British would be an amphibious assault near Stanley in an effort to seize quickly both the all-important airport, through which
Argentine supplies arrived, and the capital itself, thereby forcing a speedy Argentine surrender. Of course, it was the obviousness of such a plan that made it so risky. The
British would be landing on mine-strewn beaches, raked by Argentine firing positions, all but on top of a numerically superior defending force which could use the buildings of the
capital – and perhaps its inhabitants – as cover. However, the alternative landing grounds also had their drawbacks, and this led Menéndez to assume that an assault on, or near,
Stanley remained the most likely prospect. After all, the early Argentine experience of East Falkland’s boggy hinterland suggested that much of it was impassable to massed forces, even if
conveyed by tracked vehicles.