Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (29 page)

This sudden about-turn had the backing of the principal opposition parties. The truth was that neither Shirley Williams nor Roy Jenkins was at all at ease with a military response, but they
decided to keep quiet and let the more hawkish David Owen (MP for the naval constituency of Plymouth Devonport) speak on behalf of the SDP as events unfolded. Tories who assumed that, as a veteran
campaigner for nuclear disarmament, Michael Foot would make the case for pacifism showed only how little they understood a man who had made his name in 1940 with
Guilty Men
, the passionate
denouncement of those who had appeased the fascist dictators. While
Labour’s defence spokesman, John Silkin, dismissed Galtieri as ‘a bargain-basement
Mussolini’ and accused Thatcher, Carrington and Nott of being the ‘three most guilty people’ for not foreseeing the turn of events, it was Foot who pronounced the most articulate
case for backing up a diplomatic initiative with the dispatch of a task force:

Behind the scenes, however, the Labour leadership was forced to wage its own war against those in its ranks with no desire to unfurl the Union Jack on Margaret Thatcher’s
behalf. On Labour’s NEC, Tony Benn’s motion to oppose the dispatch of the task force was lost by the narrow margin of six votes to five. Benn’s rejection of any military attempt
to reclaim the islands was one of principle, but he also thought it a mistake to ‘tie the Labour Party to Thatcher’s collapse’. In the succeeding weeks, it was Benn who became the
public face of opposition to the war and, in consequence, he received more mail than at any previous time in his career. Some of it, he conceded, was ‘vulgar abuse’, but most of it was
‘overwhelmingly supportive – I suppose coming primarily from middle-class people’. The sack-loads convinced him that the majority of the British public were against going to war,
‘but the media are preventing that view becoming apparent’.
²²
He was far from being the only Labour left-winger to argue that a military
solution was futile. At the first meeting of the left-wing Tribune Group after the crisis began, Benn recorded Robin Cook assuring his colleagues that the islands’ loss was a done deal
because Argentina was too strong, that ‘the position couldn’t be reversed, and the Falklanders wouldn’t want us back’.
²³

If that was true, then it was the prime minister who looked like becoming an early casualty of the imbroglio. But first – and on the same day on which Cook, the future Labour Foreign
Secretary, was rubbishing the idea that the junta could be confronted – it was the current Foreign Secretary who was tendering his resignation after reading the weekend’s press, in
particular a damning leading article in
The Times
.
²⁴
Two other Foreign Office ministers followed his example. Thatcher allowed them to fall
on their broken swords and replaced Carrington with Francis Pym. Like his predecessor, Pym was an Old Etonian veteran of the Second World War (in which he had won the Military Cross). While a
‘wet’, he had at least shown backbone as well as foresight in arguing against Nott’s 1981 cuts to the Royal Navy. When Nott also offered his resignation, Thatcher refused to
accept it, not least because it
was necessary to her own reputation that the link between the Argentines’ actions and recent defence policy was not formally
acknowledged.

Although it had endorsed almost without a quibble the task force’s dispatch, the Cabinet was too large and unwieldy for the day-to-day crisis management that would now be necessary and
much as Thatcher kept it regularly informed – it mostly met twice a week during the campaign – she took the elderly Harold Macmillan’s advice that a tight-knit War Cabinet should
be formed to direct operations. It met once, and sometimes twice, a day. It comprised Thatcher, Pym, Nott, the Home Secretary, Willie Whitelaw and also Cecil Parkinson, who, as Chancellor of the
Duchy of Lancaster and chairman of the Conservative Party, had no obvious reason for being included other than as a Thatcher loyalist upon whom the prime minister might rely in countering any lurch
into ‘wet’ defeatism by her new Foreign Secretary.

In the weeks before the task force reached its destination, the Foreign Office’s role was central to the search for a peaceful solution and, if that failed, international acquiescence in a
British military operation. The chair of the United Nations Security Council was at that moment held by Zaire (Congo), and any resolution could be vetoed by either of the two communist permanent
members, the Soviet Union and China. While the right-wing junta in Buenos Aires was hardly the sort of regime Moscow normally cared to support, the Soviet Union had, despite the vast expanse of its
own prairies, become heavily dependent on Argentine grain. Nevertheless, through what can only be adjudged the skilful diplomacy of the British ambassador to the UN, Sir Anthony Parsons – and
an urgent telephone call from Thatcher to King Hussein of Jordan – on 3 April, Britain secured the adoption of resolution 502 by ten votes to one (Panama), with four abstentions (China, the
Soviet Union, Poland and Spain). The resolution called upon Argentina to remove her forces from the Falklands and enter into diplomatic negotiations for a settlement with Britain. It was cunningly
worded, for it focused on Argentina’s resort to force rather than the right of British ownership – a far more contentious issue that several ‘anti-colonial’ Security Council
members would not have endorsed. In this respect, the French helpfully persuaded Zaire and Togo to support the resolution and this neutering of Third World opposition may have persuaded the Soviet
Union that there was no point in pursuing the matter. Parsons was in no doubt that the resolution represented about as far as the UN could be pushed, warning the Foreign Office in Whitehall:
‘We have virtually no support on the substance of the problem. We must bear this closely in mind for the future in the UN context.’
²⁵
With such considerations to the fore, Britain never officially declared war on Argentina. Doing so would have created more legal problems than it was worth, not least given the Cold War impasse on
the Security Council where
a Soviet veto of British military action would have been certain. Instead, Britain justified its use of force by invoking the UN Charter’s
article 51, which allows for the ‘inherent right of individual or collective self defence’.

On whom could Britain rely in this moment of crisis? Her position was strongly backed by Commonwealth countries like Canada and Australia. New Zealand even volunteered one of its own frigates to
free up an additional Royal Navy ship for service in the South Atlantic. Initially, Britain’s partners in the European Community were also supportive, introducing economic sanctions which cut
off one third of Argentina’s export market. It was as the prospect of military action became more likely that Thatcher discovered the depth of this support. In mid-May, Ireland and Italy
opted out of the European embargo, while the West German government scarcely concealed its distaste at Britain’s determination to back words up with military deeds. No such pacifistic
reflexes were shown by the socialist president of France, François Mitterrand. France rushed to provide Britain with details of the armaments and defence systems it had sold to Argentina and
worked with British secret agents to prevent Buenos Aires from acquiring any more of the deadly French-made Exocet missiles through third parties (the Israelis and South Africans being especially
keen to help Argentina gain a deadly stockpile). Indeed, Nott concluded: ‘In so many ways Mitterrand and the French were our greatest allies.’
²⁶

With colonial possessions of her own in disparate parts of the world, France had no hang-ups about endorsing the fundamentals of Britain’s case for ownership of islands eight thousand
miles away. It was a difficult outlook for countries without such a tradition to understand. In particular, the republic that had been the first to break away from the British Empire found itself
with a dilemma. That the United States did not leap to the defence of its most militarily and politically important ally in NATO struck many in Britain as perverse and as further evidence that the
‘special relationship’ was a one-way, unrequited crush. Ronald Reagan’s administration had taken office in January 1981 and, for all the sentiments it shared with Thatcher, it
also saw Galtieri’s regime as an ally in the attempt to create an effective anti-communist defence pact in Latin America. In particular, a British–Argentine war risked triggering the
break-up of the Rio Treaty. Signed in 1947, this was a key arm of US strategy in the region and was designed to repel Soviet interference thereby allowing any American country to assist any other
that was attacked from outside the American continent.

Argentina’s staunchest supporters in the Republican administration were Thomas Enders, the State Department under-secretary responsible for South America, and the extraordinarily tough and
uncompromising mistress of realpolitik, Jeane Kirkpatrick. The US ambassador to the UN, Kirkpatrick justified her decision to attend a dinner at the Argentine embassy in
Washington a few hours
after
the invasion of the Falklands with the defence: ‘Now, if the Argentines own the islands, then moving troops into them is not armed
aggression.’
²⁷
Conscious of her Irish nationalist ancestry, Kirkpatrick was sentimentally anti-British. Instructed from Washington to support
UN resolution 502, she pointedly excused herself from attending the debate. Reagan found himself trying to balance the United States’ competing interests and to prevent serious internal
wrangling within his administration. ‘It’s a very difficult situation for the United States,’ he admitted publicly on 6 April, ‘because we’re friends with both the
countries engaged in this dispute.’ Becoming an honest broker was one way of avoiding a painful choice, though this created the problem of whether to refer publicly to
Las Malvinas
or
the Falklands. With his own ineffable style, the president settled for ‘that little ice-cold bunch of land down there’.

The president and his public were not in unison. Despite the damage done to Britain’s reputation in the United States by the deaths of the IRA hunger strikers, when asked to make their
choice America’s press and popular opinion overwhelmingly preferred to cosy up to the English-speaking democracy than to the epaulettes of a quasi-fascist junta. Be that as it may, what
clearly was in Reagan’s interest was to defuse the row before battle was joined. He dispatched his Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, to try and find a diplomatic solution. Previously
NATO’s commander-in-chief, General Haig bore the countenance of a stiff, strong, yet rather frustrated soldier, who was serving the president who had crushed his own White House ambitions.
From 9 to 19 April, he commuted between London, Buenos Aires and Washington in an effort to find a workable compromise. The United States’ efforts to portray itself as a diplomatic
intermediary meant it did not impose economic sanctions on Argentina while these talks were ongoing.

The reality, however, was that it was not just a desire to avoid having to choose between allies that pushed the Reagan administration towards trying to broker a peaceful resolution of the
conflict. The Pentagon circulated the top US military advice that a war could not be in Britain’s best interests because, given the 8,000-mile logistical difficulties and the absence of the
ships and aircraft needed to pull it off, it was simply impossible for Britain to win it.
²⁸
She would be humiliated. This made it even more urgent
that a formula should be found that would allow Thatcher to call back a task force that she was otherwise sending to its doom. The real headache concerned what to do if no deal could be agreed. In
this debate, the cautious, balanced attitude of the State Department, and to some extent of the White House, was aggressively countered by the intelligence community and, in particular, by the
actively pro-British defence secretary, Caspar Weinberger. As far as Weinberger was concerned, if Britain was going to fight, then the United
States had a duty to lend every
form of military assistance (short of joining the war) in order to give it at least a chance of victory. It was Weinberger who smoothed over difficulties concerning the use of the US airbase on
Ascension Island for the British war effort and passed on intercepts of communications between Buenos Aires and its forces on the Falklands. He also ensured that the task force’s urgent
requests to be supplied with American Sidewinder missiles were met. Fired by the Sea Harriers, the Sidewinders were to prove invaluable in the battles for air supremacy over the South Atlantic.

By 24 April, the task force was not yet ready to mount an assault on the Falklands but was in a position to retake South Georgia. While fruitless diplomatic initiatives continued to grind on
concerning the main islands, the War Cabinet saw no reason to squander the opportunity to secure a far less complicated victory in a military operation that would show the Argentines that the task
force was not just for show. In the event, the opening manoeuvres of Operation Paraquet started badly when an SAS reconnaissance party had to be airlifted off a glacier and the presence of an
Argentine submarine,
Santa Fe
, forced a ship laden with Royal Marines to do an abrupt about-turn. It was shortly after dawn the following day, 25 April, that the task force’s luck
turned for the better. British helicopters spotted the
Santa Fe
still on the surface and engaged it, repeatedly hitting the sub with missiles and depth charges and causing sufficient damage
that it had to limp, semi-crippled, into the harbour at King Edward’s Point. On the island, Alfredo Astiz was commanding a ‘Sworn to Die’ detachment which, instead, reacted to the
shelling from three frigates and the landing of Royal Marines by surrendering without firing a shot. It was then that Astiz followed ignominy with infamy: while holding up a white flag and
beckoning the marines towards him, he deliberate tried to lure them over a minefield. To his disappointment, the trigger mechanisms had frozen solid. With the job done and no loss of life to
report, a message was sent to the Admiralty in Whitehall: ‘Be pleased to inform Her Majesty that the White Ensign flies alongside the Union Jack on South Georgia. God Save the Queen.’
Thatcher duly strode out of the front door of No. 10 to bring the news to the waiting reporters and rolling cameras assembled in the evening dusk. She rebutted further questions with the rejoinder:
‘Just rejoice at that news and congratulate our forces and the marines . . . Rejoice’ – a gut expression of relief which her detractors, editing it to ‘Rejoice!
Rejoice!’, later held up as evidence of her jingoistic enthusiasm for war. It was actually Astiz who exceeded what could have been expected from the turn of events – rather than being
extradited to France to face a murder charge, the ‘Blond Angel of Death’ was sent home to Argentina where he was greeted with a hero’s welcome.
²⁹