Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (28 page)

As the subsequent Franks report attested, British intelligence knew nothing of the junta’s decision to attack. Not that it would have made much difference if spies had been secreted all
round the Casa Rosada – the ‘Pink house’, Argentina’s official presidential residence – for there would have been no time to dispatch a force sufficient to repel the
Argentine assault. In the dash to the Falklands, Argentina was always going to get there first. All Whitehall knew for sure was that the situation was critical, that
Endurance
might be fired
upon and that a full-scale invasion was at least a possibility. On 29 March, the Ministry of Defence ordered the nuclear submarines HMS
Spartan
and HMS
Splendid
from their Scottish
base of Faslane. They would reach the Falklands on 11 April. A story was planted on the front page of
The Times
announcing (erroneously) that another nuclear sub, HMS
Superb
,
‘was believed to be on its way’ to the Falkland Islands.
¹²
It was news that came too late to have a deterrent effect. The invasion fleet
had already put to sea. A vast armada, supported by the flagship of the Argentine navy, the aircraft carrier
Veinticinco de Mayo
, was within four days of its destination. The Falkland
Islands and South Georgia were doomed.

It was late on 30 March that John Nott informed Thatcher that there could be no doubt that there was an Argentine fleet heading straight for the Falklands’
capital,
Port Stanley. Most of the information Nott was receiving from the Ministry of Defence suggested that Britain could not retake the islands.
¹³
A
national humiliation seemed unavoidable. A country that within living memory had led an empire covering a quarter of the world had sunk to a state in which it could not retake a few windswept
islands from a bankrupt and unstable Latin American dictatorship. Had it come to this? Could the British lion really be so utterly toothless? It was at this sombre stage in the discussions that the
First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Henry Leach (having only with difficulty got past a particularly officious policeman), strode purposefully into the room. Standing in his full uniform and determined to
prove the senior service’s worth against the impending spending cuts, he contradicted every piece of defeatist advice emanating from the Ministry of Defence. There could be no half-measures,
he announced. A task force could be assembled over the weekend and could reach the Falklands in three weeks. ‘Three days, you mean,’ interjected Thatcher, showing herself still an
ingénue about war. She was quickly put right. Having to learn quickly on the job, she carefully cross-examined Leach and asked him if he truly believed the islands could be retaken. Leach
replied that ‘we could and in my judgement, though it is not my business to say so, we should’, because: ‘If we do not, or if we pussyfoot in our actions and do not achieve
complete success, in another few months we shall be living in a different country whose word counts for little.’
¹⁴

That this flourish left Nott unmoved was immaterial.
¹⁵
It struck a penetrating chord with the woman who mattered.

Towards the Abyss

‘I hope the people realize,’ warned the commander of the British task force, Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse, ‘that this is the most difficult thing that we have
attempted since the Second World War.’
¹⁶
Having spent the first fortnight after the Falkland Islands’ invasion overseeing developments
from the armed forces’ headquarters at Northwood in Hertfordshire, Fieldhouse had been flown down to hold his council of war on board the aircraft carrier HMS
Hermes
with the other
principal task force commanders, Rear Admiral Sandy Woodward, Commodore Michael Clapp and Brigadier Julian Thompson. By then, 17 April, the task force was off Ascension Island, a British-owned
volcanic pimple of land populated by a US airbase. Situated 3,700 miles from Britain and 3,300 miles from the Falklands, Ascension was a crucial mid-point for the task force to rendezvous and take
on extra supplies before heading towards its target, ten days’ sail away. Suddenly, the prospect of engaging the Argentine forces in a full-scale war had gone from possible to probable. It
was a war for which Britain had done no planning whatsoever.

To the hasty decision to send the task force, Thatcher had met with little by way of opposition in the Cabinet (only John Biffen had expressed doubts when it met on 2
April). It was difficult to disagree with the proposition that a South American military junta would be unlikely to respond to diplomatic initiatives unless they came backed up by the threat of
arms. If anything was likely to make Galtieri see sense, it would surely be the Royal Navy – in 1982 still the third-largest navy in the world – bearing down upon his increasingly
nervous forces. Only if he remained intransigent would the task force find itself going into battle. Yet it was far too dangerous a game to play as a bluff. If much of Whitehall thought Britain
could not win the resulting conflict, it was a reasonable assumption that the same calculation was stiffening resolve in the Casa Rosada. What was more, the very act of sending the pride of the
British fleet south created its own momentum. Once the armada had assembled off the coast of the Falkland Islands it could not hang around indefinitely while the diplomatic process was drawn out by
one tortuous initiative after another. Midsummer in the United Kingdom would be midwinter in the South Atlantic, bringing conditions that would compel the task force to disperse and return home in
a tail-between-the-legs withdrawal which could only be interpreted as an admission of failure.

Given the risks involved and the strong hand held by the junta, the incisiveness of Thatcher’s response was remarkable and, to some, deeply worrying. Yet there was no time to be squandered
in delay, and the task force began to be put together immediately on 2 April, with a mere weekend assigned to completing the herculean task of recalling sailors from leave, making emergency repairs
and modifications, getting all the provisions in the right place and the ships ready for a three-month deployment in the South Atlantic. As evidence that at least the Royal Navy, and its civilian
contractors, had not succumbed to the much-discussed ‘British disease’ of laziness and poor management it was definitive. On 5 April, a large crowd gathered along the harbour walls at
Portsmouth to watch the first wave of ships, led by the aircraft carriers HMS
Invincible
and HMS
Hermes
, sail out to an uncertain fate. The government’s unease about sending the
Queen’s son, Prince Andrew, a helicopter pilot on board
Invincible
, into a potential war zone was quashed by his mother, who insisted the second in line to the throne wanted to do his
duty without fear or favour. A second armada of ships sailed from Gibraltar with Rear Admiral Sandy Woodward, who assumed command of the carrier battle group.

Over the following weeks, the task force built up to full strength with over one hundred ships sailing towards their common target. There were forty-four warships, twenty-two ships of the Royal
Fleet Auxiliary and forty-five supporting merchant ships crewed by civilian volunteers. The impressive spectacle hid considerable shortcomings, which hostilities were
certain
to expose. There were insufficient purpose-built troop-carriers for an operation of this scale, and those forces expected to spearhead the landings, the 2nd and 3rd Battalions of the Parachute
Regiment (2 and 3 Para), and some of the Royal Marines’ 3rd Commando Brigade, found themselves travelling on the hastily requisitioned P&O cruise liner
Canberra
. Army
reinforcements in the shape of 5 Infantry Brigade followed behind on the similarly requisitioned
Queen Elizabeth II
, which sailed from Southampton on 12 May. There was every reason to be
nervous. Once the task force came within range of Argentine planes and missiles, the ships would be sitting ducks unless British domination of the skies could be established. Unfortunately, this
could not be guaranteed because their destination was far outside the reach of land-based RAF fighters.

The task force would thus be dependent upon whatever aircraft could be packed on to the decks of the carriers. Unfortunately, the Royal Navy’s aircraft carrier HMS
Ark Royal
had
already been scrapped – a fact of which Leach found Thatcher to be initially ignorant – and the task force was left with what were actually supposed to be helicopter carriers, the
23-year-old HMS
Hermes
, which had to be diverted from the scrapyard, and HMS
Invincible
, which was a third of the size of
Ark Royal
and, despite being only two years old, was
already earmarked for sale to the Australians. Argentine jets firing deadly Exocet missiles were not going to be sent packing by a few Royal Navy helicopters, no matter how proficient their
piloting. Hopes therefore rested on the brand-new Sea Harrier aircraft of which the navy had just taken delivery. The Sea Harriers’ vertical take-off technology meant they could travel on the
decks of
Hermes
and
Invincible
– although, problematically, they were so new that many of their pilots were alarmingly short of experience of flying them. It was not even
certain whether the Harriers could be flown effectively at night. Truly, it was a journey into the unknown.

Assembling and protecting the ships off the Falklands was difficult enough; actually landing forces to retake the islands was even more problematic. By the end of April, the Argentines had
flooded thirteen thousand troops on to the islands, a ratio that equated to seven soldiers for every islander. Whoever held the capital, Port Stanley, effectively held the Falklands, but the task
force had to think carefully about the wisdom of mounting a direct assault on a built-up area – partly because that was where Argentine forces, protected by rings of minefields, were most
heavily concentrated, and partly because fighting over the capital risked killing rather than liberating the thousand civilian inhabitants.

When the first wave of Argentines had come ashore near Stanley in the early hours of 2 April, they had faced only a detachment of sixty-nine Royal Marines, armed with nothing heavier than a few
rocket-launchers, who were deployed to defend Government House on the western outskirts of the
capital. By 6.30 a.m., the islands’ governor, Rex Hunt, found his radio
link with London cut and Government House surrounded by Argentine commandos. For almost three hours, the Royal Marines resisted, keeping up a barrage of fire that kept the invaders at bay. Despite
taking out the commandos’ officer, Captain Giachino, the marines found themselves pinned down by overwhelming numbers and any attempt at a break-out would risk civilian lives in
street-to-street fighting. At 9.25 a.m., with the audible rumble of Argentine armoured vehicles heading towards Government House, Hunt bowed to the inevitable and ordered the marines to cease fire.
They were duly taken prisoner, while the governor did his best to keep his dignity, donning full ceremonial uniform before getting into his official car (a London taxicab) to be driven towards the
airport and exile. By then, the Argentine flag was fluttering over his capital. That the new occupiers casually assumed they would not be challenged was evident from the commendable speed with
which they repatriated to Britain the captive Royal Marines.

South Georgia’s turn came the following day, 3 April. The island was defended by twenty-two Royal Marines which HMS
Endurance
had landed on 31 March, and it was via
Endurance
that they received the order to resist the invasion – but ‘not resist beyond point where lives might be lost to no avail’. This was a compromise that Nott and the Foreign
Secretary, Lord Carrington, had devised in London after successfully dissuading Thatcher whose instinct – surprisingly – was that the marines should lay down their arms without a
fight.
¹⁷
While the marines took up position, the British Atlantic Survey team huddled for safety in the church at Grytviken. As soon as the invaders
came within sight, the Royal Marines opened up, bringing down a Puma helicopter laden with Argentine marines, inflicting other casualties on the assault party and letting rip at an Argentine
corvette that was steaming into the harbour. The
Guerrico
was riddled with over one thousand bullets and sufficiently damaged by direct hits from two anti-tank rockets that it beat a hasty
retreat back into the ocean. Nevertheless, as with the battle at Government House, the odds made for an unwinnable situation for the marines. For the second time in twenty-four hours, a British
force was forced to surrender, leaving South Georgia at the mercy of Alfredo Astiz, a naval officer unaffectionately known in his homeland as
El Ángel Rubio de la Muerte
.
^EN17
Aside from the brutality he had inflicted upon the regime’s domestic opponents, he was wanted on an international arrest warrant in Sweden for the
disappearance of a seventeen-year-old girl and in France for the murder of two nuns.

Chanting ecstatically ‘
Las Malvinas son Argentinas
’, great crowds surged into Buenos Aires’s Plaza de Mayo to greet the news of Argentina’s twin
victories. Trafalgar Square was visited by no comparable demonstration for vengeance, the British public’s response being restricted to damage to the Argentine embassy’s
windows from lobbed tins of corned beef. Most of the anger – and the apprehension – was internalized. An opinion poll published on 6 April suggested that 60 per cent of the public
blamed Thatcher for the humiliation.
¹⁸
Three days previously, she had faced a tense House of Commons, which had been recalled to sit on a Saturday
for the first time since the Suez crisis in 1956. No vote was taken then on the course of action, nor on any subsequent occasion during the crisis. Constitutionally, it was not the
legislature’s prerogative to determine the government’s action in an emergency of this kind. In reality, it did not need a formal vote to tabulate the mood of the House: anything short
of a resolute statement from the prime minister would have caused a haemorrhage in her standing with Conservative backbenchers. In particular, the speech by the Tory turned Ulster Unionist, Enoch
Powell, unnerved her. She had been dubbed the ‘Iron Lady’, he reminded the House, but it was the coming weeks that would truly show ‘of what metal she is made’.
¹⁹
There was more than a hint of menace in his suggestion. She had spent the previous day being subjected to a long list prepared by the Foreign Office of all
the negative consequences that could flow from a forceful response to Argentina. But she was in no mood for quibbles and prevarications from a department lampooned for being a hotbed of cold feet.
‘What was the alternative?’ she subsequently summed up her riposte: ‘That a common or garden dictator should rule over the Queen’s subjects and prevail by fraud and
violence? Not while I was prime minister.’
²⁰
Thus it was that she listened to Sir Henry Leach’s can-do approach and, without waiting for
a more detailed analysis, dispatched a task force on an operation for which no contingency planning existed. In this one headstrong act, the Cabinet committed Britain to a potential military
engagement that ran counter not just to John Nott’s recently proposed cuts but to every defence review since Harold Wilson’s 1967 abandonment of the East of Suez commitments, whereby
British strategy assumed a NATO versus Warsaw Pact conflict in the European theatre rather than British-only operations in distant parts of the world.