Margaret Thatcher knew that time was running out. She was acutely conscious of the limited window of opportunity afforded by the South Atlantic weather patterns. With her war cabinet she had given approval on 8 May to the military’s plan for an amphibious landing at San Carlos Bay in the Falklands. The remaining units of the task force were given orders to sail south from Ascension Island. On 12 May the requisitioned liner Queen Elizabeth II left Portsmouth carrying 3,000 men of the Welsh and Scots Guards to reinforce the Marines and Paratroopers who would launch the first wave of the assault and establish the beach-head.
With these military moves so far advanced, and the landing on the Falklands planned for 21 May (almost the last possible date for weather reasons), the Prime Minister grew increasingly irritated with those who kept urging her to make further diplomatic concessions. President Reagan was not the only one to catch the rough edge of her tongue on this issue. At a meeting of the war cabinet at Chequers on 17 May, she was bitterly sharp with Francis Pym and his team of senior Foreign Office diplomats who were drafting a final ultimatum to Argentina.
The unpleasant wrangling at this meeting showed Margaret Thatcher at her most aggressive. At various moments she accused the five Foreign Office representatives, Sir Anthony Parsons, Sir Nicholas Henderson, Sir Michael Palliser, Sir Antony Acland and Francis Pym of ‘being wet, ready to sell out, unsupportive of British interests’ and lacking resolution. At one point she asked, ‘Did the Foreign Office have no principles?’ For good measure, she added the insult that while the Foreign Office ‘were content to be dishonest and consult with dishonest people, she was honest’.26
At this moment, John Nott attacked her for being unfair. She counter-attacked, shouting him down for being rude! These rough tactics described by various participants as: ‘A totally horrendous bull session’, or more loftily as ‘Mrs Thatcher’s High Noon with the FO’,27 caused its most senior official to offer his resignation. ‘At one moment when I thought she was being unnecessarily critical’, recalled Antony Acland, ‘I said, “If you want to get another Permanent Under-Secretary, for heavens sake do”.’ After a long pause, the Prime Minister backed down. ‘All right, no more Foreign Office bashing’, she replied in a grudging tone.
It was on the tip of Acland’s tongue to say, ‘I don’t know how long that will last, Prime Minister’, but he restrained himself to, ‘Thank you very much’.28 The incident was symptomatic of her belligerent style towards the diplomatic service even though the record suggests that it served her well throughout the crisis.
The picture conveyed by the various accounts of this day at Chequers suggests a warmongering Prime Minister beating off an appeasement-minded Foreign Office. It was not that simple. No one at this Chequers gathering had any real expectations that the junta would yield to the British ultimatum. But the Foreign Office team wanted to draft a document demonstrating ‘beyond peradventure’, as one of them kept saying, that the UK had gone to the furthest possible limits in offering every reasonable option to avoid war.29 Margaret Thatcher regarded this exercise as a waste of time, with the added danger that it might trigger a new round of arguments to delay the landing of task-force troops on the Falkland Islands. A few days earlier she had sat on the front bench during a House of Commons debate on 13 May visibly seething as Francis Pym, followed by Ted Heath, had made out the case for further negotiations.
There was, however, one moment in this debate when the Prime Minister perked up. Her body language and her nodding signified complete agreement with what was the second major contribution by Enoch Powell to Parliament’s consideration of the Falklands crisis. During the initial debate on 3 April he had sent shivers down many a spine when he had asserted in his compelling counter-tenor that the next few weeks would find out what metal the Iron Lady was made of. Now, in this 13 May debate, he rounded on Francis Pym, issuing a veiled demand for his resignation on the grounds that the Foreign Secretary had made concessions radically different from the basis on which the task force had been despatched. ‘If people doubt that …’, continued Powell in tones ringing with menace, ‘let them visualise the task force sailing back up the Atlantic and into Portsmouth harbour. Would those who sent them, would those who comprise that force, say “We achieved the purposes for which we set sail”? Of course not.’30
Although some dissented from Enoch Powell’s argument, Margaret Thatcher wholeheartedly agreed with it. In case there was any doubt about it, her energetic PPS, Ian Gow, bustled around the committee-room corridor just before the 1922 Committee of Conservative back-benchers held its weekly meeting. He was handing out the Hansard transcripts of this second warning from Enoch the Oracle, telling all and sundry that ‘The Lady has taken it to heart’.31 Once again the Foreign Secretary was clearly in the Prime Minister’s bad books. Not surprisingly Pym had a bruising reception at the 1922, which he left to shouts of ‘No surrender!’ and ‘No appeasement’, after his poorly received remarks. I was one of the louder shouters. A couple of days later, Ian Gow sidled up to me and murmured in his quaint style: ‘The Queen’s First Minister has asked me to thank the Honourable Member for Thanet South for his most welcome support at the 1922 Committee.’32
Because of the tension between the Prime Minister and her Foreign Secretary, there was considerable ambiguity in the British government’s position during the week before the task force landed its men on the Falklands. However, there was no such ambivalence in the mind of Margaret Thatcher. Two days before she went head to head with her senior diplomats in that highly charged session at Chequers, she addressed a conference of Scottish Conservatives at Perth. She told them ‘I should not be doing my duty if I did not warn you in the simplest and clearest terms … a negotiated settlement may prove to be unsustainable’.33
She was right in her warning for, as expected, the Argentine junta rejected Britain’s final ultimatum on 19 May. The search for a peaceful settlement was over. The Prime Minister announced this to the House of Commons, and simultaneously published a white paper setting out the history of the failed peace process. She also withdrew any concessions that had been offered during the abortive negotiations. The decks were now cleared for war.34
REFLECTION
The unity in Parliament that greeted the publication of the white paper was a vindication of Margaret Thatcher’s strategy. From the outset she had consistently believed that diplomatic negotiations would never end the Argentine occupation of the Falklands. She faced massive pressure from the Americans, the UN and her own Foreign Secretary to back down from this stance but, apart from one brief wobble caused by the cabinet vote on 5 May, she refused to do so. As a result of her steadfast determination she kept faith with both the Falkland Islanders and with the will of Parliament.
It is hard to believe that any other politician would have remained so straightforward in purpose and so single minded in commitment. It was the force of her personality and the strength of her certainty that enabled her to stand firm. The people who appreciated this most were the men who were about to do the fighting.
________________
* The Overseas and Defence Committee of the Cabinet created a South Atlantic Sub-Committee, hence ODSA.
21
The Falklands War III
Victory
THE BATTLE FOR THE FALKLANDS
Margaret Thatcher had an exceptionally good relationship with the military. Somehow it filtered down from senior commanders to junior officers and through the ranks that this Prime Minister was hewn from a block of granite quite different from other politicians. In the context of fighting a war, her moral certainty, determination and absolute support for ‘our boys’, as she often called them, was a boost to their morale. She also strengthened the senior commanders by not second guessing their plans.
On 18 May, the Prime Minister and the war cabinet gathered in the Ministry of Defence to receive a final briefing from the Chiefs of Staff on the prospects for landing Royal Marines and Paratroopers of the task force at the chosen
location of San Carlos Bay. It was made clear, for the first time to the politicians, how enormous the risks were, given the threat posed by the Argentine Air Force. If the Prime Minister was shaken, she did not show it. She asked many questions to increase her understanding of the situation, but not in any way to challenge the tactics that she strongly supported. ‘Her biggest concern in her questioning was to make sure the number of casualties would be minimised’, recalled the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong.1
Once the political decision to approve the sending in of the task force had been taken by the war cabinet and endorsed by the full cabinet, the die was cast. The date of the landing, 21 May, was a closely guarded secret. On that day, as the counter-invasion got under way, Margaret Thatcher, as MP for Finchley, was scheduled to be carrying out constituency engagements. She had to open a warehouse, accept a bouquet of roses, meet a delegation of local residents concerned about a planning problem and give a speech at the retirement party of her agent. The next day, Carol asked her how on earth she could carry out her constituency programme looking so calm and unruffled in the press photographs. ‘Of course, all my thoughts were in the South Atlantic. I was desperately worried … it was just so important that the landing went right’, her mother replied. ‘But if I hadn’t gone to the function people would have thought something was wrong – I had to carry on as normal.’2
Margaret Thatcher kept up a brave front of looking normal. But on her way to Finchley she was thrown by one early piece of bad news from the landing ground: two Gazelle helicopters had been shot down with three fatalities. She went ahead with the warehouse opening at which a Royal Marines band was playing. Their martial music was too much for her at the moment when she knew the Marines were approaching the beaches in their landing craft. By the time she left she was fighting back tears of anxiety. But during a later constituency engagement, a retirement party for her agent, there came better news. The beach-head had been established at San Carlos Bay. ‘That’s it. That’s what I’ve been waiting for all day. Let’s go!’ declared Margaret Thatcher in uplifted spirits.3 As she walked back into Downing Street she paused to tell the expectant crowd: ‘These are nervous days, but we have marvellous fighting forces; everyone is behind them. We are fighting a just cause, and we wish them Godspeed.’4
On the beaches of San Carlos the landings went better than expected, with 4,000 Marines and Paras coming safely ashore. But in San Carlos Bay the ships of the task force were coming under sustained and sometimes devastating attack. The British commanders had underestimated the courage and effectiveness of the Argentine pilots, while overestimating the fire-power and reliability of the task force’s air defences.
In the first hours of daylight the frigate HMS Ardent was sunk, another frigate HMS Argonaut was badly damaged, and so was the destroyer HMS Brilliant. In the middle of the fiercest fighting the Royal Navy had seen since the Second World War, Margaret Thatcher visited the Fleet Headquarters at Northwood. She understood at first hand from briefings in the Operations Room the savagery of the attacks by the Argentine’s Mirage, Skyhawk, Pucara and Aermacchi aircraft flying across San Carlos water at suicidally low heights to direct their bombs and missiles at the British ships.
‘I did my best to seem confident’, she later recalled. But her inner feelings were different. She could hardly believe that the Canberra, requisitioned as a troop ship for 3,000 men, could survive the constant bombardment aimed at her. She well understood that this phase of the battle was finely balanced. As she left Northwood to return to Chequers, the Prime Minister drew aside the task-force commander, Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse. When they were out of earshot she asked him, ‘How long can we go on taking this kind of punishment?’5 His verbatim reply was not recorded, but seems to have been a mixture of continuing anxiety combined with the reassurance that the Argentine Air Force were taking heavy losses from the British Harriers and their US-supplied Sidewinder missiles.
Although Margaret Thatcher’s weekend at Chequers and the week ahead of her were fraught with worry, she stuck to her self-imposed rule of not telephoning task-force headquarters at Northwood to ask for news. This restraint was admirable but it created its own tensions. Late at night in the flat above No. 10, surrounded only by her family, Carol asked her mother a question about the day’s progress and was given the anguished reply: ‘I wish I knew, I wish I knew.’ To which Denis calmly responded, ‘That is how it is in a war’.6
The early reports the Prime Minister did receive in the first few days after the landing at San Carlos Bay often contained bad news. On Tuesday 25 May she was working late in her room in the House of Commons when John Nott came in to tell her that the destroyer HMS Coventry had been bombed by Argentine aircraft and was sinking. Nineteen of the crew were lost.
Later that night the duty clerk at No. 10 told her that the 18,000-ton roll-on-roll-off container ship the Atlantic Conveyor had been hit by two Exocet missiles and was sinking. Margaret Thatcher knew that this ship contained some of the most vital re-supplies of the war including nineteen Harrier aircraft, four Chinook and seven Wessex helicopters, essential to the movement of troops.
The loss of the Atlantic Conveyor caused her a sleepless night of worry, inflamed by an Argentine radio report that one of Britain’s two aircraft carriers, HMS Illustrious, had been attacked and damaged. In the midst of these traumas, Denis woke up to find his wife sitting on the end of the bed in floods of tears. ‘Oh no, oh no! Another ship! All my young men!’ she sobbed. He sat down beside her and said, ‘That’s what war’s like, love. I’ve been in one. I know.’7
Her son as well as her husband helped to calm her down. Mark pinned a billet doux to her pillow with the words, ‘Mum, I’m so sorry. Love M’, followed by some lines by Kipling she had taught him to recite as a child:
Dear-bought and clear, a thousand year,
Our fathers’ title runs.
Make we likewise their sacrifice,
Defrauding not our sons.8
When morning came, the sacrifices were not quite as bad as the Prime Minister had feared. The radio report of an attack on Illustrious turned out to be a false alarm. Although the Atlantic Conveyor had been sunk, her cargo of Harriers had been flown to safety two days earlier. But the six Wessex and three Chinook helicopters, winter tents for 4,500 men, runway and fuelling equipment were at the bottom of the South Atlantic along with the ship, the ship’s captain and eleven members of the crew. These losses were a severe blow to the logistics of moving Marines and Paras across East Falkland towards the capital of Port Stanley.
On the ground at San Carlos, the bridgehead was well established but the land campaign was taking time to get under way. The delays led to acute frustrations at 10 Downing Street. For the first and only time in the war there were tensions between the Prime Minister and her Chiefs of Staff. Some members of the war cabinet fretted openly that the land forces were being too cautious and that their commander, delayed on board the liner Queen Elizabeth II, requisitioned as a troop ship, was taking too long to arrive. ‘It might have been quicker by gondola’, was Margaret Thatcher’s tart comment.9
The Prime Minister’s impatience boiled over into making one bad judgement. Shortly before the major landings began, Admiral Lewin reported that there was an opportunity to sink the enemy aircraft carrier Veinticinco de Mayo. It posed a potential threat to the ships of the task force, and was a legitimate target. But the carrier was within Argentine territorial waters. Margaret Thatcher was in favour of attacking her. John Nott took the opposite view. He recalled:
We had an enormous argument. I said that we were going to recapture the Islands within a month anyway. If we sank the Veinticinco de Mayo in its own territorial waters, it would cause international uproar and turn the whole of South America against us. In the end, I carried my case with the war cabinet. It was our only major disagreement.10
While this naval argument was taking place in London, the military took a bold initiative in the land war by sending the 2nd bat
talion of the Parachute Regiment out of the bridgehead with orders to capture Darwin and Goose Green. Margaret Thatcher was incandescent with the BBC when news of the imminent movement towards Goose Green was broadcast on the World Service before 2nd Para had launched their attack. Possibly as a result of these leaks, British casualties were heavier than expected. They included the battalion commander Colonel ‘H’ Jones, who was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross after the recapture of Goose Green. Margaret Thatcher was said to be more troubled by his death than by any other loss of the war, with the exception of the sinking of HMS Sheffield.11
On 31 May, Admiral John Pointdexter, the Deputy National Security Advisor at the White House, telephoned Robert Armstrong to set up a call on the hot-line between the President and the Prime Minister. As it was hastily arranged, neither the Cabinet Secretary nor the Prime Minister were fully briefed about what would be on the agenda, although Margaret Thatcher may have had some indications from the British Embassy in Washington that Reagan was likely to suggest a cease-fire.
The call began affably enough, with the President congratulating the Prime Minister on demonstrating to the world that unprovoked aggression did not pay, and asking, ‘How’s it going down there?’
He received a ten-minute monologue in reply. When Margaret Thatcher paused for breath, Reagan broke his silence to ask a further question about the military situation. He was answered with a second lengthy monologue. During this part of the conversation, Reagan held up the receiver to his staff in the Oval Office, with his hand over the mouthpiece, and said with a grin, ‘Isn’t she marvellous?’12
Eventually, the President was able to intervene for long enough to indicate the purpose of his call. He said he wanted to share ‘some of our ideas on how we might capitalise on the success you’ve had with a diplomatic initiative’. He seemed to be suggesting that a contact group could be used as intermediaries between the combatants. ‘I think an effort to show what we’re all still willing to seek a settlement … would undercut the effort of … the leftists in South America who are actively seeking to exploit this crisis. Now, I’m thinking about this plan …’
Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality Page 46
