Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  For the Falkland Islanders, much of this was academic. But one ship did matter to them. This was HMS Endurance, the ageing ice patrol vessel that had been keeping watch over the South Atlantic since 1968. In itself Endurance was pretty useless, and the Ministry of Defence had been talking about getting rid of it for years. The Foreign Office thought it was an important symbol of Britain’s determination to defend the Falklands, while the islanders themselves found it reassuring. But it was an obvious target for Nott’s axe, not least because it was overdue for an extremely expensive refit. From the Foreign Office, Lord Carrington warned that scrapping Endurance ‘would be interpreted by both the Islanders and the Argentines as a reduction in our commitment to the Islands and in our willingness to defend them’. But nobody at the Navy really wanted to fight for the ship, especially if scrapping Endurance helped to save another frigate. As Mrs Thatcher herself put it, Endurance was a ‘military irrelevance’, which ‘would neither deter nor repel any planned invasion’. So it had to go.12

  As it turned out, the decision to scrap Endurance was one of the most expensive Mrs Thatcher ever took. Later, even the Franks Committee’s report on the origins of the war, which was widely seen as a bit of a whitewash, agreed with the Foreign Office view that the ship had been an emblem of Britain’s ‘commitment to the defence of the Falkland Islands’, and that getting rid of it was a bad mistake. The obvious counter-argument is that if the government had retained Endurance, it would have had to get rid of something else. Yet, as the archives show, Carrington repeatedly warned his colleagues that this particular cut would be seen as an invitation to Argentina. Indeed, although Carrington later took the blame for the invasion, he was the only senior minister who recognized that storm clouds were gathering. In September 1981 he told his colleagues, yet again, that the Argentine regime was under ‘strong domestic pressure to show results’ and was betraying ‘renewed impatience’ with the failure to agree a deal. They should not ‘discount the risk’, he wrote, that ‘we might become involved in a military confrontation with Argentina’. And if they did, ‘defending the Islands would be both difficult and costly’.13

  All this gives the lie to the Franks Report’s claim that the Argentine invasion of the Falklands could not reasonably have been foreseen. It was foreseen. That said, it is hard to know what Mrs Thatcher’s government should have done differently. The islanders themselves had rejected the leaseback idea; if the government had handed them over to Buenos Aires against their will, it would have been pilloried by the press, the Labour Party and its own backbenchers. Some historians, such as Mrs Thatcher’s biographers Hugo Young and John Campbell, argue that the government should have deterred the Argentine invasion by sending more ships to the South Atlantic. Of course it is easy to say that now. But if Mrs Thatcher had sent more ships, she would have scuppered any chance of settling the issue through negotiations. What was more, in the autumn of 1981 a report for the defence chiefs concluded that to ‘deter a full-scale invasion’, Britain would have to send a ‘large balanced force’ including at least four destroyers and an Invincible-class aircraft carrier, as well as numerous supply ships and a brigade to reinforce Stanley’s garrison of Royal Marines. Not only would this be extremely expensive, it ‘could well precipitate the very action it was intended to deter’. And if Mrs Thatcher had sent the ships and Argentina had reacted, history’s verdict would not be kind.14

  None of this, of course, means the government was blameless. Back in 1976, in the first line of the speech that earned her the Iron Lady nickname, Mrs Thatcher had proclaimed that ‘the first duty of any Government is to safeguard its people against external aggression’. In the Falklands she conspicuously failed to deliver on that promise. Scrapping Endurance, in particular, now looks like a terrible mistake. It is true, of course, that she was dependent on advice from the Ministry of Defence, much of which proved unforgivably complacent. But as she well knew, the buck always stops at the top. If the invasion had happened under Labour, she would not have cut Jim Callaghan or Michael Foot an inch of slack. It happened on her watch, so she gets the blame.15

  In a wider sense, though, this is beside the point. Much of the historical discussion about the Falklands, like much of the discussion of the 1980s in general, is absurdly parochial. Contrary to what some of her critics claimed, Mrs Thatcher did not want a war in the Falklands. Her government, like its predecessors, believed the islands’ future lay in a closer relationship with Argentina. She certainly made mistakes, but getting rid of a burglar alarm is not the same thing as burgling a house. The first shots in the conflict were not fired by British soldiers; they were fired by Argentines. Whatever her critics said, the war was not made in London. It was made in Buenos Aires.

  To most people in Britain at the turn of the 1980s, Argentina was so remote it might as well have been on the moon. In the popular imagination it seemed an intoxicating, passionate place, the land of tango and steak, pampas and gauchos, the vast wilderness of Patagonia and the crumbling grandeur of Buenos Aires. But to readers of The Times or the Guardian, it was the unsettling instability of Argentine life that loomed largest: the bombs, the death squads and the triple-digit hyperinflation. When a military coup deposed the floundering Isabel Perón in 1976, The Times hoped Argentina’s new masters might banish its ‘nightmare of bloodshed, corruption, administrative paralysis and economic disaster’. They did indeed restore order, though at a horrifyingly high price. During the so-called Dirty War, tens of thousands of Marxists, trade unionists, clergymen, students and journalists were variously kidnapped, imprisoned, raped, tortured, shot or simply dropped into the Atlantic. None of this was a secret. Another Times editorial, in July 1981, noted that the junta’s campaign had come at an ‘enormous cost in human suffering’. After the ‘brutal repression which has been carried out in the name of combating terrorism’, the paper said sadly, ‘Argentina needs a return to normality’.16

  Normality, however, was some way off. At the beginning of 1982, the Argentine economy was still in a terrible mess, with production and earnings in free-fall and inflation at lunatic levels. The workers were restive; the mood was febrile. It was against this background that the head of the army, General Leopoldo Galtieri, took over as the junta’s third president. Tall, rugged and hard-drinking, Galtieri was the son of Italian immigrants and had spent his entire adult life in the military. He was a man of action, not ideas; a gambler, not a strategist. For strategy, he relied on his chief ally, Admiral Jorge Anaya, who ran Argentina’s navy. The two men had been friends since their days at the National Military College, and it was Anaya who urged Galtieri to settle the Falklands issue once and for all. With the islands back in Argentine hands, Anaya argued, their domestic popularity would be assured.17

  At the time, Anaya’s plan seemed rational enough. If the junta could regain the islands by January 1983, which would mark the 150th anniversary of the British takeover, the Buenos Aires crowds would cheer them to the skies. But given the fate of Ridley’s initiative, any chance of a negotiated settlement seemed extremely remote. So on 15 December 1981, Anaya told his chief of naval operations to draft a secret contingency plan to seize the islands, and by late January they had a very rough outline. Ideally they would strike in the second half of 1982, after the British had withdrawn the Endurance. Taking the islands would be fairly straightforward: once their troops had landed outside Stanley, it would be easy to overpower the tiny garrison of Royal Marines.

  As for the British, Anaya never expected them to hit back. Everybody knew they had lost their fighting spirit, while Mrs Thatcher’s plan to scrap the Endurance showed she no longer took the defence of the islands seriously. And if she did make a fuss, so what? She would never dare to move without American support, yet Argentina was one of Washington’s most reliable partners. General Galtieri had even been trained at West Point. Nobody seriously doubted that if it came to the crunch President Reagan would side with his friends from Buenos Aires.18

  Although the plan w
as supposed to be secret, rumours soon spread. Perhaps the junta hoped that, if they rattled their sabres loudly enough, the British would roll over. On 24 January the newspaper La Prensa ran a story, later picked up by the Guardian, claiming that the Galtieri regime was running out of patience with the talks and was seriously considering military action. On 2 March, Britain’s defence attaché in Buenos Aires warned that a full military attack was not beyond the realms of possibility. And on the next day the Foreign Office forwarded to Number 10 a cable from Britain’s ambassador in Buenos Aires reporting on the intransigent rhetoric coming from the Argentine Foreign Ministry. On the top, Mrs Thatcher scrawled: ‘We must make contingency plans.’ But none of her officials did anything about it. In Whitehall, nobody believed – or wanted to believe – that the Argentines were serious.19

  By this point, Anaya’s men had drawn up a preliminary landing plan. On 2 March, the day before Mrs Thatcher made her anxious little note, Galtieri told one of his brigadier-generals, Mario Benjamin Menéndez, that they would soon reclaim the Malvinas and that he would be the islands’ first military governor. But at this stage they had no plans to invade before September. Some of Anaya’s officers believed it was ‘only a contingency plan’, and Rear Admiral Carlos Büsser, who led the invasion, told the historian Martin Middlebrook that he expected to be working on it until the final months of 1982. The ‘main emphasis’, Büsser claimed, was ‘always on recovering the islands by negotiations’. Since negotiations had stalled, this seems a bit disingenuous. Probably the junta were always going to invade; the only question was when. This was where the South Georgia scrap-metal dealers came in.20

  The occupation of South Georgia was a very odd business, and even now it is hard to untangle the details. The island itself, some 800 nautical miles to the east of Stanley, is even more remote than the Falklands. First claimed for Britain by Captain Cook in 1775, it was now effectively deserted, save for the British Antarctic Survey’s tiny research station at King Edward Point. But the island’s former whaling stations, where the explorer Ernest Shackleton had famously sought help in 1916, were littered with the rusting relics of whaling ships and oil processing plants. And in 1978 an Argentine wheeler-dealer, Constantino Davidoff, approached the nominal owners, a company based in Edinburgh, to ask if he could carry off the old equipment for scrap.

  To cut a long story short, the company agreed, the Foreign Office gave its permission and Davidoff got his contract. However, when he first visited South Georgia in December 1981 to see exactly what was there, his men behaved badly, not getting the right clearance, scrawling ‘Los Malvinas son Argentinas’ on a wall and generally making a nuisance of themselves. The damage was spotted by the British Antarctic Survey, and a shamefaced Davidoff duly went to the British Embassy in Buenos Aires to apologize. The Embassy agreed to give him another chance, and on 18 March 1982 the Bahia Buen Suceso sailed into the former whaling station of Leith, South Georgia, nominally to collect the equipment. But now the story took a very strange turn. When a British Antarctic Survey team came across Davidoff’s men in Leith the next day, they discovered that not only were some dressed in paramilitary uniforms, but they had again vandalized the British Antarctic Survey station, were flying the Argentine flag and were even barbecuing a local reindeer, which was a protected species. Even by the standards of South American scrap-metal dealers, this seemed pretty poor form.

  But Davidoff’s men were not just scrap-metal dealers, or at least not all of them. In effect, his expedition had been co-opted by the Argentine Navy, who had offered him the use of their ships, free of charge, to bring the scrap back to the mainland. Their motives, however, were not entirely charitable. Argentina had laid claim to South Georgia since 1927, and Davidoff’s scheme gave them a chance to establish a presence on the island, as they had already done on Southern Thule. Under their plan, known as Operation Alpha, a group of naval personnel had joined Davidoff’s workers and were planning to stay behind after the scrap merchants left. Once they had a foothold on the island, they would be joined by a second party of Argentine Marine commandos, who would establish a permanent military base. By the time the British noticed, they hoped, South Georgia would be in Argentine hands.21

  On the face of it, Operation Alpha was a perfectly workable plan. It was basically a Southern Thule-style military escapade, and there was no reason to expect drastic consequences. The problem, however, was that it muddied the waters for the plan to invade the Falklands, which was an entirely separate undertaking. Indeed, some of Admiral Anaya’s senior commanders thought they had persuaded him to postpone Operation Alpha and were horrified to hear it had gone ahead. There was obviously no chance now of an early breakthrough in the negotiations, because the British were furious. Worse, with Britain’s attention now focused on the South Atlantic, Anaya’s commanders were in danger of losing any element of surprise. The irony is that if Anaya had shut down the stunt in South Georgia he could have launched the conquest of the Falklands a few weeks later, when the weather would have made a successful British expedition almost impossible. But as it was, the British reaction forced him to bring the invasion plans forward. And although she could hardly have known it, this was Mrs Thatcher’s great stroke of luck.22

  Over the next few days, the crisis in South Georgia spiralled out of control. The Governor of the Falkland Islands, Rex Hunt, ordered the intruders to haul down the Argentine flag and retreat to their ship, and asked the government to send Endurance from Stanley with a detachment of Royal Marines. Eventually the Foreign Office agreed, while in the meantime the Argentines seemed to pack up and leave. But by 22 March it was obvious that some of them, at least, were still on the island. The Argentines were clearly up to something, and Hunt urged the Foreign Office to deter future incursions with a show of strength. In Whitehall, however, the feeling was that Britain should do nothing to inflame the situation. The ambassador in Buenos Aires, Anthony Williams, thought talk of military action ridiculous and assured his superiors that the junta were ‘much too intelligent to do anything so silly’. So when the Foreign Office minister Richard Luce reported on the affair to the House of Commons, he deliberately played it down. There had been a bit of a contretemps, he said, and ‘a small number of men and some equipment remain. We are therefore making arrangements to ensure their early departure.’23

  Had Britain been a dictatorship, like Argentina, the Foreign Office might have got away with taking such a soft line. But the Commons was fractious. Even before Luce’s speech, the ever-dramatic Alan Clark had recorded his unease at the situation in South Georgia. ‘If we don’t throw them out, preferably shedding blood at the same time,’ he wrote, ‘they will try their luck in the Falklands.’ When Clark discussed his fears with other backbenchers in the smoking room, they agreed that ‘it’s all down to that fucking idiot Nott, and his spastic “Command Paper”, which is effectively running down the Royal Navy so as to keep the soldiers in Rhine Army happy’. ‘Surely Margaret must sympathise?’ said Clark. ‘Don’t bet on that, Alan,’ said the similarly ferocious Nicholas Budgen. ‘She is governed only by what the Americans want. At heart she is just a vulgar, middle-class Reaganite.’24

  The result of all this armchair sabre-rattling was that when Luce made his statement on 23 March he was besieged by speakers demanding a tougher response. The government must realize, thundered Jim Callaghan, that the plan to withdraw Endurance was a ‘gross dereliction of duty’. Endurance was in the area, Luce said feebly, and ‘in a position to help if necessary’. But that was not good enough. The events in South Georgia were ‘tantamount to the invasion of an independent country’, insisted the Conservative backbencher Nicholas Winterton. Britain must send ‘tangible support to the Falkland Islanders’, agreed Sir Bernard Braine, while a third Tory, John Stokes, demanded that they send ‘sufficient armed forces – naval, military or air – to defend the Falkland Islands’. ‘We’ve got the whole thing opened now,’ Clark recorded happily. ‘Clearly the Labour Party are also indignant
, and if she doesn’t get the Argentines out by next week there will be a major disturbance.’25

  Unknown to Clark, one of the spectators in the public gallery was an official from the Argentine Embassy. And now came one of the crucial moments in the whole story. A few hours later, Galtieri, Anaya and their senior colleagues met in Buenos Aires. The confrontation was clearly getting out of hand: British suspicions had been roused, the Endurance was heading for South Georgia’s main harbour, Grytviken, and Mrs Thatcher’s backbenchers were urging her to send reinforcements to the South Atlantic. As the junta saw it, they were about to be humiliated. Worse, if they did not act now, they might lose any chance of regaining the islands in the foreseeable future. They could not back down. This was their moment; they must seize it.

  That evening, Anaya ordered another ship, the Bahia Paradiso, to sail directly for South Georgia with a group of armed marines, as per the plan in Operation Alpha. In the first of several public relations calamities, the commander was Lieutenant Alfredo Astiz, nicknamed the ‘Blond Angel of Death’ for his gruesome record during the Dirty War. Wanted by the French for torturing and killing two Catholic nuns, Astiz was the worst possible advertisement for the Argentine military and a gift to the British tabloids. Meanwhile, Anaya ordered his planners to bring forward their timetable. For the next two days they worked without a wink of sleep, and on 25 March they reported that they could sail in three days’ time. The next day, the junta held one last meeting. If there were any lingering doubts, the fact that the Argentine unions had just called a general strike decided the issue. They could not afford to be humiliated. The British would be furious, said Galtieri’s foreign minister, but if the invasion went according to plan, they would be powerless to react: ‘Let’s do it quickly.’26

  At dawn on Sunday 28 March the first Argentine troops boarded their ships at the naval base in Puerto Belgrano, south of Buenos Aires. It was, remembered Rear Admiral Büsser, a lovely sunny day, a ‘nice autumn day without wind’. The soldiers had been told they were going on exercise in Patagonia. But with so much ammunition and so much secrecy, many suspected the truth. Some had packed large quantities of Argentine flags to hand out to the islanders, who would naturally be thrilled to be liberated from their piratical overlords. ‘Those of us who knew where we going’, Büsser recalled, ‘were very proud. We felt very lucky that we had been chosen and extraordinarily fortunate to have the opportunity to regain the Malvinas.’ At midday all was ready. The ships sailed. That evening, on the military landing ship Cabo San Antonio, Büsser’s troops celebrated Mass and prayed for victory.27