Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Some forty-nine men were killed in the Bluff Cove air attacks, including four Chinese crewmen, while a further forty were severely burned – many of them, like Weston, beyond recognition. For the paratroopers pulling the charred, blackened survivors ashore, it was like something from a nightmare. ‘In the boat,’ wrote Ken Lukowiak more than a decade later, ‘there were men whose expressions and cries I can still see and hear today.’ In London, Mrs Thatcher sat in silence for two minutes, tears running down her face. ‘General Moore was grief-stricken,’ she wrote. ‘We all felt – how many more.’ But she reluctantly agreed to her commanders’ request not to release the casualty figures, in order to trick the Argentines into thinking that the Task Force had lost dozens, perhaps hundreds more men than it had. As a result, Ministry of Defence switchboards were jammed by soldiers’ families desperately seeking information. In the press, some estimates suggested that hundreds might have been killed.65

  In reality, General Moore was poised to tighten his grip. After their gruelling yomp over the Falklands moorlands, his troops were at last in position outside Stanley. For two days the British fleet pounded the Argentine forces on the high ground to the west of the capital. Then, on the morning of 11 June, Moore’s commanders briefed their men for the coming battle. The plan was for 3 Para, 42 Commando and 45 Commando to move overnight against the Argentine positions on Mount Longdon, Mount Harriet and Two Sisters, and press on to the next ridges when they had secured their objectives. ‘I know that none of us expects a walkover,’ read Moore’s final message to his troops. ‘There will be hard fighting but the reputations of all units in this formation are that they fight hard and they win … May God go with you.’66

  Moore’s men went into battle late on the evening of 11 June. As with all night fighting, it was an experience of utter chaos and horror. The close-quarters combat was often exceptionally savage, as paratroopers and Marines fought their way from trench to trench with bayonets and grenades. Later, Vincent Bramley, who was in the thick of the action, remembered his uncontrollable nerves, his shaking knees and churning stomach, the ‘deadly silence’ as he and his mates climbed into position, the ‘anguished moaning and crying’ of the wounded in the darkness, the shock and terror as the shells rained down. He remembered the sight of shaking, sobbing Argentine prisoners; a dying man moaning in Spanish for his mother; a wounded Argentine who burst into tears when Bramley lowered his rifle and tried to help him; a fellow Para who lay dead in a broken heap, clutching a teddy bear given him by his sister before they left England. ‘What a fucking game this is,’ one of his mates said, as he tucked the bear into their fallen comrade’s smock.

  By now Bramley knew there was ‘no glory in killing’. ‘I’ve done all the training possible for this,’ an army medic muttered grimly, ‘and it still hasn’t been what I thought.’ Like the SAS and the Marines, the Paras had always seen themselves as harder than other soldiers, let alone the general public. Yet nothing had prepared them for the sight of a man literally cradling his intestines in his lap, a man with one leg hanging by a thread. Nor had anything prepared them for the shock as their friends fell dead beside them. Like all young men, they had thought themselves invincible. ‘Only yesterday we had been celebrating Tim’s 19th birthday and mine the week before,’ one paratrooper reflected, ‘and I thought, “What the fuck am I doing here? Tim’s dead, I’m 8,000 miles from home, I’m being shot at and my mate is lying dead next to me.”’67

  Afterwards, when veterans published their accounts of the war, many readers were shocked by their casual brutality. Ken Lukowiak remembered an incident when, faced with a horrifically injured prisoner whose brains were literally falling out of his head, a sergeant told the others to stand back and fired a machine-gun burst into the Argentine’s body. Bramley told a similar story about another sergeant shooting an injured Argentine, on the grounds that he might be rigged to a booby trap. He claimed that a paratrooper had bayoneted a wounded prisoner with the words ‘Shut up, shut up, you cunt!’ and that other paratroopers had shot their captives and thrown them over a cliff. Both writers confirmed that paratroopers had taken souvenirs from their dead opponents. One of Bramley’s comrades picked up a skull with the brain still inside (‘This is the ultimate souvenir. My missus will love this’), while others were reported to have cut off their dead adversaries’ ears. At Goose Green, Lukowiak saw men posing for ‘happy snaps’ beside the Argentines they had killed. One man heaved up a dead Argentine, put a cigarette in his mouth and pretended to light it, while a friend snapped away on his camera. ‘They both laughed,’ Lukowiak wrote. ‘I also laughed.’68

  When these stories came out in the early 1990s, some critics insisted that they must have been grossly exaggerated. Yet none of the paratroopers’ recollections would have been remotely surprising to men who had served in Malaya, Korea or the two world wars. Indeed, the fact that readers were so shocked speaks volumes about their ignorance of the realities of war, from which most people were now completely insulated. ‘If young men are sent 8,000 miles from their homes, to fight a war in a place that none of them had ever heard of, then such things should be expected,’ wrote Lukowiak. ‘Their bravado was just a cover for their fear.’ And as the historian Helen Parr points out, the surprising thing is not how many reports of atrocities there were, but how few. The most obvious fact about the Falklands War is that, by the sadistic standards of most twentieth-century conflicts, it was unusually clean – perhaps because it was so short, and because civilians were barely involved at all.69

  By midday on the 12th, all three objectives had been secured. The British had lost twenty-three men on Longdon, eight on Two Sisters and another seven on Mount Harriet, the Argentines having fought more valiantly than is often remembered. The battle had also seen the last British naval losses of the war. While bombarding Argentine positions on Mount Harriet, HMS Glamorgan had been hit by an Exocet with the loss of thirteen lives, among them the young David Tinker. In Number 10, Mrs Thatcher, distraught that Britain was losing its ‘bravest and best’, found the news ‘unjust and heartbreaking’. But there was little doubt now that the end was near.70

  After a day’s rest while reinforcements from 5 Infantry Brigade moved into position, General Moore renewed the attack. This time the targets were the next two Argentine positions, on Mount Tumbledown and Wireless Ridge. Once again the conditions were dreadful; once again, though, British casualties were relatively light. Using ‘rifles, bayonets, shovels and whatever came to hand’, the Scots Guards fought their way through a driving blizzard to the summit of Tumbledown for the loss of nine lives, while 2 Para lost only three men in capturing Wireless Ridge. By first light, the Argentine survivors, exhausted, bedraggled and panic-stricken, were streaming back into Stanley, ‘like men resurrected from their graves’. Defeat was inevitable, and they knew it.71

  It was the morning of Monday 14 June, a damp, grey day. On Wireless Ridge, Max Hastings passed the abandoned Argentine positions, littered with weapons, ammunition and clothing, and sat down to type his latest despatch for the Evening Standard. Of all the reporters embedded in the Task Force, none had identified more closely with Britain’s fighting men, or been more committed to the cause of retaking the islands. Now Hastings paid a handsome tribute to the paratroopers celebrating their latest victory. ‘Their morale is sky-high,’ he wrote. ‘Their certainty that they have won and that the enemy is collapsing is absolute. They are very cold, very dirty, but in their mood this morning, they could march to London.’ A moment later, he heard shouting: ‘They’re running away! It’s on the radio! The Argies are running everywhere! Victory!’

  Hastings hitched a lift on a Scimitar tank to the lip of the ridge, and looked down on to a narrow concrete road leading towards Stanley, its ‘little houses and churches’ laid out like a children’s train set. It looked, he thought, like a ‘prize lying open for the taking’. And as the men around him discussed the next advance, an idea took shape. ‘There was a chance, just a chance,’ he tho
ught, ‘that we could be first into Stanley. It would be the greatest scoop of my professional life.’ They moved on. At the little racecourse, on the outskirts of the town, the exhausted paratroopers halted and began to brew up. Hastings wandered down to the road. One paratrooper asked what he was doing, but he kept walking. The road bent around to the right, and suddenly he realized he was passing Government House. He raised his hands in the air, one clutching a white handkerchief, and kept going. By the cathedral he saw a group of Argentine soldiers. ‘Good morning!’ he said cheerfully. They said nothing. Eventually he ran into an Argentine colonel, who proved remarkably cordial. ‘Will you surrender East and West Falkland?’ Hastings asked, hardly believing his luck. ‘I think so,’ the colonel said, ‘but it is best to wait until your general meets General Menéndez.’ Hastings asked if it was all right for him to talk to the islanders. ‘Of course,’ the colonel said.

  Hastings walked on. He passed lines of Argentine soldiers, ‘cowed, drained of hostility’. Some officers peered suspiciously at him from their vehicles, but they said nothing. Then, at last, he saw what he was looking for: the Upland Goose, where ten weeks earlier, in another age, Simon Winchester had eaten cake and watched the rain. Now Hastings went inside, and found some twenty people in the bar. ‘I’m from the task force,’ he said, and they burst into applause. ‘We never doubted for a moment that the British would come,’ the landlord said. ‘We have just been waiting for the moment. Would you like a drink?’72

  34

  We Are Ourselves Again

  A change has come about in Britain … The people of this nation have discovered that they have a self, which the older among them supposed had been lost forever, and the young, who never knew it, have nevertheless recognized for theirs.

  Enoch Powell, The Times, 14 May 1982

  Mrs Thatcher makes great play with her feelings for the SAS whose motto is ‘Who dares wins.’

  In the Falklands crisis she dared. And won.

  Terence Lancaster, Daily Mirror, 16 June 1982

  It was nine o’clock in the evening when Margaret Thatcher got the call. On a scrap of notepaper she scribbled the time and date, and then a few sketchy but momentous words. ‘From Northwood – Gen. Moore pressed forward – Enemy retreated … White flags flying over Stanley.’ Then she went over to the Commons, where rumours were spreading fast. In the lobbies, wrote Alan Clark, ‘I found the whole House, policemen, badge messengers, etc., everybody bubbling with excitement.’ Clark squeezed through into the chamber, which was already heaving with anticipation. Just after ten, Mrs Thatcher made her way in, ‘radiant, and there was cheering, bellowing indeed’. At 10.14, she got to her feet:

  On a point of order, Mr Speaker. May I give the House the latest information about the battle of the Falklands? After successful attacks last night, General Moore decided to press forward. The Argentines retreated. Our forces reached the outskirts of Port Stanley. Large numbers of Argentine soldiers threw down their weapons. They are reported to be flying white flags over Port Stanley. Our troops have been ordered not to fire except in self-defence. Talks are now in progress between General Menéndez and our Deputy Commander, Brigadier Waters, about the surrender of the Argentine forces on East and West Falkland. I shall report further to the House tomorrow.

  At first she seemed extraordinarily calm. Only right at the end did she relax, and allow herself a broad smile of relief. And at the words ‘East and West Falkland’ a great roar of triumph rolled across the House.

  When she sat down, the cheers were deafening. Then Michael Foot, so influential in setting the tone at the beginning of the war, rose to speak. There would, he said:

  be widespread, genuine rejoicing – to use the word that the right hon. Lady once used – at the prospect of the end of the bloodshed. If the news is confirmed, as I trust it will be, there will be great congratulations from the House tomorrow to the British forces who have conducted themselves in such a manner and, if I may say so, to the right hon. Lady.

  In the future, Foot said, there would be time to debate the ‘origins of this matter … but I can well understand the anxieties and pressures that must have been upon the right hon. Lady during these weeks. I can understand that at this moment those pressures and anxieties may have been relieved, and I congratulate her on that.’ It was a generous thing to say; when he had finished, more cheers of approval echoed across the chamber.1

  As Mrs Thatcher made her way out, Clark rushed to intercept her. ‘Prime Minister, only you could have done this,’ he exclaimed: ‘you did it alone, and your place in history is assured.’ But she looked a ‘little startled. Had she heard properly? She was still a little bemused by the triumph.’ Perhaps the emotion was now beginning to sink in; for all her composure, this must have been an intensely heady moment. In her Commons office, packed with well-wishers, Willie Whitelaw proposed a toast. ‘I don’t think anybody else but you could have done it,’ he said. At that, one observer remembered, ‘she wept, out of sheer relief’, before the ever-reliable Denis put his arm around her. ‘Well done,’ he said. ‘Have a drink.’2

  When the Prime Minister got back to Number 10, it was just after midnight. As on that memorable afternoon three years earlier, when she had first walked into Number 10, the cameras were waiting. Once again she was wearing blue; once again she was flanked by policemen. Then she had been the earnest reformer; now she was the conquering heroine. ‘Just wonderful news,’ she said, clearly still elated, ‘and it’s Great Britain. Marvellous forces, every single one of them. It’s just been – it’s just been everyone together, and that’s what matters. We knew what we had to do, and we went about it.’ Then she gestured to the crowd, who were singing ‘Rule, Britannia’: ‘Listen to everyone. I must go down and talk to them.’

  Afterwards, in her private memoir, she remembered the moment:

  Downing Street was full of people, young people. It was their generation who had done it. Today’s heroes. Britain still breeds them.

  As I went to sleep very late that night I felt an enormous burden had been lifted from my shoulders and future worries would be small compared with those of life or death which had been with us constantly for eleven weeks. It was a miracle wrought by ordinary men and women with extraordinary qualities. Forever bold, forever brave, forever remembered.

  But as she well knew, victory had come at a cost. Two days later, she wrote a letter to Ray Stuart, a Tewkesbury man whose son Matthew had been killed on HMS Argonaut on his eighteenth birthday. The first lines were typewritten: ‘Thank you for writing to me about your son Matthew. Since you wrote, of course, we have had the news of the victory of our forces … Nothing that I say can diminish your loss; you can, however, take pride that Matthew died that others may live in freedom and justice.’ But then, in her own hand, she added a postscript:

  I have had telegrams and letters from all over the world showing great respect, admiration and thankfulness for Britain’s stand in this matter. King Hussein said, ‘The British Forces acquitted themselves brilliantly on the field with determination, courage and skill. The souls of martyrs never die. It is only by upholding lofty principles that human dignity and rights may be upheld and a brighter tomorrow may be born.’

  He was speaking of young men like Matthew.3

  *

  By the time the Cabinet met on the morning of the 15th, Major-General Moore’s message confirming Menéndez’s surrender had reached London. His final lines were a model of patriotic understatement: ‘The Falklands Islands are once more under the government desired by their inhabitants. God save the Queen.’ In the Cabinet Room, Lord Hailsham congratulated Mrs Thatcher on her ‘courage and leadership’, which had added ‘new lustre to our arms and the spirit of our people’. Then she went back across to the Commons, where the congratulations continued to flow. For the watching Frank Johnson, ‘her triumph was total: the most complete a British Prime Minister has achieved in a generation’ – and she knew it.

  Amid the derision and disbelie
f of Britain’s sophisticated classes, she had vowed to the world all those weeks ago that she would free those islands. And now she had. As she sat there, much of the House must have pondered in relief, exultation or dismay: the old girl had actually done it. Meanwhile, she leafed through her notes, perhaps trying to give the impression that she regarded this as just another working day, from time to time smiling sweetly about her. But she knew that life and politics being what they are, she will never again have a day such as this.

  One tribute meant more than any other. Back on 3 April, Enoch Powell had warned that the Commons would soon learn of what metal she was made. Now he announced that he had obtained a copy of a report ‘from the public analyst … It shows that the substance under test consisted of ferrous matter of the highest quality, that it is of exceptional tensile strength, is highly resistant to wear and tear and to stress, and may be used with advantage for all national purposes.’ Some observers groaned. But Mrs Thatcher loved it. Later, Ian Gow persuaded Powell to sign the transcript of his speech, which he had framed and gave her as a Christmas present.4

  In the next few days, as furious crowds streamed into the streets of Buenos Aires and a humiliated General Galtieri announced his resignation, messages poured in from friends abroad. The Prime Ministers of Australia and New Zealand were quick to offer their congratulations, while President Reagan wrote to commend ‘a brilliant military feat and a defense of our shared principle that disputes are not to be resolved by aggression’. The ‘minimum loss of life and the generous terms of withdrawal’, he added, ‘were also in the finest British tradition’. An especially gushing letter came from the Canadian premier Pierre Trudeau, not previously a great fan, who had high praise for Mrs Thatcher’s ‘strength and integrity’ as well as the ‘measured and brilliant’ British forces. The Prime Minister of newly independent Belize thanked her on behalf of the ‘little people of the world’, while Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew thought the war proved ‘there is still that divine spark in the British people’. The most memorable message, though, came from El Salvador’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, then embroiled in one of the world’s most savage civil wars.