Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Dear Mrs Thatcher,

  You have succeeded where we failed. Since the despatch of the Task Force to the Falkland Islands, 266 Argentine military advisers have been withdrawn from Central America.

  Thank you.

  Yours in the democratic struggle,

  FDR – Revolutionary Democratic Front El Salvador

  For good measure, the message came with a bunch of flowers.5

  On Fleet Street all was ecstasy. ‘WHITE FLAGS OVER STANLEY!’ exulted the Mail. ‘WE’VE WON!’ roared the Sun. The front page of the Express showed a close-up of an imperious Mrs Thatcher framed within a colossal V for victory. ‘We have done what we set out to do,’ wrote George Gale, hailing ‘The Hour of Our Triumph’:

  We have brought about the restoration of British rule to the Falklands. That, above all, is what counts. We have defeated the Argentine invaders and despoilers of our territory … We have rejected the foreign body from our midst. Our flags now fly again from one end of the Falklands to the other. No Argentine flag flies, except the flag of surrender.

  Had Britain ‘done nothing’, he said, ‘we would have suffered a shameful defeat’. Thankfully, Mrs Thatcher had rejected the ‘pacifists, appeasers, wobblers and wets’. Yet this was not merely her victory. It was the people’s victory:

  We have seen in these weeks of crisis and battle a remarkable resurgence of patriotism. It has welled up from the nation’s depth. We have undergone a sea-change …

  For years patriotism was written off – in the years since Suez, in the swinging sixties, in the slumping seventies.

  Yet it must always have been there, for we have seen it flooding back.

  Our troops have fought to regain our land. They have battled to defend our people and to assert our interests. The country has become engaged. It has been locked into the struggle. The blood has quickened and thrilled.

  The British people, Gale said, had ‘almost lost track of our history, had almost given up the roots of our past. But now we have fought again for what is ours, and the blood is up, the heart is strong.’ Britain was reborn. Nothing was beyond it now.6

  While the Conservative papers gloried in ‘V-F Day’, Mrs Thatcher’s critics shook their heads in horror. For those still true to the spirit of the 1960s, the new national mood was almost too much to bear. ‘Not English I feel now,’ recorded the appalled Alan Bennett. ‘This is just where I happen to have been put down. No country. No party. No Church. No voice. And now they are singing “Britannia Rules the Waves” in Downing Street. It’s the Last Night of the Proms erected into a policy.’ ‘I have felt totally alienated from popular opinion’, Jenny Palmer told Mass Observation, ‘and so conscious of holding a minority view that in company I constantly hoped that the topic would not come up, especially with elderly relatives.’ The war, she wrote, ‘hasn’t solved anything and it isn’t over’. As for the jubilation in the media, she considered it ‘disgusting … I thanked God for the Guardian – there were other people who felt the same way as my husband and myself.’7

  Indeed there were. One Guardian reader, furious that the Argentine surrender had driven the unemployment figures off the front pages, wondered whether ‘the Falklands Islands or the British Isles has the more sheep’. The paper’s veteran columnist James Cameron maintained that the war had been a ‘military and political debacle’, conceived in the ‘folly and arrogance’ of an ‘obsessed’ Prime Minister. And some critics went even further. Addressing trade unionists in Dundee, the Scottish miners’ leader Mick McGahey insisted that Mrs Thatcher’s hands were ‘covered in the blood of young British and Argentine boys’, and accused Michael Foot of pandering to the ‘jingoism’ of the hour. Tony Benn, too, had harsh words for Foot, whose congratulations he thought ‘odious and excessive’. The press, Benn wrote, ‘has gone berserk – Union Jacks, “VF” day and the Queen smiling and Thatcher looking stern, and pictures of our troops and God knows what. I find it utterly distressing, but there you are … A bloody awful day.’8

  There was, of course, still work to be done. In the next few days the British troops herded 11,313 weary, crestfallen Argentine prisoners to the quays for the journey home. Meanwhile, Stanley was a hub of activity. There were more than a hundred minefields to be cleared, power and water supplies to be reconnected, bodies to be buried, buildings to be repaired. Although Mrs Thatcher’s boys were desperate to get home, most did not embark for weeks. But Rex Hunt wasted little time in returning to his post. After a ceremonial welcome in driving rain, he went straight to Government House, where he found that the Argentines (or perhaps the British?) had made off with all his wine. Still, his books had been left untouched, except for a volume of the Illustrated London News from the First World War, which Menéndez had apparently been reading for inspiration. The Argentine commander had also left behind his scented pink lip-balm and a pair of pyjamas. ‘As they were thicker and warmer than mine,’ Hunt recorded, ‘I had no compunction about wearing them.’9

  Was victory inevitable? On paper, the combatants had always been ludicrously ill matched. For all its travails, Britain was a vastly richer and better-governed country than Argentina, with a far more professional and better-equipped military. In the last forty years the British had fought Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, as well as the North Koreans, the Chinese and a host of guerrillas from Malaya to Aden. But despite their gold braid, the most senior Argentine officers had barely fired a shot in anger. They were very good at launching coups, wearing sunglasses and murdering dissidents, but they had no record of fighting wars, let alone winning them. In some cases their only experience of combat had been to apply electrodes to the genitals of left-wing poets. Most of their young conscripts, meanwhile, had never been outside Argentina and had no idea what they were supposed to be doing. Even before the British landing, many of them were desperate to pack up and go home.10

  But things could easily have been different. Many experts had thought the campaign hideously risky: in Admiral Woodward’s words, ‘we fought our way along a knife-edge’. For all their weaknesses, the Argentines had the advantages of numbers and geography. And even after the Task Force had arrived in the South Atlantic, fate might have dealt Britain a different hand. If more Argentine bombs had gone off, Woodward wrote, he could have lost another half a dozen ships, and ‘if they had hit either of our aircraft carriers, the British would have been finished’. In that case, the war would have gone down as the crowning debacle in Britain’s inexorable fall from grace. But the bombs did not go off. The carriers remained unscathed. The landings went to plan. There was more to it than luck, but as so often in Mrs Thatcher’s career, fortune was with her. As the Tory dissenter Julian Critchley remarked: ‘She who dares, wins.’11

  Victory did not, of course, come without a price. According to the official history of the campaign, the immediate cost was about £1 billion, while the cost of defending the Falklands over the next six years came to almost £4 billion. In purely economic terms, it would have been cheaper to abandon the islands and pay the residents £1 million each in compensation. But what preoccupied most people was the bloodshed. Some 253 British servicemen had been killed, while a further 775 were wounded.fn1 In relative terms, these numbers were minuscule. Far more British soldiers had died in Malaya or Cyprus than in the Falklands. But in a comfortable, peaceful, post-imperial age, when war felt utterly remote from the national experience, the death toll seemed profoundly shocking.

  To put it bluntly, young men’s lives were more precious in 1982 than they had been thirty or forty years earlier. For more pacific observers, to lose as many as 253 seemed monstrously disproportionate. It was no accident, then, that Mrs Thatcher allowed grieving families to bury their sons at home, rather than in battlefield graves, as in previous wars. Instead of being an inevitable part of a collective endeavour, each death was now seen as an individual family tragedy. For the tabloids, the prime example was 22-year-old Lance-Corporal Simon Cockton of Frimley, Surrey, who had literally kissed his teenage wif
e Lindsay goodbye at their wedding reception before leaving for the Falklands. He was killed by friendly fire when HMS Cardiff shot down a British helicopter over East Falkland. ‘Like the others who fought and died for his country,’ Lindsay told the papers, ‘the least we can do is to bring him home. I want him to be buried in St Peter’s Church where we were married.’12

  Few men returned from the South Atlantic without mental scars. Ken Lukowiak’s memories were dominated by the ‘young men who had their flesh ripped and punctured by flying metal, young men who screamed and died in agony, young men who prayed for mercy’. Vincent Bramley, whose battalion had lost almost two dozen men, had similarly little time for the tabloids’ triumphalism. ‘Gone were the days’, he wrote, ‘when I had thought of war as a game.’ For almost a year, the faces of his dying friends flashed before him as he slept, their agonies haunting his dreams. He felt restless, hemmed in, dissatisfied, bitter. ‘It all seemed so unreal,’ he explained:

  The odd thing was, I felt anger. Anger at everyone for doing their own thing. It was as if something in my head was urging me to shout at them as they walked along the streets, ‘Hey, you lot, licking your fucking ice creams, there’s a fucking lot of injured guys over there. Friends have been killed, but all you’re interested in is yourselves.’13

  When the historian Helen Parr, whose uncle Dave had been killed on Wireless Ridge, interviewed his former comrades, they talked of their unease at being described as conquering heroes, their alienation from friends and family, their feelings of emptiness, guilt, even shame. A study five years after the war suggested that almost one in four veterans had severe post-traumatic stress disorder, while a similar proportion showed other traumatic symptoms. Many had trouble sleeping and found it impossible to settle into civilian life. Reluctant to admit weakness, unable to open up about their grief and guilt, some turned to drink or drugs, to chasing women or to fighting in pubs. Later, the South Atlantic Medal Association, representing Falklands veterans, claimed that more men had taken their own lives than had died in the conflict. A Ministry of Defence survey in 2013, however, suggested that only ninety-five veterans had killed themselves since 1982, a lower suicide rate than among the civilian male population.14

  Still, there is no doubt that the war took a punishing psychological toll. When Panorama flew a group of former Welsh Guards back to the islands to mark the thirty-fifth anniversary of the conflict, many were still haunted by their experiences. ‘Not a single day that goes by when you don’t think about it, think about the boys, friends that we lost,’ said Mick Hermanis, who had been only 19 and survived the attack on the Sir Galahad. ‘As I grew older it started eating away at me,’ said Nigel O’Keeffe, who had been just 18 and struggled for years with alcoholism and depression. Another who turned to drink, Paul Bromwell, said his experiences had ‘marked me for the rest of my life … It’s a devil really, because you can’t see the injury, everyone thinks you’re all right but underneath you’re screaming.’15

  But it was another young Welsh Guardsman who became the public face of the Task Force. Born in Caerphilly and brought up on a council estate, Simon Weston had joined the army at the age of 16 after getting into trouble with the police. Horrifically wounded during the attack on the Galahad, he suffered 46 per cent burns, easily enough to have killed him. As his face and hands melted in the heat, he lost his eyelids, one of his ears, part of his nose and some of his fingers. In the first moments after the attack, he begged one of his mates to shoot him and end his misery. When a doctor saw him, he said bluntly: ‘God, you’re ugly.’ When Weston saw his own face, he said: ‘Oh, you’ve got a lot of work to do on that.’ On his way home, on the hospital ship Uganda, he got septicaemia, nearly lost his eyesight and became deeply depressed. When he was wheeled into the transit hospital at RAF Lyneham, his waiting mother said to his grandmother: ‘Oh Mam, look at that poor boy.’ Weston cried out: ‘Mam, it’s me!’ and at that, he remembered, ‘her face turned to stone’.16

  The doctors worked on Weston for years. He required more than seventy operations and multiple skin grafts, many of them on his face, which was now utterly unrecognizable. In public, he presented an image of unrelenting optimism. ‘He’s a great one for jokes,’ wrote Polly Toynbee after visiting him in October. ‘He has become a kind of walking mascot at the Queen Elizabeth Military Hospital in Woolwich. His cheeriness defies belief.’ To the public he was a hero, jolly and resilient, the embodiment of British valour. The newspapers adored him. It was ‘humbling’ to contemplate Weston’s ‘dignity and resilience’, said the Express. But it could ‘not publish a picture of Simon, because it would shock and horrify readers’.

  In reality, Weston was suffering from severe depression. ‘I was filled with self-loathing – drinking too much, waking up at night because I was still on fire, hearing the screams of people dying around me,’ he later told The Times. ‘The darkness inside was so bad, I could lose a whole weekend and not remember a thing. I was an incredibly sad, lonely person for a hell of a long time.’ At last, alone one day in his room, he decided to end it all. ‘I tried to top myself with a crossbow – cocked it and everything – but my damaged hands weren’t strong enough to pull the twine back on the bow and the damn thing nearly took my fingers off.’

  But his life turned around eventually. He got married, had three children and travelled the world as a motivational speaker. He befriended the Argentine pilot who had attacked the Galahad: a ‘very kind and compassionate man’, Weston said. Decades later, he remained one of the most admired men in the country. He still carried the mental scars, yet he never doubted that the cause had been just. ‘It was a must, this war,’ he told Polly Toynbee. ‘Lives were lost, and I’m sorry, but dictators must be stopped. No two ways about it. We can’t let dictators rule the world.’17

  To people who had always opposed the war, the suffering of men such as Simon Weston merely confirmed that they had been right. Some saw the war as ridiculous, pointless, an absurd aberration. The Buenos Aires Herald thought it a combination of ‘an Italian opera with a very British Ealing comedy’; the biographer John Campbell calls it a ‘Gilbert and Sullivan or Monty Python war’. The journalist Simon Winchester thought it a ‘terrible, ghastly and irresponsible mistake’ and a ‘blot upon our hopes for international respect’. The Argentine Nobel laureate Jorge Luis Borges remarked that the combatants looked like ‘two bald men fighting over a comb’, and suggested that the islands should be ‘given to Bolivia so that it has access to the sea’. And another great writer of the age, the children’s author Raymond Briggs, published a savagely grotesque satire, The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman (1984), which briefly topped the bestseller lists. Mrs Thatcher, ‘an old woman with lots of money and guns’, does not come out well. ‘When this Old Iron Woman heard that the Tin-Pot General had bagsied the sad little island,’ writes Briggs, ‘she flew into a rage. “IT’S MINE!” she screeched. “MINE! MINE! MINE! I bagsied it AGES ago. I bagsied it FIRST! DID! DID! DID!”’18

  For all Borges’s brilliance, his analogy completely missed the point. There were more than 1,800 people living on the Falkland Islands, some families having been there for generations. The vast majority were desperate to remain British; all of them were shocked and frightened by the Argentine invasion. This was their home: when critics blithely suggested that they should be bribed to move halfway across the world, they were naturally outraged. In his final pages, Briggs depicted the Falklands as a bomb-shattered, corpse-littered wasteland, while Winchester was sure the islanders would soon regret living in an ‘armed camp’. In reality, the islanders never wavered in their gratitude to Mrs Thatcher, and never faltered in their allegiance to the British flag. A survey on the fourth anniversary of the invasion found that more than 95 per cent of Falkland Islanders wanted to remain British. Only three people said they would accept Argentine sovereignty instead.19

  It is true, of course, that the Falklands were a long way from London, and that defending them was very
expensive. But given how long the islanders had been living there, it seems very odd to argue that they should have been denied the right of self-determination, or simply handed over to General Galtieri. When, in the autumn of 1982, Alan Clark visited the islands for the first time, he passed Port Stanley’s infants’ school, where ‘out tumbled a lot of jolly, fair-haired children in their anoraks, to be collected by their Mums’. It was, Clark thought, a ‘completely English scene. We could not possibly have abandoned these people and packaged them up in some diplomatic deal. This has been a real war of liberation … a battle fought in obedience to a blood tie.’ He was so moved that when he got back he scribbled a letter to the Chief Whip. ‘Seeing all those little fair-haired children in their anoraks’, he wrote, ‘brought home more effectively than anything else could have done what exactly we were fighting for, and how impossible it would have been to have abandoned them to a foreign power.’ Whatever Clark’s ideological peculiarities, on this issue millions of people would have agreed with him.20

  The great majority of the men who fought for the Falklands believed the campaign had been worth it. Vincent Bramley might have learned a shattering lesson in the horrors of war, but he was ‘fully behind the decision to send the task force’ and ‘wouldn’t hesitate to fight again for our country and its beliefs’. At the military hospital in Woolwich, many of the patients assured reporters that they still believed in the cause. ‘British soil had to be guarded and that’s what we were doing down there,’ said Denzil Connick, who had lost his left leg. ‘We had to go down there and do it, or this country would never have lived it down,’ agreed Mark Richards, who had suffered dreadful burns on the Galahad. ‘We’d have had people taking over Belize and Gibraltar next.’ And among the general public, the vast majority believed Mrs Thatcher had done the right thing. Victory had banished their misgivings: a poll for the Sunday Times after the Argentine surrender found that fully 81 per cent thought she had been right to fight for the Falklands.21