The Iron Lady

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by John Campbell


  She made a point of writing personally to the families of all the men who died. She later claimed, without irony, that her own anxiety when Mark was lost in the Sahara earlier that year gave her an insight into what the Falkland mothers were going through. (‘I was lucky,’ she told Miriam Stoppard in 1985. ‘They weren’t.’)13 The old hands around her – not least Denis, who had served in Italy in 1943 – 5 – all had to console her at times with the reminder that casualties were inevitable. Once the casualties started, however, they only made her more determined to finish the job.

  Her sex was really beside the point. What made Mrs Thatcher a successful war leader – apart from the quality of the forces under her command and a large slice of luck – was the clarity of her purpose. She had an unblinking single-mindedness about achieving her objective and an extraordinary simple faith that because her cause was right it would prevail. In war, as in economics, it was this moralistic certainty, not her gender, which set her apart from her male colleagues, enabling her to grasp risks they would have baulked at. In the messy trade-offs of domestic politics, her clear-cut sense of righteousness was a mixed attribute – a source of strength up to a point, but also a weakness which narrowed her capacity for human sympathy. In war it was pure strength. It was the job of her colleagues in the War Cabinet to weigh the risks, and specifically the job of Pym as Foreign Secretary to pursue every diplomatic possibility of averting war – if only to keep world opinion on Britain’s side. As it happened, she was right to see from an early stage that there was no genuine compromise available. She recognised that General Galtieri could no more back down without winning the sovereignty of las Malvinas than she could accept their continued occupation. So she was vindicated in her determination that there was no alternative to war.

  Yet the fact remains that even she, with all her determination, still could not have retaken the islands if the Chiefs of Staff had not advised her that it was militarily possible, or if they had judged the risk too great. Theirs was the real responsibility. Mrs Thatcher’s role was to make and sustain the political judgement that if the military said it could be done, then it should be done. By the force of her own conviction she won and kept the backing of her Cabinet for her unswerving line. It is this judgement that colleagues doubted that any other modern Prime Minister, or potential alternative Prime Minister in 1982, would have made. In the event, she won her war and liberated the islands, with relatively little loss of life; and the victory was judged to have been worth the cost. Nevertheless the cost was high – 255 British lives; six ships sunk and others damaged; the huge cost of defending the islands for an indefinite future – and it could very easily have been much higher. The risk was never properly calculated in advance, and the Argentines should have inflicted much heavier damage than they did. It was in fact a very close-run thing. All the elements of the task force were operating at the extreme limits of their capacity, with virtually no margin for error; some units outside Stanley were down to their last six rounds of ammunition when the Argentine surrender came.14 The peacemakers were right to explore every possibility of averting Mrs Thatcher’s appalling gamble.

  The diplomacy of war

  As the task force steamed slowly south during April and early May, Mrs Thatcher’s position was very delicate, since she had to be seen to be willing to accept a reasonable settlement, if one could be negotiated, even though she was personally determined to agree to nothing less than the full recovery of British sovereignty over the islands. She recognised that she must keep the diplomatic option open in order to retain world and above all American opinion on Britain’s side – though she had difficulty understanding how the Americans could fail to support their most faithful ally against what seemed to her a clear-cut case of unprovoked aggression. In fact, the first instinct of the Reagan administration, which had taken office in Washington at the beginning of 1981, was to remain neutral. There was a strong lobby, most powerfully represented by the outspoken Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, which considered the preservation of good relations with Latin America more important than pandering to British imperial nostalgia. President Reagan himself, bemused by the importance Mrs Thatcher attached to what he called ‘that little ice-cold bunch of land down there’, stated on 6 April that America was friends with both Britain and Argentina.15 It was on this basis, to Mrs Thatcher’s fury, that Secretary of State Alexander Haig set out to try to broker an even-handed settlement.

  It was not, as is often assumed, Mrs Thatcher’s special relationship with Ronald Reagan which swung American sentiment in Britain’s favour over the next few weeks, but a brilliant exercise in old-fashioned diplomacy by two paladins of the despised Foreign Office – Sir Anthony Parsons, Britain’s Ambassador to the United Nations in New York, and Sir Nicholas Henderson, the British Ambassador in Washington. In addition, and crucially, the US Defense Secretary, Caspar Weinberger, accorded Britain on his own initiative vital military cooperation – the use of the US base on Ascension Island, with unlimited fuel and spares, accelerated purchase of Sidewinder missiles and access to American intelligence – long before the White House had officially come off the fence, and despite the fact that the US military viewed the attempt to retake the islands as ‘a futile and impossible effort’ which could not succeed.16 For this help beyond the call of duty Weinberger was awarded an honorary knighthood after the war.

  Anthony Parsons pulled off an extraordinary coup, just one day after the invasion, by persuading the UN Security Council to pass a resolution (Resolution 502) condemning the Argentine action and calling for the withdrawal of the occupying troops pending a diplomatic solution. To obtain the necessary two-thirds majority – discounting the Communist and Latin nations – he had to twist the arms of Togo, Zaire, Uganda, Guyana and Jordan. He managed the first four, before calling in Mrs Thatcher to make a personal appeal by telephone to King Hussein. She succeeded. The Argentines had never imagined that Britain could mobilise the UN in support of an imperialist quarrel. As in Rhodesia, Mrs Thatcher would much rather have done without the involvement of the UN. But in the eyes of the world, Resolution 502 gave priceless legitimacy to Britain’s claim to be standing up for freedom, self-determination and international law. Over the next few days Nico Henderson toured the television studios of Washington projecting Britain’s cause to the American public. Most crucially, the French froze the export of Exocet missiles and spare parts for those they already had. Mrs Thatcher was always grateful for President Mitterrand’s prompt and unconditional support. Within a week of the invasion Galtieri and his junta – who had expected no more than token protests – found not only Britain in arms but most of the world arrayed against them.

  This gratifying approval, however, was accorded on the assumption that Britain remained ready to negotiate. The six-week hiatus before the task force reached the South Atlantic allowed ample time for a peaceful settlement to be found as Al Haig shuttled back and forth between London and Buenos Aires. Even after hostilities had started, Reagan never ceased to beg her to accept a ceasefire. In fact Mrs Thatcher played an extraordinary lone hand against the entire foreign-policy establishment of both Britain and America to ensure that all their well-intentioned peace-mongering should not forestall the military victory which she was convinced was the only outcome Britain could accept. But she recognised that she would forfeit international support if she appeared inflexible.

  Haig’s initial proposals provided for Argentine withdrawal from the islands followed by an interim joint administration while a permanent settlement was negotiated. Over the next two months numerous variations were spun on these three central ideas.Through all the comings and goings, however, Mrs Thatcher remained adamant on two points: first, that the occupying force must withdraw before anything else could be considered and second, that the wishes of the islanders in any eventual settlement must be ‘paramount’. But Galtieri and his colleagues were equally adamant that the islands were Argentine and they would not let go what they
had seized without a guarantee of eventual sovereignty. Between these two sticking points there was no compromise. But thanks to Parsons’ diplomatic coup Mrs Thatcher had UN authority for her position. Resolution 502 not only called for Argentine withdrawal and guaranteed the right of self-determination; Article 51 of the UN Charter asserted the right of self-defence against aggression. So long as she showed a willingness to compromise on hypothetical details the Charter endorsed her essential demands.

  At first she did not have too much difficulty holding her line. On 23 April, to her disgust, Pym bowed to intense American pressure and was persuaded to recommend a package which she described as ‘conditional surrender’.17‘I could not have stayed as Prime Minister had the War Cabinet accepted Francis Pym’s proposals,’ she wrote in her memoirs. ‘I would have resigned.’18 She averted that necessity, as she often did before crucial Cabinets, by squaring Willie Whitelaw in advance. As usual he did not let her down. Rather than send Pym back to Haig with a flat rejection, however, Nott proposed that they ask him to put his package to the Argentines first, in the expectation that they would reject it – as they duly did. ‘It was the Argentine invasion which started this crisis,’ she told the Commons, ‘and it is Argentine withdrawal that must put an end to it.’19 That was relatively easy. Next day came news of the recapture of South Georgia, and a few days later the US Government formally came out on Britain’s side, promising material and intelligence support. ‘We now have the total support of the United States,’ Mrs Thatcher announced, ‘which we would expect and which I think we always expected to have.’20

  The next time round the track was much more difficult. On 2 May the British submarine Conqueror sank the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano, with the loss of 368 lives; next day, in retaliation, the Argentine air force sank the destroyer Sheffield, killing twenty-one of her crew. Suddenly war was a reality, and international pressure on Britain to refrain from escalating the conflict grew more urgent.

  The question of why the War Cabinet agreed to sink the Belgrano has generated more controversy than any other aspect of the Falklands war. Britain had declared (on 12 April) a maritime exclusion zone of 200 miles around the islands, inside which it warned that any Argentine ship was liable to be sunk. But the Belgrano was outside the zone on 2 May and – it later transpired – steaming away from the islands. To attack her in these circumstances appeared to be an act of unprovoked escalation – even a war crime. In fact there were good military reasons for doing so. The Argentine fleet was at sea, with orders to attack British ships: the previous day it had launched, but aborted, an Exocet attack. The direction in which the Belgrano, with her two accompanying Exocet-armed destroyers, was temporarily headed was, in Lewin’s view, ‘entirely immaterial’. 21 The commander of the task force, Admiral ‘Sandy’ Woodward, suspected that she was engaged in ‘a classic pincer movement’ and requested permission to sink her.22 Lewin backed his request, and the War Cabinet had little hesitation in agreeing. By 2 May the original exclusion zone had been superseded; the Argentines had been warned that from 26 April any ship operating in the area of the task force would be liable to attack. The Belgrano, Mrs Thatcher told the Commons next day, ‘posed a very obvious threat to the men in our task force. Had we left it any later it would have been too late and I might have had to come to the House with the news that some of our ships had been sunk.’23 She has always subsequently maintained that the decision was taken for strictly military reasons to counter ‘a clear military threat which we could not responsibly ignore’.24 Moreover even critics have had to admit that the action was justified by its result, since the Argentine navy never ventured out of port again for the duration of the conflict.25

  The allegation that the Belgrano was sunk deliberately to scupper a peace plan proposed by the President of Peru does not stand up. On the contrary, the loss of the Belgrano and the Sheffield did more than anything else to get President Bellaunde’s initiative off the ground. Now that both sides had shown the other what they could do, there was growing demand both at home and abroad for a ceasefire before further carnage was unleashed. On 5 May Mrs Thatcher felt obliged to seek the support of the full Cabinet. This time she did not get it. Bellaunde’s scheme was essentially the same as Haig’s – ‘Haig in a poncho’; it was still clear that the Argentines were prepared to discuss interim administrations only on the understanding that sovereignty would eventually be theirs. But as the Prime Minister went round the table only Michael Heseltine and Quintin Hailsham held to the uncompromising line.26 The next day Mrs Thatcher was obliged to announce that ‘we have made a very constructive response’ to the Peruvian proposals.

  Once again she was relying on the Argentines rejecting half a cake; and once again Galtieri did not let her down. Nevertheless this was the first time since 2 April that Mrs Thatcher had let herself be committed to accept a compromise settlement, with some form of condominium or UN trusteeship replacing simple British sovereignty. The full Cabinet discussed a range of different options in exhaustive detail; she could no longer get her way by threatening resignation.27 This was the moment when the junta could have achieved a share in the government of the islands, had they had the sense to grasp it. A word from Foreign Minister Costa Mendes to the UN Secretary-General in New York that evening, and Britain could not have defied American and world opinion by pressing on.

  Instead the countdown now quickened. On 8 May the task force sailed south from Ascension Island. Nott and others had always felt that this was the critical point after which it would not be possible to recall it with the job half done.28 The same day the War Cabinet approved Woodward’s plan for an amphibious landing on the western side of East Falkland, at San Carlos Bay, to begin on 21 May. On 12 May the requisitioned passenger liner Queen Elizabeth II left Southampton carrying another 3,000 men of the 5th Infantry Brigade – Welsh Guards and Scots Guards – to reinforce the Marines and Parachute Regiment who would make the initial assault. In the Commons on 13 May Mrs Thatcher was visibly irritated by further talk of peace. ‘May I make it perfectly clear,’ she told a Tory questioner, ‘that we are working for a peaceful solution, not a peaceful sell-out.’29 Later she practically bit Reagan’s head off when the President rang to urge further negotiations: ‘He couldn’t get a word in edgeways,’ one of his aides recalled.30

  The following day, Sunday 16 May, she held an all-day meeting of the extended War Cabinet at Chequers to agree the form of words of Britain’s final negotiating stance – in effect an ultimatum. No one expected it to be accepted: Mrs Thatcher’s mind was fixed on the trial ahead. But Parsons and Henderson were still concerned to frame as conciliatory a text as possible to demonstrate Britain’s willingness to go to the limit of concessions to avert war. In response the Prime Minister harried them relentlessly with high-principled talk of democracy, aggression, self-determination and the Americans’ moral obligation to take Britain’s side, insisting on clarity where they favoured diplomatic fudge.

  In the Commons three days later she explicitly cleared the decks for war. Blaming the Argentines’ ‘obduracy and delay, deception and bad faith’ for thwarting every effort over the past six weeks to negotiate a peaceful settlement, she announced with ill-concealed relief that the effort was over. While Britain had offered reasonable proposals, including acceptance of interim UN administration of the islands, following an Argentine withdrawal and pending long-term negotiations ‘without pre-judgement of the outcome’, Argentina had ‘sought merely to confuse and prolong the negotiations, while remaining in illegal possession of the islands. I believe that if we had a dozen more negotiations the tactics and results would be the same.’ Therefore, she announced, the British proposals were now withdrawn. ‘They are no longer on the table.’

  Difficult days lie ahead; but Britain will face them in the conviction that our cause is just and in the knowledge that we have been doing everything reasonable to secure a negotiated settlement… Britain has a responsibility towards the islanders to restore their democr
atic way of life. She has a duty towards the whole world to show that aggression will not succeed, and to uphold the cause of freedom.31

  Victory and after

  Once the order was given, four days later, to launch the counter-invasion, Mrs Thatcher had little further role to play: like everyone else she could only wait for news and trust the forces to deliver what Leach and Lewin had rashly promised seven weeks before. The risk of failure was still very real. The landing at San Carlos Bay without adequate air cover (the navy had no airborne early-warning system, and only forty Harriers against 160 Argentine planes) broke all the canons of warfare. American admirals later admitted that they would not have attempted it.32 Helped by bad weather, the assault force reached San Carlos Water undetected – the Argentines had expected a landing nearer to Port Stanley – beachheads were successfully secured and 4,000 men put ashore on 21 May. But in the crucial battle for air superiority over the next four days two frigates (Ardent and Antelope) and the destroyer Coventry were sunk, and several more ships damaged. The losses would have been worse if several Argentine bombs had not failed to explode; but they were bad enough to force Woodward to keep Hermes and Invincible at a greater distance than intended, which in turn reduced the combat capacity of the Harriers.

  Militarily most serious was the sinking on 25 May of the transport ship Atlantic Conveyor, with the loss of three of the task force’s four Chinook helicopters, with which it had been planned to lift the Marines and Paras across the island to Port Stanley. Now they had to ‘yomp’ the whole way on foot, carrying their heavy equipment. Fortunately – and inexplicably – the Argentines failed to bomb the beachheads before the troops were ready to move off. Fortunately the Harriers performed better than could have been predicted, inflicting heavier losses on the Argentine air force than its commanders in Buenos Aires (never very keen on Galtieri’s war) were prepared to accept. Fortunately, too, the Argentine submarines stayed in port; while their land forces, though they outnumbered the British by 2–1, turned out to be unwilling conscripts from the warmer climate of northern Argentina, physically and psychologically less suited to the bitter Falklands winter than the Arctic-trained British professionals. Once the Marines and the Paras had begun their advance on Stanley – by way of a diversion to Goose Green – there was little doubt that they would get there; but the casualties could have been much greater had the Argentines put up more determined resistance. As it was, the last big blow to the British forces was the sinking of the troopship Sir Galahad at Fitzroy on 8 June, with the loss of fifty-one Welsh Guardsmen. The inadequately protected landing at Fitzroy was one perilous operation that went tragically wrong, giving a chilling glimpse of what might easily have been; but it did not delay the final push towards Stanley. Six days later the tin-roofed settlement was surrounded and the Argentine commander surrendered without need for a final onslaught.

 

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