White Flags over Whitehall
How the fate of some windswept and underpopulated islands in the South Atlantic could end up causing a war that claimed a thousand lives was unfathomable to many who were not
caught up in its partisan passions. Giving his response to Britain’s torpedoing of the Argentine light cruiser
General Belgrano
, the West German minister Heinz Estphal expressed the
utter incredulity felt in Bonn. It was, he said, ‘inconceivable and incomprehensible’ that a fellow European country could have gone to war over such an issue ‘shortly before the
dawning of the new millennium’.
4
The novelist Jorge Luis Borges described the conflict as ‘two bald men fighting over a comb’. With
such disdainful impartiality, he stood detached from the long complaints of historical injustice volubly expressed by his Argentine compatriots, successive generations of whom were nurtured on the
belief that, by rights, the Falkland Islands were
Las Malvinas
, stolen in an act of British piracy. Ownership of the islands excited no comparable passion in the United Kingdom until Friday,
2 April 1982, when the news that they had been
forcibly seized generated a mixture of outrage and bewilderment – and, doubtless, for many a scramble to the atlas to
find out where they were located. The cartography showed that, besides smaller outcrops, they comprised two major islands, East and West Falkland, which together were about half the size of Wales.
There were one thousand eight hundred inhabitants, half of whom lived in the capital, Port Stanley, and the rest in small villages and scattered settlements spread out across a landscape that was
reminiscent of the west coast of Scotland (upon eventually visiting it, Thatcher’s husband, Denis, memorably summed it up as ‘miles and miles of bugger all’). A further insight
into the nature of these distant possessions was offered to those who looked up the design of the Falkland Islands’ flag, which featured the Union Jack and a thickly fleeced sheep.
That the islands were a British dependency was long established, albeit a reality legally untested in an international court of arbitration. It is impossible to guess what verdict a UN-backed
committee might have come to on the matter, since it would depend on whether it placed the most weight on the islands’ history, their geography, the cause of anti-colonialism or the rights of
self-determination. As with UN judgements generally, much would doubtless have hinged upon the national composition and ingrained prejudices of those nominated to the relevant committee. Without
such adjudication, British possession effectively amounted to nine tenths of the law, an injustice against which Argentina made two main claims. The first was that they legitimately owned
Las
Malvinas
before the British stole them, and the second was that the islands were considerably nearer (three hundred miles away) to Argentina than to the UK (eight thousand miles away).
The geographical fact of Argentina’s proximity was hardly a clinching argument. If it had been a guiding principle, it would have triggered any number of boundary revisions all over the
globe. Indeed, Argentina had been more than happy to dismiss the geographical proximity argument during its 1973 dispute with Uruguay over the island of Martín García. Historically,
it was unclear who, if anyone, truly owned the
Malvinas/
Falkland Islands prior to their becoming a British crown colony, with their own governor, executive and legislative councils, in 1845.
Whether the islands were first spotted in the sixteenth century by British or Spanish mariners was disputed, although it was the British who made the first recorded landing, in 1690. There having
been no indigenous population, the much-cited issue of colonialism was irrelevant, since uninhabited islands have to be colonized by someone if they are to be settled. The debate therefore
descended into an exchange of conflicting claims over who got there first, who got there in larger numbers, and who stayed for the longer period. At the same time as a British settlement was
established on West Falkland in 1766, a two-year-old French settlement on East Falkland was ceded to
Spain. By 1811, neither the British nor the Spanish remained on the
islands. Five years later, the nascent Argentina gained independence from Spain and in a giant land grab unilaterally laid claim to all of Spain’s South American possessions, including what
became Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Chile. When it was made clear that the new state’s ambitions also extended as far as the Falkland Islands, the British objected, and in 1833 two Royal
Navy vessels turned away an Argentine colonizing party and re-established the British settlement. Thereafter, during the succeeding 149 years, the islands were continuously British, with a
population of one thousand eight hundred establishing itself, 95 per cent of whom were originally of British stock and were equally determined to remain British.
5
The irony was that Britain’s Foreign Office did not want the Falkland Islands. Since 1966, diplomats had been trying to find ways round the islanders’ obstinate loyalty to their
mother country. Good relations with the right-wing Argentine military dictators were seen of being of greater long-term benefit. Britain’s trade and investment with the Falklands was a tiny
fraction of that with Argentina, leading Whitehall to argue that rapport with Buenos Aires should not be continually hampered by fewer than two thousand, not very economically productive, kelpers
and sheep-farmers. After all, what of the business interests of the seventeen thousand British citizens living and working in Argentina? While there was occasional talk that the Falklands might
eventually prove their worth if untested analyses of oil deposits in the area were to prove accurate, this was deemed a distant possibility. In so far as it influenced Whitehall’s thinking,
it was to make the argument for reaching an understanding with Argentina all the more pressing. After all, developing an oil industry in the South Atlantic would be especially difficult if it was
obstructed by the only nearby mainland country. With oil, as with everything else, the Falkland Islands were too remote for their inhabitants to have access to regular supplies and easy travel
arrangements if Argentina were to cut off all links. Seemingly, the most inexpensive way to prevent such isolation was to appease the despots in Buenos Aires.
Yet, modest though their revenue was, the Falklands were only a minor drain on British resources. In good years, they had even raised more than was spent on them. What was more, the islanders
had shown themselves almost embarrassingly grateful for the meagre benefits they got in return for their loyalty. During both world wars, they had pulled together their tiny savings to gift them to
Britain’s war effort. In the Battle of Britain alone, ten Spitfires were paid for by the kelpers of the South Atlantic. In particular, being British meant they did not have to be ruled either
by demagogue populists like the Perons or by the quasi-fascist military juntas that had, on and off, been misruling Argentine territory for over half a century. Fear of such a regime was wholly
explicable. Since instigating the ‘Dirty War’ in
1976, the junta’s death squads had murdered eleven thousand Argentine citizens – the euphemistically
named ‘disappeared’ – and were still engaged in murdering dissidents and insurgents when, in 1982, the regime added the Falkland islanders to its list of internal
opponents.
6
At the height of the most brutal period of repression, it took the former navy man James Callaghan to put his appeasing diplomats in their
place with the outburst: ‘I’m not handing over one thousand eight hundred Britons to a gang of f---ing fascists.’
7
This was the sentiment – if not the precise language – that most resonated with Margaret Thatcher. When advised that it would be courteous to send a friendly message to the new junta
of General Leopoldo Galtieri, which had seized power in Argentina in December 1981, she replied icily that she did not send messages ‘on the occasion of military
takeovers’.
8
Whitehall officials despaired of such an emotional attitude to problem-solving; in November 1980 the Foreign Office revived an idea
that had been mooted during the 1970s: Britain would cede sovereignty of the Falklands to Argentina in return for a fifty-year lease-back, which would give the islanders time either to acclimatize
to the change or to depart (the latter, incidentally, was easier said than done, because the British Nationality Act 1981 had failed to grant them automatic residency rights in the mother country).
Reluctant to be seen to contradict her minister’s scheme directly, Thatcher was more than content to let back-bench Tory MPs join with opposition politicians to scupper the lease-back
initiative in Parliament. Yet the Foreign Office’s inability to secure its preferred measure of appeasement was followed by the failure of the Treasury and the Ministry of Defence to
recognize the need to preserve a military commitment in the South Atlantic. The result was a policy of calamitous folly – curtailing Buenos Aires’s expectations of a diplomatic
settlement while all but stripping the Falkland Islands of their defences. For such was the inescapable conclusion to be drawn from the cuts announced in June 1981 by the defence secretary, John
Nott. The Royal Navy was to bear the brunt, reduced from a worldwide role to become little more than a home waters force on anti-submarine patrol. The Chatham dockyards would close and the number
of surface ships was to be slashed. Among the vessels to be axed were the aircraft carriers HMS
Hermes
and HMS
Illustrious
, the assault ship HMS
Fearless
– all three of
which were to prove essential prerequisites for retaking the Falklands – six destroyers and HMS
Endurance
, which was the sole South Atlantic patrol ship. By itself, the lightly armed
Endurance
could hardly have held up an entire invasion fleet, but it was a useful spy ship and, even more importantly, a symbol of Britain’s determination to defend its outpost.
Announcing that it was to be scrapped was tantamount to signalling that Britain had lost the will to protect the Falklands.
The news of these defence cuts did not come as a great surprise in Buenos
Aires. Among the principal advocates and planners of a Falklands invasion force was Admiral Jorge
Anaya, who derided the British as
maricones
,
EN16
a judgement formed while he was naval attaché in London in the mid-1970s. In 1977,
Argentina had illegally set up a hut manned by twenty – presumably very cold – personnel on South Thule, the most easterly (and otherwise uninhabited) of the Falkland Islands
dependencies. Not only did Britain take no measures to eject them, the then Foreign Secretary, Anthony Crosland, even begged Buenos Aires not to make their presence public.
9
While the Callaghan government did meet the escalating tension by directing a nuclear-powered submarine towards the Falklands, the Argentine junta may not have been aware
of the manoeuvre at the time.
10
At any rate, there was no reason to assume this show of willpower would set a precedent: to Latin American eyes, the
new Conservative administration seemed to contain at least as many
maricones
as its Labour predecessor.
Where Britain’s economic problems brought retrenchment, Argentina’s difficulties encouraged assertiveness. With national bankruptcy looming and an inflation rate heading past 130 per
cent, the government in Buenos Aires decided what the country needed was the heady distraction of an easy victory. Almost immediately after assuming power, the new junta of General Galtieri,
Admiral Anaya and the air force chief, General Lami Dozo, began planning to invade the Falkland Islands and their dependent island of South Georgia, eight hundred miles to the east. Of these
intentions, Britain was unaware. The militarist nature of the Argentine regime, the possibility that it might strike before the 150th anniversary of the Falklands becoming a British colony, which
would fall in 1983, and the increasingly hostile rhetoric emanating from Buenos Aires were sufficient for Thatcher to minute ‘we must make contingency plans’ on 5 March
1982,
11
but scarcely represented grounds to divert a significant Royal Navy detachment, which might, in any case, succeed only in exacerbating
tension. Reasons to be apprehensive nevertheless continued to mount. During March, more Argentine planes than usual infringed the Falklands’ airspace. Another disturbing, but by no means
definitive, sign of trouble came on 20 March, when members of the British Atlantic Survey on South Georgia reported that fifty Argentine scrap-metal contractors, some in paramilitary uniforms, had
landed and hoisted their national flag at the old whaling station of Leith. The intruders were not the scrap-metal contractors they claimed to be but the vanguard of a detachment of Argentine
marines. What London did not know was whether they represented the first wave of a full-scale invasion or were merely a token gesture, comparable to the 1977 landing on South Thule. It was only
clear that their presence could not be hushed up – South Georgia was a 110-mile-long
island, not an insignificant dot on the map like South Thule. Either Britain did
nothing and effectively showed itself to be content to let intruders take over South Georgia, or an international incident would have to be risked by removing them – if necessary, by
force.
The Foreign Office concluded it had no option but to lodge a formal protest and demand that the ‘scrap-metal’ party leave the island. As a back-up,
Endurance
was ordered to
South Georgia with a detachment of Royal Marines on board to assist the intruders’ departure. This belated display of martial spirit was to prove one of the most providential decisions of the
whole crisis, for it brought matters swiftly to a head, with unexpected consequences. The junta was planning to invade the Falkland Islands in late May (when the onset of the South Atlantic winter
would have made it impossible for a British relief force to assemble around the islands for at least six months). It was the sudden crisis over South Georgia that provided the pretext for the junta
to act and to do so without further delay. Thus, on 26 March, the junta of Galtieri, Anaya and Lami Dozo brought forward their plans and took the decision to launch the invasion of the Falklands on
2 April. They assumed that Britain possessed neither the will nor the means to get its islands back. And they would have been right about the means if only they had waited – just long enough
to meet their original May invasion schedule might have been sufficient; waiting until Nott’s defence cuts had been implemented would certainly have delivered victory to the junta. Instead,
impetuosity did for yet another dictatorship.