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 By 2 May the original exclusion zone had been superseded; the Argentines had been warned that from 26 April any ship operating in the area of the task force would be liable to attack.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 democratic 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
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
