Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (125 page)

During the night of 1 to 2 May, intercepts picked up Argentine naval plans. An intelligence summary was sent to the Task Force: ‘it is believed that a major Argentine attack is planned for 2 May.
BELGRANO
is deploying to a position 54.00S 060.00W to attack targets of opportunity S of the Falkland Islands.’
³⁰
The Task Force Commander, Rear Admiral John ‘Sandy’ Woodward, on board the carrier
Hermes
, was alarmed. He knew that an Argentine group led by Argentina’s only aircraft carrier, the
25 de Mayo
, was seeking to attack the British fleet, perhaps in a dawn strike, and he feared that the
Belgrano
, a cruiser, accompanied by destroyers carrying Exocet missiles, supplied by France, was leading a pincer movement to help effect this: ‘In exercises the previous year Woodward had shown that it was possible to get a destroyer close enough to a fully prepared American carrier to fire four Exocets. He did not want his own carrier to suffer
the same fate.’
³¹
It was a given of the conflict, accepted by all the main British players, that the loss of their two carriers before the assault – perhaps the loss of only one of them – would deprive the Task Force of the necessary air-cover, and so be fatal to the British cause.
³²
Nothing, therefore, was more important than to prevent such an attack. Following a War Cabinet decision made on 30 April, the Rules of Engagement had already been changed to allow the Task Force to attack the Argentine carrier even if it was outside the TEZ: the carrier could move 500 miles a day and her aircraft 500 more. Her escorts were carrying Exocets. The danger to the Task Force was considered such that the British were planning to attack the
25 de Mayo
as early as possible, under cover of Article 51 of the UN Charter, the article justifying self-defence. To date, however, the carrier had evaded detection. The
Belgrano
, on the other hand, was being successfully shadowed by the submarine
Conqueror
. The problem for Woodward was that the changes made to the ROE for the carrier did not apply to the
Belgrano
. While the cruiser stayed just outside the TEZ, she would remain safe from attack. Frustrated that he could do no more to thwart the impending Argentine pincer movement, Woodward purposely ignored the ROE and, early in the morning of Sunday 2 May, he ordered
Conqueror
to sink the
Belgrano
. Woodward had no authority to do this, and so, as he knew would happen, the order was rescinded at the Joint Headquarters at Northwood. But the effect of his action was to bring the issue immediately before the Chiefs of Staff. As Woodward wished, the Chiefs quickly agreed to ask the War Cabinet to extend the altered ROE to all Argentine ships, submarines and auxiliaries outside the TEZ.

Mrs Thatcher was at Chequers that morning. Lewin and Fieldhouse arrived to see her with this urgent request. The War Cabinet was not due to meet until the afternoon and so Mrs Thatcher quickly assembled all those members of it who had already arrived – including Whitelaw, Nott, Parkinson, Havers and Antony Acland (Francis Pym was in Washington), as well as the two admirals – in the small white drawing room.
*
Although this was ‘a very charged day’ because of the dangers that seemed to be accumulating,
³³
it was not one fraught with indecision or dispute. Clive Whitmore, who attended the key meeting, remembered a fairly brief discussion in which ‘the issues were presented in stark and simple terms.’
³⁴
Mrs Thatcher showed no desire to gainsay her admirals. She thought the intelligence showed ‘there was no doubt she [the
Belgrano
] was a threat.’
³⁵
Even the Foreign Office view, as advanced by Acland, was that ‘If it hadn’t wanted to be sunk, it shouldn’t have been there.’
³⁶
There was no disagreement. As always, Mrs Thatcher was very careful about legality. Havers assured her that the extension of the ROE was legal, though he successfully proposed that they should not be extended to auxiliaries and also pointed out that attacks became harder to justify the further away from the TEZ they got.
³⁷
Within twenty minutes or so, matters were settled: the ROE should be extended, with the general purpose of allowing the British fleet the freedom of action in self-defence which the Argentines had given themselves, and the specific and immediate purpose of allowing
Conqueror
to attack the
Belgrano
. As Mrs Thatcher put it in conversation years later, ‘You don’t wait for them to get to your ships.’
³⁸
At the formal meeting in the afternoon, more information was given about the threat to the Task Force. As Mrs Thatcher remembered it, ‘We broke up desperately worried that we hadn’t got or found the aircraft carrier again. We believed the navy had been
reserved
for a major attack on the Task Force.’
³⁹

That night,
Conqueror
torpedoed the
Belgrano
. At 0811Z (the ‘Z’ denotes GMT), the
Belgrano
had turned west because the Argentine Commander Allara had concluded that a lack of wind meant that his carrier could not launch Skyhawks against the British. The Argentines had also lost the positions of the British carriers. To protect his ships from submarine attack, Allara considered it safer for them to retreat to shallow water. Woodward guessed that this change of plan was taking place, but was not sure. In any event, no change of course would have affected his intentions, since a ship moving away from him one day could be expected to try to return the next. At 1857Z,
Conqueror
attacked, scoring two hits, and withdrew quickly, evading counter-attacks. About 200 men were killed by one of the two explosions. Another 850 took to the life-rafts. No immediate attempt by Argentine vessels was made to rescue them. In her private memoir, Mrs Thatcher remarked that even though
Conqueror
withdrew, deliberately leaving the Argentine destroyers unmolested,
*
they were ‘slow to pick up survivors’.
⁴⁰
She was implying that they did not care enough for their own men. This seems unlikely. The probable explanation is that it was not until after midnight that they realized the
Belgrano
had sunk.
⁴¹
In total, 321 men of the
Belgrano
died.

‘Gotcha!’ roared the
Sun
headline of the following day, and although this was later used as an example of callousness and jingoism, it did reflect widespread popular reaction. Public opinion was acutely conscious of the danger to the lives of British servicemen and was correspondingly relieved when any threat was removed. At the time the headline was composed, only the successful torpedo strike, rather than the large loss of Argentine life, was known. There was very little popular feeling that this had been an excessive action. It was only the following evening, when John Nott was in the middle of making a statement to the press on the subject, that the news of the sinking, and of the loss of life, came through. In the Commons the next day, Nott said that the
Belgrano
had been close to the Total Exclusion Zone ‘and was closing on elements of our Task Force, which was only hours away’.
⁴²
When it emerged that this had been an error, and that the
Belgrano
had actually been moving away from the TEZ, opponents began to suspect a cover-up.

The events surrounding the sinking of the
Belgrano
would later become a cause célèbre, even a ‘King Charles’s head’, among those opposed to war. It was claimed that the ship had been sunk in order to destroy the US–Peruvian ‘peace process’, but this has been disproved, notably by Freedman:
⁴³
at the time of its decision to allow the sinking of the
Belgrano
, the War Cabinet did not know of the Peruvian proposals. The military effect of the sinking was to prevent the Argentine fleet daring to engage the Task Force or break through the TEZ for the rest of the war. But its immediate political effect was to alter international opinion. Ireland pronounced itself ‘appalled’ and called for an end to the EEC sanctions against Argentina and a meeting of the UN Security Council to call for a ceasefire. There was highly unfavourable reaction even from more supportive EEC states, including Germany, Holland and France. Argentina immediately assumed (mistakenly) that the British had been able to hit the
Belgrano
because of US satellite intelligence, and so was furious with America. To a world which until then had regarded the Falklands crisis as almost a comic opera, the scale of the loss of life was horrifying. ‘We’re all trying to bring peace,’ Ronald Reagan wrote in his diary, ‘but the bleeding has started.’
⁴⁴
It was the third anniversary of Mrs Thatcher’s general election victory.
*

No one reacted with more frenzied activity than Al Haig. On the day that the decision to sink the
Belgrano
was made (but before either man knew about it), he and Pym had met in Washington. Haig had told Pym that he thought the imposition of the TEZ obviated the need for a major assault, and had outlined his latest ideas ‘which had originated in a Peruvian initiative’.
⁴⁵
Pym had told a press conference in Washington that ‘there is no other military action at present other than making the zone secure.’
⁴⁶
Beside her transcript of this, Mrs Thatcher scrawled her wiggly line of disfavour. When the news of the
Belgrano
reached Haig, he pushed his seven proposals even harder, using President Belaúnde of Peru as the link with Argentina and the means of not making the plans look too much like his own. He spoke to Henderson in what the British Ambassador called ‘an extremely active frame of mind’.
⁴⁷
Henderson cabled home: ‘He thought there was nothing to stop us sinking the whole Argentine fleet.’ Then there would be collapse in Buenos Aires and the alienation of Latin America. The British, Haig said, should propose a ceasefire. ‘I told him’, wrote Henderson, ‘that after waiting three weeks while the Argentines reinforced the islands we were not in a mood to rush to an Armistice just because the Argentines were losing hands down.’
⁴⁸
In the course of the day, Haig rang Henderson three times, reporting that Belaúnde ‘complained bitterly that British action had torpedoed the chances of peace’,
⁴⁹
and urging swift settlement on the basis of his proposals. Haig remained very sensitive in later life about this period: ‘There wasn’t any pressure from me. At all. You’d better look at Mr Pym there. He was a very active guy. I certainly wasn’t putting any pressure on Britain. Margaret knew that.’
⁵⁰
Mrs Thatcher’s memoirs speak differently: ‘Once again, Mr Haig was bringing diplomatic pressure to bear.’
⁵¹
*
In private, she was more caustic: ‘The devil! Al Haig!’: she resented his talk of ‘diplomatic magnanimity’.
⁵²
Magnanimity is something offered by the victors: Britain had not yet won. The divisions within the American administration are well illustrated by the fact that Caspar Weinberger chose 3 May as the moment to make the British an offer so generous as to be actually embarrassing: he proposed to make an aircraft carrier available to the Task Force to provide a mobile runway.
^53
†
Despite its gratitude, Britain refused.

In the House of Commons on 4 May, Denis Healey, for the Labour Opposition, became more aggressive in calling for a peace deal. In words not likely to please Mrs Thatcher, Francis Pym replied: ‘I agree … that in the end, whenever that is, there must be a negotiated settlement. The sooner that it comes, the better it will be.’
⁵⁴

Just before 11 o’clock that evening, John Nott had to come to the House. He informed MPs that the Type 42 destroyer HMS
Sheffield
had been hit by an Exocet missile earlier in the day.
Sheffield
was part of an ‘Air Defence Screen’ to protect the Task Force from Exocet attack, a little more than 50 miles south-east of Port Stanley, so, in taking the hit, she had, in a tragic way, been performing her function. Fires had broken out and spread fast. Eventually, the captain gave the order to abandon ship. Of a crew of 281, it later emerged that twenty had died and twenty-six had been wounded. ‘We were indeed shocked at the fierceness of the fire … so many suffered such bad burns,’ Mrs Thatcher recorded in her private memoir, and she was upset that ‘We never learned how best to announce such grievous news.’
⁵⁵
In this case, the decision was made to tell the world about the loss of
Sheffield
before the next of kin had been informed about casualties. She hated this, but thought it better than keeping people in doubt about which ship had been hit, particularly as Argentina often put out false statements which caused even more alarm uncorrected. The Prime Minister took the news very hard. After Nott’s statement in the House, she sat in her Commons room, with Willie Whitelaw, in tears. Whitelaw emerged and said to her detective Barry Strevens, who was guarding the door: ‘Don’t let anyone in. She wants to be alone.’
⁵⁶

The loss of
Sheffield
exposed a gap in attitude between those who had served in the Second World War and the younger generation. The former more readily understood that such things were unavoidable in war. They realized that the effect of such losses would tend to harden British public opinion in support of the Task Force. Younger people, especially in the media, were more shocked and more inclined to think that such a blow would see the whole thing called off. Throughout the crisis, Clive Whitmore had made it his business to remind Mrs Thatcher that she needed to make some sort of private calculation, grim though it was, of how many British deaths the government could sustain. She refused to put a figure on it, but was interested in his answer. He told her a maximum of a thousand.
⁵⁷
When the news of
Sheffield
broke, Mrs Thatcher understood very well that the public would need all the reassurance that could be offered. Lord Lewin later recalled: