Falklands War should not be celebrated

MAY I congratulate you on your hilarious front page feature for April Fool’s Day: “’Iron Lady’ deserves her own special day.” What a joke!

The Falklands War resulted in

255 British servicemen killed and

775 wounded, plus three Falkland Islanders. A large proportion of the survivors are still suffering from PTSD. Some 649 Argentinians died in the conflict, with about 300 of them killed when the cruiser General Belgrano was torpedoed by a British submarine while steaming away from the islands and out of the exclusion zone.

And all of this death and destruction came about because of two leaders who wished to divert attention from the dreadful conditions in their own countries: General Galtieri of Argentina and Margaret Thatcher of Britain.

Argentina was in the midst of an economic disaster, as well as experiencing civil unrest as the population reacted to the Junta’s shocking human rights violations.

In Britain, Thatcher was facing much criticism in response to her domestic policies. Savage Government spending cuts, a declining manufacturing industry and high unemployment were all making Thatcher increasingly unpopular. The Falklands War saved her political skin and gave us too many more years of Thatcherism.

I am sure that many of your readers watched The Falklands War: The Untold Story, shown on Channel 4 last week, which so clearly demonstrated the incompetent planing and operation of the war to regain the Falklands, the ill-prepared and poorly equipped combatants and the political interference which led to the British victory being ‘a very close-run thing’.

As we watch the horrors that are unfolding in Ukraine, please can we not celebrate any wars.

Emma Grainger Ottery St Mary, Devon