Max Hastings

By Max Hastings

TEN years after the Falklands War, I arranged to meet a Royal Marine with whom I landed at San Carlos Bay on May 21, 1982, for what became the foremost adventure of my life. He had lost a foot on a landmine on the war’s last day, but idiotically I thought that did not seem a life-changing disability.

I could not have been more wrong. As we talked, it swiftly became clear that the South Atlantic experience, so thrilling and rewarding for me yet by 1992 a mere memory, had wrecked his life. Today, 20 years further on and three decades from that extraordinary event, my once-young Royal Marine comrade is in his 50s, and, I fear, the Falklands still tragically dogs his days.

And what of the rest of us, the British people? A month after the Argentine surrender, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made a triumphal speech to a rally of the Tory faithful at Cheltenham, in which she proclaimed her belief that victory in the South Atlantic showed: ‘Britain is no longer a nation in retreat.’

Has this proved to be true? Or have we been obliged to recognise that euphoric moment, the revival of pride in our warrior heritage, as a brief flash of glory before we found ourselves once more back on our familiar path of national decline? How does Britain’s 1982 saga appear, from the perspective of the second decade of the 21st century?

First, almost no pundit or historian disputes that Margaret Thatcher was right to go to war after the Argentines seized Britain’s Falklands dependency 30 years ago yesterday. To be sure, she acted for partisan political motives. Her own government was responsible for the series of diplomatic and strategic bunglings which caused the military dictatorship in Buenos Aires to conclude that we were no longer either willing or able to defend the islands.

Thatcher knew that the Falklands had nothing to do with the huge economic and industrial problems of this country in 1982. Losing them would not affect our national circumstances, save in one small but vital matter: self-respect.

Britain’s pride in those days had fallen wretchedly low. Most of us remember the Seventies as a ghastly decade, in which we seemed doomed to perpetual decline. We could do nothing right as a nation, and the first three years of the Thatcher government had done little to raise our spirits.

In the wake of the Argentine invasion, the Prime Minister knew that if she failed to reverse this national humiliation, her authority was forfeit over her government and country alike. That is why she took the huge gamble of dispatching a naval task force to recover them.

MANY of us who had sailed to the South Atlantic landed home, in the wake of victory, to feel that we were returning to a different country from that which we had left. The exultation, joy, public celebrations of a kind not seen since 1945, were wonders to behold. Mrs Thatcher reaped the fruits of a victory that was rightly seen as her own.

I am one of those convinced that, without her Falklands triumph, the subsequent ‘ Thatcher revolution’ could never have happened; it is even doubtful she could have won the 1983 General Election. Remember, before the war she was the most unpopular Prime Minister since polling began.

The first test of the political transformation wrought by the war came at Beaconsfield, where a by-election was held on May 27, in the midst of the fighting. The Tories, who had feared defeat, won by a landslide. The Labour candidate, who opposed the conflict, lost his deposit. He later told fellow Labour politician Robin Cook that he learned from the experience that the British people like war prime ministers.

His name was Tony Blair, and I think he got the wrong message. The British people like wars only if we can understand their causes and win them quickly. I have always thought that public opinion could have turned against the Falklands, if the conflict had continued for another couple of months.

In the immediate aftermath of the campaign, Thatcher deluged with cash the armed forces, whose prestige had soared, to replace lost ships and equipment. The Royal Marines and the navy’s aircraft-carrier programme were reprieved from the axe.

But within a depressingly short period, the historic trend of British governments since 1945 reasserted itself. Thatcher, ‘the Iron Lady’, was as reluctant as her successors have proved to pay big bills for defence.

By the time the First Gulf War came around in 1990, in her last weeks in Downing Street she strongly advocated fighting to liberate Kuwait. But it proved necessary to cannibalise the whole of the Rhine Army’s armoured vehicle inventory to send a weak division to the desert, so threadbare had the forces become on her watch.

In the last years of the 20th century, however, both Britain and America came to believe that wars could deliver foreign policy objectives quickly, and at small cost in lives. First in Kuwait, then in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, Western planes and troops achieved their purposes. The public was not much enthused — there were no victory parades for returning heroes to match 1982 — but did not seem to mind.

Iraq and Afghanistan changed everything, of course. Blair’s and Bush’s wars since 2003 have taught us bitter and expensive lessons. Although the Falklands seemed a tough campaign, defeating Argentina was much easier than winning public support for war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Falklands victory had also made some generals dangerously over- confident about what the Armed Forces could achieve.

During the past decade, our top soldiers have been too ready to acquiesce in ill- considered and under-