"We have many new friends this morning": THE FALKLAND ISLANDS, APRIL 2, 1982

Forty years ago today, in the climax to a territorial dispute between Britain and Argentina which had been smouldering for 150 years, 140 Argentinian special forces landed at 4:30 a.m. local time at Mullet Creek, southwest of Stanley, the capital of the Falkland Islands. Many more landed on the beaches. At 9:25 a.m. the governor, Rex Hunt, surrendered, and the invaders claimed for Argentina the British territory they call Las Islas Malvinas.

It was not that Whitehall had not been warned. A week before, on March 20th, Hunt had told Nick Barker, captain of the Royal Navy's ice patrol ship Endurance that Argentinian 'scrapmen' had landed on South Georgia, 800 miles from Stanley. Endurance, with her complement of Royal Marines and 9 of the Falklands' own Landing Party 8901, set off to arrest them.

Barker had been warning his superiors of an imminent invasion since the previous summer, when he had heard rumours in Buenos Aires. Not for the last time, his superiors told him to shut up. Now they told him not to get involved. He did get involved, deeply and dangerously, and he saved Endurance, but that is another story.

Major-General Julian Thompson, C.B., O.B.E., Royal Marines, who commanded 3 Commando Brigade in 1982, recalls that he was told by telephone at 2 a.m., "Bring your brigade to short notice and sail on Tuesday. This was Friday morning."

A task force of 100 ships, carrying 3,000 Royal Marines, two battalions of the Parachute Regiment, 100 S.A.S. and S.B.S. and other personnel, left Portsmouth over the next few weeks. It would take them seven weeks to sail the 8,000 miles to the South Atlantic. Britain at war was a spectacle that shocked the world.

In a letter dated Monday, May 31, 1982, I wrote to Douglas: "I imagine the Falklands are much on your mind of late, and they form a sort of constant undercurrent to my own. I find myself wondering what you think, how you feel, if you have anybody involved, what your opinion of this or that tactic would be... I try to see things through your eyes, and I must admit, Douglas, every time another ship dies, or your Navy (because it is your Navy to me) takes another blow, I feel it as a kind of personal knock. There was a horrible photo on the front page of the newspaper of the last moments of H.M.S. Sheffield, with the caption 'Death of a Ship', and it was all awful-- awful. I wish it had never started, I wish it would soon end, and I wish and hope Britain never gives up, never relinquishes her islands.

"It came as a total surprise to all of us in Canada. In fact, the night of April first, I was out having dinner with my best friend, who was in Toronto on business, and I was late coming home and so missed the news. The next morning, to hear the islands had been invaded-- and then the leaving of the fleet from Portsmouth-- I was quite moved by that, and wondered if you had driven down to see it. And then the almost Nelsonian slowness of their progress. It was, the whole affair was, at first, almost anachronistic, and viewed largely by Canadians, and I think Americans too, almost as the last roar of the lion, the last attempt of a small, troubled, half-forgotten, once glorious Britannia to rule the waves again. Which was why that leaving of Portsmouth, which must have sent your memory reeling back some forty years, was so moving and yet so sad. Going to war on a matter of honour, going coolly, without for the most part any blood-or-glory talk, to get the job done. And now the world, which no doubt smiled faintly behind its hand, is horrified when it sees what modern missiles are capable of doing."

He wrote back: "I enjoyed your comments on the Falklands tremendously. I have been very involved as you can imagine, and a lot of my writing was laid aside as I spoke up for the navy, not that they needed it, and went around the various ships and bases before the squadron departed. Yes, I did have a lump in my throat as they steamed out of Portsmouth, and the only regret I had was that I was not going with them. But have no fear, dear Kim, we are not half-forgotten, even if our 'friends' would like to believe it. No other country could or would have done what we did. It was the longest-ever campaign we had mounted, to land an outnumbered force on a handful of rocks and fight a well-prepared enemy.... Of course a few ships had to sink and men to die, it is the price of unpreparedness and years of peacetime thinking. But never again.

"You at least will be glad to know that many hundreds of Bolitho books sailed with the squadron. I hope he helped to sustain our lads when all others turned aside."

The rest of the world may have looked on and thought it was a nasty little sideshow of a war, a mere brushfire. But, as it unfolded in all its savagery, it became much more than that. Ships burned, men died: in flames, in the sea, in the air, on the boggy ground in snow and sleet and rain and wind by day, and under heavy fire at night, and those who buried them or committed their bodies to the deep or carried the wounded or tried to save them would be forever changed by their experiences. There was, and still is, bitterness, outrage, accusation: charges that lives were wasted unnecessarily. "It was down to 10 minutes, when we might well have lost the war," said General Sir Hugh Michael Rose, K.C.B., C.B.E., D.S.O., Q.G.M., who was the commanding officer of 22 S.A.S. in 1982.

Lieutenant-General Sir Hew William Royston Pike, K.C.B., D.S.O., M.B.E., who was commanding officer of 3 Para, wrote of the aftermath of the battle of Mount Longdon, one of five night attacks, which lasted from 9 p.m. until 7 a.m., "The debris of battle was scattered along the length of the mountain... weapons, clothing, rations, boots, tents, ammunition, blood-stained medical dressings, all abandoned along with the recoilless rifles, mortars and machine-guns that had given us so much trouble during darkness. The enemy lay dead everywhere... standing amid the shell holes and shambles of battle and watching the determined, triumphant but shocked, saddened faces of those who had lost their friends, the Iron Duke's comment was never more apt: 'there is nothing half so melancholy as a battle won, unless it is a battle lost'."

The Argentinian brigadier Mario Menendez refused dictator General Leopoldo Galtieri's demand that he continue fighting. "The only language they understand is the language of the gun." Menendez answered, "To go on resisting means more deaths and the same outcome-- losing the war." He had 10,000 men, air superiority and artillery, but morale among his men, many of whom were conscripts, was crumbling. "A most singular display of military disintegration," wrote Lieutenant-Colonel Nick Vaux, 42 Commando, of the Argentinians the British encountered in Stanley. "Damaged guns and vehicles were tilted grotesquely off the road, abandoned equipment, weapons and tentage heaped everywhere."

Menendez surrendered, and at 9:30 p.m. on June 14th, 1982, Las Islas Malvinas became the Falkland Islands once more.

The cost, for a little brushfire war the rest of the world perhaps did not take seriously, was steep. The list of gallantry awards for the Falklands campaign is long, and the word 'posthumous' recurs with terrible frequency. The two Victoria Crosses, awarded to Lieutenant-Colonel Herbert "H" Jones, commanding officer of 2 Para, and Sergeant Ian McKay of 3 Para, were both posthumous.

I asked Douglas in a letter if awarding two V.C.s had been disproportionate to the event. He wrote back: "I'm not sure that I feel as you do about the V.C. It is unlike any other award, and more holders lived than died. The point is, there can be no other way to show how you feel about a man who risks everything, more so in a brush war than one where the whole world is at stake. It is not enough to be a hero. As Nelson said when the equivalent of today's smug war correspondents asked him to define the term 'hero' after the Nile. He answered coldly, 'One who inspires courage in others.'

"I have seen many men and boys die under fire, and have known the vital importance of showing courage when all hell is breaking loose around you. Others look to you. No matter how junior, how new that feeble gold stripe is on your sleeve, you are the man of the moment. Men do not fight for causes, and in the navy especially they fight for each other, for the ship, because that is what they are there for. But do not place too much importance on the event. How many fell on the Somme, a million? The lonely 18 year-old signalman who was shot dead beside me in mid-Channel in 1944 was our only casualty that night. His death was no less important."

To stand before the Falklands memorial in the crypt at St. Paul's Cathedral in London and read its many names is profoundly moving. But not one is unimportant. Those who never came home, and those who came home wounded in body or in mind. Those who remember it all, and those who would rather forget. But none of them, I think, would want what they did to be forgotten. Ordinary men, Douglas used to say, called upon to do extraordinary things.

I salute their extraordinary courage.