KEY POINTS:
"There is no period so remote as the recent past," wrote Alan Bennett, a proposition of which the strange episode of the Falklands War is the elegant proof.
Already after 25 years, there is a sepia tinge to the whole enterprise. It seems to have more in common with the expeditions of empire of a century gone than the post-9/11 wars in which British servicemen and women are now embroiled in Afghanistan and Iraq. The war in the South Atlantic is now seen as something we "won", rather like the World Cup of 1966, and thoughts of how close-run it was and of the chorus of criticism at the time are now suppressed. It is likely to prove the last military operation of any scale that Britain will mount and execute alone, and it was the last footnote in the story of the wars of the British Empire. True, there was some assistance from the United States and France, but it was not quite as extensive as Washington and Paris now claim. From the US, the main gifts were copious amounts of aviation fuel, the lease-back of the Ascension Island base and handy gizmos like the Stinger shoulder-launched missile. Much has been made about the way the US helped with intelligence. But, as the BBC's radio voice on the frontline, I must say I saw very little of this, as the general intelligence on the exact disposition of the Argentinians, and why they invaded the Malvinas/Falklands in the first place, seemed less than profound. The only Americans I came across were US mercenaries serving as snipers with one of the Argentinian infantry battalions.
Most striking is the casualty rate in such a brief period. Officially, 258 British servicemen and three Falklanders died. Some 700 Argentinians were killed. Hundreds of Britons were injured, and more reported serious psychological trauma and disturbance, some years after the event. More British servicemen died than the total number killed on operations in Afghanistan since 2001 and Iraq since 2003. Such attrition will not be tolerated today.
The way the campaign was reported - and here I cannot plead the innocent bystander - is unlikely to be repeated, either. We were, in all, a party of about 32-34 accredited journalists, photographers, television crew members. We were all white, male and British. There was no embedded reporter from Europe, the Commonwealth or the US (though they tried hard enough), let alone from Latin America. Imagine trying to keep CNN or Al Jazeera out of British bases in Basra and Lashkar Gha today. And besides, who would want to?
Further, the sheer physical circumstances made our band of fractious brothers more constrained than any accredited reporter of a campaign in living memory. The military and political powers were able to control who of the media they took with them, what they could see and do, and how they got their dispatches and reports back. The soldiers and marines got to know us, and we them, and the flow of information was pretty good. It got even better once we were in the thick of it together. Once the action started on the ground after the landings at San Carlos on May 21, we moved into a remote realm of topsy-turvy.
Throughout May, the weather worsened; the battlefields and bleak landscape of peat and rock were blasted by killer winds and blizzards straight from Antarctica.
On the last night of the war itself, June 14, the Argentinian prisoners huddled in their thousands in temperatures of minus 20C.
A positive of the war was that it got rid of the hideous Argentinian military junta, and it is a pity that some of the more monstrous officers weren't put on trial.. The Falklanders are British citizens and did not deserve Argentinian military tyranny. But it's a pity it took a shooting war, 1000 dead and several thousand injured and damaged to make a point.
- THE INDEPENDENT
