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How France helped the UK to win the war in the Falklands

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  • #61
    Cross post from another thread

    Originally posted by Dreadnought View Post
    The Sphinx and the curious case of the Iron Lady's H-bomb
    François Mitterrand took many secrets with him when he died 10 years ago, but now his most startling claim is revealed. John Follain reports
    It is May 7, 1982, shortly after 3.30pm. Ali Magoudi, a Parisian psychoanalyst, paces back and forth awaiting the secret arrival of his next patient — whose identity, if revealed, would set off an earthquake in French politics.

    The figure who enters, 45 minutes late, is François Mitterrand, no less — the president of France. Magoudi discovers that his patient does not want to talk about his childhood or his dreams, but about Margaret Thatcher and the crisis over the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands.

    “Excuse me,” Mitterrand begins, apologising for his late arrival. “I had a difference of opinion to settle with the Iron Lady. What an impossible woman, that Thatcher! “With her four nuclear submarines on mission in the southern Atlantic, she threatens to launch the atomic weapon against Argentina — unless I supply her with the secret codes that render deaf and blind the missiles we have sold to the Argentinians. Margaret has given me very precise instructions on the telephone.”

    The scene is the most striking in Magoudi’s book, Rendez-vous: The psychoanalysis of François Mitterrand, which is to be published in France on Friday. An account of their meetings, which spanned 11 years from 1982 to 1993, it is by far the most revealing of a flurry of books preceding the 10th anniversary of Mitterrand’s death on January 8, 1996.

    The psychoanalyst has assured his publisher that all the quotes attributed to Mitterrand are genuine, although he cannot vouch for the truth of what the president said.

    Magoudi never fathoms Mitterrand out enough to draw up a psychological profile. But in notes taken after their meetings, he writes of his patient’s near-mystical enjoyment of power, his paranoid tendencies, his “massive anxiety” and the way morbid images frequently crop up in his speech.

    The French are still fascinated by the socialist leader who ruled France for 14 years, and who so cultivated an aura of mystery he was nicknamed “le Sphinx”. Although he claimed to have brought morality into French politics, his legacy has been clouded by corruption scandals. Last month, seven of his former associates were convicted of invasion of privacy for their role in a phone-tapping operation that he orchestrated on spurious national security grounds.

    Imagine a Tony Blair, a George W Bush or a Vladimir Putin confiding to a psychoanalyst long-buried childhood memories; glimpses of his private life involving an estranged wife, a mistress and an illegitimate daughter; fears of illness and death; and the occasional state secret or state lie.

    Magoudi says his book was ordered by Mitterrand himself, who knew he would not live to see it published. It is a bizarre, intimate and haunting testament. Above all, it throws a new light on the help Mitterrand gave to Thatcher — who, he famously said, “had the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe”.

    IT WAS in early May 1982, after a year in power, that Mitterrand contacted Magoudi to ask him to become his therapist. The psychoanalyst accepted with reluctance: he didn’t relish the prospect of the secret service searching his study in the Marais district or curious courtiers bugging his telephone.

    The next day, on May 4, two French-manufactured Super Etendard planes of the Argentine airforce attacked HMS Sheffield, a destroyer in the British taskforce steaming to the Falkland islands.

    A wave-skimming Exocet missile hit the Sheffield amidships, killing 20 crew and injuring 24. The destroyer was scuttled and British naval commanders swiftly concluded that this French-made weapon was so effective that the entire operation to throw the Argentine occupiers out of the islands was at risk.

    Mitterrand had already pledged co-operation to Thatcher. Jacques Attali, his former aide, wrote that the president called her on the day after the invasion and told her: “I am with you.”

    According to Attali, who acted as his interpreter, “she was stunned and did not expect it”. Mitterrand had come to her aid while her friend Ronald Reagan dithered.

    Now Magoudi adds a nuclear twist to this apparently selfless entente. He writes that the death toll on the stricken Sheffield did not appear to impress Mitterrand unduly.

    “In war, when there is one death, it is already a lot,” the president said as their therapy session got under way three days later. “But, after all, these soldiers were professionals. If they were serving on this destroyer, it’s because they were volunteers. When you do this kind of job, you don’t invoke the gods every time there is a small hitch.”

    Mitterrand added: “I express myself freely in telling you this. I won’t say it in public, of course.”

    In full flow, he told Magoudi that he had ordered the Exocet’s secrets to be handed over to the British at Thatcher’s insistence.

    “She is furious,” he said. “She blames me personally for this new Trafalgar . . . I have been forced to yield. She has them now, the codes. If our customers find out that the French wreck the weapons they sell, it’s not going to reflect well on our exports.


    “I ask you to keep that to yourself. I’ve been told that psychoanalysts don’t know how to keep mum in town! Is that true?” Magoudi did not reply. Instead he asked: “How do you react to such an intransigent woman?” Mitterrand replied: “What do you expect? You can’t win a struggle against the insular syndrome of an unbridled Englishwoman. To provoke a nuclear war for small islands inhabited by three sheep who are as hairy as they are frozen! Fortunately I yielded to her. Otherwise, I assure you, the metallic index finger of the lady would press the button.”

    Magoudi wanted to know how his patient felt about being “symbolically emasculated”, as the psychoanalyst put it. “You mean that in the face of such aggressiveness you remain passive?” he asked.

    “I will have the last word,” Mitterrand replied. “Her island, it’s me who will destroy it. Her island, I swear that soon it will no longer be one. I will take my revenge. I will tie England to Europe, despite its natural tendency for isolation. How? I will build a tunnel under the Channel. Yes. I will succeed where Napoleon III failed.”

    Clearly delighted with his vision, Mitterrand had no doubt he would persuade Thatcher to accept the tunnel. “I will flatter her shopkeeper spirit. I will tell her that the welding to the Continent will not cost the crown one kopeck. She will not resist this resonant argument.”

    What are we to make of this account? What we do know is that there were British nuclear weapons in the Falklands conflict zone. According to Sir Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies at King’s College London, the British taskforce carried nuclear depth charges. But he said there was no intention to use them.

    A number of ships that had been on exercises off Gibraltar had been ordered to steam south with nuclear depth charges on board rather than use up precious time unloading them.

    “The government was desperate to get them away from the taskforce but the delays this would have caused at a time when they were trying to make the biggest diplomatic impact meant they decided they had better take them,” Freedman said. “They put them in the safest places possible. There was no intention to use them, but they certainly went.”

    There have been no credible reports of Polaris nuclear-armed submarines in the area. But, two years after the war, the Labour party demanded an official inquiry into a report that Britain had sent a Polaris to Ascension Island, the staging post for the taskforce, to be on stand-by for a nuclear attack on the Argentine city of Cordoba if the war went badly.

    The retired admirals who had been in charge of the Royal Navy during the conflict denied the charge. Admiral Sir Terence Lewin, then chief of the defence staff, said a nuclear attack “never entered our remotest thoughts”. Admiral Henry Leach, chief of the naval staff at the time, said: “We did not contemplate a nuclear attack and did not make any even potentially preparatory moves for such action.”

    Was Thatcher bluffing Mitterrand? Or was he exaggerating her ruthlessness? He certainly gave her the Exocet codes, despite the resistance of his ministers and military chiefs, who wanted to protect French secrets and would have been happy to see Britain humiliated.

    Investigations in the 1990s revealed that France provided Britain with a large amount of technical assistance. The most valuable information was on the Exocet’s homing radar. Officials of Aerospatiale, the manufacturer, denied having direct dealings with the British; but Aerospatiale was run by Jacques Mitterrand, the president’s brother, a fact that may have facilitated a quiet arrangement.

    Sir John Nott, defence minister during the Falklands war, revealed in his memoirs that the French also supplied aircraft similar to those sold to Argentina for British pilots to practise against.

    “In so many ways,” wrote Nott, a diehard Eurosceptic like Thatcher, “Mitterrand and the French were our greatest allies.”

    Thatcher wrote in her memoirs that the French president was “absolutely staunch” in his support. “I was to have many disputes with President Mitterrand in later years,” she wrote. “But I never forgot the debt we owed him for his personal support throughout the Falklands crisis.”

    Mitterrand’s own assessment of her was confided to Attali. “Of course it is only power that matters,” he said late one night in 1982. “You can do nothing without it. That’s why I admire Thatcher.”

    For all her exasperating behaviour over Europe, “a mutual trust united them”, Attali said on the release of a book of his conversations with Mitterrand in 1996. “There was a certain tension between them, but they had a relationship of seduction, the rapport of man-woman.”

    And, according to Attali, Mitterrand’s “Caligula” remark had been misquoted. He had actually said she had “the eyes of Stalin and the voice of Marilyn Monroe”.

    As for Mitterrand’s payback, the Channel tunnel, this agreement was sealed when Thatcher visited Paris in November 1984, two years after the Falklands war. Reports at the time spoke of a late-night session over whisky at the British ambassador’s residence in the rue de Faubourg St Honoré, where her doubts turned to an almost messianic belief in the project.

    At 2am she drank a toast to Anglo-French co-operation. “We had to have another drink before we were allowed to go to bed,” the late Nick Ridley, who was transport secretary, recorded in his memoirs, “exhausted though we were.”

    The tunnel was meant to open in 1993 at a cost of £5 billion. In fact it limped into operation with a limited service in 1994 at £12 billion, and in its first year of operation lost £900m. Mitterrand had his revenge — although the tunnel has proved as much as a financial black hole for France as for Britain. Eurotunnel, the Anglo-French operating company, owes more than £6 billion.

    IN HIS book Magoudi provides other insights into the president’s secret and manipulative ways. He has kept secret the locations of some of their meetings but says their therapy sessions lasted for a total of 18 hours. They also met informally for lunch and sometimes travelled together, he says.

    At their first meeting, Mitterrand’s pale complexion and mummy-like pursed lips struck the therapist as signs of illness. The president revealed he had prostate cancer — a secret that was to be kept from the French public for most of his years in power.

    “My doctors are categorical,” he said. “The shooting pain I felt behind the thigh is not a sciatica, which is what Claude Gubler (his doctor) told the press . . . I have a minuscule cancer which only men suffer from.” It had spread to the bone and Mitterrand doubted the efficacy of his medical treatment.

    He had consulted the astrologist Elizabeth Teissier, a former model and soft-porn actress, who had advised him to take no chances “given my current astral conjunction”. She had suggested he find a psychoanalyst to help him fight the cancer mentally. Mitterrand had picked Magoudi after asking intelligence agents to investigate him.

    “I have waited for this presidency and the pleasure it gives me for too long to allow myself to be manoeuvred by death,” Mitterrand told Magoudi. “Do you realise? I have waited for more than 40 years before taking the place of Charles de Gaulle.”

    A prominent politician since the 1950s, Mitterrand had used the French socialist party as a vehicle for personal political survival during the long Gaullist ascendancy of the 1960s and 1970s. On arriving at the presidential Elysée Palace, he had immediately chosen de Gaulle’s former office for himself.

    “Today it’s me who speaks in the name of France,” he told Magoudi. “Every time I rejoice internally . . . You do not know the joy that the love coming from all the French gives you. You will never know the effects of that drug.”

    Mitterrand had a plan: “to act, a little; to speak, a great deal; to build, enormously; to travel, definitely”.

    He appealed to Magoudi to help him in the mental fight to live long enough to fulfil this goal. “From you I ask only one thing. Help me to gain time, the time to build the image that I wish to leave to history. I need more of it, of time. A great deal.”

    After a few sessions, Mitterrand revealed to Magoudi the existence of his illegitimate daughter, Mazarine, born in 1974 when he was 58. He said that for years he had no longer lived with Danielle, his wife. This was at a time when all of France save for a few intimate friends of Mitterrand believed the president and the first lady shared a house on the Left Bank.

    To hide Mazarine, his daughter by his mistress Anne Pingeot, a curator at the Musée d’Orsay, Mitterrand set up a vast and illicit eavesdropping apparatus that targeted politicians, lawyers, journalists and celebrities.

    He did not speak publicly about Mazarine until shortly before his death, by which time she was a university student. Most French people saw her for the first time when she appeared at his funeral.

    “I have had adventures,” Mitterrand told Magoudi. “I was a rather handsome young man with a desire to seduce made all the more intense by the fact that, deep down, I wasn’t self-confident.”

    Comparing himself to Don Giovanni, he quipped that he had made fewer conquests than the “mille e tre” (1,003) attributed to the seducer in Mozart’s opera. “Of one thing I am certain: the arrival of my daughter, as I was getting close to the age of 60, threw me into the fountain of youth!” After Mazarine’s birth, the president confided, several friends had advised him to seek a discreet divorce. If he had refused to do so it was not to respect any familial or religious prohibition. Nor was it to bend to a conformism that would have stopped voters from supporting his presidential bid.

    “If I preferred this state of confusion and secrecy, it’s that I cannot resolve myself to leaving those I have loved. I don’t break with somebody. I add up.”

    Magoudi found himself entrusted with secrets and lies that, were they to become public, could have forced Mitterrand to abandon the presidency. A coughing fit, prompted by a casual mention of the number 15, led to an abrupt confession about one of the most controversial incidents in Mitterrand’s political life.

    He confirmed that on the night of October 15, 1955, he had stage-managed an attempt on his own life — the machinegunning of his car south of the Luxembourg Gardens. Mitterrand always publicly denied any role in this attack, known as l’affaire de l’Observatoire, which had led to a scandal that cost him his parliamentary immunity and almost brought his political career to an end.

    It had been a time of rare tension, he explained to Magoudi, with French settlers in Algeria waging a violent campaign against anyone, like himself, who advocated dialogue with that colony’s independence movement. He had no regrets: it was the only way of obtaining police protection.

    Mitterrand returned again and again to his obsession with death. In one aside, while complaining that the Elysée Palace was too small, he said he had contemplated shifting the presidency to the sprawling Invalides complex by Napoleon’s tomb on the other side of the Seine.

    “To get closer to the ashes of Napoleon would have amused me, but people would have called me a megalomaniac. I soon dropped the idea.”

    One morning, Magoudi found a message on his answerphone from Mitterrand, who told him that in the night he had suffered from stomach pains so virulent he feared he would die. Yet the doctor had told him the symptoms were purely psychological.

    “Ever since childhood, the idea of an imminent death seizes me sporadically,” the message ran. “In the lonely night I sometimes feel oppressed or seized by panic. Sometimes I am even terrified.”

    On a flight back to Paris from Vietnam in early 1993, according to Magoudi, the president called him aside and said: “The time has come. My end is near. I have a commission for you: write the psychoanalysis of François Mitterrand . . . Use everything I have confided to you . . . Do it for the 10th anniversary of my death.”

    Mitterrand’s presidency ended in 1995. He died the following year. Thatcher remembered him as “quieter, more urbane” than Jacques Chirac, his long-term rival and successor as president. Chirac “had a sure grasp of detail and a profound interest in economics” while Mitterrand “was a self- conscious intellectual, fascinated by foreign policy and bored by detail and possibly contemptuous of economics”.

    “Oddly enough,” she wrote, “I liked them both.”

    Rendez-vous: La psychanalyse de François Mitterrand, by Ali Magoudi, is published on Friday by Maren Sell Editeurs, Paris

    Comment


    • #62
      If the war had dragged on another year and the Brits were forced to mount a 2nd attempt, I would think the US would have provided some ships and planes to replenish and bolster the RN.

      A spare training carrier or amphib carrier with F-4s and Harriers repainted in UK colors. There would be "civilian contractors" on board to help with RN sailors with the operation and to provide extra man power. Landing craft and landing ships on emergency loan. And of course plenty of fuel and ammo.
      "Only Nixon can go to China." -- Old Vulcan proverb.

      Comment


      • #63
        It would appear that Mitterand thought Thatcher capable of anything. Though I strongly doubt the nuclear option, it would be clear that unrestricted naval operations would have commenced against the Argentine coast ... and I don't doubt the SAS and SBS units would be quite busy staying on the islands, being supplied and relieved by subs.

        Comment


        • #64
          GUN, I don`t doubt further US help if we had to mount a second attempt.

          OoE, I have read that piece before, but not in such an expanded form. Thanks for posting. I think Mitterrand did indeed take that with him to the grave, although I would baulk at calling the good Doctor a joker!
          I can believe the call on the Exocet codes. Didn`t help the Atlantic Conveyor but it "might" have helped save the carriers, I really don`t know.

          I have a hard time swallowing Lawrence Freedman`s comments on the carriage of nuclear depth bombs all the way down south. I actually believe they were removed at Ascension on the way south. The bombs were Helo dropped devices and I see no difficulties with the Helo`s removing them from the ships magazines en-route, to be dropped onto an escorting freighter. I can`t see that a huge number were deployed on all ships to begin with.
          The main task force could have offloaded them in Portsmouth before departure.
          The Gibraltar group is interesting though...

          I agree, no way would we have nuked Cordoba or anywhere else, so no need for a Polaris boat to go south.
          The bluff I can certainly believe. I expect that US state department would be horrified if they got wind, with a timely wink from Thatcher the order of the day.

          On combat, I always wondered why our SSN`s didn`t go all out and take out everything Argentine that floated. An ultimatum along the lines of...."Return all Argentine naval units to port or they will be attacked on sight, from midnight tonight"... No exclusion zone. I guess the political climate didn`t exist for such action, although the Belgrano sinking did it all for us.

          Other missions that seem to be forgotten, or are just quiet, were the very long range Nimrod patrols off the Argentine coast performed by the MR-1 and the R-1 ELINT bird. Probably for obvious reasons, but their help was said to be invaluable.
          "Liberty is a thing beyond all price.

          Comment


          • #65
            Perhaps not a nuclear attack but I cannot see the Argentine mainland being off limits.

            Comment


            • #66
              You are probably right, however any "major" attack on the mainland would have been be an escalation, that spectre was at the forefront in the commanders minds back then. They had to tread carefully internationally speaking, hence the exclusion zone and not a total all out naval war from the start.

              If that scenario had played out, how so?
              There are still rumours of aborted attacks on Argentine airfields by SAS/SBS teams to target SuEs and Exocet.There was no satisfactory egress plan, essentially they would have been suicide missions.

              RAF Vulcans would have stood little chance against fighters specifically held back to counter them with zero top cover themselves.

              The only legitimate targets in the political climate were Argentine airfields, without major concessions and support from Chile, i.e basing RAF attack aircraft there, with the possible threat of attack that would bring to Chile, I don`t see a way they could be put out of action. So, I guess, the mainland wouldn`t be off limits to small actions, but anything larger might not have been feasible, ie, war winning.
              "Liberty is a thing beyond all price.

              Comment


              • #67
                Take a page from the Chinese. What was stopping Thatcher from replacing the nukes from the POLARIS with HE? If Mitterand wasn't lying, the fact that it was a POLARIS, even an HE one, would signify the escalation that Thatcher was willing to goto ... and there's nothing in the Argentine arsenal to stop it.

                Comment


                • #68
                  OOE, sir, were there any reports from the Argentinians or Brits that after the Sheffield the Exocet missiles were not striking their targets?

                  Comment


                  • #69
                    The codes for the missles. Once these were broadcast over ECM the threat dimished, however the hospital ship could not broadcast the codes and was struck among a few others.
                    Fortitude.....The strength to persist...The courage to endure.

                    Comment


                    • #70
                      col yu,

                      If Mitterand wasn't lying, the fact that it was a POLARIS, even an HE one, would signify the escalation that Thatcher was willing to goto ... and there's nothing in the Argentine arsenal to stop it.
                      holy crap, i think the soviets would go crazy if that happened.
                      There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

                      Comment


                      • #71
                        Originally posted by Officer of Engineers View Post
                        Perhaps not a nuclear attack but I cannot see the Argentine mainland being off limits.
                        I think there were SF reconnaissance units on the mainland and if I am right missions to strike targets on the mainland were drawn up. I am sure I read something about a mission being aborted due to a boat breaking down and the team having to land in Chile. I'll see if I can dig it up.
                        Nulli Secundus
                        People always talk of dying for their country, and never of making the other bastard die for his

                        Comment


                        • #72
                          Originally posted by Tin Man View Post
                          You are probably right, however any "major" attack on the mainland would have been be an escalation, that spectre was at the forefront in the commanders minds back then. They had to tread carefully internationally speaking, hence the exclusion zone and not a total all out naval war from the start.

                          If that scenario had played out, how so?
                          There are still rumours of aborted attacks on Argentine airfields by SAS/SBS teams to target SuEs and Exocet.There was no satisfactory egress plan, essentially they would have been suicide missions.

                          RAF Vulcans would have stood little chance against fighters specifically held back to counter them with zero top cover themselves.

                          The only legitimate targets in the political climate were Argentine airfields, without major concessions and support from Chile, i.e basing RAF attack aircraft there, with the possible threat of attack that would bring to Chile, I don`t see a way they could be put out of action. So, I guess, the mainland wouldn`t be off limits to small actions, but anything larger might not have been feasible, ie, war winning.
                          What about targeting the leadership? There was a willingness in some sectors to send in teams to kill those in charge.
                          Nulli Secundus
                          People always talk of dying for their country, and never of making the other bastard die for his

                          Comment


                          • #73
                            Scuse me for a sec there Gents. A link for OOE's post#61

                            http://www.margaretthatcher.org/comm...p?docid=110663
                            Fortitude.....The strength to persist...The courage to endure.

                            Comment


                            • #74
                              Originally posted by Dreadnought View Post
                              The codes for the missles. Once these were broadcast over ECM the threat dimished, however the hospital ship could not broadcast the codes and was struck among a few others.
                              I don't understand your question. We know there were misses.

                              Originally posted by astralis View Post
                              holy crap, i think the soviets would go crazy if that happened.
                              It would have been an HE attack, not a nuke, and Argentina was never under the Soviet nuclear umbrella.
                              Last edited by Officer of Engineers; 14 Apr 09,, 17:07.

                              Comment


                              • #75
                                Choosing to sink the Belgrano

                                Decision to sink the Belgrano
                                [extract from Margaret Thatcher The Downing Street Years (1993), pp214-16]

                                The next day, Sunday, which I spent at Chequers, was one of great - though often misunderstood - significance for the outcome of the Falklands War. As often on Sundays during the crisis, the members of the War Cabinet, Chiefs of Staff and officials came to Chequers for lunch and discussions. On this occasion there was a special matter on which I needed an urgent decision.

                                I called together Willie Whitelaw , John Nott , Cecil Parkinson , Michael Havers , Terry Lewin , Admiral Fieldhouse and Sir Antony Acland , the Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office. ( Francis Pym was in America). Admiral Fieldhouse told us that one of our submarines, HMS Conqueror, had been shadowing the Argentine cruiser, General Belgrano. The Belgrano was escorted by two destroyers. The cruiser itself had substantial fire power provided by 6 inch guns with a range of 13 miles and anti-aircraft missiles. We were advised that she might have been fitted with Exocet anti-ship missiles, and her two destroyer escorts were known to be carrying them. The whole group was sailing on the edge of the Exclusion Zone. We had received intelligence about the aggressive intentions of the Argentine fleet. There had been extensive air attacks on our ships the previous day and des>Admiral Woodward , in command of the Task Force, had every reason to believe that a full scale attack was developing. The Argentinian aircraft carrier, the 25 de Mayo, had been sighted some time earlier and we had agreed to change the rules of engagement to deal with the threat she posed. However, our submarine had lost contact with the carrier, which had slipped past it to the North. There was a strong possibility that Conqueror might also lose contact with the Belgrano group. Admiral Woodward had to come to a judgment about what to do with the Belgrano in the light of these circumstances. From all the information available, he concluded that the carrier and the Belgrano group were engaged in a classic pincer movement against the Task Force. It was clear to me what must be done to protect our forces, in the light of Admiral Woodward's concern and Admiral Fieldhouse's advice. We therefore decided that British forces should be able to attack any Argentine naval vessel on the same basis as agreed previously for the carrier.

                                Later we approved reinforcements for the Falklands which would be taken there in the QE2. It surprised me a little that the need for reinforcements had not been clear sooner. I asked whether it was really necessary or advisable to use this great ship and to put so many people in it, but as soon as I was told that it was necessary to get them there in time I gave my agreement. I was always concerned that we would not have sufficient men and equipment when the time came for the final battle and I was repeatedly struck by the fact that even such highly qualified professionals as advised us often under-estimated the requirements. We broke up still desperately worried that the aircraft carrier which could have done such damage to our vulnerable Task Force had not been found.

                                The necessary order conveying the change of rules of engagement was sent from Northwood to HMS Conqueror at 1.30 pm. In fact, it was not until after 5pm that Conqueror reported that she had received the order. The Belgrano was torpedoed and sunk just before 8 o'clock that evening. Our submarine headed away as quickly as possible. Wrongly believing that they would be the next targets, the Belgrano's escorts seem to have engaged in anti-submarine activities rather than rescuing its crew, some 321 of whom were lost - though initially the death toll was reported to be much higher. The ship's poor state of battle readiness greatly increased the casualties. Back in London we knew that the Belgrano had been hit, but it was some hours before we knew that she had sunk.

                                A large amount of malicious and misleading nonsense was circulated at the time and long afterwards about the reasons why we sank the Belgrano. These allegations have been demonstrated to be without foundation. The decision to sink the Belgrano was taken for strictly military not political reasons: the claim that we were trying to undermine a promising peace initiative from Peru will not bear scrutiny. Those of us who took the decision at Chequers did not at that time know anything about the Peruvian proposals, which in any case closely resembled the Haig plan rejected by the Argentinians only days before. There was a clear military threat which we could not responsibly ignore. Moreover, subsequent events more than justified what was done. As a result of the devastating loss of the Belgrano, the Argentinian Navy - above all the carrier - went back to port and stayed there. Thereafter it posed no serious threat to the success of the taskforce, though of course we were not to know that this would be so at the time. The sinking of the Belgrano turned out to be one of the most decisive military actions of the war.

                                However, the shocking loss of life caused us many problems because it provided a reason - or in some cases perhaps an excuse - for breaks in the ranks among the less committed of our allies: it also increased pressure on us at the UN. The Irish Government called for an immediate meeting of the Security Council, though after intense pressure from Tony Parsons and some from Javier Perez de Cuellar ] the UN Secretary General, they were eventually persuaded to suspend their request - not, however, before the Irish Defence Minister had described us as"the aggressor" . There was some wavering from the French and rather more from the West Germans, who pressed for a ceasefire and UN negotiations. Moreover, by the time of the sinking of the Belgrano, the diplomatic scene was already becoming more difficult and complicated.

                                I have already mentioned the peace plan which the President of Peru [ Fernando Belaunde Terry ] had put to Al Haig and which he in turn had put to Francis Pym in Washington on 1st and 2nd May, though we had no sight of it until later. With the sinking of the Belgrano, Mr Haig was once again bringing pressure to bear, urging on us diplomatic magnanimity and, expressing his belief that whatever the course of the military campaign there must be a negotiated outcome to avoid open-ended hostility and instability. To add to the confusion, the UN Secretary General was now seeking to launch a peace initiative of his own, much to the irritation of Mr Haig.
                                Fortitude.....The strength to persist...The courage to endure.

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