The worst reported war since the Crimean
One of Britain's leading novelists recalls how
the conflict unfolded back home
Julian Barnes
Guardian
Monday February 25, 2002
In April 1982 I took over from Clive James as
the Observer's television critic. I anticipated a cosy
period of acclimatisation: a new American soap called
Dynasty was soon to start, followed by the year's main event, the stirring
quasi-warfare of the World Cup in Spain. Instead, at coffee time on the Monday
morning of my second week, ITV brought us the real thing live: the departure of
a British military force to recapture a piece of colonial territory 8,000 miles
away. The day was calm and blue at Portsmouth; two aircraft carriers towered
over the waterside houses as tugs chivvied them out to sea; farewelling
sailors lined the ships' edges; all was done with Royal Tournament precision.
Then the fleet steamed off into misty long-shot, while the helicopters strapped
to the decks shrank to polished beetles. It looked rather good on television,
this war that would doubtless be called off before the equator was reached.
Little did we guess that these were the last
sunny, honest, unspun images we were likely to get
for some time; or that the Falklands war would turn out to be the
worst-reported war since the Crimean. While our armed forces defeated the Argentinians, the Ministry of Defence
was putting to rout the British media. All the significant news, good or bad,
was announced or leaked from London. Reporters in the south Atlantic had the
sour experience of hearing "their" news being broken for them on the
World Service. Reports were censored, delayed, occasionally lost, and at best
sent back by the swiftest carrier-turtle the Royal Navy could find. When relations
between the press and the navy on board the Hermes were at their worst, Michael
Nicholson of ITN and Peter Archer of the Press Association prefaced their
bulletins with the rider that they were being censored. This fact was itself cen sored.
In the age of image, the Falklands war remained
image-free for much of its length - no British pictures for 54 of the 74 days
the conflict lasted - and image-weak thereafter. Don McCullin,
our greatest living war photographer, was refused accreditation (so was Roddy Llewellyn, no doubt for different reasons). While the
task force was at sea, there was only "radiovision":
the voices of Brian Hanrahan and Michael Nicholson
embellished by stills. And when the action on land began, the images were
limited and controlled. Official factoids were grudgingly provided by the
Ministry of Defence spokesman Ian McDonald, a man
with the delivery and charisma of a speak-your-weight machine.
So the war, instead of being experienced back
home as a continuous narrative, was a succession of jump-cuts, of sporadic
sound- and vision-bites. The words that endure: Gotcha, Yomp,
Rejoice, I Counted Them All Out and I Counted Them All Back. The still
pictures: a library shot of the Belgrano, a yomping marine with a Union Jack attached to his radio
aerial, the camouflaged face of Max Hastings, the
reconstructed face of Simon Weston. The vision-bites: departure of the fleet,
Harriers leaving the deck, the Sheffield ablaze, helicopters at Bluff Cove
blowing liferafts to the shore with their rotors,
burial of the dead at Goose Green, Argentinian
prisoners with P&O cruise labels around their necks. Nor did these
sequences always come in the correct order. If bad news couldn't be hidden, it
was certainly repositioned: thus the estimate of casualties at Bluff Cove was
covered by heartening shots of the QE2 returning home.
Given this vacuum, and the trifling official
opposition to the war (Michael Foot, "inveterate peacemonger",
in his self-applauding phrase, led a traditionally bellicose Labour party), a head of toxic jingoism built up. Driving
round Nottinghamshire at the time, I was amazed that such a high proportion of
the population owned Union Jacks. The bull frog tendency of the Tory party was
in full croak. In pubs, it was wise to avoid discussion with learned readers of
the Sun. It is still a surprise that the newspaper actually withdrew that
Gotcha headline. Later editions led with the much more caring and concerned
question: "Did 1200 Argies Drown?"
Every so often, you would shake your head and
think that it couldn't, at this late stage of the 20th century, be happening
like this. Or at least not for this reason: perhaps it was all about mineral
reserves of incalculable wealth in the Antarctic, which we would lose unless we
retained the Falklands? But no, it really was as simple as Borges said it was:
two bald men fighting over a comb. Moralising
aggression was the dominant public tone, and Brian Hitchen,
editor of the Daily Star, was probably right when he said: "Most people
would have been pig-sick if there hadn't been a fight." And for once, no
one could stop us. This wasn't one of those measly pinko
UN combined-ops; it wasn't putting down Commie insurgents; this time, the Yanks
damn well couldn't tell us to stop. It was one-on-one, us-and-them, everyone
else out of the ring or off the pitch. And when the referee - Alexander Haig,
as it happened - tried to blow the whistle, nobody took any notice. After all,
what had been happening domestically for the last couple of decades - a slow
downward drift, squabbles with Europe, lack of respect out there? Well, we'd learn them respect. This was our war, and we were jolly well
going to have it.
The fact that the rest of the world viewed the
war as a bizarre and brainless squabble between nostalgic imperialism and
nostalgic fascism was irrelevant; we didn't care what the rest of the world
thought, except to imagine that it was impressed. ("What did you make of
that war?" I asked a Swiss friend recently. He paused, frowned, and went
into maximum-politeness mode. "I thought it was . . . ridiculous," he
replied.) The fact that we'd been trying for decades to offload the islands,
with the ardent Thatcherite Nicholas Ridley
presenting a leaseback solution to the House of Commons only two years
previously, was forgotten. The fact that we'd traded with the junta, welcomed
its leaders and sold arms to them, but now realised
that it was a filthy dictatorship after all, was swallowed without a burp. The
fact that there were a mere 1,800 islanders, and that their way of life was
preserved at the cost of 1,000 British casualties and 1,800 Argentinian
ones did not seem a grossly stupid and expensive way of conducting foreign
policy; it proved that freedom is indivisible, tyranny will be defeated, and
the wishes of the loyal locals sovereign. Oh, and the fact that we're now
trying to get rid of Gibraltar has absolutely nothing to do with the case.
The Falklands war was the making of Mrs Thatcher, and therefore has enduring consequences. But
the episode of war itself has remained enclosed, separate, unreal,
without consequence. Are the British any more attached to the islanders than
they were before? Do we give the location a thought except as a place of battle
and burial? Do we think of a future solution, or have we simply decided that
there is no longer a problem? By the end of the 1980s, the estimated cost of
the action and its aftermath had reached £2m an islander, but everyone seems to
have stopped counting long ago.
Dr Johnson, seeking to prevent an earlier
Falklands conflict, wrote: "It is wonderful with what coolness and
indifference the greater part of mankind see war commenced. Those that hear of
it at a distance, or read of it in books, but have never presented its evils to
their minds, consider it as little more than a
splendid game." His truths persist. Television and football kept hovering
round the edges of that distant war of 1982, and their values bled into it.
Match of the Day with deaths? One of the first significant moves by the briefly
regnant Argentinian governor of the Malvinas was to
promise a free colour television set to every island
home in time for the World Cup. (Transistor radios in exchange for vasectomy
seemed to work, so why not tellies for sovereignty?)
And do you remember who first brought news of the ceasefire to viewers on BBC1?
Not Mrs Thatcher, not Ian McDonald, not Brian Hanrahan. No, it was David Coleman.
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