Falklands surrender

I have a grandson, ten years old, who's interested in astronomy and who already knows more about the space programme and the possibility, or he says the 'non' possibility, of reaching Scorpio than I will ever know.

We were watching the news together, or rather the weather satellite picture that precedes the news. I told him I thought that the photograph of the Pacific Ocean and the whole of North America and a clear picture of the drifting weather systems was one of the most wonderful things that had happened in my lifetime. 'Didn't you have it,' he said, 'when you were a boy?' 'No,' I said. He was baffled.

Well, there's another convention that concerns the satellite – a new convention in news reporting that has crept up on us on cats' paws and it's something that's going to revolutionise, if it hasn't already done it, the writing of history. Historians still, I notice, stay with written documents and what the actors say happened after the event.

What I'm talking about is something startlingly relevant to the reporting of the Falklands war and to the fall, or should we say the reshuffling, of the Argentine junta. Every night, for half an hour before midnight, as a supplement to our earlier half-hours of news round-ups, we have one network programme that conducts interviews at length by satellite, not with network correspondents, not with bespectacled students of affairs, not with knowing journalists, but with the actual participants in the events – the people who have to bear responsibility for them.

So, for instance, a two-way dialogue from two capitals between the British ambassador to Washington and Mr Costa Méndez of Argentina or the Israeli ambassador and the Lebanese ambassador calling each other dreadful names. The novelty of what is rapidly becoming a daily or nightly convention threw my mind back with a lurch the other evening to the old, innocent, or if you like supremely hypocritical, tradition of news gathering and news dissemination in the First World War.

I wondered how it would have been, how we would have felt, if the young man who conducts these interviews from Washington, a blonde gollywog with a sharp eye and a sharper mind, had been able to bring in Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig from Allied GHQ in France and said to him, 'Field Marshal, thank you for being with us. The unofficial estimate of the losses of your men, after this first day of the Battle of the Somme, is between fifty-five and sixty thousand, yet you say that the position is holding and that the morale of your men is splendid. Would you explain that to us, Field Marshal?'.

Well, the other evening – and I'd better say exactly when, since events and attitudes towards them can turn somersaults overnight – on Wednesday evening then, we first saw pictures of flag-waving in London and a happy Mrs Thatcher and a happy Mr Nott. Then we cut to the non-appearance on the palace balcony of General Galtieri in Buenos Aires and shots of rioting in the streets. Then we had an interview with Mr Denis Healey, brought in as a former defence minister, to speculate on what lay ahead for the repatriation of prisoners, the administration of the Falklands and so on.

Then, and understandably the most interesting segment, was a long talk with an Argentine in Buenos Aires, a military man with close ties to the junta, the one that ran the war. He was asked at once about the discrepancy between the British and the Argentine reports of the Falklands war and where things stood at the moment. He began without a second's hesitation with a remarkable sentence. He said, 'In wartime, all governments lie, except when they're winning'. I don't think anybody has put in a more toothsome nutshell what seems to me to be the root of the nasty conflict that could go on developing between London and Buenos Aires – the drastically varying accounts of what was happening, what has happened and what is going to happen as they've been given by each government to its own people.

A dictatorship is nothing if not positive. It can allow differences of opinion on how things should be done, on effectiveness, but not on the aims and the principles it governs by. Dictators know in their bones that they are there on sufferance so they must dragoon public opinion by not arguing about the truth, but by proclaiming it and Argentina is, among many dictatorships in Latin America, notorious for its treatment of people who stop saying, 'Yes, general! No, general!' and who publish or speak their own version of the truth. They simply disappear. They're known as 'the disappearing ones'.

So I imagine the military expert we heard on Wednesday night had his work cut out tiptoeing around any private misgivings he might have had before he marched solidly, but with evident sincerity, along the party line. I, for one, though, didn't get the impression of a man simply reciting propaganda. His opening sentence for one thing implied an admission that the junta had to lie to its people since it was losing. We have to remember that Argentina hasn't, within living memory, fought anybody but its own terrorists, guerrillas and its own people and it was plain at the start, from the April invasion, that the Argentine people were caught up in a novel wave of exhilaration much like the ecstasy that overtook England in August 1914.

Well, from then on, the official news – and there's no other – confidently pictured the sinking of the approaching British task force. When the British put their first men ashore and American estimates ran to something like 2,000 men or more, Mr Costa Méndez, himself, ridiculed the claim on television. More like 400 he said. By the time Britain had secured her foothold and was moving on, the Buenos Aires papers were teaching their people about the 1940 British evacuation from Dunkirk and were promising a repeat performance. The comparative figures on the loss of aircraft were, of course, far apart. The Argentine reports of damage to the task force, even more so.

When the final moment came and we, and I don't doubt newspapers around the world, showed the photograph of General Moore holding up the surrender document, that was the time to watch what the Argentine television and press were saying and being told to say. In the first 24 hours, the official word was that General Galtieri, thinking of the rough time that both sides were having bending against snowstorms and suffering from disease and exhaustion, that he'd arranged a humanitarian ceasefire with the British. It was in the confident belief that the Argentine people would applaud this magnanimous gesture that General Galtieri announced he would speak from the palace balcony that evening. Well, by nightfall, the truth, the essential fact, anyway, had moved in like a summer thunderstorm. The general wisely chose to talk indoors on television.

At this point, the most interesting note, a strong hint of the mischief to come, was that nowhere did one hear or read the dread word 'rendicion' – surrender. Our Argentine military expert the other evening wouldn't use it. Mr Costa Méndez, trained in the quaint and admirable tradition of an earlier generation of diplomats like Lord Carrington, took on himself the prime responsibility and offered to resign. Mr Costa Méndez scorned the word 'surrender'. But, from foreign radio and from word of mouth, the people learned the truth.

Yet, the old junta's version of how it lost prevails, namely, that the British would never have won alone, that the villain of the piece is the United States which overwhelmed them with advanced military technology. Maybe it will come out later but no American source or digging reporter has made us aware that the United States offered much more than very useful intelligence, radar, refuelling facilities and the like.

The Argentine military man boosted the official view by remarking that 50 per cent of the British fleet – I take it he meant the task force – had been put out of action. He mused, he wondered how the British people would feel when only half their fleet came limping into port. This also is news to us. At any rate, however the junta is reshuffled, whether or not even the Peronists eventually come to power, there doesn't seem much doubt at the moment that Argentina is not going to bow to the British version of what happened or to Mrs Thatcher's long-range plans for the future of the islands.

The battle for the Falklands, we're reading and hearing from Buenos Aires, was the first campaign of the war. It was lost because of an American stab in the back, that's the parrot phrase and it was hard, the other evening, to know whether the furious crowds in the main square of Buenos Aires, were hurling the word 'traitors' at the generals or the Americans.

And dark hints are still thrown out that the war will go on this year, next year, from the mainland. There is, apparently, no present intention on the part of the new team to accept British sovereignty or a return to the old status quo. Now this may be desperate bluster but whether it is or not, it is meant to compel Britain to maintain a large and expensive garrison and, here, an awkward truth intrudes itself from Washington.

It's the first move in re-adjusting an American hemisphere policy that we've talked about before, the need of the United States to mend all those broken South American fences and heal those wounded friendships. It's something new and disturbing. The strong reluctance of the Reagan administration to support Britain in maintaining this rearguard force, a semi-permanent garrison. The NATO countries, too, are not inclined to rejoice over the indefinite withdrawal of part of the British fleet to the South Atlantic.

So I think you can expect the president and Secretary Haig, from now on, to press Mrs Thatcher to moderate her fighting posture considerably and sit down to work out with the Argentines a compromise solution.

One administration official put it sharply: 'It is unthinkable for us to offer carte blanche to the British for a permanent state of de facto war.' Secretary Haig anticipated this fear weeks ago when he hoped aloud that Mrs Thatcher would remember Winston Churchill's prescription for warriors, 'In war, resolution, in victory, magnanimity.'

There is, however, another line of Churchill's that had better be recalled. It is not the end of the Falklands conflict, 'it is the end of the beginning'.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.