The Times only heard that a place had been secured for its nominated reporter, John Witherow, at 10.15 p.m on Sunday 4 April. He had to race to catch the train to Portsmouth – for Invincible was scheduled to set sail at midnight. Almost the only instructions Witherow received from Gray’s Inn Road was to pack a dark suit. There was, after all, the possibility he might be asked to dine with the officers in the wardroom. He at least came better prepared for the rigours of a South Atlantic winter than the Sun’s representative who arrived at Portsmouth docks on a motorbike wearing a pair of shorts.9
Robert Fisk was The Times’s star war reporter, but he was in the Middle East. And as it transpired, he would soon have an invasion on his doorstep to cover. John Witherow was a thirty-year-old reporter on the home news desk, who had come to the paper from Reuters as recently as 1980. The son of a South African businessman, he had been brought to England as a child and sent to Bedford School. Before reading history at York University, he had done two years voluntary service in Namibia where he taught and helped establish a library for the inhabitants and was befriended by Bishop Colin Winter, an outspoken critic of Apartheid. He was hardly the obvious choice but, although there was no certainty that the Task Force would see action, his status as a young and unmarried reporter who was not committed anywhere else at that moment weighed in favour of his being sent on an assignment that could take weeks or months – or even take his life.
Only representatives of the British media were allowed to accompany the Task Force, Margaret Thatcher taking the view ‘we certainly didn’t want any foreigners reporting what we were doing down there!’.10 Witherow and his fellow journalists were soon to discover the limitations imposed upon them, their dispatches monitored by MoD minders and by Royal Naval press officers. The minders occasionally prevented details in dispatches leaving the ship only for the same disclosures to be released by the MoD in London. There was to be considerable friction over this and other scores. When either bureaucratic or technical difficulties prevented Witherow getting his dispatches out, the burden of war reporting fell on Henry Stanhope in London. For his information, Stanhope was reliant upon MoD briefings. But in the first weeks of the Task Force’s long journey, the focus was on how diplomacy might yet avert shots being fired in anger. Julian Haviland, the political editor, reported the mood in Westminster as did Christopher Thomas from Buenos Aires. Nicholas Ashford filed from Washington and from New York Zoriana Pysariwsky followed developments at the UN.
With the hawkish Charles Douglas-Home in charge, there was never any doubt what line the paper would take. The seizure of the islands was, the leading article declared as soon as the invasion was confirmed, ‘as perfect an example of unprovoked aggression and military expansion as the world has had to witness since the end of Adolf Hitler’. Russia would back Argentina and nothing but words could be expected from the UN. If need be, it would be necessary to meet force with force.11 On Monday 4 April – the day the Task Force left Portsmouth harbour – there was only one leading article, stretching down the page and occupying sixty-eight column inches and more than five and a half feet. It was written by the editor. ‘When British territory is invaded, it is not just an invasion of our land, but of our whole spirit. We are all Falklanders now’ the paper thundered. The Argentine junta had eliminated its opponents – ‘the disappeared ones’ as they were euphemistically known. ‘The disappearance of individuals is the Junta’s recognized method of dealing with opposition. We are now faced with a situation where it intends to make a whole island people – the Falklanders – disappear.’ This could not be tolerated. The words of John Donne were intoned. And it was time for the Defence Secretary, John Nott, and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, to consider their positions.12
During the weekend, Margaret Thatcher and her deputy, Willie Whitelaw, had tried to shore up Carrington’s resolve to stay. But, as Thatcher put it in her memoirs, ‘Having seen Monday’s press, in particular the Times leader, he decided that he must go.’13 Nott, however, was persuaded to hang on. For Douglas-Home, the most important task was to bolster the Prime Minister’s reserve not to back down. On 2 April, the Foreign Office had presented her with a litany of diplomatic pitfalls if she proceeded with her intention to send, and if necessary, use, the Task Force just as the MoD had listed the military impediments. Her decision to disregard such advice filled many in Whitehall with alarm. It was essential to restrict the strategic decisions to an inner core. An inner ‘War Cabinet’ was formed to meet once (sometimes twice) a day to conduct operations. On it sat Mrs Thatcher, her deputy Whitelaw, Nott, Carrington’s successor at the Foreign Office, Francis Pym and Cecil Parkinson (who, although only Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, could be expected to back his leader’s resolve if the Foreign Office tested it).
In New York, Britain’s UN Ambassador, Sir Anthony Parsons, had achieved a notable triumph in securing Resolution 502, which demanded an Argentine withdrawal from the islands. The Security Council presidency was in the hands of Zaire and Spain and Panama sympathized with Argentina. Russia, which could have vetoed the resolution outright, had no reason to back a NATO country and was heavily dependent on Argentine grain. Parsons’s skill (and a telephone lecture from Mrs Thatcher to King Hussein of Jordan) ensured most of the opposition was neutered into abstention. Only Panama voted against Britain. Yet, while the United States had voted favourably, its true position was equivocal. It could not rebuff its most senior NATO ally, but it did not want to undermine the anti-Communist regime in Buenos Aires. The 1947 Rio Treaty allowed for any American country to assist any other that was attacked from outside the American continent. Washington believed this was a shield against Soviet interference. A British strike could fatally crack the edifice. Indeed, the night the Argentinians had invaded, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Walter Stoessel and Thomas Enders (respectively US Ambassador to the UN; Deputy-Secretary of State; Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America) were among a group of senior US officials who had dined at the Argentine Embassy. Kirkpatrick, in particular, was no friend of Britain. On 13 April she went so far as to suggest ‘If the Argentines own the islands, then moving troops into them is not armed aggression.’14 Could Britain proceed without US endorsement? The lesson of Suez was not encouraging.
The dispatch of the US Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, as a peace broker between Buenos Aires and London bought Washington time to avoid taking sides. President Mitterrand proved a staunch supporter of Britain’s claim to take back islands recognized by international law as her own, but not all the European partners were so steadfast. When the EEC embargo on Argentine imports came up for its monthly renewal in mid-May, Italy and Ireland opted out of it. The closer the Task Force got to fighting the more jumpy became the Germans. Beyond the EEC, Britain’s greatest allies proved to be Pinochet’s Chile, Australia and New Zealand. Auckland’s Prime Minister, Robert Muldoon, wrote a personal article in The Times making clear ‘New Zealand will back Britain all the way’.15 He offered one of his country’s frigates to take the place of a Royal Naval vessel called up for South Atlantic operations.
To Conservatives of Douglas-Home’s cobalt hue, reclaiming the Falklands had implications beyond assuring the self-determination of its islanders. It was also about marking an end to the years of continuous national retreat since Suez. It was about proving that Britain was still great and was not, as Margaret Thatcher put