Philip - Armadas

Sir,

Please be advised of the following.

1/This is to inform you that at 12:01 hours GMT this day, 1st September, 1969, a two hundred miles Total Air and Maritime Exclusion Zone (TAMEZ) will come into effect in respect of the following map references: 514140S, 575110W (East Falkland); 541653S, 363029W (South Georgia); and 67358S, 68759W, (British Antarctic Territories).

2/You are hereby notified that Her Majestys Government reserves to itself the absolute right to authorise the use of force to arrest or to destroy any Argentine flagged aircraft or vessel discovered within the aforementioned two-hundred-mile radius TAMEZs without warning.

3/All Argentine Army, Navy and Air Force assets inside the aforementioned TAMEZs should be evacuated immediately. Any such assets remaining within any of the TAMEZs will be treated as hostile from 00:01 hours GMT on 10th September, 1969.

4/Any ships or aircraft suspected to be carrying weapons, war supplies or military personnel from the mainland to the Falklands will be liable to attack without warning.

I have the honour to be Her Majestys Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs.

This was the verbatim text of the note handed to the Cha rg d ' affaires at the Embassy of the Argentine Republic in Washington D.C. shortly before seven oclock (local time) on the evening of Sunday 31st August, 1969. It was signed for and on behalf of Her Majestys Government by Lord Thomas Carlyle Harding-Grayson, the United Kingdoms Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs.

The phoney war period between the British announcement of the imposition of three Total Air and Maritime Exclusion Zones (TAMEZs) in the South Atlantic and the commencement of hostilities seemed, at the time, to drag on interminably. Moreover, its longevity some thirty-seven days eventually began to suggest to the rest of the world that the resolve of the British might, in some way be in question.

This, of course, ignores the practical problems of waging war many thousands of miles from ones nearest bases; and the restraining effect of the quietly persistent behind the scenes pressure from the Brenckmann Administration in Washington, demanding that peace should be given not one but several, last chances. That said, for the Argentine Junta, we now know that Henry Kissingers shuttle diplomacy to Buenos Aires, was for the men in the Casa Rosada, very much the equivalent of drinking in the last chance saloon.

Although sadly, this was a thing neither he, or anybody else, was able to communicate to General Juan Carlos Ongana Carballo and his co-dictators before it was far, far too late.

Rightly, I think, there is a consensus amongst scholars of these things that the Argentine had plenty of opportunities to step back from the brink, and wilfully ignored them all. Extraordinarily, when Henry Kissinger informed them that in the event of war, they could expect no further aid, military or fiscal from the United States, they dismissed the threat and its consequences as yet another bluff .

Undoubtedly, the Secretary of States two el ongated unsuccessful attempts to talk sense into the Junta deploying friendship, reason and in the end cajoling and threats were genuine attempts, and for the Argentine, tragically missed opportunities to avoid hostilities. Kissinger had eventually conceded defeat. After which, with no little exasperation and a very heavy heart, President Brenckmann had ordered the US Department of Defense to offer all assistance to the United Kingdoms military operations in the South Atlantic short of US personnel actually participating in war-fighting missions, while tying British hands until midnight, DC time on the night of 6-7th October 1969.

All such support should be rendered on the basis of United Kingdom forces operating out of area under the auspices of the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance

In other words, henceforth the United States would provide logistical support to its ally as if it was fighting in Europe against Soviet aggression. The message ought to have been loud and clear to the Junta had its members not been selectively deaf, dumb and blind by then that whatever happened, the Brits were not on their own, regardless of the collateral damage to US foreign policy objectives and influence in Latin America.

That was not to say that US support for the British cause was, in any sense, unconditional. In fact, it was the reverse; it was simply that the Thatcher Administration in Oxford was, in many ways, as wilfully obtuse in certain respects as its Argentine counterparts in Buenos Aires. There were limits to what the White House, and Main Street America was prepared to stomach and although, later there was a great deal of controversy about the question of whether the United Kingdom was entitled to employ what amounted to unrestricted submarine warfare in the South Atlantic, this had never, at any time been the view from Pennsylvania Avenue. However, this was not a debate conducted in public; meaning that it was not understood, even in Washington, that the Brenckmann Administrations NATO-like support for the British war effort was strictly conditional, not the free hand that Margaret Thatcher believed it to be and was subsequently to discover, it was not, having never really understood that US policy in Latin America was not just about the fate of the Falkland Islands, let alone the health of the fable transatlantic special relationship!

However, none of this was immediately apparent on the day the Argentine Junta was informed that the US Governments patience was exhausted.

The White House, faced by the Organisation of American States OAS - intransigence over its preferred solution to the Cuba Problem, and realising that the Generals in the Argentine and their South American allies were presently beyond reason, had pragmatically determined to press the reset button vis--vis US-Latin American relations. Modern historians suggest that the OASs unreasoning, self-defeating obstruction over Cuba was the last straw. Perhaps, but US exasperation with even its few remaining friends in South America had been rampant since long before the October War and, in many respects, the only surprising thing was that it took so long for the White Houses patience to snap.