Margaret Thatcher: Falklands Was Defining

When the strutting head of a military junta General Leopold Galtieri invaded the Falkland Islands, most Britons had to rush to their atlases to find out just where the islands were.

The government appeared to be equally taken by surprise - so much so that the Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington resigned.

There followed a frantic round of shuttle diplomacy, brokered by the Americans.

To the astonishment of people in Britain, to the dismay of the Argentinians, and to the amazement of the Americans and the rest of the world, Britain assembled a task force to sail to the South Atlantic.

It looked like Lord Palmerston's Gunboat Diplomacy had returned, that Britain was somehow trying to recapture its colonial past, a final hurrah of an Empire on which the sun had set decades before.

The crisis became a defining moment of Margaret Thatcher's premiership, and changed her image and her political fortunes.

Before April 2, 1982, when the junta in Buenos Aires ordered the invasion of the Falkland islands - called Las Malvinas by the Argentines - opinion polls showed her to be the most unpopular Prime Minister ever.

After British forces recaptured the Falkland islands and South Georgia her popularity soared, allowing her to call a general election in 1983 which she won by a landslide.

Margaret Thatcher and husband Denis in Stanley in 1983

As so often in military conflict, the line between triumph and disaster was thin.

Had things gone wrong, her time in office would have come to a hasty end and modern British political history would have taken an alternative course - leading to a very different present.

Mrs Thatcher established and chaired a small war cabinet, officially called the ODSA Overseas and Defence committee, South Atlantic, to take charge of the conduct of the war.

Within days of the invasion, the ODSA had authorised and dispatched a naval task force to retake the islands.

Despite the effectiveness of the Argentine air force with its Exocet missiles and some serious military setbacks for the British, including the sinking of the Sir Galahad which was carrying the Welsh Guards in San Carlos Water, British troops first took back South Georgia, and then the Falklands.

Fortunately for the British, many of the French-made Exocets failed to detonate.

In bloody night-time hand-to-hand fighting, the Argentine army conscripts proved little match for the highly-trained British Paras and Royal Marine Commandos.

The Gurkhas, in particular, struck terror into the hearts of Argentine troops who were cold, wet, miserable and demoralised, dug in on the windswept Falklands hills.

Argentina surrendered on June 14, and the Union Jack was hoisted in the Falklands capital Port Stanley by exhausted but jubilant troops.

The conflict cost the lives of  255 British servicemen and 3 Falkland Islanders.

Some 649 Argentinians died, half of them after the British nuclear-powered submarine HMS Conqueror torpedoed and sank the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano on May 2 in the most controversial military action of the war.

British troops fighting in the Falklands during the conflict

Mrs Thatcher was criticised in parliament and, famously, on television by a member of the public for the decision to sink the Belgrano, which reports said was sailing away from the Falklands at the time.

She maintained that the Argentine cruiser had posed a threat to British forces.

She was also criticised for neglecting the defence of the Falklands , allowing the Argentinian junta the opportunity to invade in the first place - neglect which led Lord Carrington to resign.

Overall, however, she was perceived as a highly capable, committed, and above all successful war leader, and the "Falklands factor" , along with a bitterly divided Labour Party, undoubtedly paved the way for her subsequent general election victory.

In the years after the conflict, Mrs Thatcher often referred in public and in private to the "Falklands spirit", reflecting her nostalgia not only for her popularity at the time, but also her preference for the streamlined and efficient decision-making of the military and a small war cabinet rather than the drawn-out and often painstaking deal-making of cabinet government in peacetime.

The Falklands revealed many of the qualities that marked Mrs Thatcher's time in office - her determination, her conviction that she was right, and her abrasive dismissal of anyone who questioned that conviction.

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