I’ve never understood the credit Margaret Thatcher was given for sending British troops to retake the Falkland Islands from Argentina in 1982.

The decision to send the Task Force was certainly a gamble but it was by no means brave. Had it failed she would have been gone as Prime Minister: no doubt.

But it was a gamble she simply had to take. Had the troops not been sent her position would have been equally precarious. She could not have sat back and allowed Argentina to keep the Falklands (the Malvinas as we would now know them) by force majeure. She would have been gone within months if not weeks. A British Prime Minister not able to defend British sovereign territory? The Tory party never would take kindly to that.

This was what I like to call the War of Thatcher’s Face. She had to send the troops, had to win, to save face, to preserve her position. Such a decision is the opposite of brave. It isn’t a decision at all. It was almost – but not quite – what in chess is called zugzwang (forced to move) except in Thatcher’s case there was the faint possibility of success.

That the Argentines would turn out to be pretty duff at fusing their bombs correctly and also at enthusing and supporting their soldiers in the field was by no means apparent when the decision had to be made.

It was gamble or die (politically die.) Without that choice she would have been nothing but an ignominious footnote in British History; as opposed to one of the most contentious PMs of recent times.

Nor did I understand the ecstatic reception she was afforded by the islanders themselves when she visited later that year.

If I had been a Falkland Islander I’d have been berating her for allowing the Argentine invasion to occur in the first place – even for encouraging it.

In the end she had no other decision to make – if only because the situation had arisen because she allowed it to.

I’ve been hearing all day on the news about Margaret Thatcher’s “shock” on being told of the intelligence about the imminent Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982.

Why is this being presented/spun as being to her credit? She is said to not have believed that the Argentines would invade. Yet this is despite the fact that she must have had advisers who had warned her of the possibility.

It was only some months after the war, during the Franks inquiry, that she said the things being quoted. She certainly professes shock. But then she had to. She also told the inquiry that immediately after the invasion no-one knew whether Britain could retake the islands. “We did not know – we did not know,” she said.

May I provide a translation? “I’m afraid for my job here. If I don’t wriggle out of this I’ll have to resign.”

Never forget that it was her Government’s decision, for reasons of economy, to withdraw prematurely the Antarctic Survey ship HMS Endurance that sent the signal to the Argentines that Britain was no longer interested in its southern domains and gave them cause to believe the Falklands were theirs for the taking (and keeping.)

Many people at the time (some, like the good lady, still to this day) saw this as Thatcher engineering the conflict. If she is innocent of this charge and that act was simple incompetence then she was – and is – still culpable. I well remember David Owen, Foreign Secretary in the previous Labour Government, saying in a television interview that they had at one time despatched a nuclear submarine to the South Atlantic to warn the Argentines off – a fact which must have been in the minds of Civil Servants in Thatcher’s time.

I also remember Mrs Thatcher quoting the Franks Report in her contribution to the Parliamentary debate following its publication that, “No-one could have foreseen that the Argentines would attack at that time and on that day.”

As I said at the time to whoever would listen: I cannot foresee the exact time and day that it will rain again; but I do know that it will.

…… that the last Glasgow Tram ran along the rails.

The trams were much loved in Glasgow. Thousands turned out to watch their final passing.

There’s film of Glasgow’s trams at the Scottish Screen Archive and The Last Tram appears on You Tube.

We took a day trip over to Ayrshire a couple of weeks ago as we had never before been to Culzean Castle.

The castle is very imposing as you cross over a bridge on the walk from the car park.

This is not how it was originally. It was built as a square tower – typical of the defensive arrangements needed for such buildings in the Middle Ages and to the right here – and has been added to over the years.

The interiors are very impressive. Robert Adam was given the commission to design them in the late 18^th century. He had a passion for symmetry.

Like most National Trust properties no photos are allowed inside. We took the guided tour.

I was surprised the guide expressed puzzlement as to the origin of the unusual pronunciation of Culzean (Cull-ain.) I suggested to him it was most likely due to the old Scottish letter yogh, which looked a bit like the number 3 and fell out of use when printing arrived as the English alphabet didn’t have it; z was used as the nearest approximation, hence Culzean, McFadzean, Menzies, Dalziel etc. The surname MacKenzie would have been pronounced MacKen-yie way back then; the town of Lenzie similarly.

General (later President) Dwight D Eisenhower was given a suite of rooms in Culzean for his lifetime as a gift from a grateful UK government. He visited once when President of the US, so Culzean became a temporary White House. These rooms are not on the tour. They’re now used as a hotel.

This clocktower building is directly opposite the entrance to the Castle proper. It’s substantial enough on its own.

Culzean’s grounds are enormous. We had a long walk to the Swan Pond (there were no swans) came back by a different route and barely touched the acres available.

This building in the grounds close to the castle had a sort of deco look; especially to the windows.

The first commercially successful steamship in Europe sailed up the Clyde on its maiden voyage 200 years ago this month.

For an image see here. It shows a painting of the ship passing Dumbarton Rock. It’s a detail from a picture painted in 1914 by William Daniell.

The ship was commisioned by Henry Bell and called the Comet. She was named for a prominent comet that had appeared in the skies the year before. Bell became known as the father of steam navigation.

This tale and the inspiration for the ship from the earlier Charlotte Dundas was a familiar one to children of my generation but with the demise of shipbuilding on the Clyde I don’t know how much of it today’s youngsters will hear about.

There were substantial celebrations for the 100^th anniversary and again in 1962. This year‘s have been more muted.

At least two obelisks to the memory of Bell were erected on the banks of the Clyde and a replica of the Comet can still be seen in Port Glasgow.

Stalin’s War With Germany, Volume 2. Grafton, 1985, 1199p – including 223p of references and sources, 78p of bibliography and a 38p index.)

I read the previous volume on Stalin’s war with Germany, The Road to Stalingrad, last year. Like that, this too is blighted with an alphanumeric soup of Army and Front names. The Red Army had variously:- Shock Armies, Guards Armies, Guards Tank Armies, Air Armies, Artillery Armies, Motorised Divisions, Rifle Divisions, Guards Cavalry Corps etc – designated by prefixes such as 1st, 2nd – all organised into different Fronts – Southern Front, South-Western Front, Leningrad Front, Steppe Front, Voronezh Front, Bryansk Front, four Ukrainian Fronts, three Baltic Fronts, three Belorussian Fronts, which morphed and changed or merged as the war progressed. Added to this is the proliferation of German units some of which are delineated in words (Sixth Panzer Army) or Roman numerals (XLVI Panzer.) Keeping track of it all is well-nigh impossible. Best to go with the flow as the narrative is very broad brush and consists mostly of plans to attack here or there with the various Soviet forces available to whatever Front is being discussed at the time.

The book gets out of these difficulties when it comes to the diplomatic area, being lucid on the various discussions with the Western Allies on Poland, Greece, Romania etc. In the matter of discussions Tito was unusual among the resistance leaders in German-occupied territories as he stood up to Stalin. The Western Allies were hamstrung in their dealings with Stalin as regards the post war settlements as they had no armies in Eastern Europe. A surprise to me was that there had apparently been a German plan to kidnap President Roosevelt from the Big Three conference in Tehran. Otto Skorzeny (who did rescue Mussolini from his mountain top imprisonment after the Italian change of sides) had a look at the possibility but dismissed it. Seemingly an aeroplane did land some German agents but the plot was foiled as the Russians had a spy in their midst. How much of this was genuine, how much a Soviet fabrication is debatable; Erickson says he has seen no documentary evidence.

This volume starts with the aftermath of the encirclement of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad. Thereafter it describes an almost consistent series of Soviet victories, though there were occasional holdups and slight reverses along the way. The emphasis on the Stavka is lessened here compared to Volume 1, perhaps because there were little or no crises for the Red Army to endure from 1943 on, only extremely bloody slogging. The role of the artillery in reducing German positions prior to Soviet attacks is made obvious – plus the importance of holding back the tanks until the infantry had made the breakthrough.

By this account the halting of the Soviet armies in front of Warsaw was not entirely an exercise in cynicism. They had just made a rapid advance, were at the end of long supply lines, with depleted forces and worn equipment and had suffered considerable losses (nearly 300,000 casualties over the two Fronts concerned in the relevant campaign.) Despite a wide exposure to World War 2 histories I had not been aware till reading this that there had also been an anti-Nazi rising in Slovakia as well as in Warsaw. Then again matters on the Eastern Front have tended to be skimmed by US or British accounts.

It is notable that in this book the war in Italy, D-Day, the breakout from Normandy, the crossing of the Rhine etc are incidental, off-stage, barely mentioned except in terms of co-ordination of attacks. The scale of the Soviet effort comes through loud and clear. In their terms, theirs was the only war. Even some of the German units involved in the Battle of the Bulge were later moved east.

The savage nature of the fighting for Reich territory in East Prussia and in front of and inside Berlin is given note. The 1st echelon of Soviet troops was well-trained, even clean-shaven, and relatively disciplined. The 2nd echelon was a complete contrast, made up either of POWs released by the advance and hurriedly retrained or conscripts from the various recently liberated Soviet republics – all of whom had suffered at German hands (Erickson’s description is “brutalised”) and some of whom may have resented both sides equally.

There is less sense in this volume of Stalin’s controlling hand on the armies, again perhaps due to the victories being won. His impatience comes through, though, and his possible vengefulness.

At one point Erickson gives the figure of over 1,500,000 Communist Party members being casualties in the Great Patriotic War. This underlines the magnitude of the Soviet Union contribution to winning the war as not every soldier would have been a party member. And there were of course the civilian casualties. The final attacks were pushed through with huge losses. Still, even at the end, there were German armies in the field capable of resistance, though some others were going through the motions.

Erickson had the benefit of speaking to some of the Soviet generals involved in writing his history of “Stalin’s War,” It was however written well before the demise of the Soviet Union and may well now have been superseded.

I must mark the passing of Gore Vidal.

As I have only read two of his novels, Myra Breckinridge and Julian, I knew him mostly from his appearances on television which were always entertaining and informative and in which he showed himself to be an unusual citizen of the US (at least from the perspective of this side of the Atlantic) since he was sharply critical of many aspects of his native country’s political and cultural life – a stance which is arguably more patriotic than that of someone who accepts and follows unquestioningly. He dubbed the US the United States of Amnesia, bemoaning the lack of historical knowledge the majority of his countrymen have of their own political system. He was in a position to know, having been brought up right in the heart of government when as a twelve year old he acted as guide to his blind grandfather – the first ever Senator for Oklahoma – through the corridors of Congress.

It is probably as a novelist dedicated to illuminating that history his countrymen are too blindly unaware of that he will be best remembered though various of his television and other appearances remain to give a flavour of his wit and perspicacity.

Most of his books from that US historical cycle are somewhere on my TBR shelves. So many books, so little time.

Eugene Louis Vidal, Jr. (Eugene Luther Gore Vidal) 3/10/1935 – 31/7/2012. So it goes.

Fontana, 2012, 387p.

To anyone familiar with the film The Desert Fox, starring James Mason, the outlines of Rommel’s story will be familiar. The movie, though based on this book – the author even plays himself in the film – concentrates less on Rommel’s military career than his last days; with Rommel’s unwitting contacts with the July plotters leading to his forced suicide.

This biography, written after contact with Rommel’s family and first published in 1950, inevitably tends to be admiring. The author’s personal experience of Rommel’s conduct towards him as a PoW helps in this regard and there were no accusations of war crimes committed by the Afrika Korps. Winston Churchill himself regarded Rommel as a worthy opponent. Rommel’s anti-Nazi credentials are taken for granted by Young. (However recent reassessments in Germany have called this into question.)

In a military sense Rommel’s career speaks for itself. Though criticised as lacking in the strategic sense, his tactical ability, his capacity to see an opportunity and exploit it, to take risks even (especially?) when on the back foot paid off time and again. He had what the Germans call Fingerspitzengefühl, “intuition in his fingers” and a sort of sixth sense for avoiding death.

Not a typical Prussian General (he was in fact a Württemberger and liked nothing better than talking to soldiers from the locality in the thick Swabian dialect) and not from a military family, in the Great War he won the Pour le Mérite for exploits on the Italian Front where he first displayed the qualities which made his troops so willing to follow him. He was in the forefront of the German breakthroughs in the defeat of France in 1940, but his commanders and colleagues thought him too reckless and/or selfish – and too willing to take credit for wider success. Part of this may, of course, have been professional jealousy. It was the Western Desert, with its wide open spaces, that allowed him to show himself as a master of motorised/armoured warfare. He recognised that such battles were more akin to sea warfare than land and he criticised the British for their more rigid approach while acknowledging that their training for more static warfare was excellent.

I had not realised before how nearly General Auchinleck’s Operation Crusader came to defeating Rommel completely a year earlier than Alamein. That the British/Empire forces did so well considering their inferior equipment (poorer anti-tank guns, lower quality tanks – some Grants were available at this time but Shermans not until the next year) speaks volumes for their tenacity and endeavour. Rommell eventually turned the tables but his race to Egypt seriously overstretched both his army and his supply lines.

It was his contention that reinforcement could have resulted in him capturing Egypt and the Suez Canal. Once held at Alamein, and facing a well supplied and trained opponent with overwhelming superiority, he and his staff knew the jig was up.

He was bitterly aggrieved that, in the subsequent retreat and the aftermath of Operation Torch, reinforcements were then rushed in to Tunisia in what was by the time a lost cause.

After his first inspections of it he also knew that the much vaunted Atlantic Wall was anything but impregnable yet nevertheless – even through his disillusionment with Hitler and the upper General Staff (he had inspired the emnity of Kietel and Jodl in particular) – he threw himself into efforts to improve it.

British people who lived through the Second World War have a tendency to refer to the Italian army as a byword for uselessness (making jokes about tanks with only reverse gears for example.) It is noteworthy that Rommel himself had a greater appreciation of their qualities. “The Italian soldier was willing, unselfish and a good comrade and, considering his circumstances, his achievement was far above the average.” He goes on to add that their army’s performance exceeded anything the Italian Army had done for over 100 years. He attributes any failure to their military and state system, their poor equipment and lack of interest from Italian politicians.

Greenhill Books, 1994, 264 (+ xiv) p

Despite its title this book is not about the German aeroplanes of the First World War but rather the pilots who flew them. When originally published in 1931 it was the first book in English to deal with the German airmen of the time. Many of those names were familiar to me from other books on the war in the air (Quentin Reynolds’s They Fought For The Sky, Alexander McKee’s The Friendless Sky) but these mainly dealt with the Western Front. Here, as well as names such as Max Immelman, Oswald Boelcke, the Richthofen brothers, Werner Voss, Ernst Udet and Herman Göring, coverage is also given to other war theatres: Gunther Plüschow’s exploits in the far East, flying out of Tsingtao till it fell to the Japanese, Leutnant v Eschwege – dubbed “The Eagle of the Ægean Sea” by his Bulgarian Allies – whose base was Drama in Macedonia, “odd jobs” on the Eastern Front blowing up Russian supply railway lines, and in the Sinai doing the same to railways and aqueducts. These latter adventures at times read almost like Biggles stories, though not fiction and told from the opposite side.

The book is prefaced by an introduction (from 1994) by Norman Franks giving some historical context and two lists; pilots who achieved a “score” of 30 or more and all who were awarded the “Pour le Mérite” (“the Blue Max.”) It also has an odd typographical quirk where every semi-colon is preceded by a space ; as here. Was this a 1930s standard?

Since 1931 some of the incidents have been illuminated by more recent research. For instance, the famous “Red Baron,” Manfred von Richthofen, is now thought to have been killed by a bullet fired by an infantryman rather than Captain Roy Brown.

‘Vigilant’ (Claud W Sykes) when dealing with the Western Front has an irritating habit of referring to “English” aeroplanes or pilots when “British” would be more accurate but this is probably the term the Germans used and he is telling the tales from the German viewpoint. He is clearly much taken with the valour and chivalry of fliers on both sides and takes pains to point out that the German air force kept flying and fighting up to the armistice but the last sentence of his final paragraph, “Im Kreig geboren, im Kreig gestorben.* Germany has no flying Corps and we all look forward to the day when no country will need one. But a few months before we celebrate the tenth anniversary of the armistice, two Germans, setting forth from a Dominion of the British Empire, flew the Atlantic from east to west. The third member of the crew was a British subject. Germany has still a future in the air!” reads somewhat chillingly now.

*Born in the war, died in the war. This refers to the fact that the German Flying Corps did not exist as such before the war and was forced by the armistice to hand over its aeroplanes and so did not outlive it.

An article by Tom Holland in Saturday’s guardian review about the aftermath of the Roman Empire argued that there was no sudden change from classical to mediæval times, no instant forgetting, but rather a long interregnum in which the rise of Islam was an important feature.

Holland points out that the transition was all a messy business, triggering the evolution of legends of various sorts, which in Britain involved the King Arthur stories plus the evocation of elves and orcs to account for the gigantic ruins of Roman buildings. He sees Tolkien’s endeavours as an attempt to restore these myths to the culture.

The article surprisingly, to my mind, mentions Science Fiction favourably in that Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy and Herbert’s Dune sequence both recognised what Holland sees as the salient aspect of the transformation somewhat before it gained foothold in academe.

When I read the books it was easy to recognise that Asimov’s trilogy was modelled on the fall of the Roman Empire but it is the character of the Mule that Holland finds interesting – a Muhammad like figure with unusual powers. (That the Mule upset the apple cart of the Foundation’s “psychohistory” suggests to me a reflection of Asimov’s world-view.)

The parallels of the Dune sequence with Arab culture were of course unmistakeable even as a very young teenager. Paul Atreides (Muad’Dib) as Muhammad was at that time a step beyond me but is unmissable now. Herbert did seem to be in sympathy with Arab culture if not necessarily the religion it spawned. At the time I took his critique to be of the phenomenon of religion as a whole rather than Islam per se and I see no reason to alter it.

(The article further ponders the historical evidence surrounding the life of Muhammad, a matter on which I am not in a position to judge.)

Historically, the Roman Empire’s fall cannot be seen as anything other than significant. That authors still continue to see it as a template within which to set their stories – Holland mentions Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica as other not so rigorous examples – is testament to the endurance of its legacy.