William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

And yet the crowds packed the quayside, there was cheering and flag-waving as our gallant boys sailed off to do battle with the foe. The most alarming aspect of all the multitude of words so far expended is that comparatively few of them have been concerned with the actual fate that may greet these servicemen. “People will get hurt” appears at the moment to be the favourite euphemism for “killed and maimed.” “I’m afraid people get hurt in war,” was John Nott’s variation during a commendably vigorous and aggressive interview by Brian Walden on Weekend World (LWT), as if he were talking about pulled muscles or tennis elbow. Once again the bleak sense of déjá vu descended: images of chateau-dwelling, claret-swilling generals during the First World War, staff officers planning strategy hundreds of miles from the front line. The front line in this particular case looks like being halfway round the world. If I were a naval rating on HMS Invincible I would feel very uneasy about what I was being asked to do.

But then that’s not a characteristic response from people who volunteer to join the armed forces. This fact was made evident by a coincidental repeat of The Woolridge View (BBC2) about the Navy fieldgun teams which participate in the Royal Tournament. Here men volunteered to “learn to withstand unreasonable physical pain” within a training regime whose working conditions were blind obedience to the unbelievably tyrannical discipline of the NCO coaches. These men mercilessly knock their teams into shape. “Once fit,” a coach boasted, “they become beasts.” I suppose at this point one should growl “Look out Argentina,” but on reflection — not much required — it seems demeaning and sad. Clearly there’s nothing terribly sinister about it being applied to sport, but, equally clearly, one knows that these same values on display are intended to function on the battlefield as well.

1982

Shortly after the Falklands War I made two predictions in this column. One was right and the other was wrong. The first was that the journalists would have large axes to grind and deep grudges to settle over the treatment they had received. The second was that when the reels of film finally came back with the cameramen and reporters the visual record of the war would be transformed, that, finally rid of the MOD minders and government censorship, we’d get to see the pictures that had been denied us. “There should be,” I said, “some fascinating documentaries.”

Well, I was wrong. The Falklands documentaries and videos have established that what we saw at the time — albeit two weeks late — is all we’re going to get. That it was a naive assumption to think otherwise was made clear on Panorama (BBC1) in an excellent and informative programme on the astonishing hamstringing that the media experienced.

The main argument against unrestricted reporting of a war is that any information made available to the public is of value to the enemy. This is manifestly true in the case of military operations. “Eisenhower announces date of D-Day invasion” would not have been the kind of headline calculated to win friends among the armed forces, and no one, not even the most passionate advocate of a free press, would expect this sort of information to be made open. On the Panorama programme various top brass and the editor of the Daily Telegraph made exactly this point. This would have been fair and just if the practice at the time had been even approximate to this ground rule. But the mare’s nest of crossed lines, ambivalences, duplicities, disinformation and plain lying made the excuse of preserving military secrets a ludicrous sham.

The best example of this was the Goose Green leak when the World Service announced that the paratroops were advancing on the settlement, as indeed they were. The understandable wrath of the men on the ground was directed at the quislings of the BBC when in actual fact the information had been provided by a “senior government official” keen to provide some “good news.” Not, in any event, that it would have been difficult for the Argentinians to have drawn the conclusion that Goose Green was a key target. One of the more curious assumptions of the MOD’s case is that the enemy is extremely stupid and can only base his strategic and tactical decisions on what he happens to read in the newspapers.

It was Churchill who coined the phrase “in war the truth is so important that it must be protected by a bodyguard of lies.” The aptness of this saw is very confined. Give it a general frame of reference and its aphoristic certainties conceal a more sinister import. As one of the news editors perceptively remarked, this sort of media manipulation possesses only short-term advantages, but in the longer term its consequences can be far from beneficial for the perpetrators. It’s clear that from now on a deep cynicism and profound suspicion will colour the relationship between the press and the MOD. It won’t be a bad thing if some of that rubs off on the public.

But will it? Most of the truth about the Falklands will emerge eventually. Some books are already telling us facts we didn’t know before, certain reporters are re-filing the “missing” dispatches. But they will be read by only a fraction of those who were tuned in to the news and reading the newspapers at the time.

And the MOD and the government will no doubt claim that this Panorama programme was biased. Of course it was and correctly so. The gags have been removed and the media have made a convincing case against the government’s manipulation of the news to suit its ad hoc political motives and ambitions. The ball is now in its court. But I suspect that the response will be “not available for comment.”

1982

Those Tory MPs dismayed by Archbishop Runcie’s lack of gung-ho spirit over our Great Victory in the Falklands will be able to console themselves with reruns of the first major documentary to have emerged from the conflict: BBC1’s eight-part Task Force South. Here was a chance, one thought, to get things straight, to produce an account of the war under conditions where accusations of aiding and abetting the enemy and lowering national morale need no longer apply. And, what’s more, under circumstances that should be a gift to your average documentary maker, namely an eager public who sensed there was more to be told and, perhaps most valuable, a public who, if not well informed, was at least cognizant of all the major facts, geography, names of key personalities, etc.

So why was Task Force South —or at least the two episodes we saw last week — so wretchedly bland, almost insultingly simple in its tone and approach? It was as if a decision had been taken not to make the thing too complicated, as if it were aimed at an intermediate class of foreign language students — a teaching aid in an “O” level course on contemporary British history. There was a lot of skilful editing on show and for much of the time the pictures were allowed to tell their own story, but the narration — supplied by Richard Baker and Brian Hanrahan — and the editorial approach seemed studiously inoffensive and pussyfooting. There was a notable absence of comment over the Carrington resignation and the merest nod at Al Haig’s furious shuttling. Both those topics, I’ll concede, are particularly gamey cans of worms, and I dare say that it could be argued that even lifting the lid for a second or two could eat into time that could be more profitably used elsewhere: but some indication of the complexities and controversies surrounding them was definitely required. Thus far at least, it doesn’t seem to be forthcoming.