Forty years ago today, HMS Sheffield, a Type 42 destroyer of the Royal Navy, was struck by an Exocet missile fired from an Argentine Super Étendard strike fighter, with the deaths of 20 crew members and injuries to 26 more. The shock felt at the time as the news filtered through from the South Atlantic was palpable. The vulnerability of the Task Force, 8,000 miles from home and dispatched to retake the Falklands, became only too apparent.
Looking back at the success of the mission in liberating the islands, it is easy to forget that it was by no means a certainty. Given the distances involved and against a well-armed enemy, it was a remarkable feat of arms. Moreover, as Charles Moore has observed, it owed a great deal not just to the soldiers, sailors and airmen who recaptured occupied British territory but to the scientists who helped work out how the threat from the missiles could be thwarted.
The most problematic aspect of the story concerns the attitude of France during the conflict. French companies had made both the Argentine fighter planes and the Exocet missiles, so were an obvious port of call for British military planners anxious to know what they were up against. President François Mitterrand declared support for Britain from the outset of the conflict, yet the extent of the assistance from Paris is still being questioned.
In particular, the French maintained that so-called “kill switches” customarily inserted in the missiles to enable them to be disabled should they ever be used against the seller had not been included in the weapons sold to Argentina in order not to put off the purchasers. Yet when sceptical officials asked scientists to take one of the guidance systems apart, they were able to work out countermeasures that limited the effectiveness of the Argentine air force.
The obvious question, even after a gap of 40 years, is whether the French government knew this, and if so why it did not tell Britain. President Mitterrand’s brother Jacques was involved in the contractual negotiations between the manufacturer Aérospatiale, which he headed, and Argentina, so it cannot have been that hard to find out.
These matters are covered by official secrecy, but is it not time we learnt the full story? Perhaps in a spirit of Franco-UK friendship, President Macron could open the archives and let us find out.
