Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [154]
On the morning of Monday 8 June John Nott and I met Sir Henry Leach, the First Sea Lord, who argued vigorously the importance of the surface fleet. I have the greatest respect for his judgement. He could well argue that the Falklands War proved him right. He could certainly argue today that with the end of the Cold War and events in the Gulf there is now a need for mobile forces and a strong navy. At that time I had to disagree with him because I could see no other way of meeting our NATO obligations within the financial constraints.
John announced the conclusions of the Defence Review to the House of Commons on the afternoon of Thursday 25 June. The decisions — particularly to cut the number of ships and to close the base and dockyard in Chatham — ran into fierce opposition, not least from Members of Parliament whose constituencies were affected. The closure of the dockyard went ahead. But after the Falklands campaign the following year some of the decisions of the Defence Review were altered. Certainly no one who lived through that campaign could be in any doubt about the importance of a country such as Britain with far-flung interests being able to project its military power swiftly and effectively across the globe.
THE POLISH CRISIS
No matter how effectively Britain managed its defence effort it was on the unity, strength and credibility of NATO that our security ultimately depended. It was of the utmost importance that American public opinion remained committed to western Europe. So the tensions and divisions which arose in the alliance at this time were of great concern to me. My view was that ultimately we must support American leadership: but that did not mean that the Americans could pursue their interests regardless of the opinion of their European allies.
The need to decide how to react to the imposition of martial law by General Jaruzelski’s Government in Poland on 13 December 1981 highlighted problems which had been growing throughout 1981. Some European countries, most importantly the Germans, were hostile to President Reagan’s economic policy and mistrustful of his rhetoric on defence and arms control. I, of course, did not share these attitudes, though I wanted tougher action to control the widening US budget deficit. What I found irritating and on occasion quite unjustified was the way in which the actions the Americans preferred inflicted a good deal more pain on their allies than on themselves and, one might argue, the communists in Poland and the Soviet Union. The first such issue was the Polish Government’s crackdown on Solidarity.
I was from the first acutely aware of the importance of the Polish question. Like most people in Britain, I have always liked and admired the Poles, many of whom settled in this country during and after the war. But there was more to it than that. On 9 December 1980 I talked quite frankly to the Polish Deputy Prime Minister who visited London. I said that I was conscious of witnessing a change in a socialist state of a kind that had not occurred in the last sixty years. A new group of people — the Solidarity movement — were challenging the communists’ monopoly on power on their own terms. I told him how closely we were watching events in Poland and how excited I was by what was happening. I said that the socialist system had succeeded in suppressing the human spirit for a surprisingly long time but that I had always been confident that there would be a breakthrough.
But these happy signs were not to last. The Soviets brought increasing pressure to bear on the Poles. From the end of 1980 the Americans became convinced that the Soviet Union was planning direct military intervention to crush the Polish reform movement, just as they had crushed the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968.
From about the same time we began to draw up measures to punish the Soviet Union in such an eventuality. Peter Carrington and