Welcome to We Have Ways of Making You Talk. I should say Achtung Achtung here, but I'm

not going to because we're not talking about the Second World War. Yes, James and I have

veered, of course, like articulated lorry on black ice. We've jackknifeed them, we've

wound up in a Malvinas, the Fultland Islands to give them their correct name. We won, we

get to call them what we want. And we're talking to Roland White, of course. This is part

two of our conversation about Harriet 809, his fantastic book about the Air War in the

Fultlands, which we all remember from when we were little boys. We hope, and girls, that

was close. We hope you enjoy this. Experiencing it in 1982. I don't think I realised actually

how close the whole thing was. I don't know that people still even do realise how

fingernails the whole thing actually was. Obviously it would be, considering how far it is

from the UK. You're trying to land a force amphibiously, thousands and thousands of miles

away. That's the thing that beggars believe is the distance. That first Falcon raid against

Port Stanley, Airfield, was like trying to bomb Western China from Heathrow. That's the

kind of distance you're talking about. It couldn't have been a more challenging logistics

chain. And I think that this is why it's such an interesting inflection point in 1982,

I think, in that we were talking earlier about all the cuts there were and the decisions

that we're having to be made about cutting our cloth to what was required of us as a partner

and NATO. And yet still there was this vestigial breadth and depth to British defence, both

in terms of industry and in terms of defence establishments, whether it was Farnborough,

the Royal Radar establishment, British Aerospace, the missile development.

So the warfare state, as it were? Yeah, absolutely. What David Edgerton writes about was sort

of breathing its last in 1982, in terms of that breadth and depth. I wouldn't say it

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