‘After 40 years, it’s time the full story was told,” said General Sir Mike Rose at the beginning of Falklands War: The Untold Story (Channel 4). This was, as we might have expected, a tale of immense bravery and ultimate victory. But it also revealed how close Britain came to defeat.

There is a tendency these days to look back at British history with a critical eye. But this was not revisionism for the sake of it, or a Channel 4 exercise in bashing the Government of the time; the critics here were the commanders who led the operation. Rose – then a lieutenant colonel who ran 22 SAS – has never spoken publicly before this week. He, like others including Julian Thompson, then the brigadier in charge of the land force, did not mince their words.

The Task Force was poorly equipped. Overall command was assigned to the Royal Navy, operating from a bunker in Northwood, Middlesex, but the command chain they set up was “utterly dysfunctional”, according to one of the talking heads here.

“We very nearly lost the war because of some extraordinarily bad decisions that were taken by Northwood,” said Rose. He was scathing about the order to attack and capture Goose Green, and the tactical mistakes that led to the bombing of the Sir Galahad. The programme also featured heavy criticism of Brigadier Tony Wilson, commander of the 5th Infantry Brigade: a “bloody idiot” presiding over a “bloody shambles”. Wilson died in 2019, so could not defend himself here.

These were the headline-grabbing statements, and the documentary pulled no punches. But the words of ordinary servicemen were equally powerful, conveying a sense of conditions on the ground. Private Sulle Alhaji – who, like many of us, had never heard of the Falklands before 1982, recalled the pain of trench foot and the horror of seeing comrades killed around him. He returned to the islands in 2002: “We looked out, the water was still, and we just started crying. Uncontrollable crying.” Jan Koops, the second in command of the Prince of Wales’ Company of the 1st Battalion of the Welsh Guards, fought back tears as he remembered friends who lost their lives on the Galahad.

Rightly, we are proud of the Falklands victory and its countless tales of heroism. At the conclusion of this programme, though, Sir Max Hastings’s parting comment that Britain had shown that “we could still win a jolly good little colonial war – it was crazy, but it was wonderful”, struck the wrong tone.