Book Read Free

Wings

Page 30

by Patrick Bishop


  In two respects the super-sophisticated aircraft are fulfilling the same function as their wire-and-canvas forbears of nearly a century before – providing accurate information about the battlefield and firepower in support of their comrades on the ground. But others are relatively new, particularly the reliance the army now places on the air force to get them to and from the battlefield, and to transport them around it and supply them during operations.

  The attack aspect of military flying is no longer the domain of men alone. In 1992 the Government announced that women would be allowed to fly jet aircraft and two years later a woman pilot, Flight Lieutenant Jo Salter, joined 617 Squadron, the illustrious Dambusters, taking part in operations to enforce the no-fly zones over Iraq.

  In the conflicts Britain has been engaged in recently, flying fast jets has become a progressively less dangerous experience, at least as far as the threat from enemy fire is concerned. At the time of writing, twenty-one RAF personnel have died in Afghanistan since 2006. Some were killed by roadside bombs. Most were the victims of a crash when an elderly Nimrod fell out of the sky during a reconnaissance mission as a result of mechanical failure. None of the deaths was caused by an aircraft being brought down by enemy bullets or missiles – though that possibility always remains.

  By the end of the twentieth century the insulation of the jet jockey from not just the battlefield but the world was almost complete. Flight Lieutenant John Nichol, a navigator who began his service in the Cold War era, always found it difficult to answer the question ‘What’s it like flying in a Tornado?’ because ‘It’s like nothing else. In the grey, pre-dawn drizzle you clamber up into your big, ugly, mechanical monster, snuggle down into your seat and snap shut the canopy. Now you are in a different world, enclosed, autonomous, completely shut off from the outside, with a beautiful, cosy, electronic whine in the background.’

  Nichol was based in Germany and on his morning flight he would look down through gaps in the cloud to see ‘the rest of the world coming to life, waking up and going to work. Lines of cars in traffic jams stretch out below you, their lights on, wipers too probably, the drivers smoking, getting frustrated, checking their watches, listening to the bad news on the radio and a miserable weather report. And you have escaped their drudgery and trudgery and cannot but feel sorry for the poor bastards, while you are high in the blue, in heaven with an electronic whine. It is hard sometimes not to feel superior. This is why some fast jet jocks, especially single-seater pilots, develop unmatchable egos and feelings of godlike supremacy.’2

  In January 1991 Nichol and his pilot Flight Lieutenant John Peters were brought down to earth during a low-level daylight raid in the opening phase of Operation Desert Storm. They were operating alongside US Air Force and Navy jets against targets in southern Iraq. Their objective was the Ar Rumaylah Air Base in the desert west of Basra, which was strongly defended by anti-aircraft batteries and Soviet-made SAM-3 and SAM-6 surface-to-air missile sites. The pair were struck by a succession of catastrophes. First, the Tornado’s bombs failed to release over the target. They managed to shake them free and were heading for home, when they were hit by a SAM. The Tornado was in flames from stem to stern and there was nothing for it but to eject.

  ‘We both hauled up on the handles between our legs,’ wrote Peters. ‘There was a faint mechanical thud through the seats. Automatically, straps whipped around me, drawing my arms and legs firmly in against the seat frame to prevent ejection injury.’

  For a few agonizing seconds, nothing happened. Then, ‘the rockets fired. A giant grabbed us by the shoulders and ripped us upwards at thirty times the force of gravity . . . rag dolls tossed high into the air: a massive noise from the seat rocket motors, a deafening wind rush, a sensation of tumbling over and over in space. The slipstream was crushing, even through the flying kit, 400 miles per hour strong . . . there was a feeling of falling, endlessly falling, somersaulting end over end, then the drogue gun fired out a small stabilizing parachute, to stop the whirling through the air. Immediately, as the seat became upright, the main parachute deployed. There was a jarring “crack” as the canopy snapped open, a massive jerk as it caught the weight . . . the seat cut free automatically, falling away to earth. I opened my eyes. I was hanging under the blessed silk of the parachute . . . floating down into the deathly silence of enemy territory.’3

  Peters and Nichol were captured, interrogated, beaten up and displayed on Iraqi television. After seven hellish weeks they were released after Saddam Hussein’s adventure in Kuwait ended in defeat and humiliation. In all, twenty-nine Allied aircraft were brought down, most of them by SAM missiles. The danger of air-to-air interception passed when the Iraqi air force defected en masse to Iran, or the figure would surely have been higher.

  The lessons learned from the 1991 Gulf War and the counter-measures adopted meant that, thereafter, the threat from ground defences was greatly reduced. Between the end of that conflict and Britain and America’s return to war with Saddam in 2003, their aircraft enforced no-fly zones to prevent him from using air power against the Kurds in the north of the country and the Shias in the south. In that time, British and American aircraft flew more than 300,000 missions and sustained not a single casualty. The air war that led the overthrow of Saddam in 2003 came at virtually no cost to the allies. Two British aircraft were shot down, but as the result of deadly American mistakes, rather than enemy action.

  NATO aircraft also found themselves facing ageing Soviet technology when they attacked Serbian targets in the spring of 1999. The Yugoslav pilots showed exemplary pluck, coming up to face their enemies, but they presented no real threat. Missiles – even the old-fashioned and poorly maintained types in the Serbs’ armoury – still posed a danger, however, and an American F-117 stealth bomber and F-16 fighter bombers were brought down by SAM strikes.

  By the time the West launched its air war against the regime of Colonel Gaddafi in March 2010 the procedure developed in two Iraq wars and the Kosovo intervention had a well-practised smoothness, which quickly eliminated the threat from the ground. In the opening phase, more than a hundred Tomahawk cruise missiles rained down on all the key points in Libya’s air defence infrastructure, so that operations to dominate the regime’s forces could carry on virtually unhindered.

  Technological advances mean that air strikes are now far more devastating and carry far less risk than they did even in the 1990s. The advent of the laser-guided bomb, then of satellite-directed weaponry, means that ordnance can now be delivered with uncanny precision. The result is that the volume of bombs dropped has shrunk. One bomb can now be used to destroy a target where fifteen would have been needed just twenty years ago, and perhaps a thousand during the Second World War. Aircraft no longer have to get close to the objective to increase their chances of hitting it, and the weather and the fact that it is day or night are increasingly irrelevant. As accuracy has soared, risk has fallen. The increasing use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles – UAVs or ‘drones’ – as weapons platforms has removed the possibility of operator casualties altogether. Precision and lethality, however, only have value if they are directed at the right targets. The interventions in Bosnia, Iraq and particularly Afghanistan have been blighted by horrific intelligence blunders, resulting in ‘smart’ bombs blowing to scraps the very people the mission was purportedly launched to save.

  The one area of military aviation where risks are regularly taken is that of flying helicopters. In Iraq, American rotary aircraft proved alarmingly vulnerable to ground fire, even from such primitive missiles as Soviet-designed rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs).

  In Afghanistan in the early days of the British deployment to Helmand Province, Chinook pilots flying in troops to remote and embattled locations frequently came under small-arms, machine-gun and RPG fire as they landed their machines. Flight Lieutenant Chris Hasler, a twenty-six-year-old Canadian flying with the RAF’s 18 Squadron, underwent a particularly harrowing experience when inserting 3 Para soldiers on an operati
on to seize a key insurgent leader in Helmand in July 2006. As he approached the target area with more than thirty men on board reports came in that the enemy was waiting for them. The Chinooks carried on regardless. Hasler raced into the landing zone behind two helicopters piloted by a Royal Navy pilot, Lieutenant Nichol Benzie, and his boss, Wing Commander Mike Woods. As Benzie touched down the shooting started. When Hasler’s turn came to land he ‘wanted nothing more than to pull in power and get away from that place as fast as possible’. But the first Paras were now scrambling down the ramps at the rear of the lead Chinooks. Hasler realized that ‘if I didn’t put my own troops on the ground to bolster their strength they would surely be cut to ribbons’.4

  He continued his approach ‘for what seemed like years’. There was so much incoming fire and floating ribbons of tracer that he ‘didn’t realize how fast I was going until it was almost too late’. To slow down, he pulled up while only a few yards from the ground, putting the underbelly of the chopper flat on, so that it acted as an air brake. If the angle of approach was more than twenty-six degrees, he risked digging the rear rotor into the ground and a catastrophic crash. But he just ‘managed to check the nose forward to under twenty-five degrees, half a second before we touched’. It was a hard landing, but they were down. Hasler’s first reaction was ‘jubilation that I hadn’t killed everyone on board’.

  Then there were other things to worry about. A heavy machine gun was hosing bullets from a position about a hundred yards away to the left. One of the RAF crewmen tried to return fire from one of the Chinook’s door-mounted GPMGs, but ‘was having a tough time . . . the enemy had sent out groups of women and children ahead of them while they fired over their heads at us’.

  Operational procedures dictated that a helicopter should spend no more than thirty seconds on the ground, even if there were still troops on board. Hasler had been down for more than a minute and his crew and co-pilot yelled at him to lift off. He was unaware that three men were still on the ramp, struggling to unload mortar bombs. As the Chinook rose skywards, rather than head back to safety the soldiers jumped for it. Hasler poured on the power and the helicopter lifted ‘like a cork’, chased by ‘big green bulbs of tracer swishing past my co-pilot’s head at what seemed like only inches away’. Hasler was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his Afghan exploits.

  This organic integration with army operations is just one of the RAF’s twenty-first-century functions. Once again its primary duty is one that emerged early in the history of British military aviation. Just like the RFC and RNAS, which took to the skies over London to try and shoot down the looming Zeppelins and Gothas in the First World War, the RAF carries the responsibility for defending Britain from enemy air attack. Since the attacks on the World Trade Centre of 11 September, 2001 a force of Typhoon fighters is held at constant, round-the-clock ‘quick reaction alert’, ready to scramble within five minutes to intercept any aircraft that enters the United Kingdom’s airspace without authority. During the heightened threat period of the London Olympics in 2012 they were joined by Sentry airborne warning radar aircraft.

  Since the end of the Cold War the RAF has moved from a static posture, operating from bases in the United Kingdom and Germany, to becoming essentially an expeditionary air force. This means it is in a position to project British air power – usually in alliance with American and European partners – to operations across the globe, both military and humanitarian. Following the earthquake in Pakistan in 2005, for example, C-17 and Hercules transports were in action almost immediately, flying in food and vital supplies.

  The RAF is the world’s oldest independent air force. It has played a central part in the nation’s history throughout the twentieth century, and could reasonably be said to have saved it when, in the summer of 1940, the skill and courage of its airmen averted the possibility of defeat and enslavement in the greatest air battle ever seen. The RAF’s contribution to Allied victory was enormous and its losses, particularly in Bomber Command, were heavy. In the post-war years it was at the heart of our system of defence against the threat of attack from the Soviet Union, and since then it has been intimately engaged in every conflict the country has faced.

  The RAF is universally admired for its technological sophistication and skill, and respected for the power it yields. It is the biggest air force in Europe and the second largest in NATO after the USAF. The cost of maintaining it – especially in a time of global recession – has meant that just as in the early days of its existence it is compelled to restate frequently its raison d’être. The RAF’s best argument is that its technological virtuosity makes it uniquely capable of reacting to the multiple dangers emanating from conventional and unconventional adversaries across the globe. It is now faced with the challenge of defending our interests in space, where the satellites that control 90 per cent of all military capabilities reside. It has also to develop defences against cyberspace attacks, which seem likely to be a new theatre in future wars.

  At first sight the identity and preoccupations of the modern air force might seem to bear little relation to those of the bold aviators who in August 1914 climbed into their fragile craft to head out over the English Channel on their way to the battlefields of France. Yet there is a direct, linear connection between the two, which modern airmen cherish.

  ‘Every RAF squadron has a history linking it back to units from its formation,’ said a young serving officer who has done intensive service in combat roles. ‘Our history is relatively new and so is perhaps remembered more vividly.’5

  The RFC, the RNAS and the RAF were born of new technologies. To survive, to succeed, it was essential that they stood ready to exploit every new scientific development that brought the prospect of advantage. That attitude ensured that the reputations of the RAF, along with the Fleet Air Arm and Army Air Corps, have stood so high for a hundred years. It is matched by the spirit of the men and women who have served over the last century, a unique mixture of boldness, ingenuity and optimism that remains as fresh and inspiring as it was in the heady days of the pioneers. Per Ardua ad Astra . . .

  Notes

  PREFACE: THE LAST DOGFIGHT

  1. Taken from David Morgan’s book Hostile Skies (Phoenix, 2007) and a conversation with the author (14 December 2011).

  CHAPTER 1: PILOTS OF THE PURPLE TWILIGHT

  1. Flight magazine, 18 June 1910.

  2. Flight magazine, 20 April 1912.

  3. Quoted in Joshua Levine, On a Wing and a Prayer (Collins, 2008), p. 11.

  4. Quoted in Stephen Budiansky, Air Power (Viking, 2003), p. 32.

  5. Ibid., p. 42.

  6. US Centennial of Flight Commission (www.centennialofflight.gov).

  7. Quoted in Brian Johnson, Fly Navy (David & Charles, 1981), p. 24.

  8. Squadron Leader Peter Hering, Customs and Traditions of the Royal Air Force (Gale and Polden, 1961), pp. 12–13.

  9. Sir Walter Raleigh, The War in the Air (Oxford University Press, 1922), Vol. I, p. 111.

  10. Sir Philip Joubert de la Ferté, The Fated Sky (Hutchinson, 1952).

  11. Quoted in Levine, op. cit., p. 52.

  12. Sir Philip Joubert de la Ferté, The Third Service (Thames & Hudson, 1955), p. 19.

  13. Joubert, The Fated Sky, p. 32.

  14. Ibid., p. 25.

  CHAPTER 2: A WING AND A PRAYER

  1. James McCudden, Five Years in the Royal Flying Corps (London, 1919), pp. 22–3.

  2. Op. cit., p. 25.

  3. Lieutenant Colonel Louis Strange, DSO, MC, DFC, Recollections of an Airman (The Aviation Book Club, 1940), p. 43.

  4. Joubert, The Fated Sky, p. 44.

  5. CEC Rabagliati IWM Sound Archive Recording 4208.

  CHAPTER 3: ARCHIE

  1. Quoted in Levine, op. cit., p. 121.

  2. Quoted in Nigel Steel and Peter Hart, Tumult in the Clouds (Coronet, 1997), p. 36.

  3. Quoted in John Laffin, Swifter Than Eagles: The Biography of Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir John Maitl
and Salmond (William Blackwood, 1964), p. 62.

  4. James McCudden, op. cit., pp. 22–3.

  5. Quoted in Levine, op. cit., p. 128.

  6. Quoted in Steel and Hart, op. cit., p. 31.

  7. Ibid., p. 44.

  8. McCudden, op. cit., p. 59.

  9. Quoted in Laffin, op. cit., p. 65.

  10. McCudden, op. cit., p. 59.

  11. Quoted in Ralph Barker, The Royal Flying Corps in France (Constable, 1995), Vol. I, p. 98.

  12. Louis Arbon Strange, Recollections of an Airman (Hamilton, 1933).

  13. Wing Commander Ira ‘Taffy’ Jones, Tiger Squadron (W. H. Allen, 1954), p. 41.

  14. Air Vice Marshal J. E. Johnson, Full Circle: The Story of Air Fighting (Chatto & Windus, 1964), p. 11.

  15. Quoted in Steel and Hart, op. cit., p. 71.

  CHAPTER 4: THE NEW FRONT LINE

  1. Quoted in Steel and Hart, op. cit., p. 148.

  2. Private papers of M. Dayrell-Browning, IWM Department of Documents 2448.

  3. Private papers of Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson VC, IWM Department of Documents 200.

  4. Letters of M. Dayrell-Browning, IWM Department of Documents 2448.

  5. Letter of Patrick Blundstone, IWM Department of Documents 5508.

  CHAPTER 5: DEATH, DRINK, LUCK

  1. Chas Bowyer, Albert Ball, VC (Bridge Books, 1994), p. 47.

  2. Quoted in Patrick Bishop, Fighter Boys (HarperCollins, 2003), p. 25.

  3. Cecil Lewis, Sagittarius Rising (Peter Davies, 1936), p. 93.

  4. Bowyer, op. cit., pp. 52–3.

  5. Ibid., p. 81.

  6. Ibid., p. 82.

  7. Ibid., p. 53.

  8. Quoted in Levine, op. cit., pp. 308–9.

 

‹ Prev