Harrier

by Jonathan Glancey

  Charles A. Plummer, McDonnell Douglas’s chief test pilot, had flown the improved Harrier early that morning in November 1978. Among those watching from the ground was Bill Bedford; but where the British test pilot had managed just a perfunctory and distinctly wobbly, if revolutionary, hop on his first flight back in 1960, Plummer held his red, white and blue aircraft in the hover, at 130 feet, for seven minutes. Five years later, Plummer demonstrated the military capability of an early production AV-8B to the Navy and the Marines at Pax River. Making a short take-off, Plummer lifted into the air within 270 yards, carrying seven 570 lb bombs but no external fuel tanks. He flew low and fast 422 miles to his practice target, dropped his bombs accurately and then, soaring up to 42,000 feet, shot back to Pax River to land vertically, the mission having taken two-and-a-half hours; and all this with 800 lbs of fuel remaining in the internal tanks. It had been an impressive performance.

  The first production AV-8Bs, replacing A-4 Skyhawks, went to Marine Attack Squadron VMA-331, which was fully operational by September 1986. Eventually, 175 aircraft were delivered to seven front-line squadrons and one training squadron; the number included fifteen two-seat TAV-8Bs. On the other side of the Atlantic, the RAF’s No. 1 Squadron went fully operational with its brand-new GR.5 Harriers on 2 November 1989, exactly a week before the East German government announced that its citizens were free to cross the Berlin Wall. The Cold War was over.

  The new Harriers were upgraded continually as computer systems and digital technology raced ahead in winking, bleeping leaps and bounds. Digital engine control systems were followed by night-attack radar systems (GR.7; 1990), new weaponry and a final upgrade of the long-lived Pegasus (GR.7A; 2002). Not only could the latest engines produce 23,800 lbs of thrust – more than twice that of the engines installed in the P.1127 – but they now ran at lower temperatures and with far greater reliability than ever before. The last upgraded Harriers (GR.9A, with engines adapted to hot climates) were delivered to the RAF in 2006, just four years before the entire fleet was prematurely retired. The GR.7A and GR.9 variants were all rebuilds of existing airframes, the last of which was manufactured in 1992. Two-seat T. Mk 10 trainers were also built over the next three years; these were converted to T. Mk 12 standard between 2003 and 2006.

  The GR.9s went into battle, looking more like birds of prey than ever with their bigger, brooding wings, and armed to the teeth with laser-guided American Paveway IV bombs. Then there was the unfulfilled promise of British Brimstone anti-armour missiles and a host of further improvements, including fly-by-wire, that were scheduled to be made between 2006 and 2015. These last British Harriers were strong enough to have carried a P.1127, in terms of weight, into the skies. They were to prove highly effective war-birds.

  The Spanish and Italian navies certainly thought highly of their Harriers too. Both ordered Mk 2s and continue to fly these in 2013. As we have seen, when, in 1996, it had replaced the AV-8As it had ordered during the Franco years, Spain sold seven of its first generation of jump jets to the Royal Thai Navy. These served on board the newly launched flagship HTMS Chakri Naruebet, an 11,486-ton carrier built by Bazan (now Navantia) in Spain. Three years later, only one of the Harriers was operational even though the Thai Navy had not been at war. The Chakri Nuruebet had, though, been involved in several humanitarian missions, demonstrating that the military can be a powerful force for good. To date, the Thai flagship has only been to war in virtual fashion, playing the part of USS Ranger in Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn, a film set during the Vietnam War and released in 2006. The Thai Navy had been interested in replacing its rapidly diminishing AV-8A, or ‘Matador’, fleet with AV-8Bs, but the deal fell through during 2003, and the last Thai Harrier was retired three years later.

  The US had been in discussion over sales of both versions of the Harrier at various times with Australia, Brazil, Switzerland, Japan and the People’s Republic of China, as had the British with the Chinese during the Labour administration of James Callaghan in the late 1970s. However, fears of a Soviet backlash and, then, the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1979 in response to the Vietnamese invasion and occupation of Cambodia put paid to any such deal. The Vietnamese action had, though, at least succeeded in ousting the unspeakably vile regime of the mass-murderer Pol Pot, who had killed some two million, or a quarter, of his own people, making the Argentine generals and their stooges look like pale amateurs.

  The Spanish, meanwhile, re-equipped with VA-2 Matador IIs, which arrived at the naval air station at Rota, near Cadiz during 1987 and 1988. These replaced the Matador Is, taken out of service by the end of 1996. As a matter of record, the first-generation Harriers flown by the Flotilla de Aeronaves’ Octava Escuadrilla (8th Squadron) over twenty years proved to be exceptionally reliable, unlike, it seems, USMC AV-8As in the United States. Four aircraft were lost in those twenty years, and only one pilot – Lieutenant Cesar Jauregi Garcia, lost off the coast of Cabrera in May 1980 – was killed. The Matador IIs operated from the deck of the Armada’s new flagship, the 15,912-ton Principe de Asturias, which was launched in 1982 but served a decommissioning notice by the Spanish government in November 2012. At this time, the Spanish economy was performing very poorly indeed, and deep cuts were made in military expenditure. However, the Harrier fleet comprising eleven Matador IIs and five Matador II Plus’s – these with engines providing 23,600 lbs of thrust – were still able to fly from the 27,079-ton multi-role warship Juan Carlos I, launched in September 2009 but ordered six years earlier, before Europe was hard hit by the deepest recession it had experienced since the 1930s.

  The Italian Navy was a fan of the Harrier, too. It had wanted the aircraft since 1967, when the anti-submarine helicopter carrier Andrea Doria had hosted a GR.1 Harrier. However, an arcane law dating from 1937 that had survived the Second World War insisted that the Marina Militare was not allowed to fly fixed-wing aircraft. This was rescinded in 1989 and the Navy was able to order eighteen Harriers, sixteen of them single-seat AV-8Bs and all but three of these assembled by Alenia Aeronautica, Turin. Initially, the Harriers flew at sea from the 10,100-ton carrier Giuseppe Garibaldi, launched in 1983, but from 2009 they also operated from the new Italian flagship, the 27,100-ton carrier Cavour. The Italian Harriers’ first mission abroad, with NATO in early 1995, was to protect the withdrawal of UN forces from Somalia, the lawless East African state with an appalling human rights record. They did this successfully, and performed flawlessly.

  As the Mk 2 Harrier evolved, so it was to become a more reliable, more accurate and deadlier weapon. It would prove that it could contribute very usefully in serious, set-piece conventional wars like those in Iraq. It would also demonstrate that it could be deployed in a much more ‘asymmetric’ conflict like the awkwardly named Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, where its all-round flexibility and reliability would be prized, along with its ability to attack targets with pinpoint accuracy, thereby minimizing collateral casualties. The Harrier’s pilots, at least, were never to lose their fondness for an aircraft that, at its zenith, was the brilliant offspring of a sometimes turbulent relationship between Great Britain and the United States of America, and of two very different ways of fighting a war.

  CHAPTER 6

  NEW WARS FOR OLD

  Saddam Hussein was a son of a bitch. This much was known to US, British and other servicemen, including the Harrier pilots involved in fighting in Iraq in 1991 and again in 2003 and, in between, patrolling the skies over what had been the cradle of Western civilization some six thousand years ago. Saddam Hussein was also our son of a bitch – America’s, Britain’s and Western Europe’s – a nasty dictator whose Ba’ath party had been helped into power in 1963 with the connivance of Washington in a country that had been created by Britain after a peevish carve-up of the Middle East by Britain and France after the First World War. A part of the idea had been to keep the Russians at bay and Turkey weakened, and to ensure the safe passage of newly discovered Iraqi oil to Western Europe and the United States.
When Iran became a threat to Western interests after the Shah was toppled in 1979, Saddam, who at the time had been making overtures to the Soviet Union, found himself bombarded by good wishes from the United States. From now on, he would be America’s strongman in the Middle East, provided with money, military intelligence, special advisers and armaments of every kind – especially biological weapons and poison gas – and with these he would fight a protracted war against Iran throughout most of the 1980s and against citizens of his own artificial state, the Kurds to the north and Shi’ite Muslims to the south.

  The Americans loved the beaming Saddam. In 1980, he was given the keys to the city of Detroit, while in 1983 and again in 1984 Donald Rumsfeld, President Reagan’s special envoy to the Middle East, was packed off to Baghdad to reassure and do business with him. The British were clearly fond of him, too. Shortly after Saddam had been appointed deputy president of Iraq in 1969, Glencairn Balfour Paul, the British ambassador to Iraq and a keen Arabist, offered his impressions of this ‘presentable young man’ with ‘an engaging smile’ to Whitehall. ‘I should judge him, young as he is, to be a formidable, single-minded and hard-headed member of the Ba’athist hierarchy, but one with whom, if only one could see more of him, it would be possible to do business… responsibility may mellow him.’ Almost, in fact, the sort of chap Balfour Paul might have played cricket with at Sedburgh and Magdalen College, Oxford. But when the affable British diplomat, who had explored the Ennedi foothills of Tibesti by camel during his years as district commissioner of Sudan, took a somewhat uncritical view of the Ba’athist party, Saddam went on to gas the Kurds in the mountains of northern Iraq and to drain the marshes in the south of his country where Shi’ite tribesmen had lived in harmony with nature for hundreds of years. It is estimated that over half of Iraq’s chemical weapons equipment came from West Germany, but Britain did her bit too, financing a chlorine factory that would manufacture mustard gas. Many other countries, including Austria, Brazil, China, Egypt, Holland, India, Luxembourg, Singapore and Spain, provided Saddam’s regime with stockpiles of chemical weapons.

  As it was, in December 2003, a deposed and greatly aged Saddam was found by US soldiers in a hole in the ground covered with a rug and polystyrene sheeting in an orange grove near his hometown of Tikrit. A hut stood nearby, the last of the Iraqi dictator’s many homes; this one boasted just the one room fitted out with two beds and a fridge containing a can of lemonade, a box of Belgian chocolates and a packet of hot dogs. No air-conditioning. No gold taps. ‘I am the president of Iraq,’ declared the bearded man in the hole, ‘and I want to negotiate.’ There was no negotiation. After the United States had dealt with their former strongman, he was handed over to his Shi’ite enemies, who taunted him to his death at the end of a rope and filmed his last horrible moments on their mobile phones.

  While there can be no pity for Saddam Hussein, his story has been hugely important in shining a spotlight on the heartless double-dealings by the world’s superpowers and their allies with the small and Third World countries that have fought their wars, economic and military, by proxy since 1945 and have done so at an accelerating rate over the past quarter of a century. The ironies and sheer complexity of these struggles have led to seemingly absurd situations. From 1979 and for the following ten years, the Americans fought the Soviet Union in the wilds of Afghanistan not with Marines and Harriers, but through the Mujahideen, a ragbag yet highly effective army of jihadist Muslims, financed and armed by the governments of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Among the ranks of the Mujahideen were foreign adventurers including the wealthy Saudi Arabian Osama bin Laden. In hindsight, it seems absurd that Washington was so keen to spite the Soviets that it aided the man who devised the assault on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York some twenty years later and, if by default, led the US into a tangle of mistaken and even incomprehensible wars that would drag on until the present day. And it was these wars that saw the Harrier in action year after year in theatres far removed in every way from those it was designed to perform in during the Cold War itself.

  Having bogged itself down in Vietnam, ostensibly fighting a war against the spread of communism, the US appeared to have learnt little or nothing when, along with its allies, it invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. One of the great tragedies of Vietnam was that Ho Chi Minh, the hugely popular North Vietnamese leader, had longed for Washington to be his ally. Not only was George Washington his personal hero, but during the Second World War he had helped rescue US pilots and passed on intelligence about Japanese plans to the Americans. In 1945, he wrote personally to President Truman asking for US help in the liberation of Vietnam from French colonial rule now that the Japanese had been defeated. Truman, who chose not to reply, took the side of the French; over the next few years, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese starved as the rice they grew was shipped to France for a pittance. Ho Chi Minh, who had been a line manager with General Motors in Detroit in the 1920s, became a dedicated communist. American fears of the spread of communism were hardly dampened by Fidel Castro’s military victory in Cuba in January 1959 and his subsequent conversion to communism, nor by Nikita Khrushchev’s pledge of support, made in January 1961, to ‘wars of national liberation’. The Americans went into Vietnam, full time, in 1965. Two years later, Dr Martin Luther King gave a speech in which he said:

  They must see Americans as strange liberators… even though they quoted the American declaration of independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ready for independence, and we again fell to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long.

  Ho Chi Minh died in 1969, but the United States lost its war in Vietnam. By the time Saigon fell to the North in 1975, however, some one-and-a-half million of the country’s civilians had been killed. The United States had dropped 6,727,084 tons of bombs on Vietnam, compared with the 2,700,000 tons dropped by Allied bombers on Germany during the Second World War. American aircraft had also sprayed 3.5 million acres of farmland and rainforest with napalm and other chemical weapons: the effect of these will not finally wear off for many decades to come. Meanwhile, US dead amounted to some 58,000.

  It was not as if the Americans had no idea of what they were doing. In 1968, James C. Thompson, who had recently resigned from the State Department over increasing US involvement in South-East Asia, wrote a prophetic article, ‘How Could Vietnam Happen? An Autopsy’, for The Atlantic magazine:

  There is a final result of Vietnam policy I would cite that holds potential danger for the future of US foreign policy: the rise of a new breed of American ideologues who see Vietnam as the ultimate test of their doctrine. I have in mind those men in Washington who have given a new life to the missionary impulse in American foreign relations: who believe that this nation, in this era, has received a threefold endowment that can transform the world. As they see it, that endowment is composed of first, our unsurpassed military might; second, our clear technological supremacy; and third, our allegedly invincible benevolence (our ‘altruism’, our affluence, our lack of territorial aspirations). Together, it is argued, this threefold endowment provides us with the opportunity and the obligation to ease the nations of the earth toward modernization and stability: toward a full-fledged Pax Americana Technocratica. In reaching toward this goal, Vietnam is viewed as the last and crucial test. Once we have succeeded there, the road ahead is clear. In a sense, these men are our counterpart to the visionaries of Communism’s radical left: they are technocracy’s own Maoists. They do not govern Washington today. But their doctrine rides high.

  It certainly did. Although the United States was defeated in Vietnam, those same missionary ideologues were to mount their high horses and ride off to do battle with anti-American forces with increasing frequency and fervour in the decades following the fall of Saigon. And they
fell in along the way with some very odd fellow missionaries indeed, none stranger than Tony Blair, the right-wing British New Labour prime minister who had the light of Jesus in his eyes and a love of George W. Bush and what this oil man called his ‘War on Terror’ that defied all understanding. Bush Jr was, of course, not just the draft-dodging, war-mongering president of the United States who took the United States and Britain into battle in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq two years later, but also the son of George H. W. Bush Sr, the former US president and ally of Saddam Hussein until America’s strongman dared to invade Kuwait in 1990 and to seize that country’s hugely profitable oil wells. At least, Bush Sr was a highly decorated US Navy pilot, who had signed up aged eighteen and flown Grumman Avengers in the thick of action against the Japanese from the deck of the 11,000-ton carrier USS San Jacinto in 1944–5.

  This potentially toxic mix of zealous high-mindedness and realpolitik spilled over not when Saddam invaded Kuwait, but a decade later when Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda attacked Manhattan using scheduled US airliners as guided missiles. From then on, US motives became a tangle of the politics of revenge, ideological zealotry, the show of arms, the wiles of the oil lobby and a variety of other factors. Taken together, they threatened to drag the country into the many Vietnams that Che Guevara, in a speech given at the United Nations in New York in 1964, believed would bring the United States to its knees.