Under the Radar
Page 27
The reason for the flurry of transatlantic cables between Whitehall and the British Defence Secretariat in Washington early in 1969 was itself peculiar. The BDS had suddenly been asked by the Pentagon to supply information about Skyshield II so that it could be used as evidence in a forthcoming hearing of the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Appropriations. Congress’s belated interest in an exercise that had taken place eight years earlier was triggered by a sensational article in the 1 February 1969 ‘Newsletter’ of issue no. 73 of an obscure and slightly mad journal, the Washington Observer. Headed ‘TREASON STORM’, this repeated an allegation it had made in its issue no. 25 back in 1966 that the RAF’s Vulcan bombers in Skyshield II,
equipped with a new type of gear producing electro-magnetic waves that simulate magnetic storms, flew over New York, Chicago, Washington DC, Detroit etc., photographing their ‘targets’ with clocked film, without being detected by the ground defenses. The latter reported ‘no overflight,’ but when confronted with the clocked film taken by the ground radar, found that ‘atmospherics, due to magnetic storms’ had occurred at the very moment when the Vulcans’ film showed the passage of those nuclear bombers over the cities in question. The operation was a great success from the viewpoint of the RAF commanders, who had been urging their American colleagues to install the same gear on the B-52 bombers. It showed conclusively that the Soviet nuclear bases could be knocked out with the greatest ease in one single raid, before the Soviet authorities even learned that the magnetic storms over the USSR had been artificially induced.
What made Congress in 1969 take an interest in a sensational (and more than a little dotty) story they had ignored in 1966 can be explained in one word: Vietnam. In the intervening three years the war in Vietnam had become hopelessly bogged down. In particular the 1968 Tet Offensive had furnished vivid television images of North Vietnamese troops and Viet Cong cadres, long presumed wiped out, suddenly appearing as if by resurrection and pinning down US marines behind their half-tracked vehicles. This had had a decisively depressing effect on the American public’s support for the war. The Washington Observer was evidently pandering to a growing desire to look for scapegoats and had repeated the allegation of its earlier issue that the British had a hush-hush electronic device that could ‘produce artificial magnetic storms enabling large bombers to pierce any air defense in the world’. So why was this miraculous gadget not fitted to SAC’s B-52s, thus saving the lives of countless American airmen? The paper alleged this was because ‘successive US Administrations have honored a secret Executive compact with the Soviets prohibiting the installation of this electronic device on US aircraft’. Why so? Because, the Washington Observer claimed, President Kennedy had done a deal with the Soviet Union that there should be only two nuclear superpowers, the USA and the USSR. ‘All efforts were to be directed towards the elimination of England as a nuclear power. But this [British] invention, which put Soviet Russia at the mercy of RAF Bomber Command, risked undermining the whole set of premises on which a Soviet–American partnership and eventual alliance could be sold to the American public.’
Ludicrous as this flight of fancy might seem, it was clearly enough to provoke questions in the House of Representatives, calls for a Committee on Appropriations hearing, and in turn a request from the Pentagon for information from London about this alleged British super-weapon. The initial cable from the British Defence Secretariat in Washington is classified ‘Top Secret. UK Eyes Only’ and reads (with the punctuation restored):
HAVE BEEN REQUESTED BY DDR AND E [Department of Defense, Research & Engineering] AT PENTAGON TO OBTAIN INFORMATION TO BE GIVEN AS EVIDENCE TO HOUSE APPROPRIATIONS COMMITTEE ABOUT EXERCISE SKYSHIELD II IN 1961. DDR AND E WANT CONFIRMATION THAT SPECIAL TACTICS AND ECM DEVICES WERE USED WHICH SUCCESSFULLY DEFEATED NORAD. ALSO IF THERE WAS HIGH LEVEL AGREEMENT (KENNEDY/MACMILLAN SUGGESTED) THAT DETAILS OF EXERCISE WOULD NOT BE RELEASED. APPARENTLY USAF UNABLE OR UNWILLING TO RESPOND TO DDR AND E. APPRECIATE UK MAY BE IN SIMILAR PREDICAMENT. REGRET LACK OF WARNING OF THIS SUBJECT UNAVOIDABLE. EVIDENCE REQUIRED BY 2100Z HOURS WEDNESDAY 19TH. GRATEFUL FOR ANY RELEASABLE STATEMENT OR BACKGROUND INFORMATION SOONEST.e
e National Archives: MoD: DEFE 24/654.
As we know, this resulted in the claim that London were unable to trace any official records of Skyshield II. In a later cable drafted to BDS Washington the MoD said, in part:
IN ANY EVENT WE SHOULD NOT BE PREPARED TO RELEASE ANY INFORMATION WITHOUT CONCURRENCE OF USAF WHO MAY BE ACTING LOYALLY TOWARDS RAF.
[. . .]
IT IS NOT REPEAT NOT CLEAR IF 27 SQN’S SUCCESSES WERE AGAINST NORAD OR MOCK UPS. RESULTS AGAINST LATTER PROBABLY STILL HIGHLY CLASSIFIED. SIGNIFICANT THAT NO DE-BRIEFING OF CREWS WHO TOOK PART IN USA ALTHOUGH MEMBERS OF BOMBER CD. DEVELOPMENT UNIT WERE PRESENT AT GROUND STATIONS.
[. . .]
FCO UNABLE TO TRACE ANY HIGH-LEVEL AGREEMENT ON DISCLOSURE OF INFORMATION. THE THEN HEAD OF S6 DOES NOT REPEAT NOT RECALL ANY SUCH AGREEMENT.
[. . .]
SUGGEST YOU REPLY TO PENTAGON THAT IN TIME AVAILABLE WE ARE UNABLE TO PROVIDE ANY FACTUAL INFORMATION. IF USAF ARE PREPARED TO GIVE EVIDENCE WE SHOULD WISH TO BE CONSULTED AND TO BE GIVEN SUFFICIENT TIME TO EXAMINE EVIDENCE.
As for the reason why, over fifty years after the event, the USAF’s final report on Skyshield II remains classified, it is inconceivable that it could still have security implications and equally impossible that there could still be technological secrets to give away. The answer – as nearly always in such cases – is most probably to spare someone’s blushes. Sir Humphrey would have understood.
Appendix 2
Stealth
A myth has recently grown up about the Vulcan bomber having a low enough RCS (radar cross-section) to qualify it as an early ‘stealth’ aircraft. This is ridiculous. When it was designed in the late 1940s questions of stealth were simply not considered: much of Avro’s design skill was concentrated on the barely understood aerodynamics of the delta planform (p. 77). It was sheer chance that burying the engines in the wing roots was to become one of the measures adopted for stealth design over thirty years later. In fact, this was a common feature of early British jet design and was shared by many aircraft of the period including the other two V-bombers, the Valiant and the Victor, as well as by the de Havilland Comet airliner. The idea of the Vulcan with its massive delta wing as having been ‘stealthy’ – a whimsy nowadays often repeated by journalists as fact – has been nailed by the authors of the Avro Vulcan Owners’ Workshop Manual (Haynes, 2010) who included one of the Vulcan’s most distinguished test pilots, Tony Blackman. They wrote: ‘In truth the Vulcan, like other large aircraft of its time, possessed a large radar signature.’ That being said the Vulcan, like any other aircraft, could become marginally less visible at certain radar wavelengths and at certain angles.
Ever since the late 1980s, when the bizarre design of Lockheed’s F-117 Nighthawk ground-attack aircraft became widely known, public misconception has grown as to the ability of ‘stealth’ technology to render an aircraft invisible to radar. No doubt Hollywoodian special effects of people donning ‘invisibility cloaks’ (the all-time child’s fantasy) have fed into the idea that stealth technology is already doing this job for large machines such as aircraft and ships.
It isn’t. In this context ‘stealth’ just means limiting as much as possible the degree to which the machines of war can be detected by radar and other means. To date, and for the foreseeable future, nothing is completely proof against some form of detection – whether using radar, infrared equipment or ordinary eyesight. This was brought home painfully to the Americans during the Kosovo war when in early 1999 a precious F-117 was shot down over Serbia (and another severely damaged) by Soviet SAM missiles using a long-wavelength radar-guidance system that dated back to the 1960s. Worse, the downed Nighthawk was in good enough condition for its ‘stealth’ design secrets to be thoroughly investigated by Russian and (probably) Chinese technicians. Even more embarrassin
g was the incident in December 2011 when an unmanned top-secret American ‘stealth’ drone, a Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel, was not merely detected when it overflew Iran but induced by the Iranians to make a perfect landing when they fooled its default homing programme into thinking it was back at Kandahar in Afghanistan. Presumably its secrets, too, have now been fatally compromised.
Appendix 3
The aircraft pooling system
For some years before this story opens Bomber Command had gone back to operating a ‘pool’ system for its aircraft (page 107), whereby a particular crew was not assigned a particular aircraft with whose idiosyncrasies they and their crew chief became familiar. In fact this idea dated back to the Second World War. During the Battle of Britain each pilot had had his own aircraft which was serviced by its own ground crew. This not only made for loyalty between him and the men responsible for keeping his machine airworthy, but it meant that the pilot grew to know his own aircraft intimately. But under the pressure of war this was soon perceived as an extravagant use of ground crew and it was decided that savings could be made by changing to a pool system. Under this, aircraft were all serviced centrally and pilots simply drew whichever machine was ready. This can be seen as an early version of the ‘rationalisation’ that is the frequent bane of twenty-first-century life, as when few NHS patients ever see the same hospital doctor twice running, presumably on the assumption that all doctors, having supposedly been trained to the same standard, are equally good and therefore interchangeable.
However, this was emphatically not true of aircraft built much before 1975 and the slow dawn of the CADCAM era (Computer-Aided Design/Manufacture), when they were all effectively hand-built. This resulted in tiny disparities one from another which could produce considerable differences in handling, especially at high subsonic speeds. Not surprisingly, crews much preferred to stick with an aircraft they knew. The pool system of servicing, as it affected V-bomber crews, was therefore a source of disquiet and was unpopular with everyone but Whitehall’s time-and-motion men.
The blithe bureaucrat’s assumption that all aircraft of a particular type must be identical was to lead to one of the MoD’s most notorious and expensive mistakes. This concerned the Nimrod MRA4 maritime patrol aircraft, intended to be the upgraded version of the existing Nimrod MR2. MR2s were based on the old Comet airframe dating back to the late 1940s and when in the late 1990s the contracting company, Flight Refuelling Ltd, tried to mate these older sections to the newly designed wings, it was found to be impossible. Nothing matched up. The original fuselages had all been hand-built in the days before CADCAM whereas the new wings had been constructed to computerised tolerances. This was a major reason why the project’s costs soared uncontrollably, leading to its cancellation in 2010 when it was £789 million over budget and more than nine years late. Any old V-bomber crew chief in retirement could have told them what would happen; but it is a peculiarity of the modern system that nobody ever consults the people who actually know things, especially if they are over sixty and ‘out of the loop’.
Appendix 4
High jinks
Readers may find the goings-on at Wearsby’s Christmas party (p. 180) implausibly exaggerated. If so, they should consult ex-members of the RAF of that generation who are temporarily prepared to sacrifice loyalty for honesty. These now staid and often respectable members of society will probably be able to give accounts of similar occasions, perhaps including the Dining-In Night on an RAF station in the Middle East during which the officers’ mess was set on fire and gutted. They will almost certainly have heard of the most notorious of them all, the legendary 1 Group Dining-In Night.
This took place at Waddington in 1965 and was vastly bigger than the event at Wearsby. Virtually the entire V-force’s crews were present, some 750 guests in all. It is still not clear what the idea behind this grand occasion was but it is presumed that the Air Officer Commanding 1 Group at the time, Air Vice-Marshal Stapleton, thought it would be a way of congratulating and even thanking the V-force for its dedication and success. What officialdom completely underestimated was the depth of feeling among the men: the smouldering grievances caused by the rigid and often petty regulations that governed practically every aspect of their lives; the endless QRAs and target study; and the feeling that things might drag on indefinitely thus – or as long as the nuclear stalemate lasted.
A great many of the diners at Waddington had arrived already drunk and armed with bangers and other fireworks, some eager to settle old scores with members of rival squadrons. Sir Harry Broadhurst, a former Air Officer Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, was a guest of honour even though he had retired from the RAF four years previously and was therefore technically a civilian. As he walked in to take his seat at the top table he was loudly hissed, a breach of manners that must have been shocking to many of those present, and savagely so to Sir Harry. ‘Broady’ had once been a popular senior officer; but this popularity was irrevocably – if unfairly – damaged as the result of the Vulcan crash at Heathrow in 1956 when he quite rightly ejected to safety. It was not his fault that the four men in the compartment behind the cockpit did not have ejector seats. However, for this final leg of the celebratory flight – which was due to be met at Heathrow with a good deal of pomp and ceremony – he had insisted on swapping places with the aircraft’s usual co-pilot, who had to go and sit behind. Visibility was poor, with rain and heavy overcast, and on a final approach in such conditions it was customary for the man in the right-hand seat to call out the altitude while the pilot flying concentrated on his other instruments and on picking up the beacons at the end of the runway visually. In the aftermath of the accident many airmen argued that had the usual co-pilot been in the cockpit the disaster might never have happened. ‘Broady’ was not only inexperienced on type; he wasn’t calling out the heights. The result was that the pilot, Squadron Leader Donald Howard, must have been made additionally tense by the weather conditions, the restricted vision from the cockpit that all Vulcans shared, and from having the chief of Bomber Command sitting next to him. Instead of aborting and diverting to a backup airfield where conditions were better, he evidently decided to go ahead and risk a landing. Fatally misjudging his approach, he touched down in a field of Brussels sprouts 600 yards short of the runway.
All the crew who died in XA897 at Heathrow that day had been Waddington men, which probably contributed to ‘Broady’’s reception at the 1 Group Dining-In Night there nine years later. Thereafter the dinner swiftly and famously descended into total anarchy, so much damage being done that reparations eventually had to be levied from all 750 guests via their mess bills.
About the Author
James Hamilton-Paterson is the author of the bestselling Empire of the Clouds, which was hailed as a classic account of the golden age of British aviation. He won a Whitbread Prize for his first novel, Gerontius, and among his many other celebrated books are Seven-Tenths, one of the finest books written in recent times about the oceans, the satirical trilogy that began with Cooking with Fernet Branca, and the autobiographical Playing With Water. Born and educated in England, he has lived in the Philippines and Italy and now makes his home in Austria.
By the same author
fiction
Loving Monsters
The View from Mount Dog
Gerontius
The Bell-Boy
Griefwork
Ghosts of Manila
The Music
Cooking with Fernet Branca
Amazing Disgrace
Rancid Pansies
children’s fiction
Flight Underground
The House in the Waves
Hostage!
non-fiction
A Very Personal War: The Story of Cornelius Hawkridge
(also published as The Greedy War)
Mummies: Death and Life in Ancient Egypt
Playing with Water
Seven-Tenths
America’s Boy
Th
ree Miles Down
Empire of the Clouds: How Britain's Aircraft Ruled the World
poetry
Option Three
Dutch Alps
First published in 2013
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