January 1982
The road trip was going well. A few days’ break from flying had presented too good an opportunity to miss. Flight Lieutenant Martin Withers, Pilot Leader of 101 Squadron, RAF, had hired a vast American station wagon and with his five-man crew headed south into California. Hertz had been very clear. Whatever you do, don’t take the car into Mexico, they’d said. But that, of course, had only encouraged them. The RAF men all thoroughly enjoyed their day trip over the border to Tijuana.
Now, after a night staying with friends of Withers’ parents outside San Diego, they were drinking in a bar near Disneyland. And honour was at stake.
‘Weenies!’ the bullet-headed American Marine had called them. They’d only left the motel to have a couple of cocktails before heading out for something to eat, but that was the kind of challenge that Withers’ Navigator, Flight Lieutenant Gordon Graham, couldn’t let go. With dark good looks and a raffish moustache worn with conviction, Graham seemed every inch the dashing RAF officer. His precious Lotus Europa in its black and gold John Player Special livery only underlined that impression. As a patriotic Scot, Graham might have preferred a good malt, but on this occasion he’d make an exception. Tequila it was.
Round followed brutal round, but the odds were always stacked against the big American. He was competing alone, while Graham was part of a team, and the more he drank, the less he noticed. And he’d stopped noticing that Graham was passing drinks to his captain, Withers, and the rest of the crew. The Marine refused to be beaten. Semper fi. And then he passed out.
Even sharing the drinking, though, Withers’ crew were all over the place. If it hadn’t been for the pretty barmaid taking a shine to them they might have gone the same way as their loud-mouthed opponent, but she’d kept them going, plying them with coffee. Just as well too, because as the drinking had intensified, all thoughts of food fell by the wayside.
There were wide grins on their faces as the crew spilled out of the bar into the Californian night. If Withers’ grin was wider than the others’, it was with good reason: he had the barmaid’s address and phone number in his pocket.
Martin Withers was enjoying himself, really enjoying himself, for the first time in months. And that was supposed to have been why he’d joined the Air Force in the first place. He’d abandoned a career in law. As his then boss had gently pointed out, all he ever did was talk about flying and stare out of the window whenever an aeroplane flew past. Withers still had vivid memories of a summer spent at RAF Binbrook as a member of his University Air Squadron. To his student eyes, the lifestyle of the young Lightning pilots was seductive. In 1968 he joined as a graduate entrant and was soon enjoying all that life as a young RAF officer had to offer. He was posted to Vulcans and, although he still harboured an ambition to fly fighters, life was good. By the end of 1981, though, it had all gone sour. Withers’ wife, Amanda, had recently left him to return home to Australia. He’d been washed out of a fast-jet training course after the death of another student had cast a shadow over the whole class. Before his final check flight he was told that it didn’t matter how well he flew, they weren’t going to pass him. So, instead of a tour as a Qualified Flying Instructor on a Gnat he spent three years as an instructor on the less glamorous Jet Provost. Then, despite appearing to be an ideal candidate, he’d been overlooked for an exchange posting flying Alpha Jets with the Armée de l’Air in Toulouse. The weather in the south of France, he had thought, might be his only hope of persuading Amanda to come back. Instead he was sent back to the Lincolnshire fens where he had previously been stationed and back to the Vulcan Operational Conversion Unit. The OCU was the training squadron for all Vulcan bomber aircrew, but it was being shut down in anticipation of the jet’s imminent retirement. By the time Withers was qualified to instruct, there was time to take just one student through before the outfit closed and he was sent back to a frontline bomber squadron. To cap it all, now separated, he no longer qualified for free RAF mess accommodation and was living alone in a little two-bedroom maisonette on the edge of a Lincoln council estate. All of a sudden he had very little fondness for the RAF.
Then, at the end of the year, he was chosen to participate in RED FLAG. Withers seized the opportunity to put aside his unhappiness and began to prepare himself and his crew to fly the Vulcan in America in the most realistic series of war games ever devised.
In December, as the Withers crew trained, Admiral Jorge Anaya, the ascetic, sharp-faced political head of the Argentine Navy, lent his support to General Leopoldo Galtieri’s bid to take power in Argentina. Galtieri would replace President Viola, the weakened head of the country’s ruling military junta. The price for Anaya’s blessing was approval for the navy’s plan to seize Las Malvinas, the Falkland Islands, the disputed British colony barely 300 miles off their southern shores. Galtieri was easily persuaded. The two men were also confident that they could carry international opinion with them. They had seen how, when Portugal was removed from Goa by India in 1961, the world had done nothing. Throwing out the colonial power from Las Malvinas would surely be seen as a similar piece of legitimate anti-colonialism. Especially with the United States on their side. Only recently, the US government had been courting Galtieri as an ally for their operations in El Salvador. On a visit to America in 1981, Galtieri had been feted with genuine red-carpet treatment, enjoying time with those at the highest levels of government. After four years in isolation following Argentina’s military coup, the country was being welcomed back into the fold.
The date Galtieri and Anaya had in mind was 9 July 1982 – the anniversary of Argentina’s independence. By then, Britain’s Antarctic patrol ship, HMS Endurance, would have been decommissioned, conscripts could be trained, delivery of French Super Étendard attack planes and their sea-skimming Exocet missiles would be complete and, in any case, the British would be powerless to intervene in the face of the extremes of the southern winter.
That was if the British responded at all. History suggested that they were, at best, ambivalent about their distant possession.
Withers and his crew arrived in Nevada in style – determined to start as they meant to continue. Inbound to Nellis Air Force Base, the air base near Las Vegas that hosted RED FLAG, Martin Withers had spied the vast scar of the Grand Canyon thousands of feet below. He radioed Air Traffic Control, asking to abandon his flight plan and finish the transit under Visual Flight Rules. He pulled back the throttle levers of his Avro Vulcan B2, swooped down with a smile on his face, and told his crew to find themselves a vantage point. While Withers flew, his young red-haired co-pilot, Flying Officer Pete Taylor, took snaps for everyone on board with the collection of cameras that hung round his neck – it was always said, after all, that Vulcan co-pilots carried everything but the responsibility. Tourists enjoying the breathtaking panorama of the canyon must have been unnerved to find themselves looking down on the huge delta wings of a British Vulcan bomber sweeping by below them, followed quickly by a second jet, flying past more cautiously, above the lip of the gorge.
Once on the ground at Nellis, with the skyscrapers of Las Vegas’s mega-casinos visible from the vast flightline, Withers was joined by Squadron Leader Alastair ‘Monty’ Montgomery, the diminutive, hyperactive Scottish captain of the second Vulcan, and his crew. The two crews walked towards the collection of functional white low-rise buildings and hangars that lined the concrete pan. Withers, his face boyish despite his thinning hair, was popular, self-deprecating and friendly. As he entered Building 201, RED FLAG’s HQ, and began to get his bearings, he looked up at the board that displayed the day’s flying programme and winced. Over a map of the Grand Canyon was an unmissable red mark bearing the words ‘NOT BELOW 20,000 FEET’. Wonderful scenery though, he thought.
As a teenager, Monty had, like Withers, been inspired to join the Air Force by the glamour of being a fighter pilot. The moment an English Electric Lightning taxied past at an airshow with the canopy raised, its scarf-wearing pilot waving insouciantly at the crow
d, Monty had been hooked. RED FLAG was the kind of thing they’d signed up for and both men knew that it was a privilege to be involved. The RAF were first invited to take part in 1977. And since then they’d earned a reputation for low, aggressive flying. ‘Those RAF boys truly part the sand and shave the rocks,’ said one admiring American fighter pilot. Only the best crews were sent and competition for places on the RAF detachment was fierce. Over the month that followed, Withers and Monty would be tested as pilots and captains like never before. And they would become, despite their very different personalities, firm friends.
RED FLAG was born out of necessity. During the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese ace Nguyen Van Bay shot down thirteen American fighters. These weren’t the kind of numbers that sat happily with the USAF. While the war was still being fought they commissioned the ‘Red Baron’ Report into what was going wrong. American training taught the crews everything but how to fight. Good, but raw, young pilots were being overwhelmed by the experience of combat. If they lived through the first ten hours or so of combat, though, the odds on surviving the rest of the tour improved dramatically. The solution was RED FLAG, which first took place in 1975.
Flown over the deserts and ridges of Nevada, on weapons ranges the size of Switzerland, RED FLAG was a series of ultra-realistic war games. Participants were divided into blue and red forces, good guys and bad guys. Radars tuned to Warsaw Pact frequencies searched the skies while anti-aircraft units fired harmless but convincing Smoky SAMs – simulated surface-to-air missiles. RED FLAG also boasted its own ‘enemy’ fighters in the shape of the 64th Aggressor Squadron, a unit trained to fly and fight like the Soviets. Through all of this, the good guys had to try to get through to their targets. It was the closest training got to going to war for real. If combat was Red, and peacetime Green, then RED FLAG was Amber.
Inside Building 201, the walls were covered with signed pictures and plaques left behind by visiting units. In the offices of RED FLAG’s Commanding Officer, though, one poster stood out. It celebrated the time a low-flying RAF jet scraped a scar into the scrub with its wingtip. The same year, another crew took out a powerline when they flew up into it. When the engineers went out to repair the line they recorded its height from the ground: just 42 feet. And aircrew and engineers still talked about the photo taken of a Vulcan with a chunk of Joshua tree jammed behind its control surfaces. But what might appear reckless was in fact the lifeblood of the RAF strike force in 1982. Low-level flying was their main defence. It stopped search radars seeing them until the last minute, denied fire-control radars the time to get a lock and confused the air-to-air radars of defending fighters as they struggled to pick up their attackers against clutter thrown up by the ground features.
During the first week of the exercises, a minimum altitude of 200 feet was imposed – organizers didn’t want participants killing themselves – but as crews familiarized themselves with the terrain that restriction was lifted. When anyone asked Martin Withers how low he’d take his Vulcan through the Nellis ranges he’d smile mischievously and tell them ‘never below eighty feet’ – less than the wingspan of the Vulcan he was flying. At this height, the vortices spiralling off his wings could roll tumbleweed in the big bomber’s wake. A sneeze could send the crew into the ground in a twitch. But it was the big jet’s combination of size and low-down agility that so impressed the Americans. Their lumbering B-52s simply couldn’t twist and turn below the ridgelines like their British counterparts. As the Vulcans swept past it was an epic sight. The American crews who manned the Smoky SAM sites would whoop and holler at the sight of such a large aircraft being flown so low and so hard through the hot, viscous desert air. Even in the relative cool of January in Nevada the Vulcan crews would finish a sortie wet with sweat from physical exertion.
Alone on Withers’ crew, AEO, Flight Lieutenant Hugh Prior had been to RED FLAG before. Chosen as the most qualified Vulcan AEO for that first RAF deployment in 1977, he knew well the dangers the Nellis ranges presented. That year a Blackburn Buccaneer S2, trying to negotiate its way through the jagged Nevada peaks at 100 feet and 500 knots, was lost. On one occasion, Prior had thought the same fate awaited his Vulcan. As his two pilots scanned the ridgelines looking for gaps through to the next valley, one told the other, ‘We’re not going to make it.’ To Prior and the two navigators seated facing to the rear, without a view out, it was a statement open to misinterpretation at the very least. The pilot was lucky any of the three backseaters climbed into a plane with him ever again.
The Vulcans were at the Nellis ranges to practise for one thing only: to deliver a nuclear bomb. And on Martin Withers’ crew ultimate responsibility for the success of that fell to the amiable young Navigator Radar, Flight Lieutenant Bob Wright. And even getting to a frontline squadron had been far from plain sailing for him. Wright had wanted to be a pilot, but had been told after three attempts that he didn’t have the aptitude for it. Hand–eye co-ordination, they’d said. Poor A-level results didn’t help either. But he still wanted to fly and so he accepted the knock-back and joined the RAF as a Navigator, eyeing the possibility of a posting to a fast-jet squadron. Then he flunked Navigator training. He got through the second time, but then had to endure watching other students get postings to the Buccaneers and Phantoms he wanted while he got Vulcans. But as soon as he arrived at Waddington things started looking up. Being on the squadron was exactly what he’d needed. He was learning and improving with every sortie. On a five-man crew, the others were able to support and nurture the new boy. Wright, the Navigator Radar, operated the Navigation and Bombing System (NBS). This included a powerful radar which he used to fix the aircraft’s position against distinctive ground features. Low over the ridges and valleys of the Nevada scrub, he also served another vital function – providing back-up to the pilots who used their own Terrain-Following Radar (TFR) to fly clear of obstacles. Sitting at his right shoulder, Navigator Plotter Gordon Graham planned the route, and navigated the aircraft around it. He controlled the jet’s primary navigation system: the Ground Position Indicator Mk 6. The GPI6 provided a continuous read-out of the aircraft’s position over the ground in latitude and longitude. Graham’s system was linked to Wright’s NBS, and information could be passed between the two. The two navigators worked together, and as RED FLAG progressed each began to develop an instinct for how the other operated. They were becoming a strong team. In the end though, while Graham could navigate the aircraft, the pilots Withers and Taylor could follow his directions, and AEO Hugh Prior could try to make sure they stayed safe from the attentions of enemy air defences, it was still Wright who had to drop the bomb on target. And that alone was the Vulcan’s raison d’être.
Chapter 2
Galtieri’s accession to Argentina’s presidency meant that Anaya’s plot to invade Las Islas Malvinas became a priority. In so doing, it displaced an earlier initiative to test Britain’s resolve in the region. In July 1981, encouraged by signals from London suggesting a waning interest in the South Atlantic, Anaya and Vice-Admiral Juan Lombardo, the Commander-in-Chief of the Argentine fleet, had begun planning a different operation. In 1976 the two men had put fifty naval technicians and scientists ashore on the frozen British island of Southern Thule, one of the chain of South Sandwich Islands that lie 400 miles to the south-east of South Georgia. The Argentinians quietly constructed a permanent weather station there and, beyond protesting, the British did nothing to remove them.
Anaya and Lombardo proposed to repeat the operation on South Georgia itself. The plan was christened Operation ALPHA and was designed to establish an Argentine claim on the remote outpost. But with Galtieri in power, ALPHA was relegated, quickly overtaken in Anaya’s imagination by the greater prize: taking possession of Las Malvinas. Plans for ALPHA, however, remained in place. Lombardo quickly realized that Operation BLUE, as the Falklands plan became known, would be jeopardized if Operation ALPHA was allowed to go ahead. The British were certain, he thought, to send a nuclear hunter-killer submarine
in response to any move on South Georgia and the Argentine Navy simply had no answer to a weapon of such stealth and sophistication.
Lombardo signalled Anaya in Buenos Aires from his base at Puerto Belgrano on 15 January in order to make his point and was told by Anaya that ALPHA had been cancelled. Reassured, Lombardo and his staff carried on with detailed planning for Operation BLUE. The Falkland Islands’ long and messy history was about to become manifest.
Early disputes over sovereignty were characterized by their half-heartedness – that is, until any rival displayed an interest. Sightings of the islands by ships rounding Cape Horn date back to the sixteenth century, but it was the British who were the first to record setting foot on the islands, when a privateer, Captain John Strong, en route to Chile, was forced to take refuge there from a storm. Few, however, seemed particularly enamoured of the bleak, treeless islands that sat like a pair of lungs, either side of Falkland Sound – the channel of water named by Strong after the then Lord of the Admiralty. It was over sixty years before a more permanent presence on the islands was established. And it was French. Antoine de Bougainville created the small settlement of Port Louis on East Falkland in 1764, claiming the islands for the French king. Three years later, in an attempt to strengthen an alliance with Spain, the colony was sold to her for the modern-day equivalent of £250,000 and Port Louis became Puerto Soledad. And Les Malouines – named after the French port of Saint-Malo – became Las Malvinas. And that would have been that: the islands would have passed from Spain to Argentina as that country came into existence in the early 1800s, assuming independence and control of Spain’s South American territories.
Or it would have been were it not for the fact that, while all this was going on, the British had arrived on Saunders Island off West Falkland in 1765, fenced off and planted a vegetable garden, and named the whole enterprise Port Egmont. But although the British mission might have been motivated by French interest in the region, the men on the ground appear to have been entirely ignorant of the rival French settlement at Port Louis.
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