Vulcan 607

by Rowland White

  * * *

  In March 1982, Endurance wasn’t the only British asset facing the prospect of imminent retirement. While she and the Bahia Buen Suceso criss-crossed the South Atlantic, Martin Withers delivered a Vulcan bomber to the Imperial War Museum at Duxford in Cambridgeshire. The big jet came in low over the M11 motorway, performing two touch-and-goes for an airshow crowd on the museum’s short runway before shutting down the engines for the last time. It wasn’t even such an unusual day’s work for the aircraft’s crew. Other Vulcans were being flown into museums around the country. RED FLAG had been an Indian summer; the writing was on the wall for the old bombers.

  By the time the Argentine negotiating team returned from New York, the mood in Argentina had hardened. The outcome of the talks no longer mattered. The Argentine Navy – in particular, Admiral Anaya – now seemed to be setting the agenda. And had the plan delivered by Vice-Admiral Lombardo on 15 February been acted on, it might even have worked. Instead, Anaya’s unfortunate deputy was completely wrong-footed.

  His plan to take Las Malvinas had contained one clear warning: if the British deployed a hunter-killer, the Argentine Navy would effectively be restricted to Argentina’s home waters. So when news reached him at his Punta del Este resort that Davidoff’s scrap metal dealers had raised the Argentine flag on South Georgia, he knew that Anaya had lied to him. The scrap dealers were no more than a cover story. ALPHA, he realized, was under way and the British, he felt certain, would dispatch a nuclear submarine south. Once it arrived on station, BLUE was off. He had, he calculated, about ten days to act.

  Chapter 4

  ‘How do you feel about the Argentines hoisting their flag on South Georgia?’

  The news took John Smith by surprise – he was frustrated that he was learning of events so close to home from a friend over 8,000 miles away in the UK. He felt it acutely too. Now running Sparrowhawk House guesthouse in the west of Stanley, he’d once worked for the British Antarctic Survey and had visited South Georgia before spending the next twenty years working for the FIC, the Falkland Islands Company. Although he had been born in Southampton, his roots were now in the Falklands. He’d been a resident for twenty-five years and been married to an islander, Ileen, for twenty-one of them. They had four children, two boys and two girls. Smith loved the islands, cherishing and recording their unique history – a job which included regular inspections of the rusting hulks of ships that had made it to Stanley harbour but no further.

  Staying at the guesthouse when Smith heard the news of the scrap dealers’ action on South Georgia was Captain Goffoglio of the Argentine Navy. That evening Goffoglio walked down the hill, past the children’s playing field in front of Sparrowhawk House, to join the islanders at a town hall dance. He spent the evening dancing with a blonde Argentine teacher who was in Stanley to teach Spanish. As they reeled around, both wore knowing, contented smiles. Upset by events on South Georgia, John Smith found it uncomfortable to watch.

  Goffoglio’s cheerful reaction to the news from South Georgia contrasted greatly with that of his superior. A horrified Vice-Admiral Juan Lombardo was racing back to Puerto Belgrano against a British submarine that he was sure was on its way. But instead of sending an attack submarine, Britain ordered HMS Endurance to return to South Georgia, stand off Grytviken and await further orders. While ‘Red Plum’ embarked nine extra Marines from the Falklands garrison, fitted the two 20mm cannon that were normally stowed below decks and left her hydrographers behind, she set sail armed with little more than a firm set of the jaw.

  In Stanley, ten-year-old Leona Vidal had been looking forward to an excursion aboard Endurance before the ship returned to the UK for winter. She and her classmates had been excited about it for weeks. With their trip scheduled for 1 April, the children planned a practical joke: to pretend one of them had fallen overboard. With Endurance gone, they were upset that their April Fools’ Day prank was off – probably no bad thing. And in any case, their disappointment would soon seem very insignificant. As Endurance steamed east her radio operators intercepted traffic from Argentina to the Bahia Buen Suceso congratulating her on her mission’s success. The situation was very finely poised and the dispatch of Endurance was about to tip the balance.

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Michael Beetham sat in his office on the sixth floor of the Ministry of Defence building on Whitehall. As 1950s blocks go, he thought, it wasn’t too bad. A bit of wood panelling here and there helped to dress it up, along with a few oil paintings from the MoD archives. Beetham was a compact, precise man whose kindly demeanour gave little hint of the fierce reputation he’d earned as a young squadron commander.

  In the summer of 1940, Beetham had spent the school holidays with his father. A veteran of the First World War, but too old to fight in the Second, he had been posted by the army to Hillsea Barracks on the hills overlooking Portsmouth. Although tales of the trenches didn’t fill the boy with much enthusiasm, his father was keen for him to join the army and the young Beetham expected to follow in his father’s footsteps. Until, that is, from his vantage point at Hillsea, he watched scenes from the Battle of Britain unfold. As the Hurricanes and Spitfires took on the attacking German bombers they cast a spell on him. That’s what I want to do!, he thought.

  ‘Sorry about the army,’ he told his father, ‘I want to be a fighter pilot and fly one of those!’ He joined the Air Force a year later, but by then the RAF needed bomber pilots. And in the winter of 1943 he was posted to 50 Squadron to fly Lancasters.

  His squadron’s next target had been Berlin. Beetham’s crew weren’t on the list to go. His Squadron Commander took him aside and told him he felt that such a heavily defended target might be too much on his first-ever raid. The next night, though, their names were on the list. And the target was again Berlin. ‘We’re going to be going to Berlin a lot,’ the CO told him. ‘I can’t hold you back any more.’ Beetham went on to fly thirty missions over Germany. Ten of them were over Berlin, but it was Augsburg that was mentioned in the citation for his DFC. Deep into southern Germany near the Austrian border, Augsburg and back was a long haul. His crew had completed their bomb-run and had turned for home, when the flight engineer spoke over the RT. The coolant temperature on one of the port engines had begun to rise alarmingly.

  ‘Temperature’s too high,’ said the engineer. ‘We’ve got to feather it. If we don’t do something about it…’ His voice trailed off.

  If they didn’t shut the Merlin down they’d have a fire on their hands. Beetham cut the power. Flying on three engines, they lost height and dropped behind the stream of bombers. Then, for the next 600 miles over enemy territory, they were on their own.

  Now, thirty-seven years after the end of that war, he was in his fifth year as Chief of the Air Staff, the professional head of the Royal Air Force, and he was finding reports of scrap metal merchants raising the Argentine flag on South Georgia difficult to get too worked up about. After all, he’d seen it all before. He remembered earlier Argentine feints: the incident on Southern Thule in 1976, threats to British ships in the South Atlantic, even the deranged Operation CONDOR, when a group of Argentine radicals landed an airliner on Stanley racecourse and claimed the islands for Argentina.

  In 1982, the entire MoD planning was focused on NATO and the Cold War. Intelligence-gathering, weapons systems, orders of battle and training were all concerned with keeping at bay the Soviet threat from the east. NATO forces faced nearly overwhelming numerical superiority and the UK could ill afford to be distracted by the regular routine contingency planning for every potential troublespot around the globe. At six-month intervals the chiefs would review possible theatres of operation throughout the world. Belize, the ex-colony of British Honduras that Guatemala had designs on, would always figure. So too would the Falklands. But unlike Central America, which was relatively easy to reinforce, whenever the Falklands came up, the conclusions would be the same – as things stood, the islands were practically indefensible. Although defence contingency plans r
anged from sending a submarine to mounting a task force to ward off any threat, without proper resources being committed to the Falklands the plan for its defence amounted to little more than a hope that it wouldn’t be necessary to defend it. And faced with the prospect of an occupation, it was thought unlikely that the islands could even be won back through force of arms.

  But no one in Whitehall, it seemed, believed it would come to that. Beetham was not alone in failing to appreciate the significance of what was unfolding in the South Atlantic. After reviewing defence contingency plans for the Falklands and drawing little encouragement from them, the Defence Secretary, Sir John Nott, left for a NATO planning meeting in Colorado Springs on 22 March. The Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Terence Lewin, flew to New Zealand on an official visit, while Lord Carrington, the Foreign Secretary, left for Israel after agreeing to the dispatch of Endurance on 20 March.

  There appeared to be a complete dislocation between Argentina’s view of what was happening and London’s. In the end, it was the mistaken assumption by Argentina that Britain had taken her seriously that triggered the immediate invasion of the Falklands. In sending Endurance, the British visibly demonstrated the gravity with which they regarded Operation ALPHA, but the patrol vessel was a paper tiger. Lombardo assumed, reasonably enough, that his opponent’s response would make military sense. He never considered that Endurance might represent the sum total of Britain’s reaction. He had, he believed, only until the submarine arrived to act.

  While Lombardo scrambled to get back to Buenos Aires, the British press began to take an interest in the story. ‘NAVY GUN BOAT SAILS TO REPEL INVADERS’ read the most excitable of the headlines on offer. At RAF Waddington, Martin Withers registered the story, but like so many other people in Britain viewed it as a little local difficulty in a faraway place that would soon blow over. Before returning to the Vulcan force, he’d completed a tour as a Qualified Flying Instructor flying Jet Provosts. Used to the enormous Vulcan, he’d enjoyed flying the nimble two-seat trainers and jumped at the chance to keep his hand in. On 23 March, the day he threw the little JP around the sky for an exhilarating three-quarters of an hour of aerobatics, Lombardo was confronting Anaya. He demanded to know what was going on, but Anaya never gave him an answer. Instead, he simply asked his subordinate, ‘Are we in a position to implement the Malvinas plan?’

  As drafted, the answer could only be no. While 9 July had been suggested as the patriotic date to launch the operation, the earliest date given was in the middle of May. Now, with a week to go before the expected arrival of the submarine, the plan was in disarray. Lombardo had carefully designed Operation BLUE to use – and be seen quite clearly to be using – the minimum possible force. When the small main body of troops flew in by helicopter, one component of the invasion force would already be staying as paying guests in Stanley’s Upland Goose Hotel. But his plan relied on the two transport ships and their helicopters that were now tied up in the South Georgia operation. Lombardo told Anaya he would need to consult his planning team and report back.

  At Puerto Belgrano, Lombardo and his team frantically reworked the plan. He would now have to use warships and landing craft to deliver the troops to Las Malvinas. Despite his care to avoid it, Operation BLUE would now appear to be exactly what it was: a forceful, military annexation. But it could be done. Anaya was going to get his invasion.

  On 28 March, a task force that included destroyers, frigates, a submarine and an aircraft carrier, Veinticinco de Mayo, set sail for the Falkland Islands.

  Chapter 5

  30 March 1982

  Commander Roger Lane-Nott, RN, was at war. Below the chill waters of the north-western approaches to Scotland his nuclear-powered hunter-killer submarine was on the frontline of the Cold War. HMS Splendid was the newest attack boat in the fleet and she had a contact. The control room, charged with adrenalin, focused on collecting and checking every snippet of information, every piece of intelligence and every sound. And then interpreting it.

  Driving a submarine was as much an art as a science – nearly everything was subjective. The control room was tightly packed with machinery, valves, gauges and pipes. At action stations, fifteen or sixteen people were squeezed in, each with his own area of responsibility: ship control, navigation, information organization, fire control. In the middle, side by side, were the periscopes. It was an intense, claustrophobic environment in which everybody knew what was expected of him and his colleagues. There were no secrets in the control room of a nuclear submarine.

  For Lane-Nott, Splendid’s war was personal and that’s the way he wanted it. Stuck on the bulkhead in the mast well of the boat’s control room were pictures of Soviet submarine commanders. He wasn’t fighting an enemy boat, he was fighting its Captain. He had to outwit him; be better than him.

  Splendid had been at sea continuously now for nearly three months. But the success or failure of the patrol had been distilled into the last forty minutes. For sixteen hours she’d been vectored into position by RAF Nimrods. Intelligence from the RAF patrol planes would be sent back to Northwood HQ then on to Splendid via ‘the broadcast’, a very-low-frequency transmission sent from an aerial in Northamptonshire. The reports could be received at any depth just thirteen minutes after first being made by the RAF. The beauty of ‘the broadcast’ was that at no point did the submarine have to advertise its position – the submariner’s worst fear. Not for nothing were Splendid and her sister ships known as ‘Sneaky Boats’.

  The Nimrods worked closely with the attack boats. Submariners would fly with Nimrod crews to understand how they thought and operated and vice versa. Now that close co-operation had paid off, and Splendid had to maintain her contact without alerting the enemy boat.

  To minimize noise from her screws and maximize the value of the intelligence he was gathering, Lane-Nott followed silently between a mile and a half and two miles to port and aft of the Soviet boat. He was aware that at any time the enemy could do something unexpected. It wouldn’t have been the first time. In 1972, a Soviet submarine entered the Clyde Channel for the first time. Lane-Nott was a young navigator aboard HMS Conqueror, the boat given the simple order to ‘Chase him out.’ On being discovered, a very aggressive Soviet captain turned his submarine and drove it straight at Conqueror. It had been an extremely close call. There had been other occasions when harassed Russians had fired torpedoes to scare off trails. British attack boats never went to sea without live weapons in the tubes.

  This is what it was all about. Lane-Nott felt energized that he’d found his quarry so quickly. Now there was no need to rush things. A nuclear submarine had endurance to burn. As long as his sonar operators maintained contact he could stay with her as long as he liked. The indications were that she was something new, a ‘Victor 3’ or ‘Akula’ class. Something they didn’t have much intelligence on. By the time Splendid turned for home, they’d be groaning with it. Every minute of the patrol was recorded. There would be miles of tape to analyse.

  They were in difficult water though, and before continuing the trail Lane-Nott wanted to know precisely where he was rather than rely on what the Inertial Navigation System was telling him. Without breaking contact with the Soviet boat he rose to periscope depth to fix his position. The shallower water also made communication easier and as Splendid returned to depth the Captain was interrupted by one of his radio signals men.

  ‘There’s a Blue Key message for you, sir.’ For the Captain’s eyes only. Fucking hell, he thought, I don’t want this now. I’m in the middle of a bloody trail. Lane-Nott had been waiting his entire career for a Blue Key message and he was excited by the prospect of new, significant intelligence on the Russian, but a Blue Key meant that he had to decrypt it personally. Crypto codes changed every four hours and his personal safe was stuffed with the crypto cards and deciphers. Reluctantly, he left Splendid in the hands of his First Lieutenant.

  As he decrypted the message he couldn’t believe what he was reading. So he did it a
second time. It seemed inexplicable. He had orders to abandon the trail, return to base under radio silence, and to store for war in preparation for another mission. He was to ‘Proceed with all dispatch’ – an expression that dated back to Nelson’s time and all in the Navy understood. In naval terms, Lane-Nott’s orders could not have been put more forcefully.

  By three o’clock the following afternoon, Splendid was tied up in number 1 berth at Faslane naval base.

  Air Vice-Marshal George Chesworth was furious. Since the early 1960s Chesworth’s career had been devoted to finding and tracking Soviet submarines. Perhaps more than anyone else in the RAF, he’d been behind the introduction of the Nimrod into the service. He’d written the Air Staff Requirement, commanded the first squadron and now was Chief of Staff at 18 Group at Northwood HQ with operational responsibility for the entire Nimrod force. Nestled among the golf courses of London’s leafy north-west suburbs, Northwood had since 1938 been the headquarters of the old Coastal Command, 18 Group’s predecessor. By 1982, it was also home to the Navy. The two services worked closely and well together in an era when joint operations were not the norm. But what on earth, Chesworth wanted to know, were they up to now?