By Monday, Waddington’s engineering wing reckoned they’d done it. The plumbing for the Vulcans’ in-flight refuelling should be serviceable. They phoned their counterparts at RAF Marham, engineers familiar with the equipment, to ask how to test that it actually worked. They were told that they needed to attach a fuel bowser to the probes and pressurize the whole system. To make the connection, though, they had to have a specialized fitting. The experts at Marham couldn’t get one to them, but they described what was needed.
‘I think I know where we’ve got one,’ said one of the 101 Squadron technicians after a moment’s thought. He seemed to recall that they had one stuck in the corner of the groundcrew room, where they used it as an ashtray. They dusted it down and used it to check the results of their weekend’s labour. It worked.
Chapter 10
On 11 November 1918, aircraft took off from RAF Marham in Norfolk bound for the airfield at Narborough, just a mile and a half to the north-east. The most destructive war the world had ever seen was over and Marham’s airmen were going to celebrate Armistice Day by bombarding their colleagues with bags of flour. The unprovoked attack didn’t go unanswered for long. In retaliation, Marham was hit from the air with bags of soot.
It was the last offensive action launched by either base before both were closed early in 1919. Peace also ended the embryonic career of Second Lieutenant Alan Cobham. He had been an RAF flying instructor at Marham for barely five months. Marham and Cobham, however, were both destined for greater things.
In 1982, RAF tanker crews slaked their thirst with beer served at the Sir Alan Cobham bar in the RAF Marham Officers’ Mess. Cobham’s brief connection with Marham in the dying days of the First World War was not the reason he was so honoured at Marham. Over the sixty years since the end of the Great War, the Norfolk airbase had become one of the largest and most important stations in the Air Force, and its main role was as home to the RAF’s entire fleet of Victor K2 aerial tankers. Without Cobham, the RAF might never even have had an air-to-air refuelling capability. After being demobbed, the young Second Lieutenant went on to become one of Britain’s legendary aviators and the world’s most passionate advocate of the potential of air-to-air refuelling. It was his persistence that culminated in Michael Beetham’s record-breaking long-range Valiant flights in the late 1950s.
In contrast to its American counterparts, the RAF was slow to embrace the possibilities the new air-refuelling technology offered, dismissing it, in 1947, as an exercise that was ‘not a paying proposition’.
Cobham thought they were fools. With a series of pioneering flights to India, South Africa and Australia in the 1920s he had become one of the most well-known and respected figures in British aviation. In 1934, driven by a belief that air-to-air refuelling would revolutionize commercial aviation, he registered the name of his new company: Flight Refuelling Ltd. Five years later he was proving the efficacy of his ideas with a transatlantic airmail service that was refuelled in flight. The system it used was developed by his new company at their base near the picturesque village of Tarrant Rushton in Dorset. While this nascent operation ended with the outbreak of war, trials continued and in 1944 the Air Ministry awarded him a contract to supply the in-flight refuelling equipment for the Lancasters of the RAF’s TIGER FORCE then preparing to deploy east for the expected brutal, bloody and drawn-out offensive against Japan.
At an RAF bomber base in Lincolnshire, the 21-year-old Flight Lieutenant Michael Beetham, DFC, was beginning his second tour as an already experienced bomber pilot. When the American nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki hastened the end of the war, plans for TIGER FORCE were abandoned. Thank God, thought Beetham, painfully well versed in the dangers faced by bomber crews, it’s not necessary.
But while the end of the war brought relief to the country and her servicemen, it was a potentially fatal blow for Alan Cobham’s Flight Refuelling operation. The contract to supply 600 sets of ‘looped hose’ flight-refuelling equipment for TIGER FORCE, despite being well advanced, was cancelled with Japan’s surrender in 1945. Cobham, though, never wavered in his faith in the system. He simply thought the Air Ministry lacked vision and he bought back, at scrap value, all of the equipment already supplied. Then, with typical bullishness and the fortune of the brave, he stayed in business long enough to establish a ground-breaking transatlantic air-refuelled passenger service to Bermuda that caught the eye of the Americans.
And in April 1948 a party of senior USAF officers arrived in Dorset to see if Cobham’s system could improve the prospects for their vast new nuclear bomber, Convair’s B-36 Peacemaker, then losing a fierce battle with the US Navy for Congressional funding. A contract with Cobham was signed soon after – the USAF were planning a surprise.
Before dawn on 7 December 1948 – the seventh anniversary of Pearl Harbor’s Day of Infamy – a heavily laden Boeing B-50 bomber clawed its way into the air from Carswell Air Force Base, Fort Worth, Texas, and, using the refuelling equipment Cobham had saved from the scrapyard, flew non-stop to Hawaii to carry out an undetected mock nuclear attack on that same US Navy Pacific base before returning to Texas.
Two and a half months later, another B-50 – Lucky Lady II – flew non-stop around the world. She was airborne for nearly four days.
As a result, Congress cancelled the US Navy’s ambitious 70,000-ton super-carrier and the ‘Magnesium Overcast’, the name given to the USAF’s vast B-36 bomber, became the spearhead of Strategic Air Command until the arrival of the B-52 in the middle of the next decade. But in Britain, the Air Ministry and RAF remained unmoved by the Americans’ success and by Cobham’s ‘slow bombardment of letters’. Instead, it was the winning combination of one impetuous remark and the inspiration of a Sunday morning lie-in that finally led the RAF to begin embracing the new technology.
While enjoying lunch with senior USAF officers at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, in 1948, Cobham heard not only of Boeing’s development of its own refuelling system for Strategic Air Command’s heavy bombers, but of the Tactical Air Command’s interest in any new air-to-air refuelling technique it might use for its single-seat fighters. The Englishman brazenly claimed that work on a suitable system for the latter was well advanced at Tarrant Rushton. The remark was utterly without foundation, but the American generals, sensing they may have found what they were looking for, arranged to visit the small Dorset factory in the spring of 1949 – just four months later.
Until now, the ‘looped hose’ system, on which all Flight Refuelling Ltd’s operations had been based, was literally hit or miss. The receiving aircraft had to extend a weighted hauling line behind it as it flew. A grappling hook-like projectile was then fired from a tanker aircraft at the trailing line. If the harpoon made contact, the receiver’s hauling line was then wound in towards the tanker. Inside the tanker, it was attached to the end of the tanker’s fuel hose before being used to wind the whole coupling back to the tail of the receiver. Only once the tanker’s fuel hose was connected to the fuel coupling at the back of the receiver could fuel flow. While it may have been easier to perform than it at first sounds, it could in no way be considered a routine or straightforward manoeuvre.
The Americans, while they’d appreciated the potential of in-flight refuelling, knew that something entirely more practical than the ‘looped hose’ system had to be devised for it to see regular squadron service. And that is exactly what Cobham had promised them he had up his sleeve.
He now had to conceive, design and test a completely new system before they arrived in Dorset, hoping to be impressed. His designers eliminated unfeasible options until they settled on a method that looked good: a receiver aircraft would fly a probe-mounted nozzle into a funnel-shaped drogue trailed behind the tanker. It nearly never got off the drawing board, however. The problem that could have killed it was finally solved when an engineer, Peter Macgregor, lying in bed on a Sunday morning, considered the way his spring-loaded roller blinds retracted. If, he thought, a s
imilar spring was mounted in the drum unit trailing the hose and drogue, it could keep the hose taut when contact was made, eliminating the whipping and looping that had so far made the system unworkable and dangerous. Just two days before the Generals arrived, the new system was tested for the first time using a Lancaster and Gloster Meteor 3, blagged from the RAF by the ever-resourceful Cobham. His brilliantly simple method had been produced with a typically British lack of governmental support. And with no sign whatsoever of that situation changing, a little over a year later Cobham was forced to sell the manufacturing rights to the Americans to keep his company solvent.
Not until 1954 did the Air Staff, perhaps persuaded by the USAF’s operational success with Cobham’s probe-and-drogue system in the Korean War, finally come to the conclusion that there was merit in giving their new V-force an air-to-air refuelling capability.
While sixty miles from Marham, on the other side of the Wash, RAF Waddington prepared for a mission that had long before ceased to be part of the Vulcan’s repertoire, at the Norfolk tanker base the story was rather different. Unlike most parts of the RAF, Marham’s Victor K2s of 55 and 57 Squadrons did in peacetime exactly what they would have to do in war – refuel the RAF’s fighters and other fast jets, keeping them in the air, giving them the range to reach their targets. In fact, throughout the Cold War, the tankers had fought a war that felt as real as the one waged by Roger Lane-Nott’s beloved submarine service.
At fighter stations like RAF Leuchars, Wattisham and Binbrook, McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantoms and English Electric Lightnings sat fuelled and armed in their hangars on Quick Reaction Alert. Their crews maintained a twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year vigil, ready to scramble at a moment’s notice to intercept intruders into UK airspace. These were invariably the Bear and Bison bombers of the Soviet Long Range and Naval Air Forces. On average there were five incursions into UK airspace a week, each testing the reaction of Britain’s stretched air defences. The Soviet bombers would come in from the north, probing through the Faeroes–Iceland gap. All had to be intercepted, identified and turned back by the RAF. Without the support of the Victor K2s the fighters, particularly the notoriously short-ranged Lightning, simply couldn’t have kept the Soviets at bay.
The ‘tanker trash’, as the Marham crews referred to themselves with pride, were doing their job for real. There was no question of them using training rounds, or checking bombing scores with cameras and computers. If they failed to deliver, in peacetime or in war, there was always potential for disaster.
As a result, Marham was a close-knit family. Many of the crews had been on the Victor K2s from day one. A number of them helped devise and refine the operating procedures that made the RAF tanker force one of the most flexible, effective and safe in the world. Safety during in-flight refuelling was always the responsibility of the ‘tanker trash’. It was a mindset that was ingrained – the life or death of the receiver was paramount.
Group Captain Jeremy Price liked things to be neat – done just so. The thoughtful, well-groomed tanker man had spent much of his professional life making sure that this was as true of air-to-air refuelling as it was of the vintage Aston Martin Ulster that he’d lovingly restored. He’d devised refuelling procedures that took decisions on safety out of the hands of stubborn fighter pilots with an aversion to admitting defeat. Another opportunity to put his skills to the test was as much a reminder of a bygone age as the old Aston: the 1969 Daily Mail Transatlantic Air Race. Price was part of the planning cell that steered an RAF Harrier to victory and enabled a Navy F-4 Phantom to set a new New York to London speed record – only beaten five years later by the astonishing SR-71 Blackbird.
Price had done it all at Marham: Flight Lieutenant, Squadron Leader, Wing Commander and Group Captain; Flight Commander (on Michael Beetham’s old squadron, 214), Squadron Commander of 57 Squadron and now, since June 1981, head of the tanker family, the Norfolk airbase’s well-liked and respected Station Commander.
But the family was feeling the strain a little. Marham had been home to V-bombers since 1956. Once considered an elite, the V-force were, by 1982, no longer the newest toy in the Air Force’s box – far from it. April 1982 saw the arrival at Marham of the first of the new Panavia Tornado GR1s, the swing-wing fighter-bombers of which so much was expected. This European collaboration had started life known as the MRCA, the Multi-Role Combat Aircraft. The Victor old-hands were not at all impressed with the brash new kids on the block. They didn’t like the way the pilots and navigators never changed out of their flight suits – that wasn’t the way the V-force did things. They didn’t like the attention the new ‘superjets’ attracted. And the fact that it was 617 Squadron, the Dambusters, the most famous squadron in the entire Air Force, didn’t help either. The ‘Dim Bastards’, they called them. MRCA? Short for ‘Much-Refurbished Canberra Aircraft’, they laughed, referring to the old English Electric Canberra jet bombers designed in the 1940s and now relegated to a declining role as the RAF’s jack-of-all-trades.
It was the Victors, though, that the RAF needed now. Marham’s shiny new residents were of no use whatsoever. Price was taken entirely by surprise. Just a few days before the invasion of the Falklands, Air Marshal Sir John Curtiss had visited Marham from 18 Group HQ at Northwood. The two men had sat around a table discussing Endurance’s frantic efforts to contain Argentine ambitions in South Georgia. They talked broadly about the South Atlantic as a theatre of operations, but without urgency. But now, while there were no clear indications yet of how the Victors might be used, it was evident that if the RAF were going to get involved, the old tankers were the only machines in their arsenal that would allow them to do so.
Soon after Sir Michael Beetham ordered the mobilization of the RAF transport force, with the Argentinians now in control of the Falklands, Price received a signal from Air Vice-Marshal Knight at 1 Group.
The ‘tanker trash’ were to prepare for war.
Chapter 11
Since handing over the reins of the nuclear deterrent to the Navy, the V-force had been run on a shoestring. The Vulcans, their crews were led to believe, wouldn’t be in service for much longer. The official line was that it wasn’t, therefore, cost-effective to spend good money on them. The few modifications that they’d had incorporated were hardly a great leap forward in technology either. The apparently endless upgrade programmes lavished on the USAF’s B-52 force were eyed enviously by their cash-strapped British counterparts. To contest bombing competitions with Strategic Air Command, Waddington’s Vulcans did have their ageing systems tweaked and enhanced. But it was little more than a bare minimum. The Heading Reference System was modified to give a smoother, more accurate feed into the Nav Plotter’s Ground Position Indicator. An additional Radar Altimeter dial was installed for the co-pilot, along with triple offset boxes for the Nav Radar that allowed him to ‘walk’ the bomber to its target using distinctive ground features. Radar-guided join-the-dots. The big delta’s ECM – Electronic Countermeasures – kit was also boosted. It didn’t, perhaps, amount to much, but Simon Baldwin, unsure whether any of it would even be relevant to the demands of CORPORATE, was determined to give his crews any help he could. Crudely screwed in and sometimes rescued from scrap heaps, the extra equipment was fitted to all the airframes selected for his training cell. And it didn’t stop there. Over the days and weeks that followed Easter, more would be done to enhance the old bombers’ capability and, more importantly, their ability to survive.
As Commanding Officer of one of Waddington’s four bomber squadrons, Baldwin had also been asked by John Laycock to put forward one of his flight crews. He had two outstanding candidates: 44’s two Flight Commanders. He had to choose one of them. In the end, though, he didn’t have to wrestle with the decision. One of them was, perhaps, the best pilot on the squadron. The other, though, was just back from RED FLAG.
‘Now you be careful.’
Monty didn’t get it. He’d just emerged from the funeral of a good friend and now his
friend’s widow was telling him to be careful.
‘What do you mean?’ he said, brightly. It sounded upbeat and unconcerned. ‘This is me, Monty!’ But she wouldn’t be reassured.
‘I don’t like this,’ she stressed, concerned about what the invasion of the Falklands was going to mean for the RAF. And for her friend Monty, in particular.
‘Oh, we won’t be going anywhere…’ Monty tried again to put her mind at ease. He drove back from the funeral with no reason to dwell on the exchange. But it soon turned out to be remarkably prescient.
When he got home, Monty’s wife Ingrid told him Simon Baldwin had phoned. The live-wire Scot called his squadron boss back to ask him what he was after.
‘You’d better come up,’ Baldwin told his Flight Commander.
Monty headed straight in to the base. And there, confusion and speculation about what might lie ahead were all around. Someone suggested they practise Vulcan on Vulcan formation flying to rehearse for refuelling.
But none of us has done any refuelling!
And the system’s dormant.
We’ll load up some bombs and there’ll be a firepower demonstration at Ascension Island.
Where’s Ascension Island?
We’ll drop some bombs to show the Argies we mean business!
That’s just dumb. Either we’re doing something or we’re not…
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