Vulcan 607

by Rowland White

  Most important of all was the news from Marham that the Vulcan pilots were proving to be ‘good prodders’. It was time, perhaps, to make sure that the Argentinians got wind of what he had in mind. There was still a faint hope that if the mounting military pressure on the junta became overwhelming, war might be averted.

  With Beetham gone, Price returned to the job of getting the first four Victors ready to fly south. Then his phone rang. The message was straightforward: an aircraft would soon be arriving to pick him up from Marham. He had a couple of hours to pack his bags. He’d had absolutely no intimation of this sudden development. Where he was going wasn’t mentioned, although he had to assume it was Ascension Island. He was just told he was going to be briefed.

  Price rushed home to pack and say his goodbyes to his family who, however they might have felt about the surprise news, accepted it phlegmatically. In the late afternoon he boarded the HS125 Dominie for the short flight to Northolt, on the outskirts of London. From there he was driven straight to Whitehall to be briefed in MoD Ops Room. He was, they told him, going to become the Senior RAF Officer on Ascension Island. He’d be flying out from Brize Norton the next day.

  Until now, the Senior RAF Officer on Ascension had been drawn from the Nimrod force. As the Victor’s crucial role began to emerge, though, Price became the obvious candidate to succeed him.

  On Friday evening, as Jerry Price was ferried around the country, Martin Withers, Monty and John Reeve prepared to fly again. With their day-refuelling qualification complete, it was time to try it at night. Between two and five o’clock in the afternoon the crews sat through briefings, impatient to fly. Ground school and intelligence briefings were a permanent fixture in a packed schedule. For the time being it was limited to subjects like refuelling and the forgotten art of conventional bombing, but some of what was to come would raise eyebrows.

  At eight o’clock, Martin Withers and Dick Russell pushed forward the throttles and released the brakes. The first of the Vulcans accelerated down the Waddington runway and roared into the night sky, then rolled out towards the North Sea towlines to rendezvous with their tanker. Reeve and Monty followed at hour-and-a-half intervals. At night, unexpectedly, refuelling seemed more straightforward. The view of the floodlit white underside of the Victor seemed more abstract. There was less of a temptation to fly instinctively. Instead, closing on the red and black stripes and making contact could be carried out without distraction from what the seat of their pants was telling them. The Vulcan captains were gaining in confidence, making contact time after time, but still the persistent, inexplicable fuel leaks that threatened to scuttle the whole enterprise continued to undermine them.

  Jerry Price spent the night in a room at Northwood Headquarters. Before leaving for Brize, he made his way to the main Ops Room for an early-morning briefing with joint planners from all three services. Conspicuous by their absence were CORPORATE’s senior military commanders, all of whom were 4,000 miles away. Admiral Fieldhouse, along with Air Marshal Curtiss and Major-General Jeremy Moore, his air and land commanders respectively, had flown to Ascension to confirm the military plan to retake the Falklands. Naval helicopters flew the visitors out to HMS Hermes, the Task Force flagship. On board the aircraft carrier they met with Admiral Woodward, Brigadier Julian Thompson and Commodore Mike Clapp, the men responsible for implementing the plan. One factor dominated their thinking: time. It forced them to plan the campaign backwards. By the end of June, the ships of the Task Force, operating in a brutal environment, far from proper maintenance, would start to fall apart. The war would be won or lost by then. A strict timetable based solely on military, not political, imperatives was drawn up and agreed on. Two elements of the plan related directly to the job being asked of Waddington’s Vulcans. First of all, Fieldhouse hoped to convince the Argentinians that Buenos Aires was under threat. If they believed – whatever the reality – that their capital city was at risk, ships and aircraft would have to be kept north, away from the battle for the Falklands, to defend it. Secondly, he wanted to pull the Argentinians on to the punch, provoking them into committing their sea and air forces in defence of their conquest against an expected British amphibious assault on 1 May. For the British plan to work, Woodward’s Battle Group needed to sail by lunchtime the following day, 18 April.

  Admiral Fieldhouse returned to London to tell the politicians that, if a war was to be won, it had to begin by 1 May, no later. Negotiations had until that date. Waddington had less than two weeks, and they’d yet to drop a single bomb.

  In the late 1960s, in the face of a growing Soviet naval threat, the Defence Secretary, Denis Healey, made the bold claim that the British knew the position of every single Soviet ship in the Mediterranean and, should it be necessary, he added, could cope with the lot of them. His confidence came from the Victor SR2’s ability, using its radar, to accurately survey 400,000 square miles of ocean in one eight-hour sortie.

  With the need for the Victor to assume the tanker role, the task of maritime radar reconnaissance, MRR, had been passed to the Vulcans. But following the upgrade to their old radars by the ex-27 Squadron engineers, the Victors were being pressed back into service in their old capacity.

  The British plan to retake the Falklands was built around four main objectives, the first of which – the establishment of the 200-mile MEZ by the nuclear attack submarine – had already been achieved. Next on the list was the recovery of South Georgia.

  The decision to retake the remote South Atlantic island was essentially a political one. On purely military grounds it would have been preferable to focus solely on the Falklands. If not essential, however, Operation PARAQUAT, as the plan to recapture South Georgia became known, was desirable for a number of reasons. From the moment the decision was taken to put the Task Force to sea, a major consideration had been the length of time it would take to arrive in a position to conduct operations off the Falklands. What could happen militarily or politically during that hiatus was unpredictable and both the Cabinet and the defence chiefs remembered how the tide had turned against Britain during the 1956 Suez Crisis. The early recapture of South Georgia could provide momentum for Britain’s military campaign and shore up the public’s morale. It was hoped that a successful campaign might even persuade Argentina to abandon the Falklands themselves. Finally, the Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Lewin, wanted to be able to demonstrate that his forces could do what he and the service chiefs had said they could do.

  Two destroyers, HMS Antrim and HMS Plymouth, had departed Ascension on 12 April, supported by the Tidespring, a Royal Fleet Auxiliary tanker. On board they were carrying Royal Marines from 42 Commando and troopers from D Squadron SAS. They joined up with HMS Endurance on 14 April and the RFA Fort Austin; then the five-ship Task Group sailed south, bound for South Georgia.

  As it had in the 1960s when Denis Healey made his statement, the Navy once again needed to know the whereabouts of enemy ships and only the Victor could provide that information.

  At RAF Marham, after a day listening to briefings on everything from the international situation to survival in the South Atlantic, Bob Tuxford was handed a will form. Concentrates the mind, he thought, as he filled it in.

  Chapter 16

  18 April 1982

  ‘VULCANS TO HIT ARGENTINA’, screamed the banner headline in the Sunday Express. Sir Michael Beetham enjoyed it. It was exactly the kind of thing he had hoped for. He wanted to intimidate the Argentinians and sow the seeds of doubt in their minds. No one had any serious intention of bombing the mainland. After all, Beetham thought, it’s not the Second World War. We’re not in the business of bombing capitals. The newspapers, however, seemed to relish the idea. Follow-up reports became increasingly overheated. ‘It is unlikely’, one concluded, ‘that any of the weapons in Argentina’s arsenal would be able to stop the bombers destroying every major airfield, every port, every military centre.’ On the record, the MoD merely allowed itself to admit, coyly, that they were ‘extending th
e capabilities of a number of Vulcans’ and that they were not thinking ‘only in a NATO context’.

  The MoD version was much closer to the truth. It was still uncertain whether it was going to be possible to get a single Vulcan as far south as the Falklands, but the publicity had been part of the Chief of the Air Staff’s plan from the outset. The newspapers could speculate to their heart’s content and the Air Force would do whatever it could to fan the flames.

  It didn’t matter to John Laycock which crew it was, because to the Daily Express they would all look the same. The newspaper just wanted a picture to follow up on their report that the military balance had tipped ‘decisively in our favour’. Laycock hauled a crew out of flight planning. None of them were anything to do with the CORPORATE flight. In fact, they were preparing to leave on a training deployment to Treviso in Italy. That had to wait until the five of them had posed on the Waddington flightline with their helmets under their arms, staring at the camera with the intimidating stares of nightclub bouncers. Behind them, dominating the shot, was the unmistakable shape of the Avro delta.

  Highly amused by the whole episode, the crew left for Italy. ‘READY TO FIGHT’, read the headline when the photo appeared in the next day’s paper. ‘A mighty Vulcan bomber sits like a Goliath on the runway and in its shadow, five men stand ready to do their duty,’ the caption added. They were doing their bit, but their contribution to Waddington’s effort didn’t end there. Out for the night in Venice, perhaps a little the worse for wear, they became convinced that a Swiss businessman they were talking to was an Argentine spy and answered his loaded questions with the best bullshit they could muster.

  John Reeve couldn’t believe what he was reading. To catch the enemy unawares was the Vulcan’s best defence. With news of their involvement all over the papers, there seemed little hope of that. So much for surprise, he thought, now they know we’re coming.

  Martin Withers was losing his appetite. He’d greeted the news that they’d be practising air-to-air refuelling with enthusiasm, but over the course of the last week the mood had changed. The plan to use the Vulcans in anger was serious. The nature of his job meant he’d thought about killing. But as a nuclear bomber pilot, his job was to keep the peace. If that failed, then, he thought, he’d have few qualms about striking back against those who threatened him and his loved ones. It had never really preyed on his mind because he never thought it would ever happen. This was different. But it wasn’t the killing that fed his apprehension, it was the risk. His worry was that attacking a coastal target at the Vulcan’s standard 250 knots and 300 feet then carrying out a climbing turn to avoid terrain seemed almost suicidal. Against modern, radar-laid guns an aircraft the size of a Vulcan would be a sitting duck. He was going to have to fly faster. ‘The Book’ – the Operating Data Manual – said that you couldn’t throw a heavy Vulcan into a 400 knot full-power turn with 60 degrees of bank. But if they were going to have a chance of evading Argentine defences, that was exactly what they’d have to do. He knew that the Vulcan had been test-flown to 415 knots. He’d even been told by a pilot who’d flown the first Mk 2 Vulcan at Farnborough that, if you opened the taps and neglected to watch the speed, she’d reach 500.

  As the newspapers rolled off the presses on Sunday morning, Withers was flying again. On the last of the night-refuelling qualification sorties, Withers pushed the throttles forward at 15,000 feet over RAF Leuchars on the east coast of Scotland. If something goes wrong, he thought, we can always go in there. Won’t help much if the wing comes off, I suppose. At 420 knots, as Dick Russell looked on anxiously, he cranked the jet into the turn. She went round on rails, pulling 2g all the way. That settled it, if he was going in low, he was going to blast through the airfield at the lowest possible height for the bombs to fuse, then haul the Vulcan into the flattest, steepest turn of his life.

  Simon Baldwin was equally concerned about his crews’ chances. But the Argentine air defences were just one of the issues he was faced with. If he couldn’t get them to the target the threat of the anti-aircraft guns would be academic. So the most pressing problem remained the refuelling. The AARIs had signed off the three Vulcan captains – all of them were now qualified to refuel by day and night, but still the leaking probes persisted. There wasn’t anything drastically wrong with their flying, but neither did it appear to be anything mechanical. Initially, there’d been a scramble to reconstitute the system, but the engineers, using the method suggested by Marham after that first, frantic weekend, were testing the connections before every flight. In any case, there seemed to be two separate faults. During the fuel transfers themselves, leaks ran down the probe and over the cockpit glass, obliterating the view forward, but this seemed manageable compared to the second, more dramatic glitch: the huge wash of fuel that would flood back into the engines as contact was broken. Notes were circulated to everyone in the Air Force with any Vulcan refuelling experience asking them if they’d had similar difficulties and what was done to overcome them. The engineers, too, were typically creative.

  Various ways of dispersing the leaking fuel were suggested and tried, from the technical – fitting lines of vortex generators to the nose between the probe and the windscreen to churn up the airflow; and the basic – bending back a metal lip that ran underneath the glass that had, at some point, for reasons no one could remember, been hammered back on itself; to the ingenious – securing a kitchen colander around the base of the probe. None worked.

  A related concern was the availability of the probes themselves. Each of the Vulcans selected began the work-up with a probe fitted, but their tips, like a lizard’s tail in the claws of a predator, were designed to sheer off, to prevent more substantial damage to the aircraft during a clumsy contact. A number of them had already been damaged. But it was no longer just Vulcans. The RAF effort in support of the Task Force had created an unprecedented demand. Design teams at companies like British Aerospace, Marshall’s of Cambridge and Flight Refuelling Ltd were working round the clock to equip the RAF’s Nimrod and Hercules fleets with probes that would enable them to operate as far south as the Falklands. By cannibalizing the rest of Waddington’s Vulcan fleet the CORPORATE flight could be kept in the air, but the supply of new probes was finite. And when they were gone, they were gone.

  In November 1981, a IX Squadron Vulcan had suffered a series of severe technical faults en route to Goose Bay in Newfoundland. She was beyond economic repair, but, rather than being scrapped, was left as a gift to commemorate the RAF’s long association with the local community. She was the first to lose her probe. Urgent calls were made to aviation museums at home and around the world. The Vulcan at the RAF Museum in Hendon was raided. The jet delivered to the Imperial War Museum at Duxford by Martin Withers lost hers too. Curators of museums at Castle Air Force Base, California, and Offut, Nebraska, turned a blind eye as teams of RAF technicians arrived in a C-130 Hercules, removed the refuelling probes from their treasured exhibits, patched the holes they left behind with blanking plates, then disappeared with their booty.

  The refuelling could either be made to work or it couldn’t, but Baldwin had to work on the assumption that the engineers would rectify whatever was wrong. So next on the list was navigation. The newspapers had mentioned ‘pinpoint accuracy’. As things stood, though, just finding the islands over such long distances was a demanding task. Locating the actual target on a first pass attack was highly unlikely. During the Cold War, the Vulcans’ routes over the Russian steppes were endlessly updated. As the reach of the Soviet air defences grew, the crews refined their flight plans to take them through the gaps. Over water, in the South Atlantic, they faced the same difficulties as the Victors: no charts, no ground features and, consequently, no way to fix a position using the radar. In fact, they had only one reliable method of checking where they were: a sextant. The Vulcan had two periscope sextants – great big things like donkey dicks, reckoned Reeve’s plotter, Jim Vinales. They might not have looked familiar to a sailor of Nelson’s
day, but the principle was no different – they established the user’s position relative to the known position of the stars. The Vulcan crews had always practised the technique on navigation exercises, or sorties across the Atlantic, but they never really had to rely on the sextants. There was a difference between keeping a skill from going rusty and having your life depend on it. The Plotters talked a confident game. Vinales reckoned it was possible, working hard at it, to be accurate to within a few miles. The other half of Reeve’s Nav team, Mick Cooper, wasn’t so sure. He thought that over the kinds of distances involved, they’d be lucky to get within forty miles of where they were supposed to be going. John Laycock and Simon Baldwin were inclined to side with Cooper. Astro-nav demanded fairly long periods of smooth, straight and level flying. Flying in even loose formation with tanker aircraft would make that impossible. Astro-nav also depended on repetition. Without continual checking through further star shots, the tiniest error would grow exponentially. If they were going to send their crews to war they weren’t prepared to do so with navigation equipment that was hardly more accurate than a road map that could tell you only what county you were in. If the Vulcan was off track by forty miles as it ran in to a coastal airfield target at low level, the first radar fix would be too late in the attack run to guarantee a successful attack. In the worst case the aircraft might have to climb into radar and missile cover to obtain a fix and then manoeuvre to make a second attempt to fly down the runway. The defenders would love that; the Vulcan crew wouldn’t. Baldwin had devised astro techniques for bombing competitions that reduced the error to about seven miles or less, but it had taken weeks of training for crews to reach that level of expertise. They didn’t now have that luxury.