As the Vulcans flew long sorties at night while the Plotters and Radars practised their astro-nav out over the Atlantic, Laycock and Baldwin sent a signal to HQ 1 Group: some kind of new navigational aid for old V-bombers was desperately needed.
John Smith thought they sounded like German Stukas. Sinister. Argentine warplanes were now flying out of Stanley airfield. The little Pucaras wheeled and dived during bombing exercises over Yorke Bay to the north of the harbour. The buzz from their turbo-prop engines rose angrily as their speed increased. Smoke and flames rose hundreds of feet into the clear, windless sky.
Families around Stanley tried to calculate the progress of the British task force. One of Fran Biggs’s little brothers cut pictures of Harriers and ships out of magazines to annotate the map her husband Peter had pinned to the wall. The nine-year-old’s handiwork would earn icy stares from soldiers searching the house.
As the islanders waited, the first ships from Sandy Woodward’s Battle Group weighed their anchors off Ascension and set a course to the south-west. It was lunchtime on 18 April. Admiral Woodward had, at least, met the first of his deadlines.
Chapter 17
18 April 1982
It was a beautiful day on Ascension Island. Most of them were. Temperatures hovered around the mid-seventies and, despite the humidity, the constant breeze from the south-east kept it comfortable. Bill Bryden liked to watch new arrivals from Wideawake’s small control tower. Over the last two weeks the USAF colonel had watched the British transport planes swarm into his normally sleepy mid-Atlantic base. Now he’d been asked to make space for four Victor K2s.
Wideawake’s runway was unusual. It rose from the threshold for about 1,000 feet before peaking and sloping away. Bryden’s controllers would always warn incoming traffic, but it could still catch you out. If a pilot misjudged his approach – if he failed to get his wheels down before the hump – he could end up chasing the runway as it sloped away from him and run out of Tarmac. First-time landings, he thought, as the first of the Victors settled into long finals for runway 14, were always interesting. Today, though, the surprise was on him.
The Victor touched down beautifully and quickly streamed a large white drag chute behind it. As the speed bled off, the pilot jettisoned the chute on to the middle of the runway. Standard practice. What the hell’s he going to do now?, wondered Bryden. Ascension Auxiliary Air Force Base had just one runway with a turning head at the end. Arrivals had to taxi to the bottom, turn through 180 degrees then backtrack to the threshold to leave off a taxiway that met the runway where they had touched down. With a knot of heavy fabric sitting on the Tarmac blocking the way there was no way back. And there were three other Victors in the pattern waiting to recover. Bryden scrambled a crew of ground handlers to drive out to the runway and remove the chute. It was heavier than it looked. It was all two of them could do to bundle it into the back of a pick-up. But with the runway now clear, the stranded Victor was able to taxi back, vacate the runway and allow the second tanker in to land. Air Traffic Control radioed the second jet first to inform the captain that there was a new standard procedure. From now on, Victors would carry their chutes to the turning head before dropping them, ensuring that the runway was unobstructed.
The confusion was a clear early indication to all involved, not least the Victor pilots, of the limitations of Wideawake’s facilities. If, for any reason at all, that single runway was put out of action, nothing could come in or out. And there was nowhere else to go. Not for over 1,000 miles in any direction.
The Victor crews were greeted with cold beers by the engineering team. They’d flown in separately on transport planes, bringing with them ground equipment to support RAF operations. Each Victor had carried a passenger on board: the Crew Chief. Armed with little more than expertise and experience, he had to try to keep his Victor flying when it was deployed away from home. With Tux was one of the most committed: Roger Brooks was a man devoted to the old V-bomber.
Later in the day, Jerry Price disembarked from a VC10 after an unnerving flight via Dakar in Senegal. The only other passenger on board, squeezed in with him amongst the cargo, had been an intense, taciturn SAS man, who, it appeared, had whiled away the entire flight sharpening knives at the back of the hold. Price looked around at the barren red-brown landscape of peaks and craters of his new command. Overlooking the runway from the south side, rising like giant termite mounds, were the volcanic shapes of Round Hill and South Gannet Hill. Only Green Mountain to the north-east broke up a landscape so similar to the moon’s, that NASA had actually tested their ‘Moon Buggy’ Lunar Roving Vehicle on the island. The mountain was a freak. When Charles Darwin stopped at Ascension in 1836 during the voyage of the HMS Beagle, he described it as ‘entirely destitute of trees’. Barely 150 years later, following an ambitious and eclectic nineteenth-century planting scheme, a thriving tropical rainforest, inhabited by orange land crabs, graced its upper slopes. Clouds now formed around the peak, giving rise to blustery showers in the early afternoons. Without any other source of natural water, great effort had gone into trying to collect the rain that fell, but it couldn’t support Ascension’s 1,000-strong migrant population. Instead, fresh water came as a by-product of the island’s two power stations. More than any other factor, the water supply was going to determine the numbers Ascension could support.
The USAF outsourced the management of Wideawake. The small contingent from PanAm were contracted to handle 285 aircraft movements per year. Of those, 104 – 52 landings, 52 take-offs – were accounted for by the weekly C-141 Starlifter transport that resupplied the island from America. That left one landing or one take-off every couple of days. The pace was not expected to be energetic. But that had already changed dramatically.
The task facing Price was immediately apparent. First on the agenda was to erect the tents that would become the Operations centre. Planning, engineering, briefing, tactical communications, even medical facilities would all be housed under canvas. The aircrew, engineers and planning team all rolled up their sleeves and mucked in. Frontier stuff, thought Tux.
For Price the one real saving grace, inflexible as it might be, was the runway. In anticipation of the Apollo moon landings, NASA built a deep-space tracking station in the 1960s. At the same time, Wideawake’s runway was extended from 6,000 to 10,000 feet. Although the Apollo programme was long gone, NASA had maintained a presence on the island. And since 1981, Ascension had again become invaluable when her lengthened strip was designated as an unlikely diversion field for the Space Shuttle. The window during which, if something went wrong during a flight, Columbia could have used Wideawake was only minutes wide, but the runway was long enough should it have to. It was fortunate that the next shuttle flight wasn’t scheduled until the end of June. Until then, the British were going to need every inch of the orbiter’s runway.
* * *
In 1981, faced with rising fuel costs and increasingly stringent airport noise restrictions, British Airways put its entire fleet of fourteen Vickers Super VC10 airliners up for sale. With a number of ex-commercial VC10s already undergoing conversion into aerial tankers, and conscious of the age of its Victor force, the MoD snapped up the old jets and put them into storage. Like the Victors they were equipped with rare Rolls-Royce Conway engines and proved to be a useful and regular source of engine parts. But with the Vulcans’ desperate need for a navigation system that would be accurate in the South Atlantic, in 1982 the VC10s were ransacked again.
The first wave of Victors deploying to Ascension had been fitted with the Carousel Inertial Navigation System. If it worked for them, there was no reason it couldn’t also work for the Vulcans. The only problem was that it was needed yesterday. Then someone remembered the VC10s. The Super VC10s sitting outside at RAF Abingdon were fitted with twin Carousel INS.
An inertial navigation device is made up of gyroscopes and ultra-sensitive accelerometers. When it’s switched on, it orientates itself to true north. Once aligned, all further moveme
nt is detected by the accelerometers and measured relative to that starting point. The beauty of the Carousel was that it was self-sufficient, needing no recourse to any further input. The disadvantage was that it needed at least fifteen minutes to warm up. It couldn’t be hurried. If the warm-up was rushed or the system disturbed, small errors would creep in from the outset. Over half an hour it was probably unimportant, but over a long flight any error grew exponentially. And once an aircraft was airborne the system was impossible to reset.
A trial fit was hastily organized and a Vulcan flown to Marham, where the new navigation kit was installed. After a successful test flight the remaining CORPORATE bombers were fitted with Carousels removed from the cockpits of the neglected VC10s. The box containing the gyros was strapped down out of harm’s way in the bomb-aimer’s prone position in the nose of the jet under the pilots’ seats. The two control panels were fitted to the Nav Plotter’s station, light grey with red and yellow buttons against the scuffed black background. Then Gordon Graham, Jim Vinales and Dick Arnott were given a tutorial in how to operate it.
On Monday afternoon, the Vulcans took off to test the Carousels and further hone the refuelling skills of their Captains. They were without the AARIs for the first time. The three co-pilots, Pete Taylor, Don Dibbens and Bill Perrins, had watched their Captains’ efforts to make contact from the ladder between the two ejection seats. Now all three got a chance to try it for themselves. Nearly three hours later they landed back at Waddington, taxied to Alpha Dispersal and parked in the same spots they’d left from. In Reeve’s jet the two Carousels showed an error of just one nautical mile. That was good enough. The CORPORATE flight could now, at least, find its way to the Falkland Islands. But while further up the RAF chain of command this was known to be the aim, the crews, as they continued training, were still in the dark. Their target had yet to be confirmed to them. No one wanted to believe that the Argentine mainland was in their sights, but the thought preyed on their minds. And if it wasn’t, they speculated, it could only be the islands themselves. And, like Beetham, Hayr and the 1 Group Planners, they knew that the only target there that made any sense at all was the hard, all-weather runway at Stanley airfield.
To much of the Argentine military, the news of the invasion was as unexpected as it was to those at Marham or Waddington. None were quite so wrong-footed as the 2nd Escuadrilla Aeronaval de Caza y Ataque, of the Argentine Navy. The unit had only taken delivery of its French Dassault Super Étendard attack jets in November the previous year. While they trained for anti-ship operations against the British task force, the squadron’s CO, Commander Jorge Colombo, explored the possibility of flying out of BAM Malvinas. Take-off and braking distances were measured and examined. It was tight, but, in the dry at least, carrying an Exocet under one wing and a fuel tank under the other, the Étendards could take off and land on Stanley’s 4,100-foot runway. And it was definitely an option as a diversion if a jet was in trouble. On 19 April, satisfied that his fledgling squadron was ready for action, Colombo deployed the first of his four Super Étendards south from their base near Buenos Aires to Rio Grande, the most southerly base on the mainland, and within range of the islands.
Two piston-engined reconnaissance planes joined the 2nd Escuadrilla at the Tierra del Fuego base. The role of the elderly, barely airworthy Neptunes of the Escuadrilla de Exploración was to fly out to sea, pick up the British ships on their radars and direct the low-flying strike fighters in to their targets.
Ironically, the first Neptunes delivered to Argentina had already had one careful owner: the Royal Air Force.
It was twenty-five years since Hugh Prior had flown in RAF Coastal Command’s old Lockheed Neptunes. Like Dick Russell, Prior joined as a national serviceman Wireless Operator/Air Gunner. Like Russell, he’d been commissioned, but then instead of going on to become a pilot, he’d trained as an AEO. He was exactly the kind of smart, well-educated operator that the RAF had hoped to attract when they decided that the V-bombers’ AEOs needed to be officers. As the fifth member of the crew, the AEO wasn’t just there to monitor electrical systems that could power a small town, look after the jet’s checklists and man the radios. The AEO’s job was to defend the bomber.
Unlike their American and Russian counterparts, the British bombers had never been armed with tail guns. Instead, the Vulcans relied on a comprehensive suite of electronic countermeasures, or ECM, to keep them safe from harm. With cheerful-sounding names like Red Shrimp, Blue Diver or Green Palm, the ECM kit didn’t sound particularly warlike and, although it had been the best available at the time, all but the Red Shrimp jammer had been overtaken by age and Soviet technology. A more recent, and still vital, addition was the 18228 Radar Warning Receiver – RWR – that alerted the AEO to the presence of enemy radars. Visual and audio warnings kicked in simultaneously. A strobe on the screen in front of the AEO would show him the direction of the threat as well as indicating the frequency band of the enemy radar. Through his headset the sound of the Pulse Recurrence Frequency, or PRF, would confirm it. Every radar emits a number of pulses per minute, reflections from which need to travel out and return for the operator to track a target. Working over greater distances, a search radar took longer to complete each sweep, resulting in a lower PRF. The higher the PRF, the greater the danger. From a slow rattle of an SA-2 Fansong fire-control radar to the angry, high-pitched buzz from the Gun Dish radar directing the fire of a ZSU-23-4’s four automatic cannons, the AEOs could identify a threat from its PRF. And knowledge never stood still. Like submarines on the hunt for new sonar footprints, 51 Squadron’s top-secret, intelligence-gathering Nimrod R1s were always searching for unknown frequencies. Once identified and analysed, the information was fed back to the RAF’s strike squadrons and added to the list.
Hugh Prior and Barry Masefield knew the sounds well. As electronic warfare instructors they’d taught others how to recognize them. When the Vulcans switched to low-level operation, their RWR kit had been upgraded. But while the 18228 usually detected a signal before it was strong enough to provide an echo back to source, both AEOs knew that it could still only buy them time. Time was crucial, though. Radar-guided weapons can only work inside a finite box – a kill zone – and they need time to lock and track. If the Vulcans could be in and out of the box before the system was ready to fire, they would survive.
The other tricks at Prior and Masefield’s disposal were limited and designed to be used against the Soviets and the Warsaw Pact arsenal. Unfortunately the Argentinians hadn’t bought their anti-aircraft weapons from the Soviets.
Simon Baldwin and his planning team had been boning up on what the Vulcan crews might expect going in against the Argentinians. Their anti-aircraft defences, it seemed, were sourced throughout the world: TPS-43 and 44 search radars from America; Oerlikon anti-aircraft guns from Switzerland – unlike Second World War pompom batteries, these were deadly accurate, radar-laid cannons firing high-explosive 35mm shells. It was modern NATO technology and the Vulcan’s vintage ECM kit was starting to look horribly inadequate.
The AEOs didn’t even know the PRF signature of a Swiss Superfledermaus or Skyguard gun-laying radar. That could be established easily though. The greater concern was what they were actually going to do about them when they found out. The powerful, but crude, Red Shrimp jammer might blind the Argentine search radars from a distance, but at close range they would burn through its barrage of white noise. The old jammers would actually act like beacons, their emissions doing little more than pinpoint their source. And against the frequencies used by the gun-laying radars they were useless. As things stood, the AEOs would be left with nothing to do but fly their bomb-run and fire bundles of chaff at the first sign of a lock-on from an enemy fire-control radar. It wasn’t enough.
Thoughts had already turned to possible alternatives. The Buccaneers at RAF Honington carried a more modern, sophisticated ECM pod – the Westinghouse AN/ALQ-101D, or Dash 10. It would work, but the two weapons pylons under each wing of th
e Buccaneer meant they had somewhere to hang it. The Vulcan didn’t. With a capacious internal bomb bay, it had never needed to carry stores externally. Chris Pye’s engineers again saved the day when they remembered that the reason why some of the Vulcans had been delivered with the more powerful 301 series Olympus engines was because they’d been expected to be carrying two huge Skybolt missiles – one under each wing. Despite Skybolt being cancelled, those 301-engined aircraft must somewhere still have the hardpoints that would have allowed them to carry the big weapon. The problem was, no one knew where they were and any blueprints that might have shown them were long discarded. The only thing for it was trial and error. One of the CORPORATE aircraft, XL391, was unlucky enough to be in the hangar undergoing minor servicing when the need arose. The engineers prodded, tapped and drilled at the underside of the jet until they found, just behind the point where the wing’s angle of sweep decreases, the missing hardpoints. They were, however, still a long way from being able to attach anything.
By the morning of Monday the 19th, a day later, they’d welded together sections of L-shaped mild-steel girders found on the engineering dump and bolted them on to the once-clean wing. The pylon itself was also built in the station workshops. With only the most basic aerodynamic fairing over the front it was equally agricultural in appearance.
Chris Pye’s team were again lucky with the Vulcans they’d chosen. Cooling ducts built into the wing for the Skybolts allowed them to run the wiring for the Dash 10 back to the cockpit. The control panel was screwed into the top of the AEO’s station replacing his cool-air duct. It was still stickered ‘HONINGTON ONLY’.
The job just needed finishing off. One of the engineers asked if someone could tell him which one of the squadrons home-brewed its own beer.
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