Vulcan 607

by Rowland White

  ‘Someone can,’ he was told, ‘but we’d rather you finished this first. Then we can talk about the home brewing!’

  ‘No,’ he said, defending himself, ‘you misunderstand. I’ve drilled through the bulkhead to take the wire in and all I want is some of those corks with the hole in the middle so that if I put the wires through the hole, push the cork into the hole in the bulkhead, shove a bit of mastic round it, it’ll be the perfect pressure tight seal…’

  To call it make and make do was understating the ingenuity by a considerable degree.

  The trial fit was a success and over the next two days the remaining CORPORATE Vulcans were rolled into the hangar to be similarly equipped. At the same time, the engineering team worked to refine the design of the hastily constructed prototype pylon.

  Having the Dash 10 – the best kit available – was something at least. But it didn’t put an end to Simon Baldwin’s concern about those radar-laid guns. The thought of them nagged away at him. He’d seen what they could do.

  Another five Victors flew in to Ascension the next day. The following morning, 20 April, they were going to send a Victor south, beyond the Antarctic convergence.

  Chapter 18

  20 April 1982

  Bob Tuxford reached up from his ejection seat to a central control panel mounted in the roof of the Victor’s cockpit. He checked the power source for engine start and opened the cross feed cock before flicking the ignition isolation. Then he selected the engine and pushed the start button.

  ‘Pressing now. One thousand… One.’ Communicating with his crew. ‘One thousand… Two.’ Then he repeated the action for the remaining engines. He dropped the other hand down to his left and released the throttles, then eased them forward before clicking the levers back into idle, turning over at around 48 per cent of their maximum revolutions. The crew went through the long list of checks: call and response over the conference intercom that connected all the men on board. Everything up and running. Today they were flying with a sixth crew member: a radar expert from the recently disbanded 27 Squadron, the specialist maritime reconnaissance unit. He would normally have had a proper seat, bolted down and secure between the pilots and the backseaters, but with the wooden box that housed the gyros and accelerometers of the Carousel INS strapped to the middle of the floor taking its place, he’d have to sit on that instead. For fifteen hours.

  It was nearly three weeks since the Falklands had been invaded and until now the Argentinians had had it nearly all their own way. Marines had put up fierce but limited resistance in Stanley and on South Georgia, but in the end they’d been overwhelmed. Today, Tux felt, was when things began to turn round. It had struck home during the briefing. As he’d looked around at his colleagues listening and taking notes from sheets of cardboard hanging from the canvas of the Victor Ops centre, he couldn’t help but think of the images of the Second World War. This is what the RAF gets paid for, he thought.

  Tux had been chosen to fly the long slot. The plan was for five Victors to fly south together. Then, like rows of cutlery used and discarded from the outside in at a banquet, the Victor formation would shrink as each wave of aircraft transferred spare fuel to those continuing, before turning for home, their usefulness at an end. Eventually, just Tux would be left, flying alone into potentially hostile skies to survey the unwelcoming seas around South Georgia. ‘What intelligence do we have and where are our surface forces?’ Tux had asked, concerned about what might be waiting for them when they descended to begin their search pattern. Knowing the location of British ships was important. Anxious, about to engage the enemy for the first time, they were as much of a cause for concern as Argentine anti-aircraft destroyers. It was all very well the Navy shooting first and asking questions later, but a beautifully worded apology wasn’t going to bring back a dead Victor crew. Tux didn’t really get an answer. The blank looks that greeted him suggested that nobody really knew.

  Now it was time to go. Tux checked in on the RT, just a brief transmission to prove the radio. Then, as he gently nudged up the power from the four Rolls-Royce Conway engines, the Victor began to roll forward. Before going too far, he tested the brakes. The big jet bowed heavily on its nosewheel. The view from the pilots’ seats was poor. Even the rear-view mirrors designed to help manoeuvring on the ground were of little use. Instead the Nav Radar and AEO would peer through their portholes on the sides of the cockpit to check the wings for clearance.

  Clear right.

  Clear left.

  Then John Keable told them the Carousel had tripped off-line.

  There was no quick fix. For the INS to find its bearings again they needed to start from scratch. It would take at least fifteen minutes to reboot and, with the rest of the formation burning precious fuel, ready to take off, they couldn’t afford to delay. Keable had no idea what had happened, but there was no way they could fly the probe slot without it. Bitterly disappointed and cursing the wretched piece of new kit, Tuxford thumbed the RT again.

  ‘We’ve lost our INS, we’re not capable.’

  And then the flexibility on which the ‘tanker trash’ prided themselves kept the mission on track.

  Watching the Victors fly into Ascension, Bill Bryden had thought about how many of the old converted V-bombers the Brits needed to support any long-range mission. Why, he wondered, can’t we lend them some of the USAF’s big Boeing KC-135s? As they were nearly twice the size of the Victors it was true that fewer of the American tankers would have been needed, but that would only increase the responsibility shouldered by each one. If you’re using two tankers and one fails, you’re worse off than if you needed five and one then develops a fault. The other critical advantage the British tanker force had was the ability to both give and receive fuel. For all its advantages, the American Stratotanker didn’t give that option. Tux knew that well – he’d spent two years flying them out of California with the USAF. It was a distinction that, in the days to come, would prove to be of vital importance.

  The five Victors waiting on the Wideawake pan were interchangeable – even at this late stage. Each of the crews carried copies of the flight plans allocated to their colleagues. Swapping positions within the formation was almost as simple as turning the page and following a new flight plan. If Tux couldn’t fly the long slot, then Squadron Leader John Elliott would. The Captain with whom Tuxford had trained in the Highlands the previous week seamlessly assumed the new role.

  As part of the first wave, flying as far as the first refuelling bracket, Tux and his crew would be barely an hour and a half out of Ascension. Always in the company of another jet, they could do without the help of the miserable Carousel that had, on this occasion, so let them down.

  The five fully loaded Victors powered down Wideawake’s runway 14, streaming one after another, and disappeared into the ink-black sky. At three o’clock in the morning local time, thousands of miles from the mainland, the only lights were those shining and blinking from the jets themselves. Careful to maintain a safe distance, they tail-chased each other up in an ascending spiral – the Victor force’s trademark ‘snake climb’. At 32,000 feet the formation turned south, to send Squadron Leader John Elliott on the longest radar reconnaissance mission in history.

  Bob Tuxford’s time would come.

  In the frigid waters off South Georgia, the ships of Task Group 319.9 waited to move. Soldiers from M Company 42 Commando – the ‘Mighty Munch’ – D Squadron SAS and No. 2 Section SBS prepared themselves for battle, packing and repacking their kit, cleaning their weapons, trying to stay fit. On board HMS Plymouth, Captain David Pentreath spoke to the SAS troopers he was playing host to.

  ‘Plymouth’, he told them, ‘is about the oldest ship in the fleet. She’s never been this far south. Wasn’t designed to. And she’s got a crack in the bow.’

  The hard to impress special forces men warmed to him immediately. Exactly what you want in a naval captain, they thought.

  While the Victors cruised south, three Vulcans took
off at twenty-minute intervals from Waddington. Then their pilots, Reeve, Withers and Montgomery, flew north along Britain’s east coast towards John O’Groats. Each aircraft carried seven 1,000lb high-explosive iron bombs, armed with 951 nose and tail fusing. Instant detonation on impact. They climbed to height and continued out over the North Sea before rolling on to a new heading that would take them to Garvie Island, a bleak slab of granite off Cape Wrath, mainland Scotland’s most north-westerly point. Forty miles out, they began their descent into thick, murky cloud.

  Weather could have been organized by the Argentinians, thought Monty as he emerged into the clear air below 5,000 feet. One by one, they dropped to 350 feet over the rough water to begin their bombing runs. Height, heading, airspeed, speed over the ground, wind direction and wind speed were all fed into the bomber’s old analogue computers. Once settled, all control inputs were made at the direction of the Nav Radars, staring into their screens, making sure the cross-hairs stayed over the target, tuning the gain on the radar to sharpen its accuracy as they got closer. As they ran in, there were familiar, terse exchanges between the Nav Radars in the back and the pilots on the flight deck.

  Go to bomb and check the demand.

  Left.

  Take it out. They had drifted to the right a little; the Nav Radar told the pilot to correct it.

  Demand zeroed. On target. Now it was crucial they kept the wings absolutely straight and level. Any acceleration in any direction as the bombs separated from their racks and they’d be thrown off course. The margins were fine, the slightest error amplified by speed and distance.

  The Nav Radars were dropping retarded bombs at low level. The bombs were standard 1,000lb bombs fitted with a tail cone that housed a small parachute. When the bomb was released from the aircraft, the tail cone opened and the small parachute deployed and slowed the descent of the bomb to ensure that it hit the ground well behind the Vulcan. Without the extra distance these devices allowed the escaping bomber to put between itself and the blast, there was the danger of scoring a disastrous own-goal.

  John Reeve’s AEO, Barry Masefield, watched through the rear-facing periscope as the bombs tumbled out of the bomb bay. He’d only ever seen this in archive footage of American B-52s. It was an exhilarating sight.

  As the bombs slammed into Garvie in a fierce hail of iron and rock, they threw spray hundreds of feet into the air. Masefield grinned as he heard the deep, percussive bellow of the explosions they’d left in their wake. The three V-bombers stayed low, continuing west at over 400 mph, leaving oily black smoke trails drifting in the wind.

  Looking out of the cockpit window to the left as he’d sped over the island, Monty couldn’t help noticing that the sheep, a few hundred yards away on the mainland, seemed utterly unbothered by his efforts. Slightly disconcerting, he thought.

  Before they returned to Waddington, the three Vulcans flew down the Scottish west coast before banking left over the English coast towards Spadeadam in the fells of east Cumberland. In the late 1950s, their destination had been the unlikely home to the Spadeadam Rocket Establishment, the largest rocket development facility outside America or the USSR; a kind of Cumbrian Cape Canaveral where Rolls-Royce had tested engines for the abandoned British Blue Streak ICBM. Now Spadeadam was a 10,000-acre electronic warfare range. Simulated Soviet radars and missiles mounted attacks on NATO aircraft as they flew through the range. It was where the RAF could test their defences. The range facilities had been hastily reprogrammed to replicate what little was known of the Argentine radars. As the Vulcans flew over, the Spadeadam systems transmitted the I and J band frequencies of Swiss Superfledermaus and Skyguard fire-control radars, and of the feared Roland surface-to-air missile. On board the bombers, the AEOs – Barry Masefield, Hugh Prior and John Hathaway – tried the new Dash 10 jamming pod for the first time. Compared to the ECM suite the Vulcans had fitted internally, the new pod, tuned to respond to the Argentine equipment, offered an altogether different measure of protection.

  Hugh Prior ignored the slow pulse of the Echo band search radars. They were harmless. Never jam until you’ve got to. But when the malevolent flutter of the fire-control radars buzzed through his headset and lit up the strobe on his control panel he hit the switch for the Dash 10. The pod went to work. As well as noise jamming like the Vulcan’s old Red Shrimp unit, the borrowed American-built pod was a deflection jammer. It worked on the same principle as a ventriloquist throwing his voice. It picked up the detection pulse of the enemy fire-control radar and electronically altered the radar return of the incoming jet to place it in airspace four or five miles away. So even if the noise-jamming alone failed to break the radar lock, the missile should go boring down on a phantom radar signature miles from where its would-be target really was. Over Spadeadam at least, the pods worked as advertised. And the AEOs had confirmed what they already knew: a Swiss anti-aircraft gun sounds exactly the same as a Russian one. Moreover, if either caught up with you, Swiss and Russian high-explosive cannon shells were going to do exactly the same damage.

  As the crews shared a beer in the Ops block they chatted excitedly about the three-and-a-half-hour sortie. After the frustrations of the air-to-air refuelling, this was much more like it. Still high on adrenalin, the crews felt bulletproof. Monty looked at them all and tried to inject a little realism.

  ‘I have to point out, fellows, that tomorrow we’re doing it in the dark.’

  Just the ticket, Mick Cooper thought and smiled to himself.

  Continuing alone from the final refuelling bracket, John Elliott allowed his Victor to cruise-climb gently to 43,000 feet. As the first burnt orange of dawn appeared on the horizon, he pulled back on the throttles and descended to 18,000 feet and into the search area, ninety miles east of South Georgia. From this point, Elliott flew west towards the centre of the island, before turning north for 120 miles. At the top of the next leg he again turned west for ninety miles before turning on to the next southerly one. Like a groundsman mowing parallel stripes into a football field, the up-and-down search pattern was precise, ensuring that each leg met the edge of the one adjacent to it. In just under an hour and a half, after completing two of these giant doglegs, Elliott’s Nav team had mapped over 150,000 square miles of sea to the north and north-west of South Georgia – an area the size of the whole of the United Kingdom. From the bridge of HMS Antrim, the ship leading the small naval Task Group, officers saw white contrails streaming from behind the Victor through a break in the clouds.

  * * *

  Progress was needed. The Defence Secretary John Nott’s worry that a news vacuum would develop was shared by colleagues in the War Cabinet. The long wait while the Task Force steamed south had, from the outset, been one of Sir Michael Beetham’s concerns. As long as it continued, the initiative lay with the enemy. The recapture of South Georgia could fill the void. There was still the faint hope that decisive action here would weaken Argentine resolve over the Falklands themselves. But if it came to war, South Georgia, with its deep fjords and natural harbours, might provide safe haven for British ships – especially those merchant ships that had been pressed into action to support the military effort.

  At ten o’clock in the evening, the phone rang in Michael Beetham’s London flat. He picked up to hear news of the RAF contribution. Beedie and Cowling, the radar team on board Elliott’s Victor, hadn’t discovered a single ship or iceberg that might threaten operation PARAQUAT. It was negative intelligence, certainly, but it was good and welcome information.

  Beetham acknowledged the news and placed the phone back on to its cradle, satisfied and relieved that his old V-bombers had made their first move without incident. Soon, perhaps, they would really make their presence felt.

  The next morning the War Cabinet would give the order to retake South Georgia – a decision that was to provide all concerned with some of the most worrying moments of the entire South Atlantic campaign.

  When they had arrived in Stanley many Argentinians had done so with high
hopes. Flyers carrying a kitsch picture of Jesus and the Virgin Mary were distributed to ‘The People of the Malvinas’ celebrating the islands’ liberation from illegal colonial rule and inviting them to ‘join us in forging a great future for the islands’. Whatever some of the invaders may have imagined, it was no liberation and it was becoming increasingly clear to even the most optimistic of them that they were going to have to fight.

  Two more expatriate families were flying out of the islands that morning. On a wet, grey day, a convoy of nearly ten Land-Rovers drove them and their luggage to the airfield, escorted by military vehicles carrying Argentine guards. It was the first glimpse John Smith had had of the quiet local airfield since it had been transformed into BAM Malvinas. It was now a high-security military zone, overrun by troops and stores. The windows of the passenger terminal below the control tower were blacked out with newspaper. Anti-aircraft batteries lined the perimeter of the airfield and its approach road. The Canache – the narrow isthmus linking the airfield on Cape Pembroke to the rest of the East Falkland mainland – was lined with minefields and barbed wire.

  The announcement that greeted Smith on his return to town was equally depressing. The Argentine authorities, perhaps alerted by reports of the RAF bombing of Garvie Island, were issuing air raid instructions to the civilian population.

  At the sound of the siren, Stanley’s residents were advised to turn off the lights and hide under the table. All car headlights were to be covered up leaving only a thin two-inch letterbox for light to shine through. Only the fire brigade were allowed to be on the streets. Smith’s dining table didn’t look like it was up to the task. At all.

  * * *

  The Argentinians weren’t alone in their concern about the effect of RAF bombs. The RSPB, The Times reported, worried about disturbances to nesting puffins, guillemots, fulmars and kittiwakes around Cape Wrath, wanted to see a moratorium on exercises with live ammunition during the April to early July breeding season. In the same edition of the paper, a cartoon depicting the unhappy birds joked, ‘It’s not the noise I mind so much as the droppings.’