Vulcan 607

by Rowland White

  An MoD spokesman tried to explain, tactfully, that the situation was ‘critical’.

  Chapter 19

  21 April 1982

  Of the three helicopters that would make the insertion, only one was equipped to fly in the extreme South Georgia weather. ‘Humphrey’, as HMS Antrim’s ageing Westland Wessex HAS3 was affectionately known, was fitted with a Flight Control System that allowed the pilot to keep track of his movement over the ground without any other visual references. Lieutenant-Commander Ian Stanley, RN, Humphrey’s pilot, could fly blind.

  It therefore fell to him to act as shepherd to two, more basic, troop-carrying Wessex HU5s. Without sight of either Humphrey or the horizon, the pilots of the HU5s would become disorientated quickly. With the capriciousness of the conditions 3,000 feet high up on an Antarctic glacier, a white-out was a definite possibility.

  Aboard Endurance, Nick Barker had tried to point out that only Shackleton and one other expedition had ever made it across the Fortuna Glacier and both had been exceptionally lucky. But the SAS had made up their minds. Before any attempt to retake South Georgia they needed to establish observation posts to gather intelligence on Argentine positions in Leith and Stromness. And they wanted to go in from the isolation of the glacier to avoid any possibility of unplanned contact with the Argentinians. Barker, the man who best knew local conditions, was sure they were making a mistake.

  The signal to go arrived from Northwood during the night. From on board Antrim the next morning, just fifteen miles from her near 10,000-foot peaks, South Georgia couldn’t be seen. And the barometer was dropping.

  At 9.30, Humphrey took off from Antrim’s deck. Ian Stanley wanted to see for himself if it was going to be possible to fly in the SAS men. Maps hadn’t prepared him or his crew for the awesome sight of South Georgia’s sheer black cliffs rising intimidatingly out of the dark sea to heights of 2,000 feet and more.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ they asked after their return.

  The truth was that Endurance’s officers had tried, but nothing really conveyed just how spectacular a sight it was. Stanley reported back that the Fortuna Glacier, as massive and uninviting as it looked, seemed clear of enemy troops, with conditions much as had been described by the crew of Endurance. Rain squalls and unpredictable winds strafed across it, but Stanley believed they could do the job.

  At 1300 on the 21st, the SAS were flown in aboard the three Wessex helicopters. As Stanley descended towards the ice he focused on his instruments. Snow, ice and cloud all blended into one. White-out. The three other members of his crew craned their necks and strained their eyes to provide a running commentary on Humphrey’s progress towards the glacier’s surface. Stanley slowly descended into the murk as gusts of 60 knots buffeted the cab and snow whipped up from the downdraft of the main rotor.

  ‘You are going down,’ he heard through his headset.

  ‘You are going down.’ At the last moment, his Aircrewman, ‘Fitz’ Fitzgerald, leaning out from Humphrey’s side door, shouted that one of the main wheels was coming down into a crevasse. Stanley was lucky it didn’t topple them.

  As the SAS men left the relative comfort of the helos, they were hit by the vicious wind and cold. One trooper noticed that the Wessex he’d just stepped off was being blown sideways across the ice. And he realized as it lifted off, taking with it his shelter from the violent squalls, just what they were all up against.

  Somehow, all three helicopters managed to disgorge their special forces cargos and return safely to their ships. They had no hesitation in describing what they’d seen as a ‘hellhole’. Ian Stanley was relieved to be back on the deck of Antrim.

  ‘I’m glad we’ll never need to go up there again,’ he said to the rest of his crew.

  The soldiers of the SAS ‘D’ Squadron, Mountain Troop, meanwhile, were in the grip of a savage Antarctic storm.

  In the event of war, the Vulcans were tasked with penetrating underneath Soviet radars, at night and, preferably, in foul weather. It was impossible to train exactly as they planned to fight, however. In peacetime, to protect the crews from unacceptable levels of danger and preserve the life of elderly airframes, strict rules governed how and when the Vulcans trained. The Terrain Following Radar had been fitted when the V-force switched to operating at low level. When used in conjunction with the H2S map painting radar, TFR gave the V-force the capability to fly low level at night and in all weathers, but it had its limitations. The TFR scanner was fitted into a small pimple on the aircraft’s nose. It transmitted a narrow radar beam along the aircraft’s heading. The pilot selected the height above ground that he wished to fly, and the TFR would provide him with fly up/fly down indications in the cockpit. By following them he could maintain a constant height above the changing ground contours. In hilly country it was like riding a roller coaster. A swimmer trying to cross a fast flowing river to a spot directly opposite where he sets out from has to aim up river to allow for the strength of the stream. Similarly, an aircraft flies in a moving air mass, and has to head off into a crosswind to follow its desired track over the ground. The stronger the crosswind, the bigger the angle between the heading along which the aircraft’s nose is pointing, and its track over the ground. If the crosswind is too strong – if that angle becomes too great – the forward-looking TFR can’t cope. It might not be a problem in normal wind conditions, but rely on it in very strong crosswinds and you’ll fly into a mountain, suffering the further indignity of accident investigators recording that you did so sideways.

  The Nav Radars offered some comfort. Using the jet’s main H2S map-painting radar, they provided back-up to the TFR. Eyes glued to their scopes, they issued instructions to the pilots.

  Ridge twelve o’clock, five miles… four miles… three miles. Any visual contact? Right, pull up.

  Get it wrong, at night, and you’ll still fly into a mountain.

  So, in the end, it all came down to the Mk 1 Human Eyeball. Unless visibility was sufficiently good for the non-flying pilot to see far enough ahead to act as safety pilot, TFR training wasn’t happening.

  There had always been another restriction on the Vulcan’s low-level flying. Like the Victors at Marham, the old V-bombers were running out of fatigue life. Every hour in the bumpy air at low level accelerated the speed with which they used what was left. With the aircraft so close to retirement and now training for war, the need to prolong the airframe’s fatigue life could be, if not ignored, at least put to one side. With authority from HQ 1 Group, Laycock and Baldwin lifted the restriction on the Vulcan’s speed from a stately 250 knots to 300 knots and more. In a similar fashion, a minimum height of 1,000 feet for TFR training was reduced to 500 feet. An attack on a defended airfield which entailed running down the runway at 1,000 feet and 250 knots would have been close to suicide – assuming any crew could have been persuaded to attempt it.

  Go in like that, Baldwin thought, and the Argentine air defences will think all their Christmases have come at once. What he had in mind was an attack at 300 feet, the lowest height from which retarded thousand-pounders could be dropped, at a speed of 350 knots. It would be a hell of an entrance.

  When the training began a week earlier, all the flights had been signed off by John Laycock. Vulcan captains were usually self-authorizing, but with the addition of in-flight refuelling – something none of the CORPORATE crews had any previous experience of – the Station Commander assumed responsibility for the first few sorties. As they grew in confidence and experience, however, Laycock recognized that authorization could revert once more to the Captains themselves. In truth, he thought, they probably now knew more about the demands of air-to-air refuelling than he did.

  The weather was grim again that evening, but given that the weather in the Falklands was often atrocious, it was probably no bad thing to train in less than perfect flying conditions. Monty, Reeve and Withers were scheduled to fly north for TFR training at 500 feet followed by further night-refuelling practice, then finish with rad
ar-offset bomb-runs on the Jurby ranges on the Isle of Man. The three Captains signed themselves out again, looking forward to another long, demanding night.

  For John Reeve and his crew a particularly miserable few hours lay ahead. Mick Cooper had a problem with his radar. At night, without the Navigation and Bombing System, dropping live ordnance was out of the question. Frustrated, Reeve scrubbed the rest of the sortie and headed back to Waddington. Just to cap it all, he was forced to take avoiding action during an Instrument Landing approach and overshoot the runway in strong crosswinds.

  The silver lining to Reeve’s dismal night’s work, perhaps, was that, in aborting, he had abandoned the opportunity to shower the Vulcan with fuel in another depressing session of air-to-air refuelling training. It was still desperately problematic. The other two crews weren’t so lucky.

  Bill Bryden had heard the reports on the BBC that Vulcans were practising dropping conventional weapons, and speculation that they would be launched on offensive operations from Ascension. The prospect troubled him. He and the small team of Americans and Saints who reported to him had done their utmost to accommodate the British. But with the volume of air traffic now using Wideawake, the letter of the lease agreement providing for its use by the British was becoming strained. The situation needed to be clarified. On 22 April, Bryden delivered a letter to the commander of British forces on Ascension reminding him that prior notification of all aircraft arrivals was necessary. Furthermore, he pointed out, the current agreement covered only logistical support. He could not support armed combat missions without authorization. The Vulcans, he made clear, could not use American fuel.

  At the same time, Bryden signalled his HQ at Patrick Air Force Base, asking for direction. Early on they’d decided that all contact with Bryden from the States would be routed through Jerry Bennett, a civilian attached to the Patrick missile facility. Bryden had suddenly become the man everyone wanted to talk to and this was a way of keeping the message traffic manageable. The one secure line between Wideawake and Patrick could only handle telemetry data from the range. But with Ascension now the focus of an increasing amount of Soviet intelligence-gathering, much of Bryden’s communication with Bennett had to rely on a new method. The Thursday after the invasion, a C-141 had flown in to Wideawake carrying supplies. On board, a secure courier carried a hastily drawn-up checklist covering all of Bryden’s expected requirements. He and Bennett would go through the list item by item. Question one – I need seven. Question two – four and so on. It was basic, but impossible to crack. No one listening in could know what was being requested.

  This time, the list didn’t cover it. The British wanted to stage long-range bombing raids from Wideawake. How do they want me to proceed?, Bryden wondered.

  His uncertainty reflected the differences in opinion there were at the highest levels of Ronald Reagan’s administration. While the American Secretary of State, Al Haig, shuttled tirelessly, but hopelessly, between Buenos Aires and London in search of a diplomatic breakthrough, he tried to maintain, in public at least, an impartial position. From the outset the old general’s efforts were doomed to failure – Argentina would not abandon her prize, but no other outcome was acceptable to Britain. At the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, despite certainty from his own military that the difficulties faced by the British were too great and that they could not succeed, simply got on with helping them. On the day Bryden signalled his concerns about the developing British operation, the American Department of Defense announced the approach to Ascension of a US Navy Military Sealift Command tanker carrying aviation fuel to replenish supplies used by the British.

  Getting the fuel to Ascension was out of Jerry Price’s hands. His concern was with getting it to the aircraft. The tanks of the Victors needed to be kept filled with 109,000lb of fuel. Any less and condensation could form during the day and contaminate the tanks’ contents with water. Any more and the fuel would vent out of the tanks’ overflow on to the Tarmac, attacking and degrading the surface of the pan.

  There was a bottleneck in the system, though. The Bulk Fuel Installation, where jet fuel was pumped ashore from the American tankers through floating pipelines, was three and a half miles away from Wideawake near Georgetown. Twelve RAF fuel bowsers had been flown in on a HeavyLift Cargo Airlines Short Belfast to supplement the small number PanAm already had in situ, but the BFI could only dispense fuel to one of them at a time. With each Victor thirstily putting away the contents of two full bowsers, the noise of the heavy trucks rumbling between the airhead and the BFI was nearly constant.

  Ascension’s unique geography had one further spanner to throw into the effort to keep the ‘ready use’ tanks at the airhead supplied with fuel. The road between Wideawake and Georgetown didn’t take long to shred the fuel trucks’ tyres. Finished with compacted volcanic rock, the road’s abrasive surface meant Price was getting barely 3,000 miles out of each set. Spare tyres for a fleet of lorries just became one more addition to the long list of equipment and materiel being flown in to Ascension by the RAF’s round-the-clock transport operation.

  Nearly everything had to come this way. Georgetown had no harbour, only an exposed pierhead that, in heavy Atlantic swells, could be out of action for days. In any case, anything being brought in by ship would take two weeks to arrive. However the solution arrived, though, the limitations of the endless to and fro of fuel bowsers and the small size of the ‘ready use’ tanks had to be addressed. Royal Engineers said they could put in a temporary steel pipe quickly and easily. To fly in three and a half miles of steel pipe, though, would tie up the transport fleet for days. Out of the question. The solution was aluminium piping at a fraction of the weight. The Engineers got to work, installing a wonky-looking pipeline that fed into new large-capacity collapsible fabric pillow tanks at the airhead. The arrangement was better than it looked. With a series of small pumps along its length and frequent leaks, the pipeline needed twenty-four-hour supervision, but it was a revelation, drastically reducing the time it took to refuel the ever-growing number of aircraft. Another problem solved. Whether or not the Vulcans were going to be allowed to use it, of course, was another matter.

  John Smith didn’t realize who the man was until later. Out walking the dog with his youngest son Tyssen, he’d waved at General Galtieri – in Stanley during his one and only visit to the islands he’d invested so much political capital in seizing. Had he known, he’d have been considerably less civil. Equally, as war drew closer, the temper of the Argentinians hardened and Smith wasn’t the only one to notice it. It was personified by Major Patricio Dowling, an especially unpleasant intelligence officer of Irish descent who’d been sent to the islands to deal with any anti-Argentinian elements he found amongst the Falklands population. Peter Biggs reckoned that probably meant just about all of it. Dowling, perhaps, reached that conclusion too. He soon broke with the efforts of the islands’ Argentine Governor, General Menendez, to treat the islanders in as decent and non-threatening a way as possible. And he quickly made himself a feared and reviled presence.

  Leona Vidal’s father was Chilean. That alone was enough for Dowling to regard the family with suspicion. That her mother Eileen spoke passable Spanish and operated the islands’ radio station made matters worse. During the occupation, the Vidals were staying in a large three-storey town house that belonged to friends who lived for most of the time in Camp – the name given to the islands’ wild countryside. While the Vidals knew their way round the house, much of what it might contain behind closed doors was a mystery to them.

  Then one night, Dowling arrived with soldiers. He pushed in past Eileen and grabbed Leona’s older brother, seventeen-year-old Glen. As Tom and Jerry played on the television, Dowling threatened to shoot the boy unless Eileen Vidal told him where the radio was hidden. There was no radio, she argued, but it wasn’t her house. How could she be sure? Dowling prowled around the ground floor and found the pair of binoculars the children used to watch what was happ
ening outside; they found it all captivating. To Dowling, though, they were just what he was looking for. He started to pull the house apart, floor by floor. Eileen was forced upstairs with him, returning moments later, the blood drained from her face. She looked terrified. On the third floor, Dowling had discovered a locked trunk.

  ‘Open it,’ he ordered.

  She said she hadn’t got a key. Didn’t know where there was one. So Dowling smashed the lock and lifted the lid, while she looked on, scared to death of what he might find. Her heart sank. Inside was a piece of equipment wrapped in a blanket. A radio, she thought. And so did Dowling. Triumphant, he whipped off the blanket to reveal a Singer sewing machine.

  Then he went berserk, tearing up the blanket, enraged at being thwarted. For the first time, ten-year-old Leona was truly frightened by the threat from this dangerous man.

  The War Cabinet were to be briefed on the military options by the Defence Chiefs in the MoD that morning. The mood amongst them was indignant, however. News of Bill Bryden’s letter stating that he could not supply fuel for the Vulcans had just reached them. It was intolerable! Disgraceful! John Nott assumed, wrongly, that the development had Al Haig’s hand on the tiller. They put the problem to one side as they listened to the heads of the three services outline their plans.

  The politicians tried to absorb the mass of information they were given. The Prime Minister was softer in private than she could appear in public when harangued by the opposition or hostile journalists. Except, that is, when she was dealing with the unfortunate Foreign Secretary, Francis Pym. Having been only weeks in the job, Pym appeared uncomfortable with the stark choices military action presented. Concerned about the implications of any decision, he seemed always to be trying to find a reason not to commit to one course of action or another. Margaret Thatcher could be so dismissive of his caution that Nott sometimes felt obliged to intervene. Let’s just consider the point that Francis is making, Nott would suggest, but Pym’s apparent desire not to do anything that might upset anyone just fuelled the Prime Minister’s belligerence. Only Willie Whitelaw shared the Foreign Secretary’s caution. And he sometimes seemed to be in the wrong century – not quite over the shock that the enemy, this time, were people we played polo with.