With what seemed to be the final restraint on British military action removed, Argentine forces on the Falklands expected the first British attacks to arrive at any time. Also waiting, steaming less than a hundred miles outside the 200-mile Maritime Exclusion Zone around the islands, were two Argentine naval Task Groups: to the north-west, the Veinticinco de Mayo with her squadron of A-4Q Skyhawks, escorted by four destroyers; to the south-west was the cruiser General Belgrano, accompanied by two ex-US Navy ‘Allen M. Sumner’ Class destroyers armed with MM38 Exocet missiles.
Flight Lieutenant Dick Russell woke on his birthday with a hangover. Nearby, on another of the metal camp beds in the Two Boats accommodation, Bob Wright was also awake. He really could have done without being shaken from his slumber, only to be told he needed to go back to sleep: Get some rest. Along with Russell and the rest of the men from the two Vulcan crews, he closed his eyes and tried to get back to sleep.
Tonight was the night.
At ten to nine, down at Wideawake, Jerry Price received the Air Tasking message for Operation BLACK BUCK, the codename given to the mission to bomb Stanley airfield. The message added detail to the Op Order of the previous day, but it was still only a statement of intent, not yet an order to go. All being well, that would follow. Between now and then, Price had to make sure that there was nothing that would prevent them carrying out their orders. Half an hour later, two more Victors arrived from the UK, turning off the long runway towards the crowded pan to complete the force he needed for BLACK BUCK. Fourteen. More than half of the RAF’s entire tanker fleet. He was going to need every one of them.
Seated on canvas-backed chairs around folding wood and metal tables, the Victor Ops team, Trevor Sitch, Barry Ireland, David Davenall and Colin Haigh, laboured with Jerry Price over the refuelling plan. The first draft of the previous day provided the template. Now they needed to make it as accurate and predictable as it could be. It was a fiendishly complicated task that relied on pens, paper, performance tables and slide rules. Their only digital assistance was from a £3.99 pocket calculator bought from Swaffham market.
Using tried and tested procedures evolved over many years at Marham, recently enhanced by the experience of the reconnaissance missions to South Georgia, they constructed an elaborate plan with one simple goal: to move as much fuel as far south as possible.
Eleven Victors and two Vulcans would take off together, each jet part of a White, Red or Blue section. The White and Red sections were Victor four-ships; the Blue section, three Victors and two Vulcans. Two of the Victors and one of the Vulcans in the Blue section were airborne reserves. If anything went wrong with any of the other jets, the reserves would simply take their place in the formation. At designated lines of latitude along the route south known as brackets, fuel would be transferred from those returning to Ascension to those continuing south. At the first bracket, four Victors, having passed on their fuel, would return, along with the two airborne reserve Victors and the reserve Vulcan. A short while later, another Victor would again top up the Vulcan before returning to Wideawake. At the next bracket two more Victors would turn back after filling the tanks of the three remaining aircraft: two Victors and the Vulcan. There would be one further Victor–Victor transfer before just one Victor and the Vulcan were left flying south together. Less than a thousand miles from the Falklands, that long-slot Victor would refuel the Vulcan then turn north. After the bomb-run, at a rendezvous about 300 miles east of Rio de Janeiro, the returning Vulcan would be met by two waiting Victors that would transfer enough fuel for the bomber to make it back to Ascension. One of these Victors was, again, an airborne reserve in case for any reason the primary Victor couldn’t refuel the Vulcan. Given the frequency with which the HDU equipment failed, it was a necessary precaution.
Thought was given to the composition of each section. Working with the head of the Victor detachment, Alan Bowman, the Ops Team spread age and experience throughout the formation. The longer-range slots were allocated to those with experience on the maritime radar reconnaissance missions and White, Red and Blue were each assigned a section leader: a squadron Flight Commander or CO. It was their responsibility to make decisions once the jets were out of effective radio range of Red Rag Control, the name adopted by the Ops Team. It hadn’t been the tag they’d wanted. Marham’s station crest featured a black bull and that had been their first choice. Discovering the mission was codenamed BLACK BUCK put paid to that. So, with a satisfying display of lateral thinking, Black Bull became Red Rag.
Over three hours, they had produced what was, on paper, a masterpiece of elegant, detailed planning that meant the Vulcan, as it ran in on its target, would be burning fuel that had already passed through five other aircraft. The amount of fuel transferred at each of fourteen planned contacts was calculated precisely. But, as Waddington had discovered two days earlier, the plan was only as good as the figures on which those calculations were based.
At one o’clock, Tux and his crew gathered with another fifty Victor pilots, Navigators and AEOs to be briefed on the refuelling plan. Jerry Price joined them alongside Air Vice-Marshal Chesworth. As Trevor Sitch spoke, using an overhead projector sitting on a large cardboard box to illustrate his words, Tux took copious notes – the first to confess that he’d never been blessed with the best of memories, this wasn’t unusual for him. But he was struck by the complexity of the operation. He knew it was uncharted territory. Others ate from packed lunch boxes while they listened. At the end of the forty-minute briefing, they took down the details from sheets of A1 paper pinned to wooden boards then suspended from the frame of the tent by white rope. They learnt which section they’d be flying as part of and where they fitted in within that. Each crew had a specific role: long-slot, short-out, long-out, first reserve, second reserve, standby crew.
They filled their notebooks, each man trying to illustrate the mass of detail in the way that best made sense of it. The safety of the whole formation depended on them recording it faithfully, then being able to interpret their own notes without confusion. While Tux scribbled, his AEO, Mick Beer, took down radio frequencies and call signs. Each jet had two: one to communicate with other aircraft in formation, one for Red Rag Control.
The one, vital missing ingredient was the weather. So that it was as up to date as it could be, the Met report wouldn’t arrive until as late in the day as possible. But without accurate information on wind speed and direction a final flight plan was impossible. Until they had that, they couldn’t lock it down.
For the rest of the day the Victor crews tried to prepare for the night that would follow: looking over the detail of the BLACK BUCK plan; checking their equipment; eating; sleeping.
At 14.42, an hour after the Victor briefing had broken up, George Chesworth received a message from Sir John Curtiss at Northwood: Take-off to be 2300 hours Zulu tonight, subject to refined timing with receipt of updated weather forecasting. Execute will be sent flash. Half an hour later the order came through.
From Air Commander
Operation BLACK BUCK
Execute op BLACK BUCK 1 AW HQ 18Gp
AAAA/19F/KAA 300853Z APR 82
Time on target 010700Z May repeat 010700Z May.
Delays in mission launch are acceptable providing that TOT is not later than 010900Z May 1982
The mission to bomb the runway at Port Stanley airfield was on. A fleet of V-bombers would launch from Ascension late that night to deliver a Vulcan over East Falkland inside the window specified by Curtiss: 0700 to 0900 Zulu, or GMT. BAM Malvinas was going to be hit before dawn, between 0400 and 0600 local time.
The metal skins of the Vulcans and Victors were hot to the touch. Their dull green and grey camouflage, useless against the scorched brown and rust of Ascension’s landscape, soaked up the heat of the equatorial sun. Throughout the afternoon, ground crew in khaki shorts and desert boots swarmed around them, checking and rechecking the airframes. When the temperature dropped later in the day, all of the jets had their tanks
filled. Those of them parked on the Tarmac side of the pan were towed forward out of their ruts ready to be checked by reserve flight crews.
During the 1950s and 1960s, when the V-force represented the front line of Britain’s nuclear deterrent, the bombers would be kept ‘combat-ready’. Price, familiar with it from his own time spent on the Victor QRA, reverted to the old approach. All the pre-flight checks had been done up to the point where the aircraft was made live for engine start. Crews could be airborne fifteen minutes from the time they arrived at the jet. Tonight, with the success of the operation dependent on the serviceability of the whole formation, it made sense to adopt the old Cold War technique. Any problems, Price hoped, could be discovered and dealt with early. He ordered all the jets to be ‘combat-readied’ in the hours before crew-in, scheduled for 2100 that evening. Monty and the Ops crew took responsibility for the two Vulcans. They started up the engines on both and ran through the checklist: no problems. Dave Stenhouse, Monty’s Nav Radar, checked the bombs, removing the safety pins from the thousand-pounders hanging in both bomb bays: five per bomb, 210 pins in total. Vulcans 598 and 607 were ‘combat-ready’.
All the time, Price and the Ops Team continued to examine and refine the refuelling plan. The last fuel transfers, those taking place barely 300 miles off the Argentine coast, they decided, would be done in strict radio silence. RT needed to be kept to a minimum throughout, but so close to the operational area it was essential. Their main worry, though, remained fuel. Especially where the Vulcan was concerned.
Monty and Bill Perrins had been checking the refuelling plan against their own figures. By their calculations, if the refuelling failed at the third or fourth bracket – and their own experience in training showed that there was every possibility it would – the Vulcan couldn’t make it back to Ascension and would have to try for the Rio diversion. To ignore this would mean breaking the cardinal rule of air-to-air refuelling: that the receiver should never be dependent on the success of a fuel transfer for survival. Frustration at the imprecision that seemed to surround the Vulcan’s fuel burn was growing amongst the Victor contingent trying to plan BLACK BUCK. While Monty and Perrins were struggling to fill the gaps, Price realized that the Vulcan figures were overly optimistic and took action. The plan’s success couldn’t be dependent on carefully measuring out only that fuel Monty and Perrins deemed was necessary. To compensate for the uncertainty, the planning team decided to fill the Vulcan’s tanks at every transfer. But the unchangeable constant in any recalculation was that there was only a finite amount of fuel within the formation. Every decision they made regarding the fuel had repercussions elsewhere. And this one meant that the two long-slot Victors flown by Bob Tuxford and Steve Biglands – the two tankers responsible for the most distant refuellings – might not make it back to Wideawake. So Price introduced another detail: a terminal airborne tanker, or TAT, a Victor that would hold station one hour out from Ascension on the long-slots’ inbound track. The TAT would wait there for three-quarters of an hour at 29,000 feet ready to relay the gasping long-slot jets home.
After re-examining the figures, Monty told Price that the Vulcans could recover to Ascension if transfer three failed after all. This didn’t fill Price with confidence. The whole refuelling plan felt perilously like a house of cards. And there were now just four and a half hours until they launched.
The Vulcan crews themselves were unaware of the debate raging within the planning cell. Instead, they prepared themselves for the night ahead. They were too precious now to risk being poisoned by fish and salad from the field kitchens tonight. Instead they enjoyed the hospitality of the American commissary down near the airfield. It took the welcome form of New York steak, prime American beef, airlifted in by the USAF. I could get used to this, thought Mick Cooper.
Martin Withers’ crew were relaxed. They’d managed to sleep for most of the day without recourse to the Temazepam recommended by the Waddington doctor. Withers had never had a problem sleeping. Stress may have caused him to lose his appetite, but he could fall asleep on a log. Among Primary crew, only Cooper really seemed to be his old self. The others now, even the irrepressible John Reeve, were a little more subdued. By seven o’clock, both crews were down at the Wideawake airhead.
‘THIS IS A SECRET BRIEFING,’ announced the planner Trevor Sitch through a handheld megaphone at a volume that could be heard out at sea.
It’s not secret any more, thought John Reeve, enjoying the irony.
‘Right, gentlemen,’ Sitch continued, ‘the purpose of the exercise is to put a stick of bombs across Port Stanley airfield.’
Despite the volume, secrecy was an absolute priority. Because of the presence of the Soviet spy trawler Zaporozhive off the coast, RT traffic had been kept to a minimum all day. At 9 p.m. a telephone and telex blackout would be imposed. Even the weather was treated with suspicion. The flash signal handed out to the Vulcan crews providing details of the wind around the Falklands – light, south-west, becoming variable – was classified ‘SECRET UK EYES BRAVO’.
Following the Victor crews’ briefing on the fuel plan earlier in the day, the tent was littered with coffee cups, food wrappers and cigarette butts. Now, upwards of seventy V-bomber pilots, navigators and AEOs were sitting and listening, the legs of their folding chairs digging into the red cinder underneath them. Strengthening katabatic winds rolled down from Green Mountain whipping past the flapping canvas. Bare lightbulbs flickered above them. Monty looked around the packed tent. It’s like the Second World War, he thought, like El Alamein. He wasn’t the only one struck by the sense of history. There was also anticipation. Bob Tuxford relished the prospect of being part of an offensive force for the first time, a feeling sharpened by uncertainty. The tanker trash had long experience working together. Tux knew his own limitations, the Victor’s and those of his colleagues. Waddington’s tin triangles were an unknown element.
Martin Withers was mystified. Much of the refuelling briefing might as well have been in a foreign language. He just couldn’t picture, in his mind’s eye, how it would all work. Trevor Sitch explained the shape of the formation. It would be split into three sections, Red, White and Blue. To avoid the likelihood of a mid-air collision, the join-up plans were necessarily complex. As each section ferried out to the first refuelling bracket, it would be separated from the next by a 2,000-foot height interval. White formed up at 36,000 feet, Red at 34,000 feet and Blue at 32,000 feet. Within each section, 500-foot intervals separated the jets. Withers had understood that, but as the shape of the formation changed after the first wave of tankers returned home, then changed again after the second bracket, it became increasingly hard to follow. He wondered how, in radio silence, you were supposed to know who was refuelling whom. Withers leaned over to Dick Russell.
‘Do you understand that?’ he asked his AARI.
‘I’ve got it,’ Russell told him as he made notes on a piece of paper.
‘OK, if you understand it – I don’t – it’s all yours…’
Happy to defer to the tanker man’s expertise, Withers relaxed. He wasn’t going all the way and there didn’t seem any point in him trying to wrap his head around it.
The crews synchronized their watches.
After the refuelling plan was briefed, the Met Officer got up to speak. South-westerlies would mean headwinds of up to 70 knots on the way down. The Nav Plotters took down the weather information. The wind speed and direction were a crucial part of their calculations of speed, distance and track. But the most potentially significant information was that, at around 20 and 40 degrees south, two cold fronts meant that thunderstorm activity was probable and that at the height refuelling was to take place turbulence was likely.
Air Vice-Marshal George Chesworth had, he felt, a duty to say something. As the briefing came to an end, he got up to speak. Careful not to go on too long, he tried to find the right words: This has never been done before; the eyes of the world are on you; there’s a lot riding on this. But he knew the
y didn’t want to hear him. He wished them all luck and left them to it.
Chapter 30
30 April 1982
The Vulcan crews worked in teams, each of them talking through the mission with his opposite number from the other crew and supported by their counterpart from Monty’s Ops crew. The AEO’s Hugh Prior and Barry Masefield discussed their tactics with John Hathaway. They agreed not to use the Vulcan’s own Red Shrimp jammer, but rely instead on the Dash 10 pod. Prior and Masefield marked their flight logs with AVF, HF, VHF and UHF radio frequencies, including those for the approach and tower at Rio, their closest diversion. There were local and international call signs and codes for all occasions: the maritime code, a short-term security code with which any information could be transmitted securely; and the two-letter authentication codes which changed every thirty minutes to confirm to their own side that they were who they said they were. The IFF – Identification Friend or Foe – transponder settings changed with the same frequency. Get it wrong and they’d be seen as fair game by nervous Royal Navy air defences. Lastly there were ‘Superfuse’ and ‘Rhomboid’. The former was to be transmitted after a successful bomb run; the latter if they failed.
Dick Russell had been thinking about the threat from the guns around Stanley. During the bomb-run, he would be no more than a passenger. Once the refuelling was done, the co-pilot, Pete Taylor, would swap places with him and he would sit, plugged into the RT, with absolutely no control over his destiny. It made him feel vulnerable.
‘What difference does it make,’ he asked Withers, ‘if we drop from 8,000 feet or 10,000 feet?’
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