‘Look, I didn’t just do it off my own back,’ Tuxford shot back at him. ‘It wasn’t my sole decision as commander of the aeroplane.’
‘Oh, I see, it’s captaincy by committee is it?’
‘Well, yes, it is. That’s exactly right. As far as I’m concerned, my crew members had a right to a say. And I can tell you that they wholeheartedly supported the view that we should continue the mission.’
‘You should be court-martialled.’
‘I’m not talking to you, you arsehole,’ Tuxford spat and pushed past.
Nerves were frayed. Monty didn’t know it yet but in lashing out, out of concern for a friend, he was attacking the man whose courage and skill had kept his friend in the air and his mission on track. As the scale of what had been achieved became apparent, a court-martial started to look very unlikely.
The BBC news report followed the old ‘lillibullero’ theme tune. The HF radio might have left a little to be desired when trying to communicate across thousands of miles of ocean, but it picked up the World Service well enough. The headline was the same as the earlier broadcast picked up by Bob Tuxford’s Victor: a lone Vulcan has successfully attacked the runway at Port Stanley. The crew, it assured them, were safe.
‘I think’, said Gordon Graham laconically, ‘they must be talking about us…’
‘We haven’t even bloody landed yet!’ Hugh Prior said, incredulous. ‘And here they are broadcasting it to the world.’ It was the word ‘successful’ that got him. As far as he was concerned, it wasn’t successful until they were safely on the ground. Martin Withers enjoyed the moment. With fuel in the tanks, they could at least laugh about it. For the first time since the message had come through from John Reeve’s Vulcan telling them they were on, the tension really lifted. There’d been undisguised relief at completing the final fuel transfer, but now there were smiles. The BBC was reporting the success of the raid. They must have done it.
Prior slotted a cassette belonging to Pete Taylor into the AEO’s tape recorder and pressed play. Through six sets of headphones, the persistent synthesized rhythm and stirring melody of Vangelis’ Chariots of Fire theme tune began to play. Since the Oscar-winning movie’s release the previous year, the music had become something of an unofficial anthem for the Withers crew. And now, as they cruised back to Ascension after their marathon operation, it provided an appropriately rousing soundtrack.
The press arrived at Waddington before 607 had landed at Ascension. The same cameras that had been blind to her departure for Ascension two days earlier returned. The attention, flattering as it might be, was unwelcome. Enormous pressure was applied to requests for interviews and information, but John Laycock resisted it. Too much was still unclear, but it was becoming apparent that the mission would turn out to be BLACK BUCK ONE. Others would follow and their security and that of the crews that would fly them needed to be protected. But the radio and television reports – and the subsequent newspaper coverage – had an interesting effect on Simon Baldwin. Over the previous month he’d concentrated on nothing but trying to ensure that his CORPORATE flight could do what it was being asked to do. He’d never had the opportunity or inclination to stand back and look at it with any sense of perspective. But in capturing the attention of the media – even though he reckoned barely 30 per cent of what was being reported was accurate – the size of their achievement finally sank in. He found a piece of string and placed it over a globe, stretched between Waddington and the Falklands. Even I’m impressed, he thought.
His frustration with the planning and the unfortunate run-in with Monty hadn’t dented Bob Tuxford’s appreciation of what the Vulcan had pulled off. He knew that his crew and the men on board 607 had been through something unique and he wanted to be the first to congratulate them. He wanted to look Withers in the eyes. While three of his worn-out crew headed straight for bed, Tuxford and his AEO, Mick Beer, nicked a couple of bikes from outside the Ops tent. The two of them cycled off to the American commissary in search of something they could hand out to the returning bomber crew.
As they pedalled back down the cinder road towards the airhead carrying tins of cold beer, they realized they were going to be part of a large crowd waiting to welcome the Vulcan home.
From 41,000 feet, Bob Wright picked up Ascension on his radar and placed his markers over the airfield. Withers checked his heading indicator and gently corrected his heading. Gordon Graham called Top of Descent and Withers pulled back on the throttles to put the jet into a long shallow descent to the island. It was a clear day and Withers and Russell saw Ascension from miles out. As Withers settled on to his glide path, he noticed the ring of cloud that hung around Green Mountain. Lovely, he thought. At five miles out he lowered the undercarriage. Dick Russell called out the speeds.
On the concrete dispersal at Wideawake, the crowd squinted into the blue sky, watching to the west as 607’s distinctive shape dropped towards them, smearing oily smoke behind her. Near her wingtips, white landing lights twinkled brightly. Below her, the main gear extended down out of the dark silhouette, reaching for the ground like the talons of an eagle.
Two One, finals. Three greens. To land, announced Withers over the RT as 607 covered the last few hundred yards of her long journey.
Ahead of him, above low cliffs lapped by a gentle swell, he saw the long runway stretch away towards a vanishing point. To his left, the white buildings of Georgetown stood out from the red earth that surrounded them. Beyond the capital, the golden sand of Long Beach lined the coast. The edge of the island flashed underneath them and a moment later they crossed the runway threshold at around 130 knots. Withers cut the power and checked the jet’s descent with a touch of backward pressure on the stick. Fifteen hours and forty-five minutes after she’d roared into the night, 607 touched down again. With a squawk and puff of burnt rubber, the main wheels kissed the Tarmac before the full weight of the bomber settled heavily on to the hydraulic oleos of the undercarriage legs. Withers held the nose up, showing the face of the delta to slow the jet down. Gordon Graham called out the speeds. 120… 110… 100…
At 80 knots, Withers brought the nose down on to the track and pushed the toe-pedals to apply the brakes. Speed bled off fast. They rolled to the end of the runway, backtracked and taxied to the pan, where their Crew Chief plugged back into the intercom. Pete Taylor reached across from the jump seat and pulled the handle to open the crew hatch. The familiar call and response of the shutdown checks echoed around the cabin, while at his feet the ground crew attached the ladder.
Transformers off… TRUs off… HP cocks… Fuel pumps off.
Outside, the whistling bellow of the Olympus engines wound down abruptly as if the plug had been pulled on a giant vacuum cleaner.
External lighting off, master off. The six men gathered their thoughts.
Canopy and ejection seats are safe. Time to meet their audience.
Through the open hatch, Taylor looked down on a sea of people urging him to join them. But he didn’t want to be the one to lead the crew out of the cockpit. As they waved and jostled for position, Taylor shouted down from the jumpseat.
‘Wait!’ he told them. ‘Martin’s coming down first.’
Withers clambered out of his ejection seat and down the yellow ladder to the ground, his thin hair matted to his scalp after sixteen hours under the cloth flying cap. Straightaway, surrounded by excited, friendly faces, he was handed a drink – champagne – eleven hours later than he’d expected one as he launched from Ascension the night before. Then Monty caught his eye and the look told him he’d done good. Amid cheers and clapping, the rest of the crew followed him out: Gordon Graham, Hugh Prior, Pete Taylor, Bob Wright and Dick Russell. All of them with wide grins across their faces. Wright glanced up at the bomb bay, opened during the shut-down sequence. He knew what to expect, but he was still struck by the sight of it. Nothing. All that was left was a bag of safety pins and nowhere to put them. Someone, he thought, would know what to do with the paperwork.
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Eventually Tux managed to fight his way through the scrum to offer Withers a beer. He tried to steal a moment with him.
‘Well done,’ Tux told him, ‘you did the job.’
But the bomber pilot seemed overwhelmed; didn’t recognize him. While Withers acknowledged the gesture, there was no sign that he realized Tux was anyone but another well-wisher. And if he had recognized him, his reaction might have been cool. Withers still felt let down by the long-slot tanker. All he knew at this point was that its captain had left him very short of fuel, a very long way from home.
Tuxford and Beer hung around for a little while longer before leaving the happy circus to go and get their heads down at last.
They had needed one Nimrod, two Vulcans, thirteen Victors, nineteen separate in-flight refuellings, forty take-offs and landings, forty-two 1,000lb bombs, ninety aircrew and over 1.5 million pounds of aviation fuel, but BLACK BUCK, the most ambitious and complex offensive operation the RAF had mounted since the end of the Second World War, was over.
At Waddington, long after 607 had come to her final stop, John Laycock finally received his copy of the Operation Order. Typical, he thought, affording himself a contented smile, must have arrived by pony…
And on the outside of the Vulcan detachment’s crew clothing and equipment tent, they now had a legend to match the ‘Victor Battle Fleet’ board that stood propped up outside the Victor’s tent. ‘VULCANS’, it soon read in big letters chalked up on the green canvas, ‘DO IT FOR REAL’.
Chapter 44
At the raid’s successful conclusion, George Chesworth spoke to Air Commander Sir John Curtiss on the line from Northwood.
‘Right, Chief of Staff,’ Curtiss began, ‘I want the same again for tonight!’
Satisfied with the outcome, and unaware of how fine the margins had been, it seemed a reasonable enough demand to Curtiss. But Chesworth, who’d been witness to just how close run a thing it had been, who’d endured the valve-bouncing tension of the Ops tent, knew it simply couldn’t be done. The crews were spent, the aircraft needed servicing and, most important of all, they needed to establish exactly how and why such a carefully worked out refuelling plan had gone so wrong.
‘No way, sir,’ he told his boss.
‘What do you mean “no way”? I want the same again for tonight!’ insisted the gruff New Zealander.
‘We can’t do it because we haven’t got the aeroplanes, we haven’t got the crews and, more importantly, you don’t realize just how close it was. We don’t know why what happened did happen.’
Curtiss wasn’t at all happy, but the conversation did allow him to pass on a reaction from the Prime Minister to the success of the first raid. Chesworth conveyed it to the Vulcan crew as they endured their hot-debriefing.
‘She is very pleased,’ he was able to tell them.
Margaret Thatcher had heard news of the raid’s success while eating breakfast. Well versed in its difficulty following her briefings by Sir Michael Beetham, she believed that the effort had been ‘stupendous’. As Home Secretary and a member of the War Cabinet, Willie Whitelaw happily acknowledged to Beetham over lunch the following day at Chequers that the RAF had done exactly what it said it would do. The Chief of the Air Staff recorded his satisfaction in his diary.
‘A GREAT DAY FOR THE AIR FORCE!’ he wrote.
In purely physical terms, the damage to the runway was substantial – this was the stated aim. At the runway’s midpoint, the southern third of its 130-foot width had been obliterated. The full extent of the damage was later measured by JARIC at 115 feet across and 84 feet deep, and although it was hastily filled, the repair was botched and the patched-up surface never stopped subsiding. The crater put an end to any remaining hopes Argentine forces had of using the runway for their fast jets. And while Hercules transports continued to use the strip until the end of the war, the damage complicated their task to the extent that, on one occasion, one of the big transports nearly crashed on take-off. To the raid’s critics this seemed a miserly reward for the effort involved, but their reaction entirely ignores the strategic impact of the raid. And it was considerable. BLACK BUCK was directly responsible for creating circumstances in which the British could win the war. On the Falkland Islands themselves, the bombs shook the occupying Argentinians to the core. A predominantly conscript invasion force around Stanley had viewed the taking of the islands in much the same way as they would the Argentine football team being 2–0 up at half-time. For them, the game was in the bag. They’d been told over and over again that the British would not retake them by force. At just before a quarter to five in the morning on 1 May, their morale took a hammer blow.
What Beetham had hoped for when it was first broadcast that the V-force was being prepared to fight was delivered in spades. He wanted to create doubt in the minds of the junta about British intent and capability. Were the mainland bases under threat? Was Buenos Aires at risk? That doubt saw the immediate redeployment of Argentina’s entire Mirage fighter force to the north of the country, out of range of the Falklands, to defend targets that played no part in British plans. From this moment on, the tiny force of Royal Navy Sea Harrier air defence fighters aboard the two carriers, on which British hopes were pinned, had the odds dramatically cut in their favour. They were free to concentrate on tackling the threat of Argentine strike aircraft. The statistics speak for themselves: during the six weeks of the war, twenty-eight Fleet Air Arm Sea Harriers shot down twenty enemy aircraft plus three probables. Not a single Sea Harrier was lost in air-to-air combat.
But there was a third, unexpected, consequence of the raid, and one that’s never really been properly appreciated. The 1 May attack on Stanley airfield was, believed Admiral Lombardo, the Argentine Commander of Combined Operations, to be the prelude to a full-scale amphibious landing by the British. As a consequence, Admiral Allara, Commander of the Argentine Navy, was ordered to launch an immediate offensive against the British task force. It was a disastrous decision.
Two Argentine battle groups launched a pincer movement on British ships sailing 150 miles to the north-east of the islands. To the north, the Argentine carrier Veinticinco de Mayo was preparing her squadron of Skyhawk fighter-bombers to strike at the British task force. To the south, the cruiser General Belgrano and two destroyer escorts were to act as a decoy, drawing ships away from the main British fleet before picking them off with sea-skimming Exocet missiles fired from the two Type 42 destroyers.
On the afternoon of 2 May, the crew of HMS Conqueror enjoyed a lunch of roast lamb while they hovered unseen beneath the keel of the Belgrano. She’d been stalking the Argentine ship for a day and a half. At 18.57 Zulu, Commander Chris Wreford-Brown, the boat’s Captain, gave the order to fire three Mk 8 torpedoes at the old ex-US Navy cruiser – a survivor of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Two of the torpedoes struck and, within an hour, she had sunk. Of Belgrano’s complement of 1,042, 368 lost their lives in the freezing South Atlantic.
Aboard Roger Lane-Nott’s boat, HMS Splendid, the signal telling them of Conqueror’s attack was greeted with quiet satisfaction. The job of a hunter-killer submarine was a brutal one, but Splendid’s company recognized the effectiveness with which their sister-ship had carried out her work. For all his admiration for the skill with which Wreford-Brown had carried out his attack, though, Lane-Nott couldn’t help a feeling of intense professional envy. His own efforts had been frustrated. It should have been Splendid, he thought.
The morality and legality of the decision to attack the Belgrano have been hotly debated ever since, but in military terms it was decisive: the entire Argentine Navy, which simply had no answer to the threat posed by the British hunter-killer submarines, retreated to Argentine territorial waters and played no further part in the war.
As a direct consequence of decisions provoked by the raid on Stanley airfield, the Argentinians lost the use of both their air defence fighters and their Navy. And in a war fought 8,000 miles from home, the odds against a Briti
sh victory were shortened.
Four further BLACK BUCK missions were flown. John Reeve and his crew got their chance on 3 May. Two raids were flown against Argentine radar installations by Neil McDougall and his crew, who, while Withers, Reeve and Monty were deployed to Ascension, had stayed at Waddington as American AGM-45 Shrike anti-radar missiles were hurriedly married to the Vulcan airframe by men with American accents who purported to be South African. On McDougall’s second mission his crew taunted and teased the Argentine defences to try to pull them on to the punch. They’d dropped into the Oerlikon kill zone around Stanley and dodged flak that zipped around the night sky like lethal fireflies. Then, having successfully fired back, they tested Monty’s suggestion that classified documents be thrown out of the crew hatch into the sea inside the ration tin when a broken probe forced them to divert to Rio’s Galeão International Airport. Saving the aircraft on that occasion demanded a brilliant piece of flying from McDougall that won him the Distinguished Flying Cross. Martin Withers flew one more mission, but Monty was destined always to be the bridesmaid. He launched in the reserve Vulcan four times, but, to his lasting regret, turned back for Ascension while the Primary continued south on each occasion.
All of the subsequent missions benefited from a completely revised refuelling plan, designed by Jerry Price and the Victor planning team to get as much as 30,000lb more fuel into the formation flying south. It was soon realized that on BLACK BUCK the Vulcan, flying at close to, and sometimes above, its maximum weight for much of the flight south and making continual small throttle adjustments to stay in formation, was burning nearly one and a half times the amount of fuel that Vulcan crews, over twenty years of training, had grown used to. There had, of necessity, been a degree of estimation in the fuel planning: there had simply been no figures available to refer to. On top of this, in order to stay in formation, neither the Victors nor the Vulcans were flying at their most fuel-efficient cruise height. Trying to force together the flight profiles of two such distinct types was an unhappy compromise. When strong headwinds led to the cancellation of a raid on 16 May, it only served to underline how little room for error even the revised plan carried.
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