Harrier
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I mention all this because such was the new world of war that the Harrier and those who flew, maintained and directed it found themselves in from 1990, when Saddam overstepped the mark. One of the great ironies of the situation is that the Iraqi dictator himself, despite being a Sunni Muslim, believed in the secularist state and was no friend whatsoever to fundamentalist Islamist jihadists. In fact, the reason the United States left him in power after Operation Desert Storm in 1991 was that Washington was concerned that, without its errant strongman, Iraq would be taken over by Shi’ite Muslims who would side with Iran and so create a climate in the region that was hostile to Western interests. When I travelled through Iraq in 2002, I spoke to Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims along with Sufis, Roman Catholics (Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s imprisoned former foreign minister, is a Chaldean Catholic), Jews and Yazidis: while many despised Saddam, they were deeply fearful of US military intervention, which they – unlike the oily British government mouthpieces I spoke to at the time – acknowledged was coming, and felt that without a strong, secular leader, Iraq would be plunged into bloody chaos and even civil war. As for democracy, most could only raise a knowing smile; as Dr Hamed Youssef Hamadi, Saddam’s uniformed minister of culture, put it to me, his hand toying with the handle of a revolver, ‘My dear, oil and democracy do not mix.’
Saddam’s fatal error was in invading Kuwait. Iraq, which had laid claims on Kuwait, once a part of the Basra province of the Ottoman empire, since the early 1930s, had tried this once before, and failed. In 1960, just months before Kuwaiti independence, Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government got wind of an invasion of what at the time was still a British protectorate by the Iraqi dictator General Qasim Abdul Karim. This was planned to coincide with the third anniversary of the 1958 Revolution during which the twenty-three-year-old, Harrow-educated King Faisal II and his family were murdered and the short-lived Hashemite kingdom became the Republic of Iraq; Qasim aimed to seize Kuwait the moment it won its independence. Britain, however, wished to protect its interests in the Persian Gulf, and, most of all, its supply of Kuwaiti oil. The concession for the exploitation of Kuwait’s vast untapped oil reserves had been granted to the Kuwaiti Oil Company. This was 50 per cent owned by British Petroleum (BP) and 50 per cent by Gulf Oil of Pittsburgh, USA. The British government owned 51 per cent of BP. With so much at stake, Macmillan packed off Lord Home, his foreign secretary, to Washington to win US approval of his plans.
Once this was granted, Operation Vantage could begin. A fleet of a dozen Royal Navy warships converged on the Gulf the same week as the maiden flight of the second Hawker P.1127. HMS Victorious, later relieved by HMS Centaur, sailed with a squadron of dashing, twin-boom de Havilland Sea Vixens. These flew patrols over Kuwait while a force of 7,000 marines and infantry landed, along with Centurion tanks, armed personnel carriers, helicopters and artillery. RAF Hunters and Canberras were on alert from Aden, Bahrain and the British protectorate of Sharjah. It was an impressive display of force. Qasim backed down and Kuwait’s independence was assured. The British maintained a plan for rescuing the state should Iraq try again until 1971.
In 1990, though, the coast had seemed clear. Saddam apparently believed either that the Americans had no fundamental objection to his annexing Kuwait or that he was powerful enough to fight them off. He was very wrong on both counts. It took seven months to plan and prepare, but when it was finally launched, Operation Desert Storm, a coalition of thirty-four nations led by the United States and sanctioned by the United Nations, proved to be a terrifying war machine. Opening with a massive aerial assault on 17 January 1991, the campaign saw very nearly a million UN soldiers – nearly three-quarters of them American – take on the Iraqi army. ‘The great duel, the mother of all battles, has begun,’ said Saddam in a state radio broadcast. It was all over within six weeks, during which time 482 coalition soldiers were killed, while the Iraqi dead numbered at least 25,000. Coalition aircraft under the USAF’s Lieutenant General Chuck Horner had flown over 100,000 sorties, losing seventy-five aircraft, forty-four to Iraqi missiles and anti-aircraft fire and just one in air-toair combat.
The UN forces were huge in number because the US, Britain and other guilty parties had helped build Saddam’s army into the world’s fourth largest. At the end of the war with Iran in 1988, it comprised 955,000 regular troops and a paramilitary Popular Army with 650,000 recruits, plus 4,500 tanks, 484 combat aircraft and 232 combat helicopters. Yet those tanks and most of those aircraft were standard Soviet-bloc hardware, suitably de-rated for export purposes and in many cases verging on obsolescence. In contrast, the US and its allies could call upon a veritable arsenal of hi-tech weaponry. They had Tomahawk cruise and AGM-130 air-to-ground missiles as well as Patriot interceptors, and their aircraft, armour and munitions benefited from the very latest digital electronics and guidance systems. All this, together with the sheer ferocity of the uncompromising assault led by General ‘Stormin’’ Norman Schwarzkopf, brought about colossal destruction of Iraqi infrastructure in and around Baghdad and the blitzing of Saddam’s tanks and principal regiments along what became known as the ‘Highway of Death’ from Kuwait to Iraq. Ultimately, there was no possible hope of success for a regime that, although highly militarized, lacked the technology and command structure to resist an onslaught on this scale.
Saddam lost, yet he still got to mass-murder Kurds under the eyes of the Americans, drain the Qurna marshes, and set some 770 Kuwaiti oil wells on fire, causing the greatest amount of financial and ecological damage possible. In short, he was allowed to carry on. Various plots to topple him, including a failed US coup in 1996, came to nothing, but in October 1998 Bill Clinton’s administration enacted the Iraq Liberation Act that called specifically for regime change and the overthrow of Saddam. The stage for the second act of the Gulf War had been set, although the justification for raising the curtain on it had yet to be found. And ironically, it was to be al-Qaeda, an organization Saddam despised, that would three years later provide at least part of that justification when it attacked the Twin Towers.
For the Harrier, this was a very different sort of war, one which was not going to involve popping up from forest clearings close to the East German border or even darting over Norwegian fjords. US Marine Corps AV-8Bs were involved extensively in the first Gulf War. Based on the USS Nassau and Tarawa as well as on land bases, they had gone into action on 17 January, initially against Iraqi artillery shelling Khafji, the border town between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Working in close collaboration with the US Army, AV-8Bs flew 3,380 sorties over 4,083 flight hours. Five were lost to Iraqi surface-to-air missiles, with two USMC pilots killed. General Schwarzkopf considered them to have been a great success, and from 1992 to 2003 AV-8Bs were kept busy policing the No Fly Zone over southern Iraq; this was not as peaceful a period as many people imagine and, although no Harriers were involved, Iraqi and US aircraft did clash.
Later, nine RAF Mk 2 Harriers – GR.7s – were sent to Turkey from RAF Laarbruch in early 1992 to police the No Fly Zone over northern Iraq and what was nominally, if not legally, Kurdistan. The aircraft of all three front-line RAF Harrier squadrons – 1, 3 and IV – were equipped with reconnaissance pods that helped not only with the immediate problem in hand but also with evaluating how and exactly where a future war with Saddam might be fought. (Such a war seemed momentarily to inch closer in June 1993, when the Iraqis made an assassination attempt on George Bush Sr while the US president was on a trip to Kuwait.) The RAF Harriers performed well, although an engine surge that occurred when refuelling from a VC-10 tanker in November 1993 caused one pilot to eject over Dahluk. He was picked up by an American helicopter, while Kurdish villagers, who were duly rewarded with livestock and other presents, guarded the remains of his jet. The RAF was beginning to learn about the need to win hearts and minds as well as positions, ‘kills’ and battles. The No Fly Zone missions were handed over to RAF Tornados in January 1995.
But before both British and American Harriers be
came engaged in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there were other combat missions to be flown. The first were during the Bosnian War of 1994–5. This vile affair was one result of the break-up of Yugoslavia, the kingdom and, latterly, communist federal republic that, in one guise or another, had held together the fractious countries, disputed territories and fathomless ethnic divides of the Balkans. From the end of the Second World War until his death in 1980, Yugoslavia was very much the fiefdom of Marshal Josip Broz, or Tito (a nom-de-guerre Broz adopted during the guerrilla war he led from 1941 against German and Italian invaders). A benevolent dictator – of sorts – Tito, who had fallen out with Stalin in 1948 and who suppressed nationalist sentiments inside Yugoslavia, created a non-aligned communist republic that became a favourite destination for British package holiday-makers in the 1970s and 1980s. What none of these sun-seekers could have known is that the country was soon to tear itself apart in the first war on the European mainland since 1945. Nor could they have known that this would be one of the most savage of all twentieth-century conflicts. Here, or so it seemed, was a well-ordered and even rather ‘liberal’ socialist state adorned with some of the most beautiful stretches of coastline to be found anywhere in the world, exquisite inland towns, venerable countryside and mountains that attracted swarms of enthusiastic skiers.
The Balkans nightmare began on 29 February 1992 when the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina declared its independence as the republics of Croatia and Slovenia had done the previous year. The problem was that Bosnia was a country whose population was divided between Bosniak Muslims, Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs. Bosnian Serbs now established their own republic with Radovan Karadžić, a part-time poet and psychologist, as president. Across the border in the Republic of Serbia, Slobodan Milošević saw this as his chance to create a Greater Serbia. Allying himself to Karadžić, and Serbian Croats, Milošević unleashed a war against Bosnia’s Muslim population, pursued mostly by the Bosnian Serb army led by Ratko Mladić and by murderous Serbian paramilitary units including the Scorpions under Slobodan Medić and the White Eagles founded by Dragoslav Bokan and Mirko Jović. Their dirty and cowardly war was characterized from the start by the indiscriminate shelling of civilians, systematic mass rape of women including children, brutal massacres and a stated policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’.
The United Nations attempted to create a No Fly Zone over Bosnia and safe areas within it, to protect its persecuted Muslim population. The Serbs ignored both. On 16 April 1994 an FRS.1 Sea Harrier flown by Lieutenant Nick Richardson, operating with 801 NAS from HMS Ark Royal, was shot down over Goražde, one of the nominally ‘safe zones’, by a shoulder-launched SA-7 surface-to-air missile. Richardson, who had been trying to bomb a pair of Bosnian Serb T-55 tanks, ejected and, scrambling to Bosnian Muslim lines, was rescued by the SAS; a French Super Puma helicopter took him back to the carrier. The Ark Royal was based in the Adriatic; she was relieved by her sister ship HMS Invincible with the Sea Harriers of 800 NAS. Together, the Sea Harrier squadrons flew 1,748 missions over the Balkans. A second aircraft was lost on 15 December 1994 when Lieutenant David Kistruck – in later life, General Manager Flight Operations, Virgin Atlantic – was forced to eject due to control failure while hovering alongside HMS Invincible.
NATO stepped up aerial attacks on Bosnian Serb positions the following July in the aftermath of the Srebrenica massacre. In a hugely deflating moment for both NATO and the United Nations, lightly armed Dutch troops guarding this ‘safe zone’ for Bosnian Muslims had proved unable to hold back Mladić’s forces; although harried by aerial attacks, these were well supported by tanks and artillery. Air support was delayed at the crucial moment as the international bureaucracy of coalition warfare denied instant action when it was needed. Mladić entered the town, separating out men and boys from the ages of twelve to seventy-seven for ‘interrogation for suspected war crimes’. Held in lorries and warehouses, more than 8,000 were murdered between 12 and 17 July. Less than a year before, the Greek Orthodox Church had declared Karadžić ‘one of the most prominent sons of our Lord Jesus Christ working for peace’ and decorated this protector of the ‘western frontiers of Orthodoxy’ with the Byzantine Knight’s Order of the First Rank of Saint Dionysius of Xanthe. Mladić was his all too willing disciple. NATO launched Operation Deliberate Force in August. By the end of that month, twelve GR.7 Harriers of IV Squadron had flown from RAF Laarbruch in Germany to Gioia del Colle airbase in the heel of Italy to fly a total of 126 sorties against the Bosnian Serbs using free-fall and laser-guided bombs.
All the principal warring parties finally signed a peace treaty in Paris on 14 December 1995. Among those who eventually stood trial for genocide, crimes against humanity and breaches of the Geneva Conventions were Milošević, who died in 2006 before a sentence was handed down, Karadžić and Mladić. The courts at The Hague were still in session at the time of writing.
This, though, was neither the end of conflict in former Yugoslavia, nor the end of the Harrier’s involvement in the Balkans. Trouble flared up again in 1998, this time in what had been the autonomous province of Kosovo in the south of Serbia. The Kosovan population is primarily Albanian, and, after Tito’s death, demands arose for an independent republic. The Serbs saw this as an attempt by Albania to increase its territory. The result was a Serbian assault on Kosovo and more blatant savagery and ‘ethnic cleansing’. NATO struck back on 24 March 1999 with Operation Allied Force, fought entirely from the air. In the name of Yugoslavia, Serbia declared war on NATO. Bill Clinton, the US president, and Tony Blair, the British prime minister, declared that this was ‘ethical foreign policy’ in action. This, perhaps, encouraged the Canadian Air Force to play such a key role in the operation: it was responsible for 10 per cent of all the bombs dropped in the defence of Kosovo. The Luftwaffe went into action for the first time since the Second World War. The Italians followed with their Mk 2 Harrier AV-8Bs, while the RAF flew GR.7s in ground-attack sorties and the Royal Navy patrolled with FA.2 Sea Harriers operating from HMS Invincible.
Finnish-Russian diplomacy led by Finland’s president Martii Ahtisaari and the threat of an invasion by tens of thousands of US and British troops put an end to the Kosovo conflict in June 1999. Air strikes had been partly effective, but also controversial. President Clinton had exaggerated the numbers of civilians either killed or under threat in Kosovo at the time of Operation Allied Force, possibly as a justification for the extraordinary scale of the NATO assault on Milošević. Even without the benefit of hindsight, Operation Allied Force seems to have been something of a sledgehammer to crack a nut – a very tough nut, perhaps, and a very nasty enemy, too. New aircraft like the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, equipped with satellite-guided ‘smart bombs’, were tested in action for the first time. The B-2s flew all the way to Serbia and back from their base at Whiteman, Missouri, yet for all the cleverness of their technology and weaponry, it was a B-2 that accidentally dropped a bomb on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese newspaper reporters.
Cruise missiles, meanwhile, were dropped from American B-52s, flying from RAF Fairford, or else launched from US warships and the Royal Navy submarine HMS Splendid. Tony Blair sent more RAF Harriers – altogether, sixteen GR.7s and seven FA.2s saw action in Serbia and Kosovo – charged with bombing ground targets in Kosovo. In Moscow, the Russian president Boris Yeltsin – possibly deep in his cups – warned of a Third World War unless NATO backed off. In the event, Russian troops were parachuted into Pristina, the Kosovan capital, as a peacekeeping force on 12 June, two days after Milošević signed a peace treaty and withdrew from Kosovo. By this time, NATO had mounted no fewer than 10,484 sorties, with the British contributing 1,018. And only then did NATO ground forces enter Kosovo. They did so as peacekeepers, a duty afforded them by a conflict fought entirely from the air.
Civilian deaths caused by NATO bombing may have amounted to 500; it remains difficult to uncover exact numbers. But without doubt, the aerial assault brought
murderous Serbian aggression to a rapid halt and spared the lives of thousands of soldiers and civilians who might have been killed in a more prolonged land battle. The Serbians lacked convincing air power – their poorly maintained MiGs were no match for NATO jets – but their army was strong and well equipped with Russian tanks, artillery and missiles.
NATO countries, meanwhile, had little appetite for further loss of life among the enemy, civilian population or indeed their own numbers. In 1999, British airmen could expect to get home safely, and they had every reason to want to. A moving BBC news report in late June 1999 showed ten Harriers returning to RAF Wittering from the Balkans. The first pilot to step down was forty-one-year-old Squadron Leader Chris Huckstep, greeted by his wife Gill and their five young children.
Huckstep and his colleagues were, however, deeply concerned that their efforts – no matter how gutsy the pilots – had not been as effective as they would have liked them to be. Without troops on the ground, it was very hard to prevent the kind of violence against civilians in which the Serbs specialized. NATO aircraft were required to patrol above the range of shoulder-held missiles. Targets down below were tiny, all but abstract things.
Harriers were led to them by forward air controllers, one of whom, the USAF’s Major Thomas Feldhausen, appeared in a Frontline documentary for American public television with Squadron Leader Huckstep and described how the system worked:
I said, ‘Okay, let’s imagine you’re in a car.’ And I’m telling this on the radio. ‘I want you to drive the car up until you get to the warehouse that’s green on the left, and I want you to turn left there. I want you to go down the road until you see the fork.’ And he’s telling me all the time on the radio, ‘Yeah, I see that. Yeah, I see that.’