‘Of course we did,’ Amos broke in. ‘But as I understand it the point of the exercise was to test NORAD, which isn’t blips on radar so much as what you do about them. Surely North American Air Defense means, well, defending against an incoming enemy. Speaking for my own lot on Saturday, none of the defenders could reach us, not even your Sixes, and we were briefed that they’ll hit Mach 2 at forty thousand feet and are good to reach well over fifty thousand.’ Amos was embarrassed to intercept a warning glance from his senior officer and subsided.
‘Yeah, well, like I said, if it had been for real you guys would’ve been taken out by missiles, ECM or no ECM.’
‘You hope. You don’t know our ECM.’
The next night a cocktail party and supper was held at the Officers’ Club to welcome the RAF detachment. The day after that, using Loring as their base, the eight Vulcans flew various sorties in which they tested their equipment against simulated surface-to-air missile sites as well as making radar bomb scoring attacks on American targets at which hits and misses were very accurately measured electronically. A ‘highly classified’ aura surrounded the whole venture. From the airmen’s point of view, it was just another exercise and the results were none of their concern.
From then on the RAF crews gave themselves up to fraternising with their USAF colleagues. The final social event of the British visit to Loring was a return party they threw for their American hosts: a binge involving the usual ritual exchange of shields and plaques, squadron ties and badges. On 20 October, somewhat reluctantly, the Vulcans flew back to Scampton. All crews agreed it had been an ace exercise, but once back home they were very surprised not to be debriefed on the mission in the usual fashion. It was obvious to them that certain sectors of NORAD had been found wanting, which seemed worthy of mention. At the very least they expected Bomber Command’s research branch would be eager to know a good few particulars of the Vulcans’ performance. However, it appeared the USAF were sitting on all the results and from then on official silence blanketed the biggest joint exercise in which the RAF had ever taken part.a
a See Appendix 1, p. 207.
Within twenty-four hours Amos was returned to his old squadron and memories of Skyshield II were swiftly buried by fresh exercises. After another year’s co-piloting he was sent off to No. 230 Operational Conversion Unit at Waddington to be turned into a full-blown Vulcan captain. Somewhere around that time he heard on the grapevine that ‘Muffin’ Mewell had been promoted group captain and had been given command of Wearsby station in Lincolnshire. The next few years passed in a haze of kerosene smoke and the endless daily rehearsals for heading off a third world war, and Skyshield II became just another fading memory.
1964–5
2
As he pedalled along, Amos was once again struck by how beautiful an airfield could be. In the clear light of an early Lincolnshire morning the gently rolling fields in the distance were darkly marked with lines of elms emerging from a stealthy ground mist: familiar shapes without which no English landscape would ever be truly complete. This hardening panorama, he now decided, performed the same function as the background of a Renaissance painting. There, behind the rallying men and horses, gorgeous with flags and harness, a far-off river might wind placidly past unheeding villages and olive groves. Here, the pale tower of the medieval church in Market Tewsbury five miles away seemed equally unwitting of the engines of war marshalled in the foreground. And just as an art-lover could read a painting’s iconography and marvel at details of sword and armour, so could an airman’s heart lift at the sight of the great ghost-white bombers on their dispersals like pale cattle caught sleeping at dawn. Yet human ingenuity had designed them to spring into the air within minutes and fly faster than the footprint of the sun.
Lately, Amos had taken to starting the day with a visit to one of the airfield’s remoter corners. There was seldom anyone about although, as on any active station, there were always sounds of industry from some quarter. This morning it was from the crews working overnight in one of the vast hangars to bring a Vulcan back to serviceability. On the cool, still air as he passed came the distant chugging of a mobile generator and the faint screech of a power tool. His cycle tyres whined softly over the perimeter track’s ribbed concrete. Out here, where less than twenty years earlier bombed-up Lancasters had waddled from dispersal, the expansion joints between the sections of pavement were still filled with bitumen. Nowadays, spilt kerosene and the searing heat of jet engines too easily dissolved or burned such tar fillings so out on the pan all the old joints had been reamed out and replaced with concrete. This perimeter road, however, remained a fossil from the Second World War, still functional in these chill and perilous times.
This and associated trivia freewheeled through Amos’s mind as he cranked his bicycle along in the growing light. Off to his right stood an immense black water tank on tall iron legs with cross-bracing, another relic from the previous war. It still functioned as an emergency supply and had always been a useful point of reference for pilots on final approach. Ahead of him there now appeared the figures of a military policeman and his Alsatian dog returning from a night’s patrolling of the inner perimeter fence. He braked to a halt as the man raised his hand in slightly more than greeting.
‘Morning, Corporal. Quiet night?’ He handed over his F.1250. There had been a security scare recently.
‘Morning, sir. Thought I recognised you. Quiet enough, it’s been.’ The immaculately blancoed white webbing of the man’s belt, holster and shoulder strap gleamed in the early light. As the policeman bent his head to read the ID Amos could see beads of dew on his service cap’s white top.
‘And how’s Air Dog Bonzo this morning?’ Amos addressed the question facetiously to the Alsatian. ‘No Russky spies to get your teeth into?’ The animal merely fixed him with a blank, killer’s gaze. There was a dusting of dew on its back and mud had oozed up between its toes.
‘Thank you, sir.’ The MP handed back the folder. ‘Long way from married quarters, sir.’
‘You married, Corporal?’
‘Not quite, sir.’
‘Just you wait. You’ll soon find a bit of distance essential now and then.’
When the guard and his dog were dots on the track behind him Amos turned in at the edge of the woods that screened the fire dump equally from the personnel on base and from the occasional British taxpayer travelling the B road a couple of hundred yards away beyond the airfield’s high outer fence. A favourite destination of his, the place drew him as the archaeological site it was. Less than two years previously RAF Wearsby had been a Fighter Command station. Then, after welling anxiety in Whitehall and Washington about the Soviets’ ability to deliver a nuclear strike, Bomber Command had taken up residence instead. The Airfield Construction Branch had worked night and day to lengthen the main runway and build a series of individual operational readiness platforms leading off it so that each bomber had immediate access to it for scramble take-offs. The crews had been busy right up to a month ago building blast pens, hardened aircraft shelters and the reinforced bunkers where Blue Steel nuclear bombs were stored. The two previous squadrons had flown off in their Hunters to Jever and Gütersloh in Germany and the great delta-winged V-bombers had moved in, three of them brand new from the Avro works, their anti-flash white finish smelling of fresh cellulose. Since the strategic catchword these days was ‘deterrent’, they were facetiously deemed to constitute part of Britain’s Great White Deterrent, a phrase which the service had reliably downgraded to Great White Detergent in honour of the novelty value of washing powders like Omo and Tide. The very word detergent brought with it an air of modernity, a suggestion of effortless efficiency.
In all the recent hectic activity at Wearsby the station’s fire dump seemed to have been overlooked. Tucked away in its distant corner, it remained an oasis immune from the new Ministry of Aviation’s world of strategic urgency. It simply went on giving a last home to the victims of mechanical failure, pilot error
and sheer bad luck. Lincolnshire – like much of East Anglia – was dotted with airfields of all kinds and despite Wearsby’s nuclear status it was also a Master Diversion Airfield, guaranteed open all year round (weather permitting) for emergency landings, civil or military. It was surprising how often it played host to pilots declaring an emergency. It might be some fighter jock far from home whose engine had surged, flamed out and refused to relight who thought he still had the altitude and was bullish enough to try to ‘dead-stick’ it onto Wearsby’s long runway instead of ejecting and letting the aircraft fall where it might. Another could be down to his last hundred pounds of fuel while searching fruitlessly in a thick sea mist for his home base. Or else a fledgling pilot from Cranwell became lost on a night flying exercise and put down at Wearsby, typically so overjoyed to find terra firma again that he would forget to lower his landing gear first. The physical remains of such episodes, once they had been designated Category 5 – written off as beyond repair – were struck off charge, lifted onto a battered Queen Mary low-loader and hauled off to the fire dump. And it was here that Amos sometimes came for a reflective visit before the day’s routines summoned him elsewhere. It was something he tried to keep from his crew, none of whom was married. They would have seen it as disquietingly morbid, their own spare time being reserved for more extroverted pursuits. As his crew chief ‘Baldy’ Hodge would remark with the sour wisdom of a married man in his mid-thirties, ‘Growing old is compulsory; growing up is not.’
On entering the dump a visitor was confronted by four main rows of scrap, in places piled twenty or more feet high, separated by broad concrete lanes stretching some fifty yards to a pair of Nissen huts at the back that still wore the fading blotches of wartime camouflage paint. The wrecked aircraft were pretty much stratified by era, the majority dating from Fighter Command’s recent occupancy. The oldest types that formed the bottom layers had been propeller-driven. Off to one side were several stacks of Meteor fuselages that had been whimsically propped on their noses, wigwam-like, with tail fins interlocked. From their plain metal finish and the yellow bands painted around wings and fuselage it was clear that many had been training aircraft: a mere handful of the nearly nine hundred Meteors the RAF had lost in service. Everywhere the early sunlight glistened on the dew-beaded remains of cockpit canopies, the crazed perspex of the older models already acquiring a brownish tinge from exposure to the elements. One of the rows of scrap was composed entirely of wings and other flying surfaces, at the bottom of which some were recognisable among the tangle of oxidising alloy as having belonged to old monoplanes such as Harvards or Typhoons. Immediately above this layer were more relics of the RAF’s earliest jet fighters: Meteors, Vampires and Venoms. Wherever water could pool, moss and even small seedlings had sprung up, especially in the tiers devoted to fuselages, where brilliant green algae favoured the rails in which cockpit canopies had once slid. In one pilot’s seat a crop of groundsel had colonised its sodden and decaying foam stuffing.
From a neighbouring lane the towering jib of a Coles Mk 5 crane was outlined against the paling sky, its steel hawsers dangling slack above the tailless fuselage of a Canberra that had landed short some weeks earlier, caught its wheels in an unseen drainage ditch and cartwheeled onto the airfield. Two dead on the spot and the third within minutes of the crash crews’ arrival. All its high-altitude photos of East Germany were lost in the ensuing fire. The crane rested its heavy grab impassively on the Canberra’s blistered hide as if holding it down against some atavistic struggle the fuselage was making to heave itself back into the air. Wire pulleys, thought Amos. Typical of the RAF to make do with a museum piece. But then, why waste a modern crane on a junkyard?
Unlike most airmen, Amos found the fire dump perversely comforting. Aircrew generally avoided confronting the evidence of the death or disaster that was anyway seldom far from their daily lives. Of necessity they inhabited a blessed present squeezed between the dangers of yesterday and the probable nuclear holocaust of tomorrow. Everybody knew of someone who had died. Some had gone instantaneously, some nastily, some even absurdly – like the ground crewman in Aden who had been replacing a faulty relay in the bomb bay of a Valiant. The aircraft was to be flown back on a UK ranger, to the delight of its crew, for a complete overhaul of the bomb-bay heating system which constantly failed. By some freakish screw-up the technician had been shut into the bay by an inattentive crew chief. The aircraft had taken off from Khormaksar, flown back to the UK at fifty thousand feet with a refuelling stop in Akrotiri, and at the last minute had been diverted to Wearsby because of an accident on its home base. Before landing the Valiant had done a low, slow run over the airfield with its bomb doors open to test them, watched by binoculars from the control tower. The deep-frozen ground crewman in his frost-covered khaki shorts fell three hundred feet onto the main runway and shattered like marble, white and crimson chunks bounding away across the grass on either side. Still other deaths remained pure enigmas. Handsome Peter Torrance had gone off in a leftover Hunter F.6 to test its Aden cannon by shooting a few holes in Knock Deep, off Felixstowe, a fifty-minute sortie at most, and had simply vanished. No radio message, no thin slick of kerosene, let alone wreckage. He had promised to be back in time for Yogi Bear on the mess TV at 17:00 and broke his word by flying off into everlasting silence.
But that wasn’t the salutary part of all this: there was nothing new to be learned from sudden death. For Amos the real point was the temporary nature of the whole strategic enterprise, from summit-level politics to outdated hardware. He found it ironic, even reassuring, that the top secrets of fifteen years ago were now junk buried beneath later layers of other top secrets, with the most recent and secret of all open to the skies and held down by the rusted grab of an obsolete crane. They were casualties of the hectic technological advances which the Cold War mandated. Everyone on the station knew that some of Britain’s most ground-breaking experimental aircraft were scrapped by government decree before they had ever flown, winding up as targets on the artillery ranges at Shoeburyness. Millions of pounds’ worth of ingenuity, labour and materials blown up by a bunch of pongos.
Yet it wasn’t really a simple issue of outrageous waste, as the newspapers claimed. If you flew a V-bomber you knew only too well the difficulty of designing new weapons on the edge of what was technically feasible. Unavoidably such weapons had long lead times, and an unexpected breakthrough on your opponent’s part might change the whole strategic plan overnight, rendering the latest interceptor or radar set obsolete before it was even rolled out. No NATO airman was ever likely to forget that day in 1960 when the American Gary Powers had been shot down deep over Russia in his U-2 reconnaissance aircraft by a Soviet surface-to-air missile. Nor had the Yanks been alone in thinking themselves safe at an altitude of over eighty thousand feet; everyone in the West had been counting on sheer height for protection. That one SAM had demonstrated they were safe no longer. It was an immense technological and political coup for the Russians; and in Powers’s later public trial Khrushchev had rubbed it in. The real worry was that the USSR had revealed itself as a good two or three years more advanced in missile-guidance systems than the West’s intelligence services had believed. In how many other fields might it already be equal – or even superior – to the best NATO could offer?
So here in a relatively forgotten corner of RAF Wearsby the strengthening light revealed the sedimentary layers of the best the RAF could once offer: a geology of ex-secrets. Amos wandered to the end of a row and opened the door of the right-hand Nissen hut. The air inside was cold and smelt of kerosene. A few more or less intact engines rested neatly on steel trestles with drip trays beneath them. Periodically, he knew, a heavy lorry would call for them, presumably to take them back to Bristols or Rolls-Royce for rebuilding. Other lorries collected the more battered engines piled to one side so their valuable alloys could be reclaimed. The second hut was locked and mainly contained salvaged instruments and avionics other than radar. Anything to do with
radar and electronic countermeasures was far too sensitive to be left in a shed, no matter how well locked and patrolled by RAF police with Alsatians. Some way off was an open area of blackened soil. This was where combustible stuff was periodically burned to give the fire crews some practice. On a still day the viscid column of smoke from shredded aero tyres and engine oil provided a marker that could be seen for miles around. Evidently the last things to go had been some seats, presumably from a crashed transport. Their skeletons, orange with heat or rust, were still tangled at the centre of the bonfire site whose edges were marked by odd lengths of half-charred hydraulic tubing like stubs of liquorice.
Between the huts rested the flattened remains of a Sycamore helicopter. For Amos this wreckage had become the dump’s focal point, almost a private shrine. By sheer chance he had happened to witness the accident, which took place in Wearsby’s airspace. He had been replacing a windscreen wiper on his tatty Hillman one unusually slack day towards noon when, as habitually as any airman, he had glanced up at the sound of aero engines. A huge Beverley transport was lumbering over a corner of the field at about fifteen hundred feet, not with any obvious intention of landing but at what looked like close to stalling speed. Buzzing beneath it and far too close, like a cleg trying to settle on a cow, was a small helicopter. At that moment Amos had a powerful premonition of disaster that leaped through him like voltage. Possibly the helicopter’s pilot misjudged the distance or else his Sycamore was caught in the vortex that the massive transport was generating, which amounted to the same thing. Its main rotor touched one of the transport’s fixed undercarriage legs, instantly shattering its blades which were hurled aside like twigs. The suddenly relieved engine raced itself to destruction within seconds and the helicopter twirled from the sky, falling towards the distant outskirts of Market Tewsbury. It disappeared from view behind the station’s chapel while the Beverley droned on, seemingly unaware of anything amiss, not deviating from its course until it, too, vanished.
Under the Radar Page 3