Vulcan 607

by Rowland White

  When the British conducted a more thorough reconnaissance the following year, however, they stumbled on de Bougainville’s colony, now numbering around 250 people. Offered a choice by the British expedition’s leader, Captain John McBride, of leaving or swearing allegiance to George III, the colonists called his bluff and a humiliated McBride was forced to return to England, leaving behind only a small contingent of marines at Port Egmont.

  Two years later, those thirteen marines gave themselves up to the Spanish commodore commanding the fleet of five frigates sent from Buenos Aires to expel them. The shame provoked a public outcry in Britain and a demand that national honour be avenged. Neither Britain nor Spain – without French support, at least – wanted war, however, so while Dr Johnson, commissioned by the British government, wrote a pamphlet trying to devalue the islands in the mind of the nation, a compromise with Spain was negotiated.

  For three years, the British colony returned to Port Egmont before quitting for good in 1774, leaving behind only a plaque restating Britain’s sovereignty, which read: ‘Be it known to all nations that Falkland’s Ysland, with this fort, the storehouses, wharf, harbour, bays, and creeks thereunto belonging, are the sole right and property of His Most Sacred Majesty George III.’

  And with that, the islands remained under the control of Spain and her inheritors, the United Provinces of Rio de la Plata and that new state’s successor, Argentina, for the next sixty years, until the brutal intervention of an American warship, the USS Lexington, in 1831.

  Spain removed her colonial authorities from Puerto Soledad in 1810, and from that point on the islands became little more than a base for American sealers, who were used to operating without rules or administration. So when the United Provinces appointed a governor in 1823, his relationship with the lawless residents was always going to be a difficult one. The simmering distrust between Buenos Aires and the unruly residents of Puerto Soledad came to a head after the appointment of a new governor, Louis Vernet. Vernet imposed restrictions on the number of seals killed, and in trying to enforce them arrested an American ship and escorted her to Buenos Aires to make the captain stand trial.

  Vernet’s great misfortune was that the USS Lexington, under her captain Silas Duncan, was at port in Buenos Aires. Demanding that Vernet be arrested as a pirate, Duncan immediately set sail for Puerto Soledad, where, on arrival, he destroyed the settlement, declared the islands ‘Free of all government’ and left.

  The British government quickly saw an opportunity both to reassert its own sovereignty and head off any possibility of the Americans establishing a permanent naval presence in the South Atlantic. In 1833 HMS Clio and HMS Tyne took and held the Falkland Islands and they have remained British ever since. But what seemed an almost casual reassertion of the status quo for the British hurt Argentina badly. For this newly independent young country it was and remained an illegal occupation, a humiliating stain on the nation’s self-image and a source of simmering resentment. They mattered to her in a way that they could never matter to Britain.

  By 1982, little appeared to have changed on that front. Now, though, these windswept southerly islands had a 1,800-strong population who were passionately and defiantly British. And the Argentinians had decided to do something about it.

  Chapter 3

  The Avro Vulcan was conceived in the reign of King George VI as a nuclear bomber. She was designed by a team led by the legendary Lancaster, Sir Roy Chadwick at A. V. Roe, to meet an ambitious 1947 Air Staff Requirement for an aircraft that could cruise at 500 knots at an altitude of 50,000 feet for nearly 4,000 miles to deliver a ‘special bomb’. With a piston-engined RAF bomber force barely capable of flying 2,000 miles at 200 knots and 20,000 feet, it was to be quite a feat of engineering.

  Chadwick’s solution was radical: a giant delta, her nose and cockpit extending forward of the triangular planform like the head and neck of a pterodactyl. It’s hard to appreciate the impact this imposing combination of power and purpose must have made when she first roared overhead, powered by four of the same Rolls-Royce Olympus engines that would be developed to propel Concorde through the sound barrier. In 1952 – two years before the last Lancaster was retired by the RAF – she must have looked like she’d soared straight out of the pages of ‘Dan Dare’ in the Eagle comic. And the public weren’t the only ones who seemed left behind by Britain’s most advanced jet bomber. When the test pilot Roly Falk wowed the crowds at the Farnborough air show, ‘the pinstriped pilot’ did so wearing a tweed suit and tie.

  After entering service in 1956, the Vulcan bore most of the weight of Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent and did so convincingly.

  In 1961, RAF Bomber Command was invited to participate in SKYSHIELD, a major exercise designed to test North America’s sophisticated air defences. Eight Vulcans took part. Four, flying from Scotland, attacked from the north. The rest approached from the south out of Kindley Air Force Base in Bermuda. Preceded by American B-47s and B-52s, the northern component streamed in at 56,000 feet, a greater height than any of the defending USAF fighters could reach. One of the British bombers picked up the fire-control radar from an American F-101 Voodoo, but it was jammed by her AEO and she made it through unscathed. The other three were untouched. From the south, the four Vulcans spread themselves across a front 200 miles across. As the line approached the American east coast, the most southerly aircraft turned sharply north and, screened by electronic jamming from the three other bombers, staged a completely undetected mock attack on New York.

  Since responsibility for Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent passed to the Royal Navy’s Polaris fleet in June 1969, however, the Vulcans had been relegated to the second wave, but they remained declared to NATO as a nuclear force. Crews joked about the tiny 28lb practice bomb that dropped foolishly from the Vulcan’s cavernous bomb bay on to the RED FLAG targets, but the pint-sized bomb perfectly simulated the ballistics of the WE177C 400-kiloton nuclear bombs the Vulcans would in theory carry into war. Hitting the target with the little ‘terror weapon’ was, ultimately, the thing that mattered at RED FLAG, the planes’ only real measure of success.

  But it was getting ever tougher for them to get through. The demands on the crews coaxing the best out of what was now very outdated equipment were becoming more intense, and the risks in doing so becoming greater. The Vulcans were the only part of the RAF cleared to fly at low level at night in any weather. In fact they depended on it. But flying through ugly thunderheads that had grounded all the American participants at RED FLAG, Monty had thought he was going to lose the jet – that she’d break up in the violent skies. Once safely back on the ground, Monty felt that, on this occasion, discretion might have been the better part of valour. Shouldn’t have ever left the ground, he thought. And when he was told by a severely shaken member of another Vulcan crew that they too had just all but hit the desert floor, he knew he wasn’t the only one riding his luck.

  Breaching the defences at night, in bad weather, below the radar, the Vulcans could still live with the hi-tech, swing-wing, supersonic USAF F-111s (which, in the early 1970s, the RAF had expected to replace the Vulcans) and completely outclassed the big B-52s. But by day, their big deltas casting long shadows on the desert floor, they were easy pickings for the new generation of American F-15 Eagles with their powerful look down–shoot down radars and guided missiles. When one Vulcan captain, breaking hard into a turn, found himself sandwiched between two F-15s he knew his number was up. The Eagle jockeys were hardly breaking sweat – one even had the impudence to wave. In the right conditions, determined crews believed, the Vulcans could reach the target to deliver their ‘bucket of sunshine’, but working with navigation and bombing equipment that hadn’t been substantially upgraded for twenty years, they now had to rely to a frightening extent on their own skills and experience. The truth was that in 1982 the Vulcans were really starting to show their age.

  That year would be the Vulcan’s last appearance at RED FLAG, but there was litt
le in the commitment or performance of the Vulcan detachment to suggest it. On or off the ground the pace was intense. In Vegas, the crews made the most of what was on offer. For many of them it was nights out with the boys, for some the slot machines featured. For John Hathaway, Monty’s AEO, it was the satisfaction of staying awake late enough to catch the hotel’s 99-cent breakfast before going to bed. By wading his way through another in the morning he was feeding himself for $1.98 a day. And RED FLAG had been known to lay on less innocent entertainment too: strippers provided by the wife of an American Lieutenant Colonel who ran her own booking agency. If the girls could cope with the big egos and testosterone of Happy Hour in the Nellis Officers’ Club during RED FLAG, the lady reckoned, they were probably ready for anything.

  But if the crews displayed big appetites for life on the ground, it was only because the enormous pressure of operating in the crowded, hostile skies out of Nellis demanded that kind of pressure valve. During the weeks at RED FLAG the Vulcan crews put themselves through the most challenging flying of their careers. By the time they took off from the long Nellis runway for the last time – their bomb bays stuffed with teddy bears and cuddly toys won in the Vegas arcades – all were holding their heads a little higher. Fuelled by that self-confidence, Withers and his crew were unable to resist a final flourish as they headed for home. But as they descended again towards the Grand Canyon, none of them imagined for a moment that they would soon be asked to draw on all they had learnt, or that self-confidence was about to become an extremely valuable commodity.

  Martin Withers began his journey home from RED FLAG on 15 February 1982. As his Vulcan flew east across America, the final draft of Vice-Admiral Lombardo’s plan to recover Las Islas Malvinas was passed to the Argentine junta. Reassured that ALPHA, the South Georgia operation, had been scrubbed and his work on BLUE approved, Lombardo went on holiday to an exclusive Uruguayan resort with his family.

  The whole of Stanley – the world’s most southerly capital – faced north, lining the south side of a large natural harbour. Whatever sun its remote latitude afforded it, it captured. There were a few trees – almost entirely absent outside town – but most of them were hunched like old women, because of the strong prevailing winds. Many of the houses were wooden and painted white. There were a few more permanent-looking constructions, but all seemed to share the same corrugated-iron roofs. Despite its small size and highlands and islands feel, though, Stanley had the infrastructure of a much larger settlement. So far from Britain and even the South American mainland, the little town needed its own power station, hospital, primary and secondary schools, and government buildings to support its population of barely 1,000 people.

  Joe King’s house, surrounded by immaculately manicured hedges, looked down the hill towards the waterfront. King had enjoyed drawing cartoons for the local paper until realizing that every time he lampooned the events of the day – usually another crashed Land-Rover – someone would take it personally. In an island community which, in and out of Stanley, totalled just 1,800 people, he knew he’d end up offending everyone. A laugh and a joke over a drink seemed safer, he’d decided. In the first months of 1982, though, his easy good humour was coming under threat from another source: Argentina. Something was up – he could smell it. Successive British government ministers had visited, suggesting compromise and accommodation with Argentina, but for King and many others, it was simple: they were British and wanted to remain so. And they wanted to get on with their lives without concerns over Britain’s commitment and Argentina’s ambition hanging over them.

  On 6 March 1982 an Argentine C-130 Hercules approached Stanley airfield. On board was the local agent – an Argentine Air Force officer – for Lineas Aéreas del Estado (LADE). Since the new airport had opened five years earlier, this quasi-civilian Argentine transport airline had operated the air link between Comodoro Rivadavia on the mainland and the islands. In the tower, Gerald Cheek, the bearded, red-haired Director of Civil Aviation on the islands, manned the radio. All appeared normal until the crew of the big turboprop radioed to say they couldn’t lower the landing gear and were aborting the landing. They flew straight down the length of the runway then simply continued west in the direction of Argentina. As the Hercules flew overhead, HMS Endurance, the Royal Navy’s ice patrol ship, steamed off Cape Pembroke, to the east of the islands. For many years she had been the only British warship permanently stationed in the South Atlantic and, militarily at least, she was of limited value. But she was a visible presence and signalled Britain’s continuing interest in the region. This was to be her final season, however, before being decommissioned without replacement.

  The announcement, made in June 1981, that Endurance was to be withdrawn had been opposed by the British Foreign Office for fear that it would send the wrong message to Argentina. It did. Along with the decision to withhold full British citizenship to nearly half the Falklands population and the imminent closure of the British Antarctic Survey base on South Georgia, it sent a very clear message to Argentina: Britain does not really care about the South Atlantic.

  The Hercules returned to Stanley later the same day. This time there were no problems with the landing gear. Gerald Cheek watched from the side of the apron as the camouflaged transport plane taxied to the terminal and drew to a quick stop without shutting down the engines. The stairs at the front of the plane swung down and the LADE agent stepped down to the concrete. Then before any of the airport ground crew could get near, the door was closed and the Hercules was taxiing back to the end of the runway for an immediate departure. There’s something not right about this, thought Cheek.

  Then the Chief Engineer of FIGAS – the Falkland Islands Government Air Service – turned to him and told him that the Hercules had a camera pod attached to the wing.

  There were other causes for concern. In a separate incident, another Argentine Hercules had declared an emergency and landed unexpectedly at Stanley airport, where she’d been surrounded by armed Royal Marines from Naval Party 8901. This tiny detachment of lightly armed marines who, on Guy Fawkes night, would fire flares into the sky in lieu of fireworks, were in effect the only defence provided by Britain for the Falklands. The British government simply didn’t take the Argentine threat seriously.

  Bilateral talks held at the UN in early March between the two countries ended inconclusively. The British delegation offered nothing beyond further talks and a restatement of the principle that the wishes of the islanders were paramount and that sovereignty was not up for negotiation. The idea that there was no timeline nor any prospect of something more tangible than an agreement to talk again was rejected out of hand in Buenos Aires.

  The two-man delegation from the Falklands that attended the talks returned from New York to Stanley sworn to secrecy, but making it quite clear that the situation was grave.

  Joe King felt as if a noose was slowly tightening.

  An Argentine entrepreneur, Constantino Davidoff, thought South Georgia would be his ticket to big money. At 105 miles long, but just eighteen and a half miles across at its widest point, the island’s dramatic, mountainous landscape rises from sea level to nearly 10,000 feet. Reputed to endure the worst weather in the world, South Georgia was most well known for providing the daunting setting for the final act of Shackleton’s epic journey to save his stranded men. It was the island’s defunct whaling industry that attracted Davidoff. Between 1904 and 1965, when whaling operations finally ceased, over 175,000 of the million and a half whales taken from Antarctica were processed on the island. Such was the efficiency of the operation there that a ninety-foot blue whale weighing 150 tons could be flensed and processed in barely an hour. Davidoff’s interest was in the derelict plant machinery, littering Leith, Stromness and Grytviken, that the whaling industry had left behind. He estimated that it was worth £7.5 million and could cost him £3 million to remove.

  In 1978 Davidoff agreed a contract with the Scottish firm Christian Salvesen, who still owned the South Georgian
leases. And then he tried to raise the money to pursue his grand scheme. While Davidoff kept the British embassy informed of his plans, little more was heard from him until December 1981, when he set sail for his El Dorado for the first time aboard the Argentine Navy icebreaker Almirante Irizar.

  Davidoff needed only a few hours ashore at Leith to decide that there were indeed rich pickings for him on the island. Before setting sail the small landing party took notes and pictures and left behind cigarette butts, film packaging and a message scrawled in chalk, ‘Las Malvinas son Argentinas – 20 December’, but it was what they didn’t do that caused ripples. While Davidoff had alerted the British embassy and Salvesen’s of his departure, he failed to obtain permission to land on South Georgia at King Edward Point, the official port of entry – thus making his landing illegal.

  Despite delivering a formal protest over the incident – which was rejected by Argentina – the British embassy in Buenos Aires gave Davidoff permission to mount his recovery operation. Davidoff told the British that he would not be returning himself. This effectively meant that control of the expedition lay with the Argentine Navy, who were happily providing Davidoff with a 3,100-ton naval transport, Bahia Buen Suceso, for four months at the bargain price of just $40,000. It would soon become apparent to everyone that their motives were far from altruistic. Bahia Buen Suceso set sail for South Georgia on 11 March carrying Argentine marines.

  Anchored off Grytviken, HMS Endurance was visiting South Georgia for the last time before returning to the UK for good. Her captain, Captain Nick Barker, knew of the Bahia’s departure, but had heard nothing more from her. It was usual for ships to broadcast regular weather updates, but Endurance’s operators heard none. The Bahia’s radio silence seemed suspicious to Barker, an officer with long experience in the region, but wasn’t, in itself, a reason for staying put. Fuel and stores on the ‘Red Plum’, as Endurance was known because of her red-painted hull, were running low. So, concerned as he was, Barker couldn’t wait for something that might never happen, and late in the afternoon on 16 March he sailed west for Stanley, leaving behind the small contingent of British Antarctic Survey scientists who were spending winter on the island.