Vulcan 607

by Rowland White

  Chapter 8

  4 April 1982

  By Sunday, as men and stores poured into the Navy’s dockyards on the south coast, Sir Michael Beetham was reorganizing the RAF for war. First he delegated the day-to-day running of the Air Force to his Vice-Chief of the Air Staff, Air Marshal Sir David Craig. Beetham, with his right-hand man, Air Vice-Marshal Ken Hayr, was now free to focus exclusively on the role the Air Force could play in the coming war. Next, he needed to ensure that the RAF had some influence at an operational level. In 1982, each of the services was run in almost total isolation from the others and Operation CORPORATE, the codename assigned to the campaign to retake the Falklands, was still primarily a naval affair. Air power in theatre would be the preserve of the Navy’s Fleet Air Arm and any effort on the RAF’s part to muscle in on that would, he knew, be resisted. The solution lay at Northwood. In the 1960s office block above the underground NATO facility, Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse, Commander-in-Chief of the British Fleet, had an office next door to Air Marshal Sir John Curtiss, George Chesworth’s boss at 18 Group. The two men enjoyed a strong rapport. The gales of laughter that often came out of the Admiral’s office during the pair’s daily morning meeting set the tone for effective cooperation throughout the entire campaign. Northwood was the only place in the country where the RAF and Navy were so closely harmonized. There was genuine synergy.

  The blunt, uncompromising Curtiss was a veteran of Bomber Command in the Second World War, and his forty-year career had also provided him with fighter and transport experience. When Admiral Fieldhouse was given command of the CORPORATE Task Force, Curtiss became his Air Commander.

  Inside Northwood, Curtiss was at the heart of the decision-making, effectively reporting straight to Beetham, with whom he began to talk daily. Curtiss had never worked directly with Beetham before but, under huge pressure, the two men established a new, sometimes fiery, relationship. While Curtiss got to grips with his new role, though, the Chief of the Air Staff was always supportive, and insistent that Curtiss fight the Air Force’s corner.

  In order to streamline the chain of command further, Beetham effectively cut Curtiss’s own superior at Strike Command, Air Chief Marshal Sir Keith Williamson, out of the loop. Curtiss took responsibility for all RAF assets involved in the campaign and communicated his needs directly to the Group AOCs, like his counterpart at 1 Group, Air Vice-Marshal Mike Knight, to a great extent bypassing Strike Command altogether.

  As AOC 18 Group, Curtiss knew that he couldn’t use his long-range Nimrods further than 1,200 miles south of Ascension. The Falkland Islands were another 2,500 miles or so beyond that. The problem he faced was what, exactly, the RAF was going to be able to do 8,000 miles from home.

  In the MoD building in Whitehall, Beetham and Hayr were wrestling with the same issue. The C-130s and VC10s of the transport fleet were already establishing ‘the motorway’ to Ascension. Hayr, his own flying background on Harriers, also saw the potential for the RAF Harrier GR3 fleet to fly from the Navy’s carriers to reinforce the Fleet Air Arm’s handful of Sea Harrier FRS1s. It had never been done before, but it seemed feasible. The maritime Nimrods of the ‘Kipper Fleet’ were placed on alert, as were their intelligence-gathering cousins, the Nimrod R1s of 51 Squadron, a force shrouded in secrecy. Beetham and Hayr asked their staff to look at other options. The answers weren’t encouraging. The Blackburn Buccaneer S2s, the RAF’s low-level strike specialists, didn’t carry enough engine oil for such an extraordinarily long mission. The all-singing, all dancing Panavia Tornado GR1 on which the RAF pinned its future had only been in squadron service for a matter of weeks. Despite Beetham’s enthusiasm for the new strike jet – he’d recently been quoted in a manufacturer’s advertisement claiming ‘it’s a real pilot’s plane’ – it was simply too new and unproven to even be contemplated. Faced with such limited choices, Beetham considered the assets available to him and began making connections. The seed of a plan was forming.

  ‘What can we do with air-to-air refuelling?’ he asked Hayr. It was abundantly clear that extending range through in-flight refuelling was the key to the RAF’s contribution. It was fortunate that few people in the RAF had greater knowledge or experience of the possibilities it offered than the Chief of the Air Staff himself. After all, he’d practically written the book on it.

  ‘VALIANT BREAKS LONDON TO CAPE RECORD BY 54 MINS’, led the 9 July 1959 edition of the Cape Argus. It followed with daily updates and looked back with pride to an earlier record set by two South Africans, Sir Pierre van Ryneveld and Sir Quentin Brand. ‘Congratulations to the RAF,’ wrote ‘Loyalist’ of Cape Town, ‘and hats off to the memories of our own pioneers too.’ That historic 1921 journey had taken the two South African adventurers over four and a half days to complete. Four years later, van Ryneveld arranged an airborne escort for the arrival of the aviator whose name became most closely identified with the iconic London–Cape Town route: Sir Alan Cobham. Cobham had flown south through Africa pioneering the route for the planned Imperial Airways service.

  As Cobham had thirty-three years earlier, the latest British arrival attracted large crowds. This time, though, access was strictly controlled because much about the sleek, white-painted bomber was still classified – no civilians would be allowed on board and only a handful of press photographers were escorted anywhere near her. Still new in service, she represented the cutting edge of Britain’s new airborne nuclear deterrent. During the week Beetham and his crew made their record-breaking flight, British newspapers reported ‘200 US H-bombers Coming to Britain’, ‘France to Explode H-bomb’ and ‘Russians Claim 2 Dogs and a Rabbit Have Gone to Space’. The two sides were squaring up to each other across the Iron Curtain.

  On the face of it, the day their Valiant left its Norfolk base for Cape Town wasn’t a good one for the RAF. Three airmen were killed when their Canberra bomber crashed in a wheatfield near Cambridgeshire and two others narrowly escaped when their Javelin fighter, flying through the storms that brought an end to Britain’s eleven-day heatwave, was struck by lightning and exploded.

  But despite the PR opportunity offered by the record-breaking flight to Cape Town, Beetham and his crew sounded measured in their reaction to their achievement.

  ‘I’m very happy about it,’ Beetham told the South African press, ‘but the real object was the non-stop flight and we beat the record incidentally.’

  The flight to Cape Town was no stunt. Instead it was part of a continuing RAF experimental programme into air-to-air refuelling. The man whose company was supplying the equipment to make it possible was Sir Alan Cobham, an evangelical advocate of the potential of the new technology. Beetham worked closely with Cobham on the Air Force trials and eventually came to share the same conviction. But the Operational Record Book for 1956 of 214 Valiant Squadron, Main Force, Bomber Command, records what a ‘gloomy and unpopular prospect’ refuelling trials were thought to be by the unfortunates assigned the role. The Squadron CO, Wing Commander Michael Beetham, stung with the same indignation. I’m a bomber man, he thought, and I want to be in a bomber role.

  But the flying was good. While other V-bomber crews were stuck on the ground on QRA, the Quick Reaction Alert (at five minutes’ readiness to get airborne in response to a nuclear attack on the UK), 214 Squadron were in the air, allowed to get on with it because no one on the Air Staff seemed to have the slightest understanding of what they were up to. Beetham began to enjoy the new role and relish the independence it offered. It meant 214’s crews were free to explore doing things their own way, refining and adapting the techniques passed on by the test pilots, making the new role their own.

  And in an environment eager for broken records and tales of derring-do they were quick to realize the publicity value it might hold. Without refuelling, the Valiant could fly for seven hours at a pinch. Soon the squadron was regularly undertaking flights of twice that duration around the UK, but it was the long-range flights to Africa that caught the public’s imagination. Flying from RAF Marh
am, their Norfolk base, refuelling over Kano in northern Nigeria, Luqa on Malta, or El Adam in Libya, each non-stop flight to Nairobi, Salisbury or Johannesburg would capture the speed record for 214.

  In October 1959, one of the Marham Valiants refuelled another of the RAF’s trio of V-bombers, the Avro Vulcan, for the first time. Two years later, a Vulcan B1 flew non-stop to Sydney, refuelled all the way by 214 Squadron’s Valiants.

  Now Beetham remembered that twenty-hour flight. If a Vulcan could reach Sydney, it should be able to get to the Falklands and back. It wasn’t quite as simple as that, however. For Sydney, tankers had been stationed along the route in Cyprus, Karachi and Singapore. Flying from Ascension, they didn’t have that luxury. On top of that, the remaining Vulcans were nuclear bombers. No one was seriously counting that as an option, but it meant that their crews hadn’t practised dropping conventional bombs for ten years. The last, and potentially most serious, problem was that the Vulcan force hadn’t practised air-to-air refuelling for twenty years. They’d be lucky to find anyone still flying the old bombers who’d even tried it before.

  There was no plan beyond seeing if it could be done – no consideration yet of possible targets on either the Falklands or the Argentine mainland. But by converting the Vulcans back to the conventional role and advertising the fact, Beetham wanted to send a message to the junta: You are not out of range and we mean business.

  ‘Make some publicity out of it,’ he told Hayr. ‘Pass the word!’

  Beetham wanted to use the V-force.

  In the Operations Room at Waddington, the flying schedules for the month ahead were mapped out on a large chinagraph board fixed to the wall. On Monday morning, the day the fleet sailed from Portsmouth, crews gathered underneath and discussed the invasion, unaware of developments at the MoD. Jim Vinales was sure, at least, that Vulcans wouldn’t be involved. Martin Withers agreed; he just couldn’t take the whole thing seriously. Even watching the tearful scenes as sailors embarked, he thought, well, it won’t come to anything. In an office just around the corner, a different picture was emerging.

  ‘We’re going to have to do something,’ Air Vice-Marshal Mike Knight told Group Captain John Laycock, RAF Waddington’s affable Station Commander. ‘I don’t know what’s likely to happen, but if there’s going to be action in South America, the Vulcans may be involved. By all means stand your station down over the bank holiday weekend. But’, Knight added, ‘don’t let too many people go too far away.’

  At this point in the Vulcan’s long career, it was an unlikely turn of events. Four months earlier, Knight had phoned Laycock, then barely a month into a two-year tour as the bomber station’s Commanding Officer.

  ‘You’re not going to like this,’ Knight had told him, ‘but we’re going to close the whole operation down on the 1st of July.’

  In her current guise at least, Waddo, as she was known to all her crews, was a station preparing for extinction, not war. With the Tornado’s introduction to service it had been on the cards, but a date had not been mentioned. Now the rush seemed indecent. Laycock knew he’d be unlikely to get command of another station. The RAF’s V-force had been his life for a quarter of a century. A promising club rugby career for Leicester had been abandoned because of the inflexible demands of the QRA, that dominated the lives of the RAF bomber crews throughout the 1960s. The camaraderie and rivalry that had existed throughout the V-force was coming to an end. A tall, bearish man who’d inevitably attracted the epithet ‘Big John’, Laycock was an approachable, steady and popular figure at Waddington; the least he could do was to make sure that the passing of the last four remaining Vulcan squadrons was marked with the pomp and ceremony that the station’s rich history deserved.

  RAF Waddington sits on Lincolnshire heights, five miles south of the county’s cathedral city. Carved from flat, well-drained farmland during the First World War, it wasn’t until the RAF’s rapid expansion in the late 1930s that Waddington became a significant bomber base. Although operations were flown on the first day of the Second World War, it wasn’t an auspicious start. The Handley Page Hampdens of 44 and 50 Squadrons failed to identify the German fleet and returned to Waddo after dropping their bombs into the North Sea. With the introduction of Lancasters in 1941, things improved dramatically and the contribution of her squadrons to the war effort was a substantial one. By 1956, with the formation of 230 Operational Conversion Unit, she became home to the RAF’s first Vulcans and the piston-engined heavies were consigned to history.

  Now, in 1982, it was the Vulcan’s turn to go. Experienced aircrew were already beginning to drift away from the squadrons to new posts. That might not be too good an idea, thought Laycock after his conversation with Air Vice-Marshal Knight, and he picked up the phone to his OC Administration Wing.

  ‘Look, we might have to get people to turn round and come straight back.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ came the reassuring reply. ‘We’re on top of it. Let’s see what happens.’

  HMS Splendid surfaced for only fifteen to twenty minutes every day to fix her position. For the rest of the time she kept up a punishing pace. A day and a half behind Spartan, sailing from Gibraltar, Lane-Nott pushed his boat through the water at a constant 26, 27, even 28 knots. But in the control room the only evidence of her speed was a small dial indicating that they were travelling at 20-plus knots. As they travelled south, sticking to the anti-metric depths they used to complicate the Soviets’ efforts, Lane-Nott and his First Lieutenant worked up their attack teams. They trained the crew hard for an hour and a half, three times a day, letting them resume normal duties between sessions to keep them focused. The Captain’s knowledge of Soviet submarines, Soviet surface vessels and Soviet tactics was encyclopaedic, but when it came to the Argentinians, the copy of Jane’s Fighting Ships they carried on board represented the sum of it. The Argentinians had good, German diesel-electric submarines, but how effective were they in Argentine hands? For a while, Lane-Nott wasn’t even sure what sort of torpedoes the enemy were carrying. But he did know, from his own experience, that a well-handled diesel boat will always detect a nuclear submarine before it is itself detected. There were French A-69 frigates and a carrier, but what sort of a threat did they represent? And there were the British Type 42 destroyers. At least he knew what they sounded like; the Hercules had been the ship on the slip at Barrow-in-Furness immediately before Splendid herself. For all of the crew’s confidence in locking horns with the Soviets in the battleground of the North Atlantic, knowing so little about the threat they were facing made him genuinely apprehensive.

  Only a slight rise in the temperature on board as they sailed into the warmer water of the tropics gave any hint to the crew of Splendid’s progress. But as they approached the equator, they expected problems with satellite communications. At least on this journey they actually had such a facility. When HMS Dreadnought had been sent south to patrol Falklands waters in 1977, Lane-Nott had been at Northwood. The only way they’d been able to get a message to her then was to send a high-frequency signal to Endurance, who in turn would have to turn it into a UHF signal before flying one of her helicopters at sufficient height for the message to reach the submarine over the horizon. Although the British satellite communication system, SCSYS, was yet to come on line, Splendid was fitted with an American system and had access to a reserved British channel on an American satellite.

  It was one of the many ways that American support would prove crucial to the campaign ahead.

  It took nearly a month for the Americans to come down publicly on the side of the British, but, as the US Secretary of State, Al Haig, raced between London, Washington and Buenos Aires in gruelling rounds of ultimately futile shuttle diplomacy, Beetham was relaxed about securing their help. As well as Caspar Weinberger, Ronald Reagan’s anglophile Secretary of Defense, Beetham had another ally at the Pentagon in the shape of Weinberger’s Chief Military Adviser, Brigadier Carl Smith. In an earlier NATO staff posting, the British Chief of the Air Staff had
been lucky enough to have this talented officer as his Executive Officer. The two men had been golfing partners and remained good friends. The Pentagon, Beetham knew, would give the Royal Air Force all the help it needed, even though Weinberger’s own advisers were telling him that the British objective was ‘not only very formidable, but impossible’. Beetham knew through his own contacts that the American Air Force thought ‘we were bonkers to even think about it’, but, undeterred, he wanted fuel for his V-bombers and transport fleet. Lots of fuel.

  * * *

  The British Air Attaché in Washington wasn’t feeling as confident. But as he walked through the Pentagon dressed in formal uniform, draped in gold braid, the slaps on the back and exhortations to ‘Give ’em hell down there!’ and ‘Go, Brits!’ were heartening. He sat down with the Admiral in charge of logistics and began to outline what was needed. First of all, he explained that the weekend flights into Ascension were just the beginning. Ascension would be the hub for all air operations against the Falklands and, he hoped, the US wouldn’t object to that increased traffic. The meat of the discussion, though, was about fuel.

  ‘How much fuel are you thinking of?’ the Admiral asked.

  ‘We’d like an eight-million-gallon tanker full of jet fuel off Georgetown within the next seven days.’

  Unfazed, the Admiral drew back screens to reveal a chart pinpointing the position of every tanker supplying the US military throughout the world. After a brief telephone exchange, he pointed to the chart and said that a tanker on its way to Guantanamo could be diverted. So far, so good. Weinberger, it seemed, had already made his wishes clear.

  ‘How are you going to store the fuel?’ enquired the Admiral.

  ‘The ship will have to lie off Georgetown with lines ashore and be used as a floating fuel station until empty.’