Vulcan 607

by Rowland White

  Sir Michael Beetham briefed the Cabinet, explaining his plan in detail. When he had ordered the Vulcans to train for air refuelling and conventional bombing he’d had no clear idea what might or might not be feasible. Discovering the capabilities of a combined Victor and Vulcan formation had been an iterative process, but the possibilities were emerging. Earlier in the week, the newspapers had claimed confidently that Argentina’s mainland military bases would be destroyed on the first day of any conflict. Word came back from the planning cell at 1 Group that to take out just one would require four Vulcans. And for the bombers to reach the bases in southern Argentina that might influence the conflict, and return, would require the support of over seventy Victors. Even if such a mission had been politically acceptable the RAF simply didn’t have the resources to do it. Of course, it did the British cause no harm whatsoever to continue to allow the Argentinians to believe it was a possibility. Beetham continued to outline his intentions, explaining that an attack on the airfield at Port Stanley was, while extremely difficult, both technically possible and strategically desirable. Like the Americans’ opening shot of the Second World War, the Doolittle Raid against Tokyo launched in retaliation for the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the effect of Beetham’s plan was more than physical. It was a powerful statement of intent.

  The Prime Minister and her Defence Secretary were quick to embrace it. Predictably enough, Pym and Whitelaw expressed doubts. It didn’t matter. Beetham was told to go ahead and plan for the raid. While Pym, who was due to fly to Washington immediately after the briefing, was told by the Prime Minister to clarify the American attitude to launching the strike from Ascension.

  Beetham left feeling satisfied with the reaction to his proposal; particularly so with the interest Margaret Thatcher had shown. Francis Pym, he’d noticed, did not look at all amused.

  Before Pym had even left Heathrow, Bryden had received his answer from Jerry Bennett at Patrick AFB. He was to provide the British with whatever they wanted. Instructions like that, he thought, are easy to follow!

  Chapter 20

  22 April 1982

  ‘We’ve got a bloody firelock on us!’ shouted AEO Terry Anning, the RWR alive through his headset. The pilot, Flight Lieutenant Steve ‘Biggles’ Biglands, mashed the power, pulled at the control wheel and booted the rudder, tipping the Victor into a steep, screaming dive. As he was thrown against his harness, John Foot, the tanker’s Nav Radar, struggled to get his fingers to the switches of the control panel for the wing pods to try to break the lock.

  The Victors were sitting targets for surface-to-air missiles. Engineers had tried sealing bundles of foil chaff in the tanker’s airbrake, but it had got caught up in the mechanics. In a last-minute piece of improvisation, someone at Marham had realized that chaff could be kept in place in the backs of the wing pods by the retracted refuelling baskets. With the masterswitch off, the baskets were gripped tight. When the Nav Radar turned the system on, they trailed slightly – relaxed a touch – before winding back in ready for the drogues to be trailed properly. It was a one-shot deal. As the Victor twisted through the air, Foot managed to reach the refuelling controls and flicked ‘On’. Clouds of foil strips billowed out of the two Mk 20 pods, presenting the fire-control radar with a larger, more attractive target. It broke the lock, leaving the crew shaken, confused, but safe, wondering what the hell had happened.

  As the shadow boxing that preceded the British operation to retake South Georgia played out, the Victors mounted further long-range radar reconnaissance missions, to check that the seas around the island remained clear of Argentine units and ice. Biggles’ Victor K2, providing refuelling support for the second of these, had overflown Admiral Woodward’s Battle Group as it steamed south. Tux’s concern at the first briefing about the whereabouts of friendly ships had proved to be well founded.

  The next day, John Smith again gave friends a lift to the airport. He drove slowly past newly arrived missiles stacked next to the terminal building. Still in the packaging in which they were delivered from the manufacturer, they were marked with instructions like ‘DO NOT LIFT HERE’. British Tiger Cats, he thought.

  The weapons of the Grupo de Artillería de Defensa Aeria 601, an army anti-aircraft unit, had begun to arrive. The GADA 601’s guns, missiles and radars had been loaded on to a transport ship, the Ciudad de Córdoba, which, it was subsequently decided, would not run the gauntlet of the British submarines patrolling the Maritime Exclusion Zone. Now they were coming in by air to reinforce the Marine and Air Force anti-aircraft guns already in place. If they had time to work up to full strength, GADA 601 had the potential to be the most lethal unit of the lot.

  But it wasn’t the Tiger Cats that most worried Simon Baldwin. These old weapons were guided visually via a long trailing wire. To hit the target, the operator on the ground had to be able to see it. Going in before dawn, the Vulcans would be relatively safe from these. The radar-laid Oerlikons, on the other hand, worried him a great deal.

  The Oerlikon cannons had a prodigious appetite for high-explosive ammunition. Each of the twin 35mm barrels fired shells at a rate of 500 per minute. Together they threw out over 16 rounds per second. With a muzzle velocity of over 3,000 feet per second they had enormous destructive power. Baldwin remembered witnessing it.

  Faldingworth, near Scampton, had once been an RAF facility – a storage and maintenance facility for Blue Danube nuclear bombs. The scattering of low-lying buildings around the site gave little hint of its real purpose, because most of the facility was beneath the surface. When Baldwin visited in 1979, it was as a guest of the new owners, Bmarc, a subsidiary of the Swiss arms manufacturer Oerlikon-Buerhle. Bmarc were laying on a firepower demonstration at Faldingworth’s underground weapons ranges. The technicians told their guests that the two-foot-thick slab of steel bulkhead they’d be firing into had come from the German battleship Tirpitz. Baldwin wasn’t sure he believed them about that, but it certainly looked as if it could have done. What left no room for doubt was a dinner-plate-sized hole punched through it by the powerful anti-aircraft gun. And that was from a shell that, unlike those the Argentine gunners would be using, contained no high explosives.

  Three years later, the mess it could make of a thin-skinned Vulcan hardly bore thinking about. He desperately needed more information on the defences they were going to face. Then he remembered Spike Jones, a retired Wing Commander whom both he and Laycock had known when he’d been working at the Department of Air Warfare, part of the RAF College at Cranwell. Baldwin reminded Laycock that he was now working at Bmarc. The Station Commander didn’t need persuading.

  ‘Let’s find out what he wants to say.’ Baldwin picked up the phone and dialled the number for Werner Loyk, Bmarc’s managing director.

  ‘I know why you’re calling,’ said the Swiss businessman.

  ‘May I come along and see you?’ Baldwin asked.

  ‘No,’ replied Loyk, and Baldwin prepared to make his case, ‘but if you can send someone in civilian clothes, that might be OK. I’ll get back to you.’

  Spike Jones later called John Laycock and arrangements were made for the Station Intelligence Officer, Flight Lieutenant Martin Hallam, to take a trip to the Grantham factory to meet him. The information Hallam brought back to Waddington was priceless.

  Oerlikon, it turned out, had trained the Argentinians to set up and use their guns. Jones could tell them the recommended pattern of radars and gun emplacements to defend a standard airfield. And from this, Baldwin and Laycock were able to make an informed estimate of how the guns might be deployed around Port Stanley airfield. Jones told them how many shells had been sold to the Argentinians, how many they’d since had to replace and what they’d been replaced with. Some of them had been supplied by a rival company and, he said, were inferior in performance to the Oerlikon-manufactured ammunition. He told them by how much. But most important of all, he was able to provide them with details of all the Argentine anti-aircraft weapons and their respective kill zones
– the range within which they were considered deadly – and confirmed the frequencies of their air defence radars.

  The information from Jones was a real nugget, but, in addition, information on the Argentine defences was starting to filter through from the RAF Intelligence net. Baldwin asked the Station Intelligence Officer to mark the kill zones on to a piece of A3 graph paper. Concentric lines arced across the orange squares recording height and distance from the weapons’ launch point where the x and y axes met. A Tiger Cat missile burnt out at 8,500 feet. It was optically aimed, which certainly reduced its effectiveness, but with the Vulcan flying down the length of the runway at 300 feet, on a clear night a lucky shot from an alert operator couldn’t be ruled out entirely.

  Another ring drawn on this diagram at 12,800 feet out on the face of it represented the biggest threat of all: the Franco-German Roland missile. Roland was a modern and effective radar-guided missile. Capable of supersonic speeds of up to Mach 1.6, it could be fired in all weathers, day or night, without its operator ever catching sight of the target. A Vulcan was desperately vulnerable to a weapon like Roland but, Jones had told them, the Argentinians couldn’t deploy the system with its bulky launch trailer to the islands. Baldwin hoped he was right.

  The third line represented the Oerlikon guns. This was the one. The heavy shells began to tumble out of control at 6,500 feet. Go in below 6,500 though, he thought, and they’re going to get you. And that was exactly what Monty, Reeve and Withers were training to do. Baldwin sat back and lit his pipe as he weighed it all up. Low level wasn’t looking like such a good idea.

  In Argentina, meanwhile, GADA 601 had unloaded their Roland missiles from the hold of the Ciudad de Córdoba. It hadn’t been thought possible to squeeze Roland into the hold of a C-130 Hercules, but Argentine Air Force engineers decided that if there was a way of doing so, they were going to discover it.

  Regulations stated that safety altitude was the height of the highest ground within twenty-five nautical miles of the aircraft’s track, plus 10 per cent of that height, plus another 1,500 feet. Unless there was visual contact with the ground, or the aircraft was under positive radar control, these limits were not to be broken. The RAF took a belt-and-braces approach to making sure that its aircraft avoided coming into unplanned contact with the ground.

  Although Neil McDougall hadn’t yet been day- and night-qualified for refuelling, he and his crew were shadowing the training programme of the three principal CORPORATE crews. And McDougall was following the rules; while he watched his instruments, his co-pilot, Chris Lackman, maintained visual contact with the ground.

  Flying mock night-time attacks against remote airfields scattered around the Scottish Western Isles – Stornoway, Benbecula, Tyree and Islay – McDougall dropped to 500 feet and held the aircraft there. Then, comfortable and confident at that height, he stepped it down on the TFR selector: 400 feet, 300 feet, 200 feet. It seemed fine but for the increasingly enthusiastic exclamations from Lackman in the seat next to him. As part of the drive to enhance the Vulcan’s capabilities each of the co-pilots had been issued with night vision goggles, or NVGs, and instructed on how to use them. Down low they’d allow the co-pilots to provide a visual back-up to the Nav Radar during the bomb-run. Lackman couldn’t contain his excitement.

  ‘Wow! That’s amazing,’ he kept on until the laconic McDougall had had enough.

  ‘Chris, what the bloody hell are you talking about?’ he snapped.

  ‘It’s the sheep!’

  ‘What about the bloody sheep?’

  ‘I’ve never flown as low as this before, I’m looking them in their eyes!’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked McDougall. ‘We’re at two hundred feet.’

  ‘More like twenty…’

  The NVG sets made objects appear closer, but that didn’t make sense. McDougall checked his instruments and realized with a thump of adrenalin that he’d forgotten to turn on the TFR. He’d been flying on nothing but the hopelessly inaccurate altimeter. Through the NVGs, the young co-pilot could see they weren’t going to hit anything and was enjoying the ride. It frightened the living daylights out of McDougall.

  Aboard the other three jets there were other worries. As they targeted the airfields for the first time, Mick Cooper started to question the wisdom of the way they were training. If they were practising low-level attacks against coastal airfields, he assumed, not unreasonably, it was because the powers that be expected that they were going to fly a low-level attack against a coastal airfield. That was fine if they wanted him to take out hangars or a line of parked fighter jets, he thought. We can run in as fast and low as possible, keep our arse to the blast and go like shit off a shovel. But if it was the runway they were after, this was definitely not the way to go about it.

  On top of Cooper’s emerging doubts about the tactics, there had been further problems with the refuelling. Their first tanker went unserviceable and had to return to Marham. Then, on contact with its replacement, they suffered another massive fuel leak. Looking ahead to a long-range mission Cooper asked himself: How many reserves are we going to have? On the evidence so far, whatever reserves there were might quickly find themselves stretched pretty thin.

  News of the difficulty Waddington was having with the fuel leaks had filtered back up the RAF chain of command. Ten days into the training programme, senior RAF staff were becoming increasingly concerned that the problem had not yet been solved. There was a fear that, having said they were going to do it, they might not actually be able to pull it off. Beetham, overseeing every aspect of the RAF build-up, didn’t have time to dwell on the minutiae of Waddington’s struggles.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ he told Ken Hayr in exasperation, ‘go and sort it out. I’ve already told the Cabinet we’re going to do it!’

  In fact, in a moment alone with the Prime Minister, Beetham had levelled with her about the challenge they faced.

  ‘We’re trying to do this in a hurry,’ he explained. ‘We haven’t done it in a long time and we are having problems, but we’ll get over them.’

  Despite his frustration, Beetham was confident they would. Margaret Thatcher didn’t seem to doubt it.

  There were niggling little problems with the Victors, but on the whole they were bearing up well. While Jeremy Price concerned himself with trying to ensure that Ascension’s creaking infrastructure could support them, the men from Marham were bedding in well. The CO of 57 Squadron, Alan Bowman, had been drafted in as head of the Victor detachment, while the man he replaced, Marham’s cultured OC Ops, Wing Commander David Maurice-Jones – who’d once been disappointed to have to describe another officer as a man who thought Vivaldi was a drink – returned to the Norfolk base to hold the fort in Price’s absence. Before going he left the detachment on Ascension with an important bequest. Realizing the difficulty there was in reproducing complete sets of flight plans for every tanker in the growing formations, he’d sent a signal to Marham asking them to send out a photocopier. The brand-new Thermofax was flown in on one of the incoming Victors. The machine was worked hard, duplicating flight plans, frequencies, Met reports and air traffic information for diversion airfields. It was a crucial asset to the Victor Ops team under Squadron Leader Trevor Sitch.

  The aircrew, too, were proving adaptable. Ignoring protests about fire regulations, they were squeezing six to a room in the American barracks. Three got beds, the other three slept on the floor. Tux’s wheeling and dealing AEO, Mick Beer, had even managed to blag an old Ford Cortina from the locals. It meant the whole crew could escape their cramped billets for trips to English Bay in the north-west. Despite the crashing surf, this fine white sand beach was the only one on the island deemed sufficiently free from dangerous currents to swim from.

  The close-knit atmosphere that served them so well back home paid dividends on Ascension. Planning, Engineering and aircrew had been picked up as a unit and relocated somewhere new. It made little difference to the way they approached things – they were a genuine
team who worked together well.

  Every morning Alan Bowman would chair the daily meeting, but it was often informally that ideas and problems were talked through. Tux sat on stacked cases of beer as he discussed with the navigators the problem of large formations joining up before flying south. With ten aircraft taking off at one-minute intervals, they realized the first would be 120 miles away by the time the last was leaving the runway. It sounded as harmless as a GCSE maths problem, but without forethought it could have serious repercussions.

  In the evening, they’d offload over a beer in the Georgetown Exiles Club, the best way of shedding the pressure that, however reluctant they were to acknowledge it, was growing with each passing day.

  As he travelled south, Admiral Woodward reflected that the loss of either of the aircraft carriers, particularly his flagship, HMS Hermes, would effectively end British hopes of retaking the Falkland Islands. The greatest threat to the two capital ships and the rest of the British task force came from the attack jets of the Comando Aviación Naval Argentina, the Argentine Naval Air Arm. They were the specialist ship killers. While the Super Étendards of 2 Escuadrilla Aeronaval de Caza y Ataque had rehearsed air-refuelled Exocet missions, the A-4Q Skyhawk pilots of 3 Escuadrilla had done their best to impart what they knew to their Air Force colleagues. But as they were only too aware, it was difficult to pass on years of hard-won experience in a couple of weeks. Like their colleagues, they too had explored the possibility of operating their jets out of BAM Malvinas, and, in early April, had actually flown one of their Skyhawks in and out of the islands’ airport to put the theory to the test. Since 17 April, though, they’d been back where they belonged, catapulting from the deck of Argentina’s only aircraft carrier, the 16,000-ton Veinticinco de Mayo, to refine the art of sinking enemy ships with 500lb Snakeye bombs.