The Ops Team were forced to go back to basics, and use geographical features like Mengeary Point, Cape Pembroke, Ordnance Point and Eagle Headland – where land and sea meet. And even these apparently reliable features were less than ideal as bomb release offsets because they moved with the changing tides. With luck, given the medium altitude of the bomb-run, the Nav Radars would be able to paint the runway itself and place their cross-hairs over the target. That, though, was no more than a possibility and certainly not something upon which they could hang the success of the mission.
The Nav Radar would also have to set the stick spacing for the bombs. Since the targeting conference in the Station Commander’s office, the Ops Team had discovered that the optimum setting on the 90-Way bomb control unit was 0.24 seconds between bombs. This translated at ground level into fifty-four yards between each bomb. But although the runway was only forty yards wide, there was no danger of missing completely because the Vulcan wouldn’t be flying at 90 degrees to it. Rather than having a target forty yards across, the 35-degree angle of the cut meant the potential target increased to seventy-six yards. If two bombs straddled the runway perfectly, each would land well within the opposite edges of the paved surface. The craters, plus heave, would rip out each side of the runway. Baldwin’s planners were fortunate; they had a 90-Way setting that meant they didn’t have to hit the centreline to put the strip out of action.
In the normal scheme of things crews weren’t allowed even to discuss their targets with other crews. The restricted access to The Vault was absolute. As the CORPORATE crews refined their attack plans, the target planning room continued to be where the rest of the Vulcan force planned the nuclear mission that was, for the next few months at least, still declared to NATO. The AARIs, although now joining the Vulcan crews on the attack itself, weren’t cleared to enter. It didn’t seem right, and Pete Standing, attached to John Reeve’s crew, was quietly taken aside and filled in on the details of the discussions taking place on the other side of the door.
Throughout the day, other preparations were made for the deployment to Ascension. Careful not to miss a trick, John Reeve and his crew looked into whether they were entitled to some sort of tropical allowance. The Falklands might be on the edge of the Antarctic Circle, but Ascension looked promising. Reeve himself qualified for a pittance to re-rank his KDs, khaki drill tropical kit, but Mick Cooper struck gold. Having left the Air Force before rejoining, he was entitled to hundreds of pounds to renew the whole lot. That sort of cash, he baited his crewmates, was going to pay for a fantastic new TV and video.
Reeve ran round the station seeing what he could cadge out of different departments to make the deployment more comfortable. The sports centre were happy to send them down to Ascension with whatever they could spare. He had less success at the library.
‘You’ll have to sign the books out individually and each of you can only have two.’
Reeve was incredulous. ‘Let’s get this right. The station’s going to war and you’re telling me you can’t help?’ He didn’t have the time or energy to argue and turned on his heel, muttering darkly about the librarian being a stickler for rules.
‘Who the fuck are you?’
‘Squadron Leader Montgomery, sir.’
‘What the fuck are you doing here?’
‘Vulcans, sir.’
‘Sort yourselves out, son. I haven’t got time for you. I don’t know why the fucking hell you’re here and I don’t know what you’re fucking well going to do, but get on with it.’ Captain Bob McQueen, RN, greeted all new arrivals to Wideawake with equal warmth and Monty was no exception. But for all the cultivated prickliness that quickly had him labelled ‘The Admiral’ by the RAF contingent, there was method in his madness. While Jerry Price was the Senior RAF Officer, McQueen ran the British show on Ascension. It was McQueen to whom Bill Bryden had handed his letter raising doubts about whether Wideawake could supply the Vulcans with fuel. Since early April, Bryden had watched him keep the entire operation together, deftly winning the trust and support of the large St Helenian work force already on the island. But with even basic requirements like water and sanitation just a breakdown away from collapse, it was understandable if strangers weren’t exactly welcomed with open arms. He needed to be relentless and ruthless in trying to keep numbers down. One unfortunate padre, flown in on more than one occasion to provide spiritual support, was each time deemed surplus to requirements and sent straight home on the next flight.
Monty was struck by just how well set up the Victor contingent seemed to be. He’d only been on the island for a couple of hours, but the desk he’d been allocated in the corner of the tent still seemed rather unimpressive by comparison. While Mel James’ technicians made contact with their counterparts from Bill Lloyd’s Victor engineering detachment, a Sherpa van drove him and his co-pilot, Bill Perrins, north to Two Boats to their accommodation.
Named after the two wooden boats upended in the nineteenth century to provide shade for those traipsing up and down Green Mountain, the village was no more than a handful of buildings put up in the 1960s to house BBC families. From the settlement, perched 850 feet above sea level, three miles east of Georgetown, the two Vulcan pilots could see beyond hard black rivers of lava to English Bay, where the ‘Great White Whale’, P&O’s flagship Canberra, sat at anchor alongside a few stray warships. The accommodation was as spartan as the views were spectacular. One half of the dormitory block already housed RAF Hercules crews, off duty, drinking and noisy. Monty and Perrins got to work sweeping out the other half. Twenty people with one toilet and two sinks – this is going to be bloody awful, he thought. No windows – at least there’d be fresh air. The two of them did their best to make it presentable, before Perrins finished it off with a hand-drawn sign of a man with his arm chopped off. If they were doing something those stuck at Waddington would give their right arm for, their hovel, it seemed only fitting, should become ‘The Right Arm Hotel’.
The Flight Planning room at RAF Waddington lay in the heart of the Ops block. Electrical cabling inside metal pipes ran across the walls and ineffective air-conditioning vents hung from the high ceilings. Below them, eight wide wooden desks faced each other. Each redecoration was simply layered on top of what had been there before. The thick magnolia paint smothered what had once been a brass loudspeaker grill in a wooden box fixed above the main entrance.
But the fact that each member of the three Vulcan crews had just been issued with a Browning 9mm automatic pistol meant that the comfortable familiarity of the scene was skewed. This was something none of them had really considered. It brought into sharp focus that the training was over. Although each had an annual proficiency check to make sure he knew his way round the weapon, carrying one outside the range was a different feeling altogether. Most of them reckoned that they were more likely to be a danger to themselves than anyone else. And while Hugh Prior thought he saw a flash of excitement on the face of his co-pilot, Pete Taylor, the gun offered him no comfort at all. With a thousand angry Argentinians running towards you, he thought, a few rounds in a sidearm were unlikely to calm them down – especially if you’d just tried to bomb them. He wondered whether it might be of some use trying to kill food, but that was bordering on the ridiculous. After all, it was difficult to actually hit anything with a Browning 9mm…
The crews spent the afternoon preparing for the nine-hour flight to Ascension. With two hours to go until their scheduled departure, John Reeve was becoming concerned that they had an intelligence briefing to sit through and they hadn’t yet even begun flight-planning. It wasn’t as if it was straightforward. Three fully laden Vulcans were leaving Waddington, joining up with the Victor tankers and only when the first refuelling was successful would the third Vulcan, included as an airborne reserve, return.
‘Don’t worry, John,’ he was appeased, ‘you don’t need to, it’s all been done by computer by Group.’
Wow… computers, he thought wearily, that’s a new one. After th
e pre-flight brief, Reeve left Don Dibbens to check the figures and joined his backseaters in aircrew feeder.
The Catering Squadron had pulled out all the stops. Nothing was too much trouble. No formica this time: all the tables were laid with white tablecloths. Reeve sat down with Mick Cooper and Barry Masefield. Cooper had already signed for the bombs. He’d been out to the jet with the armourers to check that the fusing and arming wires were all connected and the safety pins in place. The bombs had been properly decorated with messages like ‘A present from Waddington’ and ‘If found, return to Port Stanley’. Now he was tucking hungrily into a fillet steak, served blue, just the way he liked it. Cooper’s eating habits were well known, but at least watching him devour raw meat was better than having to inhale the stench from his cheese and onion sandwiches in a cramped cockpit. Back in the Ops Room, the co-pilots had finally been given the flight plans.
The bombers stood ready to go on the dispersal pans: XM598, XM607 and McDougall’s reserve, XM597. Each was fully fuelled and each modified to bombing competition standard. They had the Twin Carousel INS that would keep them on track over thousands of miles of featureless ocean. The Dash 10 ECM pod hung from the wing on its newly fashioned pylon. As a final measure to reduce their vulnerability, individual squadron markings had been painted over, and the entire underside of the bombers had been resprayed in dark sea grey to camouflage them against the murky South Atlantic skies. In their cavernous bomb bays, they carried twenty-one 1,000lb high-explosive iron bombs armed with 487 fuses and 117 ballistic tails, each one capable of smashing a crater sixty feet wide and thirty feet deep in whatever was unlucky enough to be underneath it when it landed.
But in the Ops block, the flight planning was coming badly unstuck. Fuel management and planning were the responsibility of the co-pilots, Pete Taylor and Don Dibbens. Each of them worked on the figures separately, and each kept hitting the same brick wall. Taylor worked on the fuel plan with his crew’s AARI, Dick Russell. Whichever way they ran them they kept getting the same result. Taylor and Russell called over their Captain, Martin Withers.
‘We’ve got a big problem,’ Russell told him.
Withers went through it himself and reached the same conclusion: This isn’t going to happen.
Barry Masefield came in from the feeder. Reeve had suggested his AEO go and see where their co-pilot had got to. It was immediately clear to him that something was up. By now the crews were comparing notes. And Don Dibbens looked ashen.
‘What’s the problem?’ Masefield asked.
‘We can’t get there.’
‘What are you talking about, we can’t get there?’
‘The refuelling plan we’ve got – we’re going to fall out of the sky before we get to Ascension. You’d better go and tell John…’
Dick Russell went through it again with Pete Standing, the other AARI, but the calculations remained stubbornly unworkable. After a nine-hour flight they were going to be landing with a reserve of barely 4,000lb, 10,000lb short of what they should have. Such a tiny amount spread throughout the Vulcan’s fourteen tanks counted as vapours. With relatively inaccurate fuel gauges and Ascension lying at least a thousand miles from the nearest diversion field, they were setting themselves up for disaster before they’d even started. Questions began bouncing around the Ops Room: Can we get another Victor in? Can we move the tanker bracket up or down?
They were clutching at straws.
The bulk of the thinly stretched Victor tanker force had already deployed to Wideawake along with the most frontline crews. The two Vulcans would be flying south to Ascension supported by inexperienced tanker crews. The possibilities for shuffling things around at this late stage were severely limited, to say the least.
Great, thought Simon Baldwin as he’d watched the plan unravel. John Laycock was in his office, talking with AOC 1 Group Air Vice-Marshal Mike Knight, oblivious to it all. Now I’ve got to go and tell them…
Baldwin walked around the corridors to the office; the Station Commander’s door was ajar. He knocked and went in.
‘Please don’t shoot the messenger,’ he said, ‘but the Victors can’t give us enough fuel to get to Ascension. In fact, the Vulcans are likely to fall into the sea several hundred miles short of Ascension.’
When John Laycock was told he looked like he’d rather have been anywhere else on earth than standing next to his boss, the AOC, hearing the news that his Vulcans were going nowhere that night.
‘How could we have possibly overlooked something like this?’ Knight flared – he, after all, was the one who was going to have to pick up the telephone and tell Northwood – but it was momentary. There was no mileage in apportioning blame. Knight quickly realized that everyone was too busy to bear the brunt. It was a cock-up, certainly, but nothing could be done other than postpone the deployment until the following day. He passed the message up through the chain of command through gritted teeth. The launch had been scrubbed.
Once the decision was made people speculated about who’d been at fault and where it had arisen, but it wasn’t easy to pin down. What was clear was that the planners at Bawtry had been working with completely fanciful fuel consumption figures for the Vulcan. They’d certainly asked the question: how much fuel does a Vulcan burn? And someone had answered it. But the whole exchange had been too vague. The answer is that it depends. The fuel plan had been worked out using the average fuel consumption of a Vulcan cruising at high level – about 10,000lb an hour. And that bore very little relation to what the three heavily laden bombers taking off from Waddington were going to use.
The difficulties of organizing large mixed formations with complex air-to-air refuelling plans had revealed themselves. And had hinted that at the heart of the planning was a problem which, while it had caused little more than delay and annoyance today, might have far more serious repercussions in the days to come.
Holy cow!, thought Monty when he saw the first draft of the refuelling plan for the mission itself. To get one Vulcan to the Falklands and back was, it was first thought, going to take twelve Victors. The RAF had never done anything like this before. Jerry Price had received the Op Order from Northwood earlier in the day and immediately got Trevor Sitch’s planning team to work. They’d produced a model that worked like an inverted pyramid. A large formation would take off together from Wideawake and turn south. At four points along the route, the formation would split into two groups: those continuing south and those returning to Ascension. Before the latter turned for home, they would fill the tanks of those continuing. From each of these refuelling brackets, a reduced total of fully fuelled jets would fly on towards the target. The Vulcan was at the pyramid’s apex. And key to the success of the whole exercise was the Vulcan’s fuel consumption. The Victor planners knew the capabilities of their aircraft inside out. They needed watertight information from someone with comparable knowledge of the Vulcan. So they asked Monty: ‘What do you expect the Vulcan fuel consumption to be?’ Monty and Bill Perrins got to work. Using the new photocopier, they copied and enlarged the fuel graphs from the Vulcan Operating Data Manual. The big delta’s normal maximum take-off weight was 204,000lb. With full tanks, the bombs and the Dash 10 pod, the weight was going to be a lot higher than that. Off the graph. The ODM simply didn’t include the figure they needed – a Vulcan wasn’t supposed to try to take off at that weight. The curve on the fuel consumption graph they had was exponential, rather than linear. Monty and his co-pilot tried to extrapolate a figure from where the curve on the graph ended, and estimated 13,500lb per hour. They passed this figure on to the Victor planning team to weave into their refuelling plan and wondered why it had fallen to them to figure it out. What, thought Monty, about the resources available at HQ 1 Group?
Then, just after midnight, news came through that the Vulcans weren’t leaving Waddington that night.
‘Monty, it’s off,’ Jerry Price told them. None of them was entirely clear on the reasons for the change in plan.
‘W
hat the bloody hell are you doing here?’
Sharon Cooper’s reaction to her husband’s unexpected reappearance reflected that of all the wives. The goodbyes hadn’t been at all easy either. All the couples had held each other a little tighter. Many of them had babies and small children. Don Dibbens’ wife Janice was five months pregnant – and had her leg in plaster after dislocating her knee. She knew her husband was flying into danger. Saying goodbye once had been upsetting. To have to do it again was going to be much worse. Barry Masefield’s wife Gwyneth was distraught when he arrived back at their house in Heighington. Gareth, their young son, had persistent, serious health problems. The whole family had been under an enormous amount of emotional strain already, but over the two weeks he’d been training Masefield had retreated into himself, had even stopped interrupting during Coronation Street. It was obvious something was wrong, but he couldn’t tell Gwyneth what was causing his anxiety. Now she had her husband back, but she knew she was going to have to go through it all again the next morning.
‘This is silly,’ announced Hugh Prior, ‘we’ve all said our goodbyes.’ He’d already told his wife Caroline, ‘Don’t you worry, it will be all right,’ and kissed his baby daughter, Tara. He lived on the station, a few hundred yards from the Ops block, but he couldn’t face going through it all again. He joined Pete Taylor and Dick Russell in the Mess. And, with his wife in Australia, there was no reason for Martin Withers not to join them. He, too, opted to sleep in the Mess, deciding to forsake the lonely charms of his Lincoln maisonette. The four of them stayed up drinking, putting the world to rights.
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