‘Enrique, you want to get these troops home as that’ll be the next target for Britain – Buenos Aires!’
The sign for Stanley airport had already been smashed and changed to ‘Malvinas’.
For the time being, it seemed that the hopes of the architect of the invasion plan, Admiral Lombardo, that the impact of the military could be kept to a minimum, lived on in spirit. It wouldn’t last long. Troop numbers in the Falklands were now growing. In response to UN Security Council Resolution 502, Galtieri had said Argentina would fight for the islands. Rather than withdrawing its forces, the junta was reinforcing the garrison. On 6 April, the Army’s 8th Regiment was airlifted the 500 miles from its barracks at Comodoro Rivadavia to the islands. The seas around the Falklands were no longer believed to be safe for Argentina’s transport ships. In Buenos Aires, newspapers had reported that a British nuclear submarine had been detected off the Argentine coast.
In New York, the British Air Attaché knew that neither Spartan nor Splendid was yet on station. As he talked to the French representative after a long and very boring meeting of the United Nations Staff Committee, a Soviet Admiral brushed past him.
‘Are our submarines being of any help?’ the old sailor asked, not stopping for an answer.
Two days after the Argentine 8th Regiment arrived, a detachment of the Marines with field and anti-aircraft artillery was flown in. Armed with 30mm Hispano-Suiza cannons and Tiger Cat optically guided surface-to-air missiles, the unit marked the beginning of the building up of Stanley’s defences against air attack.
Chapter 9
Spartan reached her destination first. A day and a half later, on 9 April, Good Friday, she was joined by her sister-ship, Splendid. As the two attack boats had raced south, their captains, communicating directly via satellite, had agreed how to divide the water between them. Spartan would patrol to the east of the islands, Splendid to the west. Less than a week after the invasion, on the other side of the world nearly 7,000 miles from home, the British had their first forces in theatre.
On the same day that Splendid arrived to enforce the soon to be declared Maritime Exclusion Zone, or MEZ, around the Falklands, John Laycock received a signal from HQ 1 Group at Bawtry. Waddington, it read, was to generate ten Vulcans for a conventional bombing role and reactivate the air-to-air refuelling system. The order wasn’t unexpected but its effect was dramatic. Laycock had already warned his engineers about the formidable challenge that might lie ahead. Now it was a reality.
The first task was to select the ten bombers. Each of the four squadrons at Waddington had eight Vulcans on its strength. Although built in the 1960s using what was then cutting-edge technology, they were, in many respects, hand-built. There was little of the precision and uniformity that robots and computer-aided design would later bring to aircraft manufacture. Every aircraft displayed its own unique, individual set of characteristics. Some were happy flying slowly. Others became difficult below 155 knots. One turned well to the right, but needed full outboard aileron to control the bank in a left turn. Another had stiff throttles, but handled well. XM594 was reckoned, simply, to be ‘’orrible’.
It wasn’t just the airframes that needed to be considered either. The Navigation and Bombing System was also temperamental. Linked to the radar set, the analogue bombing computer had been a leap forward when it had been introduced. But then, it could hardly fail to have been, given the woeful inaccuracy of much of the Second World War technology it replaced. In the earliest days of that long war only three bombs in every hundred were believed to land within five miles of their target. The NBS, fed with figures for height, speed of the aircraft, wind and the ballistic properties of the bomb itself, would calculate the forward throw of the bomb and, consequently, the point of release needed for the bombs to hit the target. It had always been good enough. For despite the pride men like Mick Cooper and Bob Wright took in trying to achieve pinpoint accuracy, it didn’t actually matter if a nuclear bomb was a couple of hundred yards off the bull’s-eye. Even so, by 1982, the collection of gears, bicycle chains, valves, 35mm film and lights that whirred out of sight behind the navigator’s dials really was every bit as antiquated as it seemed. There was a rumour that it had been designed during the Second World War by the astronomer Patrick Moore.
Over the years, this gash old kit had been tweaked and honed on the ranges and in inter-squadron competitions and the results recorded. The engineering team tried to put it all together and choose the best of them: the good bombers – the ones that flew well and dropped bombs where they were supposed to.
Then their carefully considered plans unravelled. Because one thing was certain: the bombers would be hauling a full load of over ten tons of high-explosive iron bombs. With a full fuel load, they’d be operating close to, even above, their maximum take-off weight. To take off they’d need every pound of thrust that could possibly be coaxed out of their Rolls-Royce Olympus engines. And that meant choosing the jets with the 301 series engines.
Britain had planned to maintain its nuclear deterrent throughout the late 1960s and 1970s with the American Douglas Skybolt missile. This huge ballistic nuclear missile with its 1,000-mile range would have been launched from beneath the wings of American B-52s and British Vulcans. In the expectation that Vulcans would be carrying Skybolts, more powerful Olympus 301s replaced the 201s halfway through the B2 production run. Then Skybolt was cancelled by John F. Kennedy. Instead, Britain bought the submarine-launched Polaris missile but forty Vulcan B2s still entered RAF service, each fitted with four 20,000lb Olympus 301 turbojets. Then they didn’t use them. In order to keep the handling characteristics consistent throughout the whole Vulcan fleet, the more powerful engines were de-rated to just 97.5 per cent of their maximum rpm. And it was in those last few per cent of revs that you found the real power.
As the Waddington engineers went through the Vulcan fleet, trying to marry the two requirements, they soon realized that only two or three of the accurate bombers had the 301s. It was frustrating, but that extra thrust was vital. When it came to the quality of the NBS, the aircrews would have to make do with whatever could be found within the small pool of 301-engined jets. The best of the rest had their engines unharnessed. This had the unlikely effect of increasing the available power to 103% of their stated maximum.
It was another two weeks before the decision to select the 301 series jets proved to have useful unintended consequences. For the time being, the biggest headache was reactivating the air-to-air refuelling system. The plumbing, Laycock was told by his engineers, had been inhibited.
‘What do you mean, “inhibited”?’ Laycock queried.
‘Well, basically, sir, we filled the refuelling valves,’ they told him.
The fix was a permanent one. Fuel from the tanker was supposed to flow into the refuelling probe above the Vulcan’s nose through 4-inch non-return valves into the jet’s fuel tanks. The material used to block the valves was resistant to the corrosive effects of aviation fuel and had been set like concrete for twenty years. The Vulcan’s refuelling system had effectively endured a vasectomy and now there was an order from Group to reverse it.