Ready or not, that the Navy was coming at all was what mattered to those living under the Argentine occupation in Stanley. Some felt instinctively that the Argentine presence was temporary – that the British were always going to ride to the rescue. Having felt for years that they’d been an unwanted burden to successive British governments, they knew now that Britain cared. As well as being a source of pride and comfort, this knowledge also fuelled small acts of defiance. In the telephone exchange, Hilda Perry had been persuaded to come back to work by the Argentinians, who were struggling to operate the old switchboard. On the same day as she was ordered out, she was asked to return.
‘No,’ she told them, ‘you told me to go.’
‘You must go back and then you’ll be working for the Argentine government.’
‘No, I won’t. I’m not coming back to work for the Argentine government.’
The occupiers tried a different tack. ‘For the sake of your own people, will you go back and ask the other girls to go back?’
‘I’ll ask them.’
Perry talked to her colleagues and the four operators decided to return to the harbour-front exchange. Surrounded by armed soldiers, the women went back to work wearing demure smiles while handing out wrong numbers, misrouting calls and cutting off Argentine conversations mid-flow. Pictures of innocence.
Gerald Cheek, meanwhile, was playing chicken with Argentine armoured cars. The new administration had ordered that, from now on, all cars would drive on the right. While they believed that this might protect islanders from careless soldiers driving on the right through habit, Cheek didn’t see it quite like that. He simply refused to drive on the ‘wrong’ side of the road. If he met an Argentinian coming the other way he’d pull up and wait, staring out to the narrows on the other side of the harbour. And that was how he stayed, bumper to bumper, until the enemy got fed up, reversed and went round him. On one occasion, driving up to the airport he met a string of the heavy, rumbling APCs that had first brought the troops into Stanley. He saw an opportunity to drive them into the peat bog beside the road.
‘You’re mad!’ his two passengers told him nervously as the big troop carriers bore down on him.
‘Hell, I’m not getting out of the way of these idiots,’ said Cheek through gritted teeth, pissed off that while all three were forced to drive around him, none got stuck in the soft ground.
Peter Biggs’s defiance was tempered by concern. He still doubted the British would actually fight to liberate the islands. He’d followed similar incidents around the world and watched them descend into stalemate. Sabre-rattling, UN farce, peacekeepers, a line of control, the invading power keeping what it had seized. He was acutely aware of how the Argentine regime dealt with political dissidents. And on the Falkland Islands there were a couple of thousand of them. Two weeks earlier he’d had a new job to throw himself into and looked forward to the birth of his first child. Now he just felt helpless.
By Monday, Waddington’s engineering wing reckoned they’d done it. The plumbing for the Vulcans’ in-flight refuelling should be serviceable. They phoned their counterparts at RAF Marham, engineers familiar with the equipment, to ask how to test that it actually worked. They were told that they needed to attach a fuel bowser to the probes and pressurize the whole system. To make the connection, though, they had to have a specialized fitting. The experts at Marham couldn’t get one to them, but they described what was needed.
‘I think I know where we’ve got one,’ said one of the 101 Squadron technicians after a moment’s thought. He seemed to recall that they had one stuck in the corner of the groundcrew room, where they used it as an ashtray. They dusted it down and used it to check the results of their weekend’s labour. It worked.
Chapter 10
On 11 November 1918, aircraft took off from RAF Marham in Norfolk bound for the airfield at Narborough, just a mile and a half to the north-east. The most destructive war the world had ever seen was over and Marham’s airmen were going to celebrate Armistice Day by bombarding their colleagues with bags of flour. The unprovoked attack didn’t go unanswered for long. In retaliation, Marham was hit from the air with bags of soot.
It was the last offensive action launched by either base before both were closed early in 1919. Peace also ended the embryonic career of Second Lieutenant Alan Cobham. He had been an RAF flying instructor at Marham for barely five months. Marham and Cobham, however, were both destined for greater things.
In 1982, RAF tanker crews slaked their thirst with beer served at the Sir Alan Cobham bar in the RAF Marham Officers’ Mess. Cobham’s brief connection with Marham in the dying days of the First World War was not the reason he was so honoured at Marham. Over the sixty years since the end of the Great War, the Norfolk airbase had become one of the largest and most important stations in the Air Force, and its main role was as home to the RAF’s entire fleet of Victor K2 aerial tankers. Without Cobham, the RAF might never even have had an air-to-air refuelling capability. After being demobbed, the young Second Lieutenant went on to become one of Britain’s legendary aviators and the world’s most passionate advocate of the potential of air-to-air refuelling. It was his persistence that culminated in Michael Beetham’s record-breaking long-range Valiant flights in the late 1950s.
In contrast to its American counterparts, the RAF was slow to embrace the possibilities the new air-refuelling technology offered, dismissing it, in 1947, as an exercise that was ‘not a paying proposition’.
Cobham thought they were fools. With a series of pioneering flights to India, South Africa and Australia in the 1920s he had become one of the most well-known and respected figures in British aviation. In 1934, driven by a belief that air-to-air refuelling would revolutionize commercial aviation, he registered the name of his new company: Flight Refuelling Ltd. Five years later he was proving the efficacy of his ideas with a transatlantic airmail service that was refuelled in flight. The system it used was developed by his new company at their base near the picturesque village of Tarrant Rushton in Dorset. While this nascent operation ended with the outbreak of war, trials continued and in 1944 the Air Ministry awarded him a contract to supply the in-flight refuelling equipment for the Lancasters of the RAF’s TIGER FORCE then preparing to deploy east for the expected brutal, bloody and drawn-out offensive against Japan.
At an RAF bomber base in Lincolnshire, the 21-year-old Flight Lieutenant Michael Beetham, DFC, was beginning his second tour as an already experienced bomber pilot. When the American nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki hastened the end of the war, plans for TIGER FORCE were abandoned. Thank God, thought Beetham, painfully well versed in the dangers faced by bomber crews, it’s not necessary.
But while the end of the war brought relief to the country and her servicemen, it was a potentially fatal blow for Alan Cobham’s Flight Refuelling operation. The contract to supply 600 sets of ‘looped hose’ flight-refuelling equipment for TIGER FORCE, despite being well advanced, was cancelled with Japan’s surrender in 1945. Cobham, though, never wavered in his faith in the system. He simply thought the Air Ministry lacked vision and he bought back, at scrap value, all of the equipment already supplied. Then, with typical bullishness and the fortune of the brave, he stayed in business long enough to establish a ground-breaking transatlantic air-refuelled passenger service to Bermuda that caught the eye of the Americans.