It was enough for Baldwin. ‘I’m happy if you’re happy.’
‘It’s all of us or nothing,’ Monty stressed, confident that his mercurial Nav Radar would rise to the occasion. The decision made, it wouldn’t be mentioned again. Not mentioned at all, though, was Monty’s concern that his Air Electronics Officer, Squadron Leader John Hathaway, appeared to be going deaf. He seemed to struggle with the RT – instructions needed to be repeated. But he was a good AEO. He’d be OK. Making up the crew were the co-pilot, Bill Perrins, and Flight Lieutenant Dick Arnott, the sharp-dressing Nav Plotter. Monty still felt a twinge of guilt. What, he wondered, am I getting them into?
On the morning of Easter Monday, Baldwin joined John Laycock and the Commanding Officers of 101 and IX Squadrons in the Ops block to choose the crews. Above the door, a plastic sign read ‘ROYAL AIR FORCE WADDINGTON OPERATIONS’, blue lettering against a white background. Inside the front entrance were dark, polished wooden boards listing decorations, aircraft types and station commanders. Among the latter, in gold calligraphy, were names that spoke of a different era: Twistleton-Wykeham-Ffiennes, Bonham-Carter and Dado-Langlois. At the end of the list was Laycock’s name. His office was down a corridor to the left of the boards, one of the few rooms in the cobbled-together building that had windows providing natural light and a view of the world outside. And there, around a conference table, was where the four senior officers met.
Laycock asked the three squadron bosses to nominate their top crews, while he spoke for 50 Squadron in the absence of their CO, Wing Commander Chris Lumb – away on leave. They looked at overall experience, experience on aircraft type, bombing competitions, RED FLAG, the reputations of the Nav teams and soon a consensus emerged. Crews were almost self-selecting. Martin Withers and Monty were just back from RED FLAG. Both were QFIs – Qualified Flying Instructors – and, as a result, had experience in flying formation – what, in essence, successful air-to-air refuelling is all about. That was 101 and 44 accounted for. Brian Gardner from IX Squadron and Chris Lumb himself had also been on the deployment. Gardner was added to the list, but Lumb was ruled out by his seniority.
‘I will not have any Vulcan Wing Commanders down at Ascension throwing their weight around,’ Laycock had been told by Air Vice-Marshal Knight at 1 Group. ‘The most senior rank you will have in your crews is Squadron Leader.’
With his hand forced, Laycock chose Squadron Leader Neil McDougall’s crew instead. McDougall hadn’t been to Nevada, but he had more experience flying Vulcans than nearly anyone else on the station. Laycock knew him well and had flown with him recently. The big Scot with the tinder-dry sense of humour got Laycock’s vote. But only until Chris Lumb returned to Waddington the next day. Once Lumb, with the greatest of reluctance, had removed himself from the list, he queried McDougall’s presence.
‘I’m surprised you selected Neil,’ he told Laycock, encouraged by the Station Commander’s invitation to speak his mind. ‘I didn’t rate him as highly as a couple of my other guys.’
‘Well, who?’ Laycock asked him.
‘John Reeve.’
‘Well, I’ve known Neil for fourteen years,’ Laycock countered, ‘and I’ve watched him operate in some particularly difficult conditions during the winter of ’78. I’ve got the highest regard for his captaincy skills.’
In the end, though, it was Lumb’s call. Laycock didn’t know as much about Reeve himself but, aware of the experience and ability found throughout his crew, was happy to defer to the 50 Squadron boss. It soon became academic, in any case, with the news from 1 Group that Marham’s stretched tanker resources wouldn’t be able to support the training of more than three crews. Neil McDougall dropped down the pecking order to become the reserve captain, replaced by Squadron Leader John Reeve.
‘Really?’ queried Monty when Baldwin told him, unable to mask his surprise. He wasn’t sure. He’d flown as Reeve’s co-pilot in Cyprus years earlier. He remembered him as a decent enough pilot, but, he worried, Reeve might go at this a bit like a bull in a china shop.
Squadron Leader Bob Tuxford had been on his new squadron for barely a week. He wasn’t too pleased about the move from 57 either. But with an influx of ex-Vulcan personnel, 55 was short on tanking experience. And he had plenty of that. Since joining the RAF in the late 1960s he’d become one of the youngest captains in the V-force, gaining command after just two years as a co-pilot. After a three-year exchange posting in California flying KC-135s for the USAF, he’d returned to the RAF as a QFI on Jet Provosts out of Leeming. Since 1980, Tux had been back with the ‘tanker trash’. He was a tall, stylish man with dark hair that swept back from a widow’s peak; his own paintings hung on the walls of a beautifully presented home. Tux’s self-possession could ruffle feathers, but no one doubted his ability, least of all the Station Commander, Jerry Price, who’d known him since they’d flown together in the early 1970s.
Price summoned Tux to the Marham Ops Centre in the evening of Easter Sunday. When Marham had been ordered to prepare for CORPORATE, there was only one Victor crew with a current qualification for day and night tanking and receiving. That had to change if the Victors were going to reach the South Atlantic. They would need to take fuel from each other in a complex long-range relay to cover the distance. There followed an unprecedented, intensive effort to bring every crew on the station up to speed. All week, Victor K2s had been streaming into the refuelling areas over the North Sea and later that night it was Tux’s turn. He was scheduled to head out to towline 6, a rectangular slice of airspace just off the East Anglian coast, bang in ten contacts and come home night-qualified. Up and down in less than two hours, he thought. First of all, though, he had to go and meet Jerry Price.
Inside Ops, Tux was greeted by a tangle of jagged-looking metal scattered across the floor: old F95 cameras. Wrestling with the sorry-looking pile were two technicians from RAF Wyton, home of the Air Force’s reconnaissance squadrons. What’s going on here?, wondered Tuxford, eyeing what looked like a pile of Meccano. Jerry Price explained. Marham’s twenty-three Victors were the only asset the RAF could deploy as far south as the Falklands. Anything that was going to be done had to be done by them. Price, along with the two Squadron Commanders, had chosen three Captains to fly low-level photographic reconnaissance missions in the Victors: Tux, Squadron Leader Martin Todd and Squadron Leader John Elliott. As Tux was the most recently qualified QFI, with the most recent low-level experience flying the little Jet Provosts, Price wanted him to fly with both Todd and Elliott on their first sorties. Nothing was said about what they might be taking pictures of, but a shortlist seemed obvious. He and the two other captains were being singled out to spearhead Marham’s effort. There was already an atmosphere of excitement and purpose on the base caused by the invasion of the Falklands, but this was going to be vastly different to the usual routine.
Then Jerry Price told him he could hand-pick his own crew. Walking into the crewroom and saying, I want you, you and you, Tuxford thought, was going to be worth the price of entry alone. A few names sprung immediately to mind.
Squadron Leader Ernie Wallis was a Marham institution. He’d seen it all. Now a sandy-haired 52-year-old veteran, he’d been a Nav Radar on the tanker force since the late 1950s, when Michael Beetham had been his squadron boss. He’d flown out of Nigeria in support of Beetham’s record-breaking long-range flights to Africa and helped develop the three-point ‘triple nipple’ Victor tanker – work that had earned him an MBE. In 1979, after twenty-one years at Marham, he was awarded the ‘Freedom of the Station’ – although in typically self-deprecating style, he wondered aloud whether it was because he was indispensable or only because the Air Force couldn’t think what else to do with him. He knew more about how the Victor’s refuelling equipment worked than anyone else at Marham. When there was a problem, if Ernie couldn’t either rectify it or circumvent it, no one could. He definitely deserved the accolade ‘Mr Flight Refuelling’. The Nav Leader of 55 Squadron, he was first on Tuxford’s list.