Ten-year-old Leona Vidal had had her heart set on it. For weeks she had been nipping into Stanley’s West Store to gaze longingly at the black Raleigh Chopper with the silver lettering. The classic push-bike design with its long Easy Rider handlebars and stick-shift Sturmey-Archer gears made her heart beat a little faster. But she knew that her mother Eileen, the islands’ radio operator, couldn’t afford it. Eileen, though, had other ideas. Signing up to a hire purchase payment scheme she bought her daughter the bike she so coveted. It became her pride and joy. For two months she cleaned it every day until, kept in the yard at the front of the house, it gleamed.
On Tuesday the 13th, she woke up to a beautiful cold, calm, clear Falklands day – the kind that in years to come she would tell people helped make Stanley such a great place to grow up. Or had done.
That morning, her bike was gone from the yard; taken, during the night, by Argentine troops whose numbers seemed to grow with every passing day. How could anyone do that to a little girl?, she wondered. What possible use could a kid’s bike be to them?
Squadron Leader John Reeve drove the mile or so to work on Tuesday morning and parked, as usual, outside the 50 Squadron buildings. He was unaware that he’d been the focus of such debate over the long Easter weekend, but didn’t stay in the dark for long. As he walked into the squadron, the faces were all familiar, but the atmosphere was anything but. It was buzzing. Then someone explained it.
‘Have you heard they’re putting crews together for the Falklands?’
Reeve was immediately determined to be a part of it. Still regretting that he had missed out on the RED FLAG deployment earlier in the year, he was desperate for a slice of the action this time.
‘You cannot exclude me from this!’ he spluttered, hammering his fist on a desk to force his point home, unable to mask how much it mattered to him that he be involved.
Brought up near Birkenhead on the Wirral peninsula, Reeve still carried a soft trace of Merseyside in his vowels. An aviation enthusiast from a young age, even now he collected Air Force memorabilia. He won an RAF scholarship after being part of the RAF cadet force at school; then, apart from a tour on Jet Provosts as an instructor, he had been on the V-force, flying Vulcans, since 1969. He had an eagerness that was sometimes mistaken for a gung-ho attitude. And his appetite for all aspects of Air Force life didn’t stop at the Mess door. At squadron dining-in nights, a box of chocolates was always handed out to mark the occasion when Reeve’s wife Pat had burst into the bar, fed up that Happy Hour had ruined another Friday night.
‘John Reeve, get your arse home,’ she shouted through the smoke and booze-fuelled chatter. ‘Your dinner’s been in the oven for four hours!’ Then she made to leave, before turning back a moment later with the clincher.
‘And, by the way, I’m having a 1lb box of Black Magic!’
It wasn’t the kind of thing that was easily lived down.
But when the 50 Squadron boss, Chris Lumb, was asked which of his crews should train for CORPORATE, it was Reeve’s can-do approach to whatever was asked of him that made a difference.
‘Relax, John, you’ve been selected,’ Reeve was told quickly, and put out of his misery.
If John Reeve was desperate not to miss out, Bob Wright, Martin Withers’ young Nav Radar, greeted with disbelief the news that their crew too had been put forward from 101 Squadron. Given the faltering start to his career as a bomb-aiming Navigator, he realized that his crew’s performance during RED FLAG must have really turned his fortunes around.
All the chosen crews were ordered to the Main Briefing Room, a large auditorium in the Ops block. The room also served as Waddington’s museum, the walls lined with black-and-white photos of long-retired aircraft like Blenheims, Hampdens, Lancasters and Washingtons. In an air of intrigued anticipation, the crews took their seats. Simon Baldwin and the other squadron bosses also sat down on the hard, straight-backed chairs.
John Laycock got to his feet at the front to address them, choosing not to speak from the stage behind him. He looked at the officers picked to do the job. Reeve had joined Mick Cooper and the rest of his crew. Monty’s lot were there. And Bob Wright sat with his Captain, Martin Withers, and the other 101 Squadron men – Hugh Prior, Gordon Graham and Peter Taylor – reunited as a complete crew for the first time since RED FLAG, over two months earlier. Laycock told them all he knew: that 1 Group had asked them to prepare the Vulcan for a conventional bombing role and revive the aircraft’s air-to-air refuelling capability. Had anyone, he asked, ever had any experience of in-flight refuelling? Only one hand went up, and it went up reluctantly. Neil McDougall had tried it once. In 1962. He remembered well the incident that had led to it disappearing from the Vulcan’s training schedules. It had been a very close call.
Closing on the tanker too fast, McDougall’s squadron boss hit the drogue hard. The refuelling probe broke off and flew back into the wing-root air intake of the number 3 engine. It was as if someone had thrown in a petrol bomb. The Olympus engine exploded. The Captain managed to bring the Vulcan home, but it was as close, McDougall thought, as you ever wanted to get to an accident.
Air-to-air refuelling in the Vulcan had been shown to be inherently dangerous. As McDougall sat and listened, he found it a little difficult to believe that, twenty years later, they were going to give it another go. Only this time, they’d be doing it without days of ground school at Marham. Instructors would be arriving from Marham the next morning. And then the flying would start.
Three months before all the remaining Vulcan squadrons were due to disappear for good, they had been asked to train for a war none of them had expected. Drawing to a close, John Laycock tried to capture the occasion’s significance.
‘People would give their right arms to be in your position,’ he told them. For some of the men listening it struck the wrong note, but all of them knew what he meant. He finished by asking if there was anyone who didn’t want to be a part of it.
There was just one. John Reeve’s Nav Plotter, Dave Harthill, had leave booked. He was due to fly to the States to be with his pregnant wife, but if this thing was really going to kick off he’d cancel. There was no way he was going to miss it, so he asked Laycock where he stood. The Station Commander felt that it was unlikely; that they were just going through the motions. After all, Air Vice-Marshal Knight had told them to enjoy themselves while it lasted. No one really believed that they’d actually be sending the Vulcans to bomb Argentina or anywhere else. It seemed a bit unnecessary to insist Harthill miss the birth of his son on account of something that might never happen. Laycock told him, ‘Go, Dave.’
It left him and Baldwin with a problem though. The V-force was made up of constituted crews that operated together as units. It was always the crew’s collective performance that mattered rather than that of any individual member. Such was the importance attached to this that if a crew member went sick before a deployment, the likelihood was that an entirely new crew would be found instead. This time, though, they were prepared to make an exception and, fortunately, a new Nav Plotter soon presented himself, rather by accident.
‘Jim will volunteer, won’t you, Jim?’ suggested Neil McDougall when it became clear that the Reeve crew was short of a navigator. ‘You’ll fill in as Nav Plotter!’
‘Yeah, sure…’ Jim Vinales answered, without really thinking about it. But it was enough. There was every chance he’d have been chosen anyway. Like Mick Cooper, Reeve’s Nav Radar, Vinales was another veteran of the GIANT VOICE bombing competitions and had an impressive record against the Americans. In 1974, his crew flew to victory in the Navigation Trophy against American B-52s and FB-111s. As Nav Plotter, it was Vinales who really took the plaudits, winning a Queen’s Commendation for his performance.