Access to the heavily fortified room in the Ops block was strictly controlled. ‘The Vault’ contained RAF Waddington’s target information and was where the Vulcan crews would spend hours mission-planning. Each was allocated both NATO and national targets. Such were the levels of secrecy that one crew wouldn’t know the target of the next. The NATO targets tended to be more popular. The more capable American strategic bomber force tended to be allocated the more heavily defended targets. In the unlikely event that Britain found herself waging war against the Soviets alone, the national list might find crews tasked with delivering a nuclear weapon to downtown Moscow – through the most comprehensive integrated air defence network in history. The short straw. Banks of documents pertaining to particular sorties were stored in vast sliding floor-to-ceiling cabinets. The files were designed to cover any possible contingency during a flight, from engine failure to civil aviation procedures. The volume was overwhelming. With way too much to learn, the information in ‘The Vault’ acted as a kind of corporate memory. What was conspicuously absent was any information at all on the Falkland Islands.
Accurate intelligence was a huge problem – as the priority given to preparing the Victors to fly reconnaissance missions underlined. The South Atlantic was way beyond the range of 39 Squadron’s high-altitude Canberra spy planes – unless a closer friendly operating base could somehow be negotiated. There was no satellite imagery from the Americans. Neither Professor Ronald Mason, the government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, nor the Defence Secretary, John Nott, were able to persuade them to divert a KH11 satellite away from NATO duties – much to both men’s frustration. Instead, there were rudimentary 1:25,000 and 1:50,000 maps and the detailed notes made by an ex-commander of the Falklands Marine garrison as he sailed around the islands’ coast. HUMINT, or human intelligence, was also in desperately short supply. In April 1982, MI6 had one officer based in Buenos Aires. He had been responsible not just for intelligence on Argentina, but for the whole of South America. Those planning the campaign would take whatever they could get, although what information there was was played close to the chest. Even Air Vice-Marshal Mike Knight, as Air Officer Commanding 1 Group, the officer with ultimate responsibility for delivering jets and crews capable of doing whatever they were ordered to do, felt outside the loop. He did whatever he could to try to anticipate what would be demanded of him and his assets. Working within such a compressed time frame, anything he could do to help those working on the coalface at Marham and Waddington, before an official signal arrived from Northwood, he would do.
Chapter 15
Simon Baldwin started early and finished late as he concentrated on trying to bring Sir Michael Beetham’s vision to life. As he worked, he lived off a diet of bacon sandwiches, coffee and Gold Block pipe tobacco. Many of the challenges he faced were entirely new to him. The Vulcan community knew all about what they would face attacking the Warsaw Pact – fighters and missiles given names by NATO like Fishbed, Flogger, Foxbat, Guideline and Grail. The AEOs probably mumbled the frequency bands of the Soviet fire-control radars as they drifted off to sleep. But Argentina, Baldwin learnt from Jane’s or material published by the Institute of Strategic Studies, had none of the Russian kit they were trained to counter. Most of it came from much closer to home, produced by factories in France, Germany, Switzerland, America and Britain. He was going to have to hit the books.
Within Air Vice-Marshal Knight’s 1 Group planning cell at Bawtry, no possible use of the Vulcans was left unconsidered. New weapons were studied, including cluster bombs and laser-guided bombs. Suddenly, a bomber a quarter of a century old, which had been neglected for years, was the centre of attention. What about a four-ship firepower demonstration to demonstrate Britain’s resolve and capability?, they asked themselves. Or minelaying sorties to keep the Argentine Navy at bay? Maybe leaflet-dropping, to demoralize her conscript troops. Even, in whispered tones, the possibility of hitting the Argentine mainland. All relied on an assumption that the Vulcan’s flight refuelling system would be successfully revived and that the Victors could provide the fuel to support whatever was planned. As it happened, it wasn’t to be as simple as that.
None of the creative thinking in evidence affected the simplicity of the orders given to Waddington in that first week: restore the Vulcan’s ability to refuel in the air and drop conventional bombs. So Baldwin’s CORPORATE flight pressed ahead. Despite the fuel leaks there had been nothing lacking in the Vulcan pilots’ ability to make contact. Someone needed to find out why the machinery was failing, but by Friday the 16th all three Captains completed their day receiver training. The bombing, though, also posed a challenge – it had been a long time since the Vulcans had dropped 1,000lb iron bombs.
Once again it fell to the engineers to get to grips with the problem first.
As a conventional bomber the Vulcan had been capable of carrying twenty-one 1,000lb bombs on three septuple bomb carriers attached to hardpoints in the bomb bay. The release of the bombs was controlled from a panel in the Nav Radar’s station in the cockpit known as the ‘90-Way’ that monitored electrical connections to each bomb. It was said that it provided ninety different ways of sequencing the drop, from one bomb to twenty-one and every combination in between, in quick succession or one at a time. It provided options and flexibility, meaning that differently fused weapons could be used separately as the mission demanded – air burst bombs in the front, delayed fuses in the back.
None of Waddington’s Vulcans was still fitted with either the bomb carriers or the 90-Way. But they didn’t just have to be reinstalled; they had to be found first. It was a good thing that the engineers seemed to have an aversion to actually getting rid of anything for good. All RAF stations had engineering dumps where the Engineering Wing stored anything that they felt might one day come in handy – anything they couldn’t bear to part with. Dumps at Waddington and Scampton, the nearby base that had just drawn the curtain on twenty-one years of Vulcan operations, were scoured for the missing kit: 90-Way panels were found, refitted and tested but the septuple bomb carriers – and they needed at least nine of them – proved harder to find. The required number was eventually made up when someone recalled that some had been disposed of at a Newark scrapyard. Incredibly, they were still there.