Much that was once known about the Vulcan had been lost. RAF training no longer offered the kind of deep foundation that had once been deemed necessary. There was someone to turn to, though: 50 Squadron’s John Williams. Williams had been through the very first Vulcan conversion course and, during a year of ground school, had practically learnt how to dismantle and rebuild the jet. If he said, ‘You need to tweak the third nut on the left one quarter-turn to the right,’ you did it. And it usually did the trick. Baldwin brought him into the CORPORATE flight’s planning team.
If the Vulcans were going to practise bombing, they were going to need bombs too. When Simon Baldwin first enquired, he discovered that Waddington’s armoury had just forty-one 1,000lb high-explosive ‘iron’ bombs. With three crews to train, they could be used up in one day on the ranges. He widened his search, but was alarmed to track down just 167 in the whole country – all that was left from thirty years of trying to dispose of the stockpile left at the end of the Second World War. Hundreds had simply been dropped into the sea. This was much appreciated by fishermen off Cyprus – where two Vulcan squadrons were stationed throughout the 1960s – who eagerly scooped up the dead fish as they floated to the surface. Many of the bomb cases that were left were cast rather than machined and that too was potentially problematic. Cast-iron cases shattered on impact like glass on a tile floor, dissipating the force of the blast. What were needed now were the tough machined cases that would penetrate deep into the ground before exploding. But the bombs had been disposed of indiscriminately and Baldwin had no choice but to take whatever he could get his hands on.
The Chief of the Air Staff knew Marham well. Visiting his old station on Friday the 16th to meet the Victor crews as they prepared to deploy to Ascension, Sir Michael Beetham felt pleased to be back. It had changed a bit since his day, but it was still recognizably the same place, still known to some of the old-timers ambivalently as ‘El Adem with grass’, after the RAF’s now long-vacated remote, windswept desert airbase in Libya. Beetham was a man held in high regard by the ‘tanker trash’ – he was one of them. As Marham’s Station Commander, Jerry Price, ushered Beetham around, he was struck again by the CAS’s gentle manner and encouraged by his interest in what was going on. Beetham, it was clear, properly understood the value of what they were doing. After all, Price reflected, he knew as much about in-flight refuelling as anyone. Responding to this, the Marham crews appeared bullish. And Beetham returned to Whitehall, both proud and confident in his men, impressed by their mood – Get up and go, we’re going to do this.
Most important of all was the news from Marham that the Vulcan pilots were proving to be ‘good prodders’. It was time, perhaps, to make sure that the Argentinians got wind of what he had in mind. There was still a faint hope that if the mounting military pressure on the junta became overwhelming, war might be averted.
With Beetham gone, Price returned to the job of getting the first four Victors ready to fly south. Then his phone rang. The message was straightforward: an aircraft would soon be arriving to pick him up from Marham. He had a couple of hours to pack his bags. He’d had absolutely no intimation of this sudden development. Where he was going wasn’t mentioned, although he had to assume it was Ascension Island. He was just told he was going to be briefed.
Price rushed home to pack and say his goodbyes to his family who, however they might have felt about the surprise news, accepted it phlegmatically. In the late afternoon he boarded the HS125 Dominie for the short flight to Northolt, on the outskirts of London. From there he was driven straight to Whitehall to be briefed in MoD Ops Room. He was, they told him, going to become the Senior RAF Officer on Ascension Island. He’d be flying out from Brize Norton the next day.
Until now, the Senior RAF Officer on Ascension had been drawn from the Nimrod force. As the Victor’s crucial role began to emerge, though, Price became the obvious candidate to succeed him.
On Friday evening, as Jerry Price was ferried around the country, Martin Withers, Monty and John Reeve prepared to fly again. With their day-refuelling qualification complete, it was time to try it at night. Between two and five o’clock in the afternoon the crews sat through briefings, impatient to fly. Ground school and intelligence briefings were a permanent fixture in a packed schedule. For the time being it was limited to subjects like refuelling and the forgotten art of conventional bombing, but some of what was to come would raise eyebrows.
At eight o’clock, Martin Withers and Dick Russell pushed forward the throttles and released the brakes. The first of the Vulcans accelerated down the Waddington runway and roared into the night sky, then rolled out towards the North Sea towlines to rendezvous with their tanker. Reeve and Monty followed at hour-and-a-half intervals. At night, unexpectedly, refuelling seemed more straightforward. The view of the floodlit white underside of the Victor seemed more abstract. There was less of a temptation to fly instinctively. Instead, closing on the red and black stripes and making contact could be carried out without distraction from what the seat of their pants was telling them. The Vulcan captains were gaining in confidence, making contact time after time, but still the persistent, inexplicable fuel leaks that threatened to scuttle the whole enterprise continued to undermine them.
Jerry Price spent the night in a room at Northwood Headquarters. Before leaving for Brize, he made his way to the main Ops Room for an early-morning briefing with joint planners from all three services. Conspicuous by their absence were CORPORATE’s senior military commanders, all of whom were 4,000 miles away. Admiral Fieldhouse, along with Air Marshal Curtiss and Major-General Jeremy Moore, his air and land commanders respectively, had flown to Ascension to confirm the military plan to retake the Falklands. Naval helicopters flew the visitors out to HMS Hermes, the Task Force flagship. On board the aircraft carrier they met with Admiral Woodward, Brigadier Julian Thompson and Commodore Mike Clapp, the men responsible for implementing the plan. One factor dominated their thinking: time. It forced them to plan the campaign backwards. By the end of June, the ships of the Task Force, operating in a brutal environment, far from proper maintenance, would start to fall apart. The war would be won or lost by then. A strict timetable based solely on military, not political, imperatives was drawn up and agreed on. Two elements of the plan related directly to the job being asked of Waddington’s Vulcans. First of all, Fieldhouse hoped to convince the Argentinians that Buenos Aires was under threat. If they believed – whatever the reality – that their capital city was at risk, ships and aircraft would have to be kept north, away from the battle for the Falklands, to defend it. Secondly, he wanted to pull the Argentinians on to the punch, provoking them into committing their sea and air forces in defence of their conquest against an expected British amphibious assault on 1 May. For the British plan to work, Woodward’s Battle Group needed to sail by lunchtime the following day, 18 April.
Admiral Fieldhouse returned to London to tell the politicians that, if a war was to be won, it had to begin by 1 May, no later. Negotiations had until that date. Waddington had less than two weeks, and they’d yet to drop a single bomb.
In the late 1960s, in the face of a growing Soviet naval threat, the Defence Secretary, Denis Healey, made the bold claim that the British knew the position of every single Soviet ship in the Mediterranean and, should it be necessary, he added, could cope with the lot of them. His confidence came from the Victor SR2’s ability, using its radar, to accurately survey 400,000 square miles of ocean in one eight-hour sortie.