With the need for the Victor to assume the tanker role, the task of maritime radar reconnaissance, MRR, had been passed to the Vulcans. But following the upgrade to their old radars by the ex-27 Squadron engineers, the Victors were being pressed back into service in their old capacity.
The British plan to retake the Falklands was built around four main objectives, the first of which – the establishment of the 200-mile MEZ by the nuclear attack submarine – had already been achieved. Next on the list was the recovery of South Georgia.
The decision to retake the remote South Atlantic island was essentially a political one. On purely military grounds it would have been preferable to focus solely on the Falklands. If not essential, however, Operation PARAQUAT, as the plan to recapture South Georgia became known, was desirable for a number of reasons. From the moment the decision was taken to put the Task Force to sea, a major consideration had been the length of time it would take to arrive in a position to conduct operations off the Falklands. What could happen militarily or politically during that hiatus was unpredictable and both the Cabinet and the defence chiefs remembered how the tide had turned against Britain during the 1956 Suez Crisis. The early recapture of South Georgia could provide momentum for Britain’s military campaign and shore up the public’s morale. It was hoped that a successful campaign might even persuade Argentina to abandon the Falklands themselves. Finally, the Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Lewin, wanted to be able to demonstrate that his forces could do what he and the service chiefs had said they could do.
Two destroyers, HMS Antrim and HMS Plymouth, had departed Ascension on 12 April, supported by the Tidespring, a Royal Fleet Auxiliary tanker. On board they were carrying Royal Marines from 42 Commando and troopers from D Squadron SAS. They joined up with HMS Endurance on 14 April and the RFA Fort Austin; then the five-ship Task Group sailed south, bound for South Georgia.
As it had in the 1960s when Denis Healey made his statement, the Navy once again needed to know the whereabouts of enemy ships and only the Victor could provide that information.
At RAF Marham, after a day listening to briefings on everything from the international situation to survival in the South Atlantic, Bob Tuxford was handed a will form. Concentrates the mind, he thought, as he filled it in.
Chapter 16
‘VULCANS TO HIT ARGENTINA’, screamed the banner headline in the Sunday Express. Sir Michael Beetham enjoyed it. It was exactly the kind of thing he had hoped for. He wanted to intimidate the Argentinians and sow the seeds of doubt in their minds. No one had any serious intention of bombing the mainland. After all, Beetham thought, it’s not the Second World War. We’re not in the business of bombing capitals. The newspapers, however, seemed to relish the idea. Follow-up reports became increasingly overheated. ‘It is unlikely’, one concluded, ‘that any of the weapons in Argentina’s arsenal would be able to stop the bombers destroying every major airfield, every port, every military centre.’ On the record, the MoD merely allowed itself to admit, coyly, that they were ‘extending the capabilities of a number of Vulcans’ and that they were not thinking ‘only in a NATO context’.
The MoD version was much closer to the truth. It was still uncertain whether it was going to be possible to get a single Vulcan as far south as the Falklands, but the publicity had been part of the Chief of the Air Staff’s plan from the outset. The newspapers could speculate to their heart’s content and the Air Force would do whatever it could to fan the flames.
It didn’t matter to John Laycock which crew it was, because to the Daily Express they would all look the same. The newspaper just wanted a picture to follow up on their report that the military balance had tipped ‘decisively in our favour’. Laycock hauled a crew out of flight planning. None of them were anything to do with the CORPORATE flight. In fact, they were preparing to leave on a training deployment to Treviso in Italy. That had to wait until the five of them had posed on the Waddington flightline with their helmets under their arms, staring at the camera with the intimidating stares of nightclub bouncers. Behind them, dominating the shot, was the unmistakable shape of the Avro delta.
Highly amused by the whole episode, the crew left for Italy. ‘READY TO FIGHT’, read the headline when the photo appeared in the next day’s paper. ‘A mighty Vulcan bomber sits like a Goliath on the runway and in its shadow, five men stand ready to do their duty,’ the caption added. They were doing their bit, but their contribution to Waddington’s effort didn’t end there. Out for the night in Venice, perhaps a little the worse for wear, they became convinced that a Swiss businessman they were talking to was an Argentine spy and answered his loaded questions with the best bullshit they could muster.
John Reeve couldn’t believe what he was reading. To catch the enemy unawares was the Vulcan’s best defence. With news of their involvement all over the papers, there seemed little hope of that. So much for surprise, he thought, now they know we’re coming.
Martin Withers was losing his appetite. He’d greeted the news that they’d be practising air-to-air refuelling with enthusiasm, but over the course of the last week the mood had changed. The plan to use the Vulcans in anger was serious. The nature of his job meant he’d thought about killing. But as a nuclear bomber pilot, his job was to keep the peace. If that failed, then, he thought, he’d have few qualms about striking back against those who threatened him and his loved ones. It had never really preyed on his mind because he never thought it would ever happen. This was different. But it wasn’t the killing that fed his apprehension, it was the risk. His worry was that attacking a coastal target at the Vulcan’s standard 250 knots and 300 feet then carrying out a climbing turn to avoid terrain seemed almost suicidal. Against modern, radar-laid guns an aircraft the size of a Vulcan would be a sitting duck. He was going to have to fly faster. ‘The Book’ – the Operating Data Manual – said that you couldn’t throw a heavy Vulcan into a 400 knot full-power turn with 60 degrees of bank. But if they were going to have a chance of evading Argentine defences, that was exactly what they’d have to do. He knew that the Vulcan had been test-flown to 415 knots. He’d even been told by a pilot who’d flown the first Mk 2 Vulcan at Farnborough that, if you opened the taps and neglected to watch the speed, she’d reach 500.
As the newspapers rolled off the presses on Sunday morning, Withers was flying again. On the last of the night-refuelling qualification sorties, Withers pushed the throttles forward at 15,000 feet over RAF Leuchars on the east coast of Scotland. If something goes wrong, he thought, we can always go in there. Won’t help much if the wing comes off, I suppose. At 420 knots, as Dick Russell looked on anxiously, he cranked the jet into the turn. She went round on rails, pulling 2g all the way. That settled it, if he was going in low, he was going to blast through the airfield at the lowest possible height for the bombs to fuse, then haul the Vulcan into the flattest, steepest turn of his life.
Simon Baldwin was equally concerned about his crews’ chances. But the Argentine air defences were just one of the issues he was faced with. If he couldn’t get them to the target the threat of the anti-aircraft guns would be academic. So the most pressing problem remained the refuelling. The AARIs had signed off the three Vulcan captains – all of them were now qualified to refuel by day and night, but still the leaking probes persisted. There wasn’t anything drastically wrong with their flying, but neither did it appear to be anything mechanical. Initially, there’d been a scramble to reconstitute the system, but the engineers, using the method suggested by Marham after that first, frantic weekend, were testing the connections before every flight. In any case, there seemed to be two separate faults. During the fuel transfers themselves, leaks ran down the probe and over the cockpit glass, obliterating the view forward, but this seemed manageable compared to the second, more dramatic glitch: the huge wash of fuel that would flood back into the engines as contact was broken. Notes were circulated to everyone in the Air Force with any Vulcan refuelling experience asking them if they’d had similar difficulties and what was done to overcome them. The engineers, too, were typically creative.