As part of the first wave, flying as far as the first refuelling bracket, Tux and his crew would be barely an hour and a half out of Ascension. Always in the company of another jet, they could do without the help of the miserable Carousel that had, on this occasion, so let them down.
The five fully loaded Victors powered down Wideawake’s runway 14, streaming one after another, and disappeared into the ink-black sky. At three o’clock in the morning local time, thousands of miles from the mainland, the only lights were those shining and blinking from the jets themselves. Careful to maintain a safe distance, they tail-chased each other up in an ascending spiral – the Victor force’s trademark ‘snake climb’. At 32,000 feet the formation turned south, to send Squadron Leader John Elliott on the longest radar reconnaissance mission in history.
Bob Tuxford’s time would come.
In the frigid waters off South Georgia, the ships of Task Group 319.9 waited to move. Soldiers from M Company 42 Commando – the ‘Mighty Munch’ – D Squadron SAS and No. 2 Section SBS prepared themselves for battle, packing and repacking their kit, cleaning their weapons, trying to stay fit. On board HMS Plymouth, Captain David Pentreath spoke to the SAS troopers he was playing host to.
‘Plymouth’, he told them, ‘is about the oldest ship in the fleet. She’s never been this far south. Wasn’t designed to. And she’s got a crack in the bow.’
The hard to impress special forces men warmed to him immediately. Exactly what you want in a naval captain, they thought.
While the Victors cruised south, three Vulcans took off at twenty-minute intervals from Waddington. Then their pilots, Reeve, Withers and Montgomery, flew north along Britain’s east coast towards John O’Groats. Each aircraft carried seven 1,000lb high-explosive iron bombs, armed with 951 nose and tail fusing. Instant detonation on impact. They climbed to height and continued out over the North Sea before rolling on to a new heading that would take them to Garvie Island, a bleak slab of granite off Cape Wrath, mainland Scotland’s most north-westerly point. Forty miles out, they began their descent into thick, murky cloud.
Weather could have been organized by the Argentinians, thought Monty as he emerged into the clear air below 5,000 feet. One by one, they dropped to 350 feet over the rough water to begin their bombing runs. Height, heading, airspeed, speed over the ground, wind direction and wind speed were all fed into the bomber’s old analogue computers. Once settled, all control inputs were made at the direction of the Nav Radars, staring into their screens, making sure the cross-hairs stayed over the target, tuning the gain on the radar to sharpen its accuracy as they got closer. As they ran in, there were familiar, terse exchanges between the Nav Radars in the back and the pilots on the flight deck.
Go to bomb and check the demand.
Left.
Take it out. They had drifted to the right a little; the Nav Radar told the pilot to correct it.
Demand zeroed. On target. Now it was crucial they kept the wings absolutely straight and level. Any acceleration in any direction as the bombs separated from their racks and they’d be thrown off course. The margins were fine, the slightest error amplified by speed and distance.
The Nav Radars were dropping retarded bombs at low level. The bombs were standard 1,000lb bombs fitted with a tail cone that housed a small parachute. When the bomb was released from the aircraft, the tail cone opened and the small parachute deployed and slowed the descent of the bomb to ensure that it hit the ground well behind the Vulcan. Without the extra distance these devices allowed the escaping bomber to put between itself and the blast, there was the danger of scoring a disastrous own-goal.
John Reeve’s AEO, Barry Masefield, watched through the rear-facing periscope as the bombs tumbled out of the bomb bay. He’d only ever seen this in archive footage of American B-52s. It was an exhilarating sight.
As the bombs slammed into Garvie in a fierce hail of iron and rock, they threw spray hundreds of feet into the air. Masefield grinned as he heard the deep, percussive bellow of the explosions they’d left in their wake. The three V-bombers stayed low, continuing west at over 400 mph, leaving oily black smoke trails drifting in the wind.
Looking out of the cockpit window to the left as he’d sped over the island, Monty couldn’t help noticing that the sheep, a few hundred yards away on the mainland, seemed utterly unbothered by his efforts. Slightly disconcerting, he thought.
Before they returned to Waddington, the three Vulcans flew down the Scottish west coast before banking left over the English coast towards Spadeadam in the fells of east Cumberland. In the late 1950s, their destination had been the unlikely home to the Spadeadam Rocket Establishment, the largest rocket development facility outside America or the USSR; a kind of Cumbrian Cape Canaveral where Rolls-Royce had tested engines for the abandoned British Blue Streak ICBM. Now Spadeadam was a 10,000-acre electronic warfare range. Simulated Soviet radars and missiles mounted attacks on NATO aircraft as they flew through the range. It was where the RAF could test their defences. The range facilities had been hastily reprogrammed to replicate what little was known of the Argentine radars. As the Vulcans flew over, the Spadeadam systems transmitted the I and J band frequencies of Swiss Superfledermaus and Skyguard fire-control radars, and of the feared Roland surface-to-air missile. On board the bombers, the AEOs – Barry Masefield, Hugh Prior and John Hathaway – tried the new Dash 10 jamming pod for the first time. Compared to the ECM suite the Vulcans had fitted internally, the new pod, tuned to respond to the Argentine equipment, offered an altogether different measure of protection.
Hugh Prior ignored the slow pulse of the Echo band search radars. They were harmless. Never jam until you’ve got to. But when the malevolent flutter of the fire-control radars buzzed through his headset and lit up the strobe on his control panel he hit the switch for the Dash 10. The pod went to work. As well as noise jamming like the Vulcan’s old Red Shrimp unit, the borrowed American-built pod was a deflection jammer. It worked on the same principle as a ventriloquist throwing his voice. It picked up the detection pulse of the enemy fire-control radar and electronically altered the radar return of the incoming jet to place it in airspace four or five miles away. So even if the noise-jamming alone failed to break the radar lock, the missile should go boring down on a phantom radar signature miles from where its would-be target really was. Over Spadeadam at least, the pods worked as advertised. And the AEOs had confirmed what they already knew: a Swiss anti-aircraft gun sounds exactly the same as a Russian one. Moreover, if either caught up with you, Swiss and Russian high-explosive cannon shells were going to do exactly the same damage.
As the crews shared a beer in the Ops block they chatted excitedly about the three-and-a-half-hour sortie. After the frustrations of the air-to-air refuelling, this was much more like it. Still high on adrenalin, the crews felt bulletproof. Monty looked at them all and tried to inject a little realism.
‘I have to point out, fellows, that tomorrow we’re doing it in the dark.’
Just the ticket, Mick Cooper thought and smiled to himself.