To reassure himself, he again turned to kill-zone graphs. The kill zones and burn-out zones are roughly hemispherical. He imagined half a grapefruit placed flat side down over a map of the target. Providing the attacking Vulcan stayed outside the grapefruit it was reasonably safe. At 8,000 feet plus it would always be above the apex of the hemisphere – above the vertical limit of the Oerlikon kill zone. On a flatter trajectory, though, the cannon’s range was greater – perhaps two and a quarter miles. But the guns weren’t going to find the Vulcan down low. She’d be running in at 8,000 feet, releasing the bombs two miles from the target and relying on their forward throw to carry them the rest of the way to the target as they fell. At worst, the Vulcan wouldn’t do much more than pierce the skin of the grapefruit.
So above the kill zone, with the added insurance of the Dash 10 jamming pod, 8,000 feet plus looked a realistic, acceptably safe attack height. But it meant that the crews would have to aim the bombs using the H2S radar alone. And with the inherent inaccuracies of the old NBS computer, they didn’t have a hope in hell of sticking a line of bombs along the centreline of a runway that was only forty yards wide.
During the Second World War, it had been calculated that the optimum angle at which to attack a runway was not at 90 degrees to the centreline but at about 35 degrees. The experience and calculations had stood the test of time. The Nav Radar’s bomb control unit, the 90-Way, allowed him to adjust the stick spacing – the distance between the bombs as they hit the ground – by setting different time intervals between bomb releases. He would need to calculate the stick spacing necessary to ensure that even if successive bombs straddled the runway, they were close enough for the resulting craters still to bite deep into both edges of the runway. Nothing could ever be for certain with NBS, but they did have a good chance of getting a bomb on the runway.
So Baldwin had a plan: low-level approach under the search radars; pop up to 8,000 feet or a little above; jam the gun radars – if necessary – with the Dash 10 pod; drop free-fall thousand-pounders, with an appropriate stick spacing, in a classic 35 degree runway cut. The bombs should hit the target and do the necessary damage. The element of surprise would count in their favour by giving the Argentinians very little time to react, and the Vulcan should be safe from the anti-aircraft defences. It was obviously not without risk, but as he sat back and considered the plan, Baldwin thought: Nobody has ever designed a war without risk. And, in any case, he felt he had another trump card. He knew his crews were very good.
He took his work to John Laycock and the two men talked through every point. The Station Commander didn’t need to be persuaded.
‘Send a signal to 1 Group,’ he told Baldwin, happy that they’d got it right. At two in the morning, the exhausted Navigator sent a ‘Personal For’ signal to Air Vice-Marshal Mike Knight at Bawtry outlining their intentions. Then he headed home to Trenchard Square to try to get some sleep.
Bob Wright, Martin Withers’ young Nav Radar, and the man who might be responsible for hitting the target, had never flown a ‘pop-up’ in his life. For that matter, until a few days earlier, he’d never dropped a 1,000lb bomb either.
Chapter 23
The chilling wail of an air-raid siren echoed through Stanley at eleven o’clock the next morning – the Argentinians testing their newly installed system. They were confident of providing forty minutes’ warning of any incoming attack. Plenty of time to make it to safehouses and shelters, they said. Many of the islanders weren’t so sure. A civil defence committee was quickly pulled together which issued its own typewritten instructions to the 545 residents who remained in town.
John Smith carried food and bedding down into his shelter under the porch, while in the west of the town the walls and roof of the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital were painted with red crosses, designed to be visible from the air. Sandbags were filled and piled high around the exposed windows of the operating theatre.
Air Vice-Marshal Mike Knight returned to Waddington on Sunday. Simon Baldwin was eager to hear his reaction to the plan he’d sent to Bawtry the previous night.
‘What do you think of it?’ Baldwin asked, confident that had Knight had any doubts, he would not have been backward in sharing them.
‘It looks OK to me,’ replied the AOC, ‘but you’ll be able to ask the Chief of the Air Staff yourself. He’s coming up here tomorrow…’
Force 7 winds, snow and sleet couldn’t dampen the mood in Stanley. At five o’clock in the afternoon, the BBC had reported news of the Argentine surrender on South Georgia. After the dreadful setbacks on Fortuna Glacier, the recapture itself had turned out to be an anti-climax.
With a single sweep of the radar, Humphrey’s Observer picked up a faint radar contact north of Grytviken. Checking against the known positions of icebergs, he gave his pilot, Ian Stanley, a new heading and the Wessex set course to investigate. It was the source of the intelligence reports from the previous day that had so rattled the Antrim group: the Argentine submarine Santa Fé. She’d been caught on the surface. Humphrey dived to attack her from behind with two Mk 11 depth charges. Her stern was lifted out of the water by the explosions. Lucky to have survived the first attack, the hunted boat turned back towards South Georgia, trailing oil. Helicopters from the rest of the small British task group then joined the attack, assaulting the lame submarine with Mk 46 torpedoes, AS12 wire-guided missiles and general purpose machine-guns fired from the cabin doors. One of the Fleet Air Arm pilots even unclipped his Browning 9mm automatic to take potshots at the submarine’s black hull, before thinking better of it and replacing the pistol in its holster.
After days of phoney war, the attack on the Santa Fé became the trigger for British action. Her chaotic arrival back at the British Antarctic Survey jetty, hounded all the way by the swarm of helicopters, caused confusion amongst the Argentine forces on the ground. Rather than wait for the Royal Marines of the ‘Mighty Munch’ holding off 200 miles away onboard RFA Tidespring, the British command decided to take advantage of the confusion using the seventy-four soldiers who could be mustered from the ships already standing off the island. While the 4.5-inch guns of Antrim and Plymouth provided naval gunfire support, the ad hoc force of Marines and special forces troopers was shuttled in by helicopter. As they gathered themselves to launch an assault on the Argentine defenders, the white flags went up. If there had ever been any will to fight amongst the occupiers, it was undone by an intimidating barrage of fire so unrelenting that the heat generated caused the grey paint on Antrim’s gun barrels to flake off and expose the metal below. South Georgia had, after setbacks which threatened the momentum of the whole British campaign in the South Atlantic, been retaken without loss of life.
In Buenos Aires, the junta took it badly, protesting indignantly to the UN Security Council that the British had ‘perpetrated an act of armed aggression against the South Georgia islands, which form part of Argentine territory’.
And on the Falklands, the military build-up continued. But the occupiers were jumpier now. Less certain, thought the islanders. More aggressive. The influence of men like Dowling was in the ascendant.