‘No you’re not, Mont. Now!’ Baldwin insisted.
Monty hauled himself out of bed and headed over. All the CORPORATE crews had been mustered in the main briefing room for the occasion.
As Beetham was introduced to the crew members in turn, John Reeve tried to engage him.
‘I told him there’d be a promotion in all of this,’ he joked, indicating his co-pilot, Don Dibbens. Reeve was making light of Dibbens’ recent, routine promotion, which just happened to have come through since the training had begun. Dibbens cringed. Beetham greeted the remark with a thin smile, but, when introduced to Reeve himself, looked as if he had been about to say something before stopping himself.
The Vulcan crews took their seats for the briefing. As they got settled, not all of them had their minds on the briefing to follow. Martin Withers’ co-pilot, Pete Taylor, couldn’t help puzzling about the Chief of the Air Staff’s blue socks. Shouldn’t they be black?, he pondered.
Then Beetham began to speak. He knew the way aircrews’ minds worked, knew that however lofty his own rank, they were a tough audience. Their hard-to-impress self-confidence was a vital part of what they did. But Beetham also understood the way they might be feeling now, as combat drew nearer. The veteran of Bomber Harris’s Second World War strategic bombing campaign had been there himself, nearly forty years earlier.
Now he was addressing a new generation of bomber crews. Their target, he told them, was the runway at Port Stanley airport. Furthermore, he told them, the raid was a powerful political statement. ‘We cannot be seen to be losing,’ he stressed. Beetham didn’t need to wait for confirmation from Cranwell. He explained that they would be going in low, before a pop-up to 8,000 feet for the bomb-run. They’d be supported on the journey south by a fleet of Victors, then one of them would be on their own.
Monty didn’t like it. We’re the boys for low level, he thought. They’d been to RED FLAG. They’d spent the last two weeks taking the jets down as low as they dared. And now they were going in at medium level. Reeve shared his irritation. First they’d needed new navigation equipment. Then they learnt that the jamming equipment they’d depended on probably wasn’t up to the job. Now, he was being told that the bombs wouldn’t work if they were dropped at low level. Why had this all been discovered in the last two weeks? It seemed to him that no one had taken the Vulcans seriously for ten years or more. But Reeve was pragmatic. He certainly wasn’t going to waste time worrying about it. If you want me to be ready, he thought, I’ll be ready.
When they were asked at the end if there were any volunteers, Reeve stuck up his hand.
Martin Withers was surprised about the decision to go in at medium level, too, but he felt less like challenging it than making sure of it. The news came as an almost overwhelming relief. Since speculation about their target had begun, he’d been burdened by a huge sense of vulnerability. Flying straight and level at a few hundred feet down the length of a heavily defended runway had always felt to him like a one-way ticket. A few words from Beetham had changed everything.
‘Are there any problems?’ Beetham finished. A question to which there was only one answer.
Monty hesitated. Unlike Withers, he hadn’t flown since breaking his probe and losing the engines. He didn’t know that things were looking more hopeful. So he stood up, and the room turned to watch.
‘We’re all keen to get on with it,’ Monty began, his frustration finding a voice, ‘but until we’ve solved the problem of the probes, we’re not going anywhere, because we can’t refuel in the dark for more than five or six minutes.’
The look he received from Air Vice-Marshal Mike Knight was chilling. He realized immediately that he had played it all wrong. He should have said something to John Laycock privately. Not here, not in front of the Chief of the Air Staff. All of the senior men knew about the refuelling problems. They’d also just been reassured by Laycock and Baldwin that, hopefully, the worst was behind them. Monty’s contribution was unnecessary and unwelcome. He felt he’d done the right thing, but he also couldn’t help feeling that it was the sort of faux pas that would be remembered. As the crews shuffled out of the Main Briefing Room, Martin Withers leaned over.
‘That’s you buggered, Mont,’ he joked, trying to make light of it, but Monty was inclined to agree. His gloom wasn’t helped by John Reeve’s evident enthusiasm. Beetham’s words seemed to have had a stirring effect on him. At this point, Monty thought, John would flap his wings down to the South Atlantic.
In the end, Monty’s pessimism didn’t greatly affect the mood of the meeting. Beetham had the reassurances he needed to brief the War Cabinet in detail and the crews, if tired, were, he felt, in good heart. Before the Chief of the Air Staff returned to London, there was just one more thing Laycock hoped to get a steer on. He was still working on the assumption that a big disbandment ceremony for the remaining Vulcan squadrons was expected on 1 July. Already frustrated by the distractions of the parade through Lincoln and IX Squadron’s imminent transformation into a Tornado squadron, Laycock asked if it was really necessary.
‘I wouldn’t expend too much energy on it, if I were you…’ Beetham told him.
Just the reply the genial Station Commander had hoped for.
As soon as the Air Marshals had departed, Simon Baldwin gathered his Ops team and described the new plan. They would need to completely revise the work they’d done so far, changing the attack profile to the medium-level pop-up, the attack track to 35 degrees off the runway heading, look again at the radar offsets now that the Vulcan would be approaching the target from the north-east and work out new stick-spacings that would ensure they could take out the runway from 8,000 feet.
The crews took off from Waddington again late that evening to fly another training sortie, a composite profile putting together all the elements of what they’d rehearsed so far – air-to-air refuelling, low-level flying, radar bombing, Carousel navigation and electronic countermeasures. On top of this they added the ‘pop-up’ manoeuvre they’d be using to drop their bombs from medium level. Twice, over Leuchars and Flamborough Head, they climbed steeply from low level for their bomb run before diving back down to the deck again. For the first time the sortie was properly representative of the mission they were being ordered to fly. Bob Wright and Pete Taylor now both had a grand total of two ‘pop-ups’ under their belts.
Reeve, Withers and Monty finally got their heads down just after 2 a.m. They all expected to be able to sleep late the next morning, though. Monty had checked: they weren’t flying the next day.
‘Definitely not,’ Laycock told him.
As they drifted off to sleep that night, none of them was aware that they’d trained for the last time. The next time they flew they’d be heading to war.
Chapter 25
Monty was woken from a deep sleep by persistent knocking on his window. As he got out of bed to find out what was going on, he noticed his wife Ingrid was already up. He pulled back the curtains and light streamed in past the silhouette of a policeman, standing on a ladder to reach the first-floor bedroom.
‘Is your name Montgomery?’ he asked, getting straight to the point.
Monty, blinking, nodded his assent.
‘I’ve got a Flight Lieutenant here to take you to Waddington.’
Monty asked for time. Now wide awake, he knew what was happening. Unable to rouse him by phone, and with Ingrid out of the house, Waddington had been forced to employ a less than conventional alarm. His bag was packed, he was ready to go, but he wanted to see his wife. He guessed she’d be round the corner with her friend Marjorie and called her. Right first time.