Rowland White: Vulcan 607

Then, at the end of the year, he was chosen to participate in RED FLAG. Withers seized the opportunity to put aside his unhappiness and began to prepare himself and his crew to fly the Vulcan in America in the most realistic series of war games ever devised.

In December, as the Withers crew trained, Admiral Jorge Anaya, the ascetic, sharp-faced political head of the Argentine Navy, lent his support to General Leopoldo Galtieri’s bid to take power in Argentina. Galtieri would replace President Viola, the weakened head of the country’s ruling military junta. The price for Anaya’s blessing was approval for the navy’s plan to seize Las Malvinas, the Falkland Islands, the disputed British colony barely 300 miles off their southern shores. Galtieri was easily persuaded. The two men were also confident that they could carry international opinion with them. They had seen how, when Portugal was removed from Goa by India in 1961, the world had done nothing. Throwing out the colonial power from Las Malvinas would surely be seen as a similar piece of legitimate anti-colonialism. Especially with the United States on their side. Only recently, the US government had been courting Galtieri as an ally for their operations in El Salvador. On a visit to America in 1981, Galtieri had been feted with genuine red-carpet treatment, enjoying time with those at the highest levels of government. After four years in isolation following Argentina’s military coup, the country was being welcomed back into the fold.

The date Galtieri and Anaya had in mind was 9 July 1982 – the anniversary of Argentina’s independence. By then, Britain’s Antarctic patrol ship, HMS Endurance , would have been decommissioned, conscripts could be trained, delivery of French Super Étendard attack planes and their sea-skimming Exocet missiles would be complete and, in any case, the British would be powerless to intervene in the face of the extremes of the southern winter.

That was if the British responded at all. History suggested that they were, at best, ambivalent about their distant possession.

Withers and his crew arrived in Nevada in style – determined to start as they meant to continue. Inbound to Nellis Air Force Base, the air base near Las Vegas that hosted RED FLAG, Martin Withers had spied the vast scar of the Grand Canyon thousands of feet below. He radioed Air Traffic Control, asking to abandon his flight plan and finish the transit under Visual Flight Rules. He pulled back the throttle levers of his Avro Vulcan B2, swooped down with a smile on his face, and told his crew to find themselves a vantage point. While Withers flew, his young red-haired co-pilot, Flying Officer Pete Taylor, took snaps for everyone on board with the collection of cameras that hung round his neck – it was always said, after all, that Vulcan co-pilots carried everything but the responsibility. Tourists enjoying the breathtaking panorama of the canyon must have been unnerved to find themselves looking down on the huge delta wings of a British Vulcan bomber sweeping by below them, followed quickly by a second jet, flying past more cautiously, above the lip of the gorge.

Once on the ground at Nellis, with the skyscrapers of Las Vegas’s mega-casinos visible from the vast flightline, Withers was joined by Squadron Leader Alastair ‘Monty’ Montgomery, the diminutive, hyperactive Scottish captain of the second Vulcan, and his crew. The two crews walked towards the collection of functional white low-rise buildings and hangars that lined the concrete pan. Withers, his face boyish despite his thinning hair, was popular, self-deprecating and friendly. As he entered Building 201, RED FLAG’s HQ, and began to get his bearings, he looked up at the board that displayed the day’s flying programme and winced. Over a map of the Grand Canyon was an unmissable red mark bearing the words ‘NOT BELOW 20,000 FEET’. Wonderful scenery though , he thought.

As a teenager, Monty had, like Withers, been inspired to join the Air Force by the glamour of being a fighter pilot. The moment an English Electric Lightning taxied past at an airshow with the canopy raised, its scarf-wearing pilot waving insouciantly at the crowd, Monty had been hooked. RED FLAG was the kind of thing they’d signed up for and both men knew that it was a privilege to be involved. The RAF were first invited to take part in 1977. And since then they’d earned a reputation for low, aggressive flying. ‘Those RAF boys truly part the sand and shave the rocks,’ said one admiring American fighter pilot. Only the best crews were sent and competition for places on the RAF detachment was fierce. Over the month that followed, Withers and Monty would be tested as pilots and captains like never before. And they would become, despite their very different personalities, firm friends.

RED FLAG was born out of necessity. During the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese ace Nguyen Van Bay shot down thirteen American fighters. These weren’t the kind of numbers that sat happily with the USAF. While the war was still being fought they commissioned the ‘Red Baron’ Report into what was going wrong. American training taught the crews everything but how to fight. Good, but raw, young pilots were being overwhelmed by the experience of combat. If they lived through the first ten hours or so of combat, though, the odds on surviving the rest of the tour improved dramatically. The solution was RED FLAG, which first took place in 1975.

Flown over the deserts and ridges of Nevada, on weapons ranges the size of Switzerland, RED FLAG was a series of ultra-realistic war games. Participants were divided into blue and red forces, good guys and bad guys. Radars tuned to Warsaw Pact frequencies searched the skies while anti-aircraft units fired harmless but convincing Smoky SAMs – simulated surface-to-air missiles. RED FLAG also boasted its own ‘enemy’ fighters in the shape of the 64th Aggressor Squadron, a unit trained to fly and fight like the Soviets. Through all of this, the good guys had to try to get through to their targets. It was the closest training got to going to war for real. If combat was Red, and peacetime Green, then RED FLAG was Amber.

Inside Building 201, the walls were covered with signed pictures and plaques left behind by visiting units. In the offices of RED FLAG’s Commanding Officer, though, one poster stood out. It celebrated the time a low-flying RAF jet scraped a scar into the scrub with its wingtip. The same year, another crew took out a powerline when they flew up into it. When the engineers went out to repair the line they recorded its height from the ground: just 42 feet. And aircrew and engineers still talked about the photo taken of a Vulcan with a chunk of Joshua tree jammed behind its control surfaces. But what might appear reckless was in fact the lifeblood of the RAF strike force in 1982. Low-level flying was their main defence. It stopped search radars seeing them until the last minute, denied fire-control radars the time to get a lock and confused the air-to-air radars of defending fighters as they struggled to pick up their attackers against clutter thrown up by the ground features.

During the first week of the exercises, a minimum altitude of 200 feet was imposed – organizers didn’t want participants killing themselves – but as crews familiarized themselves with the terrain that restriction was lifted. When anyone asked Martin Withers how low he’d take his Vulcan through the Nellis ranges he’d smile mischievously and tell them ‘never below eighty feet’ – less than the wingspan of the Vulcan he was flying. At this height, the vortices spiralling off his wings could roll tumbleweed in the big bomber’s wake. A sneeze could send the crew into the ground in a twitch. But it was the big jet’s combination of size and low-down agility that so impressed the Americans. Their lumbering B-52s simply couldn’t twist and turn below the ridgelines like their British counterparts. As the Vulcans swept past it was an epic sight. The American crews who manned the Smoky SAM sites would whoop and holler at the sight of such a large aircraft being flown so low and so hard through the hot, viscous desert air. Even in the relative cool of January in Nevada the Vulcan crews would finish a sortie wet with sweat from physical exertion.