Rowland White: Vulcan 607

And with that, the islands remained under the control of Spain and her inheritors, the United Provinces of Rio de la Plata and that new state’s successor, Argentina, for the next sixty years, until the brutal intervention of an American warship, the USS Lexington , in 1831.

Spain removed her colonial authorities from Puerto Soledad in 1810, and from that point on the islands became little more than a base for American sealers, who were used to operating without rules or administration. So when the United Provinces appointed a governor in 1823, his relationship with the lawless residents was always going to be a difficult one. The simmering distrust between Buenos Aires and the unruly residents of Puerto Soledad came to a head after the appointment of a new governor, Louis Vernet. Vernet imposed restrictions on the number of seals killed, and in trying to enforce them arrested an American ship and escorted her to Buenos Aires to make the captain stand trial.

Vernet’s great misfortune was that the USS Lexington , under her captain Silas Duncan, was at port in Buenos Aires. Demanding that Vernet be arrested as a pirate, Duncan immediately set sail for Puerto Soledad, where, on arrival, he destroyed the settlement, declared the islands ‘Free of all government’ and left.

The British government quickly saw an opportunity both to reassert its own sovereignty and head off any possibility of the Americans establishing a permanent naval presence in the South Atlantic. In 1833 HMS Clio and HMS Tyne took and held the Falkland Islands and they have remained British ever since. But what seemed an almost casual reassertion of the status quo for the British hurt Argentina badly. For this newly independent young country it was and remained an illegal occupation, a humiliating stain on the nation’s self-image and a source of simmering resentment. They mattered to her in a way that they could never matter to Britain.

By 1982, little appeared to have changed on that front. Now, though, these windswept southerly islands had a 1,800-strong population who were passionately and defiantly British. And the Argentinians had decided to do something about it.

The Avro Vulcan was conceived in the reign of King George VI as a nuclear bomber. She was designed by a team led by the legendary Lancaster, Sir Roy Chadwick at A. V. Roe, to meet an ambitious 1947 Air Staff Requirement for an aircraft that could cruise at 500 knots at an altitude of 50,000 feet for nearly 4,000 miles to deliver a ‘special bomb’. With a piston-engined RAF bomber force barely capable of flying 2,000 miles at 200 knots and 20,000 feet, it was to be quite a feat of engineering.

Chadwick’s solution was radical: a giant delta, her nose and cockpit extending forward of the triangular planform like the head and neck of a pterodactyl. It’s hard to appreciate the impact this imposing combination of power and purpose must have made when she first roared overhead, powered by four of the same Rolls-Royce Olympus engines that would be developed to propel Concorde through the sound barrier. In 1952 – two years before the last Lancaster was retired by the RAF – she must have looked like she’d soared straight out of the pages of ‘Dan Dare’ in the Eagle comic. And the public weren’t the only ones who seemed left behind by Britain’s most advanced jet bomber. When the test pilot Roly Falk wowed the crowds at the Farnborough air show, ‘the pinstriped pilot’ did so wearing a tweed suit and tie.

After entering service in 1956, the Vulcan bore most of the weight of Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent and did so convincingly.

In 1961, RAF Bomber Command was invited to participate in SKYSHIELD, a major exercise designed to test North America’s sophisticated air defences. Eight Vulcans took part. Four, flying from Scotland, attacked from the north. The rest approached from the south out of Kindley Air Force Base in Bermuda. Preceded by American B-47s and B-52s, the northern component streamed in at 56,000 feet, a greater height than any of the defending USAF fighters could reach. One of the British bombers picked up the fire-control radar from an American F-101 Voodoo, but it was jammed by her AEO and she made it through unscathed. The other three were untouched. From the south, the four Vulcans spread themselves across a front 200 miles across. As the line approached the American east coast, the most southerly aircraft turned sharply north and, screened by electronic jamming from the three other bombers, staged a completely undetected mock attack on New York.

Since responsibility for Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent passed to the Royal Navy’s Polaris fleet in June 1969, however, the Vulcans had been relegated to the second wave, but they remained declared to NATO as a nuclear force. Crews joked about the tiny 28lb practice bomb that dropped foolishly from the Vulcan’s cavernous bomb bay on to the RED FLAG targets, but the pint-sized bomb perfectly simulated the ballistics of the WE177C 400-kiloton nuclear bombs the Vulcans would in theory carry into war. Hitting the target with the little ‘terror weapon’ was, ultimately, the thing that mattered at RED FLAG, the planes’ only real measure of success.

But it was getting ever tougher for them to get through. The demands on the crews coaxing the best out of what was now very outdated equipment were becoming more intense, and the risks in doing so becoming greater. The Vulcans were the only part of the RAF cleared to fly at low level at night in any weather. In fact they depended on it. But flying through ugly thunderheads that had grounded all the American participants at RED FLAG, Monty had thought he was going to lose the jet – that she’d break up in the violent skies. Once safely back on the ground, Monty felt that, on this occasion, discretion might have been the better part of valour. Shouldn’t have ever left the ground , he thought. And when he was told by a severely shaken member of another Vulcan crew that they too had just all but hit the desert floor, he knew he wasn’t the only one riding his luck.

Breaching the defences at night, in bad weather, below the radar, the Vulcans could still live with the hi-tech, swing-wing, supersonic USAF F-111s (which, in the early 1970s, the RAF had expected to replace the Vulcans) and completely outclassed the big B-52s. But by day, their big deltas casting long shadows on the desert floor, they were easy pickings for the new generation of American F-15 Eagles with their powerful look down–shoot down radars and guided missiles. When one Vulcan captain, breaking hard into a turn, found himself sandwiched between two F-15s he knew his number was up. The Eagle jockeys were hardly breaking sweat – one even had the impudence to wave. In the right conditions, determined crews believed, the Vulcans could reach the target to deliver their ‘bucket of sunshine’, but working with navigation and bombing equipment that hadn’t been substantially upgraded for twenty years, they now had to rely to a frightening extent on their own skills and experience. The truth was that in 1982 the Vulcans were really starting to show their age.

That year would be the Vulcan’s last appearance at RED FLAG, but there was little in the commitment or performance of the Vulcan detachment to suggest it. On or off the ground the pace was intense. In Vegas, the crews made the most of what was on offer. For many of them it was nights out with the boys, for some the slot machines featured. For John Hathaway, Monty’s AEO, it was the satisfaction of staying awake late enough to catch the hotel’s 99-cent breakfast before going to bed. By wading his way through another in the morning he was feeding himself for $1.98 a day. And RED FLAG had been known to lay on less innocent entertainment too: strippers provided by the wife of an American Lieutenant Colonel who ran her own booking agency. If the girls could cope with the big egos and testosterone of Happy Hour in the Nellis Officers’ Club during RED FLAG, the lady reckoned, they were probably ready for anything.