- White, Rowland.
Vulcan 607.
London: Corgi Books, 2006.
ISBN 978-0-552-15229-7.
-
The Avro Vulcan bomber
was the backbone of Britain's nuclear deterrent from the 1950s until the end
of the 1960s, when ballistic missile submarines assumed the primary
deterrent mission. Vulcans remained in service thereafter as tactical nuclear
weapons delivery platforms in support of NATO forces. In 1982, the aging
Vulcan force was months from retirement when Argentina occupied the
Falkland Islands, and Britain summoned all of its armed services to
mount a response. The Royal Navy launched a strike force, but given the
distance (about 8000 miles from Britain to the Falklands) it would take
about two weeks to arrive. The Royal Air Force surveyed their assets and
concluded that only the Vulcan, supported by the
Handley Page Victor,
a bomber converted to an aerial refueling tanker, would permit it to
project power to such a distant theatre.
But there were difficulties—lots of them. First of all, the
Vulcan had been dedicated to the nuclear mission for decades: none of the
crews had experience dropping conventional bombs, and the bomb bay racks
to dispense them had to be hunted down in scrap yards. No Vulcan had performed
aerial refueling since 1971, since its missions were assumed to be short range
tactical sorties, and the refueling hardware had been stoppered. Crews were
sent out to find and remove refueling probes from museum specimens to install on
the bombers chosen for the mission. Simply navigating to a tiny island in the
southern hemisphere in this pre-GPS era was a challenge—Vulcan crews had
been trained to navigate by radar returns from the terrain, and there was
no terrain whatsoever between their launch point on Ascension
Island and landfall in the Falklands, so boffins figured out how to adapt
navigation gear from obsolete
VC10 airliners
to the Vulcan and make it work. The Vulcan had no modern electronic
countermeasures (ECM), rendering it vulnerable to Argentinian
anti-aircraft defences, so an ECM pod from another aircraft was grafted
onto its wing, fastening to a hardpoint which had never been used by a
Vulcan. Finding it, and thereby knowing where to drill the holes required
dismantling the wing of another Vulcan.
If the preparations were remarkable, especially since they were thrown together
in just a few weeks, the mission plan was audacious—so much so that one
expects it would have been rejected as absurd if proposed as the plot of a
James Bond film. Executing the mission to bomb the airfield on the Falkland
Islands would involve two Vulcan bombers, one
Nimrod
marine patrol aircraft,
thirteen Victor tankers, nineteen refuelings (including Victor to Victor and
Victor to Vulcan), 1.5 million pounds of fuel, and ninety aircrew. And all of
these resources, assembled and deployed in a single mission, managed to put
just one crater in the airstrip in the Falkland Islands, denying it to
Argentine fast jets, but allowing
C-130 transports to
continue to operate from it.
From a training, armament, improvisation, and logistics standpoint
this was a remarkable achievement, and the author argues that its
consequences, direct and indirect, effectively took the Argentine fast
air fighter force and navy out of the conflict, and hence paved the
way for the British
reconquista of the islands. Today
it seems quaint; you'd just launch a few cruise missiles at the airfield,
cratering it and spreading
area denial
munitions and that would be that, without risking a single airman. But
they didn't have that option then, and so they did their best with what was
available, and this epic story recounts how they pulled it off with hardware
on the edge of retirement, re-purposed for a mission its designers never
imagined, mounted with a plan with no margin for error, on a schedule nobody
could have imagined absent wartime exigency. This is a tale of the Vulcan
mission; if you're looking for a comprehensive account of the Falklands War,
you'll have to
look elsewhere. The Vulcan raid on the Falklands
was one of those extraordinary grand gestures, like the
Doolittle Raid
on Japan, which cast a longer shadow in history than their direct
consequences implied. After the Vulcan raid, nobody doubted the resolve
of Britain, and the resulting drawback of the Argentine forces almost
certainly reduced the cost of retaking the islands from the invader.
May 2010 