Rowland White - Vulcan 607

London: Corgi, 2007

Why is this book on the bedroom floor?: From time to time I get a bit of a yearning to read about laddish things and stuff that explodes. I also like reading about British social history, so when I came across this in Banardos’ for 75p I snaffled it, sandwiched between an Iris Murdoch novel and the complete plays of Alan Ayckbourn.

About the Author: A publishing director of some reknown, Rowland White is a self-confessed aviation nut and regular author of accessible works on the subject. This book was his first and he’s working on a project about the Space Shuttle as I type, which at least puts him ahead of NASA.

Plot: It’s 1982. Argentina’s military junta has invaded the Falkland Islands and South Georgia, and immediately the United Kingdom has hit back by lobbing a task force their way. But in the meantime, a crazy plan involving an obsolete bomber force and an eight thousand mile round-trip is conceived, and if successful will change the balance of air superiority in the South Atlantic. This book will take you along for that flight.

Review: If the Korean conflict of 1950-53 is called The Forgotten War, would it be fair to refer to the Falklands as The Misunderstood War? At this remove, it’s usual to frame what happened as a case of men against literal boys; of a wronged and vengeful power against a corrupt and overstretched junta. We do not tend to venerate veterans of the Falklands War as we lionise those who fought in the trenches or to push back a Fascist tide, though there are no clear reasons for this. Maybe it was because it happened eight thousand miles away and took a couple of months to play out, using still photography and sober commentary by untelegenic civil servants.

No matter that it’s claimed more British Falklands vets have committed suicide than died in the conflict itself. No matter the most public face of the war is scorched and stretched beyond its natural limits, having been rebuilt since the inferno aboard the Sir Galahad. No matter that we knew as far back as 1982 that the British had consigned over three hundred sailors to their deaths outside of an exclusion zone. The story of the Falklands War is generally one of professional and pious glory for the faded British Empire: an improbable amphibious landing by a cut-to-the-bone armed forces to reclaim a piece of the kingdom from a murderous dictatorship. As with so much in life, how you view it depends very much on how well it worked out for you.

For Britain, it’s claimed that the Falklands War gave Margaret Thatcher’s wobbling government an unexpected and unbeatable boost at the polls. There have been revisions to the theories since then, but it can't be denied that before proceedings in Spring 1982, the Iron Lady’s leadership was steadily rusting, her government having overseen a climb in the unemployment rate to 3 million, a loss to striking coal miners and a decline in industry. Biting cuts to public spending and racial tension contributed to urban riots in 1981, and if the UK had been the Sick Man of Europe under Labour, then the loss of the Falklands confirmed the diagnosis as terminal.

In Argentina, an invasion of Las Malvinas had been a rallying call which could detract from General Leopoldo Galtieri’s repression and extrajudicial killings. But in its way, the invasion cured the United Kingdom of its own malaise. Thanks to this limited conflict half a world away, Britain and its indefatigable leader flexed its muscles and set out to prove that we never shall be enslaved: we could motivate ourselves and show Johnny Foreigner who was boss. In every kind of metaphorical sense all the UK needed to do was dust itself down and remember its worth: we could create work where there was none; we could be on the winning side against the red wall; we could save the world, if we really wanted to.

At the time of the Falklands, Britain was preparing to become home to over one hundred Cruise and Pershing nuclear missiles, part of the US first strike chain to counter the Soviet threat. But although manned manouvres were practised regularly in West Germany and other NATO aligned countries, the tendency towards conflict at that time was fully nuclear. After the Cold War was over, we found out about Able Archer and Stanislav Petrov, and how close the world had come to midnight. But Britain’s tight weld to US interests was a factor in the Falklands; sensing a weakening in financial and military commitment to their South Atlantic territories, a theoretical Argentine plan to establish a bulwark on East Falkland escalated, with Admiral Jorge Anaya committing to a full scale invasion before winter set in and the British lost their nerve.

As we now know, Margaret Thatcher’s instinct to reclaim the islands (coloured by a stirring speech from Admiral Sir Henry Leach, Chief of the Defence Staff) set in motion an unprecedented and barely credible plan to retake the islands by amphibious assault, with each service vying to tip the spear. As it was, the Royal Air Force initially found itself relegated to transportation duties, with distance from the Task Force the overriding factor.

This was particularly acute for the V bomber force, whose primary missions were to maintain a watchful eye on the Soviet air threat to Britain and the North Sea. Previously the height of modernity, the V Force, consisting of Handley Page Victors and the beautiful delta winged Avro Vulcans, were by 1982 creaking, anachronistic machines, stuffed with mechanical relays and Bakelite crew consoles. Months away from being scrapped entirely, the thought was that their crews would be sat on their hands, running through their mundane drills and watching the news like everybody else.

That was until Air Chief Marshal Sir Michael Beetham hatched a bold, brilliant and completely crackpot plan, which came to be known as the Black Buck missions. And this is where Vulcan 607 takes up the story.

Even with the kind of logistics which would be sailing into hostile waters, the British Task Force would need a staging post, and had one in the form of the mid-Atlantic outcrop of Ascension Island. Three thousand miles from home, and three thousand miles from there, the idea was that a repurposed Vulcan could take out Port Stanley Airport with a stick of high explosives, removing an immediate aerial threat from the theatre of war and granting the British dominance of the skies.

However, this was easier said than done. To bring a bomber across that length of water for an attack lasting less than a minute would take precision calculation of a highly complicated refuelling relay, in-flight, in darkness and from multiple Victors. Add to this the complication that Vulcan pilots had not undertaken in-flight refuelling in years (there was simply no need once Britain’s chief nuclear threat went beneath the seas) and their crews were better suited to low level bombing, putting them well under the effective ceiling of the Argentine anti-aircraft threat, and the scale of the challenge quickly begins to get vertical.

Vulcan 607 tells the story of this epic mission, by turns fantastical, staggering and downright ridiculous. By any measure the plan was so intricate and yet so riddled with points of failure that by any estimation it should have been nowhere near successful. The fact that it was (spoiler alert, although it was nearly forty years ago) is a testament to all the people that made it happen, sometimes through blind stubbornness more than courage and application. It’s probably also in large part down to people long since dead or retired, who designed and built such iconic and yet individual machines which were just as likely to stay in the air on fumes as they were to fail on full tanks.

And in part the story told in Vulcan 607 is about personalities: hotheaded and mercurial John Reeve, who was to have led the bombing mission before his Vulcan lost cabin pressure thanks to a perished window seal; Wing Commander Simon Baldwin, a pipe smoking Forties throwback; Bob Wright, the Nav Radar operator whose career had stalled during bombing runs. But perhaps the central character is to be found literally at the head of the attack - Captain Martin Withers, the pilot whose plane and crew stepped into Reeve’s breach. Seemingly a dedicated, professional airman, Withers is painted as a quiet, calm centre of the mission. Of all the people involved in the initial Black Buck raid, Rowland White spends more time fleshing out the picture of 607’s captain than anybody else, and it helps to anchor a runaway story of heroism and technical detail. It’s a wise decision, since ultimately Withers had responsibility for a number of sliding doors moments, not least the moral quandry of dropping bombs and possibly killing a high number of people.

It would be easy for a story like this to be more about the heavy machinery than the humanity. White clearly has a fanboy’s love for the fine details (if he’s not read and re-read Len Deighton’s Bomber regularly, I’d be astounded), and in that respect he knows his target audience. From the softly lit Vulcan on the book’s front cover to the epilogue, involving a dangerous freefall landing in Rio de Janeiro, Vulcan 607 is a delicious treat for the Airfix generation, at times becoming like a succession of Top Trump cards based around the conflict. Swiss-made Superfeldermaus anti-aircraft batteries, nuclear submarines, Exocet missiles and bombing runs all get excitedly highlighted in White’s charged prose: lightning punches holes in fuselage; radar warnings buzz like malevolent insects; superheated chunks of runway blast their way into the sky.

But to his credit Rowland White does his best to ride the knife-edge all the way and what the consequences might have been if a few more doors had not been dashed through. The final refuel in the middle of a thunderstorm is a fantastic moment of tension in what turned out to be a straightforward and successful raid. This is no fictional crisis that can only be solved by an impossible hero, and White skilfully mixes the personal and the technical to keep the report moving forward. It’s no surprise that once the bomb bay doors have closed, Vulcan 607 trails off somewhat, despite the nervous wait to join up with a circling tanker plane to enable the crew to touch back down on Ascension.

What I particularly enjoyed were the little details which seem like they could have only originated via the British military. After decades of being plugged with putty, the Vulcan’s refuelling pipes were cleared, only for it to become obvious that the fittings which pressurised the system were missing. A thorough search turned one such fitting up in the groundcrew room, where it had been used as an ashtray. This is another reason why Vulcan 607 works: it has a modest, garden shed quality which helps the drama.

But on the other side of that same coin, Vulcan 607 bathes itself in the musk of Britishness, and its unmistakable scent is endemic to the way the Falklands War is reported now. We won, they lost and that’s the way it was always going to be, and almost four decades on it’s hard to imagine proceedings will ever be reframed as one of political capital and wasted youth.

It would be unfair to wholly judge Vulcan 607 as triumphalist propaganda, because the mission’s success and the undeniable drama of the story comes without caveats; there was no call for posthumous Victoria Crosses or re-enactments by Colin Firth. This is a Boy’s Own adventure, a binary us-against-them-but-also-against-all-odds win for the home team. As such, you can’t blame Rowland White for its breathlessness. But there are elements of unnecessary red white and blue colour, such as the resourceful Stanley air traffic controller John Smith spying on the dastardly Argies, or the ten year old Laura Vidal, harrowed and terrified by the occupation, waiting and hoping for deliverance. It seems somewhat churlish to expect a book of this nature to read like a long-form Victor comic and also to wring its hands, but if you want a political history of the Falklands War, there are plenty of other books out there. Vulcan 607 works best above the clouds.

I very much enjoyed Vulcan 607. Its combination of research and pace keeps you hooked throughout what is a fairly hefty book. You see a great many of these kinds of stories in discount bookshops (machinery on the cover, embossed title in huge capitals, guff about it being thrilling or extraordinary) but Vulcan 607 wins by trailing hardly any weight. Much like the Black Buck mission, it was meticulously planned, somehow conspires to keep the capacity to surprise and then gets the hell out before it crashes. However, there is a warning: Jeremy Clarkson claims on my copy that the book could have been written for him. So, y’know, what that says about you, him, Vulcan 607 and the British psyche is up for debate.

Will this book stay on the bedroom floor?: I’ve already passed it on to my dad. So it’s still cluttering up a bedroom floor, but at least it’s not mine.