The entire Vulcan force came under the command of the RAF’s 1 Group, which in turn reported to Strike Command. The Air Officer Commanding, or AOC 1 Group, was Air Vice-Marshal Michael Knight. A no-nonsense, popular figure, the ruddy-faced Knight had split loyalties. He loved the Air Force, but he also loved rugby. Today, though, he was able to combine the two. As one of two RAF members of the RFU committee he was going to watch the RAF play the Army at Twickenham. He was looking forward to it. After the game he planned to drive straight on to north Devon on leave. Driving south from HQ 1 Group at RAF Bawtry in Lincolnshire, he tuned into the parliamentary debate on the car radio. As the debate raged, he realized that he wouldn’t be going any further than Twickenham.
On South Georgia, Lieutenant Keith Mills weighed up his options. For the last two and a half hours his outgunned contingent of twenty-two Royal Marines had held King Edward’s Point. They’d mined the beach, dug defensive trenches and kept their attackers at bay, but without heavier weaponry there was little more they could do. While they rattled machine-gun fire at their attackers, 100mm high-explosive shells whistled in on a flat trajectory from the Argentine frigate Guerrico. They were beginning to find their range and only one needed to be accurate to potentially decimate the small British force. Behind them, cutting off their escape route, Argentine commandos were already ashore. One of Mills’s men had already taken two bullets in the arm. If they fought on, the casualty list was sure to grow. Then there was the safety of the British Antarctic Survey scientists to consider. The twenty-two-year-old officer had made up his mind.
‘That’s it. We’ve made our point, that’s enough. I’ve decided to surrender. Does anyone have any violent objection?’ No one spoke. But forced to give themselves up after the one-sided contest for Grytviken, Mills’s men had, at least, made the enemy’s eyes water. They’d brought down a troop-carrying Puma helicopter and blown a hole in the side of the frigate Guerrico with a Carl Gustav anti-tank missile as well as peppering her with 1,275 rounds of small-arms fire. But the Argentine flag now flew above the island that had been the trigger for it all. The Argentinians now had their Georgias del Sur, a place even the commander of the Argentine soldiers on the island, Teniente de Navio Alfredo Astiz, regarded as ‘the end of the world’.
By the end of the day, the only piece of good news for Britain was winning Security Council Resolution 502 at the UN. Pushed through quickly, it demanded the immediate withdrawal of all Argentine forces from the Falkland Islands.
In Argentina, people crowded the streets of Buenos Aires to celebrate the nation’s triumph. There hadn’t been scenes of euphoria like this since Argentina had won the World Cup in 1978. The country’s new hero, General Leopoldo Galtieri, drank up the adulation from the balcony of the presidential palace. The country’s delicate economic position, the brutal repression of the previous week’s anti-junta demonstrations, the ‘disappeared’ – all had, for the moment, been put to one side. A withdrawal was the last thing on Galtieri’s mind.
Chapter 8
By Sunday, as men and stores poured into the Navy’s dockyards on the south coast, Sir Michael Beetham was reorganizing the RAF for war. First he delegated the day-to-day running of the Air Force to his Vice-Chief of the Air Staff, Air Marshal Sir David Craig. Beetham, with his right-hand man, Air Vice-Marshal Ken Hayr, was now free to focus exclusively on the role the Air Force could play in the coming war. Next, he needed to ensure that the RAF had some influence at an operational level. In 1982, each of the services was run in almost total isolation from the others and Operation CORPORATE, the codename assigned to the campaign to retake the Falklands, was still primarily a naval affair. Air power in theatre would be the preserve of the Navy’s Fleet Air Arm and any effort on the RAF’s part to muscle in on that would, he knew, be resisted. The solution lay at Northwood. In the 1960s office block above the underground NATO facility, Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse, Commander-in-Chief of the British Fleet, had an office next door to Air Marshal Sir John Curtiss, George Chesworth’s boss at 18 Group. The two men enjoyed a strong rapport. The gales of laughter that often came out of the Admiral’s office during the pair’s daily morning meeting set the tone for effective cooperation throughout the entire campaign. Northwood was the only place in the country where the RAF and Navy were so closely harmonized. There was genuine synergy.
The blunt, uncompromising Curtiss was a veteran of Bomber Command in the Second World War, and his forty-year career had also provided him with fighter and transport experience. When Admiral Fieldhouse was given command of the CORPORATE Task Force, Curtiss became his Air Commander.
Inside Northwood, Curtiss was at the heart of the decision-making, effectively reporting straight to Beetham, with whom he began to talk daily. Curtiss had never worked directly with Beetham before but, under huge pressure, the two men established a new, sometimes fiery, relationship. While Curtiss got to grips with his new role, though, the Chief of the Air Staff was always supportive, and insistent that Curtiss fight the Air Force’s corner.
In order to streamline the chain of command further, Beetham effectively cut Curtiss’s own superior at Strike Command, Air Chief Marshal Sir Keith Williamson, out of the loop. Curtiss took responsibility for all RAF assets involved in the campaign and communicated his needs directly to the Group AOCs, like his counterpart at 1 Group, Air Vice-Marshal Mike Knight, to a great extent bypassing Strike Command altogether.
As AOC 18 Group, Curtiss knew that he couldn’t use his long-range Nimrods further than 1,200 miles south of Ascension. The Falkland Islands were another 2,500 miles or so beyond that. The problem he faced was what, exactly, the RAF was going to be able to do 8,000 miles from home.
In the MoD building in Whitehall, Beetham and Hayr were wrestling with the same issue. The C-130s and VC10s of the transport fleet were already establishing ‘the motorway’ to Ascension. Hayr, his own flying background on Harriers, also saw the potential for the RAF Harrier GR3 fleet to fly from the Navy’s carriers to reinforce the Fleet Air Arm’s handful of Sea Harrier FRS1s. It had never been done before, but it seemed feasible. The maritime Nimrods of the ‘Kipper Fleet’ were placed on alert, as were their intelligence-gathering cousins, the Nimrod R1s of 51 Squadron, a force shrouded in secrecy. Beetham and Hayr asked their staff to look at other options. The answers weren’t encouraging. The Blackburn Buccaneer S2s, the RAF’s low-level strike specialists, didn’t carry enough engine oil for such an extraordinarily long mission. The all-singing, all dancing Panavia Tornado GR1 on which the RAF pinned its future had only been in squadron service for a matter of weeks. Despite Beetham’s enthusiasm for the new strike jet – he’d recently been quoted in a manufacturer’s advertisement claiming ‘it’s a real pilot’s plane’ – it was simply too new and unproven to even be contemplated. Faced with such limited choices, Beetham considered the assets available to him and began making connections. The seed of a plan was forming.