Just over five long seconds after the first bomb fell, Bob Wright’s bomb counter finally clicked on to twenty-one and an amber light to his side flicked on.
‘Bombs gone,’ he called and immediately flicked the switch to close the bomb bay. Without waiting for the doors to shut on the empty bomb bay Martin Withers pushed the throttle levers all the way to the gate and poured on the power. The four Olympus engines assaulted the night with 80,000lb of dry thrust as they drove the jet forward. Withers pulled the stick across to his left and the big delta bit into a 60-degree bank to the left. Lighter now than at any time since leaving Waddington, she felt agile and responsive again. As he wound her round in a steep 2g turn, the whole crew was pushed deep into their seats. After the insidious, consuming uncertainty about what would await them at the end of their journey south, Withers felt an overwhelming sense of relief as he turned away from Stanley. Away from the wasps’ nest of Argentine anti-aircraft defences. And away from the Roland missile battery that, still waiting for confirmation that the Vulcan was even hostile, was yet to join the battle. But there was still nearly half a minute to go until 607 would once more be outside their reach, beyond the kill zone.
From the right-hand seat, Pete Taylor looked across his Captain towards the ground. As Withers held the bomber in the turn, careful to control any sideslip with his rudder pedals, Taylor once again caught sight of Stanley’s lights about seven miles to the west. Then three miles closer, he saw the milky, cotton wool shapes of the clouds around the airfield flare like cumulus in an electrical storm as, eighteen seconds after it had left the Vulcan, the first thousand-pounder bored deep into the centre of the runway and detonated. At the Nav Radar’s station behind him, Bob Wright felt the distant crump of the bombs resonate through the skin of the bomber as it turned.
A plug of Tarmac, concrete and hardcore over sixty feet wide and half as deep was vaporized by the explosion as the earth below was heaved over the lip of the new crater. One hundred feet on and a quarter of a second later, the next bomb hit the ground, gouging out and destroying another superheated chunk of the airfield’s surface. From the epicentre of each blast, shockwaves struck out in concentric rings. From the supersonic heart of each blast, steep walls of pressure, density and temperature were thrown out, driven from behind like the bow-wave of a super tanker. But these invisible, unstoppable, waves of boiling overpressure pushed out from the blast at the speed of sound. Huge kinetic energy turned to heat as they swept irresistibly across the flat ground against the still night air. The delay by the GADA 601 AN/TPS-43 operators in confirming the identity of the British intruder meant that when the first bomb exploded on the runway, it did so utterly without warning. Major Alberto Iannariello had been sitting in an armchair in the control tower, lost in his thoughts, when the deafening explosion ripped him out of his reverie. Almost instantaneously, a scorching red pressure wave swept violently into the building, punching out the windows and shaking the walls to their foundations. Iannariello was thrown from his chair and passed out. The rest of the stick of thousand-pounders slammed into the ground, opening up a line of wreckage that walked relentlessly across the airfield. For five seconds one heavy, percussive boom followed another, the massive sound of each explosion running into the next.
Angry, billowing clouds of heat and shrapnel rolled across the exposed airfield, mauling anything in their path. The hangar was flayed, stripped of its corrugated iron walls. Stores and equipment were smashed. And vehicles and machinery caught in the path of the fierce ripples of overpressure lost their hydraulic systems, their fluid-filled pipes bursting under the intensity of kinetic energy pulsing through the air. Only the effective dispersal of accommodation, combustibles and ammunition by Major Héctor Rusticinni protected some of the airfield’s most vital assets.
Rusticinni himself had been asleep on the floor of his shelter as the bombs hammered into the ground. Close to the explosions, the terrible noise was overwhelming. He was pitched into the air, stunned awake with the rest of the men in the hideout. With each successive eruption, they were tumbled and churned together, all of them alarmed, confused and frightened by the sudden, unknown force of the attack.
And inside the foxholes sheltering the conscripts, the sound of screaming augmented the thunderous noise from the British bombs. Some screamed because they’d been told to. These unfortunates had been taught, at the first sign of bombardment, to open their mouths and yell at the top of their voices to protect their hearing. Yet still their eardrums felt like they would rupture. Those that forgot their training cried out through fear.
Sitting in his living room with a cup of tea, John Fowler noticed that his fire was dying out. He got up and bent over it with a poker. As he jabbed at the glowing peat, the ground-shaking noise from 607’s stick of bombs shook the house. Desperately unsettled, he began to work out that it had come from the direction of the airport, and he knew that war had arrived.
The first explosion came almost as a relief to Elizabeth Goss – an end to the agonizing tension of anticipation that had followed the sound of the Vulcan’s engines. She lay still as the hollow, heavy crump, crump, crump of the bombs rolled across the harbour to Stanley. The house rattled in the dark. And still her husband didn’t stir.
Joe King leapt out of bed as the sound and shock first reverberated through Stanley. He rushed to the east window of the first-floor bedroom to try to see what was going on.
‘What is it?’ his wife asked urgently.
‘I can’t see. There’s an awful lot of noise, but I can’t see anything. Either somebody’s bombing the airport or something’s exploded down there.’
Then the force of the pressure wave slammed shut the window and King jumped back from it. As he stumbled, the old pyjamas he’d taken to wearing while he and his wife housed so many guests slipped down around his ankles.
‘Look at that,’ he said, turning back to his wife, ‘they’ve blown my pyjamas off!’
Across town, other islanders were also woken abruptly from their sleep and, as they shook themselves awake, confusion and panic gave way to smiles as they began to realize that the boomboomboomboom from the airport meant that the British were fighting back. Peter Biggs tried to reassure his wife Fran, explaining to her what he thought was happening. Then he heard the crisper, machine-gun rattle of the flak crackle through the night.
Alberto Iannariello was underneath his armchair when he regained consciousness. He could hear the sound of a man in pain from the ground floor. Iannariello freed himself, grabbed his helmet and rifle and ran down two flights of stairs towards the baggage-handling area. At the foot of the stairs he found Captain Dovichi, his face pale and strained from the agony of a badly injured back. Iannariello continued outside to witness scenes of carnage and chaos. Soldiers and airmen were running around without apparent purpose. Wounded, shell-shocked men staggered or lay moaning. And three men were already dead. This, he thought, is our baptism of fire.
As he looked across the shattered airfield, the muzzles of the anti-aircraft guns flashed red, illuminating their immediate surroundings, as they spat out ammunition at over 500 rounds per minute. Tracer streaked into the air accompanied by the furious clatter from the gun barrels. Hundreds of high-explosive shells pumped into the air, each blown into the sky from the Oerlikon and Rheinmetall cannons at over 3,000 feet per second, lashing out at their unseen attacker. Behind him from south of the airfield, Iannariello saw surface-to-air missiles explode into the sky, burning white-orange through the dark in hopeful pursuit.