From 41,000 feet, Bob Wright picked up Ascension on his radar and placed his markers over the airfield. Withers checked his heading indicator and gently corrected his heading. Gordon Graham called Top of Descent and Withers pulled back on the throttles to put the jet into a long shallow descent to the island. It was a clear day and Withers and Russell saw Ascension from miles out. As Withers settled on to his glide path, he noticed the ring of cloud that hung around Green Mountain. Lovely, he thought. At five miles out he lowered the undercarriage. Dick Russell called out the speeds.
On the concrete dispersal at Wideawake, the crowd squinted into the blue sky, watching to the west as 607’s distinctive shape dropped towards them, smearing oily smoke behind her. Near her wingtips, white landing lights twinkled brightly. Below her, the main gear extended down out of the dark silhouette, reaching for the ground like the talons of an eagle.
Two One, finals. Three greens. To land, announced Withers over the RT as 607 covered the last few hundred yards of her long journey.
Ahead of him, above low cliffs lapped by a gentle swell, he saw the long runway stretch away towards a vanishing point. To his left, the white buildings of Georgetown stood out from the red earth that surrounded them. Beyond the capital, the golden sand of Long Beach lined the coast. The edge of the island flashed underneath them and a moment later they crossed the runway threshold at around 130 knots. Withers cut the power and checked the jet’s descent with a touch of backward pressure on the stick. Fifteen hours and forty-five minutes after she’d roared into the night, 607 touched down again. With a squawk and puff of burnt rubber, the main wheels kissed the Tarmac before the full weight of the bomber settled heavily on to the hydraulic oleos of the undercarriage legs. Withers held the nose up, showing the face of the delta to slow the jet down. Gordon Graham called out the speeds. 120… 110… 100…
At 80 knots, Withers brought the nose down on to the track and pushed the toe-pedals to apply the brakes. Speed bled off fast. They rolled to the end of the runway, backtracked and taxied to the pan, where their Crew Chief plugged back into the intercom. Pete Taylor reached across from the jump seat and pulled the handle to open the crew hatch. The familiar call and response of the shutdown checks echoed around the cabin, while at his feet the ground crew attached the ladder.
Transformers off… TRUs off… HP cocks… Fuel pumps off.
Outside, the whistling bellow of the Olympus engines wound down abruptly as if the plug had been pulled on a giant vacuum cleaner.
External lighting off, master off. The six men gathered their thoughts.
Canopy and ejection seats are safe. Time to meet their audience.
Through the open hatch, Taylor looked down on a sea of people urging him to join them. But he didn’t want to be the one to lead the crew out of the cockpit. As they waved and jostled for position, Taylor shouted down from the jumpseat.
‘Wait!’ he told them. ‘Martin’s coming down first.’
Withers clambered out of his ejection seat and down the yellow ladder to the ground, his thin hair matted to his scalp after sixteen hours under the cloth flying cap. Straightaway, surrounded by excited, friendly faces, he was handed a drink – champagne – eleven hours later than he’d expected one as he launched from Ascension the night before. Then Monty caught his eye and the look told him he’d done good. Amid cheers and clapping, the rest of the crew followed him out: Gordon Graham, Hugh Prior, Pete Taylor, Bob Wright and Dick Russell. All of them with wide grins across their faces. Wright glanced up at the bomb bay, opened during the shut-down sequence. He knew what to expect, but he was still struck by the sight of it. Nothing. All that was left was a bag of safety pins and nowhere to put them. Someone, he thought, would know what to do with the paperwork.
Eventually Tux managed to fight his way through the scrum to offer Withers a beer. He tried to steal a moment with him.
‘Well done,’ Tux told him, ‘you did the job.’
But the bomber pilot seemed overwhelmed; didn’t recognize him. While Withers acknowledged the gesture, there was no sign that he realized Tux was anyone but another well-wisher. And if he had recognized him, his reaction might have been cool. Withers still felt let down by the long-slot tanker. All he knew at this point was that its captain had left him very short of fuel, a very long way from home.
Tuxford and Beer hung around for a little while longer before leaving the happy circus to go and get their heads down at last.
They had needed one Nimrod, two Vulcans, thirteen Victors, nineteen separate in-flight refuellings, forty take-offs and landings, forty-two 1,000lb bombs, ninety aircrew and over 1.5 million pounds of aviation fuel, but BLACK BUCK, the most ambitious and complex offensive operation the RAF had mounted since the end of the Second World War, was over.
At Waddington, long after 607 had come to her final stop, John Laycock finally received his copy of the Operation Order. Typical, he thought, affording himself a contented smile, must have arrived by pony…
And on the outside of the Vulcan detachment’s crew clothing and equipment tent, they now had a legend to match the ‘Victor Battle Fleet’ board that stood propped up outside the Victor’s tent. ‘VULCANS’, it soon read in big letters chalked up on the green canvas, ‘DO IT FOR REAL’.
Chapter 44
At the raid’s successful conclusion, George Chesworth spoke to Air Commander Sir John Curtiss on the line from Northwood.
‘Right, Chief of Staff,’ Curtiss began, ‘I want the same again for tonight!’
Satisfied with the outcome, and unaware of how fine the margins had been, it seemed a reasonable enough demand to Curtiss. But Chesworth, who’d been witness to just how close run a thing it had been, who’d endured the valve-bouncing tension of the Ops tent, knew it simply couldn’t be done. The crews were spent, the aircraft needed servicing and, most important of all, they needed to establish exactly how and why such a carefully worked out refuelling plan had gone so wrong.
‘No way, sir,’ he told his boss.
‘What do you mean “no way”? I want the same again for tonight!’ insisted the gruff New Zealander.
‘We can’t do it because we haven’t got the aeroplanes, we haven’t got the crews and, more importantly, you don’t realize just how close it was. We don’t know why what happened did happen.’
Curtiss wasn’t at all happy, but the conversation did allow him to pass on a reaction from the Prime Minister to the success of the first raid. Chesworth conveyed it to the Vulcan crew as they endured their hot-debriefing.
‘She is very pleased,’ he was able to tell them.
Margaret Thatcher had heard news of the raid’s success while eating breakfast. Well versed in its difficulty following her briefings by Sir Michael Beetham, she believed that the effort had been ‘stupendous’. As Home Secretary and a member of the War Cabinet, Willie Whitelaw happily acknowledged to Beetham over lunch the following day at Chequers that the RAF had done exactly what it said it would do. The Chief of the Air Staff recorded his satisfaction in his diary.
‘A GREAT DAY FOR THE AIR FORCE!’ he wrote.
In purely physical terms, the damage to the runway was substantial – this was the stated aim. At the runway’s midpoint, the southern third of its 130-foot width had been obliterated. The full extent of the damage was later measured by JARIC at 115 feet across and 84 feet deep, and although it was hastily filled, the repair was botched and the patched-up surface never stopped subsiding. The crater put an end to any remaining hopes Argentine forces had of using the runway for their fast jets. And while Hercules transports continued to use the strip until the end of the war, the damage complicated their task to the extent that, on one occasion, one of the big transports nearly crashed on take-off. To the raid’s critics this seemed a miserly reward for the effort involved, but their reaction entirely ignores the strategic impact of the raid. And it was considerable. BLACK BUCK was directly responsible for creating circumstances in which the British could win the war. On the Falkland Islands themselves, the bombs shook the occupying Argentinians to the core. A predominantly conscript invasion force around Stanley had viewed the taking of the islands in much the same way as they would the Argentine football team being 2–0 up at half-time. For them, the game was in the bag. They’d been told over and over again that the British would not retake them by force. At just before a quarter to five in the morning on 1 May, their morale took a hammer blow.