What Beetham had hoped for when it was first broadcast that the V-force was being prepared to fight was delivered in spades. He wanted to create doubt in the minds of the junta about British intent and capability. Were the mainland bases under threat? Was Buenos Aires at risk? That doubt saw the immediate redeployment of Argentina’s entire Mirage fighter force to the north of the country, out of range of the Falklands, to defend targets that played no part in British plans. From this moment on, the tiny force of Royal Navy Sea Harrier air defence fighters aboard the two carriers, on which British hopes were pinned, had the odds dramatically cut in their favour. They were free to concentrate on tackling the threat of Argentine strike aircraft. The statistics speak for themselves: during the six weeks of the war, twenty-eight Fleet Air Arm Sea Harriers shot down twenty enemy aircraft plus three probables. Not a single Sea Harrier was lost in air-to-air combat.
But there was a third, unexpected, consequence of the raid, and one that’s never really been properly appreciated. The 1 May attack on Stanley airfield was, believed Admiral Lombardo, the Argentine Commander of Combined Operations, to be the prelude to a full-scale amphibious landing by the British. As a consequence, Admiral Allara, Commander of the Argentine Navy, was ordered to launch an immediate offensive against the British task force. It was a disastrous decision.
Two Argentine battle groups launched a pincer movement on British ships sailing 150 miles to the north-east of the islands. To the north, the Argentine carrier Veinticinco de Mayo was preparing her squadron of Skyhawk fighter-bombers to strike at the British task force. To the south, the cruiser General Belgrano and two destroyer escorts were to act as a decoy, drawing ships away from the main British fleet before picking them off with sea-skimming Exocet missiles fired from the two Type 42 destroyers.
On the afternoon of 2 May, the crew of HMS Conqueror enjoyed a lunch of roast lamb while they hovered unseen beneath the keel of the Belgrano. She’d been stalking the Argentine ship for a day and a half. At 18.57 Zulu, Commander Chris Wreford-Brown, the boat’s Captain, gave the order to fire three Mk 8 torpedoes at the old ex-US Navy cruiser – a survivor of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Two of the torpedoes struck and, within an hour, she had sunk. Of Belgrano’s complement of 1,042, 368 lost their lives in the freezing South Atlantic.
Aboard Roger Lane-Nott’s boat, HMS Splendid, the signal telling them of Conqueror’s attack was greeted with quiet satisfaction. The job of a hunter-killer submarine was a brutal one, but Splendid’s company recognized the effectiveness with which their sister-ship had carried out her work. For all his admiration for the skill with which Wreford-Brown had carried out his attack, though, Lane-Nott couldn’t help a feeling of intense professional envy. His own efforts had been frustrated. It should have been Splendid, he thought.
The morality and legality of the decision to attack the Belgrano have been hotly debated ever since, but in military terms it was decisive: the entire Argentine Navy, which simply had no answer to the threat posed by the British hunter-killer submarines, retreated to Argentine territorial waters and played no further part in the war.
As a direct consequence of decisions provoked by the raid on Stanley airfield, the Argentinians lost the use of both their air defence fighters and their Navy. And in a war fought 8,000 miles from home, the odds against a British victory were shortened.
Four further BLACK BUCK missions were flown. John Reeve and his crew got their chance on 3 May. Two raids were flown against Argentine radar installations by Neil McDougall and his crew, who, while Withers, Reeve and Monty were deployed to Ascension, had stayed at Waddington as American AGM-45 Shrike anti-radar missiles were hurriedly married to the Vulcan airframe by men with American accents who purported to be South African. On McDougall’s second mission his crew taunted and teased the Argentine defences to try to pull them on to the punch. They’d dropped into the Oerlikon kill zone around Stanley and dodged flak that zipped around the night sky like lethal fireflies. Then, having successfully fired back, they tested Monty’s suggestion that classified documents be thrown out of the crew hatch into the sea inside the ration tin when a broken probe forced them to divert to Rio’s Galeão International Airport. Saving the aircraft on that occasion demanded a brilliant piece of flying from McDougall that won him the Distinguished Flying Cross. Martin Withers flew one more mission, but Monty was destined always to be the bridesmaid. He launched in the reserve Vulcan four times, but, to his lasting regret, turned back for Ascension while the Primary continued south on each occasion.
All of the subsequent missions benefited from a completely revised refuelling plan, designed by Jerry Price and the Victor planning team to get as much as 30,000lb more fuel into the formation flying south. It was soon realized that on BLACK BUCK the Vulcan, flying at close to, and sometimes above, its maximum weight for much of the flight south and making continual small throttle adjustments to stay in formation, was burning nearly one and a half times the amount of fuel that Vulcan crews, over twenty years of training, had grown used to. There had, of necessity, been a degree of estimation in the fuel planning: there had simply been no figures available to refer to. On top of this, in order to stay in formation, neither the Victors nor the Vulcans were flying at their most fuel-efficient cruise height. Trying to force together the flight profiles of two such distinct types was an unhappy compromise. When strong headwinds led to the cancellation of a raid on 16 May, it only served to underline how little room for error even the revised plan carried.
In an ideal world, ‘One Bomb’ Beetham – as some who didn’t properly grasp the ambition or success of the raid had unfairly tagged him – would have liked to have put ten Vulcans over Stanley, but it couldn’t be done; the resources just weren’t there. His Air Force had done everything it said it would do and more – without BLACK BUCK, the war would have been harder to win. In the event, one bomber was enough.
And that bomber, the magnificent delta-winged Avro Vulcan, just months before it was destined for the scrapheap, entered the Guinness Book of Records for having flown, at nearly 8,000 miles, ‘the longest-range attack in air history’. Despite the eventual Argentine surrender on 14 June, the Vulcans soldiered on as bombers with 44 Squadron under Simon Baldwin until December 1982 – given a stay of execution as a contingency against further Argentine aggression. Had they retired in July as planned, nothing else in the RAF could have done the job. On 8 November 1982, in conditions of great secrecy, one of Strike Command’s recently acquired Panavia Tornado GR1s, accompanied by a Buccaneer S2, took part in exercise STORM TRAIL. The aim was to demonstrate the offensive reach of the new strike jet by staging a mock attack on RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus from the UK. The Tornado took off from RAF Marham. Strict conditions on the air-to-air refuelling were put in place – not above 28,000 feet and not in cloud – because the Tornado’s anti-icing systems weren’t yet fully operational. Both limits had to be busted in order for the mission to succeed. At times, the Tornado, always asthmatic at altitude, had to rely on the Victor tankers supporting the mission to shepherd it along. It made it there and back, though. Just. But the Tornado’s warload on STORM TRAIL was a tiny fraction of that carried by Vulcans on the BLACK BUCK missions; the distance from the UK to Cyprus, barely 2,000 miles.