For his flight into the unknown, Martin Withers was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross while his crew were Mentioned in Dispatches. Withers’ citation recorded that he had displayed qualities of ‘leadership, determination and presence of mind which were an inspiration to his crew’. He took them with him to London when he was presented with his medal.
For his part, Bob Tuxford was awarded the Air Force Cross – his crew all received the Queen’s Commendation for Valuable Service in the Air. Tux also received a personal letter from Sir Michael Beetham congratulating him on his ‘epic flight’.
Shortly after the end of hostilities, Tuxford’s wife Eileen was at home alone watching a documentary about the Falklands War on television when the telephone rang. She picked up and a voice she didn’t recognize introduced himself as Martin Withers’ father. He’d been watching the same programme and had felt moved to say something.
‘If it hadn’t been for your husband’s AFC,’ he told her, ‘my son wouldn’t have got his DFC.’
On Ascension Island the day after the raid, when its fragile tapestry had become apparent to all involved, Bob Tuxford was enjoying a drink with Beer, Keable, Rees and Wallis in the American commissary. The group looked up to see Martin Withers’ Vulcan crew crossing the noisy bar to join them. Withers was carrying a tray of beers which he set down on the table and pushed towards Tuxford.
‘Well done, guys,’ Withers said, ‘and thank you.’ It didn’t need much more than that.
Epilogue
The Old Lags
The raid had three advantages, really. The first advantage was to give the people at that time a little fillip. The news had been all bad until then. The second advantage was to cause the Japanese to worry and feel that they were vulnerable, and the third and most useful part of the raid was that it caused a diversion of aircraft and equipment to the defense of the home islands which the Japanese badly needed in the theaters where the war was actually being fought.
At just after nine o’clock in the evening on 1 May 1982, television audiences around Britain tuned in to BBC1 to watch the big hair and shoulderpads of a new American drama called Dynasty. As they settled into their sofas, in London over 700 veterans of the Second World War gathered under the heavy chandeliers of the Grosvenor House ballroom for the annual Bomber Command Association dinner. Every year since 1977, they’d met at the Park Lane hotel to keep alive the memory of their wartime contribution. Some had attended a memorial service earlier in the day at the Royal Air Force church of St Clement Danes at the eastern end of the Strand, but most had come to the capital especially for the evening’s reunion. They’d been well fed and watered when Air Chief Marshal Sir Michael Beetham rose from his chair to reply to the toast on behalf of the Royal Air Force. As a Bomber Command veteran himself he was one of them and that, at any other time, would have been enough to guarantee a warm reception. Today, though, just a few hours earlier, Flight Lieutenant Martin Withers had shut down the engines of his Vulcan bomber on a remote airfield in the mid-Atlantic after completing an epic mission ordered by Beetham himself. The RAF strategic bomber force had been in action again and that event held a significance in this company that it could hold nowhere else. Some of the audience had gone on, after the war, to fly the Vulcans and Victors of the V-force. One or two of the names of the men who’d taken part in BLACK BUCK might even have been familiar to them. Beetham felt at home and spoke with pride on the day of another extraordinary RAF achievement.
And yet the veterans’ most enthusiastic reaction was reserved for someone else. The room fell silent as the Guest of Honour, wearing thick, black-rimmed spectacles, rose to speak. Although ninety years old and reliant on a pair of hearing aids, Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris remained a pungent, witty after-dinner speaker. And ‘Old Butch’, as he was known to his crews, was adored by them. They shared with him the hurt that came from knowing their role in Hitler’s defeat had not been properly recognized by their country. Indeed, it seemed sometimes that she was almost ashamed of what they had done. Harris spoke for twenty minutes without notes, captivating an audience that hung on his every word and afterwards sat late into the night, finding time for all who asked for it. Stung into silence by the controversy surrounding his wartime bombing campaign he had only recently begun to talk of it again, mainly because of the encouragement of the veterans. He was profoundly moved by the affection shown to him by his ‘old lags’. Sir Michael Beetham felt privileged to have become friendly with Harris in his years as Chief of the Air Staff. The two men sat next to each other at dinner. But Harris was not the only legendary wartime leader in attendance. Another honoured guest was the 86-year-old Lieutenant General James H. Doolittle, Commander of the US 8th Air Force and Harris’s American counterpart towards the end of the war. ‘Bert’ Harris counted Doolittle as one of the closest of his friends. And his presence today had a particular resonance.
In April 1942, Doolittle had led an ultra-long-range raid on Tokyo that marked the beginning of America’s response to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. For a while, America had been powerless to respond to the unexpected attack on her Hawaiian naval base. But the audacity and ingenuity of Doolittle’s B-25 strike on Tokyo had shaken the Japanese. Ironically, one of those who appreciated the impact of the ‘Doolittle Raid’ was the then Argentine commercial attaché to Japan.
‘It caught the Japs by surprise,’ he reported, ‘their unbounded confidence began to crack.’
Forty years on, the RAF’s similarly unexpected raid had just had a comparable effect on his own countrymen – a fact not lost on Doolittle and his companions at the Grosvenor House dinner. As they discussed the Vulcan raid, Sir Michael Beetham was gratified by Harris’s approval. The old man was delighted with news of the bomber’s success.
‘We can’t be kicked around without retaliating,’ Harris said, reflecting on the decision to take out the runway. ‘I would have done exactly that.’ He went on, warming to his theme: the air-crews involved in BLACK BUCK, he was in no doubt, were of ‘the same breed’ as those he used to command.
Harris’s only note of criticism was appropriate given the name by which he was now best known. Ideally, he said, he might have liked to use heavier bombs; make bigger craters. But, as he had the grace to acknowledge, ‘it is an awfully long way to carry them’.