‘Sorry about the army,’ he told his father, ‘I want to be a fighter pilot and fly one of those!’ He joined the Air Force a year later, but by then the RAF needed bomber pilots. And in the winter of 1943 he was posted to 50 Squadron to fly Lancasters.
His squadron’s next target had been Berlin. Beetham’s crew weren’t on the list to go. His Squadron Commander took him aside and told him he felt that such a heavily defended target might be too much on his first-ever raid. The next night, though, their names were on the list. And the target was again Berlin. ‘We’re going to be going to Berlin a lot,’ the CO told him. ‘I can’t hold you back any more.’ Beetham went on to fly thirty missions over Germany. Ten of them were over Berlin, but it was Augsburg that was mentioned in the citation for his DFC. Deep into southern Germany near the Austrian border, Augsburg and back was a long haul. His crew had completed their bomb-run and had turned for home, when the flight engineer spoke over the RT. The coolant temperature on one of the port engines had begun to rise alarmingly.
‘Temperature’s too high,’ said the engineer. ‘We’ve got to feather it. If we don’t do something about it…’ His voice trailed off.
If they didn’t shut the Merlin down they’d have a fire on their hands. Beetham cut the power. Flying on three engines, they lost height and dropped behind the stream of bombers. Then, for the next 600 miles over enemy territory, they were on their own.
Now, thirty-seven years after the end of that war, he was in his fifth year as Chief of the Air Staff, the professional head of the Royal Air Force, and he was finding reports of scrap metal merchants raising the Argentine flag on South Georgia difficult to get too worked up about. After all, he’d seen it all before. He remembered earlier Argentine feints: the incident on Southern Thule in 1976, threats to British ships in the South Atlantic, even the deranged Operation CONDOR, when a group of Argentine radicals landed an airliner on Stanley racecourse and claimed the islands for Argentina.
In 1982, the entire MoD planning was focused on NATO and the Cold War. Intelligence-gathering, weapons systems, orders of battle and training were all concerned with keeping at bay the Soviet threat from the east. NATO forces faced nearly overwhelming numerical superiority and the UK could ill afford to be distracted by the regular routine contingency planning for every potential troublespot around the globe. At six-month intervals the chiefs would review possible theatres of operation throughout the world. Belize, the ex-colony of British Honduras that Guatemala had designs on, would always figure. So too would the Falklands. But unlike Central America, which was relatively easy to reinforce, whenever the Falklands came up, the conclusions would be the same – as things stood, the islands were practically indefensible. Although defence contingency plans ranged from sending a submarine to mounting a task force to ward off any threat, without proper resources being committed to the Falklands the plan for its defence amounted to little more than a hope that it wouldn’t be necessary to defend it. And faced with the prospect of an occupation, it was thought unlikely that the islands could even be won back through force of arms.
But no one in Whitehall, it seemed, believed it would come to that. Beetham was not alone in failing to appreciate the significance of what was unfolding in the South Atlantic. After reviewing defence contingency plans for the Falklands and drawing little encouragement from them, the Defence Secretary, Sir John Nott, left for a NATO planning meeting in Colorado Springs on 22 March. The Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Terence Lewin, flew to New Zealand on an official visit, while Lord Carrington, the Foreign Secretary, left for Israel after agreeing to the dispatch of Endurance on 20 March.
There appeared to be a complete dislocation between Argentina’s view of what was happening and London’s. In the end, it was the mistaken assumption by Argentina that Britain had taken her seriously that triggered the immediate invasion of the Falklands. In sending Endurance, the British visibly demonstrated the gravity with which they regarded Operation ALPHA, but the patrol vessel was a paper tiger. Lombardo assumed, reasonably enough, that his opponent’s response would make military sense. He never considered that Endurance might represent the sum total of Britain’s reaction. He had, he believed, only until the submarine arrived to act.
While Lombardo scrambled to get back to Buenos Aires, the British press began to take an interest in the story. ‘NAVY GUN BOAT SAILS TO REPEL INVADERS’ read the most excitable of the headlines on offer. At RAF Waddington, Martin Withers registered the story, but like so many other people in Britain viewed it as a little local difficulty in a faraway place that would soon blow over. Before returning to the Vulcan force, he’d completed a tour as a Qualified Flying Instructor flying Jet Provosts. Used to the enormous Vulcan, he’d enjoyed flying the nimble two-seat trainers and jumped at the chance to keep his hand in. On 23 March, the day he threw the little JP around the sky for an exhilarating three-quarters of an hour of aerobatics, Lombardo was confronting Anaya. He demanded to know what was going on, but Anaya never gave him an answer. Instead, he simply asked his subordinate, ‘Are we in a position to implement the Malvinas plan?’
As drafted, the answer could only be no. While 9 July had been suggested as the patriotic date to launch the operation, the earliest date given was in the middle of May. Now, with a week to go before the expected arrival of the submarine, the plan was in disarray. Lombardo had carefully designed Operation BLUE to use – and be seen quite clearly to be using – the minimum possible force. When the small main body of troops flew in by helicopter, one component of the invasion force would already be staying as paying guests in Stanley’s Upland Goose Hotel. But his plan relied on the two transport ships and their helicopters that were now tied up in the South Georgia operation. Lombardo told Anaya he would need to consult his planning team and report back.
At Puerto Belgrano, Lombardo and his team frantically reworked the plan. He would now have to use warships and landing craft to deliver the troops to Las Malvinas. Despite his care to avoid it, Operation BLUE would now appear to be exactly what it was: a forceful, military annexation. But it could be done. Anaya was going to get his invasion.
On 28 March, a task force that included destroyers, frigates, a submarine and an aircraft carrier, Veinticinco de Mayo, set sail for the Falkland Islands.
Chapter 5
Commander Roger Lane-Nott, RN, was at war. Below the chill waters of the north-western approaches to Scotland his nuclear-powered hunter-killer submarine was on the frontline of the Cold War. HMS Splendid was the newest attack boat in the fleet and she had a contact. The control room, charged with adrenalin, focused on collecting and checking every snippet of information, every piece of intelligence and every sound. And then interpreting it.
Driving a submarine was as much an art as a science – nearly everything was subjective. The control room was tightly packed with machinery, valves, gauges and pipes. At action stations, fifteen or sixteen people were squeezed in, each with his own area of responsibility: ship control, navigation, information organization, fire control. In the middle, side by side, were the periscopes. It was an intense, claustrophobic environment in which everybody knew what was expected of him and his colleagues. There were no secrets in the control room of a nuclear submarine.