CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Grounded

Some months before we left Leuchars Esmé and I had decided that we ought to try to get a toe-hold in the housing market. Constant movement at home and overseas, the advantages of being on Stations at which one was serving, and a basic lack of capital had previously kept us from making any attempt to do so. However, rapidly rising house prices, and a desire to provide an overdue static base for the family, suggested we should delay no longer. During one of my trips to Wattisham to visit 23 Squadron I had been offered a mooring at the mouth of the River Deben. Although we didn’t have the slightest hope of buying a boat and a house at the same time, this was a sufficiently attractive offer to decide us to begin looking for a house in the area. We eventually found a place on the outskirts of an attractive village in the rural outback of Suffolk and went well over budget to buy it – so much so that for the next few years we were very short of spending money indeed.

We moved directly from Leuchars to the new house and spent December settling in. At the beginning of January 1976, leaving Esmé and Julia (who had insisted in giving up boarding in favour of doing A levels locally) happily ensconced in it, I went to join the year-long course at the Royal College of Defence Studies in London. As it was not practicable to commute daily from the village I found myself a room for use from Monday to Friday, boarding with a dear old lady who let me know very quickly that she would not have taken a lodger had her husband not had the indecency to die just as he was about to take up an ambassadorial appointment.

The RCDS course comprised people from some twenty countries: seventy officers of one-star rank and above from navies, armies and air forces, twenty members of various diplomatic and civil services, and some high-ranking policemen. As it was going to be conducted at a more reasonable pace than I had known for some time it seemed the ideal thing to follow a hectic spell in command. Reasonably paced or not, it was a prestige course and a considerable privilege to be on, particularly for a Group Captain.

In February I got a letter from Paddy Harbison telling me that Leuchars had been judged the best Station in Strike Command for 1975, my second year as Station Commander – a bit of an irony considering how close I came to being sacked. A month later I was summoned to go and see the Assistant Air Secretary, Air Vice-Marshal Alec Maisner. When I got to his office, wondering what he might want me for, he invited me to sit down and, without any preliminary chat, told me that he was required to express to me the Air Force Board’s displeasure that I had not acted to curb excessive drinking by the 23 Squadron officer who had had the car accident. He added that this officer had been recorded to have had a serious drink problem during his basic flying training and that this should have alerted me to keep an eye on him. Had I been given an opportunity to say anything in advance of this censure I would have pointed out that only the keepers of his records, the Directorate General of Personnel, would have known of any previous mention of a problem, and nothing had been disclosed to me. I could also have pointed out that his drinking habits at Leuchars had not been noticeably different to those of many of his peers on the squadrons. I didn’t leave Alec Maisner’s office feeling admonished; I left feeling saddened by this example of disregard for the firm principle of English law that no one be condemned unheard. I also couldn’t help thinking of those lines by a character in Act 1 of Brenden Behan’s play ‘The Hostage’: ‘…. I was courtmartialled [sic] in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.’

It was, of course, hardly the most serious of condemnations and I let it pass. However, when the Air Secretary, now Air Chief Marshal Sir Neville Stack, pitched up at the College in September to give the light blue element their postings his opening statement to me really did take me aback. ‘You were selected for substantive promotion in July,’ he said, ‘but the Board felt that in view of the incidents at your Station you should not be seen to be receiving the accolade of promotion.’ I thought this an extraordinary statement; had it not been delivered I would have been none the wiser about the promotion, and so I could only interpret it as an addition to the admonishment already delivered by Alec Maisner. ‘However,’ he continued cheerfully, ‘I want you at the end of the year as an Acting Air Commodore in the appointment of Director of Operations (Air Defence and Overseas) in the MOD.’ This took some of the sting out of not receiving ‘the accolade of promotion’ and, as it meant that I would be getting acting rank after just three and a half years as a Group Captain I felt I really had little to complain about. Besides, I could always hope that I would be ’substantiated’ in the rank of Air Commodore as soon as the Board considered my sins to have been expiated. All these positive thoughts notwithstanding, I was left with something of a bad taste in my mouth.

The RCDS year turned out to be exceptionally enjoyable, full of good things that made it memorable. There were lectures by ministers, ambassadors, the Chief of the Defence Staff, the head of the Metropolitan police, and a myriad of other experts in their fields – and we were able to fire awkward questions at them all. The highlight for most of us was the overseas tour that took parties of course members on five-week long educative jaunts to various parts of the world. My party went to North America, visiting such diverse locations in Canada as Quebec, Montreal, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, Yellowknife, and Inuvik, an Eskimo settlement in the far and frozen north. We started in the United States at Los Angeles and went on to Atlanta, Denver, Williamsburg, Detroit, New York, and ended up in Washington. We were feted and treated as VIPs wherever we went, and indeed, this was the case throughout the entire year – which was lovely while it lasted, but it did make it rather difficult to come back to an ordinary working environment when it ended.

It didn’t help that the working environment I was destined for, the Ministry of Defence, Main Building, Whitehall, was a vast and depressing edifice, from the ‘greasy spoon’ canteen in the basement to the offices tucked away on the seventh floor. Dreary uncarpeted corridors, their walls painted in one-colour Works Department magnolia, ran on both sides of it, parallel to Whitehall on one side, and to the Thames on the other. In the centre of the building were two enclosed wells clad in dirty white tiles into which the winter sun did not penetrate. My office, and the nearby offices of my staff, were off the Whitehall corridor on the fourth floor. My boss, the Assistant Chief of Air Staff (Operations), or ACAS (Ops) in the jargon of the place, was on the next floor up. Three and four star officers and equivalent-level civil servants occupied the few decently appointed offices in the entire building on the sixth floor. Some months after I took up my appointment, the lifts in the Westminster end of the building were taken out of service for a week for essential maintenance work. Meeting the new Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Michael Beetham – who had very recently taken over the post from Air Chief Marshal Sir Neil Cameron – at the bottom of the stairs one morning just as he was starting the long climb to the sixth floor, I tried a bit of humour to break the silence between us. Pointing at the stairs I said: ‘It must be tough at the top, sir.’ He either didn’t catch my rather feeble attempt at a pun, or was remarkably fit, for all he said was ‘Not in the least’ and bounded off upwards.

It took a little time to become familiar with the conventions of the Main Building and to discover that power did not always run straight up and down the military hierarchical structure within it: due allowance had to be made, among other things, for the influence of the civil servants who, as a rule, had the advantage of remaining longer in their posts than their military counterparts. I quickly realised how beneficial it would have been to have served an apprenticeship in the Ministry at a junior level before being exposed to the place in the glare of a higher level of responsibility.

When I took up my appointment in the building the ACAS (Ops) was my one time flight commander, David Craig. David was still the rather shy, reserved, mild-mannered, gentleman that I had known on 247 Squadron. A highly intelligent man, and a lot more experienced in the ways of, and astute about coping with, Whitehall than I was ever likely to be, he exhibited, despite his shyness, a steely resolve and a determination to press the best out of all who worked for him.

For most of my first year I was busy with little more than the routine of my role: advising on matters of air defence policy, chairing a committee charged with introducing computers to the operational side of the RAF, seeing that all reports of UFO sightings were compared with the recorded and retained air defence radarscope pictures (a time-wasting task that had been allocated to the ADGE people at some time in the past), trotting over to Brussels to attend the odd NATO air defence meeting, and liaising with the USAF at Ramstein and the Italian Air Force in Rome about setting up an Air Combat Manoeuvring Range off the coast of Sardinia.

My Directorate had also become responsible for the rump of the once large Overseas Department. Before my time this had been reduced to a staff of one wing commander and three squadron leaders charged with holding and amending the contingency plans produced by the Commands. Normally these officers had very little to occupy them but, when something threatened that might require a contingency plan to be put into action a brief could be very rapidly required on the sixth floor. The first time this happened during my tenure the wing commander was on leave and the squadron leaders were unable to produce what I needed quickly enough for a meeting called at short notice by the Vice Chief of the Air Staff, Air Marshal Sir Peter Terry. He wanted to discuss options in response to some threatening trouble in Africa and was not impressed by my failure to have all the facts of the pertinent plan at my fingertips, and let me know it. I should of course have recognised earlier the dangers of not being instantly able to service the desire of top men to be ahead of the game at all times, and I hastened to close the stable door by bringing the Overseas lot under the supervision of Group Captain (Air Defence), at that time my old saviour from the tedium of target-towing, Brian Cox. Unfortunately, as far as Peter Terry was concerned, I had let the horse bolt.

About a year before I was appointed to the air defence role in the MOD a small Working Party had been set up under Air Commodore Dickie Wirdnam, one of my erstwhile course-mates at Coltishall. This was tasked to determine how best to make the existing (analogue) air defence radars compatible with a planned (digital) communication system that was designed to provide high-speed links between the various elements of the UKADGE, NADGE, the operations centres at 11 Group and HQ Strike Command, and the airfields. The Working Party had obtained authority to commission a feasibility study by an electronics firm and had committed £4,000,000 to this. The study had been completed and the firm involved was proposing a box of tricks to be fitted to the air defence radars at a total cost of £29,000,000. I thought this to be a waste of money, as it did absolutely nothing to enhance the radars’ capability. A better use of that sum, I felt, would be to spend it buying modern mobile radars. Marconi had just brought onto the market a highly capable digital mobile radar that incorporated a whole new approach to countering jamming. The quoted price for one of these, including transporters and support vehicles, was £2,500,000. For £29,000,000, I reasoned, enough of these could be bought to replace our existing main radars, and have a few to spare. Not only would detection capabilities be enhanced in a jamming environment, but there might also be a better chance of radars surviving conventional attacks; the static radars at known locations would be at serious risk (the Type 85s, for example, had huge scanners mounted on large brick buildings). I therefore wrote a paper recommending that new mobile radars be purchased as an alternative to fitting the old with conversion kits. I suggested that these could be based in peacetime at the existing sites and be dispersed to previously surveyed but undisclosed rural sites if and when hostilities threatened, and moved as required during any hostilities to enhance their chance of survival from conventional attack.

Dickie Wirdnam did not like my proposal and David Craig was somewhat dubious about it. Understandably Dickie resented the thought of wasting all the work already done, and the money already spent. David argued that changing plans that had already been the subject of a preliminary request to NATO for assisted funding might be a dangerous mistake, and counselled caution. Moreover, the members of my ground environment staff, all having served time on the existing radars, were emotionally opposed to the suggestion that any of them – particularly the Type 85s – should be replaced. In response to David’s point, I argued that a more dangerous mistake might be to wait until someone in NATO looked at the vulnerability of the existing radars, or asked what improvement we were likely to get in their capability by spending £29,000,000 on them. And I argued with my ADGE people the matter of the vulnerability of the Type 85s (and the Type 84s), the performance of yesterday’s technology against the new, and the cost of the ‘fix’ against lack of enhancement, but without converting many of them.

David Craig moved on to a new post while we were still trying to get some idea of how any change to the plan might affect the request for NATO funding. We failed to get a clear-cut answer and so I deployed my arguments again to his successor, Tim Lloyd. He agreed to put the proposal to VCAS for consideration and it eventually went to the Air Force Board.¹ I fear, however, that somewhere along the way the identity of the originator of the idea was lost. Certainly VCAS seemed not to know where credit might be due. During the farewell interview I had with him before leaving the MOD he told me that he thought that I should have achieved more during my time there. He ended, almost as if he felt the need to soften his message a little, by telling me that he recognised that I had had little staff experience and that he saw me as ‘a commander rather than a staff officer’. Of course he was right as far as my preferences went, but I was a little piqued by the implication that I could not hold my own in staff circles. And he was possibly also right in another sense: shortly before I was posted I had contradicted CAS on a point about air defence in front of his Air Force Board colleagues – an action that alone would have marked me down as being much too tactless, or perhaps too foolish, to be a successful ‘Whitehall Warrior’.

I left the MOD at the end of 1978 after two years in the hothouse of the Main Building and with eighteen months’ seniority as a substantive Air Commodore. Substantiation had come nine months after I had been told about the ‘the accolade of promotion’ and so, in essence, I had been docked a year’s seniority by administrative action. Not a great loss, but somewhat irritating nonetheless.

In January 1979 I went from the MOD to HQ 11 Group at Bentley Priory as the SASO. Bentley had been the HQ of Fighter Command from 1936, when the Command was formed, until 1968 when Fighter and Bomber Commands merged to form Strike Command. It was from Bentley that Dowding had directed the Battle of Britain. The old Priory building, in which every subsequent C-in-C, and latterly AOC, had occupied Dowding’s unchanged office, and sat at his original desk, had recently been declared structurally unsafe and was about to undergo a major refurbishment. The AOC and the SASO were now accommodated in adjoining offices in a modern structure in the grounds of the Priory. The current AOC, Peter Latham, was a delightfully relaxed man enjoying his final tour in a pleasant role before retiring. Once the dashing leader of the Black Arrows his main interest now, after sailing, was making and mending clocks. I could often hear him through the thin wall between our offices filing away at a clock component, something that he tended to do whenever he got bored with the paperwork on his desk. As he was well into his tour when I got there, and had clearly decided that he had done his bit as far as visiting the Group’s airfields and radar sites was concerned, I got pretty nearly carte blanche from him to go visiting myself – and I did so whenever I could, knowing that anything that cropped up when I was away would be well looked after by George Black, currently Group Captain Operations at the HQ.

The only problem about going out and about was the journey time to even the nearest of the 11 Group airfields, Wattisham and Coningsby. For visits to the Group’s more widely scattered units, particularly the radar sites in the far north, it was possible to a get one of the Devons based at Northolt. Once, for a visit to RAF Brawdy, I managed to get myself picked up from Northolt by Hawk and deposited back there at the end of the day. That – one-off opportunity as it turned out – gave me a opportunity to have a go at a very flyable little aircraft, so very clearly out of the same stable as the Hunter. The fact that the man in the back seat was happy to let a middle-aged, and not very current, staff officer fly the aircraft into tight little metropolitan Northolt, and land there, says something for his imperturbability and a lot for the ease with which the aircraft handled. Unfortunately the Devons had to be shared with all-comers from the various headquarters around London and so quite a few miles had to be done by car.

On one of my early outings I drove up to Coningsby intending to get airborne in a Phantom and, hopefully organise, for my next visit, a short conversion course on a Spitfire of the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight. However, my hopes of flying on that day were dashed by some really foul weather. The airfield was declared ‘Red’ shortly after I got there and it was forecast to remain closed by low cloud for the next few hours. There was nothing for it but to be content with a chat with some of the OCU instructors and students, have a look around various sections, and have lunch in the Mess with the station executives. I didn’t get very far with the Spitfire either, as the Flight was not having an easy task keeping its few aircraft flying and clearly didn’t want to widen the small circle of pilots authorised to fly them; I had no real justification for pressing them, and didn’t.

I was about to climb into my car for the journey back to Bentley when I had a bit of good fortune. Peter Latham telephoned to ask me to go on to Leuchars to represent him at a memorial service the following morning. I can’t recall what it was that forced a change in his plans but he had cancelled his own transport arrangements and had asked Leuchars to try to get a 43 Squadron Phantom into Coningsby to pick me up. The weather at Leuchars was good, and not bad to the west of us so, even if the pilot could not get under the cloud-base at Coningsby he could divert to somewhere like RAF Waddington and I could drive to him. The Leuchars’ aircraft did get in to Coningsby, flown by one of my old 5 Squadron pilots, John Spoor, now on 43 Squadron. He was pleased to have been given the opportunity to throw me about in the Phantom and I was, subsequently, glad to have him do it. As soon as he had refuelled we got airborne, with me in the back surrounded by navigational gear but no stick or throttles, wishing that the aircraft had had dual controls. Letting down for an approach to Leuchars John announced that he was going to burn off some fuel to get down to landing weight, banged in the re-heats and pulled the aircraft into a sustained tight turn at pretty near maximum g. As I was determined to show him that I was still able to ‘hack it’ I wasn’t going to admit to any discomfort in the rear seat, still less that my ‘Highcockalorum back’ was telling me that it was no longer up to heavy loading. When he straightened out I was rather relieved – and almost able to stand upright when I climbed out of the aircraft. In the Mess bar later it was the greatest of pleasures to meet and mingle with Leuchars’ current crop of youngsters, some of whom I knew from the past. That at least was – temporarily – rejuvenating.

Apart from trips out, which I always welcomed, particularly to the airfields, but even to the far fringes of the ADGE chain, to Fylingdales for which 11 Group had administrative responsibility, or to the underground Operations Centre (the bunker) at HQ Strike Command (to man the AD cell whenever exercises were in progress), life in the HQ went by with no particular alarms or excursions. Peter sought no initiatives or changes to the established routine, and the members of the staff went about their responsibilities with the minimum of prodding or interference from me. The progress of the squadrons towards achieving their annual tasks was watched and charted, Taceval results analysed, flight safety requirements emphasised and, at the end of the year, the destination of the Dacre decided.

About half way through my first year at Bentley, Peter Latham got a telephone call from the MOD to say that the owner of a large piece of silver, some three feet high, and intricately worked with models of early aircraft had indicated a desire to present it to the RAF, and the Air Force Board, noting that 11 Group did not have a gunnery trophy, thought it might be appropriate for us. As the Dacre Trophy had originally been awarded for air-gunnery results at a time when all fighter aircraft had guns, and had been in a sense misappropriated when the gunless Lightning came into service, we sought the views of the widow of its donor, Mrs Elizabeth Dacre, and found that she was quite happy for its present use to continue. We passed the word to London that we would be glad to have an award for the results of air-to-air firing, and in due course a handover ceremony for the new trophy was arranged at the RAF Club. During this it emerged that the donor, Mr Seed, a splendidly archetypal Yorkshireman of advanced age, had been conned some years before into thinking that he was buying the Schneider Trophy – a fact that he related with wry humour. It was an astonishing piece of surreal art – not everyone’s idea of aesthetic good taste, but we accepted it graciously and gratefully.

Formal guest nights in the Priory were a frequent and pleasant part of life at 11 Group and, during my first year, it was still possible to hold the annual Bentley Battle of Britain cocktail party in it. This had always been a splendid occasion, from the end of the war onwards, and successive AOCs of 11 Group had been determined to maintain the tradition that had started under the auspices of Fighter Command. There was unquestionably something special about the setting, with guests moving out onto the balustraded terrace, from which Dowding had gazed at the fires of blitzed London, to watch a fly-past provided each year by a Spitfire and Hurricane of the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight.

The Priory Mess was not available on my second year owing to the refurbishment programme which, sadly, was seriously set back by a fire that broke out one evening in June, and which spread with such spectacular ferocity that it looked likely at one stage to destroy the entire building. Fortunately the fire was confined to the central core of the Priory. The main walls were left intact and in due course – after my time there – all was faithfully restored as per the original by some uncharacteristic sensitivity and spending by the Department of the Environment.

Peter Latham went off into retirement in early 1981 and was replaced by Peter Harding. Not long afterwards George Black departed for HQ 38 Group and was replaced by Mac McEwan, one of my former compatriots on 145 (R) Squadron at Chivenor. Peter Harding was a determinedly new brush, fresh from one of those NATO appointments reserved by the Air Secretary for officers marked for high places. He was keen to find out what made 11 Group tick – and what did not. He wanted to be briefed about everything, and to get cracking on visiting the various elements of his parish. I was happy to organise the first but the second placed me very firmly behind the counter minding the shop while he was away.

As it happened this didn’t matter much for I badly screwed up my back during a squash game about a month after his arrival. It had been giving me recurring problems since that silly game so many years before but now, suddenly, it needed serious attention and I had to suffer the indignity of being carted off to hospital on a stretcher. But worse, I was forbidden even to think of sitting on an ejection seat for the time being. The incident gave Peter Harding the opportunity to quip, as I was being dined out on posting from Bentley, that my departure on a stretcher had been the worst case of writer’s cramp he had ever seen.

I was posted from Bentley in February 1981 to HQ Strike Command as Air Commodore Plans. On arrival I was given a run down on the appointment by the chap I was replacing, John Field. He told me that I was going to find it an interestingly odd staff position: Air Commodore Plans answered directly to the Deputy C-in-C (at the time Air Marshal Sir Peter Bairsto) whereas the other air commodores on the Air Staff were directly subordinate to SASO, himself subordinate to the Deputy C-in-C. Air Commodore Plans also sat in on the formal weekly meetings that the C-in-C held with his Deputy and the two-star members of the HQ staff. My attendance at these was going to expose me to close scrutiny by the top management at Strike Command, but I was not unhappy with that.

My staff comprised two group captains, seven wing commanders and seven squadron leaders. Group Captain Plans, Chris Sprent, had been in command of Coningsby when I first took up my appointment as the SASO at 11 Group; he gave me a thorough introductory briefing on my second day in the job. From what he said about planning responsibilities, one anomaly seemed to stick out like a sore thumb: my team and I were responsible for just about everything within the Command that required a little forethought and a plan of action or organisation, other than contingency planning for action abroad. That was under the control of a group captain in another – distant – part of the Air Staff building. Having had my fingers slightly burned in the MOD by failing to anticipate the need to bring the Overseas Staff under close supervision, I felt a trick was similarly being missed here. However, I thought it best to put aside the idea of proposing change until I found how things actually worked in the HQ.

My other group captain, Barry Blakeley, had been the Station Commander of Boulmer for part of my tour at Bentley, so he too was a known quantity. At Strike his principal responsibility was to oversee the introduction and development of (what was then called) Automatic Data Processing in and to the HQ. I was happy to leave him to this, aided as he was by a representative of the equipment manufacturer, and simply contented myself with reviewing the schedules that had been agreed for getting the system up and running, stepping in only where it appeared I could help speed things up.

The Plans job was quite a busy one, demanding on time, and offering few reasons for getting out and about. As in Aden, I had to accept the dearth of opportunities to go flying, and get on with my primary responsibilities – and I added to these after a few months by putting forward my views on the desirability of bringing contingency planning under Air Commodore Plans and having this accepted. However, things ticked along without too many intractable problems clamouring for instant solutions – but I did lose a bit of sleep each week before the C-in-C’s meetings as I was determined not to be caught out by any of the questions that invariably came my way during it.

I had been allocated an excellent Married Quarter at High Wycombe and this allowed Esmé and me to entertain quite decently – something that I realised with hindsight we had not done adequately during my time in the MOD, and thus had lost opportunities that others took routinely to network and impress. I had got to know through mutual friends when I was at Bentley, the then Lord Mayor of London, Sir Peter Gardsen, and we invited him and his wife to dinner shortly after we set up house at High Wycombe together with the C-in-C, Air Chief Marshal Sir Keith Williamson. The following day, clearly intrigued by my acquaintance with the top City dignitary, and impressed by the fact that Sir Peter had made the effort to drive out to High Wycombe through threatening flurries of snow, Sir Keith asked me how I knew him. I was about to make a joke of it and tell him that I saw my future to be in high finance, when suddenly it struck me that the C-in-C really knew very little about me – although he too had been a fighter pilot our paths had not crossed – and his question probably reflected natural curiosity about an unknown quantity on his staff. This thought reminded me that both he and Peter Bairsto had spent some time quizzing Esmé when they had first met her at High Wycombe, and I suddenly wondered if allowing ourselves to become socially invisible while I was at the RCDS and the MOD may have been more damaging than we had thought. Buying a house may be a great investment, but if the process makes a serving officer so hard up that he has to park his wife in it and live apparently apart he may be sending out the wrong signals.

In February 1982, after I had been in the job for a year, Peter Bairsto surprised me by suggesting that Esmé and I might like to accompany him and his wife to Germany for a few days. He explained this by saying that he felt that I ought to be aware of what had been done in Germany to ‘harden’ the airfields as there was a possibility that this process would be funded for the fighter airfields in the United Kingdom in the near future. We stayed in Germany with the Deputy Commander, John Sutton, in the Deputy Commander’s impressively fine house in the grounds of the RAF hospital at Wegberg, a couple of kilometres from the HQ at Rheindahlen. Peter and I had a full Command briefing, looked over a couple of airfields, and went out in the field (frozen at –21ºC) to spend a few hours with a RAF Regiment Rapier surface-to-air missile unit. I was particularly impressed during our visit to the airfields by the hardened aircraft shelters and hardened crew accommodation, sealed and pressurised to withstand chemical and biological weapon attack. Experiencing that tiny slice of RAF Germany was enough to make me feel again my earlier regret that I had never had a posting there.

Back at High Wycombe I returned to business as usual in the plans department. By late March, however, the HQ was alerted to the activities of a party of Argentineans in far away South Georgia and we began to monitor this, wondering whether it would involve any tasking by us. Concurrently there was growing concern in Whitehall as to what Argentinean intentions in the South Atlantic might be. Then, on 2 April, Argentinean forces landed on the Falkland Islands and we manned up the operations bunker for full twenty-four hour a day cover.

Shortly before the invasion occurred the Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, had been considering with Cabinet colleagues, advised by the single-Service Chiefs (the Chief of the Defence Staff was abroad), what response could or should be made if the Falklands were invaded. Two nuclear submarines had already been despatched southward by the Secretary of State for Defence, John Knott, in response to the Argentinean actions on South Georgia. On the eve of the invasion the Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Sir Henry Leach, robustly assured Mrs Thatcher that, if it became necessary, retaking the Falklands would be feasible. Within hours of the invasion happening, he was charged to prepare a task force to sail south to give us the option of taking them back. He was also instructed to send a third nuclear attack-submarine hard in the wake of the first two.

The CAS, still Sir Michael Beetham, had already tasked ACAS (Ops) to look at all possible options for RAF participation in any action to recover the islands. Following the decision to assemble the task force he had telephoned CNS to ask what the Navy might need from the RAF. CNS had been fighting a battle in Whitehall against cuts in the Navy’s strength then being proposed as part of a current Defence Review. The Falklands operation presented a heaven-sent opportunity to prove the value of retaining a deep-sea capability and to show that the cuts were a mistake. To this end he was determined to keep operations to retake the Falklands exclusively dark-blue. He asked simply for three Hercules C 130s for logistic support of the task force; Sir Michael told ACAS (Ops) to bring the whole of the RAF transport force to standby.

At Strike Command we watched the build up. We listened to intelligence briefings. We acted as and when asked. However, although few of us realised it at the time, we were being somewhat marginalised. Executive power was being moved to Northwood. Northwood, on the north-west fringe of London, had been the HQ of the former RAF Coastal Command since 1938. It now housed three NATO HQs² plus two single-Service ones, that of C-in-C Fleet, and that of Strike Command’s maritime-air Group, No. 18. C-in-C Fleet and AOC 18 Group, currently Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse and Air Marshal Sir John Curtiss respectively, also wore the NATO hats. They worked closely and well together and it was natural, therefore, when the Admiral was given command of the Falkland enterprise, that the AOC should be his Air Commander. Sir Michael Beetham, convinced that the RAF would have a crucial role to play, whether the Navy liked it or not, saw John Curtiss as the best medium for getting the RAF view across. He therefore short-circuited the normal command structure by authorising AOC 18 Group to deal directly with the other Groups likely to be involved.

It was fascinating to watch the whole thing come together. The first step for the Government was to get American permission to use the airfield built by the US Army in 1942 on the British-owned island of Ascension, a halfway stage in the 8,000 nm trip to the Falklands; this was freely given. The next step, for the RAF, was to move equipment and supplies to Ascension to be loaded on those task-force ships that had been got under way speedily without first returning to UK ports; included in this move were six Harrier GR3s and their pilots from No. 1 Squadron, and four Chinooks and their crews from No. 18 Squadron. There was also a need to position aircraft on the island capable of providing surveillance cover for the task force as it moved south. The Nimrod maritime surveillance fleet did not have the range to go the whole distance beyond Ascension; only the Victor K2 tankers, capable of carrying a considerable weight of fuel, their crews well practised in refuelling from each other in the air, could initially do the long-range reconnaissance task. By 20 April, eight Victor K2 tankers were positioned at Ascension (and on the 22nd four of them refuelled a fifth on a flight to South Georgia to support an attempted British landing there). Action was rapidly initiated to equip the Nimrods and the Hercules fleet, and some Vulcans,³ with an air-to-air refuelling capability.

Sir Michael Beetham had had the possibility of mounting a bombing mission in mind since the decision to retake the Falklands was made, and this was eventually approved by the Cabinet. On 1 May, two Vulcans were launched from Ascension, one as a spare, and one to bomb the airport at Port Stanley. They were supported by thirteen Victors. The difficulties encountered by the crews of both aircraft types, and the manner in which they overcame them make an epic tale.⁴ The raid, by an aircraft long past its prime, followed subsequently by five more single aircraft raids, was a success. Although only one bomb, dropped on the first raid, hit the runway fair and square, its effect was to deny the use of the airfield to Argentinean offensive aircraft for the duration of the conflict; had Exocet-armed aircraft been able to land and refuel at Stanley, and consequently attack the two carriers (parked well to the east and out of range from the South American mainland) the outcome of the Falkland conflict might well have been very different.

Three of the four Chinooks sent south were lost when the ship carrying them, the Atlantic Conveyor, was sunk. The one Chinook that survived flew with remarkable intensity and remained unbelievably serviceable. Happily the Harriers had transferred to HMS Hermes before the Atlantic Conveyor was attacked and throughout the conflict they were heavily tasked by the Navy to fly ground attack missions. Subsequently reinforced by more No. 1 Squadron aircraft (by way of a nine-hour air-to-air refuelled flog from Acsension) and some extra pilots, the small Harrier force acquitted itself extraordinarily well; that (and the fact that 24% of the Sea Harrier pilots serving on the Naval squadrons were RAF) deserved more recognition than was accorded by RN publicity when all was done and dusted.

The Argentinean forces on the Falklands surrendered on 14 June, and while things were far from over for our people on the islands, on the ships, at Ascension or involved in one way or another within the United Kingdom, life at Strike Command settled back to normal. The staff in and out of the bunker may not have had direct control but we had been able to help in a number of ways, and we had felt part of every phase. And, having been privy to the things tackled and achieved by the Victors and their crews throughout the Falklands period, I came away from the bunker with total admiration for a force that I had previously simply set behind and suckled from.

A month before the surrender Peter Bairsto had called me into his office, and to my total – and unbelieving – delight, had told me that I had been selected for the post of Deputy Commander, RAF Germany. I was due to take this up in July. I can’t be sure whether he had been aware that I was possibly being considered for this when he took me visiting in February but, as he also said that I had been considered for the post of AOC 11 Group, and that he had suggested that I should have a respite from air defence and have a chance to experience something different, it is a fair assumption that he did. It is also a fair assumption I that I owed my coming promotion to the rank of Air Vice-Marshal to him, and through him, to Keith Williamson.

I had never given much thought to the less obvious factors that affected careers in the Service, and the things that might influence the fits and starts of an individual’s movement – or lack of it – upwards. I had no reason to do so until I slowed almost to a halt as an Air Commodore. The confidential reporting system in use in the RAF gave scope for adverse comment without the need to spell this out to the person reported upon. Defenders of the system argue that any such comment in one report stands out when a sequence of reports is looked at and thus undeserved disparagement can be discounted. However, I have seen mild dispraise create sufficient doubts in the minds of members of a promotion board to cause them to defer the promotion of an individual from the list they were considering. And there is nothing quite as damnatory as the thing one sometimes saw: faint praise. Although there were careful guidelines issued with the Forms 1369 in the interests of achieving a reasonable level of objectivity, and most reporting officers strived for this, likes and dislikes inevitably played a part in determining the way in which some reports were written. But, taking a person’s ability and effort as read, the most important thing that anyone can hope for in any hierarchy is that he or she has the good fortune to work for people sufficiently sure of their own qualities and abilities to recognise and unstintingly commend good qualities in their subordinates. I was lucky to have worked for a few such. It is perhaps invidious to mention just five but I owe much to: Sir Michael Le Fanu in Aden, an admiral of the first water; John Nicholls at Leuchars, a fighter pilot through and through; Don McClen at Binbrook, a man of such outstanding ability that I do not doubt that he would have reached the top-most rank had not illness and marital upheaval disabled him; Air Chief Marshal Sir Dennis (Splinters) Smallwood, who supported me as C-in-C Strike Command; and Peter Bairsto, known affectionately by all who served under him as the ‘Bear’, and recognised by all as a shrewd, occasionally irascible, particularly demanding, but scrupulously fair boss.