CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Deputy Commander

I went to Germany in July 1982 glad to be back in charge of something other than a desk, and delighted to be at the heart of the NATO ‘front line’. RAF Germany was commanded at the time by Air Marshal Sir Thomas (Jock) Kennedy, a delightful man whom I had first met on the RCDS course. As C-in-C he also held the NATO appointment of Commander Second Allied Tactical Air Force, an organisation with a Headquarters staff but no forces under direct command in peacetime. As Jock was heavily engaged in the delicate diplomacy required to ensure that 2 ATAF might actually coalesce into an effective fighting whole should war threaten, he was happy to leave his deputy to run RAF Germany as fully and as freely as any AOC running his Group. As far as I was concerned this was a very satisfactory arrangement.

HQ RAF Germany was co-located, in the vast complex of Rheindahlen, with HQ BAOR and two NATO units, HQ Northern Army Group and HQ 2 ATAF. The Command had four active airfields in West Germany (Wildenrath, Bruggen, Laarbruch, and Gutersloh) and one at Gatow in the British Sector in West Berlin. When I took up my appointment there were two Phantom squadrons and a Bloodhound SAM squadron at Wildenrath in the air defence role; four Jaguar squadrons at Bruggen; two Buccaneer squadrons at Laarbruch; and two extra-large Harrier squadrons and a Puma helicopter squadron at Gutersloh. There was also a communications squadron at Wildenrath equipped with twin piston-engined Pembrokes. The main purpose of Gatow was to provide an airhead for the resupply of the British garrison in Berlin, but it also housed a very useful listening post that enabled RAF intelligence to tune into what was going on in the air in East Germany; and it had two Chipmunks on strength to enable us to exercise our right to fly within the Berlin Control Zone.

It has always been traditional within the RAF for the commander to fly – and I was perfectly happy to pursue this and have a go with as many of the squadrons in the Command as I could. To start with I chose the easy option, the Phantom FG2. Nobody mentioned refresher flying this time, but we went about it sensibly via a very full check-out in mid-August by one of the squadrons’ QFIs. He pronounced me fit and throughout my tour I flew when I could with both Phantom outfits, Nos 19 and 92 Squadrons, taking advantage not just of my familiarity with the aircraft but also of the fact that Wildenrath was only 14 kilometres down the road from the HQ. However, I had a slight problem whenever I went to fly, and this applied throughout RAF Germany: most of the aircraft were in hardened aircraft shelters and in the gloom of these the only way I could tackle the start-up checks in the cockpit was to put on my half-moon reading glasses; this was not the image of a fast-jet pilot that the young ground crews were used to and I could see an element of incredulity on their faces at the thought of some geriatric aviator foolishly trying to recapture his lost youth.

Wildenrath was also just 135 nm from the nearest point of the Inner German Border, as the German Government euphemistically called the ‘Iron Curtain’, and the plethora of airfields and especially prepared highway strips on the other side of it in Eastern Germany. That is, between seventeen and twenty minutes’ flying time for a low-level intruder, or half that for a supersonic high-level one. These times, and the probability that the NATO air defence radars would not see much in the electronically induced fog of war, put the emphasis on setting up agreed CAPs rather than holding readiness states on the ground – the more cost-effective way of employing fighters. This situation was on the point of improving dramatically when I got to Germany with the appearance in theatre of USAF-owned Airborne Warning and Control aircraft, and with plans well advanced for NATO to procure its own. The AWACs introduced a new level of capability to the air defence world, with their ability to see low-level targets at ranges bounded only by the distance of the horizon at the heights they chose to fly and the capability of their radar.

But all this was for the future and, while I was there, we mostly practised interceptions from Wildenrath’s CAP lines, an exercise often made more interesting by the open season that prevailed on the continent on all passing military aircraft. That said it was intensely irritating to be seen off constantly by Belgian F 16s capable of pulling inside the Phantoms’ radius of turn and onto our tails with depressing ease.

It was quickly obvious to me that Tacevals were even more fiercely prepared for by the RAF Germany Station Commanders than they had been in the UK, with self-generated call-outs and exercises forming a pretty frequent component of the normal station routine. I didn’t want to discourage this as it produced a competitive focus for people in every section of each base and kept everyone at a very effective pitch of readiness to counter the real threat if it came. However, very shortly after I became Deputy Commander I found it necessary to counsel a bit of caution and remind people not to push safety aside in the interests of realism.

Before my arrival a Phantom had shot down a Jaguar and, almost before I had found my way around my office, the results of the Board of Inquiry into the incident landed on my desk. The facts were that the Station Commander at Wildenrath had called an alert exercise and the Phantoms had been produced and armed in response. As the exercise was almost complete he was telephoned by a Taceval team, springing an unrelated surprise evaluation on an air defence radar station, to request him to supply some aircraft to test its controlling capability. He did so without first having the aircraft disarmed. On take-off the navigator of one called out, as was the standard practice on everyday training sorties, ‘Check Master Armament Switch live’ and the pilot, forgetting for some inexplicable reason that the aircraft was armed, put the switch to live. They were ordered to intercept the Jaguar and they did so, all too successfully. I felt it best in the circumstances to convene a court martial so that the Phantom crew would have the opportunity to be represented legally and deploy whatever defence they might have.

During the proceedings a defending barrister, who had done his homework well, pointed out that while the Command Flying Order Book allowed flights with live missiles provided they were ‘made safe’, the reference to making safe was a hang-over from Lightning days. The Redtop missiles, to which the book had once referred, were entirely safe unless deliberately made ‘live’ by plugs that the pilots had to insert in them on the ground; the missiles carried by the Phantom had no similar safety device and the Master Armament Switch was relied on in lieu. Whoever had had the job of rewriting the Command Flying Order Book whenever the Lightnings were replaced by Phantoms in RAF Germany had lazily changed the names without amending the text to suit the changed circumstances. The HQ RAF Germany staff officer responsible had been guilty of outrageously poor work – and cannot have been adequately supervised. This did not exculpate the foolish firers but it did mitigate the punishment that the Court might otherwise have awarded.

To draw a line under the whole matter and protect the Station Commander, Roger Palin, from any administrative action that might possibly be demanded from London pour encourager les autres, I had him in my office and formally delivered a Reprimand to him. I explained to him that the reason I was doing this was because he should have foreseen the possibility of such an accident occurring in the heat of an alert exercise and, if live weapons were to be carried, a cautionary briefing should have been delivered beforehand. I am not sure that he entirely appreciated my reasoning but, reflecting on it all later, particularly when he reached the rank of Air Chief Marshal, he could hardly hold to the belief that the Reprimand did him any harm.

Getting airborne in an aircraft with which I was comfortably familiar was one thing. However, I was forced to accept that it was not going to be so easy with anything other than the Phantom. I had thought at first that I could do a lot of the paper work that came across my desk after normal office hours in order to find time for flying, but that was naive for I soon found that about five evenings each week were going to be taken up by the round of entertaining and being entertained that was the inescapable routine of the job. And then there were the official commitments in a variety of forms that took me away from the desk. Many of these were of course a pleasure, and some a considerable pleasure. For example, a month after I arrived in Germany, I was invited to represent the C-in-C at the annual regatta of the British Kiel Yacht Club, an entity that had emerged from the aftermath of victory in 1945 via the requisitioning of premises and yachts that had belonged to the Luftwaffe. It had been kept alive by the establishment of a Royal Engineer diving school with enough spare capacity to run the club. I went up to Kiel throughout my tour and sailed in the club’s boats whenever I could get away.

Another pleasure that Jock Kennedy passed my way was the task of representing him at the RAF Germany skiing championships at Val d’Isere the following January. This was followed in March by some skiing at Garmisch on the border with Austria. But one pleasure – and privilege – that I particularly enjoyed was visiting Berlin. A delightful house, once owned by the wartime Luftwaffe fighter ace Adolph Galland, had been procured for British use soon after the war ended. This was maintained and staffed for use by the C-in-C RAF Germany whenever he was in Berlin (courtesy of the ‘Berlin Budget’, money made available by the German Government to fund the Allied garrisons in West Berlin). Jock was happy to let me use it and I did so whenever I could. West and East Berlin with their dividing wall, the history of the town, its atmosphere, and its reminders of the Nazi era, produced a compelling atmosphere. Two particular bits of living history exemplified this: the boxing ring in the 1936 Olympic Stadium, where Joe Louis hammered Max Schmelling, was still there exactly as it had been during those Games; and the cellar in the former Supreme Court building still had hooks in the ceiling from which those tried in the building for the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler were hanged by piano-wire. I was clearly going to have to squeeze my flying into odd moments but, could I cavil if I could not find time to go solo in everything in the Command? Hardly. And in any case, as long as I could get my hands on the controls, would it matter if I flew with another pilot aboard to satisfy qualification and currency requirements? No.

My predecessor, John Sutton, had warned me that I would be required to open an air display each September at a small grass airfield called Auf dem Dümpel. This was near Bergneustadt in the hilly, wooded, country about 40 kilometres east of Cologne. The President of the airfield’s flying club had had the initiative some twenty years before to call on the then C-in-C RAF Germany and persuade him to support an open day at Auf dem Dümpel. He also had had the guile to invite the C-in-C to be the show’s patron in the interests of promoting continuing support. In due course this annual commitment was delegated to the Deputy Commander. As John Sutton had also said that he had attempted some German words when he opened the display I felt that I could do no less. So, some weeks before the event I did what he had done: I had what I intended to say carefully translated into good German and reproduced on tape in the interests of getting the accent absolutely right. I listened assiduously to the tape and, on the day, was confidently ready. Unfortunately, the Club’s President pre-empted me by saying very largely what I was about to say as he introduced me over the loudspeaker system to the crowd. On my following two occasions as patron I made no attempt to pose as a German linguist.

We got lots of other requests for aircraft to participate in air displays throughout Germany, and we were generally able to provide them. However, I received one request that I felt it politic to turn down. The officer commanding the British Army brigade in whose area the Möhne dam lay telephoned to ask me if I could organise an over-flight of the dam by the Lancaster bomber that the RAF still kept in flying condition. He thought it would be just the thing for the brigade’s open day. I thought that he might have understood that the Dambusters’ raid did not have the same resonance among the locals as it had had with British filmgoers. Even though very nearly forty years had passed since the end of the war, memories were still a little raw down-stream from the Möhne.

Towards the end of September I went up to the Sennelager military training area, a vast acreage of farmland, abandoned buildings and forest, on the northern side of the Teutoburgerwald near the garrison town of Paderborn and not far from Gutersloh. This, now much used by the British Army in Germany, had been the scene of military manoeuvres since before Bismarck became the first Chancellor of the new German Empire in 1871. My purpose was to visit the Harrier Force deployed ‘in the field’ at Sennelager, and to combine this with a commitment to show the Harriers to a group of European parliamentarians who were having a look at some of the forces that would be assigned to 2 ATAF in war. I got there the day before the parliamentarians and had time to look around, have a thorough briefing from Gutersloh’s Station Commander, Group Captain Dick Johns,¹ on the various options available for deploying the Force in war, and have a flight in a Harrier T2. I was impressed, first of all, by how far the RAF had come since my time in Chiang Mai in procuring good equipment for functioning away from base. The Harrier Force had some magnificent gear, from good tents to an impressive array of support vehicles. To add icing to the camping-equipment cake some earlier Harrier Force Commander had procured, rather like General Montgomery before him, a comfortable caravan for use when deployed; Dick Johns very kindly housed me in this for the night I spent with the Force, and it was luxury indeed. Unfortunately, the one thing that had not been improved was the standard of field latrines; our holes in the ground at Chiang Mai were infinitely preferable to the over-full Elsans I found at Sennelager.

The Harriers were parked under pine trees just off a metalled road running through the woods around it. We strapped in for my flight under the trees. Squadron Leader Burwell, the pilot taking me up, did his checks, then the camouflage netting over the aircraft was removed, and we were pushed out onto the roadway for a rapid start-up (away from the risk of setting the ‘hide’ alight). Take-off was a matter of running for a hundred yards or so along the roadway.

Once airborne I was given control and had an enjoyable thirty-five minutes throwing the Harrier around at low level and having a bird’s-eye view of the Sennelager area. My impression of the aircraft was that it was very similar in performance at low level to the Hunter, perhaps a little less stable, and somewhat lighter on the controls. However, I was not offered an opportunity to try my hand at hovering or any of the things special to the Harrier. I had to hand control back for the landing, which was adroitly accomplished, vertically downwards, on to a pierced steel-plate laid out in a clearing at the side of the road from which we had taken off.

The short take-off and the vertical landing capabilities of the aircraft were certainly impressive and with these attributes, and the weapons now available for the Harrier force such as the SNEB rocket pod, cluster bombs, and soon, hopefully, laser-guided bombs, ground attack had certainly advanced since I was on 20 Squadron. The head-up display in the GR3 represented an improvement in weapon-aiming as well, and the inertial navigation system, provided there was time available for it to be aligned properly, was a very useful aid to getting accurately to the chosen IP. Above all, the Harrier force offered survivability in an environment where attacks on airfields would unquestionably be given the highest priority. Provided the plans for resupply in the field could be made to work in the disruption and fog of battle, the Harrier would certainly have a vital role to play in helping stop Soviet tanks if they ever rolled across the IGB. Unfortunately, as Gutersloh was a bit too far from Rheindahlen for a quick nip out of the office, the Harrier was one RAF Germany aircraft in which I could hardly hope to have more than a very occasional trip.

However, the distance between Rheindahlen and Bruggen did not pose the same problem and I felt that I should have a go at getting to solo stage in the Jaguar. I had my first flight in early October with the officer commanding No. 17 Squadron, Wing Commander Peter Johnston. I followed this with four conversion sorties over a two-day period some five weeks later with the squadron QFI, Squadron Leader Holder. On 12 November I was sent off by myself for a low-level trip, having been given one final warning to avoid rotating for take-off at too slow a speed. I had not noticed any particular problem but apparently the Adour engines did not have the power to overcome the drag that could be induced if the nose was lifted too high in an attempt to get off the ground. I set off in a north-westerly direction, skirting the Ruhr and on into the north German plain, gingerly using the Jaguar’s moving-map display to tell me where I was. This was a considerable luxury for an old Hunter – and even Lightning – pilot and more than made up for the absence of a navigator in this single-seat aircraft; however, being an old Hunter pilot, I still monitored my progress carefully using the map in my hand.

The Jaguar was designed for fast low-level penetration of enemy defences and, accordingly, the ride through the turbulence that is inevitable near ground level was a lot smoother than I remembered it having been in the Hunter. At height it was somewhat unstable, as I found when I later flew one down to the NATO weapons’ centre at Decimomannu in Sardinia to visit one of the RAF Germany squadrons on detachment there. As there was no autopilot, and it didn’t seem possible to trim successfully for level flight, I found I had to watch my height constantly and work away at countering the aircraft’s continuing attempts to depart from it. Because it was possible to pre-dial ‘way-points’ into the aircraft’s computer and thereby report with an accuracy that I hadn’t previously known in a single-seat aircraft, it was possible to fly on civil airways. This was just as well, as most continental countries were tending to phase out – other than in designated training areas – the right of military aircraft to navigate freely as had once been the case above the level of civilian flights. The other requirement for flying airways – which the Jaguar also had – was the height responder facility on the Identification Friend or Foe kit. The accuracy that this device provided had its penalties however. As I checked in on passing over an airway reporting point at Nice, en route to Decci, a female voice asked me to report my height. When I replied that I was at Flight Level 330, which is 33,000 feet with the standard millibar setting of 1013.2 dialled into the altimeter, she came back immediately with ‘No you are not, you are at 32,800 feet’. Given that International Air Traffic rules require aircraft on specific headings to be at specific flight levels, separated by (at the very least) 1,000 feet of height difference, and given the Jaguar’s friskiness in pitch, I felt that a passing 200 foot deviation from my required flight level was not at all bad. But I had not allowed for a bit of Gallic feminist point scoring.

Bruggen represented the serious side of our Cold War defences. Four Jaguars were kept permanently on standby there, each loaded with two tactical nuclear bombs slung under their wings. The hardened aircraft shelters in which they were housed were themselves inside security fences guarded by armed RAF police in watch-towers and at the electronically operated gates across the taxiway leading out of the readiness dispersal. The police had orders to shoot any pilot attempting to taxi out if they had not received the requisite and required coded clearance. By my time in Germany the RAF had been handling nuclear weapons for over twenty-five years without risk or mishap. Orders and instructions were clear and tight, and ground-handling equipment proven – or so we thought.

One evening I was telephoned by Bruggen’s Station Commander, John Thompson, to say that he had a problem: a bomb being returned from servicing at Aldermaston (nestling in its specially designed carrying-case) had not been properly secured on the low-loader lorry that was transporting it from the delivering Hercules to storage in the Bruggen bomb-dump (the Hercules had been late in arriving, the Station Armament Officer had been called away to deal with something else, and the corporeal driver, on duty longer than he thought he would be, decided that he could get away without strapping the case onto the low-loader as was clearly required by regulations). The bomb, or rather the carrying-case with the bomb in it, had slid off the low-loader as the driver turned a corner and had hit the ground. The case had burst and some slight damage appeared to have been done to the casing of the bomb. To cover the possibility of a leakage of radiation John Thompson had sensibly called a ‘practice’ incident to enable him quietly to establish a cordon on the Station at a safe distance. The laid down procedures required me to acquaint the British Embassy at Bonn immediately of any type of nuclear incident, no matter how trivial, and this I did. The following morning I went down to Bonn to have a word with my point of contact there, the Minister, Christopher Mallaby. Christopher, later HM Ambassador in Bonn, and after that in Paris, was primarily interested in knowing how quickly we could remove the problem from Germany. He was not very happy when I told him that nothing could be done until experts had been whistled up from Aldermaston, and had had time to determine if the bomb could be moved safely. There followed a fraught period while it was painstakingly pored over and the warhead carefully X-rayed. Nobody was taking any chances and there were a considerable number of consultations between the experts on the spot and Aldermaston. Finally, after some three weeks of testing and teeth-sucking the bomb was deemed safe for moving, loaded onto a Hercules and shipped out. As it turned out, there never had been any risk of radiation leakage. However, nerves in the Embassy stayed a little frayed until I was able to report that the bomb was well out over the North Sea; the real fear was perhaps not so much of a leakage of radiation, but rather of a leakage to the German Press. The subsequent Board of Inquiry into the incident recommended disciplinary action against six servicemen.

Incidentally, the especially designed cases in which the bombs were transported had been tested for strength as a condition of their procurement. The requirement was that they survive undamaged a drop of twenty-five feet onto a concrete surface. They had passed this test perfectly but no one seemed to have thought of testing them with a mock-up in them of the heavy article they were designed to contain.

I paid my first visit to Berlin in December, flying up the access corridor from Braunschweig in a Pembroke at 3,000 feet. Visibility was good and it was very interesting to see, assembled on the airfields that we passed over or near, some of the Russian military strength that was deployed close to the Iron Curtain. The corridor, one of three agreed in 1945 when the western allies and the Russians were still friendly, led into the Berlin Control Zone, a circular cylinder centred on Berlin of 35 nm diameter stretching from ground level to 15,000 feet. Flights within the Zone were coordinated by one of the very few four-power cooperative ventures that had survived much beyond 1945, the Berlin Air Safety Centre. There was an agreed right of flight throughout the control Zone for all four former allies, and some thirty years after my last flight in a Chipmunk I had one over Berlin, crossing into the Russian Sector at 1,000 feet at the Brandenburg Gate, flying down the Unter den Linden before having a scenic tour of most of East Berlin. Even at that height it was possible to see how tatty that slice of city was in comparison with the thrusting, prosperous-looking, busy bit on the western side of the wall.

The original post-war agreement allowed military and civilian flights along the corridors but restricted the latter to a few nominated airlines, in our case British European Airways – and later British Airways – only. The originally agreed top height of the corridors, 15,000 feet, probably seemed very reasonable in 1945, but in the jet age the airlines wanted the advantage of flying higher both for fuel economy and to avoid subjecting the paying passengers unnecessarily to turbulent conditions nearer the ground. However, the Russians were unwilling to change the terms of an agreement that they had willingly reached in the heady aftermath of victory.

At the beginning of February 1983 I flew out to the United States in an RAFVC-10 to visit one of Germany’s Jaguar squadrons detached, as part of an on-going programme to Nellis Air Force Base, for live weapons training. I was met by John Thompson and members of the squadron, taken to check into my Las Vegas hotel, and then ‘down town’ for a meal. The fact that it was three o’clock in the morning by my body clock did not deter them at all. The USAF had established at Nellis, and in the Nevada desert, an extremely effective weapons-training complex. There was an ‘Aggressor Squadron’ that studied Soviet tactics, and flew aircraft painted in Russian colours and with Russian insignia; they were the ‘enemy’ with a mission to disrupt the ground attack and bombing sorties mounted by the visiting squadrons. F 15s were provided to fly escort to the weapon-delivering aircraft, the latter all carrying live munitions to fire or drop on the ground ranges. And there was the pinnacle of sophistication for air combat training – an Air Combat Manoeuvring Range whose radars could record combat exercises in detail and whose sensors, using responses from pods mounted for the exercises on the participating aircraft, could record the participants’ heading, height, speed, g, and angle of attack at any and every moment during it. The end product was a definitive record of results for use during debriefing – and a resultant improvement in tactics and pilot skills in combat.

I was given a ride in a two-seat F 15, one of four escorting a flight of six RAF Germany Jaguars carrying live bombs to drop when they reached the target area some sixty miles up-country. We flew at 3,000 feet watchfully waiting for the Aggressors to pounce on the Jaguars and, when they did, found ourselves immediately in a glorious swirling low-level dogfight. The F 15 was a joy to throw about and absolutely splendid at low-level, high-speed, high g manoeuvring. I was an instant convert to it and desperately wished, as so often RAF pilots had wished over the years, that the British Government would splash out for the odd up-to-date bit of kit from the States – and avoid tinkering and modification on the rare occasion that it did buy anything!

In April, Jock Kennedy departed, destined for the Air Force Board as Air Member for Personnel. He was replaced by Air Marshal Sir Patrick Hine – the same Paddy Hine who had dragged me away from my law books at Andover nearly twenty years before. I don’t know whether he was concerned that past friendship might be detrimental to a professional working relationship between us, but from the beginning he was, and remained, unwilling to allow himself the close relationship with his deputy that had been Jock’s style. However, he was the boss and I adjusted to the new regime. Happily one thing did not change: although Paddy was determined to visit every corner of his parish, and get airborne whenever he could, he did not cavil at my well established practice of getting away from the office for some flying myself and in May I was back in the Phantom, even getting a weekend trip in one, via a stop at Brindisi, to Akrotiri.

The next opportunity I had to venture into East Berlin was in late June. This time I travelled from West Berlin by car via the Glienicke Brũucke, the agreed crossing point for military vehicles and, according to a number of Hollywood films, the spot where captured spies were exchanged. The occasion was a cocktail party given by the members of the British Mission to the Commander-in-Chief, Russian Forces in Germany (BRIXMIS) in its Mission House. These Missions – the French and Americans each had one as well, and the Russians had reciprocal ones with the western three – had been set up in 1945 for genuine liaison purposes. However, as each had the right to travel in the others’ areas of control they had gradually developed over the years into useful little spying teams.² And, of course, each was subject to restrictions and close observation when on the opposite side of the IGB to their own. In East Germany, our people were often subjected to downright dangerous interferences. For example, their vehicles would be forced into ‘accidents’ on the road, and on one occasion I had to protest as Duty Commander (a duty which the Chief of Staff, BAOR and I held in turn) via the head of SOXMIS, the normal conduit to the Soviet authorities, after two members of BRIXMIS had been injured when their car was forced into a ditch.

Our side did not set out to injure but we were not above a few tricks, such as when we got the West German police to arrest a SOXMIS crew for ‘illegal parking’ and, while they were detained, carted away their car and stripped it to see what sort of recording and camera equipment were in its hidden compartments. That naturally brought a protest from SOXMIS and another lengthy exchange of correspondence. At the cocktail party, however, all was sweetness if not light, and I had a lengthy spell trying to converse with the Chief of Staff of the Soviet Air Forces in Germany, Major General V Myescheryakov. He seemed a pleasant enough man but, as he had what I took to be a political minder at his elbow at all times, he was not very forthcoming and carefully avoided putting forward any views on any of the subjects on which I tried to open a serious conversation. When, finally, I suggested to him that it was a bit ridiculous for two former allies to be lined up against each other across the IGB, and that perhaps we were unnecessarily fearful of each other’s intentions he said, glancing at his minder: ‘We are frightened of nobody.’ Good patriotic stuff, but death to the pursuit of a meaningful discussion.

Having had a few trips in the Puma, and found how willing No. 230 Squadron was to fly one to Rheindahlen whenever I asked, I felt that I should show willing in return and learn to fly the aircraft. I spoke to Dick Johns about the possibility of organising a short course and this was arranged for mid-August in a very easy and convenient way: I was picked up by a Puma on each of three mornings from the grass just outside the fence that surrounded the Headquarters and put through a trimmed-down syllabus of six training sorties by the Squadron’s QFI, Flight Lieutenant Brewerton. My only previous experience of helicopters, apart from sitting down the back end of several on various transit flights, and following winching from dinghy drills at sea, comprised one flight in the cockpit of a Whirlwind many years before with my old QUAS instructor Harry Dodd at the controls. I recall thinking then how impossible it seemed to be to deal with and coordinate the demands of stick, rudders, cyclic pitch and twist-grip throttle. However, technology had moved on and in the Puma a computer made things much simpler by keeping the engine output matched to the demands made of the main blades, and the tail-rotor in balancing tune. Thus, while there was still a lot to learn, including how to cope with the computer off-line, getting to grips with the modern machine was not as difficult as I had expected. At the end of the sixth flight we landed at Bruggen, shut down, and I was sent solo. All I had to do was start up, lift the machine of the ground a few feet into a hover and, having ascertained that everything was working as advertised, fly across the airfield and land. I found myself feeling again something of the apprehension about being able to do it as I had felt on my solo trip in the Chipmunk – and much the same exhilaration when I had accomplished it. Having spent so many years rushing at speed down runways to get airborne, and decelerating along them on landing, the ability to lift into the air and put down again almost anywhere was somehow very appealing. While I wouldn’t have wished to have started out on helicopters, and missed all the years on fighters, I was now more than ready to use any reasonable excuse to fly the Puma.

Out of the blue I got an invitation to go and meet the SOXMIS people at their West Germany mission house at Bunde, in the BAOR I Corps area. I went up by Puma and landed on a hockey-pitch sized patch of grass surrounded by quite tall poplar trees within a rather dreary looking compound enclosed by barbed wire. There was an office building, a Mess building and a few houses for the use of those SOXMIS personnel who chose (or were allowed) to bring their wives with them. Outside the compound, and down the road a little, a British military police-car was parked, permanently on stand-by to follow any sorties out of it. The seven members of the SOXMIS team were lined up to greet me, Brigadier General Golitsyn (the head of mission) saluting and smiling broadly as I climbed down from the chopper. After he had introduced me to his officers, and shown me around, we got down to a session of informal talks, amounting initially to little more than a discussion of the complaints about which we had previously corresponded with each other, and ending with mutual assurances of good will and a promise by the General to ask the ‘East German Police’ to respect the rights that the Russians had given us in 1945. I wasn’t sure what to make of that promise but, as it had been the East Germans who had been giving us most grief I gave him the benefit of the doubt; it was just possible that the East Germans were acting, not as surrogates, but on their own malicious initiative.

Talks over, the General led the way into the dining room of the Mission Mess and my heart sank at the sight of a table piled high with food. I knew that before we started eating we would almost inevitably have to follow the Russian tradition of toasting each other, and everything we could think of – and we did. A couple of hours later, having eaten our way through the mountain of food and talked some more, I climbed aboard the Puma, started it up and, determined to make a good exit from the poplar tree confines of the compound, lifted us into the sky like a rocket. The 230 Squadron pilot – with me to satisfy currency requirements – was rather alarmed by the rate of ascent and made to reach to restrain it, doubtless concerned that I might override the computer-controlled synchronisation between blade angles and power. However, as the Puma was designed to lift the weight equivalent of sixteen fully equipped soldiers, and was empty, no harm ensued.

I flew the Puma whenever I could through September and October and, in December, had an introductory trip in a Chinook of No. 18 Squadron. The squadron had deployed to RAF Germany in June and had been working up with No. I British Corps since. As it had not yet built up to a full complement of aircraft post Falklands – and was only slowly achieving it – I felt it best to leave the crews to their work-up for the time being, content myself with looking in on the outfit whenever I was up at Gutersloh, and continue to fly with 230 Squadron.

I also had the opportunity to get a ride in an Army Gazelle from time to time whenever I needed a speedy transit from Rheindahlen to some distant site and 230 Squadron could not oblige. The Gazelle pilots were mostly SNCOs, which reflected an employment policy quite different to that of the RAF. The Germans, too, had NCOs in the cockpit: once when I got a lift in a Luffwaffe ‘Huey’ with my good friend and former Messerschmitt 109 pilot, Major General Hans Flade, the Chief of Staff of 2 ATAF, we were flown – very competently in thick cloud – by a corporal. I had always been somewhat ambivalent about the RAF’s policy of commissioning pilots and navigators. Perhaps it was a good recruiting lure to offer short-service commissions widely, but I think we might have missed some useful people by fishing in a pool narrowed by looking for ‘officer qualities’. Against that, it seemed wrong to have the mix that we had during the Second World War when officers and NCOs were often exposed to the same risks and responsibilities in the air, but at different pay and accommodation scales on the ground.

Another change under way in the Command during the autumn of 1983 was the replacement of the Buccaneers at Laarbruch by Tornados. The first Buccaneer Squadron to disband and reform with its new aircraft was No. 15, followed a month or so later by No. 16. I had had no great desire to learn to fly the Buccaneer, an aircraft that had been developed for the Navy, and was by now well past its prime, but I had felt for some time that I had better show some willing and had eventually organised a trip in one. I was taken up by Laarbruch’s Commanding Officer, Group Captain Graham Smart. Graham, anxious to show me what the aircraft could do in terms of its low-level under-the-radar penetration role, had arranged for a pair of Phantoms to mount CAP and we occupied ourselves for about thirty minutes with runs against them and a bit of hard evasive turning. All very well for Graham with his hands on the controls in front, but not very interesting for me in the back. I was sitting low in a control-less compartment my vision impeded, as it had been on the Phantom trip from Coningsby to Leuchars, by apparatus that I didn’t even know how to turn on. And then we set off for a few passes on a bombing range. Hitherto I had simply been a little bored in the back but now, with negative g on each dive on the target and high positive g on each pull-out, I began to feel decidedly unwell. I had never felt like this when I was doing much the same thing in Hunters, but then I was in current flying practice with the aviation equivalent of ‘sea-legs’, and I was doing the flying (which was probably what kept me hale and hearty in the F 15 out of Nellis). It was acutely embarrassing having to hand over a sick-bag (fortuitously left in the aircraft by a previous occupant) to the airman who saw us back into dispersal at Laarbruch. It was almost as if the aeroplane was paying me back for my disdain for it. One positive thing did come out of the trip, however: for the first time in my flying life I began to appreciate the courage and stoicism of navigators and other aircrew who don’t have any chance of getting their hands on the thing that really matters – the stick. Happily it doesn’t take long, back on firm ground, to recover, and by the time I was on the way back to Rheindahlen the colour had returned to my face, and the only thing I was suffering from was the loss of some dignity at Laarbruch.

The evening ahead included dinner at Flagstaff House, the residence of the C-in-C BAOR, General Sir Nigel Bagnall. The Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was staying overnight with him and he had invited a cross-section of senior staff from the combined HQs to come and meet her. She was seated for dinner on the General’s right, by his deaf (gunner’s) ear. I was seated immediately on her right and, from the moment she realised that he was having difficulty hearing her, and for most of the time we were at the table, I had her attention. Our conversation began rather blandly with the PM asking me what I did and what I thought of life in Germany. She then asked me – she had obviously been well briefed about BAOR – if the wives of RAF men in Germany were as disgruntled as Army wives were about spending so much of their lives there and missing out on the opportunities that the United Kingdom provided for gainful employment (it was not in fact a serious problem for us as RAF personnel, on the whole, spent much less of their lives in Germany than the Army people did). She felt, she said, that surely wives would prefer to be with their husbands rather than be unaccompanied as was happening so frequently when units were sent to Northern Ireland. That led us on to the topic of the ‘troubles’ in the Province and, when she discovered that I hailed from there she asked if I had any views on the possibility of the two sections of the community ever reaching agreement on anything. I suggested that it might well be possible but not quickly, and it would first be necessary to find a way to weaken or placate the Republican desire to make Northern Ireland part of the Irish Republic. However, I went on, before any offers were made to either side both should be starved a little of the unemployment benefits that enabled so many to be full-time terrorists. I even suggested, slightly mischievously, that it might be worthwhile trying to concentrate minds in the Province by announcing an intention to remove all troops on a given date, say, in eighteen months from any such announcement. ‘But we did that in Aden,’ she immediately parried, ‘and that produced nothing but chaos.’ ‘Ah, but Aden was quite different,’ I countered, adding rather pretentiously that I was there at the time. ‘The two terrorist groups in Aden, unlike the Irish, wanted the same thing. They were simply determined to out-do each other in nastiness to the British in order to win support locally. An impending end-date in Ulster might make negotiations with both sides possible and profitable.’ I banged on at some length about the nature of the tribal divisions in Northern Ireland, doubtless telling her what she already knew, and probably boring the pants off her, but she was gracious enough to listen.

In February, a test pilot from Boscombe Down brought a Hunter T7 out to Germany to give us a look at the work being done on Forward Looking Infra Red, a device for picking out heat emitting sources on the ground. He also had with him a couple of sets of helmet-mounted Night Vision Goggles. I had not had any experience of either, and when I went up with him for a low-level flight on a pitch-black night I was impressed by both. There was still some work to be done on FLIR but it was easy to see that it had considerable potential. I was aware that Night Vision Goggles were already in service but to me they were novel, and it was a new experience to approach an unlighted airfield and runway, seeing both in a sort of ghostly greenness, and be able to carry out a landing as easily as one did by daylight. While hurling an aircraft at the ground in the dark in a steep dive was never going to be comfortable,³ on the strength of this short experience it was easy to be convinced that both devices were going to make a real difference to ground attack work in the future, and most particularly to close air support.

1984 continued at a fast pace with commitments of one sort or another both inside the HQ and away from it. There was plenty to do and very little that wasn’t a pleasure. In late February, for example, I travelled to Bad Kohlgrub, near Oberammergrau in the Bavarian Alps to visit the RAF Germany Winter Survival School for a couple of days. As well as exposing aircrews to the rigours of camping in the snow in self-built shelters, and then subjecting them to interrogation sessions conducted by professional Service interrogators, the school offered participants a chance to learn to ski. Although the first two items had to be endured, the skiing was a pleasure and ensured that there was never a shortage of people wanting to go on the school’s courses. I ducked out of the interrogation bit, however.

In March I travelled to Switzerland at the invitation of the CAS of the Swiss Air Force, a delightfully pleasant man whom I had hosted on a visit to RAF Germany the previous autumn. Among the highlights of this trip was a look at one of the underground hangars that the Swiss had sunk into the sides of mountains and equipped to survive several months of nuclear ravage across Europe. I also watched Swiss Hunters practising live air-to-ground firing at a range high in the Alps, and a Swiss Air Force anti-aircraft gun unit firing live shells at towed targets in another section of the Alps, somewhat surprised that both activities were possible in a country that I had always thought to be short of space and full of people pursuing out-door activities. Before leaving I was given the chance to try my hand at a Pilatus P7, a rather nifty and fully aerobatic two-seater training machine that British Aerospace, acting for the manufacturers, was keen to sell to the RAF.

In April I began again the annual round of Air Officer’s Inspections of our five airfields plus the RAF Hospital at Wegberg, the administrative unit supporting the HQ, RAF Rheindahlen, and the RAF unit at Decimomannu. They all came and went with due formality, some excellent hospitality, and a chance to chat with people across the rank structure. At Wegberg I was reminded that I had banged on about the rank structure in relation to discipline some six months before when the commanding officer of the hospital had remanded one of his nurses to me on a Charge. She was a flight lieutenant in the Princess Mary’s Royal Air Force Nursing Service who had joined the gliding club at Bruggen, been instructed by a corporal, succumbed to his charms, and was later found in bed with him in a caravan by a couple of Bruggen’s patrolling RAF Policemen. During the process of hearing the Charge she was accompanied by another woman, as is the standard requirement. The latter was a substantial lady who seemed to be glowering at me throughout the proceedings, and particularly fiercely when the ‘offender’ started to weep. This happened when I pointed out to the nurse that the Royal Air Force Act conferred on officers the power to order those under them – perhaps, in the circumstances, I should have said subordinate to them – to carry out actions that might well be hazardous and, in war, could even result in their deaths. Unless discipline was nurtured and enforced, I went on to explain, such orders might not be followed in extremis; and sleeping with a person to whom one might have to issue an order, particularly an unpleasant one, was hardly conducive to the level of discipline necessary in a military context. All very ponderous stuff but I felt it necessary to say something in an egalitarian and sexually liberated age that might get through to her. I caught sight of her during my inspection of the hospital, hesitating in a doorway, almost as if she was torn between wanting to hide and wanting to speak. We didn’t speak but the woman who had accompanied her, a squadron leader matron, did make a point of seeking me out to tell me that until they had heard my harangue about discipline neither had appreciated the responsibilities involved. I had thought she was going to take me to task for being harsh to one of her girls, or even to point out to me that a nurse was hardly likely to need to issue hazardous orders. I was very happy that I got both assumptions wrong.

By July I had been Deputy Commander for two years – normally the most that one could hope for in any senior command appointment. However, the MOD was in the middle of another round of cuts and joint-Service rationalisations and a temporary freeze had been imposed on postings for people of my rank level and above until it had been completed. I had been told in February that my next appointment would most likely be as Commandant of the Staff College at Bracknell, but that this could be contingent on the outcome of the MOD review. And, Jock Kennedy had warned me later in the year that once this had been completed, he might well want me to move quickly. As it turned out, he did: the freeze ended in early September, my posting to Bracknell was confirmed, and my date of departure from Germany was fixed for two weeks later. I agreed to a request that I get swiftly to Bracknell to take over from my predecessor there as soon as possible.

I embarked on a whistle-stop tour of visits to the various units in the Command, and even managed a trip to Kiel to enjoy for the last time the British Yacht Club’s autumn regatta. I also squeezed in a helicopter ride to Auf dem Dümpel to open the air show for a third time, and take my leave of my friends there. I had not done too well in 1984 as far as flying was concerned; apart from the T7 ride, the swirl around in the Pilatus P7 in Switzerland, an introductory flight in a Tornado GR2, and a few sorties in Pumas and Phantoms, but I really had no cause for complaint. I had one final flight on 4 September; it was, as my first flight in Germany had been, in a Phantom on a low-level PI trip in the Ardennes area south-west of Aachen – once again being duffed up by Belgian F 16s!

My tour in RAF Germany had given me the greatest pleasure. The military environment was fascinating; the job outstanding; the opportunities to fly a wide variety of aircraft types, unique. I had waited a long time to be posted there. And it had been worth the wait.