V-Force E-Book

Jonathan Glancey

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 415

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'Impressive... Glancey has written an engaging and affectionate account of the V-bombers, not least the figures who made it all possible.' Telegraph THE THREE VERY DIFFERENT models of V class bomber comprising Britain's strategic nuclear strike force - Vickers Valiant, Avro Vulcan and Handley Page Victor - marked a radical change in post-war bomber design. From the time they first entered service between 1955 and 1957, these charismatic, high-flying jets stole the public imagination. Theirs, though, was a terrible beauty. In 1956, over the South Australian desert, Valiant WZ366 was the first British aircraft to drop an operational atomic bomb. The V-bombers were Britain's premier Cold War aircraft. But frictions in Anglo-American relations alongside developments in radar and surface-to-air missiles led to the Royal Navy taking over Britain's nuclear deterrent role in 1968. Despite this, the V-bombers enjoyed a second life in conventional roles, most notably when Vulcans undertook the longest bombing raids in history in the 1982 Falklands War. V-Force sets these formidable, haunting aircraft in the story of the development of twentieth-century weapons of mass destruction, military rivalries and international politics. It is both an extraordinary ode to the V-bombers and a unique lens through which to view Britain's Cold War experience.

Leseprobe

Also by Jonathan Glancey

Operation BowlerWings Over WaterThe Journey MattersConcorde

Harrier

Giants of SteamSpitfireNagaland

Tornado: 21st Century Steam

The Story of ArchitectureLondon: Bread and CircusesArchitecture: A Visual HistoryLost Buildings

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2025 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Jonathan Glancey, 2025

The moral right of Jonathan Glancey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

The picture acknowledgements on pp. 307–8 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

Map designed by Jeff Edwards.

Endpaper image: Ministry of Defence © Crown Copyright, 1958.Reproduced under the terms of the Open Government Licence.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 83895 795 7

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978 1 80546 544 7

E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 796 4

Printed in Great Britain

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Uno Animo Agimus

We act with one accord

Motto of 35 (Vulcan) Squadron RAF

Contents

MAP

V-BOMBER DISPERSAL BASES AND AIRFIELDS, 1962

PROLOGUE

In balance with this life, this death

CHAPTER 1

Weapons of Mass Destruction I:The bomber will always get through

CHAPTER 2

Weapons of Mass Destruction II:All changed, changed utterly

CHAPTER 3

Weapons of Mass Destruction III: Inception

CHAPTER 4

QRA and Other Early Service

CHAPTER 5

Missiles

CHAPTER 6

Impact

CHAPTER 7

Swords Into Ploughshares

CHAPTER 8

Rivals – USSR/USA/France

CHAPTER 9

What Might Have Been

CHAPTER 10

Post-Polaris

CHAPTER 11

Vulcan to the Sky

AFTERWORD

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Illustration Credits

Index

V-bomber Dispersal Bases and Airfields, 1962

Prologue

In balance with this life, this death

Nuclear white knights. B.2 Vulcans at RAF Wittering, 1963

RAF Coningsby, Lincolnshire. Friday, 26 October 1962. ‘I’m dashing off,’ said newly commissioned Pilot Officer Peter West to his wife as he prepared to swap his married quarters for a caravan parked next to a pure white delta-wing Vulcan B.2 nuclear bomber stabled on the fringe of the airfield. The caravan was where West and his four fellow crew members were to wait for the call to ‘scramble’.

‘If you see us take off,’ continued the young air electronics officer, ‘I want you to take the children, put them in the car, put a few things in the car with them, and get the hell out of there. Drive up to Scotland. Go to your brother in Skye. You’ll probably be safe there.’

Even when strapped into the cramped cockpit of the Vulcan and prepared for take-off at any moment, West thought – and hoped – the bombers would remain on the ground. For West believed in the sanity of MAD, the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction, by which the full-scale use of nuclear weapons by an attacker on a nuclear-armed defender with second-strike capabilities, like his Vulcan bomber, would cause the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender.

‘In the highly improbable idea that we would take off,’ West recalled in 2009, ‘we knew that if we did get back, there would be nothing to get back to. Long afterwards, my wife said that she thought to herself at the time, “What a bloody fool. Where does he think I’m going to go? How far does he think I’ll get? I would be passing all the airfields, all of which would be primary targets, come on!”’

If those airfields had been hit by Soviet nuclear bombs or missiles, much of Britain would have been devastated, vast swathes of its population killed, maimed or fatally weakened – very possibly for generations to come. Mrs West would have needed a brand-new 120-mph Jaguar Mk X, clear A roads, and the driving skills of Pat or Stirling Moss to have any realistic chance of speeding her family 500 miles north-west to Skye. Even then, RAF Machrihanish, on the west coast of Scotland – one of the RAF’s nuclear bomber dispersal bases – may well have been hit. And who, in any case, could be sure of which way the wind, laced with nuclear fallout, would be blowing, or even if the ferry over the sea to Skye would be sailing? Mrs West felt it would have been best to stay at home with the children. If the family was going to die, it would be with the children in their mother’s arms.

These were the hours and minutes, we are taught, that the world held its breath. The Four Horsemen were mounted. The gates of Hell appeared to gape. Armageddon seemed inescapable. Apocalypse now. Was US president John F. Kennedy truly prepared to launch nuclear strikes against the Soviet Union that October weekend in 1962? Would his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev, be forced to reply in kind? If Friday 26th, when Pilot Officer West was called away from home, was ‘hot’, then, if it had been possible to measure the temperature on some politico-military thermometer, Saturday 27th was scorching.

At what time should the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists have set their well-known Doomsday Clock that weekend? When this graphic device first appeared on the cover of the scientific journal in its new magazine format in June 1947, it was set at seven minutes to midnight. The aim had been to alert the public at large to the imminent threat of uncontained nuclear weaponry. Founded in 1945 by the Russian-born biophysicist Eugene Rabinowitch of the University of Chicago following the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the bulletin’s early contributors included Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Bertrand Russell and Soviet physicist Nikolay Semyonov.

Newspaper editors worldwide were entranced by the Doomsday Clock. It was designed both intellectually and graphically – the memorable artwork was by the artist Martyl Langsdorf – to make alarming front-page headlines, and it did. Peter West and many of his colleagues were certainly aware of it. Following the testing of H-bombs in November 1952 in the US and August 1953 in the Soviet Union, the clock had advanced to two minutes to twelve. On Saturday, 27 October 1962, it must surely have ticked towards a minute – or even to just a few seconds – to midnight.

That afternoon, a Soviet S-75 Dvina ground-to-air missile system shot down a US Lockheed U-2 ‘spy’ plane over Cuba – killing its pilot, Major Rudolf Anderson. Two weeks earlier, Anderson had been one of the USAF reconnaissance pilots who discovered nine Soviet nuclear missile launch sites dotted along the Cuban coastline, installed following the failed US-backed invasion to oust Castro at the Bay of Pigs the previous year. Forty R-12 and R-14 ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads, capable of striking targets across the United States, were on their way by sea from the USSR to the Caribbean island, and heading towards a US Navy blockade.

Since February, two nuclear bombers at key RAF bases had been on QRA (Quick Reaction Alert) standby. On Saturday 27th, Bomber Command ordered Alert Condition 3. This meant that as many of Britain’s nuclear bombers as possible should be armed and prepared for take-off within fifteen minutes. Far from the east coast of England, a dozen Fleet Air Arm Sea Vixens on board the 23,900-ton aircraft carrier HMS Hermes were also on alert and ready to strike Sevastopol – a key Soviet military base – and other Crimean targets with free-fall Red Beard A-bombs. The distinctive all-weather de Havilland FAW.1 jets, featuring twin Rolls-Royce Avon engines and twin tail booms, had a maximum speed of 650 mph (a Mach 1.4 version had been considered, but dropped) and a range of 600 nautical miles. Designed by a team led by Ronald Bishop of de Havilland Mosquito fame, they could fly low over the water at high speeds. Although their primary role was to protect the fleet, they could carry air-to-ground as well as air-to-air missiles and Red Beard.

While the minutes to Armageddon ticked by, diplomacy was at work. The British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, spoke by phone to President Kennedy, who was keen to invade Cuba and destroy the nuclear missile silos. We can listen to their conversation today – the veteran British politician calming the presidential waters while Soviet diplomats negotiated with the Americans in Washington. Despite loud threats, Khrushchev had no desire for nuclear war.

What neither Kennedy, Macmillan nor even Khrushchev knew at the time was that, on Saturday 27th, one of the four Foxtrot-class submarines escorting the Soviet ships steaming to Cuba very nearly fired the opening shot of World War III. Surfacing to recharge its batteries, B-59 caught the attention of the US Navy, and Captain Valentin Savitsky ordered his crew to submerge. Because, at this moment, the sub was out of contact with anyone, including Moscow, US ships hoping to establish communication lobbed practice depth charges, aiming to encourage it to resurface. Believing he was under lethal attack, Savitsky prepared to launch a nuclear-tipped torpedo at one of his antagonists. He was stopped at the last moment by Captain Vasily Arkhipov, the submarine brigade’s measured chief of staff who, very fortunately, was on board B-59. It was, although recollections vary, a very close-run thing indeed.

In the eastern and East Midland counties of England that momentous Saturday, villagers became aware of sudden preparations to launch (not that they would have known their technical specifications) 65-foot high, 11,000-mph Thor nuclear intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs). These rose from top-secret RAF Bomber Command launch pads close to the medieval parish churches and rural pubs they frequented. Sixty of these weapons – delivered to twenty sites in Cambridgeshire, the East Riding of Yorkshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Northants and Norfolk – had arrived from the US between 1958 and 1961, in the bellies of Douglas C-124 Globemaster II transport planes. Designed by US Navy rocket engineer Commander Robert Truax and program manager Adolf Thiel – who had earlier worked for Wernher von Braun on the design of the V-2 rocket in Nazi Germany – the safety record of Thor was not 100 per cent. There had been several accidents in the United States, while in December 1960 liquid oxygen spilling from one of the missiles onto its launch pad at RAF Ludford Magna, Lincolnshire, very nearly caused a fire that could have detonated its rocket fuel and very possibly its 1.44-megaton warhead.

Was anyone supping a pint in Ludford Magna’s White Hart Inn that weekend aware that they were a sitting target for Soviet missiles and bombers? Or that they could have been blown to kingdom come by their own countrymen nearly two years ago by that nuclear missile, based on the design of a Nazi ‘vengeance weapon’, sited across the fields little more than a mile south of the pub? Did they know on that knife-edge October weekend that Mach 2 RAF Lightnings and even faster ground-to-air Bloodhound missiles were on red alert to intercept Soviet bombers entering British airspace?

This being England, something else, beknown only to a handful of cabinet ministers, senior civil servants, art gallery directors and removal firms, was afoot. The cream of the collections of the National Gallery, the Tate Gallery, the British Museum, the V&A, the Royal Collection and the Public Record Office were to be taken by road at night to the safety of the Manod Quarry in North Wales and the Westwood Quarry at Corsham, Wiltshire, as they had been during the Second World War. But this also being England, one of the gallery directors – the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, Anthony Blunt – was a long-standing Soviet spy. If Moscow had really wanted to ‘nuke’ treasured works of art, a quick call to Blunt could have revealed all.

The missile crisis ended following a meeting between Robert F. Kennedy, President Kennedy’s younger brother and de facto chief of staff, and Anatoly Dobrynin, Soviet ambassador to Washington. At 10 a.m. GMT on Sunday 28th, a letter from Khrushchev was read out over Radio Moscow announcing the immediate withdrawal of missiles from Cuba. Praising Khrushchev’s ‘statesmanlike decision’, Kennedy promised, and delivered, ‘reciprocal measures to assure peace in the Caribbean area’ – and, he might have added, the Western world. At what had seemed the very last minute, the Cuban Missile Crisis was solved by old-fashioned, if tightrope, diplomacy. In Britain, Bomber Command’s V-Force stood down. Pilot Officer Peter West could go back home to his family.

Curiously, while for West and his RAF colleagues the world was threatened with nuclear devastation that daunting weekend, the Doomsday Clock stood unmoving at seven minutes to midnight. How so? According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

The answers to this seeming anomaly are that the Doomsday Clock captures trends and takes into account the capacity of leaders and societies to respond to crises with reasoned actions to prevent nuclear holocaust. The Cuban Missile Crisis, for all its potential and ultimate destruction, only lasted a few weeks; however, the lessons were quickly apparent when the United States and the Soviet Union installed the first hotline between the two capitals to improve communications, and, of course, negotiated the 1963 test ban treaty, ending all atmospheric nuclear testing. Others have suggested that the gravity of the Cuban Missile Crisis has been defined by decades of scholarship but that, in 1962, the world population, to a large degree, was unaware of what exactly had just happened. Or, more precisely, what hadn’t happened.

In Britain that Saturday, many people were simply out shopping or watching football. Arsenal beat Wolves 5–4. Hearts beat Kilmarnock 1–0. The deadly match between NATO and the Soviet Union ended in a nail-biting draw.

The nuclear deterrent remained firmly in place, with Britain’s borne through the 1960s by the purpose-built bombers of V-Force. This book tells their story from the ember days of the Second World War and the white-hot development of the atom bomb to their ultimate replacement by the inverse logic of Royal Navy submarines. V-Force looks at these winged Cold War warriors – warts, rivets and all – through the lenses of invention and engineering, of rivalry with fellow NATO countries as well as with the Soviet Union, and of popular culture, too. It looks at how, rather surprisingly, on holidays and business trips we may well have been flying aboard civil versions of the V-bombers. And it hopes to explain why, long after their role was sensibly usurped, it proved hard to let these machines vanish from the skies they were designed to protect. A story of success, with compromise and failure along the way; of changing political and military priorities; and, not least, of derring-do by those associated with these machines, both in the air and on the ground.

B.1 Vulcan leads B.1 Victor (top) and B.1 Valiant (below)

Britain’s V-Force was the front line of an aerial cavalry that would have charged towards targets behind the Iron Curtain if the Soviets had fired a first shot in what we think of, flinchingly, as World War III. Some hours behind these charismatic British bombers, waves of eight-engine USAF Boeing B-52 Stratofortress bombers would have been making their relentless 500-mph way east and west towards Soviet targets. V-Force was always the West’s advance guard.

Vulcan, Victor, Valiant. What machines these were.

V-Force: First Impressions

I once spent a glorious summer afternoon, when young, reading in a Lincolnshire field sentried with blood-red poppies. I put my book down each time a camouflaged Vulcan bomber rose from close-by RAF Waddington. Stunning-looking, evidently powerful, and somewhat smoky, the aircraft nosed up over the field. They created, at first, elongated delta-shaped shadows, and then, as they passed over, a collective Jovian roar shot through with a demonic chorus of unearthly howls. This howling was the sound signature of the Vulcan, caused by the geometry of its air intakes at certain throttle settings. There was something strangely primeval about the noise. It was easy to imagine Vulcans howling over Lincolnshire fields into combat in some last weird battle in the East; white-clad aerial knights in their nuclear prime over Russian guns, delivering hell before thundering back across the North Sea. Back to the sky-piercing spires, potato flowers, poppy-strewn fields and rich earth of air-based Lincolnshire.

The thought of Pilot Officer West and his colleagues flying into battle in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, should common sense have evaporated and diplomacy failed, calls to mind that wistful phrase ‘Cavalry of the Sky’ and, odd or not, the Charge of the Light Brigade. Rather like Lord Cardigan’s ‘six hundred’ galloping into the ‘valley of Death’ towards Russian artillery in the Battle of Balaklava during the Crimean War (1853–56), the RAF’s V-bombers in the 1960s would have faced a palisade of enemy weaponry in the guise of ground-to-air missile launch pads stretching in their hundreds from the Baltic to the Caspian Sea. A V-750VN missile from one of the S-75 Dvina air defence systems had shot down the CIA Lockheed U-2 spy plane flown at 70,500 feet by Gary Powers over the Soviet Union on 1 May 1960. Another V-750 had taken down Major Anderson’s U-2 over Cuba.

How these British aircraft stirred the public imagination. At the 1955 Farnborough Air Show, Avro’s chief test pilot, Wing Commander Roland ‘Roly’ Falk – dressed in Savile Row suit and tie – barrel-rolled the second production Vulcan, all 69 tons of it, while in his take-off climb. Recorded on film, Roly’s roll astonishes still. While Alex Henshaw, Vickers’ chief test pilot during the Second World War, had rolled the four-engine Avro Lancaster heavy bomber – the only pilot known to have done so – he certainly would not have been able to perform this aerobatic feat immediately after take-off.

The Avro Vulcan first flew in 1952, seven years after the end of the Second World War. It had been on the drawing board in 1947, five years after the Avro Lancaster went into service with Bomber Command. The sudden swap in the early 1950s from camouflaged 280-mph piston-engine machines bristling with machine guns pointing from Perspex turrets to pure-white, unarmed 625-mph flying-wing jets may well have dumbfounded many of those attending the Farnborough Air Show on public weekends. These two famous aircraft types belonged to eras separated by the atomic bomb. What Farnborough audiences might have found even more extraordinary is the fact that the Lancaster and the Vulcan were designed by the same engineers. Stuart Davies – who took over as head of design at Avro after Roy Chadwick, his chief, was killed in an aircraft accident in 1947 – was not only the key designer of the Vulcan. He had also turned the unsuccessful twin-engine wartime Avro Manchester bomber into the triumphant four-engine Lancaster, and before that had worked on the design of the Hawker Hart and Hawker Fury, the former a fast light bomber, the latter an aerobatic fighter, both in service with the RAF from 1930–31.

Bespoke test pilot: Roly Falk about to fly a B.1 Vulcan

Before these superb biplanes that so thrilled crowds at the Hendon Air Shows of the 1930s, Davies had worked on the 1924 Mk X version of the Vickers Virginia biplane bomber, substituting the wood structure of earlier models for one of duralumin and steel. The Virginia was the replacement for the First World War Vickers Vimy, a modified version of which, in 1919, Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Brown had flown when they made the first non-stop transatlantic flight. Flying in atrocious conditions, this nearly sixteen-hour flight was fuelled by petrol, soggy sandwiches, chocolate bars, and coffee laced with spirits. Virginias remained in service with the RAF until 1941, the year the Lancaster first flew.

Watching those Vulcans, by now painted in camouflage for low-level missions, howling over that Lincolnshire field was an unalloyed visceral sensation and unadulterated visual joy. However, the connection, through Stuart Davies, of the delta-wing nuclear jets to the earliest days of British bomber aircraft seemed to me improbable. They were the products of such very different technological eras.

I last saw one of these memorable machines flying – as at least 2 million other people did – at air displays between 2008 and 2015 by XH558 The Spirit of Great Britain, restored by the Vulcan to the Sky Trust. It was wonderful to witness this mesmerizing V-bomber put through its paces – flying, as pilots have said, like a jet fighter – and it was special to join a crowd of people falling – almost – into silence as XH558 led a brace of Lancasters close by RAF Waddington on 21 August 2014, to mark the ground-breaking of a Bomber Command memorial near Lincoln. Among those watching was 92-yearold Wing Commander George ‘Johnny’ Johnson, last of the famed ‘Dambusters’. The generation gap between the two types of Avro bombers was reinforced by the sound of the Lancasters at full throttle, working hard to keep pace with the Vulcan, which was maintaining a nose-up attitude to keep its speed down and help counter the turbulence from the wake of its powerful exhausts.

Of the other two V-Force bombers, I never witnessed a Vickers Valiant, the first of the trio into service and the first to be withdrawn from flight. I did, though, marvel at the Handley Page Victor. It would be hard not to. Low-slung on the ground, the Victor, especially when viewed head-on, had the appearance, surreally, of some enormous and deeply strange fish. A ray of sorts. That shape. That pair of giant gills – the air intakes of its Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire turbojets – and those curious segmented crescent wings. I could imagine them flapping slowly and powerfully through the ocean depths. A very mechanical fish, though, with its Captain Nemo cockpit, that oddly spaced glazing and long probing nose. The Victor’s tail, though, was not that of a fish, but of another mighty sea creature – the whale. Though whether piscine or whale-like in terms of its looks, the Victor displayed a strangely alien aesthetic.

I watched Victors fly in and out of RAF Marham in Norfolk. They were aerial fuel tankers by then, retired in 1993. Until 2021, a Victor served as a gate guardian at Marham. With neither the resources nor the time to restore the aircraft, in 2020 the RAF asked if anyone would like to take the Victor on. The last viewings were made on 10 October 2020, during the Covid pandemic. There were no offers. No Victor has flown since.

Quieter – relatively so – than the Vulcan, the Victor sounded more like an early jet airliner than a purely military aircraft. As we will see, there were, in fact, proposals for civil airliner versions of all three production V-bombers, with that of the Valiant, the most conventional of them, coming closest to realization. This may well seem odd to anyone who has so much as peered into the claustrophobic cockpits of the V-bombers. The Vulcan’s is, for everyone except perhaps those for whom this aircraft could do no wrong, almost frightening. How could five crew members – six if the crew chief, usually an NCO appointed to care for a specific aircraft and its designated regular crew, was on board – cope, shoehorned for hours on end into a space just big enough for them to squeeze inside? If you think an economy seat on board a budget airline Airbus or Boeing is cramped, try the cockpit of a Vulcan for size.

Pilots of light or much smaller aircraft, or those lucky enough to have flown in a Lancaster, would have found the almost complete lack of a view ahead disconcerting. Even more discomfiting was the fact that the airframe of the Vulcan was largely invisible from the pilots’ seats. Not that pilots would have seen all that much in nuclear conflict. They were even trained to fly with a patch over one eye. The light of a nuclear explosion would have been blinding.

The best view of these beguiling aircraft was either from the ground or from another aircraft – an RAF Lightning interceptor perhaps, flying in formation with V-bombers or aiming to refuel from tanker versions. The real view from inside a Vulcan was that of the instrument panels.

Three members of the Vulcan’s crew – radar plotter, navigator, air electronics officer – had to sit at the bottom of a ladder, facing backwards in a dark cubby hole with no view whatsoever. No ejection seats either, unlike the captain and co-pilot above them. As for any member of the crew who might feel a call of nature during a sortie, the Vulcan was equipped with a small bin with a tube attached, at the bottom of the ladder. There was no privacy, and how on earth – or in the air – a crew member could move around this space-capsule-like area kitted out in bulky high-altitude flight gear is anyone’s guess. During the 1982 Falklands War, Flight Lieutenant Martin Withers and his crew – six in all, including an air-to-air refuelling instructor – flew a 15-hour, 45-minute bombing mission from Ascension Island to Port Stanley and back, a world record. How did they avoid cramp?

Glimpses of these aircraft in early childhood aside, I knew them not in white, but in camouflage. But in my mind’s eye – as well as, of course, through the medium of photography, film and video – I see them, now that none are flying, clothed as if in white samite and, as if we might yet awake King Arthur and his knights from their sleep in Avalon and its dispersal sites – Chepstow, Caerleon, Alderley Edge, Richmond, Sewingshields – ready to defend us again. A V-Force of the imagination.

Perhaps I am being too romantic. Rarely, though, has a team of aircraft rooted themselves so quickly and so deeply in the national consciousness. Their active life in the disturbing role for which they were designed proved to be fleetingly brief. Only one of them, the Valiant, unleashed a nuclear bomb – and this, thankfully, on a test site, although this was dangerous enough for anyone’s good.

Bucked by turbulent politics, V-Force was an Atomic Age weapon to be admired and feared. An aerial Excalibur, it seems somehow appropriate that at the end of the 1960s its weaponry and defining purpose, now that there was no guarantee that the bombers would ever reach their targets, were to be drawn underwater into the near-silent depths of submarine warfare. For those few years, though, how V-Force – Britain’s frontline nuclear deterrent – shone.

This book is one attempt to illustrate the history of V-Force, to place Britain’s V-bombers in their social and political, design and engineering, and, of course, military context, including that of their rivals. It is not a nuts, bolts and rivets reference book. I list a number of these for further reading at the end. Instead, it tries to capture something of this remarkable and even quixotic aerial adventure, so very short-lived in its original form as the forces of politics and ever-more advanced weaponry lowered it ever-closer to the ground.

The sorry part of the story is Britain’s failure to either capitalize on or to develop its own military and commercial aviation technology when it might have done. If not always, politics and economics – short-term, knee-jerk and international – have a habit of winning over home-grown invention and technology. Britain’s defence, and specifically its nuclear deterrent, became increasingly reliant on US politics and technology. There are those who will argue that this was an inevitable process, yet this is not wholly true. In part it was due not just to the wiles of domestic and international politics, but to an almost wilful deindustrialization – the turning of what were factories and research institutes into poorly designed housing estates and shopping centres. In 2025, Britain finds it hard to make locomotives, trains or cars on its own.

There are, of course, outstanding examples of international collaboration in the aviation industry – Concorde, for example, or the Eurofighter Typhoon – and yet, just across the Channel, France retains an independent nuclear deterrent, and manufactures its own multi-role fighter, the Dassault Rafale – which, unlike the otherwise highly capable Typhoon, can operate from land and sea and be equipped with nuclear missiles. The British economy is said to rank sixth in the world, the French seventh. Britain’s increasing lack of independence and competitiveness is not to do with a lack of money, but rather a lack of will, or interest perhaps. This is not an argument in favour of spending on guns rather than butter, nor of encouraging war over peace, but of considered self-defence, of Britain being a dynamic NATO partner, and of the desire and ability to invent, design, make and, in the case of aircraft, fly high.

The V-Force bombers, at their most deadly sixty years ago, were compelling machines fighting a strange, unfought war that we are still rightfully fearful of. Theirs – as the necessary opening chapters tracking the story of devastatingly powerful weapons, destruction on an increasingly horrifying scale, nuclear deterrence, and the role bombers were expected to play in it show – was truly a terrible beauty.

ONE

Weapons of Mass Destruction I

The bomber will always get through

10 November 1932. Thirty years before the Cuban Missile Crisis. Stanley Baldwin, the de facto prime minister of the 1931–35 national government – Ramsay MacDonald’s health was deteriorating, his speeches confused – addressed parliament on the issue of rearmament. ‘I think it is well… for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through. The only defence is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves…’

A few weeks after the end of the Second World War, Clement Attlee, the new Labour prime minister who had been deputy leader of the Labour Party at the time of Baldwin’s speech, noted that ‘the modern conception of war to which in my lifetime we have become accustomed is now completely out of date. We recognised or some of us did before this war that bombing could only be answered by counter bombing. We were right. Berlin and Magdeburg were the only answer to London and Coventry. Both derive from Guernica.’

Other Spanish towns and cities, including Córdoba, Durango, Jaén and Madrid, had been bombed from the air by Hitler’s Condor Legion and Mussolini’s Aviazione Legionaria before Guernica was targeted on the afternoon of Monday, 26 April 1937. Lieutenant Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, younger brother of the ‘Red Baron’ and head of the Condor Legion, had his tactical reasons for attacking the town, yet the only way he could see of trapping Basque forces at a particular road junction was to carpet-bomb the area. Given the existing level of technology, the pinpoint bombing of the roads and bridges he claimed to have been after was out of the question.

Guernica, Pablo Picasso (1937)

Made in five waves, the raid was executed by three new German bombers – a pair of Heinkel He 111s and a Dornier Do 17, proving themselves in combat – and by eighteen Junkers Ju 52s (trimotor general utility aircraft) and three Italian Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 trimotor light bombers. Accompanied by Messerschmitt Bf 109, Heinkel He 51 and Fiat CR.32 fighters, the fifth wave was the most destructive. German and Italian air crews dropped 22 tons of bombs on Guernica. As to how many civilians were killed, no one really seems to know. Numbers vary from 300 to 1,700. Of buildings destroyed, it was at least 14 per cent or perhaps as many as 74 per cent. Whatever the figures, the raid was horrific.

What made this episode so well known outside Spain is the fact that George Steer, a reporter from the London Times covering the Spanish Civil War, had been quick to arrive at the scene. His story, published on 28 April, was syndicated to the New York Times and picked up by international press agencies. Guernica was the first such raid to be reported first-hand. Steer’s story was embellished as it did the rounds, leading British MPs to believe that Guernica was an ‘open city’ – neither occupied nor defended by military forces, and not allowed to be bombed under international law – which was untrue, while the Congressional Record shows that US senators and representatives were misled to believe that poison gas had been used. The death toll grew with rising international outrage.

Told of what had happened, Pablo Picasso, then living in Paris, read Steer’s account and set to work on an ambitious and nightmarish interpretation in black, white and grey oils of the bombing of the Basque town. The giant canvas, Guernica, would be displayed in the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris. Albert Speer’s towering German Pavilion topped with a Nazi eagle stood close by.

Guernica has loomed large in the collective imagination ever since. Who, from that Monday market day in April 1937, could have escaped the bombers? In 2007, the then president of the Basque parliament, Juan José Ibarretxe, met political deputies from Dresden, Hiroshima, Oświęcim (Auschwitz), Pforzheim, Volgograd (Stalingrad) and Warsaw to remember the significance of the raid on Guernica. Tadatoshi Akiba, mayor of Hiroshima, said:

Human beings have often sought to give concrete form to our powerful collective longing for peace. After World War I, that longing led to the League of Nations and numerous rules and taboos designed to govern warfare itself. Of these, the most important was the proscription against attacking and killing civilian non-combatants even in times of war. However, the second half of the twentieth century has seen most of those taboos broken. Guernica was the point of departure, and Hiroshima is the ultimate symbol. We must find ways to communicate to future generations the history of horror that began with Guernica.

Back in England in the early 1930s, there were those who disagreed with Stanley Baldwin’s assertion that the bomber would always get through – among them Air Marshal Hugh Dowding, appointed head of Fighter Command in 1936, who pushed for the development of radar, the Royal Observer Corps and the advanced eight-gun Rolls-Royce Merlin–powered Hurricane and Spitfire fighters. Even so, measured voices like that of the future Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan, who had fought and been badly wounded in brutal front-line battles in France during the First World War, believed the opening weeks of a new war with Germany would witness the deaths of hundreds of thousands of British civilians. Writing in 1956, Macmillan said that he, among many others, had ‘thought of air warfare in 1938 rather as people think of nuclear war today’.

Dowding’s great victory was the Battle of Britain, his air defence system holding back an outright German invasion of England while doing its best to protect British towns and cities from aerial attacks. In the hours of darkness, German bombers did get through Dowding’s defences, wreaking havoc on, among other hard-hit towns and cities, Birmingham, Bristol, Coventry, Glasgow, Kingston upon Hull, Liverpool, Manchester, Plymouth, Portsmouth and Southampton. Between September 1940 and May 1941, London was bombed on fifty-seven consecutive nights.

The RAF’s attempt to hit back at Germany proved disturbingly ineffective. In August 1941, the official Butt Report – an analysis of 633 target photographs made by the War Cabinet Secretariat economist David Bensusan-Butt – revealed that by the time the British bombers, flying by night, reached the industrial complexes of the Ruhr, just one in ten flew within five miles of its target; half of all bombs dropped fell into open countryside; and only 1 per cent were within the vicinity of the target, a case of the sound and fury of bomber aircraft signifying precious little.

One immediate upshot of the Butt Report was the formation of what proved to be the highly successful Pathfinder Force – RAF Bomber Command squadrons charged with locating and marking targets. Another was the advancement of the case for the area or ‘carpet’ bombing of German cities by large formations of heavy bombers. To this the Lindemann Report of March 1942 added a disturbing rider. Written by Winston Churchill’s close friend and chief scientific advisor, Frederick Lindemann, 1st Viscount Cherwell, it called for Bomber Command to direct its raids at working-class districts, thus destroying the German workforce.

Britain’s heavy four-engine bombers – the Handley Page Halifax, Short Stirling and the brand-new Avro Lancaster – began coming into service, and in large numbers. In February 1942, Air Marshal Arthur Harris was appointed Air Officer Commanding Bomber Command. At the same time the United States Army Air Force (USAAF)’s VIII Bomber Command (called the Eighth Air Force from 1944) arrived in England – at first at RAF Daws Hill, close by Harris’s headquarters at RAF High Wycombe. The Americans began ferrying fleets of heavy four-engine Boeing B-17 and Consolidated B-24 Liberator bombers across the Atlantic.

Harris made his intentions clear: ‘The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw and half a hundred other places, they put that rather naive theory into operation.’ Borrowing from the Old Testament (Hosea 8:7), he announced, ‘They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.’ In a BBC radio broadcast on 28 July 1942, he added fuel to his fire: ‘We are going to scourge the Third Reich from end to end. We are bombing Germany city by city and ever more terribly in order to make it impossible for them to go on with the war. That is our object; we shall pursue it relentlessly.’

A First World War fighter ace, in 1923 Harris had taken command of 45 Squadron stationed in a politically unstable Iraq. The RAF had been employed to ‘police’ the country following an uprising in summer 1920, in which more than 100,000 armed tribesmen rebelled against the British occupation. Flying missions totalling 4,008 hours, the RAF dropped 97 tons of bombs and fired 183,861 rounds for the loss of nine men killed, seven wounded and eleven aircraft destroyed. Nearly 9,000 Iraqis died. The uprising was quashed. With the RAF replacing ground troops, British military expenditure in Iraq fell from £23 million in 1921 to less than £4 million five years later.

Squadron Leader Harris added bomb-racks to his Vickers Vernon – a biplane introduced in 1921 and the RAF’s first dedicated troop carrier – and, in doing so, almost invented the first British heavy bomber. ‘The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means,’ reported Harris after several punitive raids against Iraqi rebels. ‘Within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured, by four or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape.’

From spring 1942, the tables were about to be turned on Germany. The major Allied air raids were to prove devastating. The first American heavy bomber raid on German-occupied Europe was made on 17 August 1942, by twelve B-17s of the 97th Bomb Group (motto: Venit Hora, ‘The Hour Has Come’) from RAF Grafton Underwood, Northamptonshire, on railway marshalling yards at Sotteville-lès-Rouen. The pilot of the lead aircraft in the first flight of six B-17s, Butcher Shop, was Captain Paul W. Tibbets. On 6 August 1945, Tibbets would fly the B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay from Tinian, an island under US control in the western Pacific, to Hiroshima.

With the Americans flying by day and the RAF at night, German cities reaped Harris’s whirlwind. The most concentrated assault was Operation Gomorrah (the Old Testament again – ‘Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven’, Genesis 19:24), a raid on Hamburg protracted over eight days and seven nights, which at the time was the heaviest in the history of air warfare. It hit Hamburg’s shipyards, U-boat pens and oil refineries, yet Allied bombers were after bigger game – the city itself. Careful calculations relating to the flammability of the city’s building stock, as well as wind direction and humidity, were made before the bombers set off. On the night of the most intense raid (27/28 July 1943), an aerial armada of 787 RAF bombers – 74 Wellingtons, 116 Stirlings, 244 Halifaxes and 353 Lancasters – headed to the tinder-dry city guided by RAF’s Pathfinder Force, with 739 aircraft attacking.

Reaping the whirlwind: aftermath of Allied bombing in the Eilbek district of Hamburg

The bombing caused an unpredicted and unprecedented vortex of superheated air that turned into a 150-mph tornado of fire rising 1,500 feet and howling demonically through the working-class districts of Borgfelde, Hamm, Hammerbrook and Rothenburgsort. People were swept off their feet from pavements into the burning air. The temperature rose to 815°C, causing the asphalt streets to burst into flames. Fuel spills ignited fires in the harbour and along the canals. Air-raid shelters were of no use; the air was sucked from inside them. Over three infernal hours, the firestorm destroyed thousands of apartment buildings, adding significantly to the total number of people killed in Hamburg – perhaps as many as 42,000 over those eight days. Hundreds of thousands more fled the city.

The raid that night had been meticulously planned. There were diversionary sorties by twin-engine Wellingtons and Mosquitos on targets including Bremen, Duisberg, Kiel and Lübeck. In the process, the mighty Krupp steelworks at Essen was badly damaged, with Dr Gustav Krupp suffering a severe stroke the morning following the raid. New techniques including Window (or chaff) – aluminized paper strips dropped from bombers to baffle enemy radar on the ground and in the air – helped the Allied crews immeasurably. Searchlights and night-fighters were unable to locate the hundreds of British bombers as a result. A follow-up raid by 777 RAF bombers was hugely damaging, although there was no second firestorm.

On the night of 27/28 July, Hamburg had witnessed the jaws of a medieval hell gaping wide. In the wake of Gomorrah, Air Marshal Harris wrote to Marshal of the Royal Air Force, Sir Charles Portal, assuring the Chief of the Air Staff that Bomber Command was now able ‘to produce in Germany by April 1st 1944, a state of devastation in which surrender is inevitable’. Harris also called on the government to be honest with the British public concerning the nature and purpose of the area bombing campaign:

The aim of the Combined Bomber Offensive… should be unambiguously stated [as] the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilised life throughout Germany… the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing, are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories.

Following criticism of the devastating Allied bombing of Dresden over four raids made between 13 and 15 February 1945, when some 25,000 people were killed and the old city destroyed, the by now Air Chief Marshal Harris noted, ‘The feeling, such as there is, over Dresden, could be easily explained by any psychiatrist. It is connected with German bands and Dresden shepherdesses. Actually, Dresden was a mass of munitions works, an intact government centre, and a key transportation point to the East. It is now none of these things.’

Harris’s bombers had certainly got through, but at a terrible cost both for German civilians and for his aircrew. And if Allied confidence had been mounting with good reason, there were still nights when it went wrong. On a raid made on Nuremberg under a full moon – 30/31 March 1944 – Bomber Command lost 106 aircraft out of the 795 taking part, and 545 men. Of every hundred airmen who joined Bomber Command, forty-five were killed, six were seriously injured and eight were held as prisoners of war.

There was, though, another school of thought to Harris’s. The English inventor and Vickers-Armstrongs engineer Barnes Wallis, for one, believed from the outset that the war might be won through the destruction of German infrastructure, major manufacturing plants and military installations. To this effect, early in the war he proposed a six-engine Vickers Victory bomber with a pressurized hull, designed to cruise at 320 mph at 45,000 feet (beyond the reach of German fighters) carrying a single 22,400-lb (10-ton) bomb. The idea seemed fanciful to many in the Air Ministry at a time when the Lancaster four-engine bomber was under development.

Although Wallis was able to conduct wind-tunnel tests on a model of his six-engine bomber, in 1941 the project was shelved. Though not before it had helped to further a key question over the efficacy of RAF bombing. What if a Vickers Victory should make it to the heart of the Ruhr only to miss its target – very possibly by some distance? What a waste that would be of invention, construction, testing, training, preparation, fuel, adrenaline and sweat. In the event, Wallis found a mechanical ally in the guise of what proved to be the highly capable Avro Lancaster. On the night of 16/17 May 1943, nineteen specially modified Lancasters of 617 Squadron flew from RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire at ‘zero feet’ (actually 100 feet) to avoid radar, and headed to the Möhne, Eder and Sorpe dams – key strategic targets that between them supplied water and hydroelectricity to the industrial, arms-manufacturing Ruhr district.

Each aircraft carried a single weapon, a cylindrical 9,000-lb ‘Upkeep’ mine designed by Barnes Wallis. Hanging from the bellies of the Lancasters, the mines were to be spun backwards at 500 rpm before being released precisely 425 yards from the walls of the dams, with the aircraft flying at a prescribed 232 mph and 60 feet above the water – and this in bright moonlight and into heavy flak. Several attempts were made on the dams that night with Wallis’s ‘bouncing bombs’, which lived up to their name, clearing defensive torpedo nets as they skipped towards the dam walls before spinning down them and exploding underwater at a depth of 30 feet.

Two dams, the Möhne and Eder, were breached. Local towns were flooded, trains were washed off their tracks and six electricity stations were put out of action. Thirteen hundred civilians were killed, including nearly 500 slave labourers, mostly women, from Ukraine. According to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, 20,000 labourers were diverted from building the defensive Atlantic Wall along the Normandy and Brittany coasts to reconstruct the vital dams. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, described the attack as ‘an act of war against the state, but one to be admired, for the English had navigated and planned so thoroughly’. The story made the front page of the New York Times and won American admiration. The raid was a huge morale booster.

Air Vice Marshal Ralph Cochrane, commander of 5 Group, which included 617 Squadron, sent a message to Wing Commander Guy Gibson, the 24-year-old commander of Operation Chastise – and, to date, veteran of more than 170 bombing and night-fighter missions. ‘The disaster which you have inflicted on the German war machine was a result of hard work, discipline and courage. The determination not to be beaten in the task and getting the bombs exactly on the aiming point in spite of opposition have set an example others will be proud to follow.’

Flying skill, pinpoint accuracy and sheer bravery. It was a heady mix. The King and Queen visited Scampton and the Lancaster crews soon after the raid. In June 1943, Gibson was presented with the Victoria Cross at Buckingham Palace. There were thirty-three other decorations for his fellow Dambusters. That evening, the ‘boys’ were wined and dined by A. V. Roe, founder of Avro, at the Hungaria restaurant on London’s Lower Regent Street – ration books thrown to the wind – and entertained, impromptu, by fellow diners, the comedian Arthur Askey, band leader and impresario Jack Hylton, and Elsie Carlisle, the singer best known for her renditions of ‘A Nightingale Sang in Leicester Square’ and Cole Porter’s ‘What Is This Thing Called Love?’. Other guests included Tommy Sopwith, of Sopwith Camel and Hawker Aircraft fame, and Barnes Wallis.