Wings (38 page)

The enemy was not just the Soviet Union but communism. The ideological nature of this struggle meant that it could be fought by proxies all over the world. In 1950 capitalism and communism went
to war in Korea, when the United Nations intervened to prevent the southern half of Korea being swallowed by the communist north. Most of the outside help for the Republic of Korea came from
America, with limited support from Britain and others. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was backed heavily by the Chinese communists and the Soviet Union.

After a slow start, the Soviets were closing the wide technological gap that had opened up at the end of the Second World War. They had learned how to the build the Bomb and had developed their
own jet fighters, notably the MiG 15, which at the start of the conflict outclassed the American Shooting Stars and Panthers, and the British and Australian Meteors. It was only with the arrival of
the North American-manufactured F-86 Sabre, which, like the MiG, had performance-enhancing swept wings, that the West was able to compete on equal terms.

The Korean War (1950–53) produced some of the greatest fighter-to-fighter confrontations in the history of aerial warfare, with aggressive pilots clashing in individual combats that
recalled the contests of the First World War. Much of the dogfighting was done along the Yalu Valley on North Korea’s frontier with China, which US pilots nicknamed ‘MiG Alley’.
There, Sabres tried to intercept Korean and Chinese jets,
many of the former flown by Soviet pilots, and prevent them from attacking fighter bombers operating in the south.
The most successful unit was the 4th Fighter Interceptor Wing (4 FIW), which was striving to add to the glory its forebears had won flying Mustangs during the Second World War.

A small number of experienced RAF officers were attached to 4 FIW after Fighter Command, anxious to create a cadre of pilots with experience of jet-fighter combat, called for volunteers. British
and American aircrew had worked alongside each other, for the most part in harmony, for large stretches of the preceding war, though there were marked differences in outlook. The British stiff
upper lip is a cliché, but in those days it was also a reality, underlying the RAF’s attitudes to tactics, strategy and demeanour, in the air and on the ground. The cult of
understatement was equally potent. Many Britons found the Americans’ capacity for self-dramatization laughable, and their attitudes to death mawkish and embarrassing. In 1944 Bill Waterton,
the Meteor test pilot, had been stationed alongside an American Lightning squadron and found that ‘they stayed at their end of the mess and we ours. The coolness was not due to criticisms of
one another as flyers, but to fundamental differences of temperament. We felt rather bewildered by the Americans, for instance, when after the loss of an aircraft, tears flowed with beer and their
mess bore a maudlin, funereal air that lasted a week. They, in turn, could not understand British distaste for public exhibitions of grief, and were appalled by the RAF’s “Poor old Mike
went for a burton this afternoon. Let’s have a drink on him.”’
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Another perceived American character defect was glory-hunting, which Colin Walker Downes witnessed while flying Sabres with 4 FIW. The wing was based at K-14 airfield on
the south side of the Han river, a few miles west of Seoul and in action daily over MiG Alley. High-ranking desk-jockeys were keen to join the ranks of the ‘MiG maulers’ and claim a
scalp. Despite their lack of experience or flying skills they would from time to time take command of an operation, to the annoyance of their subordinates, who had the task of keeping the
‘one-day wonders’ out of trouble.

Nor was there any shortage of egotists among the unit commanders engaged in daily combat. The United States Air Force (USAF), which in September 1947 had moved out from under the aegis of the
army to become a separate branch of the US military, encouraged a competitive culture with pilots pushing to log the five kills that would make them an ‘ace’. Senior officers would
jostle for the ‘shooting slots’ on the offensive sweeps that provided the best opportunities for success.

British pilots like Walker Downes were given the supporting role of ‘wingman’, watching their leader’s back and directing him onto targets. One morning, just before the end of
the war, he was flying as wingman to Captain Lonnie Moore in the Yalu area when they spotted two pairs of MiGs apparently heading for their home base at Feng Cheng. Moore ordered the
‘bounce’ on the last pair.

‘I was to the right and behind Moore and I called him “clear” as he closed on the trailing MiG,’ he wrote. ‘I asked if he was sure the pair in front of us were the
last pair and
received an “Affirmative” answer.’ Moore opened fire at 300 yards and closed to 100 yards, where it seemed that ‘the stream of bullets
must have gone straight up the tailpipe of the MiG, for several pieces came away, followed quickly by the cockpit canopy as the pilot ejected at 1,500 feet.’ Moore throttled back to avoid
overshooting the lead MiG and Walker Downes had to throw his Sabre into a barrel roll to stay behind his leader.

Hanging upside down at the top of the roll he spotted two MiGs closing on them in staggered formation. He called a warning to Moore, who carried on oblivious, intent on finishing the remaining
MiG in front of him, which was now approaching the Feng Cheng runway. The pursuing MiGs were now on Moore’s tail. He realized his predicament and broke away to the left, leaving Walker Downes
heading straight across the airfield at low altitude. As he flashed across it at a few hundred feet ‘the whole airfield seemed to light up’ as the anti-aircraft guns went into
action.

The flak burst alarmingly but harmlessly in the sky around, and then he was clear. The MiG that had been chasing Moore was still ahead and, despite the turbulence which set his ‘flying
helmet bobbing against the canopy, while trying to rubberneck, looking for MiGs’, Downes managed to range his gunsight ‘pipper’ on the target. He opened fire at 400 yards. It was
too soon, but he saw the Sabre’s .50 calibre machine-gun rounds sparking off the fuselage as the MiG broke sharply to the left.

Then Downes was sandwiched between two attackers. One latched onto his tail and opened fire. The Russian jets were armed with three cannon, which had the power to bring
down a B-29 bomber with a few hits. The shells moved at low velocity, however, and by turning tightly Downes was able to avoid the ‘red cricket balls’ floating towards
him. The huge gravitational forces that weighed in during a full power turn were to some extent counteracted by the ‘G-suit’ – worn over the flying suit and lined with hoses,
which pumped up to slow the downward rush of blood away from the brain. Even so, his helmet was ‘weighing like a sandbag on my head as it pushed my goggles over my eyes’ and he felt
close to ‘greying out’. He glanced back to see his pursuer slamming ‘into the ground in an explosive ball of fire’ – apparently having gone into a high-speed stall as
he tried to bring his guns to bear.

Downes dived for the deck at full power and headed south and out to sea where he landed on the sandy beach of a friendly island. He made it back to K-14 at dusk to the surprise of everyone who
had assumed he was dead. When he ran into Moore, the American’s main concern was whether Downes had confirmed the two MiGs he was claiming to have shot down.
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The gung-ho spirit of the American fliers was mirrored in the institutional attitude of their bosses. The USAF and in particular the Strategic Air Command (SAC) exuded aggression and displayed a
willingness to embrace the concept of mutual annihilation that underlay the possession of nuclear weapons. The SAC was the air force’s bomber wing and it soaked up much of the mighty
resources of the US military budget. It was led by ‘bomber generals’, exemplified by the baby-faced, cigar-sucking Curtis LeMay, the architect of the
firebombing
of Tokyo. LeMay believed that America’s entire nuclear arsenal should be employed in a single, obliterating strike if it seemed likely that a Soviet attack was planned – an atomic age
version of the ‘knock-out blow’ theory of the interwar years. Throughout the 1950s the SAC stood in a state of perpetual readiness to send its nuclear bombers against a host of Soviet
cities as soon as the order was given.

It was a Sisyphean task, requiring constant reconnaissance, monitoring and analysis of the Soviet Union’s actions. It was the fate of the RAF during the period to work as a junior partner
with the USAF, sharing the exhausting labour of eternal vigilance.

In October 1953 warheads were exploded in the South Australian desert, the start of a process that would produce Blue Danube, Britain’s plutonium bomb. The new weapons would be carried by
a succession of ‘V Bombers’ – the Vickers Valiant, AvroVulcan and Handley Page Victor, which acted as Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent force until the responsibility
passed to the Royal Navy’s Polaris missile-equipped submarines in 1969.

America’s initial reluctance to share her nuclear secrets waned and in 1958 the US–UK Mutual Defence Agreement was signed, which locked the two countries into a shared nuclear
strategy. The RAF was at the forefront of NATO’s plans for nuclear war with the Soviet Union. From bases in central and eastern England V-Bombers would be the trigger force for a nuclear
Armageddon, and had the capacity to destroy Moscow and Kiev, killing millions before the
Americans had entered Soviet airspace. For much of the time the RAF’s Cold War
duties seemed to those who carried them out like an elaborate game, albeit one that bore the risk of violent death if things went wrong. Both sides broke the rules frequently. RAF aircraft flew
deep into Soviet air space on intelligence-gathering missions, collecting radar and photographic evidence of military sites, and despite some narrow escapes they got away with it.

In autumn 1962, however, the feeling of unreality that pervaded the Cold War evaporated and the unimaginable prospect of a nuclear war became horribly plausible. At the end of October, President
John F. Kennedy received hard evidence that Soviet missiles were about to be deployed in Cuba, a hundred miles from the Florida coast. He warned that the delivery of the weapons would be opposed by
force. Any clash had the potential to escalate into an all-out nuclear conflict in which Britain – as America’s nearest ally and partner in her nuclear strategy – would be in the
front line. During the weekend of 26 October 1962 the V-Bomber force was brought to the highest levels of readiness. At four air bases forty Vulcans stood with their bombs on board, their crews
waiting alongside at fifteen minutes’ readiness.

‘The aircraft were all ready to go,’ remembered former Wing Commander Peter West, an electronics officer on a Vulcan based at Coningsby in Lincolnshire. ‘We were fully kitted
out with our flying gear. All we had to do was get in, put our straps on, press the button and the engines would start up.’

The crisis passed, however, and for decades the British public remained in ignorance of how serious the drama had become. Over the next few decades fear of nuclear
obliteration retreated from the national psyche. As the era of the Bomb passed and nuclear weaponry moved into the realm of intercontinental rocketry, the notion of superpower conflict once again
became too big to comprehend. After the dying skirmishes of the colonial era – in Suez and in Aden – the prospect of a conventional war seemed equally remote. By the early 1980s, aside
from its Cold War preoccupations in Germany, Britain’s military energies were mainly spent trying to control the rebellious natives across the water in Northern Ireland. In both theatres,
life had settled down into a familiar and predictable rhythm. In 1982 it was shattered by an eruption in a group of islands most Britons had perhaps heard of, but would be hard-pressed to locate on
a map.

From the outset, the Falklands conflict seemed a freak of history. It was fought to hang onto a scrap of empire – yet the principle underlying the action was the very
un-imperial one of self-determination. It came at a time when imperial sentiment had anyway all but vanished and Britain’s armed forces were being reshaped to suit the needs of a
post-colonial world. It was fortunate that they had not yet been transformed to the point where a major exercise in power projection was no longer possible. Victory did nothing to arrest this
process, however. The war remains a historical firebreak, a last demonstration of classical, twentieth-century war-fighting before the arrival of the hi-tech military age.

It was also the last time in which the Royal Navy would play the major role in a war involving Britain. The fleet was still of a size that it could organize the transportation of thousands of
soldiers 8,000 miles across the ocean, deliver them into battle and sustain them on the ground. Equally importantly, it was
equipped with an air force that could protect them
throughout the operation. The air war over the Falklands was fought largely by naval aviators flying off aircraft carriers. Long before the ground troops went ashore the airmen were in action
against a formidable and determined enemy, who had the advantage of operating from their own soil. The British aviators had to succeed if the campaign to recapture the Falklands was not to end in
bloody and ignominious failure.