Vulcan 607

by Rowland White

432pp, Bantam, £16.99

In 1961, four nuclear bombers entered United States airspace, flying high above the maximum altitude of the defending American fighters. Three jammed the ground-based and airborne radars directed at them. The fourth arrived unchallenged and unforeseen, over New York City.

The aircraft was an Avro Vulcan bomber, capable of carrying a 21,000lb nuclear payload. It looked like a scary version of Concorde. The New York stunt was part of an Anglo-American military exercise which proved the plane's ability to deliver nuclear bombs wherever they might be needed, whoever the enemy. The RAF called it "the tin triangle".

Just over 20 years later, its last three squadrons were about to be disbanded, the aircraft sent to flight museums and scrapyards. But the Vulcan was to find one last role, one as unexpected as its appearance over the Big Apple more than two decades earlier. In 1982, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands and the United Kingdom found itself fighting a war on the other side of the world.

Rowland White's Vulcan 607 is an account of the mission to destroy the Argentinian-held airstrip at Stanley on East Falkland. It was, and remains, the longest range air attack in history. The task was simple. The means by which it was achieved, White demonstrates, was mind-bogglingly complex, sometimes chaotic, occasionally farcical and never less than fascinating.

It should have been impossible. Conceived in the reign of George VI, the Vulcan was the longest-range bomber that the RAF possessed, able to fly 4,000 miles at 50,000ft. Unfortunately, the nearest available airfield to the Falklands - Ascension Island - was an 8,000-mile round trip away.

The solution would be mid-air refuelling by a fleet of Handley Page Victors, a plane able to carry its own weight in fuel and well-practised at the manoeuvre. In 1982, Britain's overstretched Phantoms and Lightnings (the latter were notorious gas-guzzlers) chased off an average of five Russian spy-planes a week. The Victors kept the fighter force aloft. Earlier, they had continuously refuelled a Vulcan all the way from RAF Marham in Norfolk to Sydney.

But that was in 1951. In 1982, Vulcan crews had not practised mid-air refuelling for 20 years, or conventional bombing for 10. The refuelling valves were filled with 20-year-old cement and the vast bomb-bays typically held a 28lb dummy of a 400 kiloton "bucket of sunshine". Pinpoint accuracy was only a matter of pride. It hardly mattered if a nuclear bomb fell a few yards off-target.

White's account of how these technical problems were overcome by a whirling cast of pilots, navigators, electronics officers and engineers is the heart of Vulcan 607. Missing parts were scavenged from Vulcans previously donated to museums (refuelling valves) or reclaimed from scrapyards (the bomb-racks). A seal for a new radar-jamming device was improvised from corks from a home-brew beer kit and one crucial component discovered in the engineers' mess, serving as an ashtray. Mid-air refuelling was as easy, according to one Vulcan pilot, as "sticking wet spaghetti up a cat's arse" and the RAF could muster only 167 bombs of the correct airstrip-destroying variety, which meant precious little practice for the crews.

These difficulties form a long but gripping build-up to the attack itself. This narrative is underpinned by a grim hilarity at the improbability of it all, and the growing realisation that many of the problems were home-grown. Britain's military forces, fully tooled up for a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, simply did not have the right kit for an adventure in the South Atlantic.

Inevitably, the book is subject to a degree of mission-creep. The sufferings of the Falkland Islanders at the hands of the Argentinians (a Chopper bike stolen, a blanket torn up) are over-played, although the scattering of severed duck-heads among one lady's marigolds lingers in the mind. Oppression by surrealism? Similarly, the task of disentangling the muddled political background to the war, a folly of mutual Anglo-Argentinian incomprehension, might better have been left to the standard histories.

White's digressions also scoop in some unlikely nuggets. The British higher-ups are revealed engaged in string-and-chewing gum improvisations to rival those of the RAF planners and engineers. Mrs Thatcher's decision to send the task force turns (in White's solidly researched pages) on a couple of well-chosen remarks by Admiral Sir Henry Leach, chief of the Naval Staff, who attended the crucial meeting only because he was looking for Defence Secretary John Nott that morning and found him with the prime minister. Meanwhile, the Soviet view of the affair is expressed in an appropriately enigmatic scene between a Russian admiral and the British air attaché at the UN. The Argentinians had reported British nuclear submarines in the South Atlantic that week: a useful piece of misinformation, although 2,000 miles wide of the mark, the British attaché knew to his chagrin. "Are our submarines being of any help?" the admiral inquired, without waiting for a reply.

Aloft, the race to outfit the Vulcans and supporting Victors for their mission reached a kind of technical frenzy compounded by the problem of no one knowing exactly how the mission could be achieved. Three days before the Vulcans were due to fly to Ascension Island, the decision to bomb from 300ft was changed to 7,000ft. The crews practised this twice. Next they discovered that the fuel calculation to get them to Ascension was wrong. They took off two days later, from RAF Waddington, during a decommissioning ceremony for one of the other two Vulcan squadrons.

One of the more surprising revelations of Vulcan 607 is that fuel calculations can enthral. The logistics of how fuel was swapped between the bomb-carrying Vulcan and its 14 supporting Victor tankers was worked out by the crews the night before the mission using four slide-rules and a calculator. The Victors, of course, had to refuel each other as well as the Vulcan. White supplies a very complicated diagram. Some of the fuel passed through five aircraft before being burned by the attack aircraft's Rolls-Royce Olympus engines. All this was done in total darkness.

The plane known as Vulcan 607 was the secondary choice for the attack, promoted after the designated Vulcan turned back four minutes after take-off. Eight hours later, burning 16,250lb of fuel an hour (4,000lb more than it should), its three different navigation systems giving it three different positions, having last refuelled in the middle of an electrical storm, Vulcan 607 arrived over the Port Stanley airstrip, with the advantage of complete surprise. It quickly dug 21 big holes and left, exactly as planned.

The aircrews of the Vulcan and the last Victor heard the news of their success on the BBC World Service, limping towards a hoped-for rendezvous with airborne tankers somewhere off the coast of Rio de Janeiro.

Vulcan 607 ends, inevitably, on an anti-climactic note. The last Vulcan squadrons were replaced by Tornadoes in the following year. White's real story ends with Vulcan 607's arrival over the target. The raid on Port Stanley takes two minutes to read. It cannot live up to the tale of logistical miracle which made the attack possible. But that was true of the whole war.

· Lawrence Norfolk's In the Shape of a Boar is published by Orion