Vulcan 607 - Rowland White

From the sand to the skies this time. In 1982 we Brits had a problem - Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. We had another problem - with the Task Force to retake them still thousands of miles away in the Atlantic, the Argentinian military was using the runway at Port Stanley to fly reinforcements in hand over fist as well as base attack aircraft on it. We couldn't use cruise missiles - launched from the 2 SSN's we had on station - because we hadn't bought any yet (D'oh). We couldn't use naval gunfire because Exocets woud have sunk the lot miles from Stanley; for the same reason we couldn't use an airstrike from the inbound carriers - Harriers are subsonic, therefore easy meat, and had no payload worth talking about. But we had to do something to remind the Argetinians that we were serious about retaking what was lost, reassure the islanders that we were coming and try to knock out aforementioned aircraft before they sank every ship in the fleet.
What to do?

The Vulcan! A quintessential Cold War aircraft, last of the RAF's traditional heavy bombers and 3 months away from being scrapped. The bomb bay was hastily refitted from a nuclear payload to a conventional one (81 1000 pounders), air-to-air refuelling kit not used for years was refurbished, aircrews trained and then together with every tanker that the RAF could scrape up, the whole lot was sent to Ascension Island. But Stanley was still four thousand miles further than the Vulcan's could reach from Ascension even on a one-way trip. Hmmmmm, 3rd problem.

This book rattles along nicely to start with and has a few real derring-do moments that made even me laugh out loud. USAF fighters are specifically prohibited from flying inside the Grand Canyon (Independance Day and Will Smith not withstanding) yet the Vulcans did it quite regularly, often flying 50 feet or more below the Canyon lip. And this was a bomber.

Sadly, once the initial spurt of action is done with and before the tension of the actual Black Buck raid starts, there is the most horrendously yawn-inducing section which takes up a good third of the book. Yes, I grant you that no-one can go into combat without a secure logistics train behind him, and yes I recognise that a lot of backroom work needed to be done very quickly, but please. We didn't have to be told everything. Whether this was a deliberate artifice to let the reader down gently before ratcheting everything up again I know not; I suspect it is and it actually does this very well, but at the risk of becoming so dry it rivals a dead dog in a desert.

But where this bok does score, and score pretty highly, is in the sheer balls needed to do the job. Alone. At night. At low level. With ten minute's worth of fuel in the tanks before an abort. With none of the fancy navigational or aiming devices that air forces seem to rely on now. And no support of ay kind to help a bomber get past air defence radars, missile batteries, AAA guns and probable fighter attack. This was stuff straight out of WW2 manuals with mostly Korean War-vintage equipment. This was flying.

If you can handle the boredom part, this is worth a read. If not, steer clear.

6 out of 10