REVIEW BY GRAHAM GOODLAD
Growing up near RAF Scampton at the height of the Cold War, in my formative years the delta-winged Avro Vulcan was a familiar sight. Soaring overhead with what V-Force author Jonathan Glancey calls its ‘otherworldly howl’, it was an awe-inspiring machine. The Vulcan and its cousins, the Vickers Valiant and Handley Page Victor, were the V-bombers. Their story has been told before, both as individual aircraft and as a group, but in Jonathan Glancey they have found a new historian with a fresh approach.
The first chapter takes us straight into the most dangerous moment of the West’s four-decade-long confrontation with the Soviet Union, when Vulcans were on standby in the Cuban Missile Crisis. In a sobering reality check, we hear from the wife of pilot Peter West, who had told her to drive their children from Lincolnshire to the Isle of Skye if the bombers set off to attack the USSR: ‘What a bloody fool. How far does he think I’ll get? I would be passing all the airfields, all of which would be primary targets, come on!’
Aerial giants
Not all of the book, it has to be said, relates directly to the story of the V-Force. Readers may be surprised to find some 40 pages (out of c.300) devoted to the history of aerial bombing from Guernica onwards, followed by a brief survey of the development of the British, US, and Soviet atomic weapons projects. The book gets into its stride with a fast-paced appraisal of each of the V-bombers. As Glancey acknowledges in his introduction, this is not an in-depth technical survey. Nonetheless, there is enough design detail to show that the three aircraft represented a quantum leap from the piston-engined bombers of World War II.
Oasis of archaeology