V-Force: Britain’s nuclear bombers and the Cold War

This article is from Military History Matters issue 149

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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.

Woven into the text are vivid portraits of key figures, such as test pilot Roly Falk, who invariably flew wearing a pin-striped suit and caused controversy by barrel-rolling a Vulcan at the 1955 Farnborough air show. Here, too, is Stuart Davies, the Avro company designer who took over after the premature death of his better-remembered boss Roy Chadwick, who was responsible for the Lancaster and the original concept of the Vulcan.

V-Force successfully captures what it was like to fly these aerial giants at a time of great international tension. Glancey’s discussion of the movement of Aboriginal people to make way for the Maralinga nuclear tests in South Australia in the 1950s and ‘60s, reminds us of how remote the period seems in some ways from our own, more sensitive age. A senior scientist at the time queried the placing of ‘the affairs of a handful of natives above those of the British Commonwealth of Nations.’

Other startling details relate to the welfare of the air crews. Only the Vulcan and Victor pilot and co-pilot were provided with ejection seats. Pilots were trained to fly with a patch over one eye, as a precaution against the other being blinded by the nuclear flash. On a more mundane note, we learn that a plane capable of eradicating entire cities had a soup warmer for the crew that was so inefficient it took a full 90 minutes to do its work.