MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency
“Vulcan 607”: revealing the stories behind the bombing of Stanley airport
THE story behind Operation Black Buck, the incredible raid on Stanley airport by Vulcan bombers in 1982, is told in a new book due to be released in June.
Rowland White's Vulcan 607 provides a close up look into the mission to destroy the vital landing strip at Stanley and the issues surrounding it.
Drawing on extensive interviews with the men involved, Falkland's residents and British High Command, and with unprecedented access to contemporary military records, Mr White takes readers inside the raid and the extraordinary build up to it
Vulcan 607 is a story of ingenuity, courage and sheer bloody-mindedness and of an unlikely triumph against the odds. As well as maps and cutaways, the book includes 24 pages of colour and black and white photos, many of them rare, some of them never before published.
Mr White visited the Falklands in 2004 as part of his research. He said that when he first decided to write a book about the raid that opened the British campaign to retake the Falklands, the war he expected to write about was, "...still the slightly exotic-feeling war on the other side of the world that I remembered from childhood."
That all changed for him, however, when he visited Stanley in August 2004.
"I always knew that in order to do the story justice I'd have to visit the Islands, but I hadn't been sure quite what I'd come home with.
"Would it be a vivid impression of the landscape? Well, yes, I took that home with me. Would it be an understanding of the kind of hole in the ground a 1000lb high-explosive bomb can cause? I certainly got that too. But what I really gained was a crystal clear sense of why we were fighting at all. It was all about the people living on the Islands."
He said he couldn't have been made to feel more welcome in Stanley. "Everyone I met was friendly, helpful and generous with their time and memories. And through the conversations I had with them I gained a powerful insight into how they felt about their home being invaded. And how, as a consequence, I might have felt.
"My time in Stanley brought the war much closer to home for me. It humanised it and that made for a book which had a firmer grasp of the significance of the RAF's effort on the morning of May 1, 1982 and the fighting that followed."
The book which followed is an account of an extraordinary and relatively unsung military operation, but after visiting Stanley, Mr White said, it became more than that. "It became about why that operation mattered."
He said he hopes he has done justice to the stories people shared with him during that visit in 2004. "Through those stories I hope I'll have been able to show readers why we had to win back the Islands. It wasn't about pride or bloody-mindedness or anything like that, it was about what was right.
"I came away knowing that we could no more have left the inhabitants of the Falkland Islands in the hands of a foreign invader than we could the people of Surrey."
On a personal note, Mr White said he "thoroughly enjoyed" his time in Stanley. "What I glimpsed of the Islands during my short stay was wonderful. My kind of place. "I'm very grateful to everyone I met while I stayed and I look forward to whenever I'll next be able to visit."
He added, "I'll just try to remember to bring my wallet next time, which as Carl Stroud discovered, I managed to leave in the back of taxi at Brize Norton before catching my flight. Thanks for saving the day, Carl!"
? Vulcan 607 is published in hardback by Bantam Press on June 1, 2006 priced at £16.99. It is available to pre-order now at www.amazon.co.ukwith a saving of over £5 on the cover price. (PN)
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