TORNADO TRIBUTE //“You didn’t operate the nuclear QRA [quick
reaction alert] as a squadron,” Bagwell
recalled. “You all arrived, you did your
24-hour stints and you all sat there and
made jokes with each other in the communal
crewroom within the compound.”
A pair of WE177 nuclear gravity bombs
under the fuselage of each Tornado was
the standard fit, plus underwing fuel tanks.
“There really wasn’t enough gas to bring
it all the way home, so there were various
places that you would potentially be able
to land at on the way back – if indeed
there was anything to come home to.”
The Tornado squadrons were assigned military
targets “of sufficient strategic importance”
- likely to include airfields not far from the
Inner German Border (IGB). “At the end of
the day, this was going to be a significant
deterrent operation had it ever been enacted.
“In peacetime we were held at 15 minutes’
readiness – that was about the amount of time
you had to react to a ballistic missile attack.”
Strike mission
Only three months after arriving at Brüggen,
Bagwell was pulling nuclear QRA duty. At
first, his limited combat-ready status meant
he was trusted to “do the basics – and in
a war, I could pretty much drop all the
weapons and not make an idiot of myself, but
most importantly I could do the nuclear role”.
Although specialised, the nuclear role was
relatively straightforward in terms of flying
and tactics. “It was pretty much a single-ship
mission,” Bagwell explained. “Of course,
there was a great desire to get you on the
roster to make sure you took your turn. It
was a bit of a pain having to keep going in
there for 24 hours every couple of weeks.”
However, growing experience in the
conventional attack domain meant a
new Tornado crew member would likely
be deemed fully combat-ready after six
months. Now, as well as nuclear strike,
they would be able to take part in multi-
aircraft formations with a variety of weapons
- albeit, at this stage, still unguided.
Primary conventional weapons
were retarded 1,000lb (454kg) dumb
bombs, BL755 cluster bombs and the
JP233 runway denial weapon.
“It was the [conventional] attack missions
where you had to do almost all your training
in the air because the simulators had no
visuals, they weren’t very sophisticated,”
Bagwell explained. “Your live training
was very much devoted to the attack
mission and was done all around Germany,
almost exclusively at low level.
“The beauty of this for the Germany
squadrons was that you were flying the
routes and the places that you would be
flying for real. The ‘single-digit’ SAMs
[surface-to-air missiles] were more easily
defeated by flying low. For the first 15
years, the Tornado spent its life at 250ft or
below, because that was believed to be the
best way of surviving effectively that Inner
German Border surface-to-air system.”
From Brüggen and Laarbruch the Tornado’s
targets could all be reached at low level without
aerial refuelling. In fact, it was only the UK
squadrons that routinely undertook tanking
in those days: their tactics involved topping
up over the North Sea and then dropping
down to low level for their target runs.Alone and unafraid
Compared to the Jaguars and Buccaneers
it replaced, the Tornado represented a
step change in capability, even though its
armoury, at that time, was little altered.
“The one big difference with the Tornado
is that you could operate in the dark, in
all weather, without being able to see the
target or the ground,” Bagwell noted.
“The tactics were very similar. The
procedures were quite similar. The
aircraft had a slightly more sophisticated
electronic warfare system and warning
receiver, so our survivability was definitely
improved. Had the weather been poor,
that would have helped survivability,
but we would also have got to the target
and at least got some weapons off.”
Rigorous training and the inherent capability
of the Tornado meant its crews were sanguine
when it came to survival – even in what would
have been among the world’s most hostile
airspace. “We were going to Red Flags and
Green Flags every year,” Bagwell reflected. “It
was relentless. We would go to Spadeadam,
we would go to the Polygon range in Germany.
We were training and testing the aircraft sub-
systems on a regular basis, and were up against
Soviet systems on some of those exercises.
“We had a pretty good understanding
of what worked, and we were fairly sure
that we had the tactics and the capability
to defeat the ground systems. In terms of
aircraft threats, we were relying heavily
on speed and not being detected.
“We were pretty confident in the ’80s
that we could match, outrun or avoid
Soviet air threats. We didn’t have many
aircraft shot down on Red Flags.”
For a Tornado crew, their potential fate in
a Central Front confrontation would have
rested in their hands. “The chances of you
getting a dedicated escort in a Cold War
scenario were slim,” Bagwell added. “You
had your package, you went, you cameback, you survived, you went again.”
While a ‘hot war’ would have seen NATO
putting up combat air patrols to defend against
Warsaw Pact attack, they would have essentially
been a barrier to protect the homeland and
military installations. NATO’s attackers- Tornados included – would have been
engaged in a deadly game of ‘duck and run’.
“If a war kicked off then, it would have
been chaos,” Bagwell said. “The ability to sit
down and plan for a day, a nice co-ordinated
mission, just wasn’t going to happen. You
were all going to be throwing the kitchen
sink as fast and as furiously as you could.
“You’d be relying on the sum of all the
parts to overwhelm the enemy rather than
have a really sophisticated, integrated
plan. It was mass versus mass, and he who
could throw his mass fastest would win.”
Nevertheless, amid this chaos, the Tornado
squadrons would have relied on their knowledge
of the air corridors that led in and out of East
Germany. If they were lucky, these would be
guarded at their points of entry by friendly
‘Wild Weasel’ defence-suppression assets.
Without data links or multiple, secure
communications channels, air war on the
Central Front would have been a free for
all. “We used to spend a lot of time doing
reconnaissance testing and lesson learning to
make sure we could identify one aircraft from
another,” Bagwell remembers. “Quite frankly,
that’s what it was going to come down to.
“In the event of an all-out nuclear war, had
we ever got to that, heaven forbid, you had
mass launches where you would load every
aircraft and you’d launch 40 aeroplanes. We
used to practise those, and you’d launch the
whole wing in an hour; every 20 seconds
an aeroplane would roll and take-off.
“It was quite spectacular. It was designed to be
a deterrent. If you tried to get your head around
it, you’d probably worry yourself to death.”
While the professionalism of the Tornado
squadrons in Germany helped keep the
peace on the Central Front, the intensity
of their training would prove invaluable
when the RAF Tornado finally did go to
war – in very different circumstances. A
matter of days after Saddam Hussein’s forces
invaded Kuwait in August 1990, the RAF
was mobilising to deploy to the Gulf – and
the Tornado would lead the offensive line.
Above: A pair of No XV(R) Squadron Tactical Weapons Conversion Unit (TWCU) Tornado GR1s with Carrier
Bomb Light Store (CBLS) practice bomb carriers under their fuselages. The jets could carry 4lb practice
bombs set up to mimic the characteristics of the WE177 nuclear store.AFM51