At the start of a short holiday break, I enjoyed a visit to the “East Midlands AeroPark” at Castle Donington, located right next to East Midlands Airport. They have a small but good collection of (often later-mark) Cold War era jets, mostly in reasonably good condition despite being kept outdoors.
I had not previously seen many examples of the DH Vampire, so the 2 T11 variants on display were interesting to see (XD447 and XD534). A curator explained to me that the yellow-painted aerials on the wings were part of a navigation system, based on timing differences of signals being received across the airframe. At other displays, I also had not previously noticed the large number of aerials mounted on the Nimrod’s upper fuselage. They were probably more noticeable here because a raised mound surrounding the displays gives you an elevated viewpoint.
The tandem-seat Hunter trainer, XL569, was interesting to see and in good condition, as was the FR10 mark XJ714. However, the GA11 variant WV382 was obviously in need of a coat of paint and not shown in its best light. Jaguar XZ369 was very-well displayed, with open avionics bays. Lightning ZF588 was also very-well displayed, and this was the first time that I had properly noticed just how large the Lightning airframe is.
For me though, the overall star of the show was Vulcan B2 XM575. The curator was on hand to talk about this airframe, explaining that the engines are still in place and all the electrics are working. Unfortunately the clutch plate for the bomb-bay doors was needing to be replaced, so they could not demonstrate that mechanism. That was more than compensated for by a view above and along the wing’s leading edge, showing that its shape is much more complex than the simple delta that you see from below. It was also interesting to see the Ram Air Turbine (“RAT”) deployed – this would have provided electric to the aircraft if all other systems had failed, ie a power source of last resort (“deploy and pray”, as the curator said).
Here are some photos from my visit – all copyright Lee Russell, 2024.
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I became interested in the technology behind medieval armour during Covid-19 lockdown (who didn’t pick up a new hobby?) and the opportunity to see reproduction armour in use during a joust was too good to miss. Over the May ’24 bank holiday weekend, Leeds Castle at Maidstone hosted 3 days of jousting, and I managed to get there for the final day.
It was great seeing the variety of armours in use, and the choices each “knight” was making about protection vs mobility and function. I’m not going to talk at length about that here, as the pictures will do a much better job – enjoy!
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I’m an irregular reader of the short fiction on 365 tomorrows. Time is precious and life is short, so a story needs a really compelling theme to draw me in. It feels odd over the Christmas holidays to say that I ‘enjoyed’ this tale by Benson. In 8 paragraphs it steps us through the last 17 seconds of all human life on a planet which might be Earth. And yet… Benson tells his story through the eyes of someone falling in love in the last seconds of their life… both fatalistic and poignant, yet somehow redeemed by that last moment of love – recommended.
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Completing my tour of the “big ticket” UK aircraft museums, I visited the Imperial War Museum’s (IWM) display at Duxford this weekend. The site presents both flying aircraft and static exhibits (mostly in hangars). It has a strong sense of being focussed on WW2 aircraft, although there are some Cold War military and passenger jets on display.
It was interesting watching how the pilot got into mkI Hurricane P3717, and then lovely to see it flying!
Spitfire ML295 looked very clean and obviously well-maintained (for flying day experiences). Several of us watching one particular flight also noticed that its engine sounded rougher than expected, leading us to wonder if a different engine variant was used in the 2-seater versions:
Another interesting aircraft to see flying was the PBY-5A Catalina ‘Miss Pick Up’. I’d only seen a Catalina flying once before and this was a real treat:
Two WW2 B-17s were on display – one the famous ‘Memphis Belle’ outside, the other inside a hangar dedicated to the USAF. These were complimented elsewhere by Lancaster KB889, although that was displayed in a somewhat unflattering location that made it hard to appreciate:
From the Cold War era, I enjoyed getting close to the B52D bomber ‘0689’, which apparently flew 200 missions during the Vietnam War. It was impossible to appreciate the size and engineering that went into this aircraft due to it being crammed into a hangar full of so many other planes – it deserves a hangar of its own in order to be properly appreciated. Of special note, it was the closest I’ve come to seeing the anti-flash curtains that were used in these bombers:
In that same USAF display I also saw this deactivated Tomahawk GLCM launcher, which had apparently been stationed at RAF Greenham Common. It was a very strange feeling being this close to such a potentially devastating weapon. I do not believe that any nation should possess nuclear weapons and my reflections on visiting Greenham Common can be found in this article.
A Vulcan bomber (XJ824) and a TSR2 prototype are also on display, but in such a poor location that I did not enjoy looking at them.
I had not expected to see Victor XH648 and it was interesting seeing the air-air refueling pods fitted to its wings. The aircraft seems very well preserved. I don’t know a lot about the history of Victor tankers, and wondered whether operational aircraft flew in camouflage paint schemes carrying bright orange pods!
My visit finished with a look at a deactivated Polaris missile (a submarine-launched ICBM). I had not seen one of these before and was disappointed with the tiny bit of information displayed with it. However, this exhibit did give me a genuine laugh-out-loud moment when I noticed the ‘INERT’ markings on the casings – thanks for removing the warheads before putting it on display!
On the whole, my visit to IWM Duxford was enjoyable but I won’t visit again unless it is for a special ‘flying day’. Overall I found the exhibits to be too closely packed in the hangars, making it hard (or sometimes impossible) to properly appreciate the aircraft. A much better display of many of the aircraft found at Duxford can be seen at the RAF Museum at Hendon. And probably the best display of a Vulcan can be found at Solway, even though the aircraft is left outside to the elements. Here are links to my articles about those:
Life in my day job is very demanding, but over the past week I have just found the physical & emotional energy needed to publish 3 paperbacks with Cold War / New Cold War themes:
“Cold War – How The Cold War Nuclear Arms Race Affected The World” collects together a series of non-fiction articles that I first released on this website.
“Black Ops – 4 Secret Missions from the S.I.G. Archive” is a set of short stories based around the UK’s Special Investigations Group that features in my new Action-Thriller series.
S.I.G. are on the front line with…
* Underwater espionage in the Black Sea,
* Cross-border raids into the Ukraine Occupied Territory, and
* The daring extraction of a defecting Russian colonel, code-named Malachite, from under the noses of her FSB handlers.
Set between 2070-2071, the five short stories in this collection explore a fictional road to war and a nuclear attack on the United Kingdom.
The United States and Russia remain ideologically opposed behind arsenals containing thousands of nuclear warheads. But now they also contend with the emergent strength of China as another Superpower, as well as considering the possible actions of smaller powers caught up in the struggle between them.
When tensions run high between the major powers, what would it be like to endure a thermonuclear attack?
It has been fun to finally pull these three books together and I am looking forward to getting my own hard copies from Amazon in a couple of days time. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I have enjoyed writing them!
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It has been a while since I posted on my blog. In the background I’ve been working on my ‘Lissa Blackwood’ action-thriller series, preparing these articles about the Cold War for publication and considering how I want my website to look in 2023. I hope you like the new-look banner!
As time passes we are forgetting what the Cold War was like. We are forgetting what it means to live in a country under the threat of a four minute warning before the bombs start to hit. We are forgetting how dangerous nuclear weapons are to both our individual survival, and the survival of every living thing on the surface of this planet. We are forgetting that these weapons are not toys to be played with as counters during political negotiations.
My ‘Cold War – How The Cold War Nuclear Arms Race Affected The World’ articles present some key facts and stories from the Cold War. Sharing them will help to ensure that the Cold War is still talked about, and provide some context for the ‘New Cold War’ which seems to have already started.
I have very strong memories of the closing years of the First Cold War. For a teenager growing up in those times, the news was full of reports about anti-nuclear protests by CND, the Falklands War, the Reagan Administration’s “Star Wars project” (ie SDI) , social uprisings in Eastern Europe, the eventual fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification. Films like ‘When the Wind Blows’, ‘The Day After’ and ‘Threads’ had shown just how devastating a nuclear war would be. I remember news reports of US Cruise Missile launchers prowling the UK countryside on manoeuvres, practicing for the day that they might need to rain nuclear hell on the USSR.
‘The World’ seemed like a very dangerous place. It was. And it still is.
Culture played its part in the Cold War, of course. Over the years my sense of Cold War style conflict has been inspired by wonderful films like the James Bond series (of course), and ‘The Ipcress File’. As a reader I’ve been enthralled by more classics than I count from the likes of Ian Fleming, John le Carré, Tom Clancy, Jack Higgins, Robert Harris, Alistair MacLean, James Patterson… and too many more to list here! All of that has blended with my lived experience of the Cold War into themes that often appear in my own fiction.
I hope these articles inspire your own reflections on what it really means to be in a Cold War.
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This Jubilee weekend I ticked off two small entries on my UK Cold War bucket list.
First up was a visit to the National Cold War Museum at RAF Cosford, just north of Birmingham. I had been itching to see this exhibition ever since I’d visited the RAF Museum at Hendon in 2019.
Hendon is a superb museum with an excellent display of well-exhibited aircraft. I totally enjoyed seeing Tornado ZA457, Buccaneer XW547 (‘Guinness Girl’, in Gulf War colours), and Lancaster R5868.
Vulcan XL318, RAF Museum London – (c) Lee Russell
Tornado ZA457, RAF Museum London – (c) Lee Russell
Lancaster R5868, RAF Museum London – (c) Lee Russell
The star of the show was Vulcan XL318 – very impressive with its conventional bomb load in front of it, and almost as exciting as being able to climb inside Vulcan XJ823 at Solway Aviation Museum in 2019. Hendon also had two fascinating pieces of ephemera on display: an Operation GRAPPLE hydrogen bomb test Test flag (1957) and the original Vulcan Refuelling Plan for the Falklands War raid Operation Black Buck.
What more wonderful delights were waiting at the National Cold War museum?
Unfortunately the Cosford exhibition does not live up to its prestigious name.
There are some excellent and unique Cold War aircraft on display. I enjoyed seeing Nimrod XV249 (unfortunately exhibited outdoors, subject to the elements), the Lightning test-bed WG760, Valiant XD818 in white anti-flash paint, as well as the TSR-2 (of course). There was a somewhat morbid fascination to be had with seeing a Thor IRBM (1.44 megatons yield), a Red Beard ‘tactical’ nuclear bomb casing (yield 15-25 kilotons, mk 1 or 2) and a Yellow Sun strategic hydrogen bomb casing (yield 400kt or 1.1Mt, Green Grass or Red Snow warheads).
Yellow Sun fusion bomb casing, RAF Cosford – (c) Lee Russell
Red Beard tactical nuclear bomb casing, RAF Cosford – (c) Lee Russell
THOR IRBM, RAF Cosford – (c) Lee Russell
However, the aircraft are packed into too small a space to be properly appreciated and I was left mostly underwhelmed by the display, especially Vulcan XM598 which is in a miserable spot.
The following day I exorcised my dismay with Cosford by visiting submarine B-49 which is moored on the River Medway at Strood. B-49 is a Soviet Foxtrot boat, which was diesel-electric powered and conventionally armed with up to 22 torpedoes (6 bow tubes, 4 at the stern). It is currently known by its new owners as Foxtrot B-39 U-475 Black Widow. Foxtrots played a central role in the Cuban Missile Crisis when 4 were deployed to Cuba – three were subsequently forced to surface, while one managed to evade US forces.
ex-Soviet submarine B-49, River Medway – (c) Lee Russellex-Soviet submarine B-49, River Medway – (c) Lee Russell
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Nobody has anything to gain through a proliferating deployment of nuclear weapons. Allowing US nukes to be stored in the UK increases the chances of the country being destroyed in any confrontation between NATO and Russia (… perhaps China, in years to come). Surely the world needs national leaders to act rationally and reduce tensions over these terrible weapons, not keep banging the drums of war with them?
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On 28/2/22, the online news service “MyLondon” reported that a spokesperson for the London mayor had told them that “… London is well prepared in the “remote” event of Russia launching a nuclear strike on the capital…” — I nearly fell off my chair when I read that.
It is the latest iteration of continuous government propagandising about the survivability of a nuclear attack. However, we know a nuclear attack (for almost the entire population) just isn’t survivable in the UK:
There is no programme of nuclear shelter provision for the public in the UK.
There is no established programme of comprehensive civil defence for the UK population in the event of a nuclear attack.
Apparently the mayor’s office said that “… London has a resilient and well-established system in place to ensure key agencies work closely and effectively together to keep us all safe – this includes keeping Londoners fully informed about any emergencies.” — This misses the point completely.
A single 1.2-megaton bomb (equivalent to a US B-83 warhead) exploding over London would detonate with a force equivalent to around 80 Hiroshima attacks. Everything within 1 km of the explosion would be vaporised. There would be significant blast damage to 7.5 km, third-degree burns out to 13 km and light blast damage to over 21 km. And it’s likely that London would be targeted with many bombs. Nothing much in London is going to survive that, including the ‘key agencies’ that the mayor says would ‘keep us all safe’.
The UK population generally does not understand the power of nuclear weapons or that, with the country being rather small, there are few places where the immediate effects of an attack could be avoided. Even if the immediate effects were avoided, the after-effects could be even more non-survivable, up to and including the effects of a nuclear winter.
We need to call out these deceptions and lies about the survivability of a nuclear attack on the UK, and share the truth wherever we can – our very lives depend on it.
While I was recently out on a road trip for another reason, I took the opportunity to visit the first three fictional landing sites for the Martian’s cylinders in H. G. Wells’ novel “The War of the Worlds” (serialised in 1897, first hardcover published in 1898).
The cover of my copy of “The War of the Worlds”
Unlike many ‘classic’ science fiction stories, this tale has stood the test of time. Soundly based in a realistic setting, it is still a compelling, page-turning read. I’m not going to summarise the plot here — if you are unfamiliar with the book, it is easily available and I recommend reading it. If you don’t have time to read the book, the 1953 film version is a reasonable re-telling of the story and the infamous 1938 radio broadcast by Orson Welles is entertaining.
In the book, the Martians send seven cylinders from their dying planet to the Earth, intending to conquer our planet and make it their own. The cylinders land in a line extending from Horsell Common in Surrey to Primrose Hill in London:
#1 – on the common between Horsell, Ottershaw, and Woking… not far from the sand pits. #2 – in the pine woods to the northwest of Chertsey road #3 – Woods to the North of Pyrford – looking towards Addlestone #4 – Bushey Park, Hampton – North of the Thames #5 – Sheen / towards Mortlake (where the narrator and curate are caught in a house when the cylinder crashes into it) #6 – Wimbledon Common, London #7 – Primrose Hill, London
All of these sites would have been known to Wells. He lived at Primrose Hill between 1888-1891, and in Woking (where his “The War of the Worlds” begins) between 1895-1896. The first three landing sites are within a few miles of each other. It is then a bit of a hike towards the fourth landing site at Bushey Park, with the remaining three being rather dispersed as you head into London.
The First Cylinder falls… Wells describes how the first cylinder falls from the sky in darkness, followed by observations of it in the morning:
“Then came the night of the first falling star. It was seen early in the morning, rushing over Winchester eastward, a line of flame high in the atmosphere. Hundreds must have seen it, and taken it for an ordinary falling star…
Horsell Common sand pit – author’s photo (c) Lee Russell, 2021
… Ogilvy, who had seen the shooting star and who was persuaded that a meteorite lay somewhere on the common between Horsell, Ottershaw, and Woking, rose early with the idea of finding it. Find it he did, soon after dawn, and not far from the sand pits. An enormous hole had been made by the impact of the projectile, and the sand and gravel had been flung violently in every direction over the heath, forming heaps visible a mile and a half away. The heather was on fire eastward, and a thin blue smoke rose against the dawn.
Horsell Common, reimagined as an old-style picture (c) Lee Russell, 2021
… The Thing itself lay almost entirely buried in sand, amidst the scattered splinters of a fir tree it had shivered to fragments in its descent. The uncovered part had the appearance of a huge cylinder, caked over and its outline softened by a thick scaly dun-coloured incrustation. It had a diameter of about thirty yards…”
The woods at Horsell Common are full of trees with exposed roots, which reminded me of the martians, crawling out from their cylinders author’s photo, (c) Lee Russell, 2021
The Second Cylinder… I could not get onto the golf links at Addlestone but this picture of the local countryside was taken nearby. Generally the land feels quite flat and open, with hills quite far away in the distance. The narrator tells us how his neighbour described the fall of the second cylinder here:
Surrey countryside near Addlestone golf links – author’s photo (c) Lee Russell, 2021
“… he told me of the burning of the pine woods about the Byfleet Golf Links… The woods… were still burning… They will be hot under foot for days, on account of the thick soil of pine needles and turf…”
The Third Cylinder… The narrator sees the third cylinder falling in darkness at Pyrford: “As I ascended the little hill beyond Pyrford Church… the trees about me shivered with the first intimation of the storm that was upon me. Then I heard midnight pealing out from Pyrford Church behind me, and then came the silhouette of Maybury Hill, with its tree-tops and roofs black and sharp against the red.
Pyrford golf course – the third martian cylinder’s landing site? author’s photo, (c) Lee Russell, 2021
Even as I beheld this a lurid green glare lit the road about me and showed the distant woods towards Addlestone. I felt a tug at the reins. I saw that the driving clouds had been pierced as it were by a thread of green fire, suddenly lighting their confusion and falling into the field to my left. It was the third falling star!”
In a storm he then sees Martian fighting machines for the first time:
“… my attention was arrested by something that was moving rapidly down the opposite slope of Maybury Hill… one flash following another showed it to be in swift rolling movement. It was an elusive vision–a moment of bewildering darkness, and then, in a flash like daylight… this problematical object came out clear and sharp and bright.
… How can I describe it? A monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine trees, and smashing them aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather; articulate ropes of steel dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder. A flash, and it came out vividly, heeling over one way with two feet in the air, to vanish and reappear almost instantly as it seemed, with the next flash, a hundred yards nearer…
… Then suddenly the trees in the pine wood ahead of me were parted, as brittle reeds are parted by a man thrusting through them; they were snapped off and driven headlong, and a second huge tripod appeared, rushing, as it seemed, headlong towards me. And I was galloping hard to meet it!”
Martian tripods from the first two cylinders had moved to meet the third cylinder landing at Pyrford.
Pyrford golf course was again typical of this area of Surrey, open fields surrounded by woods, leading off towards low hills in the distance.
I’m sure that, at the time of writing, the journey by horse from Horsell Common to Addlestone and then Pyrford would have been quite an adventure. Today you can cover than ground in less than thirty minutes by car, but it was still entertaining to imagine what it would have been like in the late 1880s-1890s…
… and there is of course that wonderful memory of standing at the sand pit on Horsell Common and imagining the first fallen cylinder, steaming in its pit…
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