Electronic Counter-Measures - Tony Cunnane's Life and Times

When I first joined 18 Squadron we were a training squadron and didn’t have a war role so we were always the poor relations to 101 Squadron in the next hangar, but at least we could relax in the knowledge that we didn't have to react to most of the many call-outs and alert exercises that plagued their lives. I think it is true to say that the majority of the aircrew on our squadron thought that 18 Squadron's peacetime training role was rather specious - and boring! We spent most of our flying time coming in at high level (above 40,000 feet) from the near Continent towards the UK's east coast, which is what, presumably the planners of the day thought the Soviet Air Force would do in the event of a pre-emptive strike. At various points we would switch on our ancient jamming equipments with the object of 'blinding' the UK air defence radars and rendering their voice frequencies useless due to loud noises. Each of our equipments operated on a single frequency so the ground crew had to programme each jamming transmitter in advance and all the AEO had to do was switch the equipment on and off. Having a fairly high-power output fed into rather primitive wide-angle antennae, our transmitters did tend to have what were known in the trade as side-lobes, where energy went out on frequencies well away from the intended one. We did, on a number of occasions, manage to blot out the domestic television transmitters in large parts of the UK but that was accidental not deliberate. After that had happened, the inevitable stories in the newspapers and on TV merely blamed the loss of pictures on 'abnormal atmospheric conditions.'

Our efforts didn't really affect the capability of the UK air defence radars much because of the one major flaw in electronic countermeasures (ECM) of the day. If you switched the jammers on too early the ground radars would see the jamming as a single rather narrow spoke on their screens. That not only warned the radar station that the 'enemy' was coming but also enabled them to get an accurate bearing on the jamming aircraft and so alert the defending fighters. If two of the air defence radars got narrow spokes at the same time, they could triangulate the information to provide a fairly accurate fix. On the other hand, switching on the jammers too late would usually mean that the air defence radars had already identified the incoming aircraft and were tracking them; switching on the jammers then merely confirmed that you were the enemy. In the days of the ‘four minute warning’ that would have been all that was needed for war plans to be implemented.

Our voice jamming equipment also operated on specific frequencies but we could listen in on the frequencies that the ground controllers were using to control the fighter aircraft. For reasons of flight safety, both military and civilian, we had to ensure that we didn't jam any operational frequencies. The fighters were allowed to ask their ground controller to switch channel if our jamming affected their reception - which sort of negated the purpose of the exercise especially if we heard the request and the new frequency was one that we could jam. Quite often it happened that some fighters changed to the new frequency whilst others did not because they had not heard the order. Thus, on many occasions mayhem resulted but not for long - our jamming runs rarely exceed about 20 minutes. In any case, there was a master safety frequency which ground controllers could use to order us to switch off all our jamming transmitters.

We were, therefore, rather surprised when our Squadron Commander informed us one day that he had asked Bomber Command HQ to give the squadron a formal war role. We were dismayed when he told us that Command had agreed! From then on, 18 Squadron became part of what was known as the ‘main force’ and we had to react to all Bomber Command’s frequent alert and readiness exercises. When 101 Squadron heard of this, which took quite a time because it was supposed to be secret, they gloated. Not only did we on 18 Squadron not have a proper job but now we had to react to the same alerts that they did.

When 18 Squadron disbanded in 1963, its specialist electronic warfare role having been taken over by the new Mark 2 Vulcans, I was posted from Finningley to Gaydon near Leamington Spa as an instructor on the Valiant ground school and not long after arriving there I was appointed editor of the station newspaper, ‘The Gaydon Gazette’. There was a new openness in the official attitude towards the media. Gaydon was a V Bomber training unit not a front-line bomber station and so security was rather less of an issue. My métier was obviously known to my new station commander when he gave me the job. As often happens with station and in-house magazines even today, I had to write most of the stories myself.

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