Another voice

The two Britains

Auberon Waugh

RAF Bruggen, North Rhine-Westphalia Alarge notice greets the visitor as soon he is inside the heavily guarded gates of RAF Bruggen, the most westerly of the RAF's bases situated near the Dutch border. It was put there by a former com- mander of the base and is viewed by the current commander, Group Captain John Thomson, with a certain embarrassed amusement. It stands about eight feet high, in large white capital letters on a blue background: THE TASK OF THIS STATION IN TIME OF PEACE IS TO PREPARE FOR WAR. DON'T YOU FORGET IT.'

It is the sort of message which might easi- ly have been composed by Peter Simple's General 'Tiger' Nidgett, scissor-scarred veteran of the Royal Army Tailoring Corps. By great good fortune, my companion on this two-man inspection of Britain's defence preparedness was none other than Mr Michael Wharton, the twinkling, quiet- spoken former Intelligence colonel in India who has been writing the Peter Simple col- umn single-handed for nearly a quarter of a century. I heard him twittering with pleasure beside me every time we passed this notice. But Group Captain Thomson ex- plained that despite its somewhat lurid wor- ding the essence of the message was entirely correct. Don't let us forget it.

John Thomson, a quiet, intelligent, com- petent man in his middle or late thirties with an attractive Texan wife and two young children, is certainly not to be confused with General 'Tiger' Nidgett. His command covers four squadrons of Jaguar strike/at- tack aircraft, various surface-to-air missile installations, a large maintenance unit and a huge security force as well as ancillaries, wives and dependants — well over 6,000 souls in all and untold millions of pounds' worth of equipment. His planes are air- borne 2.4 hours a day, carrying goodness knows what devilish equipment — I saw cluster bombs and 1,000-pounders, as well as enough missiles and high-explosive can- non to rejoice any small boy's heart — in their ceaseless struggle to discourage the Russians from their loathsome intentions.

He believes he is doing a useful, not to say vitally important job, and so, quite plainly, do all the men and women under his command. There was none of the cyni- cism which I remembered from my army days. Underneath all the banter and good humour there are a sincerity and quiet seriousness of which General Nidgett himself would certainly have approved.

It was a disagreement over the usefulness of the RAF's role which led to my invita- tion. At the end of the Falklands war I

wrote a slightly extravagant little piece in the Sunday Telegraph complaining that Port Stanley airfield, which the RAF claim- ed night after night to have put out of ac- tion with high-level Vulcan bombing raids, was in point of fact more or less untouched. The bombs appeared to have missed the Falkland Islands altogether — perhaps they had been bombing Tristan da Cunha by mistake. Although my tone was mildly derisive it was not, as I remember, par- ticularly censorious, as I knew only too well from my own experience how easy it is to make errors of map-reading. Since the Sea Harrier force which performed so well belonged to the Navy, I inquired what ex- actly had been the RAF's role in the Falklands war and suggested rather rudely that if the RAF proposed building a monu- ment to its performance there,, the monu- ment should be one of those abstract sculptures with a large hole in it.

Needless to say, every retired squadron leader in the country reads the Sunday Telegraph and most of them decided to write to me, pointing out that the RAF had provided transport facilities and a Rapier anti-aircraft missile squadron and that ten of the Sea Harrier pilots had in fact been on secondment from the RAF. However, the tone of many of these letters was so offen- sive that I wrote a second piece, querying whether the RAF in fact had any useful role at all except as an extremely expensive form of Home Guard, a Dad's Army equipped with pikes and breastplates of solid gold.

Among the letters which continued to ar- rive after I had written the second piece was a thoughtful and polite one, written more in sorrow than in anger, from Group Captain. Thomson, suggesting that I should really come and see for myself before writing about these matters. So, eventually, I did.

The philosophy of NATO defence, as I understand it, is that in the event of nuclear war both sides have the capability of im- mobilising the other; in the event of a war fought with conventional weapons, NATO, although outnumbered three to two in warplanes and five to two in tanks, never- theless offers a formidable obstruction which can (and does) discourage Soviet adventurism while promising to contain a Warsaw Pact offensive until American rein- forcements arrive.

So there it is. The only thing which makes me uneasy is my suspicion that the decision to go nuclear may have been left to the Warsaw Pact, which would seem to give them a considerable first-strike advantage. Not to put too fine a point on it, it seems to me that all the NATO air bases in Germany and Britain could probably be knocked out by a nuclear first strike using missiles against which they have no defence, and this would leave us exactly where we would have been without them, wondering whether to use the increasingly incredible strategic deterrent.

But perhaps all this will change under Mrs Thatcher, until the declared NATO strategy will once again be a massive tactical nuclear strike on the first Warsaw Pact infr- ingement. It would be impossible to exag- gerate the boost given to forces morale by Mrs Thatcher and her Falklands adventure. Whatever it is these swashbucklers, swift, indifferent men, believe, they believe in it very firmly indeed.

A large part of NATO's defence posture would seem to rely on its own credibility or plausibility, and since this involves projec- ting the right image 1 was a little bit uneasy about my own role as a guest. Kind and hospitable as they undoubtedly are, 1 was doubtful whether I would write anything about them, and intended to write in fact about the BBC Television strike which, on my departure, threatened to stop the show- ing of Wimbledon.

Now, I learn, the threat has passed. The union once again climbed down. What disturbed me about the dispute was that no one — not the Mirror nor the Guardian ever tried to understand the union's point of view. What the BBC was trying to do was to stop them fiddling their expenses. The expenses fiddle is a central institution of British life, and is bound to remain so under our present system of personal taxa- tion. Employers and employed were both implicated in a theoretically illegal agree- ment on which the BBC was trying to rat.

Britain, as I say, is a nation on the fiddle. Our tax and welfare arrangements demand it. The fiddle is not just as British as roast beef, it is a cornerstone of our economic life which the Assoication of Broadcasting Staff was trying to preserve. How dare anyone pretend to be surprised by the discovery?

Yet here, in Germany, one sees the other Britain, just as we saw it in the Falklands war: a nation of brave, intelligent, efficient people working happily together in a hierar- chically structured society for what they see as their country's good. That is the real lesson of the Royal Air Force in Germany — not what it is doing but the fact that it exists, with all its keenness, its patriotism and Boy Scout values miraculously intact. I wonder if these two Britains — the Britain of Thomson-Nidgett and the Britain of Pilger-Kaufman — will ever come into con- tact with each other.