…... listening to lots of soviet radar systems just as I had in the simulator at home, but these were real signals coming from enemy radars. The thought running through my mind was “ITS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE LIKE THIS!
We came out of cloud, as forecast, but still under cloud, into a flat, brown, landscape in a flat grey light. The roads were brown, the rivers (lots of
them) were brown, there was no colour contrast at all. Both Buccaneers were late acquiring the target. However, direct hits from both salvos of 6 LGBs demolished the bridge completely, Strike ONE. This instance of bad weather was by no means unique; over the following weeks we were to lose several days operations due to cloud/rain and also sandstorms. So much for imagining the desert’s endless burning sunshine!
Iraqi bridges were all on a large scale and included both motorway and suspension types. We initially had some misgivings about the effectiveness of our rather ancient 1000lb bombs. In the event it transpired that their rapid, successive impacts and explosions produced a synergistically-greater destructive effect; rather like a hammer-drill; they proved very effective at destroying bridges. However, not every mission went according to plan.. The LGBs that we were using were guided by what was described as a BANG-BANG system, which meant that the fins went from zero to full deflection and back to zero again, nothing between the two. But if they jammed at full or no deflection, there was no means of controlling the weapon. That happened on an attack against a bridge near the town of Fallujah large numbers of unintentional civilian casualties resulted when some bombs malfunctioned and ended up in a busy market square.
On some suspension bridges, the bombs went right through the roadway before detonating in, or above the river below the bridge; that was soon corrected by shortening the fuse time delay. We also settled an old argument as to which was the best aiming point on suspension bridges, the abutments or the suspension towers. Bombs striking the thousands of tons of concrete that make the abutments did little apparent damage (surprise - surprise); when we hit the towers, the bridges came down (2).
