At Wisley Aerodrome in Surrey on 18 May 1951, the prototype Vickers Type 660 — registration WB210, the future Valiant — lifted off the runway for the first time. Test pilot “Mutt” Summers, the same man who had taken the prototype Spitfire airborne sixteen years earlier, was at the controls. From his cockpit at 9,000 feet, Britain’s first jet-powered four-engined nuclear bomber must have felt like a complete repudiation of the war that had ended only six years before. Until that morning, no British aircraft had ever been designed to drop an atomic bomb. From that morning, every British strategic decision until the late 1960s would assume the Valiant could.

Seventy-five years to the day, the Valiant is the largely-forgotten elder of the famous V-Bomber trio. The Avro Vulcan gets the airshow posters, the Handley Page Victor gets the cult following, and the Valiant — first into service, first into nuclear test, first into actual combat — sits quietly between them in the history books. Today, on its anniversary, it deserves a second look.

Three bombers, one threat

The Air Ministry’s Specification B.35/46, issued in January 1947, asked British industry to design a jet-powered bomber capable of carrying a 10,000-pound nuclear weapon to Moscow and returning. Three manufacturers offered three radically different answers: Avro proposed a delta-winged design that became the Vulcan; Handley Page proposed a crescent-winged design that became the Victor; and Vickers — facing a more conservative Air Ministry preference for a back-up option — proposed a relatively orthodox swept-wing design that became the Valiant.

The result was a “belt-and-braces” procurement. Britain ordered all three V-Bombers, each on a different production timetable, each filling a slightly different operational niche. The Valiant was the simplest and so the cheapest, and it would be the first into squadron service by some four years. The Vulcan and Victor were the more advanced (and, eventually, more capable) aircraft. But until the late 1950s, the Valiant was the cornerstone of the British nuclear deterrent.

From Suez to a hydrogen bomb

The Valiant achieved two firsts no other RAF bomber has matched. On 11 October 1956, Squadron Leader Edwin Flavell of 49 Squadron dropped a British “Blue Danube” Mk 1 nuclear gravity bomb from a Valiant over the Maralinga test range in South Australia — the first British nuclear weapon ever delivered from a Royal Air Force aircraft. Three weeks later, during Operation Musketeer over Egypt, Valiants from 138 and 207 Squadron flew conventional bombing raids against Egyptian airfields. They remain the only V-bombers to have dropped bombs in anger.

Two years later the Valiant did it again. On 28 April 1958, in Operation Grapple Y over Christmas Island, a Valiant of 49 Squadron dropped Britain’s first true thermonuclear weapon — a hydrogen bomb with a yield of approximately three megatons. Britain became the third hydrogen-bomb-armed nation in the world, and the aircraft that delivered the demonstration was the same Valiant that had been the V-bomber stop-gap.

“When the bomb left the aircraft, there was the most remarkable sensation of weight lifting off the airframe. I closed my eyes against the flash. I had been told to expect a great deal, and a great deal happened.”

Sqn Ldr Edwin Flavell — Captain, Valiant WZ366, 49 Squadron — Operation Buffalo, 11 October 1956

A spectacular, terminal failure

In 1962, in response to Soviet introduction of effective high-altitude surface-to-air missiles like the SA-2 Guideline, the entire V-Force was ordered to retrain for the low-level penetration role. The aircraft would now fly at 250 feet and 450 knots to deliver weapons under the radar horizon. The Vulcan and the Victor handled the new profile reasonably well — heavily built, broad-winged, structurally generous. The Valiant did not.

In summer 1964, fatigue cracks were discovered in the rear-spar lower booms of multiple Valiants. The aircraft, designed for the original high-altitude profile, was tearing itself apart in the high-G turbulent low-level air. The crack-propagation rate ruled out economic repair. In January 1965 — barely a decade after entering service — the entire Valiant fleet of approximately seventy aircraft was grounded and immediately struck off charge. The aircraft that had been Britain’s first nuclear bomber was retired before either of the V-Bombers that followed it.

The aircraft that taught the RAF how to fly the bomb

What the Valiant left behind was a generation of senior RAF officers who had personally trained for, and several who had personally executed, nuclear delivery. The aircraft never had to drop a weapon in war, and the absence of that fact is itself a kind of memorial. Britain entered the nuclear age behind the United States and the Soviet Union; the Valiant got it onto a level playing field with both.

Only one complete Valiant survives — XD818, the aircraft that dropped the Christmas Island H-bomb — on permanent display at the RAF Museum Cosford. Seventy-five years after its first flight, it sits at the entrance to the Cold War hall, gleaming in the anti-flash white it wore on the morning it carried Britain into the thermonuclear era.

Sources: RAF Museum Cosford, Vulcan to the Sky Trust, Thunder and Lightnings, IWM.