A Long Long War: Voices from the British Army in Northern Ireland 1969-1998
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A Long Long War: Voices from the British Army in Northern Ireland 1969-1998
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Overview
There are stories from some of the most seminal moments during the troubles in Northern Ireland—the Crossmaglen firefights, the 1988 corporals killings, the Ballygawley bus bombing, and more—told from the perspective of the British soldiers who served there between 1969 and 1998. This was a war against terrorists who knew no mercy or compassion; a war involving sectarian hatred and violent death. Over 1,000 British lives were lost in a place just thirty minutes flying time away from the mainland.
The British Army was sent into Northern Ireland on August 14, 1969, by the Wilson government as law and order had broken down and the population (mainly Catholics) and property were at grave risk. Between then and 1998, some 300,000 British troops served in Northern Ireland. This is their story—in their own words—from first to last.
Receiving a remarkable amount of cooperation from Northern Ireland veterans eager to tell their story, the author has compiled a vivid and unforgettable record. Their experiences—sad and poignant, fearful and violent, courageous in the face of adversity, even downright hilarious—make for compelling reading. Their voices need to be heard.
“One of the first and only books to offer the perspective of regular British soldiers serving in the Northern Irish conflict . . . a valuable addition to the extensive literature about the Irish Troubles.” —Choice
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781907677601 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Helion & Company Ltd. |
| Publication date: | 02/20/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 540 |
| Sales rank: | 637,473 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Stage is Set
The last British soldier – officially – to be killed on active service in Northern Ireland – I pray, in later years that the fickle hand of history does not prove me wrong – was Lance-Bombardier Stephen Restorick of the Royal Artillery. Whilst manning a permanent vehicle checkpoint (PVCP) in Armagh, he was shot by an IRA sniper and lay dying, cradled in the arms of a woman he had never met before and whose car was stopped at the PVCP. He died later in hospital and the woman said 'He was there smiling and a while later, he was dead.' That tragic event took place on February 12, 1997, some 10 or more years ago now, as I start this book.
For those of you interested in such statistics, Stephen's death took the toll of British soldiers killed, to over 740 – although there is evidence which suggests that the figure is well over 1,000 – and their blood was spilled not only on Northern Ireland's streets, roads, fields and country lanes, but also in two of London's Royal Parks, on a motorway near Huddersfield, in a band practice session in Kent, in a Hampshire railway station, in pubs in the South East of England, in a street in Derby city centre, in Wembley, London and on the streets of Holland, Belgium and Germany.
Night after night, all readers over the age of 21 must have heard the news emanating from a BBC or ITV newsreader, spoken over images of riots and mobs and steel-helmeted, plastic-visored soldiers fending off petrol bombs – or 'miscellaneous incendiary devices' as Armyspeak described them. Those black and white images becoming ever so much whiter as an 'Irish cocktail' exploded over the top of a PIG (Patrol Infantry Group, an armoured personnel carrier) or against one of the grimfaced soldier's riot shield. The sharp crack of a baton round – or a rubber bullet as the flak-jacketed news reporter called them as he crouched anxiously down behind the PIG or around a wall – and an entire cacophony of sounds which we came to recognise as 'normal' for Belfast and Londonderry.
Hands up any reader who has not heard of the Lower Falls or the Divis Street flats, or the Unity Street flats or the Turf Lodge in Belfast? Hands up any readers who have never heard of the Bogside or the Creggan or of Crossmaglen? Who doesn't remember the bombings in Enniskillen on that most sacred of days to the British Commonwealth: Remembrance Sunday?
Who, among you had even heard of Warrenpoint until that terrible day in August, 1979, when 16 Paras and 2 Queen's Own soldiers were killed by an IRA landmine?
Now tell me, had the 'Troubles' never started, would you know where Anderstown or the Springfield Road or Ormeau Road or the Ballymurphy Estate or the Shankhill were? Would the name Omagh mean anything at all to you, had not the so-called Real IRA decided that a ceasefire and long term peace was not what they wanted?
How many of the Green Howards would have even heard of the Ardoyne or the Crumlin Road had fate not decreed that they be sent there to keep the peace?
But it was all so different, all those long years ago in the summer of 1969, when Harold Wilson's Labour government sent troops out to Northern Ireland on 'peace-keeping' duties. The squaddies, the 'Toms', even our officers – or 'Ruperts' as they were called – were all welcomed with open arms as the outrageously suppressed Catholics saw them as liberators; rather like Tom Courtenay's brilliant portrayal of a Walter Mitty-like character in Billy Liar where, at the head of a diverse and battered army he liberates the fictional country of Ambrosia. Unlike the fictional character in that movie, this was real. 'This is it, boys, we're going in to save the Catholics!' But, like lots of things in life, once the 'honeymoon' period was over, things were so much different; so very different. Like a doomed love affair, once the romance is gone, there's emptiness and then hatred; was it ever thus in Northern Ireland!
On what seemed like a nightly basis on our TV screens, we had watched those black and white images being broadcast from Northern Ireland depicting the plight of the Catholic community, clearly being repressed institutionally by the ruling Protestant politicians. The shouts and screams and cries of rage and hatred. If you are old enough, how can you forget the images of the RUC officers liberally using their truncheons and punching Civil Rights marchers as they protested against their second-class citizen status? The nightly cries of 'one man, one vote' echoed across our living rooms and was splashed across the front pages of every newspaper.
On the mainland, with our inherent and accepted equality in housing, education, employment and voting rights, we watched, somewhat bemusedly, as, in another part of the United Kingdom, the legitimately elected Government was actually bestowing the same rights as we enjoyed, on one part of the electorate and yet denying them to another – on the basis of religion!
Daily, our newspapers explained – a little too glibly in my opinion, almost as though it were acceptable – how often Protestants would enjoy two votes in certain situations and the Catholics would be denied even one. How the allocation of Council housing stock was on the basis of Protestants first and the Catholics not at all. How in education terms, the Protestant kids would receive the better education of the two communities. And, finally, how jobs were offered, purely on the basis of which church the applicant either prayed at, or nominally was involved with.
I was brought up a Jehovah's Witness and suffered as a result through lost friendships, through being considered some sort of social leper and through religious shunning. As a consequence, there was immediate solidarity with the Catholics – not thinking for a moment that one day that many might detest the community for the spawning and protection of the IRA – and myself, in common with millions, took their side.
So, from 1968 and through into that glorious summer of the following year, black and white scenes from the film Mississippi Burning were re-enacted on the streets of Belfast and Londonderry on a nightly basis. We soon discovered that the latter had two names! Londonderry if one was a Protestant or this new term which emerged, Loyalist and Derry if one was on the opposite side of the sectarian divide or, again, a new word which joined the lexicon of Northern Ireland, a Nationalist! One former soldier – of Irish descent, although proudly having worn the uniform of the British Army – wrote to the author expressing the long held views of his Father. 'He would rather drink acid than call it Londonderry.'
We were soon to learn that the newly emerging lexicon would grow and continue to grow. The next term to confront us would be 'B-Specials' (or 'Bspashools', as a big RUC sergeant would pronounce it one day as he explained to me why the Protestants were the 'good' guys) and these police auxiliaries would fill the vacuum created by the disbanding of the infamous Black and Tans. The Black and Tans, known as such because of their mix 'n match uniforms were a collection of former British soldiers, unemployed in the wake of 1918's peace dividend and early-released convicts of the worst type. Their barbarity, cruelty and systematic violence against Irish citizens in the run up to Irish independence is legendary, but it is not for debate here.
It is sufficient to say, that the B-Specials of 1968 and 1969 clearly drew on the activities of their mentors in the mixed uniform of nearly 50 years earlier. Wearing their black uniforms, these bully boys used the crudest of violence, wanton vandalism and blatant attacks on the Catholic communities throughout the province. It is no coincidence that the ranks of NICRA (Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association) swelled, commensurate to the increase of what was perceived as state violence against them by the RUC and B-Specials.
Their violence and repressive methods, which included mob attacks and deliberate arson attacks on the 'Taigs', as they called the other half of the sectarian divide was so blatant, that it was obvious that their longevity as an institutionalised force would be short lived.
In Londonderry – I use this term based on its description in my atlas and not in terms of my political leanings – 15,000 people held a sit-down protest and brought the city centre to a halt despite the liberal use of police batons. Another march was held with 5,000 people and, in protest against the brutality of the police, the next one attracted 20,000. New characters began to emerge and Bernadette Devlin, a firebrand of a girl with her dulcet Northern Irish accent popped up on the BBC and ITV news almost nightly. Later, Loyalists would try to kill the, then, Bernadette McAliskey and, as British troops ran into her house to save her, she would cynically remark 'What; have ye come to finish me off?'
Other names were starting to emerge, people such as Gerry Fitt, SDLP MP for West Belfast and John Hume. But, of the legendary IRA, there was as yet, no mention. It was, somewhat apocryphally believed that, after the Border wars of the late 1950s, the dormant IRA had sold all their weapons to the Free Wales Army (FWA)
In a period of almost constant tension, with parades and processions by both sides of the sectarian divide being seen as provocative, the Ulster government, led by William Craig, was quick to arbitrarily ban Catholic marches but openly sanction Protestant ones. In particular, the loud, triumphalistic bands of orange-sashed Protestants celebrating their historical victories over the Catholics, marching along and insulting them were especially volatile, provoking largescale backlashes with violence quick to start. The Orange Order leaders seemed to delight in routing their marches through Catholic areas and deliberately seeking flashpoints.
They did, of course, assert that these marches traditionally went through other sectarian areas and were backed by both Craig and the RUC. Somewhat ironically, when the RUC tried to keep the warring factions apart, however half-heartedly, their officers often came off worse as they were the meat in a sectarian sandwich!
One of the final straws for Harold Wilson's Labour government came, one feels, with the ambushing of a Civil Rights march at Duke Street in the city-with-two-names and later on a country bridge in the province, by the RUC.
This, the most violent incident to date, occurred at Burntollet Bridge where the marchers were attacked by about 200 unionists armed with iron bars, bottles and stones while police did little to protect them. The sight of the NICRA marchers being cut down as they marched for equality was simply too much for the Wilson Government, which had sat on its hands for far too long.
There is no doubt that the RUC were heavy-handed and violent and the whole scene was captured on film by an RTE camera crew from the Irish Republic – the rest, as they say, is history.
The question on the lips of the world was: how much longer can the British tolerate the nightly televising of Protestant or Loyalist mobs burning out entire Catholic streets forcing them to grab their meagre possessions and flee to what, in effect, were Catholic enclaves? The reverse was also true, as Catholics in retaliation, turned on their former friends and neighbours simply because they worshipped at a different denomination's Church.
In fact, although this was still a year down the line, a photograph of a soldier of the Green Howards carrying an injured woman over his shoulder after she was attacked by a Catholic mob, burned into the psyche of any decent-minded person who looked at it. That, and the sight of two more of the 'Yorkies' carrying an elderly man in his chair away from the burning ruins of his house did much to haunt both those of us with clear consciences and those, like the Wilson cabinet, who had stayed on the fence for far too long.
The whole world continued to watch and then wondered how long it would be before the trickle of dispossessed and burned-out families, their few bits of salvaged furniture and clothes piled on hand carts soon became a raging torrent and resembled the sad French and Belgian parades of refugees streaming away before the onslaught of the German Blitzkrieg in 1940!
The riots and the gradual collapse of social order as B Special–led mobs attacked entire streets of Catholics and the injuries sustained by both the RUC and civilians alike could not be allowed to go on. Thus was set the stage for the biggest tragedy in modern British history.
In the summer of 1969, British troops were deployed to the province and, for the first time since the General Strike of 1926 (other than the exigencies of 1939– 45) armed soldiers would play a role on the streets of the United Kingdom.
Ever since the Easter Rising in Dublin 1916 – and even earlier with the emergence of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in the 19th century – the IRA had existed to varying degrees in terms of manpower and firearms. There had been border campaigns and even a wartime bombing campaign on the British mainland, but the motley crew of dissident Republicans had been largely quiet for well over a decade until the well-publicised problems in Northern Ireland from 1968 onwards.
In 1969, the expediently re-formed IRA had split into the Official wing and the far more militant, Provisional wing. The latter, the hot-heads and radicals had been disheartened as the IRA had been quiet and had not lived up to its traditional role of 'defending' the Catholic, or Nationalist communities. It was pointedly made clear to the dissenting Provisionals that the initials I.R.A. in many Catholics' eyes, in view of their acquiescence, or certainly, lack of resistance, to the attacks by the Protestants and, particularly, the B-Specials now stood for 'I Ran Away.'
For the first few years of the conflict, both wings vied for the role of being the bigger killer of security forces, but this mantle was quickly accorded to the highly militant Provisionals who clearly had few scruples when it came to killings. Their hollow apologies at bungled bombings and shootings and 'wrong targets' never did quite ring true, even nearly 40 years after they began the killing.
The IRA demand for a 'United Ireland' wasn't at first recognised by the British – both Government and Army – but in the end, after initially presenting themselves as defenders of the Catholic communities, they were actually able to hijack the 'one man-one vote' campaign for their own particular objectives. Did we, therefore, possibly just 'sleepwalk' our way into the bloodiest event to hit the British Isles since the Luftwaffe Blitz and Cromwell's tiff with Charles I over the concept of divine rule?
Whatever the cause – and here I have no intention of becoming bogged down in all the so-called historical perspectives – by the July of their third year in a 'peace-keeping' role, a peak deployment of 30,300 British and UDR soldiers were stationed in Northern Ireland. By the end of that third year, 243 British soldiers had been killed and 243 Army CVOs (Army Casualty Visiting Officers) had been forced to make that sad visit to 243 anxious families on the British mainland.
On it rumbled, depressing year after depressing year; a Catholic killed at random one day and a Protestant murdered a day or so after, in the same random manner, just because his address or location signified his religion. And, squeezed seemingly in between each killing, another squaddie met a violent end and another local officer was receiving instructions to drive to a house somewhere on the mainland to inform the lad's family and loved ones.
Tit-for-tat, a game we played during our childhoods suddenly assumed more sinister connotations in that sad and violent province.
After Wilson, Edward Heath (1970–74), Wilson again (1974–77), James Callaghan (1977–79), Margaret Thatcher (1979–90) and finally John Major (1990–97) continued to send out troops to the province – it was, after all, part of the United Kingdom. They were sent to fight and to die on what were, ostensibly, the streets of Great Britain. Five separate Prime-Ministers tried and failed and British soldiers paid the price for the sectarian hatred and for the failure of successive Governments. In the end, Tony Blair's Labour Government presided over peace and, to date, no squaddie has been killed on active service since he came to power. I firmly believe that this would have happened anyway, and that, whilst we should pay credit to Blair, I do not believe that he was solely responsible.
Why then, did all the killing, the shootings and bombings stop when it did?
The Army's perseverance, their inability to give in – after all, the last war they had lost was in the fields of Georgia back in 1783 – the stirling work of the much put-upon RUC, the sacrifice of the brave men of the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), The Royal Irish Regiment and, in the end, the sickened public all brought about an uneasy peace. It might be uneasy, but, please God it is holding and has held for over 10 years now.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Long, Long, War"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Ken M. Wharton.
Excerpted by permission of Helion & Company Limited.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of photos,
List of maps,
Foreword,
Preface,
Acknowledgements,
Publishers' Acknowledgements,
Glossary,
Introduction,
Chapters,
1 The Stage is Set,
2 1969,
3 1970,
4 1971,
5 1972,
6 1973,
7 1974,
8 1975,
9 1976,
10 1977,
11 1978,
12 1979,
13 1980,
14 1981,
15 1982,
16 1983,
17 1984,
18 1985,
19 1986,
20 1987,
21 1988,
22 1989,
23 1990,
24 1991,
25 1992,
26 1993,
27 1994,
28 1995,
29 1996/97,
30 After Stephen Restorick: 1998 onwards,
Epilogue,
Afterword,
Appendix I,
Appendix II,
Roll of Honour,
Bibliography,