The Making Of The British Army (67 page)

After the Borneo Confrontation, then, the trend in manpower was ever downwards – in the TA, too – with both Labour and Conservative governments trying to find more and more economies in expensive volunteers. National Servicemen, coming and going all the time, may have been a training burden, and they may have been ‘bolshie’, but they had been cheap. Manpower was expensive, the defence budget was inevitably finite, and military equipment was costlier by the year. BAOR was an equipment-intensive organization, and the human element was consequently squeezed ever harder. To some extent the TA could come to the rescue, no longer fielding formed brigades and divisions but instead filling in the increasing gaps in the regular army’s order of battle for general war. But it was not ‘tidy’.

By the end of the 1960s Britain had all but withdrawn from east of Suez. There remained only the garrison in Hong Kong (the contingent of the Commonwealth Brigade was soon to leave Singapore) and a Gurkha battalion in Brunei, maintained at the expense of the sultan. In the Mediterranean, British troops quit Malta, thinned out in Gibraltar and withdrew into the handful of sovereign base areas in Cyprus (with a few more wearing UN berets to keep the peace between Greek and Turkish Cypriots following independence). And in Germany they
trained incessantly over the rolling plains of Lower Saxony to be ready for the Soviet army.

In 1968 not a single British soldier was killed in action. It was the first year of which this could be said in the lifetime of any serving man – the first, in all probability, in the army’s history.
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‘THE CHIEF CONSTABLE BELIEVES IT IS A LAW AND ORDER SITUATION; THE
GOC
knows
it is counter-insurgency.’

So said the staff officer briefing the company commanders of a newly arrived infantry battalion in South Armagh – ‘bandit country’, as it was known – in 1980: eleven long years after the ‘Troubles’ began.
²³⁴
Six months later when the battalion left, five of them were dead, and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and the army were no nearer defining what it was they were doing. Notwithstanding – perhaps even because of – this strategic failure, Operation Banner, the longest operation in the army’s history, was one of its most formative experiences, a 38-year continuous commitment with a final bill of more than 300,000 troops, 763 of whom had been killed and 6,116 wounded as a direct result of terrorist action.

‘Op Banner’ taught three generations of officers and NCOs the habit of tactical decision-making, of taking operational responsibility, often under fire and always under the threat of ambush by bullet or bomb. And it did so within a political context so demanding that each tactical decision might have an immediate strategic consequence. Indeed, the IRA would time their attacks with an eye to the six o’clock news.

The reaction of the commander on the ground, whether lance-corporal or captain, was as much a battle for the headlines – for the route to hearts and minds on both sides of the water and both sides of the border – as it was for the streets of Belfast or the roads of South Armagh.
Minimum force:
the words were etched on the tactical consciousness of every officer and NCO, a principle developed for counter-insurgency ‘east of Suez’ where a miscalculation might not be so catastrophic (there were no ‘Bloody Sunday’ inquiries for Malaya, Cyprus, Kenya or Aden).
²³⁵
The experience east of Suez together with that of Operation Banner begat a doctrine for ‘operations other than war’ that would make the British army’s intervention in the chaotic disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s both possible and beneficial at a time when other armies held back in ignorance of what to do. But did too much ‘peacekeeping’ damage the army’s health, as the US army was wont to ask? Did it blunt its fighting edge?

Ireland had not troubled the army much since 1922, but in Ireland, perhaps as in no other place, old sins cast long shadows. The Catholic Irish had worn red coats for centuries; even after 1922 they continued to do so, though not in those regiments that had gained the tough fighting reputations of Wellington’s day, or on the North-West Frontier, or in France and Flanders – the Dublin Fusiliers, the Munster Fusiliers, the Leinsters, the Royal Irish, and the incomparable Connaught Rangers. They joined instead the Irish Guards or, increasingly, the Ulster regiments, some of which had previously been – on the surface at least – predominantly Protestant. These southern, almost all Catholic, Irishmen were in the minds of their fellow soldiers the loyal Irish, ‘West Britons’,
²³⁶
like those who in 1916 were fighting on the Western Front.

On the other hand, the Irish Republican Army (IRA),
²³⁷
which sprang seemingly inexplicably from the same community, would murder any
man or woman in or out of uniform – any civilian, indeed – who opposed their vision of a united socialist republic of Ireland, just as they had done during the First World War, in a campaign of which the 1916 ‘Easter Rising’ was merely the most spectacular but incompetent action. The British army, both in 1916 and after 1918 during the fighting which led to Irish independence, had had little time for ‘hearts and minds’; and the excesses of the ‘Black and Tans’ – as the frequently ex-service police auxiliaries were known for their mixture of khaki and blue or green clothing and brown and black leather (alluding to the Scarteen Hunt’s ‘black and tan’ foxhounds) – compounded the resentment of British troops in the minds of the Catholic population.

‘The Troubles’, as with poetic Irish understatement the conflict became known north and south of the border, began in the summer of 1969 towards the end of a period of Europe-wide protest which ranged from the courageous and focused anti-Russian demonstrations in Czechoslovakia (the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968) to the left-wing, nihilist, student–worker riots in Paris and West Germany. The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA, which was not solely Catholic) had been turning up the heat in their protest marches against discrimination in employment and political representation, and a series of running battles in Belfast and Londonderry, the second city of the province, in which (Protestant) Loyalists joined against the NICRA, had left the RUC not only exhausted but reviled: by the (Catholic) Nationalists and also by many Loyalists who had been on the receiving end of RUC even-(if heavy-)handedness. Whatever the reality, the appearance was of a police force intent on enforcing Loyalist dominance. In consequence, Harold Wilson’s Labour government ordered in the army as a ‘peacekeeping’ force more acceptable than the RUC to the Nationalists.

It is interesting to speculate what would have been the outcome (assuming the Troubles, at that stage at least, were indeed a case of enforcing law and order and not a true insurgency) had the RUC been reinforced by the Metropolitan Police and other constabularies, as those forces in the Yorkshire and Midland coalfields were during the miners’ strike of 1984–5. But Ireland was, after all, over the water, and the province had a long tradition of ‘militarism’. And the RUC – in particular its auxiliary part-time constabulary, the ‘B Specials’ – was not merely a police force but an anti-guerrilla force. As well as police stations it had ‘barracks’, armoured cars and medium machine guns. To
an Ulsterman, the arrival of soldiers on the streets did not perhaps have the same impact it would have had on the inhabitants of a mainland British city. To the Loyalists they were another echelon of the civil power, which was in effect the RUC; to the Nationalists they were likewise another echelon, but more impartial than the RUC.

To the IRA, however, British troops posed a very significant threat, though not in the way that might first be supposed. For the troops were welcomed initially in the Bogside and Creggan areas of Londonderry, the scenes of the worst violence later. The Prince of Wales’s Own Regiment of Yorkshire, not long home from Aden and sent from Colchester with little notice, were given mugs of tea by Catholic women who hailed them as protectors from both the Loyalists and the RUC. It was the same in the Falls Road area of Belfast, later notorious for its gun battles (it was here in 1973 that Lieutenant, now General Sir, Richard Dannatt won the MC). But this role of the British army as protector of the Catholic – Nationalist population was inimical to the IRA’s own strategy of replacing the RUC in the ‘Green’ areas.
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The IRA therefore began direct action – attacks on police stations and RUC men, particularly Special Branch – and continued to foment disorder through NICRA, provoking more sectarian violence.

Troops began surging in and out of Northern Ireland. Usually, there were just two battalions resident in Belfast and County Down; during the 1970 ‘marching season’, the summer months when the various Protestant associations took to the streets to mark King William’s victories against Catholic James, there were fifteen. Both civil disorder and attacks on the security forces, which included the new, locally raised Ulster Defence Regiment, increased. Internment was introduced, which brought a temporary respite. But internment of suspected members of both the IRA and the UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force, the Loyalist paramilitaries), on the certification of an RUC inspector, and robust methods of interrogation, only hardened support in the Nationalist areas, which soon turned into IRA strongholds. By the summer of 1971, just eighteen months after Yorkshire soldiers had
been drinking Catholic tea, armed gangs had all but taken over the Bogside in Londonderry, and daily clashes with youths of the Protestant lodges were rapidly making the streets look like the East End of London in the Blitz. Soon there were barricades all over the place and the IRA openly manned checkpoints, eagerly filmed by the international media. By the end of the year, seven soldiers had been killed in the city.

Although police primacy was the ostensible principle, in reality the RUC had withdrawn from the hard areas. Here the army’s presence too was only transient, being confined to risky foot patrols and pointless, even provocative, mobile patrols in obsolescent armoured troop carriers – the heavily up-armoured one-ton Humber, known as a ‘pig’ for its snouty appearance, or the bigger Saracen with its revolving turret and machine gun. In the absence of specialist riot gear and techniques, soldiers could only respond to violence in the rough and ready way they had in places like Aden, where the general absence of the media at the point of contact meant that such tactics worked. In Northern Ireland, where almost every clash was filmed and not all were faithfully edited, the same tactics were often counter-productive. The IRA certainly comprehended this, and had every reason therefore to provoke excess. NICRA, some of whose members were entirely well-meaning but whose leaders were – to put it mildly – manipulated or manipulating, also saw that violent protest paid, especially when initial concessions made by the Northern Ireland government at Stormont convinced the leadership that more violence would lead to more concessions. This was textbook insurgency: the IRA now had the means to bring on proxy battle with the army in which the military response would only further the political object. In words that South American revolutionaries of that time were using, it was about making society brittle. In this situation it was vital for the army (and RUC) to avoid taking the bait; but in Londonderry in particular there was an accident waiting to happen, and early the following year the IRA won perhaps its most significant victory of the campaign.

What exactly happened that day – ‘Bloody Sunday’ – has been the subject of the longest-running judicial inquiry in history, its report still not public at the time of writing this book. ‘The facts that are undisputed are well known,’ the prime minister, Tony Blair, told Parliament when announcing the inquiry by Lord Justice Saville almost twenty-six years to the day after the event: