The Making Of The British Army (68 page)
Read The Making Of The British Army Online
Authors: Allan Mallinson
Blair went on to say that the report’s timescale meant that Widgery was not able to consider all the evidence that might have been available – testimony from the wounded still in hospital, for example, or substantial numbers of eye-witness accounts. New material had since come to light, including ballistic and medical evidence. But he added his appreciation for ‘the way in which our security forces have responded over the years to terrorism in Northern Ireland’, which ‘set an example to the world of restraint combined with effectiveness, given the dangerous circumstances in which they are called on to operate’. And he included the inevitable palliative that ‘Lessons have, of course, been learnt over many years – in some cases, painful lessons.’
In his autobiography
Soldier
, General Sir Mike Jackson, who on that day was adjutant of 1 Para, which had been sent from Belfast to reinforce the brigade in Londonderry, describes what he saw:
here [the Bogside] Nationalists had declared ‘Free Derry’, a barricaded ‘no-go’ area for the Security Forces, openly policed by armed and hooded IRA men. A community alert system was used to mobilize the IRA to repel incursions by the Security Forces. Women would sound the alarm by banging dustbin lids. The Irish flag flew over ‘Free Derry’, which to all intents and purposes was no longer part of the United Kingdom …
Londonderry lay within the responsibility of 8 Brigade, commanded by Brigadier Andrew McClelland. By comparison with 39 Brigade [in Belfast, to which 1 Para belonged] it was 8 Brigade’s practice to use CS gas in large quantities, while in Belfast we hardly used it at all. Although circumstances in
Londonderry were quite different from those prevailing in Belfast, there was a sense in 39 Brigade that 8 Brigade hadn’t been firm enough.
Jackson goes on to explain the fears of the city’s business community that the coming march, which was illegal, would end in the destruction of property as well as business. A plan was devised to hold the marchers on a ‘containment line’ by barriers across the roads into the commercial and civic centre, and to arrest the ‘worst of the hooligans’:
It was a snatch operation, of the type we did all the time. The main difficulty was to stop people running away: to put a cork in the bottle. We had evolved a tactic of going in behind the crowd or of coming in at the flank to cut them off. Clearly this was a large operation which would require a large number of troops. We envisaged using three companies, in a pincer movement, to surround the rioters and cut off their retreat, arrest them, bundle them into the pigs and take them off for handover to the RUC.
Derek Wilford [commanding officer] gave us a briefing shortly before the march. His attitude was confident and professional. There was a sense that we might be heading for some sort of set-piece confrontation: it seemed unlikely that there wouldn’t be at least some aggro. But it’s worth stressing that the Battalion’s mission was to capture rioters in the immediate vicinity of the barricades, which of course meant going over the containment line … Of course we anticipated that the IRA might react when we ‘invaded their turf’. We had to be prepared to be attacked at any time. However, there was no sense in which we planned to use the arrest operation to ‘teach the IRA a lesson’. That was not on the agenda.
The march got under way in the afternoon, and Jackson, who was with the commanding officer throughout, describes how they heard on the radio that Support Company, which in any battalion included the older, more experienced soldiers, had shot a man trying to detonate a nail bomb. Towards four o’clock the marchers came down the hill towards ‘Aggro Corner’, near where the Paras waited:
There was a lot of shouting and chanting. The vast majority of them did not linger by the barricades, but moved on beyond the Rossville Flats to ‘Free Derry Corner’, a well-known gathering place, where they were addressed by various speakers. But the hooligans hung back by the barricades so they could take on the soldiers. This was what we had anticipated. The thugs and the marchers were now separated, so we could get behind the thugs and isolate them.
After a frustrating delay, the Paras were given the word to go in.
Through the window I saw our Support Company’s vehicles moving towards the Rossville Flats, about two hundred yards off. The barricades had been pulled to one side to allow vehicle access. Now they were debussing in the shadow of the flats. Some soldiers were carrying batons ready to make arrests, their rifles slung across their backs, but some had their weapons ready to cover the others. There was nothing unusual about this; on the contrary, it was standard drill for some soldiers to cover those making arrests. Almost immediately it became apparent that they thought they had come under fire. They began zig-zagging from side to side and looking for cover.
Derek Wilford was a commander who liked to be forward among his soldiers, to see what was happening for himself. After a few minutes, he decided to do just that. We tore down the stairs together, round the corner and out into the street, and then sprinted across the waste ground. There was a lot of noise. I saw soldiers hunched up, trying to make their bodies as small as possible. As I dashed forward with my head down I had the definite impression that someone was firing at me from a vantage point somewhere ahead. When you are used to the sound of gunfire you can estimate the range and the direction it is coming from. You first hear a crack, which is the sound of displaced air as the bullet passes close to you; then a thump, the delayed noise of the rifle being fired. The thump gives you an indication of direction, the time gap between the crack and the thump gives you a sense of range.
Trying to describe the minutes that followed was never going to be easy: ‘It was a confused situation’, writes Jackson. ‘My next clear memory of that day is of being back in a factory building,’ and it was here in the early evening that it was ‘becoming clear that there had been a large number of fatalities’ – considerably more indeed than in one action before or since:
I was left with some very mixed and worrying feelings. I imagine that others in the Battalion felt the same. I hated the thought, as some commentators would state straight away, that our soldiers might have lost control. It would be very unprofessional to have done that, and in the army one is very proud of professionalism. I knew these men, and I knew their quality. So far as I was concerned the Paras were tough, but they were disciplined. I found it difficult to accept that there could have been any mass breach of discipline … But however incredible the accusations, it was a terrible thought that we might have
killed innocent people, whatever the stress of the moment, and whatever the provocation. There was no doubt in my own mind that we had come under fire, and in those circumstances it was legitimate to return fire at properly identified targets. The question remains whether the response of some of our soldiers was proportionate or not, considering the nature of the threat.
The Widgery report in the immediate aftermath of the affair had in fact concluded that some of the firing had ‘bordered on the reckless’. The Saville inquiry – whose costs are approaching £400 million – may be able to refine that judgement, though it is difficult to see how. As Jackson says, the fact that it has taken so long and consumed so much public money is perhaps in itself evidence of the difficulty in establishing the truth. ‘As well try to write the history of a ball,’ said the duke of Wellington on learning that someone wanted to write an account of Waterloo. But it is difficult to believe that the truth was Blair’s object. A finding that the Paras were not to blame would be dismissed by the Nationalist community; that they
were
to blame would be a most inconvenient truth. The inquiry could only have been about ‘process’ – and during that process what appears to be peace has come to Northern Ireland.
‘Lessons have, of course, been learnt over many years,’ Blair had told Parliament, with that Delphic addition, ‘in some cases, painful lessons.’ In fact the lesson-learning needed no formal process: the troops on the ground throughout the province knew they had lost what sympathy remained among the Nationalist community, and among most of the media. Crucially, it handed a propaganda coup to the Nationalist fund-raising machine in the United States; and it would be nearly three decades before US Democrat politicians in particular saw beyond the ‘freedom fighter’ badge that Bloody Sunday had bestowed on the IRA and recognized them for what they were. No matter what the truth, at the time perception was everything. When, for example, the coroner closed the official inquests eighteen months later – and a full year after Widgery – he felt himself moved to remark (whether properly or not is immaterial):
It strikes me that the Army ran amok that day and shot without thinking what they were doing. They were shooting innocent people. These people may have been taking part in a march that was banned but that does not justify the
troops coming in and firing live rounds indiscriminately. I would say without hesitation that it was sheer, unadulterated murder.
The coroner was retired Major Hubert O’Neill, late of the Royal Artillery.
The IRA now had a ‘legitimate’
casus belli.
The British army was portrayed as the enemy of the Nationalist population, and the IRA would battle them out of Northern Ireland. And for the next thirty years they tried to do just that, with the active support of a significant part, and the approval of the greater part, of the Nationalist population. Even those who shared Nationalist aspirations but abhorred violence were in an ambivalent position: to them the IRA’s means may have been wrong, but the cause was right; they could not be
wholly
condemned therefore. The Catholic Church in the province seemed at times to be particularly awash with ambivalence; certainly many of its priests were Nationalist sympathizers, and some were known to be not entirely inactive supporters. And the Provisional IRA, being merely socialist and Republican, was more palatable to the Catholic hierarchy, for all their sins of violence, than the Official IRA and their hard-line communism. In fact the OIRA declared a ceasefire soon afterwards, and became a spent force.
The ‘Troubles’, and attempts to deal with them, were bedevilled by this complex mix of perspectives and elements. The lack of normal policing in the Nationalist areas, urban and rural alike, especially along the border with the South, allowed crime to flourish (with much of the proceeds going to the IRA) and everyday laws to be flouted. As such the situation was one of law and order. The IRA’s war with the security forces, however, was a clear insurgency – armed rebellion against the state. The Troubles were also in part civil war, a continuation of internal conflicts that had plagued the island for centuries; the sectarian violence was at times truly atavistic. And overlaying, perhaps even underlying, all this – and certainly weaving in and out of the tangled thicket of the ‘Irish problem’ – was a contest of political ideas which would not have been out of place in the Russia of 1917. The bombs that exploded in public places in Northern Ireland and on the mainland were more lethal than those of the Fenian outrages in London in the nineteenth century, or the anarchist bombs in France and Central Europe, but they were out of the same book of violent revolution. If anyone truly understood what all this was about, no one
had a clear idea how it was to be ended – except, perhaps, by the passage of time alone.
In all this the RUC struggled bravely to reform itself and to uphold the law. And in upholding the law it had to deal with the chief challenge to the rule of law, the IRA. Its Special Branch was reinforced and its activities expanded. But since the RUC was no longer a paramilitary organization, it could not take on the IRA in direct combat. The army was therefore increasingly drawn in, its mission – variously stated – being to ‘hold the ring’ while a political solution was found, and to ‘drive a wedge between the men of violence and the Nationalist community’. It was never formally tasked with seeking out and destroying the IRA; the gun battles occurred more often as a consequence of guarding the network of RUC stations, urban and rural, or on speculative ambushes and patrolling. Occasionally, however, there were active operations based on hard intelligence. In the early days, as in Malaya or Borneo, this was the infantry’s job; but as the campaign progressed and ‘hard’ intelligence became even more valuable, the SAS took the lead.
And in the early days the infantry’s war, in the rural areas especially, was not dissimilar to what it had been in the Far East. In February 1973 a staff-serjeant platoon commander of the King’s Own Royal Border Regiment (KORBR)
239
was killed in an exchange of fire with an IRA ‘active service unit’ (ASU) near Strabane on the border in County Tyrone. Soon afterwards the battalion received intelligence that the ASU was based at a farm close by, and the KORBR’s commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel (later Major-General) David Miller, who had won an MC as a company commander in Aden, ordered one of his platoons to set up an observation post (OP) ready to take offensive action if the ASU showed themselves. The platoon commander was 21-year-old Lieutenant Stephen Flanagan, who was not long out of Sandhurst and had spent most of his first year in jungle training with the battalion in Malaysia. Miller gave him a very free operational hand, as Flanagan’s diary records:
