The Making Of The British Army (69 page)

0900hrs 2nd February – summoned to CO’s office. Gave me 24hrs to devise a plan to sort them out. Three provisos; don’t cross the border, abide by the Yellow Card [rules of engagement] and keep in communication. Spent all day studying my Jungle Warfare School manuals for inspiration (I had been trained in Malaya but not at the Platoon Commanders’ Course in Wiltshire).

0900hrs 3rd February – presented my plan for an OP/ambush inserted by night with a dug-in rebroadcast station for the useless A41 radio. Deception would be the key to success and survival.

3rd–5th February – preparation and rehearsals.

2359hrs 6th February – self, carrying GPMG [general-purpose machine gun], and both company snipers dropped off by covert van 1 mile short of OP, chosen from an aerial photograph. Found a suitable hedgerow and dug in. The first comms check with the rebro station at 0200hrs failed (and was never established).

Dawn 7th February – the deception plan began with the OC’s [officer commanding the company] helicopter flight along the river to wake the ASU. Two men appeared at the doors of a lone house and adjacent caravan; neither appeared armed. The range was greater than I wanted. Just before 0900 sounds of three Saracens and two Ferrets [wheeled armoured vehicles] announced the arrival of 9th Platoon and troop of 16th/5th Lancers into positions on the Border to the north of our OP. We couldn’t see them. After 45 minutes, single shots fired from dead ground somewhere to our front at the platoon, who returned fire and then withdrew to our base as briefed.

1200hrs still nothing. OC’s orders were to withdraw to the ERV [emergency rendez-vous] no later than Noon. We wanted to, but needed to wait.

1307hrs – A car arrived on the forecourt of the lone building – was it a pub? Two men got out both carrying rifles. I nodded assent; two shots, both men went to ground, but it was not clear if they had been hit. That’s what the GPMG was for. Long killing burst. Then silence. Someone said it was time to get to the ERV.

8th February – OC agreed the Platoon should mount a clearance op to the same area, provided I took all available firepower. Overnight someone had constructed a brick wall with firing ports in front of the caravan. Ten minutes after we arrived, shots were fired from the firing ports and from two trenches beside the main road. All hell broke out. Six Brownings [heavy calibre machine guns] on the Saracens, the Ferrets and troop leader’s Saladin were firing, plus the three platoon GPMGs. Sergeant H tried to grip the fire discipline [control the volume of fire] but they couldn’t hear him; I watched transfixed at the impact of this weight of fire on a hurriedly constructed brick wall. Within seconds it
was gone, exposing the caravan and the poor sods who had taken us on.

Special Branch reported that four of the seven-man ASU had possibly been killed (although this was never established). For his courage, planning and leadership during the operation, Flanagan was awarded the MC.

In the urban areas, however, the daily patrolling, with or without the RUC, was more a battle to keep the IRA off the streets, where the deadliest threat to foot or vehicle patrols was the single-shot sniper (IEDs – improvised explosive devices – tended to be used by the IRA as ‘spectaculars’, with a warning to gain the greatest disruptive effect). To deter the sniper a ‘multiple’ of three patrols, each of four men, usually on foot, two of them commanded by a corporal or lance-corporal, the third by a subaltern or serjeant, would coordinate their movements so as to defeat the IRA early-warning system and threaten the sniper’s escape route. These ‘multiples’ became the basis of the long-term effort to win back the streets, and since two out of the three patrol commanders would be junior NCOs, Northern Ireland became known as a ‘corporals’ war’ – just as Inkerman in the Crimea had been called a ‘corporals’ battle’, the smoke and fog being so thick that no one could exercise control beyond a few yards.

In July 1976, Lance-Corporal David Harkness of the KORBR, which was on its second emergency tour of duty since leaving the province in 1973 after eighteen months as a resident battalion, was commanding a mobile patrol in West Belfast. As his Land Rover slowed to cross a ‘speed bump’ it came under sustained fire from a house at close range, one of the rounds slightly wounding him. ‘In the face of murderous fire,’ ran his medal citation,

All this had been done in the midst of passers-by and the usual traffic, with the split-second decisions – ‘flight or fight’ and fire discipline – taken by a 20-year-old lance-corporal who had left school at fifteen to join the Infantry Junior Leaders’ Battalion.
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For his courage under fierce fire, leadership and presence of mind, Harkness was awarded the Military Medal.

If ‘Op Banner’ was fundamentally a corporals’ war, there were from time to time larger operations arising from hard intelligence or simply the routine of life in a corner of the United Kingdom – such as the secure movement of quarrying explosives. There was one strategic operation, however, in July 1972, which required half the infantry strength of the entire British army. After ‘Bloody Sunday’ the Nationalist no-go areas had become so extensive and high-profile – one gable-end sign, ‘You Are Now Entering Free Derry’, challenged British sovereignty on TV screens around the world almost nightly – that it looked as if the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) would set up no-go areas of their own in the Loyalist districts. The GOC and director of operations, Lieutenant-General Sir Harry Tuzo, a gunner who had commanded 51 Gurkha Brigade in Borneo, decided on a concerted effort to clear the barricades right across the province and re-establish a presence in all the ‘green’ areas. To do this he was reinforced to twenty-seven battalions (including artillery and armoured corps regiments in the infantry role): some 21,000 men, with a further 9,000 UDR mobilized for the operation. On 31 July, by the application of this overwhelming strength in ‘Operation Motorman’, he was able at last to get rid of the no-go areas province-wide – and with scarcely a shot fired.

The war now settled into one of steady attrition, on both sides. There were occasional highs and lows, some very low indeed. In 1979, on the same day that Lord Mountbatten was killed at his estate in southern Ireland, eighteen men of the Parachute Regiment and the Queen’s Own Highlanders, including the Highlanders’ commanding officer Lieutenant-Colonel David Blair (a devout Catholic), were killed by
IEDs in skilfully executed attacks at Warrenpoint near the border south of Newry. Indeed, the IED threat in the border areas, South Armagh especially, soon became so great that there could be no overt movement by military vehicles: troops were moved instead by helicopter, and the military base at Bessbrook became for many years the busiest heliport in the world with the constant coming and going of RAF Pumas and Chinooks, and the Scouts and Gazelles of the Army Air Corps. In the four months (it would later be six) that a battalion spent in South Armagh at the height of the IRA offensive in the late 1970s and 1980s, it would lose on average six men. Between 1969 and 1997, the year PIRA declared an indefinite ceasefire, 763 servicemen were killed – the great majority of them army, including UDR – plus more than 300 RUC. Of that total, nearly half were killed in the first ten years – forty-eight of them in 1979 alone. The seventies were, indeed, the learning years, a decade in which the IRA suffered heavily too. Thereafter ‘force protection’ by both tactical and technical means became an increasing priority, so that in the early 1980s a senior commander in South Armagh would tell his battalion commanders that the real mission was not to take casualties since these were of disproportionate strategic value to the IRA compared with any tactical advantage gained in killing IRA men.
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But although these thirty-eight years of continuous operations put a severe strain in particular on the regiments of BAOR, who paid the price in erosion of their armoured warfare capability, they gave the army an incalculable edge. It developed sophisticated techniques of operational analysis and training as well as expertise in what in other armies was the preserve of Special Forces – not least in covert surveillance. Secret corners of England were given over to special instruction in urban patrolling and snap shooting, and in a host of Op-Banner-related tactics. These secret places would in turn be adapted for training for the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan. The growing awareness of tactical – strategic linkage – an ill-judged reaction on the streets of Belfast in the morning bringing a government minister to the despatch box in Westminster in the afternoon – taught the army to be media-wise. On top of this, in their contact with some of the most deprived parts of the United Kingdom and the other world of sectarianism, its officers got strong doses of ‘social reality’ – a distinct
advantage in the foreign interventions that were to follow, and an insight which kept the army from becoming once more, in the younger Moltke’s words, ‘that perfect thing apart’ at a time of growing social and political tension in the country as a whole.
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Op Banner taught the army yet again the value of patience in dealing with insurgencies, and especially in the acceptance of casualties. Above all, it gave the army – at every level – the confidence to operate in situations which lacked operational clarity. This is more than just a resigned acceptance of ‘mission creep’, or even the lack of strategic coherence: it is an acknowledgement that in any ‘war among the people’, as one of its most successful practitioners, General Sir Rupert Smith, has called it,
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the operational situation is dynamic and the correct ultimate strategy may not be discernible at the point at which military force is committed.

Op Banner also gave the army something it had never before enjoyed: public support based on a true understanding of the circumstances in which soldiers were operating. While disasters such as ‘Bloody Sunday’ in the early days caused considerable recoil – not least in the press, where journalists such as Simon Winchester of the
Guardian
appeared utterly convinced that the army was a brutal, anti-Catholic organization – the IRA bombing campaign demonstrated the true nature of militant Republicanism. The army’s mounting casualties and increasing self-control slowly but surely gained the respect, even admiration, of the public; indeed, it gained the grudging and unspoken respect of a large part of the Nationalist community too. This public affection for the army, though not nearly as demonstrative as in the United States, remains a strong sustaining force, and in turn shapes its own image-making.
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Far from blunting the army’s fighting edge, then, the ‘Troubles’ actually kept the army up to the operational mark in a decade after the
withdrawal from east of Suez when otherwise it would have known only training in Germany or the most benign sort of UN peacekeeping in Cyprus (or for a very few, more active service in Oman
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). For Special Forces – not just the SAS but the special intelligence-gathering unit 14 Intelligence Company – Northern Ireland was a singular opportunity to develop techniques for urban operations in particular which have been reprised to real effect in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed, a new ‘Special Reconnaissance Regiment’ was born of 14 Intelligence Company’s experience, and has proved a key strategic asset in both those countries. And not only was Op Banner, the ‘corporals’ war’, invaluable for junior leadership, it was a proving ground for many of the officers who would afterwards fill senior appointments in BAOR – and thereafter the First Gulf War – for the habit of operational planning and decision-making is a transferable asset.

But before that sweeping victory of armoured forces in the Gulf, there would come one of the army’s most gruelling tests of its fighting power, ever. And at the end of the longest, most tenuous, lines of communication in its history.