The Making Of The British Army (74 page)

‘High morale and self-confidence describe the mood of the 1st (UK) Armoured Division as it deployed for the second time in little over a decade to the head of the Gulf in 2003,’ writes John Keegan in his concise but astute summary of operations,
The Iraq War:

British officers were indeed conscious of the historic dimension. In his now famous pre-invasion pep talk to his battalion, the Royal Irish, Lieutenant-Colonel Tim Collins invoked the words of fellow Irishman W. B. Yeats: ‘Iraq is steeped in history. It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birthplace of Abraham. Tread lightly there.’
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Nor was the divisional commander, Major-General Robin Brims, a deeply thoughtful bachelor Wykehamist, in any hurry. Basra is a large city; to have provoked an urban battle with Iraqi troops who would not yet have known the extent of the collapse of their comrades on the road to Baghdad would have been to risk increasing the body count of both his own troops and Iraqi civilians. Instead Brims adapted the techniques of intelligence-gathering and street control learned in Northern Ireland to play a clever and ultimately successful game of cat and mouse. ‘Our snipers work in pairs,’ explained Major Ben Farrell of the Irish Guards, ‘infiltrating the enemy’s territory to give us very good observation of what is going on inside Basra and to shoot the enemy as well when the opportunity arises … They don’t kill large numbers but the psychological effect and the denial of freedom of movement to the enemy is vast.’

The Iraqi army in Basra was still active, however, and tried to provoke firefights in several sorties. But in this the advantage lay with the 1st Armoured Division, whose Challenger II tanks and Warrior armoured-infantry fighting vehicles were superior to anything the Iraqis could pit against them. On the night of 26–7 March, a squadron of Iraqi tanks fatally over-reached itself in one of these sorties, and was caught in open country at dawn by a squadron of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards (who had also fought in the First Gulf War). Fourteen Soviet-made T55 tanks were destroyed in less than a minute.

By 8 April, the day before Baghdad fell to the Americans, Basra was in British hands, and the soldiers of 1st Armoured Division were being welcomed by the largely Shia Muslim inhabitants of the city, who rejoiced in the overthrow of Saddam’s Ba’athist, largely Sunni, regime. The following day, the troops took off their helmets and put on regimental headdress instead: they would now patrol the city in bonnets, berets and caubeens as if it were Belfast. And if the wretched Basrawis were too short of food to give them tea and biscuits as they patrolled, as the residents of both Catholic and Protestant areas of Belfast had in the early days, then at least the soldiers could hand out sweets and chocolate to Iraqi children, and return the smiles of the shopkeepers. It had been a famous and clever victory.

So what went wrong? First, there was a collapse of law and order. The Iraqi army had melted away, but the US secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, to whom President Bush had given the lead in the occupation strategy, had already decided on their complete disbandment.
The Iraqi police, perhaps if only in fearful bewilderment, also quit their posts in large numbers. In the inevitable eruption of lawlessness neither the US nor the British – both of whom had rapidly drawn down their force numbers after the toppling of Saddam – had enough troops on the ground to restore order. Relations with Iraqi civilians turned sour as the coalition, which had become a very multinational force indeed for the ‘humanitarian phase’, struggled – at times heavy-handedly and at others provocatively weakly – to contain the disparate violence. Some of the excesses were more than just the reaction of the moment. One such incident, though nothing like as bad as some committed in the US sector, was the death in custody of a Basrawi (Baha Musa) in September which led to the unprecedented court martial of the commanding officer and several others of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment (QLR) – a severe blow to the army’s self-esteem. Indeed, during this time in Basra there were breakdowns in the chain of command that were – if nothing like in scale and detail – akin to those in the aftermath of the storming of Badajoz in 1812, when the duke of Wellington’s assault had not gone to plan and casualties among the officers had been high. In Basra, however, the crucial point was not that the officers were dead but that the troops were too thinly spread to contain the trouble. Sir Mike Jackson’s response as CGS – a forceful and very public message to the chain of command – was the equivalent of Wellington’s putting up the gallows in the main square.

From this eruption of lawlessness developed something more sinister, however: insurgency, and a war across the whole of Iraq between the militias, which the looted arsenals of the Iraqi army provided with weapons, ammunition and explosives. In the US sector, in the predominantly Sunni areas, the insurgency raged early and was met by an equally aggressive – indeed, violent – response. The ‘downwash’ into Basra and surrounding provinces took the already hard-pressed British-led Multi-National Division South-East (MND(SE)) by surprise, and they tried at first to contain the situation by the ‘soft-hat’ approach of Northern Ireland, rapidly losing control of the city (if control there had ever been) as casualties mounted.

Throughout 2004 the insurgency – or insurgencies – intensified across Iraq, not least in the British-led sector. Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) began taking their toll of men and vehicles; mortars pounded the bases, many of which had not yet been ‘hardened’; and the insurgents pressed home attacks on patrols with machine guns and
rocket-propelled grenades. It was in ambushes in Al Amarah, 100 miles north of Basra, that Private Johnson Beharry, a Grenadian-born soldier of the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, won the VC for valour in saving the lives of his comrades.

On 1 May 2004, Beharry’s company had been ordered to replenish an isolated outpost in the centre of the city (Beharry himself was the driver of his platoon commander’s Warrior). As they entered the city in the early hours they learned that a foot patrol was pinned down, and so drove at once to its relief. Beharry’s Warrior was hit by multiple rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) as they neared the patrol, the explosion knocking out both the platoon commander and the gunner in the turret, as well as the communications, and wounding several riflemen in the back of the vehicle. Beharry tried to drive on through the ambush, but as he came up to a barricade across the road the Warrior was hit again by RPG fire from insurgents in the adjacent alleyways and on the rooftops, and caught fire.

Beharry, now both driver and effectively commander, opened his hatch cover to let out the smoke and to work out what to do next. Without communications, and with five more Warriors hemmed in behind him, he decided to try to crash his way through the barricade, knowing it would probably be mined.

As he drove the 25 tonnes of aluminium armour at the obstruction another RPG hit them, further wounding the gunner and destroying Beharry’s armoured periscope, forcing him to drive through the remainder of the ambushed route – a full mile – with his hatch open and his head exposed. With the rest of the Warriors following him in the bid to break clear, Beharry’s own vehicle was struck repeatedly by RPGs and small-arms fire, one bullet penetrating his helmet and lodging inside.

Eventually they reached the outpost that they were meant to be replenishing, only to find that it too was under fire. Beharry’s medal citation takes up the story:

This was courage and devotion to duty of a high order. Just six weeks later, having returned to duty after medical treatment, Beharry was in another ambush in which he repeated his earlier valour and presence of mind, though on this occasion he was seriously wounded. This action, together with the first, gained him the VC – the British army’s first in twenty years.

Beharry was not the only one in his battalion to be honoured for bravery in their six-month deployment. Conspicuous Gallantry Crosses were awarded to two serjeants; there were seven MCs
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and no fewer than sixteen mentions in despatches, as well as DSOs for the commanding officer and one of the company commanders – a truly impressive list. And the Princess of Wales’s Regiment are by no means élite or even ‘fashionable’ infantry (though their antecedent regiments can number fifty-seven VCs between them): during this time other battalions were having just as much of a fight and winning similar laurels. At that time in Iraq, uncommon gallantry was commonplace.

Despite the bravery and hard fighting, however, the situation across the country had become critical. The Americans, facing both the Sunni insurgency and Al-Qaeda fighters who had been pouring into the country for a year and more, were going increasingly ‘kinetic’ – shorthand for relying on firepower – and several nations contributing to the British-led MND(SE) were keen to pull out their troops. The war had never been popular in Britain, and as casualties mounted senior officers had real fears that irreparable damage would be done to morale. The army had in any case been operating at full stretch for many years – overstretch, in the opinion of many
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– while at the same time being
progressively underfunded, and it was beginning to show. Retention rates were falling, with some of the best and most experienced officers and NCOs among those voting with their feet; regiments were simply going back on operations too quickly for their soldiers to be properly rested and retrained in between. And then towards the end of 2005 the government announced a significant increase in troop levels in Afghanistan, specifically Helmand province. The additional troops were meant to boost civil reconstruction, but within a year they were engaged in some of the heaviest fighting the army had seen since Korea.

By 2006, therefore, the British imperative was to reduce numbers in Iraq, where it was judged that there was only marginal operational advantage to be gained compared with Helmand. Efforts to train the new Iraqi army so that they could take the place of British troops were redoubled. The strategy was known as ‘transition, with security’. But this was always going to be a difficult calculus. Judging the tactical capability of the Iraqi troops was relatively straightforward; assessing the conditions on the ground, however, the other element in whether the Iraqis were truly ready to take over operations, was a finer judgement, and one requiring the greatest integrity in dealing with Whitehall’s pressure to keep up the momentum of withdrawal. In addition, the growing insurgency threatened the transition strategy: would the Iraqi army (and police) be able to cope with the accelerating violence?

The Americans faced a similar predicament in the north, but their response in 2007 was altogether different. At the instigation of three or four visionary generals, of whom David Petraeus and the retired former vice-chief of army staff Jack Keane are the best known, the US army wrote a new doctrine of counter-insurgency which drew deeply on the British experience in Malaya and elsewhere. Iraq-bound troops, and even those in theatre, were then retrained, and together with a huge increase in numbers (up to 20,000 at peak) the new doctrine was applied. The aim of the ‘surge’, as it became known, was to damp down
violence in Baghdad and other centres of the insurgency to give the Iraqi army and police the chance they needed to take control of the streets. Some senior British officers argued for a similar surge in the south-east, not least because they perceived a demoralization in their troops, who were more and more on the ‘back foot’. The SAS, for example, were reporting that British battalions had lost their offensive edge, and several senior officers were concerned that although there was no want of courage in the ranks, it was increasingly a reactive courage – which the medal citations seemed to bear out.