Читать книгу Soldiering Against Subversion - Dan Harvey - Страница 15

CHAPTER 3

The British Army Blunders

With severe and prolonged rioting in Derry, Belfast and elsewhere across the Six Counties, the Irish army was already moving towards the border. The British Prime Minister took the decision to hurriedly draft in British army elements from the mainland to reinforce the token military presence garrisoned there and together they patrolled the streets across Northern Ireland to prevent a breakdown of law and order. At 5 pm on 14 August 1969, 300 British soldiers of the 1st Battalion, the Prince of Wales Own Regiment of Yorkshire, reinforced by a Company of the 1st Battalion, the Royal Regiment of Wales, having earlier arrived in Northern Ireland on the HMS Sea Eagle, entered the Bogside in Derry. Meanwhile, three companies of the 2nd Battalion, the Queen’s Regiment, and two companies of 1st Battalion, the Royal Regiment of Wales, deployed into Belfast.

The following day, Brigadier Peter Hudson, Officer Commanding 39th Infantry Brigade, toured the areas and determined reinforcements were required. Later that same day the first elements of the 3rd Battalion, the Light Infantry, began to arrive. ‘Operation Banner’, the British army campaign in Northern Ireland, was underway. By early September, 6,000 British troops were in Northern Ireland.

They were there to quell any further intercommunal violence and at first were welcomed and accepted in the embattled Catholic areas of Belfast and Derry; their presence even perceived as likely to back the political reforms insisted on by London. In mid-October 1969, the decision was taken to disband the B-Specials and replace it with the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR). This, however, was to be a part-time element of the British army. The Unionists were deeply shocked, but it was deemed that the B-Specials represented Protestant repression and needed to be reformed. However, the move enraged Protestants, resulting in serious rioting along the Shankill Road area. Shots were fired at the British army and over twenty soldiers were wounded overall after riot squads moved in and made arrests. The British army presence in the North was regarded as a huge relief by Catholics, who happily furnished tea and biscuits to the troops. This honeymoon was not to last, however, and the pre- and post-Christmas period was to prove to be the lull before the gathering storm.

During Easter 1970 (1 April) at the edge of Belfast’s Catholic Ballymurphy housing estate, trouble broke out between two sets of rural groups and the Royal Scots intervened between them. However, instead of ‘holding the line’ between both sets of protagonists, they waded in against the Catholic residents with batons and indiscriminate volleys of CS gas to quell the stoning, rioting behaviour and continuing disorder. If not a key turning point, it was perhaps the beginning of a radicalising moment whereby nationalists began to view the British army as an instrument to perpetuate the status quo in favour of Protestant loyalists; a view reinforced on 27 June by their non-interference, despite requests in advance to do so, in the Catholic Short Strand enclave amid an armed attack by a loyalist mob, a defence which included the armed protection of St Matthew’s Church – an event in the sub-culture of the Troubles that marked the rebirth of the IRA. Earlier that month was also to see a change of government in Westminster when the Conservative Party under Edward (Ted) Heath came to power.

Traditionally, the Conservatives were more closely allied with and supportive of the Unionists, and the Stormont Government in Northern Ireland now found themselves with the twin advantages of being fully supported by London and with British troops at their disposal. Brian Faulkner, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, favoured the prioritising of security to that of political reform, and as a result the British army, at the behest of the Unionists, were directed to nullify the fledgling IRA. This push for harder security measures addressed the symptoms rather than the root cause of the Troubles, and was to later include internment without trial of over 300 people suspected of being involved with the IRA.

When the Troubles initially broke out in August 1969, the IRA had few members, fewer guns and hardly any money. The organisation was unable to adequately defend Catholic areas against the ‘Protestant Pogrom’, as it was considered in some quarters. Those few remaining individuals were taunted by graffiti daubed on walls publicly denouncing and condemning the IRA as standing for ‘I Ran Away’. Discouraged, and disheartened after the failure of ‘Operation Harvest’, the border campaign from 1956 to1962, the leadership had taken to the pursuit of a more political campaign advocating the merits of advancing a Marxist–leftist policy. After August 1969 a more militant element emerged, and in December 1969 there was a split in the organisation resulting in the pre-existing, more politically inclined, ‘Official’ IRA and the more extreme, militantly active ‘Provisional’ IRA. A strained stand-off existed between the Provisional IRA (PIRA) and the British army; though this was actually part of the Provisional’s strategy of ‘phased or staged engagement’.

The first engagement – defensive in nature and an opportunity to redeem themselves in the eyes of the Catholic community in Belfast – occurred on the evening of 27 June 1970, when a loyalist Orange Order band and their supporters marched through the Short Strand/Ballymacarrett area of East Belfast. On their return from the main parade, violence erupted as the march entered the Catholic Springfield Road area.

The River Lagan, the Newtownards and Albert Bridge Roads enclosed the district on three sides and existing within the boundary was a hugely outnumbered Catholic enclave. Theirs was an uncomfortable existence and the spectre of conflict often hung over them. Protection was problematic and withdrawal was difficult, and if attacked they knew they simply had to stand their ground. With the British army and RUC deployed nearby, but unhelpfully not intervening, it fell to those within to prevent being burned out of their homes. Armed PIRA men moved into positions distributing themselves throughout the district, including taking up the advantageous aspect afforded by the tall tower steeple of St Matthew’s Church, granting them excellent fields of observation and fire.

When repeated, determined incursions by loyalist mobs were in progress, those in the steeple responded with unyielding defence. The five-hour firefight prevented the Protestant mob from being able to position themselves to hurl petrol bombs. The march had become a riot then transformed into a gun battle, and the spirited and energetic defence of the Provisional IRA saw the attack wither. It was PIRA’s first major action and an enormous propaganda victory; successfully defending a vulnerable Catholic enclave from an armed, aggressive loyalist mob. The following day, loyalists expelled 500 Catholic workmen from the nearby Harland & Wolff shipyard and the months of June and July 1970 were to witness a series of blunders by the British military, mostly at the behest of the Unionist regime in Stormont, with an all too willing and emergent Provisional IRA capitalising on the mistakes and plunging Northern Ireland into three decades of armed conflict.

The insensitivity of The Falls Curfew was one such event that played directly into the Provisional’s hands. On 2 July 1970, an arms find in a house on Balkan Street and the resultant repercussions over the following three days were to see a turning point in the initial rapport between the Catholic community and the British army. Following a tip off, a British army patrol of five or six vehicles was despatched to the Lower Falls area, where a quantity of arms and ammunition was discovered in a house on Balkan Street. As the British troops started to withdraw, they came under attack from local youths who pelted them with bottles and stones. With the British platoon besieged in the middle of The Falls, reinforcements were sent only to be cut off by rapidly constructed barricades and suddenly an entire company was stranded in the same area. In turn, two companies were despatched to their rescue and they were forced to fire CS gas at the rioting crowds. By late afternoon, the Falls was in chaos as more troops were sent in to rescue the rescuers.

The residents claimed the unfolding of the confrontation was more systemic than reactionary, and that after days and nights of rioting and gunfire the army imposed an illegal curfew on the Lower Falls area of Belfast, putting the area in lockdown as an extended cordon line perimeter surrounded and enclosed the Catholic nationalist area for 36 hours. In conducting searches, residents complained bitterly that the army had been abusive and it was believed they caused unnecessary damage: ransacking homes, ripping up floorboards, breaking furniture and cracking open the plaster on the walls. The area being predominantly Official IRA, the two branches of the IRA fought the British army with gunfire, petrol and nail bombs. Four people were killed – three shot and one knocked down, pinned by a military vehicle – and by its cessation approximately 100 weapons and quantities of ammunition were seized. At the conclusion of the curfew, the army brought two Unionist Ministers, William Long and Captain John Brooke, into the area in the rear of a military vehicle to demonstrate their effectiveness. However, it only really ended when hundreds of women descended on the area with food, forcing their way through the cordon and leaving, it has been claimed, with IRA weapons concealed in prams and in their clothing.

Dr Patrick Hillery, the Republic of Ireland’s Minister for External Affairs, also visited the area, much to the outcry of the Unionists. The ‘Falls Road Curfew’ was an act of monumental stupidity as it generated a sense of alienation among the Catholic community. Trust was lost and the conviction that the British army were irredeemably pro-Unionist was copper-fastened. The year-long honeymoon between nationalist Belfast and the British army was at an end.

The Provisional IRA gained enormously from those early errors of judgement and was hurled headlong, beyond its expectations, towards embarking on the beginnings of its ‘offensive stage’. For a propaganda effect to be sustained you have to demonstrate its achievement in real terms; the young were vulnerable to the Provisional IRA’s propaganda, and these idealists in many cases became somewhat blinded by it. The Provisional IRA believed that violence was a necessary part of the struggle to rid Ireland of the British and aimed to enthuse public support for their ‘cause’ and encouraged people to believe that now was the moment to end partition. They believed that ‘one big push’ was all it would take and by escalation of the military campaign this was certain to be achieved. ‘Escalate, escalate, escalate’ became PIRA’s mantra.

The blunders and misuse of military resources by the Stormont Government, and by extension Westminster, caused the total alienation of the minority Catholic population from the Northern Ireland system, granting the Provisionals an opportunity to take hold. This all resulted from the Unionists’ unwillingness to compromise. A previously all but extinguished IRA had been handed a platform of opportunity – gifted a ‘cause’ – and the momentum of its initial campaign was accelerated beyond its expectations by sheer bloody-mindedness.

A visibly larger, stronger, more self-convinced Provisional IRA now took on the British army. Gun and bomb attacks became more frequent and ever more audacious and a battle of wits began between PIRA bomb makers and the British army bomb disposal teams. The Provisionals were soon getting the better of the street exchanges and British soldiers were now targets, whether they were on-duty or off-duty. For the British army, operations in Northern Ireland were a very different type of conflict to what they were trained for. The street fighting was as dangerous as any overseas foreign theatre, but there were no front lines and on any given day the ‘battlefield’ might be a street, a housing estate or a rural lane. The Provisional IRA could launch an assault, an ambush, a sniper attack, or a bomb explosion, then blend into the background by turning into an alleyway or a building, switching instantly from active hostility to just another person walking down the street – invisible and unknown.

For the British soldiers living conditions were poor, cramped makeshift barracks located in old factories and school buildings. These too were subject to attack, and there were daily hardships and dangerous demands on the individual soldier. Almost every day of a British soldier’s deployment to Northern Ireland was challenging, with high levels of street violence, riots, bombings and shootings, fatalities and being wounded not uncommon.

During the first six months of 1971, the idealists dedicated themselves to a desperate and deadly cause and the urban guerrilla offensive of the Provisional IRA concentrated heavily on ‘British’ economic targets as well as British troops. With the British army directed to pursue a military victory and the nationalists prepared to fight them, Northern Ireland was bloody, violent and politically stagnant. Through Stormont’s lack of reform and inaction towards equality, feelings of frustration, despair and grievance flourished in young Catholics, leading many in the community to join the IRA, which they saw as the only remaining option to change society in Northern Ireland. British politicians claimed that Northern Ireland was an integral part of the United Kingdom, while the Irish asserted that a small island, geographically, if not historically, ought to be an undivided state.

***

When he stepped off the aircraft at RAF Aldergrove in November 1972, Edward Heath was the first British Prime Minister in fifty years to visit Northern Ireland. The British were absentee power holders, but the authority they exercised in Northern Ireland, via the British army, was a power without responsibility. Brian Faulkner, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland and head of the province’s security committee, claimed that Belfast was as British as Bristol or Birmingham. Faulkner pushed for tough action against the ‘thugs and murderers’ of the Provisional IRA, and despite the misgivings of the General Officer Commanding of the British army in Northern Ireland, Lieutenant-General Harry Tuzo, who cautioned against it, Faulkner was granted authority to introduce internment without trial in August 1971.

Between 4 am and 7 am on 9 August 1971, ‘Operation Demetrius’ was executed and thousands of British soldiers, accompanied by RUC Special Branch detectives, swooped on addresses throughout the North, raiding houses and making arrests. Of the 342 individuals initially detained, 104 were released and the remaining 238 were jailed in Crumlin Road Prison in Belfast or on the Prison Ship Maidstone. Front doors were splintered, men and youths dragged from their beds, screaming wives, mothers and children roughly manhandled. It was an ill-conceived policy, poorly executed and one-sided. Few senior Official or Provisional IRA men were rounded up, since the RUC was operating with out-dated lists of suspected IRA members and many young members were unknown to them. Strikingly, no similar attempt was made to arrest Loyalist activists. Undertaken with the aim of smashing the newly emerging IRA, instead it imposed the gunmen on the people within nationalist ‘no-go’ areas. Riots and disturbances followed and thirteen people died on the first day of Internment. Overall, twenty-four people were killed in three days. Many refugees fled to camps south of the border and by mid-August an estimated 6,000 people had sought refuge in the South. Lieutenant Colonel Diarmuid O’Donoghue (Retd.) recalls:

When the Troubles started, I was holidaying in the ‘Long Strand’ near Rosscarbery, Co. Cork and a Garda arrived to say he had been contacted by my then Company Commander, Michael Minihan, and I was to report immediately to my unit in Dublin. Thereafter, I served six months in Castleblayney in Co. Monaghan. On this later occasion, whilst serving in Gormanstown Camp, I was catering officer for an FCÁ Camp and on the eve of its conclusion I was looking forward to once again holidaying in West Cork. However, suddenly the gates of the camp opened and refugees from the North – women and children for the most part – six abreast, came streaming into the camp. It seemed like hundreds of homeless, tired, distressed and worried people presented seeking shelter, security and sanctuary. I can honestly say we did our best for them. It was to be three further weeks before I managed to go on holiday.

Internment failed to achieve the propaganda aims of the authorities, and furthermore a number of detainees were mistreated. The fourteen ‘hooded men’, as they were to become known, experienced ‘Five Techniques’ used on them during interrogation, including hooding, sleep deprivation, white noise, starvation, standing for hours spread-eagled against a wall leaning on their fingertips, all the while accompanied by continual harassment, blows, insults and questioning. Some were forced to run the gauntlet between lines of baton-wielding soldiers and a few were taken up blindfolded in a helicopter (actually hovering only a few feet off the ground) and told they were going to be thrown out. In 1976, the Irish Government took the issue to the European Commission of Human Rights and in 1978 the European Court of Human Rights found the British Government guilty of using inhumane and degrading treatment. In Northern Ireland, the consequence of internment was to escalate the chaos and the level of conflict.

Brian Faulkner’s aim of using internment to end the violence by flushing out the gunmen did not work. On the contrary, the Provisionals’ benefitted from internment, rather than being crushed by it. The use of the British army as part of a policy prioritising a security approach over that of political reform, to nullify the fledgling Provisional IRA, backfired badly. Internationally too, the television images of the Troubles were of explosions, streets full of broken bricks and bottles, and burnt-out barricades; footage of rioting crowds, yelling and cursing in the midst of swirling clouds of CS gas as soldiers charged from behind a barrage of baton rounds, were all illustrative of a worsening situation. From July 1971 to year’s end saw a sharp increase in Provisional IRA activity. There were increased killings (140 people died in the four months after internment) and increased bombings as the Provisional IRA stepped up both the intensity and extent of its campaign, accelerating its policy of escalation.

On Sunday 30 January 1972, soldiers of 1 Para (1st Battalion, Paratroop Regiment) under Lieutenant Colonel Derek Wilford entered the Bogside area of Derry to police a Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association march and by the day’s end had shot twenty-seven unarmed people, fourteen of them fatally. The procession was near the Rossville flats when the army’s ‘arrest operation’ was mounted. It was one of the British army’s most controversial operations ever undertaken, and has since become known as ‘Bloody Sunday’. Outweighing any previous blunders, it was as inexplicable as it was incomprehensible, even for Northern Ireland. Overwhelming in its enormity, Bloody Sunday left the nationalists overwrought and inflamed and incited an already incendiary situation. Causing widespread shock and anger, 15-year-old Don Mullan, who was part of the rally on the day, described the situation as he saw it:

I participated in the civil rights march that day, my first ever, and was standing only 2-feet away from 17-year-old Michael Kelly when he was fatally shot. I can still hear him gasp as a ricochet bullet punctured his flesh. An instant later, confusion and terror reigned as a rubble barricade began to stir dust as bullets thundered into it. I am still unable to recall accurately the events of those horrific moments of my adolescence. I [remember] people to my right crying out and falling close to me at the barricade. Then suddenly, the wall of an apartment above my head burst, showering those below with brick and mortar. A primeval instinct took possession of me and unashamedly I started running home to safety. ‘Son, what’s happening?’ a woman’s voice called. ‘There must be at least six dead,’ I shouted back. Her face registered disbelief, but I did not stop to convince her.

The following day, my best friend called for me and we retraced our steps. I remember pointing to the bullet marks on the wall above where I had been the previous afternoon. We looked with incredulity at the bloodstains on the pavements and by the barricade. Across the road in a first-storey apartment, one window had six bullet holes with cracks spreading out like webs. The blue and white Civil Rights banner that had led our procession the previous day was now heavily stained with the blood of Barney McGuigan, a father of six children, who was shot while holding aloft a white handkerchief as he had cautiously made his way to the aid of a fatally wounded man. He was killed by a shot in the back of the head.

On the day of the funerals, my friend and I stood silently together in the cold rain that swept over Derry as cortège after cortège slowly made their way towards the cemetery gates. We were numb, confused and increasingly angry.

Over thirty years later, I would sit in the public gallery at Central Hall in Westminster, as ‘Soldier F’ of the Parachute Regiment in 1972 admitted under cross-examination that in addition to three other people he had also killed Mr McGuigan. Memories of that tragic day still give rise to anger and outrage within me.

Bloody Sunday was a bitter experience, especially after the whitewash of the Widgery Tribunal. The atmosphere began to change dramatically as a direct consequence. Boys that I played football with were making other choices. The IRA had many willing recruits thereafter and, well, honestly, I considered making that choice too.

The Creggan Estate in Derry was to become a Republican stronghold, but in my childhood it was not a rabid anti-British or anti-English environment. So the big question is why and how it became so? And it was not because my community was born with a genetic defect that made us prone to violence.

Following unrelenting street disturbances in August 1969, the British Army was ordered into the streets of Belfast and Derry. In the early days they engaged in various community liaison projects. It was not unusual for local soccer clubs to line out against regimental teams. I also recall on one occasion a British Army band, I think, Royal Marines, coming to our school. We gave them a rapturous welcome, preferring their percussion and brass to English, French and Maths. In May 1970 our school was the first in Northern Ireland to be offered an Adventure Training Course by the army with ten places at Magilligan Camp, about 25-miles from Derry, which included rock climbing, hill-walking, canoeing, orienteering and expedition work. Magilligan Camp was later to become a detention centre for internees in August 1971 and the theatre for an ominous encounter between unarmed Civil Rights [Association] demonstrators and 1 Para the week before Bloody Sunday 1972.

The Falls Road Curfew, the introduction of internment without trial, and especially Bloody Sunday were to have powerful, cumulative and long-lasting repercussions over the following three decades. At the time, anger, alienation and abhorrence drove a wedge between the British army and the Nationalist Catholic community, who felt that ‘the Paratroopers murdered 14 civilians on Bloody Sunday, but the Widgery Report (a British inquiry into the Bloody Sunday shootings) murdered the truth’. Trust and faith in the British army was lost, and for the Catholic community alienation became habitual and the State proved unsympathetic. Prior to these events, the Provisional IRA had nominal support, minimal backing and negligible encouragement. Afterwards, however, attitudes hardened and entrenchment followed.