by Ken Wharton
OTHER BOOKS BY
KEN WHARTON
A Long Long War (Helion and Company, 2010)
Bullets, Bombs and Cups of Tea (Helion and Company, 2012)
Wasted Years, Wasted Lives Volume 1 (Helion and Company, 2013)
Wasted Years, Wasted Lives Volume 2 (Helion and Company, 2014)
Sir, They’re Taking the Kids Indoors (Helion and Company 2015)
An Agony Continued (Helion and Company, 2015)
Another Bloody Chapter in an Endless Civil War Volume 1 (Helion and Company, 2016)
Another Bloody Chapter in an Endless Civil War Volume 2 (Helion and Company, 2017)
The Bloodiest Year 1972 (The History Press, 2017)
Bloody Belfast (The History Press, 2018)
Blood and Broken Glass (Helion and Company, 2019)
‘I sometimes wish that I was back in Belfast during the Troubles, just so that I could wish I was home again.’
Unknown former soldier
All images including front cover © The Belfast Telegraph
except for those marked as Author’s collection
First published in 2019
The History Press
The Mill, Brimscombe Port
Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG
www.thehistorypress.co.uk
© Ken Wharton, 2019
The right of Ken Wharton to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 7509 9111 7
Typesetting and origination by The History Press
Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd
eBook converted by Geethik Technologies
CONTENTS
Dedications
Foreword by Dr Aaron Edwards
Acknowledgements
Author’s Note
Introduction
Prologue
1 The First and Second Days
2 The First British Soldiers Die
3 The Rise of the Provisional Irish Republican Army
4 Atrocities (1970–79)
5 Internment
6 The Bloodiest Year: 1972
7 The Police
8 Loyalist Paramilitaries
9 ‘The Nutting Squad’ and Informers
10 Mainland Attacks
11 March 1988: A Month of Infamy
12 Atrocities (1980–94)
13 Biting Back: Undercover Ambushes
14 Eight Days of Insanity: October 1993
15 Fifty Years On
Epilogue
Appendix 1 Fatalities by Year, 1969–98
Appendix 2 Military Fatalities by Regiment
Appendix 3 Prime Ministers Who Deployed Troops to Northern Ireland
Appendix 4 Mainland European Fatalities
Select Bibliography
DEDICATIONS
To every man and woman who served in Northern Ireland, irrespective of your corps or regiment, irrespective of your roles; you are my comrades and the honour of knowing you is all mine.
To the innocent civilians on both sides of the sectarian divide who only wanted to lead a peaceful life, my empathy and my respect, especially Michelle Williamson, Elaine Hasellhoff and Tanya Austin.
To the late Ken ‘B’ and Colour Sergeant Ken Ambrose, Tim Marsh, Rob McGough and Dave Parkinson, your passing has left a void in all our lives.
To the 1,300 plus who never returned to their loved ones.
To Steven McLaughlin, Darren Ware, Dave Hallam, Ken Pettengale, Gren Wilson, Dave Judge, Dave Pomfret, John Corr, Len Chappell, Les Welling, John Hollis: to the Royal Green Jackets, Celer et Audax.
To Mike Sangster, Tim Francis, John and Bernie Swaine, Mick Potter, Royal Artillery, Ubique.
To Mike Day; for your inspiration and tireless help. Mark Denton for your tireless enthusiasm.
To Mick ‘Benny’ Hill, Steve ‘Foxy’ Norman, Andy Thomas, Royal Anglians. Dougie Durrant, ADU.
To Mark ‘C’ James Henderson, B.R., Haydn Williams, Glen Espie, Michael and Emma Forde, Mary Gilbride, Elle Mac, Maureen Herron and the men and Greenfinches of the Ulster Defence Regiment.
To Mark and Allison Overson, who started me on a long road.
To Kenny Donaldson and the staff at SEFF. Lee McDowell at the Ely Centre, Enniskillen.
To JB, ATO.
To Kenneth Anderson, Kev Wright, Tommy Clarke, Nick Sword, Royal Corps of Transport.
To Dave ‘Slops’ Langston, Army Catering Corps.
To Eddie Atkinson and Mick Brooks, Green Howards.
My cousin John Leighton, a Royal Artillery TA soldier.
To the children and loved ones of our fallen: Tammy Card, Ann Travers, Tracey Abraham, Stevie Karen Rumble, Carol Richards, Eddie Haughey, Stephen Gault, Anita and Martin Haughey, Craig Agar, Rita Martin, Ruth Forrest, Brian Johnston, Kate Carroll, Donna Munro, Mark Olphert and Carol McGough.
To my children: Anne-Marie, Anna-Martina, Jonathan, Jenny, Robbie, Alex and Nathan; love you all, and always will.
To my grandchildren: Sherriden, Kelsy, William, Sammy, Layla-Mae, Megan, Clara and Lydia; and to Ezra and to my adopted and much loved grandchildren: Morgan Addy, Charlie and Ralf Pearson.
Finally, to Adam Griffiths, Narelle Pearson, Andy Thomas, Fiona Addy, Alice Binbay and Dean Holmes: ever patient, ever persevering partners of my children. And to Lily and Layla in Queensland.
To my Canadian friend, Sandie Blair; to my Bonnyrigg friend, Elaine Hall.
FOREWORD BY DR AARON EDWARDS
As a young soldier, Ken Wharton deployed to Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles. He would not return again for thirty-five years, when he made an emotional pilgrimage to revisit the scenes of the war he left behind. In commemorating his fallen comrades, he consoled himself with the determination to understand the people of Northern Ireland and their Troubles. In this he has succeeded, writing eight best-selling books on one of the most destructive conflicts in modern European history.
Ken’s books adorn the shelves not only of those who witnessed these events unfold at first hand but also those of us who grew up in the shadow of the worst years of the Troubles.
Having researched and written about the Troubles for more than twenty years, I have found no better introduction to the military dimension of the conflict than Ken’s work.
I have frequently commended him in public for his exceptional service in highlighting the experiences of some of those 250,000 holders of the Northern Ireland campaign medal who served during Operation Banner, the British Army’s longest ever continuous deployment in modern times.
We must never forget the sacrifice and dedication of those members of the security forces who played such a pivotal role in stabilising the security situation in the Province. Although it is unfashionable to say it in certain quarters, we owe these men and women an enormous debt of gratitude. Without their stand against terrorism, it is doubtful whether we would have had the resulting peace process.
In his latest book, Ken Wharton gives us a hard-hitting, ethically minded analysis of the Troubles, half a century after their outbreak.
Ken is well aware that untangling the past is a messy business. It is littered with broken lives and traumatised people, many of whom rarely find a voice in the historical record. Ken Wharton reintroduces us to these forgotten
people. He gives them a voice.
We see the terrible times they lived through from multiple eyewitness perspectives – from a soldier arriving on the scene of the Abercorn Restaurant bombing to the son of an RUC officer seeing his father grievously injured by a Provisional IRA under-car booby trap bomb, and beyond to a civilian who was blown up in a UVF no-warning bomb in the New Lodge area. Among a catalogue of atrocities, Ken recounts the IRA attack on construction workers whose van was blown up at the Teebane crossroads in County Tyrone on 17 January 1992. While Republicans were busy justifying their slaughter of seven Protestant civilians, I was stood in a school assembly observing a solemn two minutes’ silence in remembrance of the father of one of my school friends who had been killed – a working-class man murdered for no other reason than he was out earning a crust for his family. As ever in Ken’s work, we hear from those directly affected. Ken cites the sister of one of the victims. ‘I was praying that David would be alive, no matter how serious his injuries were,’ she recalled. ‘How selfish of me. At exactly 9 p.m., my sister Heather phoned; her exact words were, “Ruth, it’s all over, David is dead.”’ These are the stories rarely told in the history books.
Apart from detailing the course and consequences of such horrific violence, Ken also considers the motives of those involved. There will be people who baulk at the suggestion that we can ever truly understand why people turn to violence. For those of us engaged in military education, we must at least try to explain – while never seeking to justify – why and how people felt compelled to take the steps they took. And, in the same way, we must also examine the consequences of their actions, the lives they cut short, the families they tore apart, and the communities left damaged by their violence.
Few agree on why the Troubles began, even fewer on who won or who lost. What we can all agree on is that this conflict has been a human tragedy. In his latest book, Ken Wharton ensures we never forget that truism. It is not an easy read.
The research Ken has undertaken reveals who the victims were, how they were going about their everyday lives when they were killed, and the trauma inflicted upon those left behind.
It is vital that we gain informed insight into the consequences of attempting to resolve disputes by the means of armed force. We should not do this for any kind of grim satisfaction but with the express intention of learning the lessons of the past so as not to repeat the mistakes.
Ken is under no illusion where much of the blame lies for these mistakes. He was a soldier once, faithfully performing his duties in service of his country. Half a century on, he has earned the right to an opinion. Beyond the individual culpability of the men and women who pulled triggers or detonated bombs, Ken singles out the ‘arrogance’ and ‘insensitivity’ of the British establishment for considerable opprobrium: arrogance because they fail to recognise that what took place in Northern Ireland was a war in every sense of the word, insensitive because they act without a single second’s thought about the impact of their decisions on the lives of the grieving families. This arrogance and insensitivity is manifested in the refusal of our politicians, newspaper editors and teachers to accept the true losses of Op Banner and blithely refer to the war in Britain’s back yard as a ‘police action – an aid to the civil power’.
In accepting and seeking to explain the ‘true losses’ of half a century of Northern Ireland’s Troubles, Ken has alerted us to the tragedy of what happened. We should all read and learn from our history, especially in a society that has, in recent times, exhibited all the signs of relapsing back into violent conflict.
They say in Ireland that the past is the present. It is hard to dispute that adage, though we could always do more to appreciate why this remains the case. Ken Wharton understands this more than most, and it is for this reason alone that I commend his latest book to you.
Dr Aaron Edwards, FRHistS
Camberley, UK
August 2018
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This author owes a deep debt of gratitude to the management and staff of the Belfast Telegraph – a superb newspaper – for their support of my writing over the course of the last few years. In this book, they have very kindly authorised me to use almost 100 photographs from their Troubles gallery to illustrate the pages. I would like to thank the following members of their management: Darwin Templeton, Richard McClean, Martin Hill and Paul Carson; my debt to you is immense. Thank you also to respected journalists and my fellow authors, Ruth Dudley Edwards and Hugh Jordan, for putting me in touch with the top people at the paper.
My thanks also to respected academic and fellow writer Aaron Edwards for all your support and goodwill.
Finally, to the following authors for writing such kind words about my books: Martin Dillon, Toby Harnden, Kevin Myers, Damien Lewis, Mark Urban, Steven McLaughlin and Patrick Bishop; thank you.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I have written eleven previous books on the Troubles, largely from the perspective of the security forces. In them, my personal detestation for the paramilitaries of both sides has been very evident; indeed, I have not sought to portray it any other way. I have not confined my opprobrium to the Republicans, as I equally loathe their Loyalist counterparts, but I was aware that I would one day need to rein in my ‘repetitive vitriol’.*
In this fifty-year history, I have attempted to be as objective as possible and report the facts without personal opinion. This, in view of the subject matter, was not an easy task. However, I concede that to be accepted as a military historian of serious note, it is necessary to do so.
I trust that I have succeeded in this objective, but I have stumbled, foundering on several occasions, when researching the terrible atrocities perpetuated by the Provisional IRA, the UFF and the UVF. It is also difficult to be passively objective in the face of constant attempts by Sinn Féin to seemingly rewrite the history of the Troubles, as they seek to sanitise their role in the violence of the last fifty years.
You, the reader, can judge how successful my efforts have been.
________________
* The words used by an Australian reader when criticising me on Amazon.au.
INTRODUCTION
As the twentieth century dawned, the British Empire was still at its zenith; it was, however, under greater pressure than at any time since the American War of Independence of 1775–83 and the Indian Mutiny of 1857–58. In South Africa, British Redcoats were fighting a guerrilla war with the Dutch settlers, the intransigent Boers, and other ‘loyal dominions’ such as Canada, New Zealand and Australia were pushing for self-government and national self-determination. The clamour for such continued to grow, becoming irresistible by the middle of the century. After two world wars had robbed Britain of the flower of the nation’s youth as well as leaving it bankrupt, the sun began to set on the Empire on which ‘the sun never set’.
There was disquiet 3,500 miles away in Canada, as well as 12,000 miles away in Australia and, of course, in South Africa; but worryingly, there was a problem much closer to home. Growing turmoil, civil disobedience and political murder were taking place much, much closer to Britain’s shores; 110 miles away to be precise in Ireland. The Irish problem was on Britain’s doorstep and it required her attention, as much as did the fighting against the Boers at Mafeking and Spion Kop – possibly even more so, as the problems would echo long into the twenty-first century in that green island across the Irish Sea.
Problems between the Irish and the British/English have their roots in the twentieth century and probably even earlier, but as a starting point, many observers point to Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland shortly after the end of the English Civil War, and the repopulation of the historical land of Ulster with Scottish Protestants from the western side of Bonnie Scotland. Over the course of the next three centuries, the Irish fought to have British influence removed from their soil with the Fenians at the forefront of their fight for independence. The Fenians believed in two fundamental principles: firstly, that Ireland had a natural
right to independence; secondly, that this right could be won only by armed revolution. The movement was represented at various times by politically homogeneous movements such as the Society of United Irishmen, Irish Republican Brotherhood, the Irish Patriot Party and the Young Irelanders, among others. Their protests, indeed the longevity of the movement, accelerated after the Great Famine of 1845–49. The bitterness of the Irish people over the perceived culpability of the British grew from this point, culminating in the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin.
It is worth noting that 180,000 Irishmen* joined the British Army, fighting with distinction at Mons, Ypres, the Somme and countless other muddy killing fields of Northern France and Belgium. The armed insurrections in Dublin’s city centre, based around the main GPO Building in O’Connell Street, were led by more than 1,250 dissidents, variously described as ‘the citizen army’ as well as the Irish Republican Army (IRA); it lasted for a week at a cost of more than 500 lives. It did not win popular support, as most of the Irish believed in the planned Home Rule Bill, which would see independence at the end of the war anyway. However, Britain’s incredibly clumsy handling of the post-Rising period guaranteed that the rebels would win the backing of the majority of Catholic Ireland. Fifteen of the rebel leaders were executed and more than 3,000 people were arrested, thus simply driving ordinary civilians into the arms of the dissidents.
At the end of the Great War, with British dead approaching three-quarters of a million, the independence movement continued towards self-determination and independence, which came in 1921, together with the compromise of partition into the Irish Free State and Ulster (Northern Ireland). There were nine counties in the ‘traditional’ land of Ulster: Cavan, Monaghan and Donegal, which were to be governed by the new Irish government, and Fermanagh, Tyrone, Londonderry, Antrim, Down and Armagh, which would remain part of the UK. The capital of the new state of Northern Ireland, an overwhelmingly Protestant country, would be Belfast.