Letters from the Front: From the First World War to the Present Day

by Roberts, Andrew

  * King Leopold III of Belgium.

  * ‘Bill’ was Edith’s sister. Her name was actually Muriel, but was christened ‘Bill’ by her two older brothers who had wanted another brother. ‘Bill’ was Vice Principal at Cheltenham Ladies College.

  * Both the Dambusters raid and the raid on the Kembs Barrage were Allied missions to destroy the dams along the Rhine. The Dambusters famously used Barnes-Wallis’ bouncing bomb in order to flood the Ruhr Valley, while the Allies attacked the Kembs Barrage in order to prevent the Germans from using it to flood the American troops who would be approaching the area.

  * Going ‘up the blue’ was British slang for going on operations in the desert.

  * Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA) was established in 1939 to provide entertainment for serving British personnel during the Second World War.

  * The ‘doodlebug’ was the colloquial name given to the German V1 flying bomb. These unmanned bombs were first launched in June 1944 and British citizens on the south coast were subjected to their terrors until March 1945. The Germans also developed the V2, a ballistic missile, which again was used to target Britain from September 1944 until March 1945.

  MODERN WARFARE

  There has only been one year since the Second World War in which British servicemen have not been killed in action: 1968. Otherwise, British forces have been engaged actively and dangerously around the world, as the post-war letters in this volume demonstrate.

  With the end of the Second World War came the beginning of the end of the British Empire. The overseas empire became a luxury for which the British, who had expended one-third of their net worth in the struggle against Nazism, could no longer afford, particularly as the Japanese had comprehensively destroyed the prestige of the British Empire in the fall of Singapore in February 1942. Many of the post-war conflicts involving British troops around the globe sprung up as a result of having to withdraw from empire, which policy makers in London understandably did not want to look like an undignified scuttle.

  Yet the first major post-war conflicts involving Britain had nothing to do with empire at all, but everything to do with ideology. In February 1950, Josef Stalin’s USSR signed a 30-year treaty of friendship with Mao Zedong’s Communist China, which enabled China to pursue an aggressive and expansionist policy on the Korean peninsula. The Cold War had only been simmering for four years, but the Communist World was about to test the resolve of the Free World.

  At dawn on Sunday 25 June 1950, China’s satellite state, Communist North Korea, invaded South Korea without warning, driving southwards as fast as possible and capturing the South Korean capital Seoul three days later. A temporary boycott of the United Nations by the USSR meant that the Security Council could pass a resolution condemning the North Korean invasion of her southern neighbour, promising to ‘furnish such assistance as may be necessary to meet the armed attack’. The entire war was thus fought under UN auspices, something which greatly helped President Harry Truman and the British Prime Minister Clement Attlee.

  On 15 September, UN forces under General Douglas MacArthur landed at Inchon, west of Seoul, and liberated the city on 26 September. Five days later UN and South Korean forces crossed the 38th Parallel into North Korea, capturing its capital, Pyongyang, on 20 October. Yet the whole strategic situation radically altered on 26 November when Red China entered the war, forcing the UN to retreat southwards. On New Year’s Day 1951, Chinese forces broke through the UN lines at the 38th Parallel and three days later they and their North Korean allies retook Seoul.

  The United States, South Korea, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada were then engaged in a desperate fight against the vast Chinese People’s Liberation Army. Between 22 and 25 April 1951 the British 29th Brigade, including the 1st Battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment (‘the Glorious Glosters’), and the 3rd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, helped to halt a huge Communist offensive along the Imjin River in some of the bitterest fighting of the war. In retrospect it was astonishing that the British death toll in Korea was only 1,078 and Australia’s 340. The United States’ was far higher, with around 40,000 killed and 103,284 wounded.

  It was not until 27 July 1953 that delegates from the United Nations, North Korea and China signed an armistice at Panmunjom, after an estimated 3 million people had perished, and a 2½-mile-wide demilitarized zone across Korea was accepted by both sides, which has remained in place ever since.

  Throughout this period, indeed from 1948 to 1960, the British Commonwealth was also fighting a guerrilla war against the Communist Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) in the jungles of Malaya, which involved some 40,000 British, Malayan and Commonwealth forces trying to hold down a Communist insurgency of between 5,000 and 8,000 fighters. The Commonwealth forces, under General Sir Gerald Templer, adopted a ‘hearts and minds’ strategy designed to win over villagers and ordinary Malayans from Communism, which was eventually very successful. In all 519 British soldiers and 1,346 policemen lost their lives in what became known as the Malayan Emergency, against over 6,000 insurgents. The fact that Malaya did not fall to Communism, in the way that Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were to – and is today a successful democratic country – can be largely explained by the imaginative, proactive tactics adopted by Templer and his senior commanders.

  Fought simultaneously with the Malayan Emergency was another insurgency operation in Kenya known as the Mau Mau Uprising. For many years Kenyan nationalists had been pressing the British for political rights and land reforms, but in 1952, as no action was seen to be taken, a significant part – but by no means the majority – of the Kikuyu tribe began to adopt terrorist techniques to try to force the British out of Kenya. The result was a guerrilla war that was fought there until 1960. Since many Kikuyu fought with the British against the Mau Mau, modern scholars tends to see the conflict largely in terms of an intra-Kikuyu tribal civil war. Although the capture of their charismatic leader Didan Kimathi in October 1956 marked the turning point in the campaign, it was not truly over until nearly four years later, by which time some 200 British and African servicemen had been killed, as well as nearly 12,000 Mau Mau and 1,817 Kenyan civilians. The independence of Kenya in December 1963 came in part because Britain refused to continue to shoulder the burden of colonialism, but would probably not have happened so soon had it not been for the war.

  Cyprus had become a protectorate of the British Empire in 1878, and during the Second World War some 30,000 Cypriots had fought against the Axis. After Britain withdrew from Egypt in 1954, however, a Greek Cypriot nationalist organisation named Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston (National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters – EOKA), which wanted Cyprus to enter into political union with Greece, began fighting for a total British withdrawal in a campaign that was to cost the lives of 371 British servicemen. By November 1955 a state of emergency had been declared by the British governor, which continued until Cyprus became independent in August 1960. Yet EOKA did not get what it ultimately wanted, and the disputes between the Greek and Turkish communities on the island eventually led to a Turkish invasion in 1974, and the partition of the island.

  Another post-war dispute over British rule occurred in Aden, a British Crown Colony. After the loss of the Suez Canal in 1956, Aden had become the main British base in the region, and was an important link for the British trade routes and oil. In January 1963 the colony was renamed the State of Aden, falling within the Federation of South Arabia (FSA). That same year, a grenade attack launched by the National Liberation Front against the British High Commissioner resulted in one person killed and around 50 injured. A state of emergency was declared. The following year Britain announced their intention to grant independence to the FSA in 1968, however over the following years the situation deteriorated and rival factions fought for control of the area. The Aden police were unarmed and in many instances reluctant to get involved, so keeping the peace fell to the British Army, who patrolled as best they could. 1967 saw mass riots and the interven
tion of British troops did little to quell the situation, but instead the troops found themselves caught in the middle and attacked by both sides. It is estimated that 90 British soldiers died during the conflict. On 30 November the British pulled out of Aden and the People’s Republic of South Yemen was proclaimed.

  In the Malayan, Mau Mau and Cypriot emergencies it was at least debatable about the extent to which local people wanted local nationalist leaders as opposed to British governors to rule them. That was certainly not the case in the next conflict to cost a significant numbers of British lives, in and around the Falklands Islands, whose 1,813-strong population were 97 per cent British. Yet on 31 March 1982 the head of the Argentinian Junta, General Leopoldo Galtieri, who had seized power the previous December, ordered an invasion of the Islands 250 miles off Argentina’s coast. The Argentinians landed on the Falklands on 2 April. At a meeting with the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Henry Leach, argued for ‘sending every element of the fleet of any possible value’, which he felt required a powerful force, not just a small squadron, with an amphibious capacity and a full commando brigade. He concluded that it should also include two aircraft carriers HMS Invincible and Hermes, as well the a number of destroyers and frigate as escorts. Enough, in short, for a war rather than just a ‘police action’.

  These were very much Margaret Thatcher’s own views, so a ‘Task Force’ was sent on the over 8,000-mile journey to the South Atlantic, to wrest back the Falkland Islands by force. Early on in the conflict the British had announced the creation of a 200-mile Total Exclusion Zone around the Islands, inside which Argentine vessels could not sail. On 2 May the Argentinian cruiser General Belgrano was sunk with the loss of 323 lives even though it was outside this exclusion zone. Since she had already made no fewer than three major changes in direction over the previous 19 hours, there was no telling whether she might not make a fourth back towards shallower water, where the British submarine HMS Conqueror might have lost track of her, so she was sunk. The sinking of Belgrano ensured the removal of the Argentine naval threat, as after her loss, the fleet, with the exception of one submarine, returned to port for the remainder of the conflict. On 21 May, British troops landed on San Carlos and after some heavy fighting, including the battles of Goose Green and Mount Tumbledown, the Argentinians surrendered on 14 June. Some 253 Britons had lost their lives recovering the Falklands, and 775 were wounded, against 649 Argentinians killed and 1,068 wounded. Three Falkland Islanders were killed.

  British involvement in the Bosnian conflict of the 1990s was driven neither by Cold War ideological nor post-imperial imperatives, but was simply humanitarian. The Bosnian conflict of 1992–95 grew out of ancient religious and ethnic hatreds in the Balkans that had for decades been submerged and kept quiescent in the ethnically diverse country of Yugoslavia, which had been ruled by the Communist dictator Marshal Tito. After his death in 1980, but especially after the fall of Communism in Europe in 1989–90, the country began to disintegrate and collapse into warring territorial parts, made worse by Christian–Muslim tensions, in which entire communities were ‘ethnically cleansed’ by their immediate neighbours. The British Army took part in the United Nations’ peace keeping mission to the former Yugoslavia, known as UNPROFOR (United Nations Protection Force), between 1992 and 1995, attempting to bring relief to communities that had been devastated by the fighting. After France, Britain was the largest contributor of troops to Bosnia. The numbers killed in the fighting in the Balkans in the 1990s is still disputed, but was probably in the region of a quarter of a million. For so many people to die on the European continent half a century after the end of the Second World War is a severe indictment of Western political leadership, as well as, of course, the perpetrators themselves.

  The Gulf War came about as the direct result of the attempt by President Saddam Hussein of Iraq to annex the neighbouring and hugely oil-rich state of Kuwait by force on 2 August 1990, in contravention of every rule of international law. Great Britain provided the third-largest force (53,462 personnel), after the United States and Saudi Arabia, of a 34-country coalition that began the liberation of Kuwait in Operation Desert Storm on 17 January 1991. The operation ended on 28 February, by which time 392 coalition personnel had lost their lives, including 47 British troops, as well as an estimated 20,000–35,000 Iraqis. Although the Iraqi forces were in full retreat, it was decided not to overthrow Saddam for fear of breaking up the coalition, a decision that many came to regret a decade later when the British Army took part in the Iraq War.

  The American-led military invasion began on 20 March 2003; 248,000 American soldiers were supported by 40 countries, 46,000 British and 2,000 Australian soldiers. Its aims were stated as being the end of Saddam Hussein’s regime, elimination of any weapons of mass destruction, removal of Islamist militants, intelligence gathering, distribution of humanitarian aid and assisting in the creation of a new government. On 9 April, Baghdad fell and Hussein’s 24-year rule was brought to an end. The ‘invasion’ phase of the conflict thus ended; the reported casualty figures were 9,200 Iraqi combatants killed, while the Coalition figures included 139 US personnel and 33 British soldiers. After the short and successful land campaign, a long counter-insurgency war had to be fought, in which the British Army was given the province of Basra in southern Iraq to protect, which it did to the best of its abilities until 2009. Unlike conventional wars, the insurgency campaign the British faced meant that it was hard to tell civilians and insurgents apart, and it became a very different battle to those previously fought by the British Army; suicide bombs and roadside Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) were a frequent threat. As such the Coalition began to use air power and artillery in order to strike at suspected ambush sites or mortar-launching positions, while also increasing surveillance efforts on major routes, stepping up the number of patrols and raiding suspected insurgents. At the same time, the Coalition sought to establish the country as a stable, democratic state, holding elections in early 2005.

  The British Army announced its withdrawal from Iraq on 30 April 2009, handing Basra over to American forces. It has been estimated that a total of 26,320 insurgents, 16,623 Iraqi military and police, 4,474 US troops (including 66 during Operation New Dawn) and 178 British service personnel and one MOD civilian were killed throughout the campaign.

  On 7 October 2001, the armed forces of the United States launched Operation Enduring Freedom, a bid to remove the Al Qaeda terrorist organization from Afghanistan and the Taliban regime from power. The action was a direct response to the Al Qaeda terrorist attack on New York on 11 September 2001, in which nearly 3,000 people died. The United Kingdom, alongside Coalition forces including the Commonwealth of Australia and the Afghan United Front (Northern Alliance), were first deployed in November 2001, with 1,700 Marines committed in eastern Afghanistan. In December of that year the United Nations formed the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in order to secure Kabul and the surrounding areas.

  The initial operations were a combination of air strikes and ground offensives, and by mid November Kabul had fallen to the Northern Alliance and Coalition troops, while some of the senior Taliban leadership had fled to neighbouring Pakistan. In 2004 the Afghan people held elections and Hamid Karzai, already the leader of an interim government, was elected to create a government, giving the people representative institutions. Osama bin Laden was killed during a Special Forces raid in Pakistan on 2 May 2011, however this action further strained the diplomatic relationship between the United States and Pakistan, which had been deteriorating for many years.

  In 2006 ISAF expanded and the British were deployed to Helmand Province as their area of operations. A total of 3,300 British soldiers were committed to the region. As with the war in Iraq, British troops found themselves up against a long, drawn-out counter-insurgency campaign, and a battle for hearts and minds among the population. The insurgents used similar tactics as they had in Iraq: roadside and suicide bombs and
IEDs. ISAF troops have spent much time building up the Afghan security forces and police in order for there to be a successful handover as and when they pull out.

  While the war is still ongoing, and British forces are committed to the fight until 2014, figures are estimated to be nearly 40,000 Taliban and insurgents dead and around 14,022 Coalition and Afghan forces lost, including 445 British dead and more than 5,500 wounded. The civilian death toll is thought to be up to as much as 12,500 between 2007–11. British troops have begun to withdraw, but, as of the end of 2013, there are estimated to be 6,000 British soldiers still serving in Afganistan.

  The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 caught British forces unprepared and, as the North Koreans poured southwards and the United States rushed forces from Japan to try to stop them, Great Britain gathered together what troops it could to assist the UN cause. The first units came from the 27th Infantry Brigade, based in Hong Kong, which arrived in time to take part in the battle for the Pusan Perimeter. The 29th Infantry Brigade followed shortly afterwards, with 1st Battalion, the Royal Ulster Rifles, amongst its units.

  Lieutenant Robert Gill was called up from the officer reserve to serve as a platoon commander with the Ulster Rifles in Korea, arriving at the beginning of November 1950. They moved to the city of Suwon, just south of the South Korean capital of Seoul, from where Bob Gill wrote to his girlfriend back home.

  Suwon

  Friday Nov 17

  Dearest Doreen,

  I am on duty tonight as Orderly Officer. At the moment I am in the Orderly room which is the ‘office’ of the battalion, and here I will stay the night. One of the clerks is tapping away at an old typewriter and altogether things are very quiet and peaceful. Later I will take a walk around camp and check on the various guards. The night is fine and there is a moon coming up. I have too much time to think of you and home, Darling. You say the same. You like to be busy so that the days pass quicker and so do I.