With the Civil War between the British and Northern Irish republicans ending in 1998, and the IRA still observing a cease fire it started in 1994, tonight the British Army pulls out of Northern Ireland, with it remaining firmly a part of the UK.
The Daily Mail's Max Hastings attacks the Saville Inquiry which is investigating "Bloody Sunday", the day in 1972, at the height of the war, when the British Army shot dead 13 civilian marchers after a group of them broke away from the march and hurled abuse at the soldiers, pelting them with rocks and other missiles. Republican terrorists Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams were both involved in HUNDREDS of atrocities but, shamefully, their crimes aren't being investigated
As the Army ends its 38-year campaign in Ulster, we should be proud of what our soldiers achieved
31st July 2007
Daily Mail
MAX HASTINGS
Today in Ulster the Army ends its longest campaign, paid for with the lives of 763 British soldiers.
Their reward? The shameful pillory that is the Bloody Sunday inquiry.
Half a lifetime ago, as a young reporter I watched the first of them go in: bewildered British soldiers in steel helmets with bayonets fixed, deploying by companies amid the ravaged Bogside in Londonderry, then the Falls Road in Belfast.
Young squaddies gazed in disbelief at the shambles created by sectarian rioting: burnt-out lorries and buses heaped into barricades; crates of Molotov cocktails stacked behind the parapets of high-rises; bricks and rocks strewn everywhere; crowds of exhausted, frightened, bitter people.
War: British soldiers in a sand bunker on guard in Northern Ireland in 1974
"Thank God for the military!" I heard a Catholic housewife call out. Many Protestants jeered in fury from behind their barricades. They felt deprived of their prey, after nights seeking to burn out Catholic streets.
The opening shots fired by the British Army on that first August night of their Ulster commitment, 38 years ago, were directed at Protestant incendiarists, not the IRA.
"God Almighty, what a place!" a young officer of the Royal Regiment of Wales said to me, after his first few hours attempting to separate the murderous tribal factions.
His comrades and successors continued to say pretty much the same thing through the intervening decades until today, when at last the British military role in Ulster is declared officially ended.
The "stand-down" of Operation Banner, launched in August 1969, marks the conclusion of the British Army's longest campaign. It has cost the lives of some 763 members of the forces.
In the worst times, the early 1970s, more than 100 soldiers a year were dying - a far worse casualty rate than Iraq or Afghanistan today. Most fell victim to bombs or bullets triggered by men they never saw.
British soldiers battle in the streets, 1972.
Terrorist war is the nastiest kind, because your enemy can be anyone. The girl who kisses a young infantryman on the street corner might be "fingering" him for an IRA sniper. The woman I heard say "Thank God for the military!" the day British soldiers entered the Falls could have been hiding guns for the Provisionals three years later.
In Iraq or Afghanistan, you will find little or no bitterness among British soldiers. In Northern Ireland, however, there was deep hatred. They arrived in the province - more than 300,000 of them, in the course of four decades - thinking they had come to keep peace. They found themselves patrolling streets in which treachery and murder were endemic.
Catholics, of course, began to treat the soldiers as an army of occupation within a few weeks of their arrival. The IRA, moribund for decades, revived dramatically. Through the 1970s and 1980s, British troops fought an escalating guerilla war against an increasingly effective and merciless foe.
First, they faced rock-throwing mobs. By 1972, there were 10,000 shootings and hundreds of bombings. IRA gunmen learned to snipe the last man of a British patrol on the streets of Londonderry or Belfast, then to escape after firing a single shot; to boobytrap the cars of judges and police officers; to murder soldiers at bases in Germany and politicians on the streets of Britain.
They acquired ever-more deadly weapons, many of them from Libya, before Colonel Gaddafi made friends with Tony Blair, and of course from the U.S., in the days before 9/11 convinced Americans that nationalist terrorism was not quite as romantic and heroic as Gerry Adams told them it was.
Many extraordinary stories of the British Army's campaign in Ulster have never been revealed, and maybe never will be. Special forces - about 150 men of the SAS and 14 Intelligence Company - took part in innumerable ambushes and shoot-outs.
One of the more remarkable happened in Derry on May 28, 1981. A young British officer in civilian clothes was driving an unmarked Opel on a surveillance mission. The IRA spotted him, and dispatched four men with Armalite rifles to stop his car.
Their stolen Ford Escort swerved across the road, forcing the Opel to halt. The gunmen emerged, gesturing the soldier out with their rifles.
Armed only with a Browning pistol, he must have reckoned his last hour had come. But he turned the tables in an astonishing fashion. Drawing his gun, in a few seconds he shot dead at close range the two IRA men beside his car, and killed a third as the Escort raced away, splattering his own vehicle with bullets! Against all odds, the officer survived.
Soldiers called Ulster "a corporal's war" because so much depended on the skill, courage and initiative of small groups, acting independently and facing a constant threat of surprise. The British Army prided itself that Ulster gave it the best junior leaders in the world.
There is more controversy about the role of intelligence and special forces. The SAS first deployed in the province in 1976, and from 1977 onwards was responsible - with 14 Intelligence Company - for a high proportion of all IRA terrorists killed.
They honed remarkable surveillance skills, sometimes watching for days and nights in all weathers in open country for Provisional terrorists.
By 1992, 18,200 British soldiers in Ulster - down from a peak strength of 27,000 in 1972 - operated from 100 heavilyfortified bases, using a huge intelligence computer database and the most sophisticated electronic equipment money could buy. The last British soldier to die was Stephen Restorick, killed by a sniper in South Armagh in February 1997.
In the end, politics induced the IRA to abandon its long, murderous campaign. Yet negotiation was only possible because the British Army in Ulster had fought the terrorists to a standstill.
Tony Blair deserves some credit for brokering peace. Yet, instead of acknowledging a debt to the British Army for its own role, almost at the outset of his premiership he laid upon it the curse of the Saville Inquiry.
As part of his "search for peace" he decreed a judicial investigation of "Bloody Sunday" in Londonderry in January 1972. Today, almost ten years on and after the expenditure of at least £150 million, the judge has still to report.
Hundreds of soldiers called to give evidence have suffered apprehension and anguish, which are still not ended. Lord Saville's own reputation has been the foremost casualty of his inquiry. He allowed it to degenerate into a showcase for Republican grievances which can profit no one, least of all the cause of reconciliation.
Few people doubted back in 1972 that Bloody Sunday - and I was in Derry that day myself - represented a shocking blunder by the Army. But the injustice of Saville is that it isolated this single episode. None of the hundreds of atrocities in which Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness were complicit has ever been subject to such scrutiny, or ever will be.
Tony Blair has quit office, leaving the Army to face the pillory, whenever Saville finally concludes his grotesque researches.
It is a sorry postscript to a story which, in the round, reflects honour on the British Army.
In Ulster, as so often in its history, for decades it fulfilled a desperate task with determination, patience and skill.
If Lord Saville's report is ever published, we should consign it to the dustbin.
The most impressive testimonial to the British Army's 38 years in Northern Ireland is that today it withdraws from active operations, leaving a society which has abandoned slaughter, and achieved grudging accommodation.
There was never anything glamorous about the campaign in Ulster. But there is much in the story deserving of British pride - and of our gratitude to those who served there so thanklessly for so long.
NUMBER OF PEOPLE KILLED IN "THE TROUBLES", 1969-1998
Catholics - 1525
Protestants - 1250
Non-Northern Irish - 691
KILLINGS CARRIED OUT BY EACH COMBATANT GROUP (showing how many Protestant and Catholics were killed by each. The remainders killed were non-Northern Irish)
IRA republicans - 1696 (49%, 790 Protestants, 338 Catholics)
UVF loyalists (Ulster Volunteer Force, allied to the British) - 396 (11%, 89 Protestants, 265 Catholics)
British Army - 299 (9%, 32 Protestant, 258 Catholics)
Unknown loyalists - 212 (6%, 50 Protestants, 212 Catholics)
UFF loyalists - 149 (4%, 17 Protestants, 132 Catholics)
INLA republicans - 110 (3%, 55 Protestants, 33 Catholics)
UDA loyalists - 102 (3%, 41 Protestant, 58 Catholics)
Unknown - 77 (27 Protestants, 42 Catholics)
RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary, NI police force) - 56 (9 Protestants, 44 Catholics)
Officals IRA republicans - 51 (7 Catholics, 24 Protestants)
PAF loyalists - 37 (0 protestants, 37 Catholics)
"Real" IRA republicans - 29 (11 Protestants, 13 Catholics)
Others - 117 (27 Protestants, 87 Catholics)
dailymail.co.uk
The Daily Mail's Max Hastings attacks the Saville Inquiry which is investigating "Bloody Sunday", the day in 1972, at the height of the war, when the British Army shot dead 13 civilian marchers after a group of them broke away from the march and hurled abuse at the soldiers, pelting them with rocks and other missiles. Republican terrorists Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams were both involved in HUNDREDS of atrocities but, shamefully, their crimes aren't being investigated
As the Army ends its 38-year campaign in Ulster, we should be proud of what our soldiers achieved
31st July 2007
Daily Mail
MAX HASTINGS
Today in Ulster the Army ends its longest campaign, paid for with the lives of 763 British soldiers.
Their reward? The shameful pillory that is the Bloody Sunday inquiry.
Half a lifetime ago, as a young reporter I watched the first of them go in: bewildered British soldiers in steel helmets with bayonets fixed, deploying by companies amid the ravaged Bogside in Londonderry, then the Falls Road in Belfast.
Young squaddies gazed in disbelief at the shambles created by sectarian rioting: burnt-out lorries and buses heaped into barricades; crates of Molotov cocktails stacked behind the parapets of high-rises; bricks and rocks strewn everywhere; crowds of exhausted, frightened, bitter people.
War: British soldiers in a sand bunker on guard in Northern Ireland in 1974
"Thank God for the military!" I heard a Catholic housewife call out. Many Protestants jeered in fury from behind their barricades. They felt deprived of their prey, after nights seeking to burn out Catholic streets.
The opening shots fired by the British Army on that first August night of their Ulster commitment, 38 years ago, were directed at Protestant incendiarists, not the IRA.
"God Almighty, what a place!" a young officer of the Royal Regiment of Wales said to me, after his first few hours attempting to separate the murderous tribal factions.
His comrades and successors continued to say pretty much the same thing through the intervening decades until today, when at last the British military role in Ulster is declared officially ended.
The "stand-down" of Operation Banner, launched in August 1969, marks the conclusion of the British Army's longest campaign. It has cost the lives of some 763 members of the forces.
In the worst times, the early 1970s, more than 100 soldiers a year were dying - a far worse casualty rate than Iraq or Afghanistan today. Most fell victim to bombs or bullets triggered by men they never saw.
British soldiers battle in the streets, 1972.
Terrorist war is the nastiest kind, because your enemy can be anyone. The girl who kisses a young infantryman on the street corner might be "fingering" him for an IRA sniper. The woman I heard say "Thank God for the military!" the day British soldiers entered the Falls could have been hiding guns for the Provisionals three years later.
In Iraq or Afghanistan, you will find little or no bitterness among British soldiers. In Northern Ireland, however, there was deep hatred. They arrived in the province - more than 300,000 of them, in the course of four decades - thinking they had come to keep peace. They found themselves patrolling streets in which treachery and murder were endemic.
Catholics, of course, began to treat the soldiers as an army of occupation within a few weeks of their arrival. The IRA, moribund for decades, revived dramatically. Through the 1970s and 1980s, British troops fought an escalating guerilla war against an increasingly effective and merciless foe.
First, they faced rock-throwing mobs. By 1972, there were 10,000 shootings and hundreds of bombings. IRA gunmen learned to snipe the last man of a British patrol on the streets of Londonderry or Belfast, then to escape after firing a single shot; to boobytrap the cars of judges and police officers; to murder soldiers at bases in Germany and politicians on the streets of Britain.
They acquired ever-more deadly weapons, many of them from Libya, before Colonel Gaddafi made friends with Tony Blair, and of course from the U.S., in the days before 9/11 convinced Americans that nationalist terrorism was not quite as romantic and heroic as Gerry Adams told them it was.
Many extraordinary stories of the British Army's campaign in Ulster have never been revealed, and maybe never will be. Special forces - about 150 men of the SAS and 14 Intelligence Company - took part in innumerable ambushes and shoot-outs.
One of the more remarkable happened in Derry on May 28, 1981. A young British officer in civilian clothes was driving an unmarked Opel on a surveillance mission. The IRA spotted him, and dispatched four men with Armalite rifles to stop his car.
Their stolen Ford Escort swerved across the road, forcing the Opel to halt. The gunmen emerged, gesturing the soldier out with their rifles.
Armed only with a Browning pistol, he must have reckoned his last hour had come. But he turned the tables in an astonishing fashion. Drawing his gun, in a few seconds he shot dead at close range the two IRA men beside his car, and killed a third as the Escort raced away, splattering his own vehicle with bullets! Against all odds, the officer survived.
Soldiers called Ulster "a corporal's war" because so much depended on the skill, courage and initiative of small groups, acting independently and facing a constant threat of surprise. The British Army prided itself that Ulster gave it the best junior leaders in the world.
There is more controversy about the role of intelligence and special forces. The SAS first deployed in the province in 1976, and from 1977 onwards was responsible - with 14 Intelligence Company - for a high proportion of all IRA terrorists killed.
They honed remarkable surveillance skills, sometimes watching for days and nights in all weathers in open country for Provisional terrorists.
By 1992, 18,200 British soldiers in Ulster - down from a peak strength of 27,000 in 1972 - operated from 100 heavilyfortified bases, using a huge intelligence computer database and the most sophisticated electronic equipment money could buy. The last British soldier to die was Stephen Restorick, killed by a sniper in South Armagh in February 1997.
In the end, politics induced the IRA to abandon its long, murderous campaign. Yet negotiation was only possible because the British Army in Ulster had fought the terrorists to a standstill.
Tony Blair deserves some credit for brokering peace. Yet, instead of acknowledging a debt to the British Army for its own role, almost at the outset of his premiership he laid upon it the curse of the Saville Inquiry.
As part of his "search for peace" he decreed a judicial investigation of "Bloody Sunday" in Londonderry in January 1972. Today, almost ten years on and after the expenditure of at least £150 million, the judge has still to report.
Hundreds of soldiers called to give evidence have suffered apprehension and anguish, which are still not ended. Lord Saville's own reputation has been the foremost casualty of his inquiry. He allowed it to degenerate into a showcase for Republican grievances which can profit no one, least of all the cause of reconciliation.
Few people doubted back in 1972 that Bloody Sunday - and I was in Derry that day myself - represented a shocking blunder by the Army. But the injustice of Saville is that it isolated this single episode. None of the hundreds of atrocities in which Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness were complicit has ever been subject to such scrutiny, or ever will be.
Tony Blair has quit office, leaving the Army to face the pillory, whenever Saville finally concludes his grotesque researches.
It is a sorry postscript to a story which, in the round, reflects honour on the British Army.
In Ulster, as so often in its history, for decades it fulfilled a desperate task with determination, patience and skill.
If Lord Saville's report is ever published, we should consign it to the dustbin.
The most impressive testimonial to the British Army's 38 years in Northern Ireland is that today it withdraws from active operations, leaving a society which has abandoned slaughter, and achieved grudging accommodation.
There was never anything glamorous about the campaign in Ulster. But there is much in the story deserving of British pride - and of our gratitude to those who served there so thanklessly for so long.
NUMBER OF PEOPLE KILLED IN "THE TROUBLES", 1969-1998
Catholics - 1525
Protestants - 1250
Non-Northern Irish - 691
KILLINGS CARRIED OUT BY EACH COMBATANT GROUP (showing how many Protestant and Catholics were killed by each. The remainders killed were non-Northern Irish)
IRA republicans - 1696 (49%, 790 Protestants, 338 Catholics)
UVF loyalists (Ulster Volunteer Force, allied to the British) - 396 (11%, 89 Protestants, 265 Catholics)
British Army - 299 (9%, 32 Protestant, 258 Catholics)
Unknown loyalists - 212 (6%, 50 Protestants, 212 Catholics)
UFF loyalists - 149 (4%, 17 Protestants, 132 Catholics)
INLA republicans - 110 (3%, 55 Protestants, 33 Catholics)
UDA loyalists - 102 (3%, 41 Protestant, 58 Catholics)
Unknown - 77 (27 Protestants, 42 Catholics)
RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary, NI police force) - 56 (9 Protestants, 44 Catholics)
Officals IRA republicans - 51 (7 Catholics, 24 Protestants)
PAF loyalists - 37 (0 protestants, 37 Catholics)
"Real" IRA republicans - 29 (11 Protestants, 13 Catholics)
Others - 117 (27 Protestants, 87 Catholics)
dailymail.co.uk
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