Bloody Belfast

An Oral History of the British Army's War Against the IRA

Ken Wharton

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780750985475, 9780752452494
• eBook ISBN: 9780752475981
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Former soldier Ken Wharton witnessed the troubles in Northern Ireland first hand. Bloody Belfast is a fascinating oral history given a chilling insight into the killing grounds of Belfast's streets.

Wharton's work is based on first hand accounts from the soldiers. The reader can walk the darkened, dangerous streets of the Lower Falls, the Divis Flats and New Lodge alongside the soldiers who braved the hate-filled mobs on the newer, but no less violent streets of the 'Murph, Turf Lodge and Andersonstown. The author has interviewed UDR soldier Glen Espie who survived being ambushed and shot by the IRA not once, but twice, and Army Dog Handler Dougie Durrant, who, through the incredible ability of his dog, tracked an IRA gunman fresh from the murder of a soldier to where he was sitting in a hot bath in the Turf Lodge, desperately trying to wash away the forensic evidence.

Wharton's reputation for honesty established from previous works has encouraged more former soldiers of Britain's forgotten army to come forward to tell their stories of Bloody Belfast. The book continues the story of his previous work, presenting the truth about a conflict which has sometimes been deliberately underplayed by the Establishment.

PART ONE

‘WHAT ABOUT YE, SOLDIER BOY?’

Northern Ireland was a shit-hole; the IRA and the Prod extremists saw to that, but there were decent people there and we had to go in for their sakes. For every one bastard, there were at least twenty or more decent ones who probably hated the paramilitaries even more than we did, but didn’t dare say so.

Private ‘W’, Royal Regiment of Wales

I do recall on a lighter note one incident that made me smile; a woman came up to me in the street and asked if I’d speak to a very young girl who had never seen a soldier. This young girl was from Canada and just maybe there are not too many soldiers on streets there. I did speak to this very young girl and I think that I made her day but, anyway this made me smile a great deal.

Nigel Glover, Royal Artillery

Too many of this wee Province’s citizenry were/are indifferent to the sacrifice made by HM Forces during Op Banner; but there are those who remember and will always be grateful.

Alex, UDR

On 14/15 August 1969, British troops were deployed onto the streets of a part of the United Kingdom for the first time – other than during the exigencies of wartime – since the General Strike of 1926. In Northern Ireland, law and order had finally broken down. The excellent Lost Lives states that, prior to that fateful day, eight people had been killed, including several some three years before the ‘recorded’ start of the Troubles. It is not the brief of this oral history to cover this period and, for the sake of a beginning, it must start the day before, with the first deaths in what the Ulster folk call the ‘wee hours’ of that August day.

Herbert Roy (26) from the Loyalist Shankill Road area became the first of five people to lose their lives that day. He was involved in rioting in the Divis Street area of Belfast and was shot and died of his wounds around 30 minutes after midnight. Almost simultaneously, little Patrick Rooney (9) was shot and killed in his own bed in the Divis Tower by a stray round. The author, a young and naive soldier, watched with horror and disbelief the TV interviews conducted with his distraught parents; the black and white pictures of a devastated, yet calm looking working man describing how he had to scrape part of his little boy’s head off the bedroom wall with a spoon. That interview, those words and the horrific imagination which accompany it will follow this author to his grave. Little did he or any of the watching world realise that many, many more grieving parents would suffer the same way before the Troubles finally claimed their last victims.

Private Hugh McCabe, a British soldier home on leave and merely observing the rioting was shot and killed in Whitehall Row, also in the Divis area. He was buried with full military honours by his comrades from the Queen’s Irish Hussars and, by the end of that fateful year, 139 days later, a further five British soldiers would also be dead. Almost seventeen months after the troops had gone in, Gunner Robert Curtis was shot and killed in Lepper Street, Belfast on 6 February 1971, along with his comrade, Gunner John Laurie who died six days later from his wounds. Popular convention has identified Curtis, whose pregnant widow gave birth some months later, as the first soldier to be killed in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. I believe that there is evidence to the contrary and that Gunner Curtis was the 22nd soldier to die.

By the end of the following month, three more soldier’s families would have received the dreaded visit by their loved one’s CVO (Casualty Visiting Officer), or equivalent, to inform them of the premature ending of a young life. On 13 September Lance Corporal Michael Spurway of the Royal Corps of Signals was killed in a ‘friendly fire’ incident and the very same day, REME Craftsman Christopher Edgar would also be dead. The circumstances surrounding his death remain highly confused and highly controversial and I am permitted only to say that he died from what the MOD refers to as ‘death by violent or unnatural causes’. Eleven days later – and here the author knows definitively the cause of death – Lance Corporal Michael ‘Mickey’ Pearce of the Royal Green Jackets became the second soldier to die under this ‘definition’.

A month later, two young Jackets Riflemen, Michael Boswell and John Keeney were killed in a riot-related road traffic accident (RTA) in the Belfast area. 1970 would continue in the same vein and eleven more regimental CVOs would make that sad journey to a house in Manchester or Leeds or London or any one of those places we all called ‘home.’ The reality was, of course, that the Army and your new-found comrades were your actual home.

Before that fateful day in the Ardoyne ‘interface’ area where IRA gunman Billy Reid shot and killed Gunner Curtis and fatally wounded Gunner Laurie, a total of 21 British soldiers had lost their lives through a variety of causes. Whatever the MOD statisticians claim, Robert Curtis was the 22nd soldier to die in Northern Ireland, not the first. Some will argue against this contention, but there were 21 families on the UK mainland who received the tragic news of a loved one’s death many months before the Royal Artillery CVO made his fateful visit who would agree with me.

Reid himself would be killed some three months later by a sergeant in a Scottish regiment after an attempted ambush in, ironically enough, Curtis Street, at the junction with Academy Street, north of Belfast’s city centre. His short, violent and murderous career would end around 800 yards from where he had bloodily written his name in IRA ‘folklore’.

The British soldiers were mostly deployed onto the streets of Belfast and Londonderry, but also in Omagh, Portadown, Newry and countless other places. They were sent in to fill the power vacuum created by the partial retreat of the outnumbered, beleaguered RUC. They were greeted, in the main by cheering Catholic families with cups of tea, biscuits and flowers and quickly – innocently and naturally – assumed the role of liberators. The same greetings were also to be found in the Loyalist or Protestant areas as these communities saw the Army as a buffer between themselves and the Fenians. Were the soldiers confused? Of course they were, as they had to appear to be the saviours, simultaneously, of two differing communities with diametrically opposing religious and political views.

It is certainly true that the Catholics eventually saw them as oppressors as their ‘honeymoon’ period with the ‘Tommies’ came to an end, probably about the same time as the other community began calling them ‘Taig lovers.’ Small wonder, that the ordinary squaddie saw himself as ‘piggy in the bloody middle’. These feelings were experienced no less by the young officer classes. For many there, including the author, the streets of Belfast and Londonderry were not a million miles away from their own streets and homes. One Green Jacket remarked, when he first saw the housing of the the Markets area: ‘Jesus Christ; I’m bleedin’ ‘ome!’

As the supply of cups of tea, plates of sandwiches and biscuits began to dry up as the soldiers patrolled the Ballymurphy Estate, the Turf Lodge, the Ardoyne, the New Lodge, Tiger Bay in Belfast, Creggan, Bogside and Gobnascale in Londonderry, so it was soon replaced by other, less savoury and certainly less edible, objects. The soldiers were spat at, had urine and faeces – human and canine varieties – hurled at them; had used sanitary towels thrust into their faces, had women break wind in their faces as they rested on their haunches on street corners. Soldiers had had dead cats and soiled baby’s nappies hurled at them as they patrolled. Through all this incredible provocation, they remained, in the main, professional and composed, which reflected the high quality of training a British soldier must undergo before being allowed outside the barracks gates.

One young soldier from the Royal Green Jackets told the author of a moment when he went into a sandwich shop – or ‘choggie’ as generations of soldiers would know them – and ordered a salad sandwich. The assistant picked one and carefully opened it and asked, ‘Ye want anythin’ on this, soldier boy?’ When the Jacket asked for salad cream, she spat onto the contents and passed it to him with the words, ‘On the house, soldier boy.’ Soldiers by now, were either declining cups of tea from Catholic households, or pretending to drink them, suspecting that they may have been spiked with all manner of toxic or dangerous substances. The breakdown in the relationship between the ‘liberators’ and the ‘liberated’ was starting to gather momentum; it would, inexorably and, perhaps, inevitably, lead to a complete and irrevocable deterioration. Although the following would occur some years afterwards, a Kingsman spoke to me of an incident which involved one of his comrades, Lance Corporal Andy Webster. Both soldiers of the King’s Regiment were based in the Andersonstown/Turf Lodge area. Andy Webster had bought his copy of the Daily Mirror from ‘Andersonstown News’ every day since the tour had started some months earlier. One morning he went in, and the newsagent, albeit politely, informed him that he could no longer sell to him or any other British soldier. It does not take a genius to work out that the local IRA commanders had warned the man off. Sadly, not long afterwards, this popular young NCO would be another casualty statistic. Webster was killed in action in Ardmonagh Gardens in the Turf by an IRA bomb on 19 May 1979. Another name for the British media and public alike to gloss over.

From that early ‘liberation’ period, successive tours of squaddies would be aware that they were persona non grata in parts of the United Kingdom. They would know that, in the Catholic/Republican areas, shopkeepers, innkeepers and the like would refuse to serve them and that, unless they were there in uniform, with brick, platoon or Company comrades, these were locations to avoid.

Up until the death of Gunner Robert Curtis the death of a soldier was still a rare occurrence, but afterwards, the floodgates would open. 32 days later, on the evening of 10 March 1971, three young Scottish soldiers, all related, would be lured to their deaths in a sleepy little village just north-west of Belfast. Despite the dangers, unarmed soldiers in civvies, with no personal protection weapons, would still, irresponsibly, be allowed into the city centre and other adjacent ‘safe’ areas of a night time to indulge in the squaddies’ second favourite pastime. Whilst drinking near the Cornmarket in the Markets area of Belfast, two young brothers and their older cousin were picked up by seemingly Loyalist women with the offer of a party.

The three soldiers – according to eyewitnesses, the worse for drink – got into a car with the women, still clutching their glasses half full of beer and set off for an evening’s continued revelling. Just north-west of the city, at White’s Brae, Squire’s Hill, Ligoniel, on a lonely mountain road, the car stopped. Apparently the three young Scots lads got out of the car for a ‘pee break’ and, whilst they stood, facing away from the road, several members of the IRA who had lain in wait approached them with revolvers. Two of the soldiers were shot in the back of the head and the third was shot in the chest as he turned. The bodies were found the following morning by children; two of them still clutched beer glasses in their lifeless hands. The three were John McCaig (17) his brother Joseph (18) and their cousin Donald McCaughey (23); all were from the Royal Highland Fusiliers and were from Ayr and Glasgow.

The then Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, a senior member of the Heath Government said, in a statement relating to the perpetrators of these first killings of off-duty soldiers: ‘… it is a small minority of armed, ruthless men whose strength lies not so much in their numbers as in their wickedness.’ These would not be the last soldiers to be killed whilst off duty. The City of Belfast Coroner stated that the murders were ‘one of the vilest crimes ever heard of in living memory.’ (Belfast Telegraph). That Coroner could not have possibly imagined at the time that this was but the first of a whole series of ‘vile’ crimes which would be perpetrated by both communities’ paramilitaries over the course of the next near 30 years.

One of the alleged killers, IRA member Patrick McAdorey, was himself later killed. On 9 August he was shot in Brompton Park in north Belfast during anti-Internment protests, apparently in a fire fight with soldiers, although there is some speculation that, in the chaos, he may have been shot by Loyalists. Lost Lives suggests that McAdorey may have also been responsible for the death of another soldier that same day. Private Malcolm Hatton (19) of the Green Howards had been shot and killed earlier during intense gun battles with the IRA in the Ardoyne area. That period of utter insanity, 9-11 August 1971, cost the lives of no less than 23 people; 20 of the deaths were in Belfast. The fatalities included two British soldiers and the first UDR man to be killed by the IRA. Paul Challenor (22) of the Royal Horse Artillery was fatally wounded by an IRA sniper in Londonderry and died shortly afterwards of his wounds. The UDR man was Winston Donnell (22) who was shot and killed by the IRA near Clady, Co Tyrone.

The gloves were off; the IRA had demonstrated, in their own evil fashion, that they were not the IRA of old – amateurs, armed with World War II German Mauser rifles and stolen TA Lee Enfields – but were now practised, professional and cold-blooded killers. They had the deaths of, officially, six soldiers to their ‘credit’ and unofficially were involved in most of the deaths of all 29. They were now starting to make a mark. Professional and cold-blooded as they already were, they would only get better at doing what they did best, killing members of the Security Forces.

Even the mass, continual rioting followed a set pattern; gangs of younger teenagers would set light to hastily built barricades and then pour a hail of rocks and stones on the soldiers and RUC. Behind them, older men would then run up and hurl petrol bombs and empty glass bottles; the soldiers hated the bursting bottles and the razor edged sharp shards of glass which showered over them. Behind this second rank, would be the shadowy IRA gunmen who would then order the front two ranks to part, like Moses parting the Red Sea, and then either open fire on selected soldiers or simply pour indiscriminate automatic fire at the massed troops.

By 1971, senior Army men knew, before the man on the ground, that the concept of protecting the Catholic communities was dying. The writing was on the wall – in more ways than one. The proliferation of signs demanding that the Brits left was evidence of this. ‘Don’t ball-lick the Brits; fight ‘em’ and ‘We stand by the IRA’ could be seen on every street corner in every Republican enclave in Northern Ireland. The long favoured open riot square formation was out; it had worked in Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaya, but the boyos were distinctly unimpressed. Instead, a formation with riot shields which protected front and flanks, and, like the old Roman ‘testudo’ shield formations, overhead as well, was developed. This formation was protected by riflemen in flank positions whose job it was to take out the gunman or the bomber. The addition of the famous snatch squads which employed the fastest runners to suddenly break through their shields and literally snatch ringleaders and drag them back behind the lines proved invaluable time and time again.

Later, in 1972, the controversial plastic bullets made it easier to target and temporarily disable people before the snatch squads were deployed. For those who were not caught at the time, where possible, video footage was taken of all the rioters’ activities so that they could be identified, traced and picked up at a later date. Another useful innovation were the mobile patrols within Belfast City Centre with the introduction of random VCPs (Vehicle Check Points). Buses were great fun for the soldiers, eager for some payback after all they had endured, where you could spend half an hour ‘P’ checking all the people on a crowded bus and then move location to start all over again with a line of cars. It is a fact that by constant 24-hour patrolling the Army limited the opposition’s ability to plan, to move people and equipment and to set up operations against them.

The need to patrol and dominate all areas constantly was always there. The patrols were up to four hours long and in the worst areas it was hard targeting for all of that time, so if the soldier was not in a fire position he was running and weaving to one. Patrol routes and timings were constantly changed to avoid forming any sort of pattern. A lot of talk went on about building a wall around the ‘hard areas’ and containing them and although this would have presented less risk to the soldiers it would also have created further no go areas, with a complete breakdown of law and order as a consequence. Another consideration was that maybe 95 per cent of the people in those areas did not deserve to be abandoned to the rule of the gun and terrorism. This had already happened in some parts of Belfast by 1972 and it was only as a result of mounting Operation Motorman that these areas were reclaimed from the terrorists. The pity of it is that the IRA had learnt from the post-Internment gun battles of 1971 and never again came out on to the streets to take on the Army. ‘Operation Motorman’ was a walkover.

From this point onwards, the pattern throughout the Province would remain largely the same, certainly concerning shootings. Instead of the ‘traditional’ fire fight, a lone IRA or INLA gunman would stalk the soldier using ‘dickers’ (a concept which will be explained through the soldiers’ own words) or take over a house or a shop, knowing that even irregular patrol patterns would soon bring a soldier into their scopes. The deaths of Blues and Royals’ Troopers Thornley and Dykes, shot and killed at the security gates at Andersonstown RUC station in April 1979 typified this approach. IRA gunmen had taken over a barbers’ shop opposite the station and waited until the two men were vulnerable at the open gates. The deaths of Kingsmen Shanley and Rumble, which took place in the Ballymurphy Estate in the same month are another example of these hit and run tactics. On this occasion, IRA members took over a house in Glenalina Gardens and a sniper fired shots from an upstairs window and killed both men; Steven Rumble died of his wounds eight days later. Murals on the ’Murph depicting a group of IRA gunmen – and women - in green Parkas, armed with assault rifles raiding as a group are certainly misleading.

The concept of the ‘lone gunman’ was also a bit of a misnomer, as in addition to the ‘dickers’ who reported on patrol movements, other supporters would be on hand to try and get weapons out of the area into the myriad IRA safe houses. The gunman would lie on a blanket and shoot at the soldiers from the prone position and, if hit, his supporters would drag the wounded – or dead – terrorist away on the blanket, along with the weapon and important forensic evidence. Another tactic was to get to a pre-arranged ‘safe house’ after a shooting, where a bath full of water would be ready for the gunman to jump straight into, in order to attempt to wash off the forensics.

Over three decades, generations of soldiers had to be based, safely quartered, fed and watered right in the very areas where they would be needed to make most impact. On the mainland, particularly across the south-east, literally hundreds of Army camps, some as old as time itself, other...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• The Voices of the British Army in Northern Ireland
• The Twenty-One Soldiers Who Lost Their Lives Before Robert Curtis
• Foreword by Andrew MacDonald, Late Kings Own Border
• Preface by Mick O’Day
• Author’s Note
• Introduction
• Part One ‘What About Ye, Soldier Boy?’
• Part Two Bloody Belfast
• Part Three The Other Killing Grounds
• Part Four Going Back, Looking Back
• Afterword
• A Soldier Died Today
• The Mill
• Roll of Honour 1969–98
• Select Bibliography
• Copyright