Chapter 25
In This Chapter
● Waving goodbye to the British Empire
● Conducting conventional wars
● Maintaining internal security and peace
After the end of the Second World War (see Chapters 23 and 24), the British army faced many commitments all over the world. In order to fulfil these commitments, the government initially retained conscription (renamed National Service). Most young National Servicemen, having had their careers interrupted, were irreverent in their attitude to the army, but when it came to actual fighting they proved to be just as good soldiers as their regular comrades. With the reduction in Imperial and other commitments, National Service began to run down during the late 1950s, leaving the army an all-regular volunteer force recruited by selection. Simultaneously, a process of downgrading of the army’s size began and has continued ever since. Regiments have amalgamated time and time again. Only a tiny handful of the regiments who served the Empire and fought in two World Wars have succeeded in preserving their identity.
The military changes taking place between the end of the Second World War and the present day have been many and varied. In the late 1940s and 1950s, the British Army was equipped in a similar fashion to at the end of the Second World War, but since that time some of the technological advances made include:
● Infantry weapons: Automatic rifles (including the L1A1 and SA80), soldier-portable anti-tank missiles and rocket launchers, bullet-proof flak jackets, and equipment protecting against nuclear and biological attack, to name but a few.
● Armoured vehicles: Ever-advanced tanks, with bigger and better guns, and more advanced armour (such as the Centurion, Chieftain, and Challenger) have been joined by armoured personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles (such as the FV432 and Warrior), designed to transport infantry squads into action protected by armour and vehicle-mounted heavy weapons.
● Helicopters: These now have numerous battlefield applications, including the tactical transport of troops and providing immediate support for them from the air.
● Missile systems and artillery: Many new systems, both traditional guns and space-age missiles, are employed by the army. Some systems are towed by other vehicles, but many are now self-propelled on armoured vehicles.
So what actions have British troops been involved in? This chapter runs through the main actions of the British army after 1945 (Figure 25-1 shows the geographical spread).
Figure 25-1: British military actions, post-1945.
Withdrawing from the Empire
After the Second World War, the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellite countries were so menacing that the British had to maintain large forces in Germany. The Soviet Union, however, preferred to fight this Cold War by proxy rather than in person, involving British troops in a conventional war in Korea and a prolonged anti-terrorist campaign in Malaya. For more on the final days of the Empire, see Sean Lang’s British History For Dummies (published by Wiley).
Palestine, 1945-1948
Palestine had never been a British colony, but the British had governed the country under a League of Nations’ mandate after the dismemberment of the Ottoman empire, following the First World War. After the Holocaust in Europe killed so many Jews in the Second World War, large numbers of the survivors wished to emigrate to their spiritual home and form their own state. Uncontrolled immigration would have swamped the indigenous Arab population of Palestine, so a necessity existed to control immigration as fairly as possible. However, when the pressure exceeded reasonable proportions, the British had to turn away would-be entrants and house them in camps. This provoked bitter hostility among Jewish Americans, who gladly provided funds for their co-religionists to buy arms. Many Jews entered Palestine illegally, displacing Arabs. Terrorists on both sides attacked the British: The Arabs because they were letting too many Jews in, and the Jews because they were not letting enough in. And when Jew and Arab were not murdering British soldiers, they were murdering each other.
The situation in Palestine grew beyond control and the British government announced its decision to withdraw its troops when the League of Nations’ mandate expired in 1948. Prior to embarkation to return home, the British presence concentrated in enclaves around Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Haifa. At this point the Jewish terrorists surfaced to try their hand at conventional warfare. Unfortunately for them, they weren’t very good at it and left the British army seriously alone for its last two weeks in Palestine. Needless to say, the troops were delighted to leave.
India and Pakistan, 1947
India and Pakistan were the first former colonies to achieve independence, and understandably the rest of the countries in the British Empire wanted their freedom as well. The British government did not want to dispute the issue and merely insisted that the necessary political infrastructure had to be in place before each country became self-governing. The United Kingdom had promised to grant independence to India, and it did so in August 1947. Unfortunately, Hindu and Muslim politicians refused to work together in one state, so two nations - India and Pakistan - came into being. This resulted in large-scale population movements across the new frontier. So long as British troops were present little violence occurred, but after the troops withdrew the new national governments were not able to prevent horrific massacres of Muslims by Hindus and vice versa as ancient hatreds surfaced.
Some regiments of the old Indian army that recruited primarily in Muslim areas transferred to the newly formed Pakistan army. In cavalry regiments that contained both Muslim and Hindu squadrons, the religion of the majority determined the army in which the regiment would serve in future, those in the minority being posted to regiments across the border. When this happened soldiers on both sides wept openly, not only because of the lost comradeship but because they suspected that one day their respective politicians would make them fight each other; they were not disappointed. Nor did the new Indian army wish to retain all the existing Gurkha regiments, which recruited in Nepal, so the British army absorbed several of these regiments. As for the former British officers of the old Indian army, some stayed for a while as advisers to the new states, some retired voluntarily, and some transferred to the British army for the remainder of their service.
Malaya, 1948-1960
Hardly had the dust from Palestine settled than another, and far more serious, outbreak of terrorist activity took place in Malaya. The terrorists called themselves the Malayan Races Liberation Army, but they were nothing of the kind. They were almost exclusively Chinese communists, many of whom had taken part in a resistance campaign against the Japanese. Their targets were government officials, the police, the army, planters, and anyone who didn’t agree with them, including their own people. They lived in the jungle, were highly organised, and were difficult to get to grips with.
On 5 April 1950 Lieutenant General Sir Harold Briggs was appointed Director of Operations. The British had already introduced detention without trial, issued identity cards (without which people were not able to purchase food), and instituted limited curfews. Briggs established greater cooperation between the armed services, the police, and the civil authorities, including sharing and coordinating intelligence. His greatest achievement, however, was a resettlement programme that, over a two-year period, moved Chinese squatters into protected villages. The army escorted food supplies into the villages, but did not allow any food out. Hungry, the terrorists were forced to operate in smaller groups.
However, on 6 October 1951 the terrorists scored a major success with the murder of the British High Commissioner, Sir Hugh Gurney. The following year, Briggs returned to Britain. The appointments of High Commissioner and Director of Operations were combined under General Sir Gerald Templar. The keynote of Templar’s policy was winning the hearts and minds of the population, and particularly its Chinese element. This approach evidently worked when prosperity returned to those areas from which the British had cleared the terrorists.
The war moved deeper into the jungle. British troops set ambushes on tracks linking terrorist bases and villages known to be supplying the enemy. The British recruited trackers from Borneo, who proved adept at interpreting the slightest sign of terrorist presence. The terrorists moved yet deeper into the jungle and began to grow their own food. These gardens were visible from the air and indicated their presence. When a terrorist base was located, it received prompt attention not only from the Royal Artillery’s guns, but also naval gunfire and air attacks.
In 1952 the Special Air Service Regiment, disbanded after the Second World War, reformed in Malaya, augmented by squadrons from Rhodesia and New Zealand. The following year helicopters enabled the British to insert troops deep into the jungle. By 1955, being a terrorist wasn’t fun any more. But the British government brushed aside the terrorists’ peace overtures and then kicked out the bottom of their collective bucket by announcing that it was to grant Malaya independence in 1957. Following Independence Day, terrorists began to surrender in large numbers. On 31 July 1960 the State of Emergency officially ended.
The terrorists had killed 3000 civilians, 1350 policemen, 128 Malayan and over 500 British and Gurkha soldiers. Some 12,000 communists took part in active operations. Of these 6710 were killed, 1290 were captured, and 2696 gave themselves up. We do not know the fate of the remainder.
Kenya, 1952-1956
Two battalions of the King’s African Rifles served in Malaya (see the previous section). This proved to be of great value when, in 1952, similar problems arose in Kenya. The difficulties involved a large dissident group of the Kikuyu tribe that called itself the Mau Mau and practised black magic initiation ceremonies. Eventually, two British brigades and local troops deployed against them. Similar measures to those used in Malaya eroded the Mau Mau’s strength, together with cordon-and-search operations and the use of counter gangs of captured Mau Mau who turned against their former comrades. By the end of 1956 the strength of the Mau Mau was broken.
Cyprus, 1954-1974
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) was an alliance of Western countries including Britain, who opposed the Soviet Union’s communist Warsaw Pact in the Cold War era after the Second World War. Cyprus was an important NATO listening post for eavesdropping on the Warsaw Pact’s radio transmissions.
At the end of March 1955 a group calling itself EOKA exploded bombs in Nicosia, initiating a terrorist campaign. The aims of EOKA were not just independence from Britain, but also union with Greece. The idea was not acceptable to the one-third of the island’s population who were Turkish, nor to the Turkish government, and, once again, the British army and the police found themselves in the middle. By 1956 no fewer than four brigades were engaged in hunting terrorists, mainly in the Troodos mountains, with some success.
In 1960, following protracted negotiation with all the parties concerned, including the Greek and Turkish governments, Great Britain granted Cyprus independence on the basis of power sharing between the two communities, retaining two sovereign base areas at Dhekelia and Akrotiri as well as rights to maintain radar and radio stations elsewhere on the island. A Greek coup d’etat in 1974 provoked a Turkish invasion that occupied the north of the island, creating the situation that exists to this day.
Aden, 1964-1967
The importance of Aden as a naval refuelling station disappeared when the United Kingdom withdrew from its Far Eastern colonies. During the early 1960s President Nasser of Egypt began meddling, not very successfully, in the affairs of neighbouring Yemen; nationalist elements there liked his proposal to absorb Aden and its protectorates into a Greater Yemen. With Nasser’s secret encouragement, a major insurrection broke out in the Radhfan mountains in Protectorate territory to the north of Aden. This was successfully put down by a punitive expedition into tribal territory.
The violence moved into Aden colony itself, despite the fact that Britain had promised independence within a year or two. Two terrorist organisations, the Marxist NLF (National Liberation Front) and FLOSY (Front For the Liberation Of South Yemen), wanted control when the British left and seemed determined to prove their credentials by committing bigger and better atrocities than their rivals. The Aden Police were corrupt to the point of murdering a number of Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, an event that provoked wild rejoicing in Crater city. It evaporated suddenly when the inhabitants awoke one morning to find that Lieutenant Colonel Colin Mitchell’s 1/Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders had taken over during the night.
In three years of conflict, 600 British casualties, including 90 killed, were sustained. During the autumn of 1967, British troops steadily withdrew inside an embarkation perimeter based on Khormaksar airfield. On the afternoon of 29 November the last company of 42 Commando left by helicopter and flew to the carrier HMS Albion. At midnight Aden and South Arabia became independent.
The ‘Real’ Wars: Great and Small
Britain has been involved in few conventional wars after the Second World War. This section gives the lowdown on where British soldiers have served in such wars.
Korea, 1951-1953
As part of the Russo/Chinese policy of expansion by surrogate means, communist North Korea was persuaded by those countries to invade noncommunist South Korea in June 1950. The United Nations reacted quickly in arranging for the rapid despatch of military assistance to South Korea. The British sent troops from Hong Kong and in July 1951 these combined with the Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian contingents to form the Commonwealth Division alongside divisions from other countries.
Following some initial success, an amphibious landing at Inchon by the US Marines outflanked the North Koreans. The North Koreans fled and the UN forces chased them almost as far as their frontier with China, the Yalu river. American General Douglas MacArthur, commanding the UN forces, put forward several wild ideas for carrying the war into China, most of which the American Joint Chiefs of Staff vetoed. They did approve one suggestion, involving the bombing of the Yalu bridges, on condition that only the Korean end was bombed!
The Chinese were horrified that their Korean pals had taken such a beating, a disaster reflecting badly on the legend of communist invincibility. At the end of November they came swarming across the Yalu in huge numbers; so many, in fact, that part of the UN army had to be evacuated by sea from Hungnam. By January 1951 the Chinese had advanced into South Korea and temporarily taken Seoul, the capital, before the UN troops pushed them back. MacArthur began talking about nuclear strikes. That was too much for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and President Truman replaced MacArthur with General Matthew B. Ridgway.
Remembering the Glorious Glosters
On 22 April 1951 the Chinese attacked once more. Their 63rd Army, consisting of about 27,000 men, had the task of crossing the Imjin river and advancing on Seoul down the traditional invasion route, the effect being to trap the UN I Corps with its back to the sea. Directly in its path, however, was Brigadier Tom Brodie’s 29th Brigade, consisting of 1/Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, 1/Royal Ulster Rifles, 1/The Gloucestershire Regiment, and a small Belgian battalion. On the right, the Fusiliers, Rifles, and the Belgians were almost swamped but retreated slowly, making the enemy pay for every metre of ground. On 25 April they were ordered to break contact and withdraw south. With tank assistance they managed to do so with difficulty.
On the left, the Glosters, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel James Carne, revealed the value of regimental tradition. At Alexandria during the Napoleonic Wars (see Part III) their two ranks had successfully fought back to back against separate French attacks, earning the famous back-badge that had adorned the regiment’s headdress ever since. Although the Chinese quickly isolated and surrounded the battalion and outnumbered the British by six to one at times, the battalion fought off human wave attacks for four days and nights. By the last morning the Glosters were concentrated on a single hill. They were no longer able to contact their supporting artillery because their radio batteries were exhausted. They had little ammunition left, and across the valley heard the Chinese buglers summoning their men for the final assault. The Glosters’ drum major responded, sending the regimental call echoing defiantly around the hills. Seven times the Chinese masses charged up the hill, and seven times the Glosters pitched them off it. Then squadrons of American F-80 aircraft howled into the attack, blasting the packed ranks of the Chinese with napalm and strafing them with cannon fire. Suddenly all was very quiet. Carne had received permission to withdraw earlier that morning. His battalion had done its job and could do nothing more. The medical officer, the chaplain, and their helpers volunteered to remain with the wounded while the rest, in small parties, tried to reach the UN lines. A total of 58 Glosters were killed in the fighting and 30 more died in captivity. Only 63 got through to form the nucleus of the reformed battalion. Reports of the Glosters’ stand spread around the world and met with something like awe. The Glorious Glosters, as they became known, received a very rare distinction for a British regiment, a US Presidential Distinguished Unit Citation. They had done their Napoleonic forebears proud.
As a whole, the 29th Brigade destroyed the Chinese 63rd Army, which withdrew and took no further part in the war in Korea. The following month the communists tried again and failed so badly that they began to surrender in droves. The front stabilised and fixed position warfare (trench warfare) set in. Even the Chinese huge manpower resources were unequal to the UN’s massive artillery response.
Ending the Korean War
British regiments each served for approximately one year in Korea. During the war’s final stages they were deployed on the hills west of the river Samichon. In the spring of 1953, ceasefire negotiations were reaching their final stages and the communists badly needed a success with which to improve their negotiating position. In May they mounted an attack in strength on a vital feature called The Hook. 1/ The Duke of Wellington’s Regiment (60 per cent of whom were 19-year-old National Servicemen) threw the Chinese off the hill after fierce hand-to-hand fighting in bunkers and tunnels.
Total British casualties during the Korean War amounted to 793 killed and 2878 wounded and missing.
Suez, 1956
In March 1956 the last British garrison of the Canal Zone left Egypt. Shortly after, Egypt’s President Nasser announced that he was nationalising the Suez Canal Company, of which Great Britain was a major shareholder. The British Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, over-reacted badly. His view was that Nasser needed to be taught a lesson. Just why is unclear, even with hindsight. The financial aspects of the transaction would have resolved in due course, and if Great Britain had wanted to retain physical possession of the Canal, why did the country withdraw its troops in the first place? After all, not much of the British Empire remained east of Suez (the traditional British route to the East).
The British government planned an invasion, but did not have sufficient resources to mount it. Months passed while it called up reservists and sorted the army out, and in that time world opinion turned against the venture. Eden did a shady deal with the French and Israelis, under which the Israelis would start a war with Egypt, and Great Britain and France would ‘intervene’ to separate the combatants and ensure the safety of the Canal. They began this short-lived operation at dawn on 5 November. The United States threatened to wreck the British economy if the fighting continued, so imposed a ceasefire at midnight the following day. By then the British and French were halfway down the Canal with little to stop them.
The Suez incident emphasised Great Britain’s loss of ‘great power’ status and destroyed the country’s prestige throughout the area. Unfortunately, the American State Department seemed unfamiliar with the Arab belief that he who survives has won. Nasser, anxious to obtain funds for his Aswan Dam project, began playing the United States and the Soviet Union off against each other. The Russians won and for almost 20 years their influence was paramount in many Middle Eastern countries.
Borneo, 1962-1966
President Ahmed Sukarno of Indonesia’s ambition was to absorb the Malayan Peninsula, Singapore, and the three territories of British Borneo - Sarawak, Brunei, and North Borneo (now Sabah) - into a Greater Indonesian state. This was contrary to the wishes of Tunku Abdul Rahman, the Prime Minister of the Malayan Federation, which the three territories wanted to join. On 8 September 1962, a 4000-strong armed mob calling itself the North Kalimantan National Army (Kalimantan being the name of Indonesian Borneo) began running amok in Brunei town. British troops from Malaya answered the Sultan’s call for assistance. They killed about 40 rebels, 2000 surrendered, and the rest fled into the jungle, where the British quickly tracked them down.
Sukarno declared that a state of confrontation existed between Indonesia and Malaya. His people, he said, were as thwarted and angry as he was and were volunteering to slip across the border and cause trouble. When the new, expanded Federation of Malaysia became a fact on 16 September, little doubt remained that a shooting war was about to break out. Nobody called it a war because Great Britain and Indonesia were not officially at war, and anyway much of what happened remained secret, so it continued to be a confrontation.
The British had become very experienced in jungle warfare (see the sections on Malaya and Kenya earlier in this chapter). In December 1962, Major General Walter Walker became Commander British Forces Borneo. His command expanded steadily until by March 1965 it contained 11 infantry battalions, half of which were British and the rest Gurkha, Malaysian, Australian, and New Zealand. Patrols from a composite British/Australian/NewZealand SAS squadron spent months at a time befriending border villages and sending back priceless intelligence. In addition, Walker had a unit of Border Scouts, 1550 strong, recruited from among indigenous tribes, two battalions of the Police Field Force, two regiments each of armoured cars, artillery, and engineers, 80 helicopters, and 40 fixed-wing aircraft including Javelin fighters. Offshore and on the rivers, the Royal Navy maintained a fleet of coastal minesweepers and patrol craft.
Much of the 1440-kilometre (900-mile) border separating Sarawak and Sabah from Kalimantan ran through wild, jungle-covered mountains, parts of which remained unmapped. As the enemy was only able to approach along established trails, the logical course of action was for the British to defend these with fortified bases from which they could watch the trails and patrol aggressively. The bulk of Walker’s troops, however, were in camps further back, employed as rapid reaction forces capable of swift deployment by helicopter into a threatened sector.
In September 1965, some 200 Indonesian volunteers overran a small outpost at Long Jawai. Gurkhas were inserted by helicopter into ambush positions along the raiders’ withdrawal route and killed all but a few of them. Three months later a repeat performance took place at the village of Kalabatan, from which only six of the enemy returned home. By March 1964, a shortage of volunteers led Sukarno to deploy regular army units that operated from bases across the border. The SAS raided these regularly with artillery support, following careful reconnaissance; the Indonesians didn’t like what was happening and abandoned their bases.
Ambushes used the deadly Claymore mine. Detonated electronically, the Claymore’s 700 steel balls blasted through its curved forward face in a 60 degree arc, killing everything within 45 metres (50 yards). Sensitive seismic detectors, capable of registering footfalls, warned the defenders of the enemy’s approach along a track.
When Walker returned to Britain in 1965, Major General George Lea maintained his offensive policy to good effect. In March 1966 Sukarno was deposed in a coup. Five months later his successor formally ended the state of confrontation. Commonwealth casualties in this undeclared war amounted to 114 killed and 181 wounded. The Indonesians lost over 700 killed and 771 captured.
The Falkland Islands, 1982
In early 1982 a deeply unpopular military junta ruled Argentina. In an effort to restore its reputation, on 2 April the junta invaded the Falkland Islands, on which Argentina had a sentimental claim dating back to the Napoleonic Wars. The sustained reduction in British armed forces had given the junta the impression that Great Britain was a toothless old lion with no stomach for a fight. Yet hardly had the rejoicing ended in Buenos Aires than the shocking news came that a naval task force under Rear Admiral John Woodward was heading for the South Atlantic to recapture the Falkland Islands and their dependency, South Georgia.
Some post-war British Prime Ministers would indeed have responded with little more than a formal protest to the United Nations, but Margaret Thatcher was not one of them. Nor was she prepared to tolerate the sort of delays that had proved fatal during the Suez crisis (see the section on Suez, earlier in this chapter).
Recapturing the Islands
The British recaptured South Georgia without difficulty on 25 April 1982. On 2 May, following the sinking of its cruiser General Belgrano, the Argentine Navy retired from the conflict. On 14 May the British SAS raided Pebble Island and destroyed a squadron of enemy ground attack aircraft on its airstrip. This meant that the Argentine garrison of the islands had to rely on aircraft flying from Argentina, as the main airfield at Port Stanley was subjected to naval gunfire. During the night of 20/21 May the assault wave of the British task force entered Falkland Sound and landed at San Carlos on East Falkland. It consisted of Brigadier Julian Thompson’s 3rd Commando Brigade (40, 42, and 45 Royal Marine Commandos, 2/ and 3/The Parachute Regiment). As the troops dug in, their heavy support weapons began coming ashore. The only serious resistance encountered came from the Argentine air force, which made several successful attacks on the British navy’s escort vessels but failed to stop the landing.
The Argentine army had not fought a serious action within living memory. It consisted of regular officers (who received far better rations than their men, even in the field), regular non-commissioned officers, and conscript soldiers. It operated according to its training manuals and proved to be good for defensive purposes only. With the exception of a garrison holding Goose Green at the southern end of the isthmus connecting the two halves of East Falkland, most Argentine units on the island were dug in a series of high features overlooking Port Stanley. They really did not enjoy life on their ‘beloved Malvinas’, as the Argentines called the Falklands. The islands seemed to consist of solely of rainy, sleet-swept moorland with a high wind-chill factor, and their population seemed to consist of lots of sheep and penguins and a small but hostile British community.
The Battle of Goose Green, 28 May 1982
On 28 May 2/The Parachute Regiment, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel H. Jones, had the task of eliminating the Argentine garrison of Goose Green. This was not an easy task, because no room for manoeuvre existed on the narrow isthmus and the enemy had dug themselves in at the far end of it. Once again, tradition played a part in the battle. The paras had defended the bridge at Arnhem (see Chapter 23) and here too they meant business, even though the Argentines heavily outnumbered them.
The paras had to neutralise bunkers and trenches under heavy fire. At one period the battalion was pinned down, and Lieutenant Colonel Jones went forward, successfully unpinning his men at the cost of his own life. Under Major Christopher Keeble the attack got moving again. The battle became a contest of wills. The paras’ mortars and Milan anti-tank guided missiles proved effective against the enemy’s bunkers. A feigned Argentine surrender cost British casualties, and after this the British accepted no surrenders unless the enemy came forward with their hands raised. At the end of 15 hours’ fighting, the Argentines were confined to a half-circle around Goose Green settlement. They screamed in fear as low-flying British Harrier aircraft strafed their remaining positions; their will had broken and they agreed to surrender at a formal parade next morning.
Goose Green cost the British 17 dead and 35 wounded. Argentine losses were 250 killed and missing, some 150 wounded, and about 1200 prisoners. The defeat was a shattering blow to Argentine morale.
The Battles around Port Stanley, 2-14 June 1982
As the paras fought at Goose Green, the rest of 3rd Commando Brigade had begun a 70-kilometre (45-mile) march across the island to Port Stanley. The islanders said it couldn’t be done, and certainly not with the huge loads that the men were carrying. The commandos and paras, however, were superbly fit, and although some units received helicopter assistance, the rest completed the march entirely on foot. On 2 June commandos took the 450-kilometre (1500-foot) Mount Kent, providing views of Port Stanley on a clear day. They had penetrated the outer, and potentially most formidable, ring of Argentine defences at comparatively little cost.
Meanwhile, Brigadier Tony Wilson’s 5th Infantry Brigade (2/The Scots Guards, 1/The Welsh Guards, and 1/7th Gurkha Rifles) had reached San Carlos, as had Major General Jeremy Moore, who was in overall command of land operations. A telephone call from a farm manager indicated that the enemy had abandoned the area of Fitzroy and Bluff Cove, to the southeast of Port Stanley. 3/The Parachute Regiment were lifted forward by helicopter to secure the area, while the two Guards battalions were shipped round to Bluff Cove in the logistic landing ships Sir Tristram and Sir Galahad. On 8 June, before disembarkation was complete, the Argentine air force attacked both ships. Sir Tristram was severely damaged and Sir Galahad became a raging inferno. The raid caused 146 casualties, including 63 killed, the majority of them Welsh Guardsmen. General Moore used the short operational pause to bring forward artillery and ammunition for the final assault on Port Stanley. During the same period the Gurkhas, of whom the enemy had an almost supernatural dread, cleaned out any remaining pockets of Argentines left behind by the British advance.
On the night of 11 June the assault began. 42 Commando took Mount Harriet and 45 Commando the Two Sisters without undue difficulty, but 3/The Parachute Regiment only took Mount Longdon after a hard fight. On the night of 13 June, 2/The Scots Guards fought and won an equally tough battle for possession of Tumbledown Mountain, while 2/The Parachute Regiment, with a troop of light tanks in support, took Wireless Ridge. In these battles some of those who thought that the bayonet was old-fashioned discovered that it could still perform its work efficiently.
By the morning of 14 June the only features remaining in enemy hands were Mount William and Sapper Hill. The Welsh Guards and Gurkhas were preparing to attack them when they saw hundreds of the enemy walking away from their positions towards Port Stanley. Later in the day the Argentine commander, General Mario Menendez, agreed to a general surrender.
Many commentators throughout the world had seriously doubted whether Great Britain was capable of projecting a task force 13,500 kilometres (8000 miles) to achieve a complete victory over an enemy that had had weeks to prepare its defences. The result led to intense study of the operation and the successful workings of British military professionalism. Curiously, it had all been rather like one of Queen Victoria’s little wars (see Chapter 12).
The First Gulf War, 1991
Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq, badly needed funds to pay for his recent inconclusive war with Iran. He thought the oil revenues of neighbouring Kuwait may provide an immediate answer, so on 2 August 1990 his army occupied the country against token opposition from the small Kuwaiti army, which withdrew into Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately for Saddam, the possession of oil is a very sensitive issue in the West. He chose to ignore United Nations Resolutions that he should withdraw, so the United States put together a coalition including Great Britain, France, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. As well as contributing naval and air contingents, Britain contributed its 1st Armoured Division.
On the night of 16/17 January 1991, while the land forces were assembling in Saudi Arabia, the Coalition powers launched a major air offensive against the Iraqi Army in Kuwait and targets in Iraq itself. While this attack was in progress, SAS patrols went behind the Iraqi lines to locate Scud missile sites. At the time, the Iraqi army was the fourth largest in the world. Some commentators managed to confuse size with excellence, describing it as formidable and its Republican Guard as ‘crack’. In fact, the army’s leadership was poor and it had never had to take on a first-class enemy. The Iraqis followed the Soviet approach to defence, so had packed Kuwait with bunkers, strong-points, and dug-in armoured vehicles, which meant that air attacks could hardly fail to cause damage and casualties. You can imagine the earthquake effect of hundreds of tons of bombs unloaded from unseen B-52s flying at the edge of the stratosphere.
The Coalition offensive, planned by General Norman Schwarzkopf and codenamed Desert Sabre, began on 24 February. It took the form of an advance into Iraq followed by a huge wheel to the right into Kuwait. The British 1st Armoured Division was close to the hub of the wheel. In Germany it had trained extensively in night fighting and was very flexible in its operations. The advance met little serious resistance, although Saddam’s engineers did manage to set fire to the Kuwaiti oil wells.
Most Iraqis, starving and with shattered nerves, simply wanted to give up. Those who tried to escape from Kuwait City along the road to Basra ended up in a huge traffic jam of wrecked and burning vehicles of every type that the coalition pounded incessantly from the air. As a captured Iraqi officer put it, the contest had been between a First World War army (his own) and a Third World War army. After 100 hours of fighting, Saddam accepted the UN resolutions relating to Kuwait as a matter of self-preservation. It worked. Kuwait was liberated and President George Bush Snr controversially ordered a ceasefire. The terms permitted Saddam to keep his helicopter gunships, which he used without mercy on Shia rebels in the south of Iraq. Some in the Arab world considered Saddam as a hero, simply because he stood up to the might of the coalition and survived. The business in Iraq remained unfinished (see the section ‘The Second Gulf War, 2003’, later in this chapter).
Iraqi losses in personnel, tanks, guns, and armoured personnel carriers were too great to quantify with any accuracy. Coalition losses were light. Very few British casualties occurred, but half derived from friendly fire when an American tank-buster aircraft attacked a British armoured column by mistake.
Afghanistan, 2001 onwards
On 11 September 2001, Islamic extremists flew two civilian airliners into the World Trade Center in New York, destroying the buildings and killing thousands of innocent people. America’s understandable desire for revenge centred first on Afghanistan, ruled by a Muslim fundamentalist group known as the Taliban, who allowed an Islamic network called Al-Qaeda to train its members in terrorist techniques on Afghan soil. The American response, aided by Afghan forces hostile to the government, soon ousted the Taliban. The SAS made the principal British contribution, fighting a savage battle of extermination with Taliban/Al-Qaeda fighters amid the rocks, caves, and hills of Helmand province in the south of Afghanistan.
Somehow, the Taliban managed to infiltrate their way back into Afghanistan. By 2006 they were particularly strong in Helmand province, a poppy-growing area of vital interest to drug dealers. While the province is nominally a NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) responsibility, in practice the real fighting has been done by the British Army and Royal Marines. The fighting was the heaviest that British troops have been involved in since the Second World War, with the Taliban sustaining serious losses for little return. At the time of writing, an end to British commitment in Afghanistan seems remote.
The Second Gulf War, 2003
President George Bush Jnr turned his attention to Iraq, mindful of the unfinished business his father had left. Saddam Hussein was indeed still in power, but his grip on Iraq was such that neither Al-Qaeda nor any other terrorist group was able to operate inside the country (see the preceding section). The American and British governments:
● Peddled the story that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and could launch them against the West within 45 minutes. The UN Weapons Inspectorate couldn’t find them; it seems that no weapons of this kind existed. Iraq did possess some short-range tactical missiles, but had already surrendered these for destruction.
● Said that what they really wanted was regime change in Iraq because Saddam was a mass murderer. However, changing other people’s regimes because you don’t like them is illegal, so the politicians then said they were keen to bring western democracy to the Iraqi people.
The United Nations did not sanction an armed American and British invasion, but Bush and British Prime Minister Blair’s administrations produced dubious evidence that Saddam was planning all sorts of evil. Despite serious public reservations, Great Britain found itself embroiled in an American war the legality of which remains highly questionable.
America and Britain assembled a coalition force in Kuwait. Operations against Iraq commenced on 20 March 2003 with a bombardment by cruise missiles and laser-guided munitions on targets in Baghdad and elsewhere. The basic strategy of the campaign was for the Americans to head straight for Baghdad, while the British contingent prevented the destruction of the southern Iraqi oilfields, took Basra, and captured the port of Umm Qasr, getting the docks back into working order. After the Americans had taken Baghdad on 9 April, the British pushed north from Basra to join them at Amarah.
Getting to that point was the easy part. Unfortunately, American politicians decreed that the coalition should disband the Iraqi army and police immediately. This proved to be a disastrous error of judgement. Suddenly, Iraq was full of armed men pursuing their own aims:
● Some were Saddam loyalists.
● Some represented a resistance to the coalition.
● Some were religious militias eager to do the bidding of their leaders.
In Basra and the south of Iraq, long British experience in counter insurgency maintained a more stable atmosphere than in other areas, where the American casualty lists lengthened by the day. By degrees, the insurgents learned that sniping at British patrols was very dangerous, so they resorted to roadside bombs. Saddam Hussein’s capture in a hole in the ground on 12 December 2003 did not have a calming effect. Since then Muslim fighters and Al-Qaeda terrorists have swarmed into Iraq, while the Shia and Sunni Muslim sects do their best to destroy each other, and suicide bombers create indiscriminate slaughter.
No end to coalition involvement in Iraq seems to be in sight at the time of writing. On 1 October 2006 the number of Iraqi civilians killed since the invasion was put at a minimum of 50,000. American military deaths at the present time are in excess of 3000, while 236 British soldiers have lost their lives.
Peacekeeping Around the World
In addition to fighting in full-blown wars, and engaging in action to enable the withdrawal from Empire, the British Army has been involved in peacekeeping missions, too. This section details the main ones. The sidebar ‘Punching above their weight’ details some of the other military actions the British Army has been involved in after 1945.
Punching above their weight
This chapter only outlines the main events in the British Army's history after 1945. Every year, the army has been employed on active service somewhere in the world. Here are a few examples of the many other events it has been involved in:
● 1948: British Honduras
● 1948-1951: Eritrea
● 1951: Aqaba, Jordan
● 1957-1959: Muscat and Oman
● 1964: Zanzibar Revolution; Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika army mutinies
● 1970-1976: The Dhofar
● 1979-1984: Rhodesia/Zimbabwe
● 1980: SAS assault on Iranian Embassy in London to end a terrorist siege
Although Great Britain is no longer an imperial or even a great power, it still possesses the ability to punch above its apparent weight and to get good results.
Ulster, 1969-1998
In 1969 the civil rights movement took up the cause of Catholic grievances in Northern Ireland. These grievances covered many aspects of day-to-day life that were imposed by the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland, who felt that both the Catholic Republic of Ireland across the border and enemies within Northern Ireland itself threatened their way of life. When a Protestant mob attacked a civil rights march, rioting was inevitable, reaching such a pitch of intensity that large-scale inter-community violence would have followed if the British government had not shipped additional troops into the province quickly.
At first the Catholic community was grateful for the British Army’s protection. No one expected this honeymoon period to last. The latest troubles gave the Irish Republican Army (IRA), an anti-British group that had begun to slip into folk memory, a new lease of life. It began orchestrating destructive riots that the British Army had to put down. The IRA therefore easily claimed that the army was an occupying force whose purpose was to oppress the Catholics. From this, sniping at soldiers on patrol and planting bombs were only a short step.
The Troubles lasted for 30 years, centring on the Catholic areas of Belfast and Londonderry and along the border with the Irish Republic, mainly in South Armagh. The British army and the police were involved in constant patrolling and surveillance, the pooling of intelligence gathered from many sources, ambush and counter-ambush, exercising restraint on the sorely tried Protestant community, and staying rigidly within the law. Politicians had to remove the causes of Catholic grievance, which in the long term removed the IRA’s reasons for continued resistance.
By far the worst year of the troubles was 1972. On 30 January, now known as Bloody Sunday, the British Parachute Regiment were fired on while dispersing an illegal march. They returned fire and 13 people were killed. The subsequent inquiry concluded that no one would have died if the march had not been held, that the army had come under fire, that the soldiers had returned that fire in accordance with their standing orders, and that no breakdown of discipline had taken place. The incident still provokes intense controversy.
In the end, the Irish gunmen recognised that the democratic process would produce better results than their campaign of violence. Most soldiers actually welcomed their tours of duty in Ulster, partly because they were doing a useful job and partly because the tension kept their reactions sharp. In total, 1972 saw 10,628 shooting incidents and 1853 bombings. Among those killed were 103 regular soldiers, 26 members of the part-time Ulster Defence Regiment, 17 members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, 223 civilians, 95 known republican gunmen, and three ‘loyalist’ gunmen. Finds included 1264 weapons and over 27 tons of explosives. 531 people were charged with terrorist offensives.
Yugoslavia, post-1992
The break-up of the old Yugoslavia into its constituent republics resurrected hatreds that the iron rule of the late President Tito had suppressed. Serb, Croat, Bosnian, Albanian, Muslim, and Christian all found reasons for killing their neighbours and burning their villages to the ground. British troops deployed by the United Nations to Bosnia and Kosovo as peacekeepers found themselves listening to both sides’ atrocity stories, and sometimes witnessing the sickening results of those atrocities. At times they also found difficulty in keeping the warring parties apart or talking their way through roadblocks while escorting a convoy of humanitarian aid to a trapped community. The troops’ duties required all their tact, persuasion, patience, strength of will, and fair mindedness. Their only thanks was the knowledge that they saved lives.