Torn Apart

by Ken Wharton

  At around 17.30 hours, the minibus passed through the village of Whitecross, with the talk possibly turning to those murdered the night before; the vehicle left the outskirts of Kingsmills a few moments later. Mr Walker saw a party of men in uniforms, standing across the road, waving a torch; he naturally assumed that it was a British Army VCP. It is very probable that he relaxed a little as he braked to a halt. The men were ordered off the bus and forced to line up outside. One of the ‘soldiers’ called out for the ‘Catholic man on board’ to show himself, but the man’s workmates thought that it was a Loyalist paramilitary gang and urged him to stay quiet. However, the man, Richard Hughes, reluctantly stepped forward, anticipating the worst, but he was told by one of the armed men to ‘Run down the road and don’t look back’. A few seconds afterwards, there was a shout of ‘Let’s do it!’ With that, at least ten automatic weapons opened up on the helpless men as they stood alongside the vehicle that had only minutes earlier been taking them towards the warmth of their own homes.

  The eleven men were shot at very close range, with a total of 136 rounds being fired in fewer than sixty seconds. As the bodies tumbled all over the place, in several cases on top of one another, the gunmen walked up and down the ragged rank of dead and dying firing further shots into the prostrate men’s heads at close range. Despite being shot an incredible eighteen times, Alan Black survived. The lucky Catholic man, Richard Hughes, meanwhile, was able to flag down a car, begging the driver to take him to the RUC station at Bessbrook. In the meantime, a local husband and wife had heard the crescendo of shots and ventured from their nearby house to investigate. The first RUC officers on the scene found the pair amongst the ten dead Protestant workers, praying for their souls. One can only imagine the carnage, the blood, the pathetic sight of the bullet-riddled bodies; amidst this scene, from what can only be described as an abattoir, was a couple on their knees praying to God.

  Suddenly, one of the Good Samaritans heard an agonised moan from behind the bullet-riddled minibus. They found the terribly wounded Alan Black lying in a ditch, barely alive. After a long wait for an ambulance, he was rushed to Daisy Hill Hospital, where he underwent an emergency operation, somehow surviving his eighteen separate wounds. He was interviewed some years later, when he described his survival. He was lying face down in a ditch; there was a trickle of water, which in early January would have been ice cold; the chill of the water kept his body temperature down, effectively keeping him in cold storage, thus allowing him to survive.

  Memorial to the three UDR soldiers killed in an IRA bomb blast in May 1991.

  One of the first RUC officers on the scene described what greeted him as an ‘...indescribable scene of carnage’. Johnston Chapman, the uncle of two of the victims, told the press that the dead men were ‘... just lying there like dogs; blood everywhere’. Two of the victims were so badly mutilated by gunfire that even close family members were prevented from viewing them. One relative stated that the hospital mortuary ‘... was like a butcher’s shop with bodies lying on the floor like slabs of meat!’

  The ten dead men were: Kenneth Whorton (24); Joseph Lennon (46); Reginald Chapman (25); his brother Walter (23); Robert Walker (46); Robert Freeburn (50); John Bryans (46); John McConville (20); James McWhirter (58); and Robert Chambers (19). Apart from Mr Walker, the men were all from Bessbrook. Not one of the men had links with any paramilitary organisation, making the IRA’s motive purely sectarian – there can be no other possible reason. The Historical Enquiries Team (HET) investigation into the incident found that members of the Provisional IRA had carried out the attack and the weapons used that night could be traced to a further 110 murders or attempted murders over the next several years.

  The murders were admitted the following day by the ‘South Armagh Republican Action Force’, a ‘flag of convenience’ for the Provisional IRA. Their spokesman claimed that the murders were an act of retaliation for the UVF bloodbaths of the previous night. This was patently absurd, leaving one to question why the Irish Times followed this line of enquiry. However, to the watching world, rapidly becoming accustomed to the bloody practice of ‘tit for tat’, it would seem a very fair assessment that the Republicans had killed Protestants to avenge the deaths of five Catholics. That assumption was wrong, simply because even a professional terrorist organisation such as the Provisional IRA were not capable of mounting such a lightning-fast response on the scale of the Kingsmills massacre. Their very existence was under threat from the British Army and large-scale planning meetings took time to organise, local armourers had to retrieve weapons from caches and British Army-style uniforms and equipment had to be sourced. This attack was not spontaneous; the Provisionals may have convinced themselves that it was in retaliation for the earlier deaths of Catholics, but it must have been planned some time previously. Even the UVF attacks on the Reavey and O’Dowd families had been planned by the Mid-Ulster Brigade some time earlier. The notion of retaliation might have been a natural assumption to make, but this had been weeks, even months, in the making.

  Reggie and Walter Chapman: Protestant brothers brutally murdered at the Kingsmill massacre.

  Alan Black, a survivor of the Kingsmill massacre; he was shot with his ten workmates.

  It has been alleged that one of the gunmen was Raymond McCreesh, a PIRA Volunteer from South Armagh. McCreesh died during the 1981 hunger strike aged 24.*Three decades later, Sinn Féin, in an alliance with the Social Democratic Labour Party (SDLP) rather controversially named a children’s playground in Newry after the dead PIRA man. Another of the gunmen that day was thought to have been Peter Joseph Cleary, who was himself shot dead in an undercover ambush by SAS troops on 15 April 1976 at Forkhill, South Armagh.

  There was further controversy in 2018, when on the fortieth anniversary of the massacre, a Sinn Féin MP, Barry McElduff, posted a video of himself balancing a Kingsmill-branded loaf on his head. He later claimed that there was no reference to the sectarian murders of January 1976. His actions were described as both indefensible as well as inexcusable by representatives on both sides of the divide; he was forced to resign as Sinn Féin MP for West Tyrone.

  It is worth noting that the Provisionals may well have been motivated by the earlier double murder of two Catholic men at Cortamlaght near Newtownhamilton in Co. Armagh the previous August. Just before midnight on that night – 24 August 1975 – Colm McCartney (22) and his friend, John Farmer (32), were returning to their homes in Bellaghy after watching a GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association) game in Dublin. Their car was flagged down by men wearing British Army uniforms, at what they thought was a routine VCP just a few miles from the Irish border. However, the men were UVF men in stolen uniforms; they made both men turn around before shooting them in the head. In what was a bizarre twist, the killers moved one of the bodies some distance before dumping it outside the house of a relative of a policeman killed by the Provisionals earlier that month. It seems likely that this use of stolen uniforms planted the seed of an idea into the minds of the local PIRA commanders, which had devastating consequences at Kingsmills. It was also used with tragic effect by the UVF when they killed members of the Miami Showband.

  On the 13th of that same month, a two-person PIRA bombing team – Rosemary Bleakley and Martin McDonagh – set out for the famous North Street Arcade in the centre of Belfast. Their plan was to plant a device before escaping on foot to evade the regular RUC/Army patrols in the area. Bleakley, a member of the women’s IRA Cumann Na mBan, and McDonagh walked into the arcade. However, the device exploded prematurely, killing them both, but also tragically killing innocent civilians Mary Dornan (30) and Ian Gallagher (41), who were in the building at the time.

  North Street Arcade. On 13 January 1976 a bomb exploded prematurely, killing four people and injuring twenty.

  Ann Street. A huge bomb was planted in a car that exploded on 28 May 1972, causing extensive damage.

  IRA bomb attack on the La Mon House Hotel.

  On 17 February 1978, the Provisi
onals set further low standards with an attack on a Protestant function at the La Mon House Hotel and restaurant in South Belfast. The La Mon was, and still is, located in Gransha Road, Comber, on the south-eastern outskirts of Belfast, close to picturesque Strangford Lough. The staff said at the time that they ‘... were a million miles from the battlefield of Belfast’, according to Belfast journalist Ivan Little. Of that cold, late winter’s evening, the same journalist said in 1978: ‘The Provisionals brought the troubles home to La Mon.’ The hotel’s Peacock Room was booked for a dinner dance for the Irish Collie Club, with another function room, the Gransha, designated for the Northern Ireland Junior Motor Cycle Club; in all, around 450 guests and staff were on the premises that night. They were joined by ‘gate-crashers’ in the form of the Provisional IRA.

  Just after 20.00 hours, the bombing unit, under cover of darkness, attached an incendiary device to four petrol canisters, fixing it to the metal grille of a window to the Peacock Room. Inside were several hundred people, drinking, dining and enjoying themselves in this oasis of tranquillity from the violence that had ravaged their country for more than eight years. The device was designed to explode, igniting the estimated 20 litres of petrol that would drive the blast and the napalm-like liquid into the room, incinerating anything and anyone in its path. The bombers slipped away, it is claimed to give an adequate warning to the police; however, in shades of the Claudy atrocity, every public telephone they tried to use had been vandalised. Additionally, the bombers were held up at a British Army VCP, thus fatefully delaying them further. The warning was finally telephoned through at 20.45 hours, reaching the RUC barracks at Newtownards at 20.57 hours. A scant three minutes later, at 21.00, the incendiary device detonated, forcing burning petrol into the room at 24,600ft per second, engulfing human beings and furniture with a total lack of discrimination. The fireball was estimated at being 40ft high and 60ft wide. Twelve people were killed instantly, their bodies seared by blast furnace-like flames. The dead were turned into charred ashes, some of them shrinking so much in the intense heat that rescue workers thought the shrivelled bodies were children. A further thirty were severely burned, with several having charred, irreparably damaged limbs amputated. When the police rang the La Mon management to warn them that a bomb had been planted, even before the officer could speak, the manager cried out: ‘For God’s sake, get out here: a bomb has exploded!’ One doctor who saw the remains described them as being like ‘... charred logs of wood ...’

  The RUC used a gruesome photograph of one of the victims to shock people into either passing on information to the SF, or at the very least denting the Nationalist community’s appetite for supporting the Provisionals. Eventually, the RUC were forced to withdraw the poster once grieving relatives had discovered the identity of the charred victim. It did, however, illustrate the near-impossible task given to the pathologists of identifying the dead. Indeed, at one stage, the RUC were compelled to use a Protestant vicar – the Reverend Roy MaGee from Dundonald – to liaise with the families of those murdered. He explained how he had to visit the loved ones and obtain samples of clothing, hair from brushes and even dental records to help in the massive forensic task. He told the BBC: ‘When one went into the Mortuary and saw what, had been a short time before, human beings, it was just too horrific to recount.’

  La Mon House Hotel Provisional IRA bomb victim Sandra Morris.

  Carol Mills.

  Christine Lockhart.

  The dead were: Thomas Neeson (52), father of three; Sandra Morris (27), mother of two; Christine Lockhart (32); Ian McCracken (25) and his wife Elizabeth (25); Sarah Wilson Cooper (62); Gordon Crothers (30), RUCR, and his wife Joan (26), mother of one; Daniel Maghill (37); Carol Mills (27); Paul Nelson (37) and his wife Dorothy (35), mother of two. Three married couples were among the dead, incinerated by the unforgiving napalm-style blast, and eight children were orphaned. At the funerals, several of the mourners, survivors of the attack, could be clearly seen with their hands encased in bandages and blue plastic protections. Moreover, it was only on the day of the funerals that the Provisionals admitted responsibility for the outrage.

  David McLenaghan, RUC, said:

  The rotunda mortuary at the RVH was a scene of horror that even Stephen King couldn’t imagine. There was marble slab upon slab circulating out from the entrance door, laden with the black charred bodies that had been out at a dog fanciers’ party. A scene which was made all the more horrific, if it could, by the smell of burnt flesh, something that took days of spraying to remove, once the last poor soul had left.

  It has been frequently alleged that the mastermind of the attack was Seamus Twomey, alongside Volunteers of the ‘Third Battalion, Belfast Brigade’. Twenty-five known ‘players’ were arrested for questioning, including Gerry Adams, who two months later became President of Sinn Féin. All of the arrested men were later released, but the real perpetrators had fled across the border into the Irish Republic.

  The Provisionals have always claimed that they tried to warn the RUC about the bomb, claiming that extraneous factors had hampered their attempts. One Sinn Féin apologist, journalist Sorley Alastar, wrote to the Belfast Telegraph following its article on the fortieth anniversary of the bombing:

  Are you sensationalizing it for your own sectarian gains? There was a warning issued, the intention was not for loss of life but a commercial target. The telephone box that was to be used had been vandalized and then the volunteers were stopped at a UDR checkpoint thus preventing a warning to be issued to evacuate the hotel while on their way to the nearest phonebox. The Republican movement issued an apology.

  It is this type of revisionism that further diminishes the credibility of the Irish Republican movement to some eyes. The Provisionals frequently and quite deliberately issued misleading warnings, often failing to reveal the precise locations of their bombs, or even lying about the planned detonation time. In the latter instance, their objective was to mislead evacuation personnel; this had the dual benefits of killing SF who thought that they had more time, while also killing or injuring members of the public. Thus, they were able to label the RUC inept, even claiming that they (the police) had intentionally misunderstood the warnings to maximise loss of life for their own propaganda purposes. It was a cynical ploy that tragically worked many times. Spokespersons for the Provisionals, people such as Gerry Adams, were frequently seen in the media, ‘regretting’ the loss of life, whilst simultaneously blaming the SF for their inability to cope.

  In late August 1979, two major blows to the British Army as well as to the Royal Family took place in a very short time span. It was to be the worst single loss of British troops since the massacre of soldiers in Khormaksar, Aden, in 1967. In addition to the deaths of eighteen soldiers, the Viceroy of India, Commander Louis Mountbatten, along with members of his family and fishing party, were also murdered on that day. In both incidents, the perpetrators were the Provisional IRA. The author was informed by the former agent Raymond Gilmour that the man who gave the order for both attacks was the late Martin McGuinness, at that time the most senior commander in the IRA.

  A man lies injured on the ground after being caught in a bomb explosion in Donegall Street, Belfast. (Fred Hoare)

  The first attack of Monday, 27 August took place at 11.45, British summer time, after Mountbatten (79) and his party had boarded his moored yacht, Silver Shadow V; it was moored at Mullaghmore, Co. Sligo, in the Irish Republic. The boat was left there for much of the year, often unguarded. It has troubled many people over the course of the past forty years that the Royal Protection Service were caught unawares on that bright sunny day. Such a high-ranking member of the Royal Family – he was after all the Queen’s cousin – was a very likely target for assassination at the hands of the Provisional IRA. If either Mountbatten himself, British Intelligence, even An Gardaí Siochana felt that way, there is very little prima facia evidence of such concern. Sometime during the hours of darkness of the 26th, a PIRA ASU bombing team was able
to sneak aboard the boat and plant an explosive device.

  In his book, John Barratt maintains that the Provisionals made an attempt on Mountbatten’s life the previous year.* In this incident, a PIRA sniper had set up a tripod-mounted weapon in bushes close to the Lough; however, rough waters off Mullaghmore prevented the shot from taking place. The late Sean O’Callaghan, a top-ranking Gardaí Special Branch agent inside the IRA, had allegedly informed his handlers of the attempt, thus alerting British sources to the potential threat against Mountbatten. If this was the case, the Irish omitted to pass on the information to their British or at least, Northern Irish, counterparts. There is, of course, the unthinkable: that British Military Intelligence chose to ignore the warning, and that Mountbatten was sacrificed to continue the build-up of the case against the Provisionals.

  A bomb explodes in a stationery shop in Royal Avenue, Belfast. (Fred Hoare)

  Whatever the truth of the matter, the facts are these: in the very early hours of the 26th/27th, PIRA member Thomas McMahon climbed on board the unguarded boat, planting a radio-controlled explosive device weighing 50lb (22.7kg). McMahon was a member of the South Armagh Brigade of PIRA; he was one of their most experienced bomb-makers. The late Raymond Gilmour named Padraig Mullaine, another leading PIRA explosives expert, as being involved in the assembling of the device. The vessel began to slip out into the lough; at approximately 11.45, the watching bomber triggered the device. The Silver Shadow V, some 200ft off the shoreline, disappeared in a flash of light, followed by a deafening thunderclap. Pieces of wood, metal and human body parts, having been blown into the air, began to crash back into the churned-up water; soon all that remained were floating pieces of matchwood. Mountbatten was terribly injured, having had both legs torn off; he floated, unconscious, among the debris. His grandson, Nicholas Knatchbull (14), and crew member, Paul Maxwell (15), were both killed instantly. Mountbatten’s mother-in-law, Doreen Brabourne, was fatally injured and died the following day. His daughter, Patricia, son-in-law, John Knatchbull, and other grandson, Timothy, were hurled into the water; although barely conscious, all three survived. Alerted by the blast, a fishing boat went to the rescue, pulling Lord Mountbatten, unconscious and bleeding profusely, from the water. He died just minutes later without even reaching the shore.