The British Army in Northern Ireland 1975-77

by Ken Wharton

  You are a hardened gunman, ready to kill or maim without compunction or mercy at the orders of your superiors in the Provisional IRA. I am of the view that you are a danger to society. (Lost Lives. pp.739-740)

  Later in the day, an IRA volunteer threw a blast bomb at a manned sangar outside the Unity Flats in Belfast. The flats were 100% Catholic and fiercely Nationalist and during the course of the Troubles were a constant source of problems – at least two soldiers were killed there. There were several main blocks, some four storeys high, and given their location close to the Shankill and Crumlin Roads and surrounded on all sides by Loyalist areas these were a target for sectarian attacks and a breeding ground for Republican paramilitaries. The place was a veritable concrete jungle with a few cosmetic but scrawny trees dotted here and there. Although the sangar at the time of the attack was manned, no soldiers were injured and four shots were fired at the fleeing bomber; he escaped unscathed.

  Whilst the Provisionals continued their incendiary blitz on shops in mainly Belfast and Londonderry, with 25 separate attacks, there were more fortunate escapes for members of the SF in Bellaghy, Co Londonderry and Rasharkin, Co Antrim. In the first instance, a part-time soldier in the UDR was working at his farm in Co Londonderry and was occupied with his piggery. The IRA had planted an explosive device in a pile of manure and a length of catgut was attached to a wheelbarrow. It was intended to explode as soon as he moved the wheelbarrow; when he did so, the device detonated but despite being showered in manure, he suffered only shock. In the second incident, two RUCR officers were sitting in a police vehicle outside a row of houses, when IRA gunmen opened fire on them. At least four shots were fired, but when the two officers got out and returned fire, the gunmen ran off.

  SOUTH ARMAGH MEMORIES

  Tim Marsh, 2nd Battalion, Royal Green Jackets

  Our four-month operational tour of duty was based in Bessbrook Mill, just outside Newry. We were responsible for the permanent vehicle checkpoint which was situated on the Drumalane Road border crossing at O’Meath. Our task was searching cars and HGVs, especially the ones loaded with fertiliser. Our transport in and out of the location was by Wessex helicopter as the threat to military vehicles was very high.

  Our other tasks in Bessbrook Mill included manning another vehicle checkpoint which was situated on the Derrymore Road near the main helicopter landing area. We also did protection of the local RUC station in Bessbrook village; all of this work could be classed as boring to the novice but it was vital work to slow down the IRA’s supply chain. As we all know there were many roads into the North which they could use. Our platoon was also used to reinforce other companies and additional cover for big planned searches in the Bessbrook area.

  I remember a time we were called to do standby at a location in Newry, and it was a case of sitting about waiting for something to happen. Then the call came to crash out to an incident on a back street in Newry. When we arrived the place was swarming with RUC men; the situation was that a vehicle had been attacked and it turned out to be a security vehicle carrying a lot of money. The RUC were surrounding the vehicle to preserve the area for evidence. The security men inside the vehicle had, unfortunately, been killed. More police arrived on the scene with SOCO and then we returned to the Newry location [this incident will be covered in Volume 2].

  Our other task at Bessbrook Mill was armed escort duties and I remember me and a guy called John had been tasked to escort the paymaster. John signed out an SMG from the armoury, whilst I signed out a Browning 9mm and we both got dressed into our civilian clothes. We got into a civilian vehicle which made its way to Banbridge town centre so the paymaster could pick up money from the bank. The car drew up outside the bank and before I could say to John that I would go into the bank, he was out of the car in civilian clothes and holding his Sterling L2A3 sub-machine gun. Then I noticed that up the road were two RUC patrolmen – they gave John a funny look as he rushed back to the car! Perhaps they thought we were going to do a robbery but changed our minds; who knows?

  One incident which will stick in my mind forever took place early the next year. We had a call from our HQ that Lieutenant-Colonel Ian Cordon-Lloyd 2nd Battalion the Royal Green Jackets had been in a helicopter accident. The helicopter had gone to an incident in the Jonesborough area. We later found out that Captain Philip Schofield, our adjutant, was in the helicopter as well; we did not know at this time if there were any survivors. The IRA claimed they had shot the helicopter down but that could not be confirmed. [This will be covered in Volume 2].

  On the 8th and 9th, the incendiary attacks continued, and the RUC and Army were seemingly helpless to prevent this latest IRA campaign. Millions of pounds of damage had already been caused and, in one of the latest attacks, a major wholesalers in Corporation Street, Belfast, was totally destroyed by a car bomb placed at the entrance. A hoax device at Ballylumford Power Station caused great consternation and the plant had to be evacuated. However, thanks to information received, a massive police swoop on the Nationalist Short Strand area of Belfast made over 20 arrests and bomb-making equipment was seized. Simultaneous swoops on the New Lodge, Beechmount and the Unity Flats had smaller but similar results. However, undeterred, the Provisionals sent out more teams and three attacks in the centre of Belfast on commercial premises showed their capacity to regroup even after setbacks.

  Earlier, a member of the Royal Military Police (RMP) was killed in a tragic RTA in the Belfast area. Corporal George Hall Middlemas (23) from Chester-Le-Street in County Durham was buried at Pelton in his native North-East. On the 14th, another RTA in the Province claimed the life of Sapper James Vance (19) of the Royal Engineers. He was the fifth Royal Engineer to be killed in Northern Ireland in 1977.

  On the 11th, the Provisionals planted a van bomb outside Keenan’s Bar in King Street, Belfast. They claimed later that warnings had been phoned through to the RUC and the Samaritans giving plenty of time to evacuate civilians. However, the RUC deny this – this author is more inclined to trust the police rather than the Republican paramilitaries – and the Samaritans stated that the warning they were given was insufficient to adequately warn the pub management. With only minutes to react, Patrick Shields, a Catholic and father of ten children employed as a security guard bravely tried to shepherd the customers to safety. Thanks to the inadequate warning, he was caught in a massive blast as the van exploded; he was killed instantly. One wonders if the godfathers of the IRA even contemplated apologising to the ten Shields children who had been left without a father.

  During that same bloody evening, masked PIRA men forced their way into the lounge bar at the Kildress Inn in Tyrone. They then fired a shot through the CCTV camera and poured petrol over a pool table and other parts of the bar. Having set it alight, they ran outside where they left three suspect devices which turned out to be hoaxes, but the pub on the main Omagh to Cookstown Road was very badly damaged. Gallagher’s tobacco factory in Henry Street, Belfast was hit by several incendiary devices but very little damage was done as PIRA sought to provoke the company to lay off workers and use their hardship to put pressure on the British Government to withdraw from the Province.

  The Provisionals’ incendiary campaign continued and several more devices went off and caused major damage in shops in Belfast, before they turned their attention to Dungannon and Armagh City. The fire brigades in both areas were finding it difficult to contain and PIRA were winning this stage of the campaign. On the 15th, a new hoax campaign was started and several gas cylinders – all of which proved harmless – were left at Albertbridge Road and Montrose Street and Templemore Avenue in Belfast and another at the Co-op on Woodstock Road. The Army was forced to fire at each cylinder in order to minimise possible blast damage, but all proved to be empty. Later, supermarkets in Rasharkin, Co Antrim, were hit by the IRA, involving a petrol bomb in one and a suspected car bomb outside another.

  At this stage, the Fire Workers Union went on strike and soldiers throughout the UK and especially in Nor
thern Ireland were forced to man their ancient ‘Green Goddesses’ in order to combat fires. On the 16th, an Army fire engine was called out to a fire at Wolfhill Road, Ligoniel caused by a UFF firebomb. A young girl – Marcia Gregg (15) – realised that her house was burning and bravely got her brothers and sisters out of an upstairs bedroom but was too frightened to jump herself. Tragically, she was engulfed by the flames, but her nine other siblings all survived. Her father and neighbours were pleading with her to jump, but she failed to do so and was overcome by the heat and fumes. In February 1976, the Loyalist terror group killed three women, two of them Catholic, at a house in the same street and Marcia’s father had given evidence. Thus the Loyalists sought revenge and tried to kill a family of 12, uncaring that they were innocent children.

  The day after, another soldier was killed, although not at the hands of Republican terrorists. Lance Corporal Barry Michael Hylton (25) of the Army Catering Corps (motto, appropriately enough is Escam in tempore: We sustain) was shot in a barracks somewhere in Northern Ireland. That he was killed by a negligent discharge (ND) is not in doubt, but whether or not it was an unloading error or horseplay is not known.

  The following morning a bomb left in a shop doorway by a PIRA bombing team was spotted by a UDR foot patrol on Lisburn Road, Belfast. The device outside the premises of Polyprint Fabrics did explode, causing massive damage, but the alert soldiers had managed to clear the area beforehand. There was a lucky escape both for a customer and for the Spar shop in which he was making purchases. The man was in the shop in Cookstown and had, appropriately enough, picked up a packet of firelighters. As he looked at it, he noticed an incendiary device inside and quickly dropped it; as he did so, it exploded but spluttered out with minimal damage.

  The 19th saw a continuation of the cassette incendiary campaign and a derelict house close to the Falls was set alight as a ‘come on’ to the Army. Soldiers attended and succeeded in extinguishing the flames but four live mortars were discovered and were close to exploding with deadly consequences. There were, most clearly, no dirty tricks to which the Provisionals would not employ. One imagines a seedy, smoke-filled living room, somewhere on the ‘Murph, or Turf Lodge or the New Lodge or Ardoyne, with three or four hardened Provisionals sitting around discussing ways to kill soldiers or policemen. Most of their sordid and cowardly discussions came to nought, but the deaths of over 1,600 members of the security forces over those 30 plus years bears eloquent testimony to their success on occasions. A second ‘come on’ was attempted the same day when a grocers’ shop in Twadell Avenue, close to the Crumlin Road, was firebombed. Very close to where the IRA had calculated that soldiers would take cover, they had placed mortar bombs and explosives; EOD were called in to defuse.

  On the 21st, Roy Mason, then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, suggested that a 78 seat Assembly, without legislative powers, could be established at Stormont with committees which would look after non-controversial matters. This ‘Five Point Plan’ was similar in a number of respects to a scheme suggested by James Molyneaux, then leader of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), and was not warmly received by the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). Interest in this proposal declined over the coming months. On the same day, an Army VCP on Monaghan Road in Aughnacloy, Co Tyrone, just yards from the Irish border, came under automatic fire. Gunmen on the border side of Co Monaghan using either a GPMG or Bren fired over 40 rounds at the soldiers but none were hit. Gardaí attended but the gunmen were long gone.

  On the 22nd, a baby came perilously close to death when a young mother purchased a baby blanket from a store in Belfast and took it to her home in Glencairn Pass. Unknown to her, an IRA team had planted an incendiary device inside the blanket, intending it should explode in-store; the baby was unharmed. At roughly the same time, the IRA, having fire-bombed and destroyed the Co-op on Springfield Road, Belfast, set up a booby-trap in order to kill or injure troops on follow-up. The device exploded and injured one soldier. A Sinn Fein apologist claimed that adequate warnings had been telephoned through, but as was usually the case, they deliberately left it too late for people to react to their warnings.

  Through the remainder of November, the Provisionals continued to use both blast and incendiary devices in order to disrupt normal life and cripple the financial heart of the country. At one of these incidents in a draper’s shop on Belfast’s Ormeau Road, the resulting blast injured a man aged 31 and a teenage boy as they walked past the shop at the wrong moment. There was also a major conflagration in Smithfield Market in Belfast after two firebombs were hurled into commercial premises and a proxy bomb caused major damage to Corry’s timber yard in Belfast. A PO’s house was attacked by the IRA and a blast bomb was left on the officer’s windowsill; the explosion caused some damage but the PO and his family were uninjured. It is indeed a testimony to the courage of both the UDR and the Prison Service that they continued working in the face of these cowardly attacks on them when they were off-duty.

  On 26 November, William Craig, then a Member of Parliament (MP), announced that the Vanguard Unionist Progressive Party (VUPP) would cease to exist as a political party as from 25 February 1978.

  On the 28th, there was an attempt to kill and maim soldiers and police at Newtownhamilton RUC station. A 5lb device was placed in a tin and packed with jagged pieces of metal and left at the front of the station, attached to trip wires from the sangar to the entrance to the helicopter pad. This entrance was used by troops to reach the pad – fortunately it was noticed and later defused. In order to get to the heli-pad the soldiers had to come out of a gate at the sangar, cross the road and either go down a flight of steps or go down the road about 30 yards where there was a lane that led down to the pad beside the egg box factory. The following day, as they sought to further disrupt both commercial and civilian life and routine, PIRA bombed the Dub Supermarket in Upper Malone, Belfast. An anonymous caller informed the Samaritans that bombs had been placed at about the moment a device exploded and wrecked the premises. A second ‘device’ turned out to be a brick wrapped in brown paper. The month ended with an IRA double attack on two shops – Gillespie & Wilson’s hardware store and Crumlin Road Chemists. When the Army arrived, they found two bombs nearby and were in the process of making them safe when the two in the other aforementioned shops exploded. Damage was major in the chemists and only slight at the hardware shop. Somewhat ironically, the Square Deal Stores, with branches in Lisburn Road, Antrim Road and Frances Street, Newtownards announced a ‘Bomb Damage’ sale with bargains galore which had been salvaged from the ruins of the Provisionals’ handiwork. The author can trace no information if the IRA ever bombed this particular chain of stores.

  The month of November had ended with deaths in single figures for another month. Four soldiers and two civilians had died during the month. There were no overtly sectarian deaths; of the six deaths, the Republicans were responsible for three and Loyalists for one.

  36

  December

  Undercover soldiers were in the news this month; the first instance occurred when an INLA member tried to hijack an Army ‘Q’ car and the other when a young Det 14 soldier was ambushed by the Provisionals. Deaths were kept in single figures again as Christmas approached; six people died in Troubles or Troubles-related incidents. It was to be the ninth Christmas of the Troubles; there would be 19 more.

  Further incendiary devices were planted in Belfast City Centre and the transportation of and planting of were becoming virtually undetectable. RUC officers were called to Ellison’s Wholesalers in Great Victoria Street in Belfast and devices disposed of by the Army. Minutes later, two youths acting under the orders of PIRA dropped two parcels outside the SKF Roller Bearings factory on Newtownards Road; both exploded, but caused only minor damage. On the 2nd, there was a lucky escape for the 200 employees of G&S Wholesalers in Gordon Street, Belfast. Armed and masked men forced their way into the premises and planted an explosive device before running off. No warnings were phoned through and
the bombing team failed to say how much time was left before detonation. Only minutes later, whilst they were still in the process of evacuation, the bomb exploded; the building was destroyed and two members of staff were taken to hospital, although their injuries were slight. Barrs’ C&C in Agnes Street off the Shankill Road was the next to be attacked and masked gunmen first of all locked the staff in a storeroom before planting a bomb. Fortunately, the staff were able to free themselves and escape the building before the device exploded.

  On the 3rd, a Republican icon was arrested – the arrest probably ended his tenure in the Provisional IRA. Seamus Twomey was dedicated to armed struggle as a means of unifying Ireland. In an interview with French television on 11 July 1977, he declared that although the IRA had fought for seven years, it could fight on for another 70 against the British in Northern Ireland as well as Britain.

  Twomey was captured in Dublin by the Garda Síochána, who had been tipped-off by Belgian police about a concealed arms shipment, to be delivered to a bogus company with an address in the area. They swooped on a house in Martello Terrace to discover Twomey outside in his car, wearing his trademark dark glasses. After a high-speed car chase, he was arrested in Sandycove, Dublin; Twomey’s arrest ended his tenure as IRA chief of staff.