Patrick Mercer reviews Huw Bennett’s Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles, 1966-1975 for The Critic:
Seen from today’s perspective, the litany of campaigns Britain fought between the World Wars seems unimportant. Yet disasters such as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar in April 1919, and the depredations of the Auxiliaries or Black and Tans in Ireland at much the same time, imperilled imperial strategy. [Richard Dannatt & Robert Lyman’s] Victory to Defeat underlines the actions of relatively small numbers of troops which threatened to unhinge whole campaigns. It makes the perfect counterpoint to Huw Bennett’s Uncivil War, which covers the opening years of the crisis in Northern Ireland in meticulous detail.
Bennett looks at operations in Northern Ireland only up until 1975 — arguably the most intense period — with a promise of further volumes to follow. This is the first, comprehensive attempt to deal in parallel with the political aspects of the campaign as well as the purely military ones. Although densely written, Uncivil War gives a very readable account of the first of three decades of conflict which dominated the everyday life of most of the combat arms of the Army. It now seems ironic, though, that Ulster was always treated as something of a sideshow when compared with the “real soldiering” of deterring the Soviets in Germany.
Central to Bennett’s book is the debacle of “Bloody Sunday” in January 1972, when paratroopers ran amok in Londonderry at a point of the campaign when the IRA was exhausted and finding it almost impossible to recruit. Politically, there might have been a breakthrough; militarily the terrorists were teetering on collapse, but one black sheep unit and the ham-fisted response by the chain of command galvanised the IRA. With a rifle’s crack, they guaranteed bloodshed for years to come.
If ever a victory was turned into defeat in modern times, this was it. Bennett pulls no punches in pointing that out. The interesting contrast with Lyman and Dannatt’s work is that no matter how much had been learnt from the Second World War, the doctrine that emerged could only be tested by blank firing exercises in Germany. Whilst the highly unlikely possibility of a war in Europe was constantly analysed, very little strategic thinking was put into the grinding, long-term campaign in Ulster that was actually killing people.
Certainly there were political initiatives and the intelligence machinery was constantly evolving, but the many battalions and regiments who were charged with everyday deterrence and occasional attrition wandered the streets with little imagination or flair, often only seeming to provide targets for the terrorists. If war against the Soviets was remote, bombs, snipers and ambushes in Ulster were certain. By contrast, the Field Service Pocket Book (India) of 1930 laid out clear advice and principles for operations on the North-West Frontier. In Ulster, we just blundered on.
If the lessons of 1918 were neglected, those that led to victory in 1945 were carefully studied, although any coherent tactical doctrine took until the 1980s to be published. Perversely, the operations that followed both world wars were much the same: small, far-flung, post-imperial scuffles which owed little to “conventional” fighting. Indeed, it might be argued that the real lessons that the Army needed to heed after 1945 were not those of a European war, but those which might have prepared it for long years in Northern Ireland or the former colonies.
