Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles, 1966–1975, by Huw Bennett

For many decades, scholars have debated how the Northern Ireland Troubles might be defined; whether a guerrilla or civil war, insurgency or terrorist campaign. Generally, the more statist accounts, or at least those based on state records, have ended up on the more conservative end of the spectrum, tending toward the view that the police and army provided lawful protection against the illegitimate forces (both republican and loyalist extremists) who opposed them. In this book, Huw Bennett, a military historian whose previous work includes a book-length study of the Kenyan Emergency, successfully challenges and rebuts the extent to which this statist view can be maintained even when looking through the state’s own records. In so doing, Bennett sets a high new standard for research on Northern Ireland that is as independent as it is discomfiting.

Bennett’s main argument rejects the standard critical line that the British army unwittingly deployed colonial counterinsurgency tactics in Northern Ireland once the Provisional IRA’s campaign got under way. Instead, he argues that Prime Minister Ted Heath knowingly declared an unofficial war on the IRA from around March 1971 in order to crush them, and to avoid a Unionist backlash and the further spread of the conflict to the Republic of Ireland and Britain. The Ministry of Defence welcomed and supported Heath’s line, as it took the pressure off the British Army on the Rhine and Britain’s wider NATO commitment by minimising the length of the Northern Ireland conflict and thus also their long-term commitment to it. However, the strategy backfired with disastrous consequences before it was gradually abandoned after March 1972. The way Bennett’s argument is justified has important caveats but it is well supported and nuanced as a result. Heath, though more hardline than in previous treatments, is less aggressive than the Northern Ireland prime minister Brian Faulkner, who sought only ‘more troops and more repression’ (p. 114). However, Bennett concludes that: ‘The road to Bloody Sunday had several way points where ministers and senior officers paused to consider whether to keep on going. They chose to do so in the knowledge that unarmed people were being shot’ (p. 118).

With regard to Bloody Sunday, when soldiers of the Parachute Regiment shot twenty-six unarmed civilians, fatally wounding fourteen, Bennett goes further than the meticulous Bloody Sunday Inquiry by looking both at the record of the unit involved and the ways in which both the army and the state worked independently to cover up the events. A damning indictment of General Ford (Commander Land Forces) is the conclusion, with extended criticism of the ministers who never moved against him (p. 192).

On the fear of loyalism, Bennett is consistent and clear: the army in these years had a modus vivendi evidenced in both the blind eye they turned to evidence of collusion in their own ranks and in the planning of their strategic operations which exclusively targeted Republican strongholds (and therefore Catholic areas). The unintended capture (and intentional release) of the UVF’s entire leadership in October 1972 is the starkest example (p. 208), but typical of wider strategic attitudes perpetuated even after the imposition of (supposedly fairer) Direct Rule in March 1972.

Progress was made in later months (the book covers the period up to 1975) where a combination of observation points, parallel and helicopter patrolling, the ‘chatting up’ of local civilians and the ‘Robot Telephone’ (a precursor to the Confidential Telephone) reduced both army and civilian deaths caused by the army to a point where they were no longer actively escalating the conflict. The book therefore begs for a second volume for the period in which police primacy, though likely itself a frustration, helped rebuild at least some trust in the nationalist/Catholic community by the conflict’s end.

Though expertly researched, there is a contradiction for this reader in the way in which Bennett rejects colonial counterinsurgency as a paradigm for the army’s behaviour. For one, the language in which the Catholics are described, even in the sanitised formal documents in the archives (pp. 25, 118, 127, 241), denotes prejudice and communal blame that bears stark resemblance to an axiomatic colonial attitude that would be referred to as racism if race were the factor that differentiated them. That the army deluded themselves with the view that all complaints were part of an IRA smear campaign simply reinforced the contradictory stereotypes that they had about Catholics, nationalists and republicans in Northern Ireland. The Falls Road Curfew, the army’s use of CS gas in residential areas, and the actions of army’s MRF units might have provided more contradictory evidence had they been explored in more detail. Colonialism it may not be, but it is something.

That the definition of collusion is kept narrow and direct is important and convincing. UDA parades looked militarised precisely because their numbers contained both former and serving members of HM Armed Forces. But so, too, there are examples within the Provisional IRA, for example Paul Marlowe (formerly of the Parachute Regiment and SAS), who in 1972 was training new Provisional IRA volunteers, having gained his own combat experience in Aden and Borneo (p. 218).

Criticisms include the need for more careful consideration of the MoD documents, which too often are taken at face value despite the caveats. Nonetheless, an objective description of their content and perspective remains useful. More nuance, too, on the Northern Ireland Office’s frustration with the MoD by 1975 was possible, and particularly when the former viewed the 2nd Battalion The Parachute Regiment as undermining their 1975 ceasefire with the Provisionals. The absence of a police source-base is unfortunate, if unavoidable, but there is little doubt that criticisms went both ways. Though the securitisation of Northern Ireland to the point that it became a de facto war is not proven in Bennett’s book, overall this is a fascinating, provocative, humane and objective study which rewrites the history of the British Army in Northern Ireland in these pivotal years and more broadly suggests the way that military history can and should be written.