Guerrillas in our midst: Reflections on the British experience of counter-insurgency in popular fiction

ABSTRACT

Over the past two decades the historical record of Britain’s wars against a series of insurgencies has experienced a fundamental academic re-assessment, challenging established beliefs about how the British state and its institutions – in particular the British Army – have waged counterinsurgency, and questioning traditional presumptions that Britain fought its insurgent enemies according to a doctrine guided by ‘hearts and minds’ and ‘minimum force’. This article shows that hints about the murky reality behind the ‘British way in counterinsurgency’ can be seen in novels published during the post-war era, some of which used recent conflicts as their subject matter, others of which referred tangentially to previous wars. Not only were these best-selling books with an international audience, but these authors had experience with Britain’s armed forces and intelligence services, and were either directly involved in counterinsurgency conflicts, or their works indicated insight and knowledge about them. Their books provided fictional illustrations of many of the themes – coercive tactics against civilians, special operations against insurgents, inter-departmental disputes, the lack of cultural understanding, the maltreatment of detainees and the excessive use of force against suspected insurgents and civilians – that have been identified and examined by military historians and other academic specialists covering Britain and counterinsurgency.

KEYWORDS:

• Counter-insurgency
• British army
• popular culture
• fiction

And what would the casual observer think of him, ‘Commander James Bond, GMG, RNVSR’, also ‘something at the Ministry of Defence’, the rather saturnine young man in his middle thirties sitting opposite the Admiral? Something a bit cold and dangerous in the face. Looks pretty fit. May have been attached to Templer in Malaya. Or Nairobi. Mau Mau work. Tough-looking customer. Doesn’t look the sort of chap one usually sees in Blades.¹  Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).

Bond aficionados will no doubt recall the scene in Fleming’s third novel where 007 is introduced to the fictional gentleman’s club by ‘M’, and beats Sir Hugo Drax in a game of bridge. As this epigraph shows, underpinning the fantasy plot of a neo-Nazi villain planning a nuclear attack on London as revenge for the Third Reich’s defeat was the reality of the ‘small wars’ Britain was fighting in its colonies at the time Moonraker was published; against the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) insurgents in Malaya, those of the Greek nationalist Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston (EOKA) in Cyprus and the Mau Mau in Kenya. The British armed forces and intelligence services also had two recently-concluded counter-insurgency (COIN) campaigns in the Middle East, in Palestine (1945–1948) and in the Canal Zone of Egypt (1951–1954). Even in peacetime, Britain was at war, and its armed forces have been engaged annually in military operations across the globe in the 75 year period that followed the end of the Second World War.² Even if these wars did not have the same impact on the lives of Britons at home,³ they were reflected in the popular culture of the time.⁴

Some of these echoes of COIN could even be seen in the school slang of the 1980s; the author and his peers used the term ‘duffing up’ to describe a playground drubbing without realising that the term dated from mandate-era Palestine in the 1930s, and referred to an officer in the Palestine Police with the surname Duff who was renowned for beating suspects in his custody.⁵ Other examples concerned the books, films and television series⁶ which referenced Britain’s post-war conflicts either openly or implicitly, such as the 1960 heist thriller The League of Gentlemen, in which a retired British Army Lieutenant-Colonel played by Jack Hawkins co-opts a group of cashiered ex-officers to carry out a bank raid. These renegades include Captain Martin Porthill (played by Bryan Forbes), who is dishonourably discharged from the British Army after summarily executing two EOKA suspects in Cyprus.⁷ This article focuses on the portrayal of COIN in popular novels of the post-war era, particularly from the thriller genre. While it does not provide a comprehensive survey of the literature, it does highlight the works of authors who achieved international acclaim, and who had either direct knowledge of their subject matter (as former soldiers or intelligence/security officers), or had served with personnel who could provide such information, or were potentially in a position to fictionalise their own experiences.⁸

The subject of COIN in fiction has received some attention, notably with John Newsinger’s work on the Special Air Service (SAS) and the doctoral thesis of the former Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) terrorist Patrick Magee, who researched his PhD while imprisoned for his part in the Brighton bombing of October 1984, which came close to killing the then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.⁹ From a critical perspective neither of these sources is free from ideological bias,¹⁰ while elite units of the British Army such as the SAS and the Parachute Regiment tend either to be lionised or demonised on political grounds, particularly for their roles in conflicts such as that in Northern Ireland from 1969 to 1998.¹¹ This article discusses the portrayal of Britain’s COIN campaigns in fictional works, and to highlight how – either through direct knowledge of informed guesswork – they often anticipated many of the controversial findings by scholars reassessing the history of the UK’s post-1945 wars. These fictional cases alluded the murky reality behind the mythology of ‘hearts and minds’ and ‘minimum force’ which scholars have revealed in a series of studies on conflicts from Palestine to Northern Ireland.

The author uses the term ‘insurgency’ to describe an internal armed revolt aimed at destabilising and overthrowing a government for ideological purposes that vary from separatism, to religious fervour or to revolutionary objectives. Much of the language around this aspect of warfare is shaped by inherent biases, as belligerents waging insurgencies will depict themselves as ‘freedom fighters’ belonging to a ‘national liberation army’ while their enemies portray them as ‘terrorists’. There is no agreed definition that distinguishes an ‘insurgent’ from a ‘terrorist’; while the usage of the former represents an effort at scholarly impartiality, the depiction of an insurgent movement in more popular literature and the media is largely by the perceptions and political perspectives of the authors.¹²

The ‘British Way’ in COIN

The COIN conflicts waged by Britain in the post-war era can be broadly grouped into three categories. The first included the struggles for decolonisation from 1945 to 1967, the most prominent being Palestine (1945–1948),¹³ Malaya (1948–1960),¹⁴ Kenya (1952–1960),¹⁵ Cyprus (1955–1959)¹⁶ and Aden/South Arabia (1962–1967).¹⁷ The second was a single domestic conflict in Northern Ireland from 1969 to 1998.¹⁸ The third involved expeditionary operations either involving advisors and special forces (with the Southern Omani province of Dhofar from 1963–1976,¹⁹ and with operations against Daesh in Iraq from 2014) or with combat troops committed as part of a multinational campaign (with Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021, and Iraq from 2003–2009).²⁰

Academic scholarship on historical rather than current conflicts has been facilitated by the British government’s process of declassification under the ‘Thirty Year Rule’, which was introduced by Harold Wilson’s government in 1965,²¹ although departments such as the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and Ministry of Defence (MOD) have used Section 3.4 of the Public Records Act to retain files.²² Successive governments from the early 1990s have declassified some historical records of the intelligence and security services (the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), MI5 and Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)), but much of their material remains closed to the public.²³ As such, to quote the scholar of intelligence Richard J. Aldrich, ‘[historians] are what they eat’,²⁴ and the alert ones should question whether official documents that remain secret have been classified because their contents are potentially embarrassing, or even scandalous. The discovery of the ‘migrated archive’ in the FCO depository at Hanslope Park in 2012 showed that a trove of government files relating to colonial rule had been kept from declassification ostensibly because of a bureaucratic oversight, although some scholars and journalists suspect that their retention from public scrutiny was due to more self-serving reasons.²⁵

As a result, the initial study of these conflicts was restricted to the sources available to academic and other researchers. In some cases, such as Northern Ireland, scholars could utilise other material for their purposes. The ‘troubles’ were extensively covered by both the British and international media. The British government and (prior to its dissolution in March 1972) the devolved administration in Stormont issued its own public pronouncements and held press conferences and media interviews, as indeed did the British Army, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), and also PIRA, other Republican and Loyalist paramilitary groups, and their respective political parties. Scholars could also use the records of debates in both the Westminster and Stormont Parliaments, official reports such as the Compton and Parker Inquiries of 1971 and 1972 into the treatment of PIRA detainees, articles describing operations in the regimental journals of the British Army and the Royal Marines, and also accounts from the Republican journal An Phoblacht or reports from non-governmental organisations such as Amnesty International and the Finucane Centre.²⁶ In contrast, the Dhofar war received sparse press coverage and limited parliamentary scrutiny, and the only sources available until the mid-2000s consisted of memoirs written by British officers who had served with the Sultan of Oman’s Armed Forces (SAF). Needless to say, this was a significant constraint for the first scholars to write about this conflict.²⁷

The basis for ‘traditional’ accounts of Britain’s experiences in COIN came from practitioners who wrote treaties based on their experiences; most notably two Army officers, Frank Kitson and Julian Paget, and a former Royal Air Force (RAF) officer who served as the Malayan Federation’s Defence Secretary during the war against the MNLA, Sir Robert Thompson.²⁸ As David French notes, these authors were treated by both Army sources and academics of the traditional school as accounts on how conflicts such as Malaya had been fought, rather than as recommendations as to how insurgencies could be defeated.²⁹ For example, the 2001 edition of the British Army’s COIN manual, ‘[the] experience of numerous small wars has provided [us] with a unique insight into this demanding form of conflict’.³⁰ The traditionalist argument was that the British developed a COIN doctrine during its wars of decolonisation that was both ethically-based and strategically successful, supported by an institutional culture in the Army that examined and absorbed the ‘lessons’ offered by successive campaigns. The British ‘way’ of fighting insurgencies was based on the concepts of ‘minimum force’ and ‘hearts and minds’. Britain’s military and security forces used restraint in fighting insurgents and handling local populations, due to the constraints imposed by both civil and military law. Furthermore, the British authorities displayed cultural understanding and empathy, seeking to understand the reasons why insurgent violence had broken out, and using a combination of political and socio-economic reforms to address the grievances that adversaries such as the MNLA and Mau Mau had exploited.³¹ The British approach to COIN therefore differed fundamentally from those of other states that resorted to indiscriminate violence and systematic coercion, whether this involved other Western powers (such as the USA in Vietnam or the French in Algeria), or authoritarian and totalitarian states. Explanations for the evolution of this ‘way’ ranged from the established importance of legal norms, the cultural attributes of the British education system (notably in the public schools from which the Army’s officer corps was largely recruited), or from what Paget claimed was ‘the natural humanity of the British Serviceman’.³²

The apparent success of the British ‘way’ in COIN was discredited by the realities of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first decade of the 21^st century, not least the bloody and frustrating experiences of British soldiers and marines fighting in South-Eastern Iraq and Helmand.³³ Concurrently, the traditional thesis on the history of Britain’s wars against insurgents was challenged and undermined by revisionist scholarship. Utilising newly available archival evidence, a new generation of academics argued that the use of exemplary and indiscriminate force was the norm in successive COIN campaigns, and that far from seeking to understand and address popular grievances the British resorted to brute force to suppress them. The tactics of COIN involved coercive measures such as the cordoning off and searching of civilian populations and the frequent use of detention without trial, while British military and security forces (including locally-recruited troops and policemen) were guilty of abuses and atrocities such as the torture of detainees and extra-judicial killings, not to mention acts of indiscipline such as the indiscriminate shooting of unarmed civilians. In the process, the civilian and military authorities also tended to cover up such abuses rather than investigate them.³⁴ Scholarship on the Kenya Emergency in particular revealed that the British colonial authorities responded to the Mau Mau rebellion with a campaign of state terror against the Kikuyu, Embu and Meru tribes. The British crushed the Mau Mau using methods such as mass detention in forced labour camps and the execution of 1,000 suspected insurgents after summary justice, and that war crimes committed by the British Army, reservist military and police units recruited from the white settler community, and loyalist forces such as the Kikuyu Home Guard were the norm, particularly in the first year of the war.³⁵ Press coverage of court cases in which former Kenyan detainees sued the British government for torture also brought public attention to the grim realities of the ‘dirty war’ against the Mau Mau.³⁶

There are however controversies within revisionist scholarship. Caroline Elkins’ use of the term ‘Britain’s gulag’ was criticised by Ronald Hyam for over-exaggerating the scale of British colonial repression by comparing it with Stalin’s crimes against humanity,³⁷ while Daniel Branch has challenged Elkins’ methodology, most notably her claim that 200,000 people were killed during the course of the anti-Mau Mau campaign (as opposed to the generally recognised figure of 20,000). Branch also argued that her scholarship has been manipulated by the then-government of President Mwai Kibaki for its own political purposes. In analysis of the British Army’s role in the Kenya Emergency Huw Bennett also refutes Elkins’ claim that the war effort amounted to genocide against the Kikuyu, while outlining the brutal and coercive tactics used to break the Mau Mau and the Army’s role in supporting them.³⁸ Studies of British COIN are now entering what Karl Hack refers to as a ‘post-revisionist’ phase focusing on explaining the character of these conflicts and why both insurgent and government forces resorted to violence. French’s own seminal work critiquing the ‘British way’ thesis argues that there was no real consistency in the way that the UK and its military and security forces approached colonial-era COIN, and that in practice it oscillated between restraint and ruthlessness. In Palestine, Cyprus, the Canal Zone and Aden ‘the security forces operated under constraints, legal and otherwise, that limited the amount of lethal force they could use’, whereas in other insurgencies ‘those constraints were in practice much weaker’, and in cases such as rural Kenya and Malaya, and the Jebel Akhdar in Oman (1957–1959), the use of force could include air strikes by the RAF.³⁹ Other authors cite the impact of constraints such as oversight by the International Committee of the Red Cross and similar organisations, or the culture of individual Army regiments (and sub-units within them).⁴⁰

These COIN conflicts were also not fought within a vacuum, and particularly dramatic events such as reports of atrocities did attract domestic attention. The Hola Camp Massacre in Kenya (3^rd March 1959) – in which a group of detainees were beaten to death by their warders – led to two well-publicised debates in the House of Commons, where the killings were condemned not only by Labour MPs such as Barbara Castle (a veteran campaigner against colonialism), but also by the Conservative Enoch Powell, otherwise best known for his racist and inflammatory speech about immigration the following decade.⁴¹ In Northern Ireland, the shooting of 13 unarmed demonstrators in Londonderry by soldiers from the 1^st Battalion the Parachute Regiment on 31^st January 1972 (‘Bloody Sunday’) caused a political uproar inflamed by a now discredited inquiry (the Widgery Report of April 1972).⁴² During the 1980s, allegations that the RUC and the SAS were carrying out an undeclared ‘shoot to kill’ policy to eliminate rather than arrest Republican terrorists were the subject of a contentious police investigation and allegations of a cover-up, which inspired the Ken Loach conspiracy thriller Hidden Agenda (1990).⁴³ It is therefore not surprising that British novels, films and television dramas often contained story-lines about COIN, even if they represented non-military genres. For example, the 1970s crime drama series The Sweeney included an episode (entitled ‘The Bigger they Are’, broadcast on 26^th October 1978) in which a tycoon is blackmailed over a massacre of villagers he participated in as a national serviceman in Malaya. This fictional crime bears a striking resemblance to the Batang Kali killings (11^th-12^th December 1948), in which a patrol from the 2^nd Battalion the Scots Guards gunned down 24 Chinese labourers, claiming that they were MNLA insurgents; revelations about this atrocity were published by the tabloid newspaper The People in February 1970.⁴⁴ The Sweeney was written by the Scottish screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin, who had served with the Gordon Highlanders in Cyprus, basing his very first television drama (Incident at Echo Six) on his national service experiences.⁴⁵

Echoes of COIN practice in fiction

As noted above, recent scholarship on British COIN conflicts calls into question the traditional assumption that civil servants, police officers and Army personnel understood the reasons why insurgents had taken up arms in the first place. It was often intellectually more convenient to attribute insurgent violence to ‘thugs’ and ‘bandits’, or (during the Cold War) to connect them to Communism and Soviet-inspired conspiracies. This is very much reflected in the fifth Bond novel, From Russia With Love (1957), during the scene where the chief of SMERSH describes to fellow senior Soviet intelligence officers the global campaign of ‘political warfare’ that the USSR is waging to weaken and destroy the West, casually referring to ‘trouble in Cyprus’ as one of its achievements. Fleming’s conspiratorial take on the Emergency provides a fictional parallel to the attempt by the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department to smear EOKA and its leader, General George Grivas, as having Communist connections, even though Grivas’ politics were closer to those of the extreme right.⁴⁶

In fiction, as in reality, it is rare to see the level of empathy shown by the eponymous spy in the Ashenden short story series published by W. Somerset Maugham in 1928. In one of Maugham’s tales (based on his own experiences in SIS during WWI), Ashenden disgusts his superior, ‘R’, when he expresses his respect for the motives and ideals displayed by an Indian nationalist in exile, Chandra Lal, who he is required to lure to his arrest, and eventual execution.⁴⁷ In war, the basis of morale rests on several factors which include the combatant’s confidence that his cause is just in contrast with his adversary’s. There have been cases where British servicemen and veterans have expressed respect for an insurgent’s courage in battle. Ian Gardiner, a Royal Marine who saw service with the SAF in Dhofar, stated that it would have been an ‘honour’ to have led fighters of the same calibre as his insurgent enemies.⁴⁸ The Dhofari guerrillas, however, were prepared to do battle with the SAF on almost equal terms, in contrast with adversaries such as Republican groups in Northern Ireland who carried out sniper and bombing attacks with little or no warning, and who were seen by soldiers and marines as cowards who hid behind civilians. A wary respect for the sophistication of a guerrilla movement’s tactics often coexisted with a sense of loathing, best expressed by an unnamed British Army officer in after an SAS ambush which killed Seumas McElwaine, a senior PIRA ‘volunteer’, in April 1986: ‘He was an extraordinary bloke who would have been in the SAS if he was in the Army. It is just as well he is dead’.⁴⁹

Gerald Seymour’s novel Harry’s Game (1975) does, however, portray the perspectives of those intimately involved in the conflict in Northern Ireland; not only the British Army and its Republican adversaries, but also the Catholic and Protestant communities. Harry’s Game begins with the shooting of a Cabinet Minister in London by a PIRA gunman, to which the unnamed Prime Minister responds by ordering a plain-clothes operation to track down the assassin. In the process, SIS enlists an Army Captain with experience of undercover operations in Aden, Harry Brown, and sends him to Belfast to find the killer, Billy Downs. Seymour's thriller confronts the reader with the impact of the ‘troubles’ on civilians. Downs’ wife is furious with her husband over his role in assassinating the Minister, and is petrified that she will lose him as a ‘martyr’ to the Republican cause. Josephine Laverty, a local Catholic girl who becomes Brown's lover, is hostile to the Army (being initially unaware that she is sleeping with a British soldier), but also disillusioned with war, telling Brown that ‘I'm not one of those who runs around with a magazine in her knickers and an Armalite up my trousers’. Most poignant of all is the plight of Theresa McCorrigan, who is arrested by the RUC after a tip-off by Brown because she slept with Downs, and who commits suicide in police custody for fear that she might be suspected as an informant, and punished by PIRA. McCorrigan's death predictably sparks off a fresh wave of rioting in Belfast against an apparent case of British brutality, yet her tragic fate epitomises the grim reality that civilians faced in repeated COIN conflicts when caught in the struggle between insurgents and counter-insurgents.⁵⁰

Harry's Game also demonstrates the truth of Kitson's adage that ‘the problem of defeating the enemy consists very largely of finding him’,⁵¹ providing a fictional example emphasising the importance of intelligence and special operations in tracking down and neutralising insurgents. The operation to find Downs is an ad hoc one that causes friction between SIS and the Army. Brown is almost exposed when he is recognised by a soldier during an Army search at a community disco, and the operation is ultimately ‘blown’ because PIRA has its own undercover spies as well. At the novel's conclusion Brown kills Downs after a fire-fight, but is then shot and badly wounded by an Army marksman who mistakes him for a terrorist, and he is finished off in the street by Downs’ wife.⁵² The fictional life and death of Captain Harry Brown mirrors that of genuine intelligence debacles during the early phases of the ‘troubles’, not least the misfortunes and controversies surrounding the Army's plain-clothes Military Reaction Force (MRF) in 1971–1972.⁵³

Special operations are also referenced in passing in an earlier work, Evelyn Waugh's Men at Arms (1952), when the hero Guy Crouchback contemplates the imminent takeover of his fictional regiment, the Halberdiers, by the fearsome and arguably unhinged Brigadier Ben Ritchie-Hook. Waugh's description of Ritchie-Hook's peacetime military career contains a vignette that echoes recent research the Special Night Squads⁵⁴ that Orde Wingate commanded during the Arab revolt in Palestine (1936–1939):

The years of peace had been years of unremitting conflict for him. Wherever there was blood and gun-powder from County Cork to the Matto Grosso, there was Ritchie-Hook. Latterly he had wandered about the Holy Land tossing hand-grenades into the front parlours of dissident Arabs. These were some of the things Guy heard in the Mess.⁵⁵

If Ritchie-Hook had experience of assassinating suspected terrorists, then Commander Picton (a minor character in the le Carre thriller The Little Drummer Girl (1983)) had plenty of practice in interrogating captive ones during his service as a colonial police officer. The encounter in this novel between Picton and one of his Mossad counterparts, Kurtz, is an awkward one; not just because of the former's ill-disguised racism (which includes anti-Semitism), but because Picton rightly suspects that Kurtz is lying when he claims that he was too young to fight the British in the 1945–1948 insurgency. Kurtz, for his part, ruminates after the meeting on his own unpleasant experiences in custody, the implicit irony here being the contrast between his present role as a counter-terrorist and his past as an insurgent:

There is a working gallows in Jerusalem where nobody is hanged any more … It is where the British hanged the Jews during the mandate time, from a noose with a leather lining on it. Only a handful, actually, and they hanged Arabs galore; but this was where they hanged two of Kurtz’s friends, in the years when he was in the Haganah with Misha Gavron. Kurtz might well have joined them. They had imprisoned him twice and interrogated him four times, and the occasional troubles he had with his teeth were still ascribed to his dentist to the beatings at the hand of an amiable young field security officer, now dead, whose manner, though not his looks, reminded him a little of Picton.⁵⁶

The ambiguities surrounding ‘hearts and minds’ are also evident in the opening of Eric Ambler's novel Passage of Arms (1959), following a successful ambush conducted by colonial troops in Malaya. A local villager, Girija Krishnan, is instructed by the British Army officer responsible for the ambush, Lieutenant Haynes, to gather a working party of civilians to bury the MNLA dead. As Ambler wryly notes:

[Girija] was aware of the reason for it. The Malay villages in the area had long been suspected by the authorities of aiding the Communist guerrillas with food and shelter. It was not that the villagers approved of the invaders, but simply that the savage reprisals that could follow any refusal of aid were more intimidating than the possibility of having fines or other collective punishments imposed by the British. They were not warlike people; their villages were often isolated; the British forces were scattered. In the past, glib official assurances that the police and army were at last gaining the upper hand and able to protect the outlying areas from the terrorists had been given too often, and too often proved baseless. Now, the villagers believed only what they saw themselves, or what had been seen by their own people. Dead terrorists had to be shown to be dead. The burial party was in the nature of a morale-building or public relations exercise.⁵⁷

The enlistment of the villagers is also coercive; the message of reassurance that the British authorities are winning the war is matched by an implicit threat to any MNLA sympathisers within the local population. Haynes’ parting comment to Krishnan – ‘Mind you spread the good news’ – can be seen as having a double meaning, and in reality the public display of insurgent bodies following a government victory was a tactic often employed to demonstrate the inevitability of the insurgency's defeat and ‘to encourage the others’.⁵⁸ For example, after the PFLOAG defeat in the battle of Mirbat in Dhofar (19^th July 1972) the provincial wali (governor) appointed by the Sultan displayed the bodies of dead guerrillas in public.⁵⁹

Fiction also highlighted the controversies surrounding the use of lethal force in COIN. In Leslie Thomas’ novel The Virgin Soldiers (1966), which is set in the Malayan Emergency, the protagonist Private Briggs panics during a riot, shooting at a group of civilian labourers he presumes are part of the mob and wounding one of them in the process. Briggs opens fire in error, a result of a misjudgement based on a combination of fear and inexperience. In contrast, the soldiers who kick ‘Juicy Lucy’ (a Chinese prostitute that Briggs falls for) to death during the same disturbances commit an unprovoked and sadistic attack on an innocent civilian.⁶⁰ Both fictional examples indicate cases where non-combatants could be killed or wounded by British forces, either as a result of mistaken identity or through wanton brutality. In reality, security forces personnel could also lash out at the civilian population either through individual or collective indiscipline, as was the case with the riot by British troops in Famagusta, Cyprus, in October 1958, which followed the murder of an Army Sergeant's wife, Catherine Cutliffe, by EOKA.⁶¹

The contentious nature of security force shootings is also alluded to in the Clive Egleton thriller Seven Days to a Killing. In successive campaigns the rules of engagement for British soldiers became progressively tighter, including regulations to issue verbal warnings before opening fire.⁶² In practice, illicit shootings could be covered up by the Army, which up until August 1972 had responsibility for investigating its own troops.⁶³ Seven Days to a Killing is essentially a Cold War spy novel, focussing on a British military intelligence officer – Major John Tarrant – and his efforts to rescue his son after the boy is abducted by the KGB. However, it also includes flashbacks to an ambush in Aden in which Tarrant sees his comrades gunned down, and then subsequently kills three enemy gunmen. A conversation between two of his superiors, Harper and Julyan, hints that Tarrant possibly breached his rules of engagement by shooting one of them after he surrendered:

‘I spoke to Tarrant’s former commanding officer on the telephone this morning, and he gave me an interesting slant on Tarrant’s character. Among the terrorists he killed in an ambush was a boy of thirteen. This boy was armed with a Kalashnikov and subsequent investigations proved beyond doubt that he had been firing it, but the interesting point is that Tarrant was torn with feelings of guilt. The boy, it appears, came out of a room with the gun in his hands while the shooting was still going on, and at the last minute, he apparently decided to surrender. Tarrant said he shot him as he dropped the gun’.

Julyan said, ‘I don’t wish to sound cynical, but in making that limited confession he pre-empted the subsequent enquiry, and at the same time won a great deal of sympathy for himself.⁶⁴

There is clear ambiguity here about whether Tarrant killed the boy in the heat of the moment, or in cold blood. It is also likely that, as was often the case in reality, his superiors were not too concerned about investigating this ‘contact’ in more detail. The insurgent ambush itself is reminiscent of the mutiny by local police in Aden on 20^th June 1967, in which a total of 20 British soldiers were killed. The bloodshed put troops on the ground in a vengeful mood, and it is clear that prior to and following the subsequent recapture of the city's Crater district soldiers from the 1^st Battalion Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and other units did carry out reprisal killing against suspected insurgents.⁶⁵

One of the ‘McAuslan’ short stories by George MacDonald Fraser, which were largely comedic in character, also alludes to another murky aspect of Britain's record in COIN, concerning the readiness of military and police personnel to take the law into their own hands. Set in Libya after World War Two, the story titled ‘Captain Errol’ (published in 1988 in The Sheikh and the Dustbin) includes an incident where Fraser's alter ego, Lieutenant Dand McNeil, is ordered with his platoon to quell a growing riot. McNeil succeeds thanks to a stratagem by one of his brother officers, a superficially charming but shady Captain who tricks the crowd into dispersing without bloodshed. Fraser's narrator subsequently implies that ‘Errol’ infiltrates the local souk to kill the agitator who instigated the disturbances. In reality, unsanctioned killings by security forces did occur in successive campaigns, in particular with white settler vigilantes in Kenya during the 1950s.⁶⁶

There are also points in popular fiction where the British military in particular are portrayed more positively. During the climactic scene in The Virgin Soldiers involving a guerrilla ambush on a train one of Briggs’ comrades, Private Sinclair, saves a Malay girl from rape by shooting her MNLA assailant, shortly before he dies of his own wounds.⁶⁷ As noted above, Ambler's Passage of Arms also specifically describes terrorism against civilians as a Communist tactic in Malaya. In A Breed of Heroes (1981), depicting a tour of Northern Ireland conducted by a fictitious elite unit, the Assault Commandos (a hybrid of the Parachute Regiment and the Royal Marines), Alan Judd emphasises the restraint the troops show in the face of both terrorist attacks and provocations by Republican sympathisers, and even the ludicrous and eccentric Commanding Officer has his moment when he upbraids a pro-PIRA journalist for his hypocrisy during a press conference.⁶⁸ Another of Seymour's thrillers, The Glory Boys (1977), also compares British COIN tactics in Northern Ireland favourably with the more ruthless Israeli methods of suppressing the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. In this novel, a Palestinian fedayeen fighter named Famy is sent to London to assassinate a visiting Israeli nuclear physicist, with the PIRA assigning one of its veterans, McCoy, to aid him. While waiting and preparing for the attack, the Irish insurgent regales his Palestinian counterpart with his experiences fighting the British, although his reminiscences do not have the effect on his listener that McCoy anticipates:

Famy had listened, uncomprehendingly and disbelieving. He tried to suggest that this was something the Israelis would never have tolerated behind the high yellow walls of the maximum security prison at Ramle, where they held the fedayeen. There were so many things McCoy said that amazed Famy. No penalties against the families and property of those arrested on terrorist charges. Detailed fire control orders for individual soldiers. A piece of paper that gave each soldier the circumstances in which he could shoot. A hundred paratroopers locked up in Crossmaglen police station whose food and ammunition came only by helicopter because it was too dangerous to drive lorries there – too many culvert bombs in the roads, too many control wires in the ditches. But what astonished him most of all was that McCoy was sitting there across the table. ‘Why, when they had caught you, when they had done all these things, did they release you?’

And McCoy had just smiled, and laughed, and known it was not possible to explain the gestures of the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland to a man whose knowledge of guerrilla warfare was based on that fought against an enemy as hard and intransigent as the Israelis.⁶⁹

Concluding remarks

This article has shown that hints at the often grim reality of British post-1945 COIN campaigning can be seen in contemporary popular literature, and there are further areas of research that both military and cultural historians may seek to undertake, such as in the portrayal of conflicts such as Malaya or Kenya in film, or indeed in a comparative approach to other countries experiencing wars against insurgents, notably France and the USA.⁷⁰ The contrasting facets of Britain's post-war experiences of fighting insurgencies can also be seen in contemporary popular literature, which often highlighted aspects of COIN that have been confirmed by academic historians addressing this inherently controversial subject. The degree to which these observations in fiction derived on insight, knowledge or hearsay is also a topic worthy of further research. In turn, today's novelists have utilised recent scholarship either as the basis for their own books, or have referenced them in passing. To take examples of the latter, in Sebastian Faulks’ Bond continuation thriller Devil May Care (2008) set in 1967, the villain, Julius Gorner, taunts a captive 007 with jibes about the crimes of British imperialism, including the brutal suppression of the Mau Mau. Jeremy Duns’ novel Free Agent (2009) incorporates a scene where Paul Dark – an SIS officer and Soviet spy – is water-boarded by his comrades, one of whom gloats about performing similar acts of torture against Jewish insurgents in post-war Palestine.⁷¹

Two authors in particular have made colonial COIN conflicts the basis of their own novels. Sadie Jones’ Small Wars (2009) is set in Cyprus in 1956, where Major Hal Treherne is serving with his battalion in the campaign against EOKA. Small Wars provides an unsparing picture of the brutality of the conflict, which incorporates the torture of detainees and clashes between troops and Greek Cypriot schoolchildren. Treherne become disillusioned with the Army not only when his battalion commander covers up a rape and a murder committed by a group of his soldiers on the rampage, but when his pregnant wife is injured in an EOKA shooting (similar to the Cutliffe killing noted above) and loses her baby as a result.⁷²

Dawood Ali McCallum's The Final Charge (2014) shifts its narrative from contemporary to colonial Kenya, providing a combination of a courtroom drama and a historical thriller commencing with the arrest of a visiting doctor from the UK. Tom Miles – a former junior British Army officer whose national service took him to Kenya during the Emergency – is charged with the torture and murder of a Mau Mau leader, General Jembe (Wilson Muya), with the prosecution being led by the latter's politically ambitious son, Paul Muya. As the court case against Miles progresses, it becomes clear that both the British and Kenyan governments have a vested interest in halting the trial, not least because Jembe was betrayed by the current (albeit fictional) acting President, John Ole-Kiisi. The flashbacks to the insurgency not only highlight the atrocities committed by both sides, but also include a description of Operation Anvil (the cordon-and-search operation conducted in Nairobi in 1954), and the tensions between the British Army and the police, not least the contempt that white settlers in the colonial security forces felt towards metropolitan counterparts who they considered to be effete and soft-headed. McCallum's story also reflects Branch's criticism of Elkins’ work, as Miles is in many respects a pawn in the political struggle between Ole-Kiisi and Muya, and their respective parties, with the exploration of Kenya's recent history being tainted by its instrumentalisation for cynical political purposes.⁷³

Cinema can likewise be utilised to examine the contentious record of British COIN. ’71 (2014) is at first glance a survival thriller set in that very year, in which a British soldier, Private Gary Hook, is separated from his patrol during a riot in Belfast, and has to make his way to safety while dodging pursuing Republican gunmen. However, the plot turns when Hook – temporarily sheltered by Loyalist paramilitaries – realises that the MRF unit attached to his battalion is covertly providing bomb-making equipment to the latter (the undercover soldiers are also in clandestine contact with PIRA and their rivals in the Official IRA, playing them off against each other). As a consequence, Hook is not only in danger of being murdered by his insurgent enemies but also by the plain-clothes intelligence operatives who are supposed to be on his side. ’71 highlights the chaos in British policy in Northern Ireland, and also explores the murky nature of the MRF's activities at that time.⁷⁴

The history of conflict is always contentious, and the study of these COIN wars provides additional causes of controversy because these were not just wars between British troops and local insurgents, but also more often than not conflicts within the indigenous communities dividing rebels from loyalists.⁷⁵ It is not surprising therefore that in Oman for example there is a general readiness of both state and society to try and forget conflicts like Dhofar (described as ‘the war between the brothers’).⁷⁶ Fictional portrayals of these conflicts can – like the joint commissions of scholars set up between former European adversaries to examine painful historical experiences⁷⁷– potentially be utilised for positive effect to publicly discuss, and address, them. Writing and producing novels or films about (say) Cyprus or Northern Ireland does carry its own risks. Participants in these wars – whether soldiers, policemen or insurgents – can react against these books or dramatisations with hostility and with accusations of bias. The exploration of past clashes, killings and abuses can also revive the trauma of combatants and civilians alike, and with contentious topics such as intelligence-gathering the naming of civilians who informed on insurgents could potentially expose them to violent reprisals.⁷⁸ Above all, such works may well be oversimplified, partisan and inaccurate, because the authors or film-makers concerned are not prepared to let the facts get in the way of a good story.⁷⁹

To offer a contrasting perspective, fiction can potentially offer veteran authors the opportunity to depict their experiences of COIN – particularly with recent conflicts such as Iraq and Afghanistan – to raise awareness of their experiences with a wider public audience, much as the US Marine veteran Karl Marlantes did with his Vietnam novel Matterhorn (2010). Participants could use a variety of means in the process; for example, we await a British version of the graphic novel The White Donkey, written and drawn by another former US Marine, Maximilian Uriate, which provides a fictional depiction of the author's alter ego as he endures a tour in Iraq, and then struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder and survivor's guilt in its aftermath.⁸⁰ Such accounts could also be utilised to promote dialogue between former foes, as shown with Paul Greengrass’ account of directing the docudrama Bloody Sunday (2002). In order to re-enact the events in Derry on 31^st January 1972, the director sought the assistance not only of the local Catholic community but also former British soldiers, who acted as the paratroopers. He made his film three years into the Saville Inquiry's works, a time when the re-investigation of Bloody Sunday was regarded by some Army veterans and critics as a sop to Republican propaganda,⁸¹ and a project that involved the co-operation of people on both sides of the conflict had the potential to turn sour. But as Greengrass recalled;

During filming [in Dublin] I saw things I never dreamt of when I first went to Derry as a young man 20 years ago. I saw Ken, 16 years a para and as hard as they come, talk politics with Carmel, a female legend in the Bogside, and Carmel crying and saying she had never knowingly talked to a British soldier. I saw [Don] Mullan sing ‘The Town I Loved So Well’ to a room full of former British soldiers, and they toast him after it was over. And I saw Bishop [Edward] Daley shake our hands and say our film had made a contribution to the peace process.

But most of all I saw the families of those innocent people watch this film and react not with anger and bitterness, but with generosity and with a yearning for peace. The people of Derry recognised that our film told the truth, yet they reacted not with recrimination, but in the spirit of reconciliation. There were no demands for vengeance. Just a cautious sense that perhaps at last the Saville inquiry may yet redeem the stain on our judicial system of Lord Widgery's dishonourable conclusions.^82,83

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Geraint Hughes

Dr Geraint Hughes is a Reader in Military and Diplomatic History at the Defence Studies Department, King's College London, teaching at the Joint Services Command and Staff College, Shrivenham, UK. He is currently working on his third book, Britain and Dhofar War in Oman, 1963-1976: A Covert War in Arabia.

Notes

1. Fleming, Casino Royale, Live and Let Die, pp.346–347. With citations, readers should note the difference between the year a book was published and the edition which the author accessed.

2. Ewen MacAskill and Iain Cobain, ‘British forces’ century of unbroken warfare set to end with Afghanistan’, The Guardian, 11^th February 2014. Ben Farmer, ‘Forces have first year since 1968 with no one killed on operations’, The Daily Telegraph, 3^rd January 2017.

3. A clear exception here concerns the conflict in Northern Ireland from 1969 to 1998, which caused 3,000 deaths, including in terrorist bombings carried out by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) in mainland Britain. To cite a minor example of the conflict's domestic impact, the author had one of his classes in school disrupted by the bombing of the Army Education Centre in Eltham, South-East London, on 14^th May 1990.

4. Lindstrum, ‘Facts about Atrocity’, pp.108–127.

5. Burleigh, Blood and Rage, p.95. On the character of the Palestine Police see Thomas, Fight or Flight, pp.37–38, pp.114–115.

6. Of the novels discussed in this article The Virgin Soldiers, Harry's Game, The Glory Boys, The Little Drummer Girl and A Breed of Heroes have all had cinema or television adaptations.

7. For more on this film see its Independent Movie Database (IMDB) page; https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052997/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2. The background of the protagonists is outline in their first meeting, a video clip of which is available on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz6cE3A1H6o; accessed 10^th December 2019).

8. Of the authors noted in this article six had served with the Army during a series of conflicts from WWII to Northern Ireland (Eric Ambler, Clive Egleton, George MacDonald Fraser, Alan Judd, Leslie Thomas and Evelyn Waugh), two with the intelligence or security services (John le Carre and Ian Fleming), and one (Gerald Seymour) was a journalist with extensive experience reporting on Northern Ireland.

9. Newsinger, Dangerous Men. Magee's PhD thesis was published as Gangsters or Guerrillas?. Magee also provided a helpful list of novels on the ‘troubles’, which is listed online courtesy of the University of Ulster's Conflict Archive on the Internet (CAIN); https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/bibdbs/magee01/index.html.

10. In an interview based on his experiences as a terrorist and academic, Magee listed six examples each of what he regarded as the best and the worst of ‘troubles’ fiction. While some of the latter are works of pulp fiction, they also include Harry's Game, which in the author's view strove to portray the ‘troubles’ from the perspective of all sides. Meanwhile, the ‘best’ examples are generally written from a pro-Republican perspective. ‘Patrick Magee: My Troubles with Fiction’, The Irish Times, 22nd October 2015.

11. Parr, Our Boys, pp.xvi-xix, pp.16–26.

12. Geraint Hughes, ‘Terrorism and Insurgency’, in Law, Routledge History of Terrorism, pp.383–396.

13. Charters, British Army and Jewish Insurgency. Hoffman, Anonymous Soldiers.

14. Hack, ‘“Iron Claws on Malaya”’, pp.99–125.

15. Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau.

16. French, Fighting EOKA.

17. Mawby, British Policy in Aden. Walker, Aden Insurgency.

18. Hennessey, Evolution of the Troubles.

19. Peterson, Oman's Insurgencies.

20. Barry, Blood, Metal and Dust.

21. Crossman, Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, entry for 5^th August 1965, pp.304–305. On 1^st January 2013 the time period for the classification of British government documents was amended from 30 to 20 years.

22. ‘Public Records Act – frequently asked questions’, National Archives of the United Kingdom; online at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/information-management/legislation/public-records-act/pra-faqs/, downloaded 16^th December 2019.

23. There are official histories on MI5, GCHQ and the first forty years of SIS. Andrew, Defence of the Realm; Ferris, Behind the Enigma; and Jeffery, MI6.

24. Aldrich, Hidden Hand, p.6.

25. Badger, ‘The “migrated archives”’.

26. Dillon, The Dirty War. Hamill, Pig in the Middle. Taylor, Provos; Loyalists; and Brits.

27. Dewar, Brush Fire Wars, pp.165–179. Mockaitis, Counter-insurgency, pp.72–95. John Pimlott, ‘The British Army: The Dhofar Campaign, 1970–1975’, in Beckett and Pimlott, Modern Counterinsurgency, p.16.

28. Kitson, Low Intensity Operations. Paget, Counter-Insurgency Campaigning. Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency.

29. AFM1/10, Counter Insurgency Operations, B-2-1.

30. French, British Way in Counter-Insurgency, pp.2–5.

31. Beckett, ‘British counter-insurgency’, pp.781–783. Dewar, Brush Fire Wars. Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife. Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency; and Counter-insurgency.

32. Gwynn, Imperial Policing, pp.1–33. Paget, Counter-Insurgency Campaigning, p.177. Thornton, ‘Minimum Force’.

33. Akam, Changing of the Guard. Farrell, Unwinnable. Tripodi, Unknown Enemy, pp.138–195.

34. French, Counter-Insurgency, passim. Grob-Fizgibbon, Imperial Endgame. Hack, ‘Everyone lived in fear’. Hughes, ‘Banality of Brutality’. Jackson, ‘British Counter-Insurgency’, pp.12–22. Newsinger, British Counterinsurgency. Mumford, The Counter-Insurgency Myth. Reis, ‘Myth of British Minimum Force’.

35. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged. Elkins, Britain's Gulag.

36. ‘Mau Mau case: UK government accepts abuse took place’, BBC News, 17^th July 2012; online at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18874040, downloaded 16^th December 2019.

37. Hyam, Britain's Declining Empire, p.192 (footnote 112).

38. Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, pp.xiv-xi. Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau, p.108, p.128. Elkins refers to an ‘incipient genocide’ on p.49 of Britain's Gulag.

39. Hack, ‘“Devils that suck the blood of the Malayan People”’. French, Counter-Insurgency, pp.133–136.

40. Bennett, ‘‘Detainees Are Always One's Achilles Heel’. Burke, An Army of Tribes.

41. ‘Hola Detention Camp’, HC Deb 16 June 1959 Vol.607 cc248-384; online at https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1959/jun/16/hola-detention-camp, downloaded 16^th December 2019. ‘Hola Camp, Kenya (Report), HC Deb 27 July 1959 Vol.610 cc181-262; online at https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1959/jul/27/hola-camp-kenya-report, downloaded 16^th December 2019.

42. ‘Northern Ireland’, HC Deb 1 February 1972 Vol.830 cc264-331; online at https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1972/feb/01/northern-ireland, accessed 16^th December 2019. The Widgery Report is online at https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/hmso/widgery.htm, accessed 16^th December 2019.

43. ‘Northern Ireland (Stalker-Sampson Inquiry), HC Deb 1 February 1988 Vol.126 cc707-8; online at https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1988/feb/01/northern-ireland-stalker-sampson-inquiry, downloaded 16^th December 2019. The IMDB page for Loach's film is at https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099768/.

44. This episode can be viewed online at https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3o9um2; accessed 10^th December 2019. See also its IMDB page at https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0714463/. On Batang Kali see Hack, ‘“Devils that suck blood”’, pp.209–213.

45. Stubbs, ‘‘Representing the Cyprus Emergency’.

46. Fleming, From Russia With Love, p.32. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand, p.575.

47. Maugham, ‘A Trip to Paris’, in Ashenden, pp.129–130. Jeffery, MI6, pp.237–238.

48. Holmes, Firing Line, p.375. The author's point about morale here is also gained from his own experiences serving with the British Army in Iraq in 2004.

49. French, Counter-Insurgency, pp.71–72. Urban, Big Boys’ Rules, p.219.

50. Seymour, Harry's Game, pp.128–129, p.119, pp.182–185. On the ITV adaptation see https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084053/.

51. Kitson, Low Intensity Operations, pp.95–96. Thompson, Communist Insurgency, pp.119–120.

52. Seymour, Harry's Game, pp.163–164, pp.215–216, pp.243–247, pp.344–367, pp.372–375.

53. Cormac, Disrupt and Deny, pp.197–214. Geraint Hughes, ‘Undercover Military Units’.

54. Hughes, ‘Terror in Galilee’.

55. Waugh, Sword of Honour, p.55.

56. Le Carre, The Little Drummer Girl, specifically pp.368–369.

57. Ambler, Passage of Arms, p.13.

58. To quote Pangloss’ remark in Candide (1759) on the execution of Admiral John Byng. Voltaire, Candide, p.111.

59. Diaries of Brigadier John Graham (Commander, Sultan's Armed Forces), 26^th July 1972, Middle East Centre Archives, St Antony's College Oxford, Graham Papers GB165-0327-4/1. Takriti, Monsoon Revolution, p.306.

60. Thomas, The Virgin Soldiers, pp.136–143, pp.147–150.

61. French, Fighting EOKA, pp.208–213. Richard Norton-Taylor, ‘Files reveal brutal treatment meted out by British forces in 1950s Cyprus’, The Guardian, 27^th July 2012.

62. Burke, Army of Tribes, pp.67–68. French, Counter-insurgency, p.83. A copy of the ‘Yellow Card’ outlining the regulations for the use of lethal force by British soldiers and marines in Northern Ireland can be seen in FCO87/584(The National Archives, Kew, UK). The author has kept the copy of ‘Card Alpha’, a similar document produced for British servicemen on Operation Telic in Iraq.

63. Bennett, ‘Direct Rule to Motorman’, pp.521–522.

64. Egleton, Seven Days to A Killing, p.89. The Aden ambush is depicted on pp.64–65. Egleton served in the British Army from 1945 to 1975, principally in the South Staffordshire (later the Staffordshire Regiment), and retired as a Lieutenant-Colonel. The Army List. Spring 1975. Volume I, p.76, p.672.

65. Walker, Aden Insurgency, pp.239–258. ‘Empire Warriors: ‘Mad Mitch” and His Tribal Law’ (2006), in Empire Warriors; broadcast on BBC2, 19^th November 2004; online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kZLyvp_AjU, downloaded 16^th January 2020.

66. Fraser, The Complete McAuslan, pp.426–443. Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau, pp.170–172.

67. Thomas, Virgin Soldiers, pp.197–198.

68. Judd, A Breed of Heroes, p.183.

69. Seymour, The Glory Boys, p.106.

70. France's experiences in Algeria (1954–1962) were subject of contemporary books and films such as Larteguy, The Centurions, and The Battle of Algiers. On the impact of popular fiction on US troops in Vietnam see Daddis, Pulp Vietnam.

71. Faulks, Devil May Care, pp.222–223, p.254. Duns, Free Agent, p.324.

72. Jones, Small Wars.

73. McCallum, The Final Charge.

74. This film's IMDB page is at https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2614684/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1. Hughes, ‘Undercover Military Units’, pp.572–573.

75. Kalyvas, Logic of Violence.

76. Peterson, Oman's Insurgencies, p.368. Valeri, Oman, pp.119–125, pp.156–157.

77. ‘It ain't necessarily so’, The Economist, 13^th October 2012. Alya Shandra, ‘Ukraine and Poland to investigate Volyn tragedy in joint historical commission’ Euromaidan Press, 24^th May 2015; online at http://euromaidanpress.com/2015/05/24/ukraine-and-poland-to-investigate-volyn-tragedy-in-joint-historical-commission/, downloaded 16^th December 2019.

78. David French, ‘Toads and Informers’.

79. Badsey, ‘Muddy Vision’. See also Benji Wilson, ‘Fighting to tell the real story’, The Daily Telegraph, 14^th January 2006, on the political controversies surrounding Steven Bochco's 2006 Iraq war drama Over There.

80. Marlantes, Matterhorn. Uriate, The White Donkey.

81. Burke, ‘Bloody Sunday’.

82. Paul Greengrass, ‘Making History’, The Guardian, 11^th January 2002. Don Mullan was the author of Eyewitness Bloody Sunday (Dublin: Wolfhound Press 1997), which provided the basis of Greengrass’ film. Edward Daly was the Bishop of Derry from 1974–1994, and had witnessed the shootings. A press photograph of him waving a white handkerchief while demonstrators evacuated one of the victims, Jackie Duddy, received international coverage.

83. The author would like to thank the librarians at the Joint Services Command and Staff College (JSCSC), Shrivenham, and North Swindon Library for their assistance in researching this chapter. The analysis, opinions and conclusions expressed or implied within are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the JSCSC, the Defence Academy, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) or any other UK government agency.