Belfast Diaries: A Gunner In Northern Ireland 1971-74

By Steve Corbett

"It's a very weird sensation to be shot at… Very often you see the gunman when it's too late or you don't see him at all. You might as well just be targets on a rifle range. I often wondered if I would get through this tour ok, and even now I still do… "

In the four-month period during 1971 that Gunner Stephen Corbett was stationed in Andersontown, Northern Ireland, 33 servicemen were killed by terrorist action in the province. His unit, 9 (Plassey) Bty, Royal Artillery, was attacked by a bomb, bullet or rioters on more than 400 occasions.

In 1972 alone, the toll of service personnel killed was more than 100. Yet their action was never classed as a war. When the servicemen returned home there were no marches through the streets to cheering crowds. They just quietly slipped in unnoticed and carried on with their other duties.

The young Gunner's notebooks detailing his two tours of duty - Andersontown, November 1971 - March 1972, and New Lodge June 1974 - October 1974 - were put in a drawer where they were to lay, untouched, for more than 30 years.

Here, for the first time, this account of his service is vividly brought to life and validated through newspaper articles, intelligence reports, and surviving examples of IRA propaganda.

Share in the day-to-day life of a Gunner and his 'band of brothers' as they patrol the streets of this unforgiving suburban battleground. Relive the sights and sounds of the rioting and gun battles, and the devastating losses of fallen comrades Bernie Fearns and Kim Maccunn.

Especially rare are the large collection of photographs taken by the author at that time, illustrating the life of a serviceman both on and off duty.

'Belfast Diaries' offers a unique opportunity to see this conflicted city through the eyes of an serviceman charged with peace-keeping duties at the height of 'The Troubles'; a real 'must-read' for any Northern Ireland or British Army enthusiast.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Helion and Company
• Release date: Oct 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781910294222

Steve Corbett

STEVE CORBETT is the Community Development Specialist for the Chalmers Center for Economic Development and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics and Community Development at Covenant College. Previously, Steve worked for Food for the Hungry International as the Regional Director for Central And South America and as Director of Staff Training. Steve has a B.A. from covenant College and a M.Ed. in Adult Education from the University of Georgia.

Book preview

Passionately interested in military history, Stephen Corbett joined 252 Hulme Cadet Battery in Manchester at 12 years of age. Five years later, he was about to be promoted to Sergeant Instructor but opted to leave the cadets and join the Regular Army instead. After passing out at Woolwich in June 1969 he joined 12th Light Air Defence Regiment at Dortmund in Germany. In July 1971 the Regiment returned to England and immediately started training for what would become two tours of peace-keeping duties in Northern Ireland, faithfully documented by the author in two pocket-sized notebooks. During that time a bomb blast left him with the devastating condition tinnitus. More than four decades later the incessant ringing has never stopped. He was one of the lucky ones, as The Belfast Diaries will attest. Stephen left the Army at the end of his second tour and now lives in Warrington with his wife Pam, who he met while in the Army. They have two children and two grandchildren who are and always will be immeasurably proud of Stephen - especially on the publication of this, his first book.

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Published by Helion & Company 2013

Designed and typeset by Farr out Publications, Wokingham, Berkshire

Cover designed by Euan Carter, Leicester (www.euancarter.com)

Printed by Henry Ling Limited, Dorchester, Dorset

Text and images © Steve Corbett 2013 unless otherwise noted

ISBN: 978-1-909384-07-1

EPUB ISBN: 978-1-910294-22-2

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system,or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written consent of Helion &

Company Limited.

For details of other military history titles published by Helion & Company Limited

contact the above address, or visit our website: http://www.helion.co.uk.

We always welcome receiving book proposals from prospective authors.

For my wife Pam, who I would never have met but for the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Also, my two lovely daughters Michelle and Elizabeth – who both encouraged me to write this book.

Contents

List of illustrations

List of maps

Introduction and Acknowledgements

Maps

Part I: 1971–72

1    August 1971 – The training begins

2    November 1971 – Baptism of fire

3    December 1971 – Trying times

4    January 1972 – The days leading up to ‘Bloody Sunday’

5    February 1972 – Six weeks to go

6    March 1972 – The final days

Photo Gallery

Part II: New Lodge 1974 – My final tour

7    February 1974 – A brief description of events surrounding my final tour

8    April-June 1974 – Preparations for the tour and the first few weeks

9    July 1974 – The bombing of the Parlour Observation Post and another fatal shooting

10   August 1974 – Parades and gun battles in the Lodge

11   September 1974 – The capture of a gunman

12   October 1974 – The final 11 days

List of illustrations

Illustrations in colour section

The first diary entry.

Poster warning of the dangers of improvised bombs.

The New Lodge diary.

Rules of Engagement: The Yellow Card

Provo propaganda from Republican News.

C Company PIRA - a doodle by me.

A couple of shootings.

Poster from the Republican News August 31st 1974.

The Loyalist News.

‘Bill and Ben, the IRA men’ in The Loyalist News.

Looking towards the Parlour OP from the Divis flats, New Lodge.

Me on guard duty.

Me at the back entrance to the camp on Cliftonpark Avenue.

Illustrations in text

The rear of the bus depot. (Photo courtesy of R. Rothwell)

Me at the Divis Drive entrance to the bus depot.

The main entrance to Milltown Cemetery. (Photo courtesy of R. Rothwell)

Me and Mitch Mitchell in front of a Pig.

Diary entries covering November 25th–27th.

The Sangar in Divis Drive. (Photo courtesy of R. Rothwell)

Titch Ferris and me.

Looking down the Falls Road from the main gate of the bus depot. (Photo courtesy of R. Rothwell)

Another view of Milltown Cemetery. (Photo courtesy of R. Rothwell)

Clancy Campbell and Brummie Morton shortly after the shooting. (Photo courtesy of Clancy Campbell)

A Republican Christmas card

Mick Krasnowski.

Andersonstown RUC Station. (Photo courtesy of R. Rothwell)

Another arms find - the results of my search.

My diary entry for Bloody Sunday.

The bus depot entrance. (Photo courtesy of R. Rothwell)

The main gate at Andersonstown bus depot, the scene of the shooting. The RUC station is to the left of the picture. (Photo courtesy of R. Rothwell)

The incident with the Ferret Scout car at the barricade.

Diary entry covering the bomb opposite the Ulster Brewery.

9 (Plassey) Battery on return from Andersonstown.

Photograph taken shortly after the bombing at the bus depot. Some of the damage can clearly be seen in the picture (Photo courtesy R. Rothwell)

Two of our Pigs which were involved in the ambushes of March 4th and 5th. (Photo courtesy of R. Rothwell)

The diary entry covering the ambush.

A map which I drew in my diary shortly after the ambush of March 5th.

Looking towards the Parlour Observation Post from the flats.

St Mary’s Church graveyard

‘Home’ for the next four months.

The infamous ‘Butts’ viewed from Edlingham Street.

VCP on Corporation Street as seen from inside a Pig.

The Parlour Observation Post.

The poster distributed around the Lodge on June 21st.

The scene of the shooting as viewed from the Parlour OP. Kim took cover behind the barrier just visible in the far right of the picture.

One of the Pigs parked up as we await the arrival of the parade.

Me on foot patrol in Fleetwood Street.

Parlour OP, watching the Lodge.

A general view of New Lodge which illustrates the maze of streets and back-alleys which caused so many problems for our patrols.

One of the main routes to the city centre - York Street on the day the Co-Op store was blown up.

Looking towards the Lodge from a deserted York Street.

The Orange parades at Carlisle Circus.

Trouble in the Lodge, Sunday August 4th.

On foot patrol: Mick Krasnowski in Phoenix Alley.

Edlingham Street: the most dangerous street in the Lodge.

The IRA statement about the shooting as published in Republican News on August 31st.

The view on Internment as depicted in Visor magazine.

The derelict property on Stratheden Street used as the observation post on the night of August 8th/9th.

New Lodge Road: looking towards the Parlour OP.

On foot in the Lodge.

Searching cars.

Reprinted from Visor, October 3rd.

Clearing the streets and checking out suspects outside Gallaher’s Cigarette Factory on August 30th. Captain Griffith is on the far right of picture.

The poster produced by 97 Battery after the shooting on August 30th.

Pim Street.

Anti-sniper patrol: Harding Street.

The article published in Battleground.

Mick Krasnowski looks on at the protesters.

The 480lb bomb on the sports field. Felix is in attendance and dismantling the device.

A Templar Green.

Ruins just off Harding Street.

Some of the devastation near Lizzy’s.

Poster from The Republican News August 31st.

The patrol: I am on the far right.

On mobile patrol.

Approaching the ‘Sally Bash’.

Two of the residents of the ‘Sally Bash’.

Valentine Street.

The Arboretum

List of maps

New Lodge, Tiger Bay and Cliftonville areas of Belfast. (Map supplied by Trevor Deary)

Andersonstown and Riverdale areas of Belfast. (Map supplied by Trevor Deary)

Introduction and Acknowledgements

Ihad just turned 17 when I joined the Army. I was actually too young for the regulars so the first 12 months of my service life counted for nothing.

By the middle of 1969 – and with my basic training finished – I was posted to 12th Light Air Defence Regiment Royal Artillery based in Dortmund, Germany. The next two years were the best years of my Army career. I paid little attention to the Troubles which had been brewing in Northern Ireland.

In the spring of 1971 we were all informed that the Regiment would be returning to England and we would be starting training in counter-terrorist techniques prior to going to Belfast.

Towards the end of November my Battery (9 Plassey Battery) was on its way to a place called Andersonstown. The next four months turned out to be the most frightening of my life and all the events in which I found myself involved were recorded in two notebooks. These books lay forgotten in the bottom of a drawer for the next 30 years. It was only because of the encouragement of my eldest daughter Michelle that I finally decided to write them up.

Many soldiers lost their lives or were wounded over the 30 or so years of the Troubles – and this was mainly done by the very people we were sent to protect. The servicemen in Ireland were at times facing battles every bit as bloody as the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, but our conflict was never classed as a war. In the four-month period I was stationed in Andersonstown there were 33 servicemen killed by terrorist action in the province. In the whole of 1972 alone the toll of service personnel killed was more than 100.

When we came home from our tour there were no marches through the streets to cheering crowds. We just quietly slipped in unnoticed and carried on with our other duties. In August 2008 I attended a Regimental reunion in St Helens, Merseyside and met up with some of my former comrades for the first time in more than 30 years. There was much heated discussion about our time in Northern Ireland and I mentioned to several people about my intention to write a book about our tours of duty over there.

I had with me a few pages I had typed up about a few of the incidents we were involved in. Some of the lads couldn’t even remember them at all and others remembered them happening in a different way. It was even suggested by others that I was exaggerating the whole thing and that the tours weren’t as bad as I made them out to be. It was only when I produced my diaries and newspaper reports from our time there that they started to remember things that they had pushed to the back of their minds for so many years.

When I had a look at the diaries back in 2007 I had great difficulty remembering some of the incidents myself. But when I started doing a little research I was able to track down reports from Belfast newspapers covering the various events. I was amazed at how accurate I had logged the times and dates of the various shootings and bombings. They fitted perfectly to the original press reports.

I contacted former members of the Regiment only for some of them to refuse point-blank to offer any help. They said that their recollections of their time over there were too painful to remember and were best forgotten. Others, on the other hand, were able to recall in great detail some of the incidents they were involved in. I suppose some of us were affected by it all rather badly and others were more fortunate to carry no mental scars.

The general public has little understanding of the pressures that service personnel face in the line of duty. Perhaps when they read the following pages they will realise why some of us reacted in the way we did. We made mistakes and we sometimes lashed out in retaliation while being subjected to extreme provocation. Everyone has their limit of patience and many of us were taken beyond that on the streets of Belfast. But on the whole I think the British Serviceman behaved with commendable restraint.

I would like to thank the following for their help with this book…‘The Glenravel Project’ for the use of newspaper reports from ‘The Troubles Magazine’, Gordon ‘Addi’ Adamson, Stuart ‘Clancy’ Campbell, Mick McHale, James ‘Slim’ Murray, Mick Krasnowski, Pete Krasnowski (who sadly passed away before the completion of this book), Dick Robinson and Bob Wilson. Also my son-in-law, Chris Ewen, who deserves a special mention for making some sense of my writings when he carried out the proofreading.

Some of the names of my former comrades have been changed to protect their identity. And certain details of some of the operations I took part in have been omitted for security reasons.

Maps

New Lodge, Tiger Bay and Cliftonville areas of Belfast. (Map supplied by Trevor Deary)

Andersonstown and Riverdale areas of Belfast. (Map supplied by Trevor Deary)

Part I

1971–72

The rear of the bus depot. (Photo courtesy of R. Rothwell)

1

August 1971

The training begins

The best two years of my life had just drawn to a close – the days I spent stationed in Dortmund in Germany seemed like one big holiday. The occasional exercise or ‘war game’ broke the boredom of camp life, but there was plenty of free time to go out and enjoy the attractions of the city. There were firing camps in Den Helder and Todendorfe and also trips out to places I had only read about in history books. Twice I went to Verdun in France – the scene of so much slaughter in the Great War. Yet at the same time, another war was brewing much closer to home…

Civil unrest was building up in Ireland. It had actually started about the time I joined the Army back in 1969, but as so often in life we took little notice of what was happening on our own doorstep. Very little was shown about it on the television in Germany and I didn’t bother with the papers much. In about May 1971, we were told that the Regiment would be returning to England within the next few months and we would be starting training prior to being posted to Northern Ireland. All of a sudden people did start to take notice of what was happening over there.

By the end of July, the Regiment had moved to their new home at Barton Stacey near Andover in Hampshire. It was a collection of wooden huts hastily thrown up in the last war as a temporary camp for troops. The accommodation was very poor compared to what we were used to in Germany, but over the next few months we wouldn’t be there much to enjoy it anyway. The training started almost immediately – countless exercises being carried out in and around the camp on foot patrols.

We had little idea really about what we would actually be facing when over there, so everything was treated as a bit of a joke.

Eventually we were sent down to Lydd in Kent where we carried out mock riots on one of the old bases. Part of the Battery would play the role of the rioters, and the others would be the troops. In the pursuit of realism, proper petrol bombs and rocks were used. It was very easy to fall into the role of either side and to take it very seriously indeed. The rocks and petrol bombs were used by some to great effect. On one of the last ‘riots’ we did, a Lance-bombardier by the name of Les Bradshaw was hit on the legs by an exploding petrol bomb. I still recall seeing his legs covered in flames as he stood at the gateway of the married quarters on the base. I think that was probably the incident that made us realise that perhaps we were taking our training a little too seriously.

The next stage of our training was a visit to Imber, an old village on Salisbury Plain. Imber had been taken over by the military in the last war to use as a training ground for troops preparing for the invasion of Europe. It had always been assumed that the village would be handed back after the war, but the military had other ideas. It was here that we carried out house-to-house combat training… charging up to buildings – grenade through the window and then burst in through the door and fire your gun. I found it all rather amusing, as I couldn’t for the life of me imagine that was what we would have to do on the streets of Belfast.

The Regiment eventually returned to Barton Stalag – as we called it – and continued with our training. Day after day and night after night the time was spent carrying out foot patrols. On one particular night a section was out honing their skills when they came across a car parked on some derelict land. They decided it would be an ideal opportunity to have a go at doing a car search, but when they went over they found a couple ‘at it’ on the back seat. The rumour doing the rounds at the time was that the lad who shone the torch into the car was greeted by the sight of his wife’s face looking back at him… now I bet that she had some explaining to do!

More time was spent on the rifle ranges and it was decided to have a competition to see who the best shot in the Battery was. When we got to Belfast the lucky winner would be deemed to be our sniper and given a Lee-Enfield T4 rifle instead of the SLR. Figure 11 targets (head and shoulder) were set up at 100 and 200 yards’ range, and we proceeded to fire our allocated ammunition at them. I hated the SLR; I always considered the rear sighting hole to be too large.

When I had been in the Army Cadets as a young boy I had been a first-class marksman with the Lee-Enfield. I used to delight at shooting at the magpie marker when it was raised to show where the shots were hitting the target. If you happened to be in the butts holding the damned thing when it was hit, it wasn’t so funny! But my shooting skills with the SLR were only noted as being ‘above average’- something I was not very proud of – because I knew I was capable of much better. The next stage of the contest was firing the Bren-Gun at steel plates placed at 200 yards. The overall winner was Phil Peters, and he was duly appointed as our Battery sniper.

I do not recall ever being given any training on the riot gun and I’m sure the first time I saw one was when I arrived in Belfast. We had been advised what things to purchase to take with us, such as ‘Granny Books’ and torches. A Granny Book was a small photo album which was large enough to take 6x4 inch pictures in plastic wallets. We used these to put in our ‘wanted lists’ of known IRA suspects and it would be carried by us at all times. The training was now over and all we had to do was put it to the test.

2

November 1971

Baptism of fire

On Wednesday November 24th 1971 at Euston Station, our Regiment boarded a troop train bound for Liverpool. As a youngster I had read loads of books about the Great War and I had read about the trains laden with troops heading towards the Front… Now here I was doing the same thing, only our ‘Front’ was to be some God-forsaken hole known as Andersonstown.

Our training in the methods of counter-terrorist techniques was now over and we were about to try it out for real. It was all a big adventure to me and I never considered the dangers I may face. After arriving at Liverpool Lime Street Station, the Regiment made its way down to the docks to board a Belfast-bound passenger ferry. I was gutted to be so close to home, as I only lived down the road in Manchester and I hadn’t seen my mother for ages. Yet here I was about to board a boat to Belfast, and I couldn’t even be sure if I would ever see home again.

My lasting memory of that trip is looking over the side as we lay tied up at the pier and watching excrement and toilet paper being thrown against the side of the ship by the swell of the River Mersey. Some of the passengers on seeing us started to sing pro- IRA songs and I could sense already the hostility that was directed towards us. Some of us spent the time just milling about on the deck as we waited for the boat to leave the pier as there seemed little else to do. Eventually we pulled out and headed into the bay. I stood at the stern and watched intently as Liverpool receded into the distance – and I wondered what the future held for us all.

Thursday 25th …

After disembarking at Belfast Docks, our Battery headed straight for base camp at Andersonstown. Our home for the next four months was to be the bus depot at the junction of Falls Road and Glen Road. Our accommodation block was situated at the top end of the depot and was nothing more than a long wooden hut protected by a wall of sandbags. Each of us was allocated a bunk-bed with a wooden foot-locker to store our belongings and the washing facilities were situated out in the yard in a hastily constructed corrugated structure. At the bottom end of the depot by the front gates stood the entrance to Milltown Cemetery and to the right the heavily fortified building of the RUC Station. To the left side and the rear of the depot lay Falls Park.

Me at the Divis Drive entrance to the bus depot.

No sooner had we arrived, I found myself on guard duty at the Divis Drive entrance to the base. My diary notes that: ‘With it being my first day, I was really scared.’ The entrance to the compound was protected by