‘Enemy Action’: The UK Ministry of Defence, Academia and the Historical Record

Abstract

The publication of Uncivil War, Huw Bennett’s history of the early years of the Northern Ireland conflict, has highlighted an increasingly obstructive and uncooperative approach by the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) towards academic researchers. Geraint Hughes argues that the impediments the MoD is placing by restricting access to archival evidence on recent military conflicts is not only undemocratic, but also distorts public awareness of the complexities of these wars, and hampers the British armed forces’ own efforts to develop as ‘learning institutions’ that can use military history to support their own professional understanding of the challenges posed by contemporary warfare. He calls for a dialogue between the MoD and the academic community that addresses the balance between operational security and accountability, and contributes to a mutually beneficial relationship where scholarship can contribute to the armed forces’ own process of self and institutional education.◼

In his 1959 James Bond thriller Goldfinger, Ian Fleming gives his villain the following line of dialogue: ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action’.¹ That quote came to mind when writing this article about the Ministry of Defence (MoD)’s engagement with academics studying Britain’s recent military campaigns; the term ‘engagement’ being closer to the definition of a battle as opposed to that which involves a co-operative interaction between two or more parties.

In October 2023 Cambridge University Press published Uncivil War, Huw Bennett’s history of the British Army’s role in the early years of the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. Bennett’s book included a five-page section on his sources, outlining an increasingly obstructive approach by the MoD which seemed designed to frustrate the author’s access to archival sources. Of equal concern was the changing attitude of the Army’s regimental associations and museums towards academic researchers, and the increasing unwillingness of both to permit access to their own records.²

The problems Bennett faced are not isolated. Ten years ago, the editors of a volume of essays by retired military commanders on operations conducted during Tony Blair’s premiership noted that the MoD prevented serving army generals from contributing.³ This obstructiveness has now extended to former service personnel, journalists and academics. Mike Martin, a former army reservist and the author of An Intimate War, a book on Helmand, faced attempts by the British Army and the MoD to block its publication, even though they had initially authorised his PhD research; Martin had to resign his commission to get his work into print.⁴ Simon Akam likewise encountered official obstruction in publishing The Changing of the Guard, his account of the British Army’s performance in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.⁵ There is growing evidence that academics studying the UK armed forces and their recent military operations are facing increasing resistance from the MoD,⁶ and that this even extends to scholars studying more innocuous subjects such as the ‘work–army life’ balance of military reservists.⁷ The Chilcot Inquiry’s struggle to get declassified evidence on the Blair government’s decision-making behind Britain’s involvement in the Iraq War (2003–09) shows that even state-appointed inquiries can face obstruction from Whitehall.⁸

The Ministry of Defence building in London, December 2016. Courtesy of Marc Zakian / Alamy Stock

To add to this, Bennett states in Uncivil War that regimental museums are also coming under official pressure to restrict access to their archives. In August 2022 the Army Historical Branch contacted their directors to instruct them that ‘any public records created by the Army or wider Defence after 1958’ in their archives should be transferred to the MoD, as their retention was a breach of the Public Records Act. Yet in response to a Freedom of Information Request lodged by Bennett requesting details on the archival material transferred as result, the Army Historical Branch claimed that their original message to the museums was ‘a supportive measure to any museums seeking advice on the information they hold. The AHB does not intend to complete a survey as it cannot compel private institutions, such as the regimental museums, to respond to its queries’.⁹

It is then reasonable for those working on Britain’s recent military history to suspect that we are beyond happenstance and coincidence now, and that there is an official effort designed to make it as hard as possible for anyone to write about the armed forces and their historical and more recent campaigns. That is worrying, and it is also counter-productive.

The Scholarly–Military Divide

Scholars of military and defence matters understand that there can be no free-for-all with official papers. Since 2013, the British government’s declassification procedures have operated under a 20 year rule, although Section 3(4) of the Public Records Act permits the retention of files on national security grounds.¹⁰ There may also be ethical reasons for withholding or redacting information in government files: a good example here would be to protect records that identify civilians who provided intelligence to military personnel during a counter-insurgency campaign, because either they or their descendants may be targeted by violent reprisals.¹¹ Yet as the intelligence scholar Richard J Aldrich notes, ‘[historians] are what they eat’,¹² and archival evidence can be concealed because the material concerned is embarrassing to politicians, senior civil servants, military commanders or the institutions they belong to.

To take an example from the relatively distant past, Carlo D’Este described the contrasting cultures that shaped the US and British official histories of the Normandy campaign of June–August 1944. Dwight D Eisenhower was clearly discomfited by some of Forrest Pogue’s findings in his 1954 book The Supreme Command, and as the former Supreme Allied Commander (not to mention the US President at the time) he potentially had the means and the influence to force the US Army to change the record. Instead, Eisenhower had the integrity to stand back, saying of the contents of The Supreme Command that ‘if that is how Dr Pogue found it, let it stand’. In contrast, official British histories on Normandy were slanted and at best equivocal in discussing Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery’s performance as the Allied land forces commander, particularly with contentious operations such as Goodwood (18–20 July 1944). The efforts by British Army historians to obfuscate and elide over Montgomery’s command may have soothed the latter’s own ego. It also provided additional grounds for his detractors to portray him as an over-promoted charlatan who failed as a commander.¹³

The Case for Transparency

Taking more recent matters into account, Northern Ireland – like Iraq and Afghanistan – was a gruelling and bloody campaign for the British armed forces. A total of 722 servicemen and women, mainly soldiers from the army, were killed during Operation Banner, out of 3,532 dead in this conflict.¹⁴ All of these men and women will be remembered by former comrades who will also recall the gruelling routine of constant patrolling, the handling of riots, and the fraught encounters with civilians from both sides of the sectarian divide who verbally and at times physically attacked them. British troops involved in Banner also found it psychologically disorienting to be conducting an operation in a domestic setting, serving in a war zone that was constitutionally part of the UK (allowing of course for the fact that a sizeable minority wanted to change this).¹⁵ Furthermore, for personnel recruited from either Northern Ireland or the Republic – or who were from the Irish diaspora on the British mainland – this was an intimate war for themselves and their families.¹⁶

Northern Ireland veterans not surprisingly display pride in their service, and feel contempt for adversaries (notably in the Provisional IRA) who committed such shocking and underhand atrocities such as the killing of Privates John McCraig, Joseph McCraig and Dougald McCaughey on 10 March 1971,¹⁷ and also the disappearance and murder of Jean McConville in December 1972.¹⁸ Public protests show that a sizeable number of them feel that they have been turned into scapegoats by hostile politicians, journalists and academics who want to arraign them for spurious crimes while giving their former foes a free pass.¹⁹ These suspicions persist although there have been more legacy prosecutions of Republican and Loyalist terrorists than military personnel.²⁰ Museum archivists also appear to be motivated by misguided efforts to defend regimental honour, and a suspicion that unit histories will be used to discredit their soldiers and perhaps arraign them by unscrupulous and partisan actors. Such attitudes should be acknowledged, and the concerns of Banner veterans should be treated with respect and sympathy, but they should not be used as an impediment to scholarship.

The British armed forces serve a democratic state, and are entrusted with the means and authority to use lethal and targeted violence during military operations conducted in the UK’s national interests. As such they should be accountable for their actions in historical and current conflicts. To take the clearest example from Northern Ireland, it would have helped the country greatly if the legal rigour applied during the Saville Inquiry on ‘Bloody Sunday’ (the killing of 13 demonstrators in Derry/Londonderry by soldiers from Support Company, 1^st Battalion the Parachute Regiment (1PARA) on 30 January 1972) had been applied in its immediate aftermath. The British Army’s record on Operation Banner was generally one of restraint and discipline, but ‘Bloody Sunday’ was one of the shocking exceptions that should have been properly investigated at the time.²¹

The best disciplined militaries train their troops in rules of engagement and laws of armed conflict. Former British Army soldiers and Royal Marines may however recall the man in their battalion/commando (or company/squadron, or platoon/troop) who the US Marine veteran and cartoonist Maximilian Uriarte refers to as ‘that guy’.²² ‘That guy’ is the serviceman who should not have been given the means and the opportunity to use lethal force, and who had the temperament and mentality to kill unlawfully and wantonly.

At the level of higher command, the Saville Inquiry highlighted two critical decisions which led to bloodshed. The first was the Commander Land Forces, Northern Ireland General Sir Robert Ford’s actions in tasking 1PARA as the arrest force for the civil rights march in the Bogside, despite complaints from other army units about their brutality towards civilians. The second involved Lieutenant-Colonel Derek Wilford, 1PARA’s commanding officer, who escalated the confrontation with the marchers in defiance of orders received from his Brigade Commander, Brigadier Pat MacLellan.²³ Both Ford and Wilford should have been held publicly and legally accountable for their actions both leading up to Bloody Sunday, and on the day itself.

As noted above, the increasingly uncooperative attitude of regimental museums may be motivated by a desire to protect cap-badge honour, although it is striking to note Bennett’s observation that the most welcoming of the ones he encountered was the Airborne Museum in Aldershot.²⁴ Justly or otherwise, the Parachute Regiment has probably the most controversial reputation from Operation Banner, although one should remember that the regiment most associated with Bloody Sunday was also the regiment of Sergeant Michael Willetts, who was posthumously decorated with the George Cross after sacrificing himself to save civilians from a Provisional IRA bombing in Belfast on 25 May 1971.²⁵ If the Airborne Museum is prepared to be forthcoming in letting a historian access its archives, then what does any other British Army unit have to hide?

Bennett relates a running fight with the MoD to use documents already acquired from an unnamed regimental museum. These papers outlined a battalion’s operations in Belfast in the summer of 1970, in which its officers and soldiers were meeting both Catholic and Protestant community groups to defuse social tensions and hear their respective grievances, while also being scrupulously careful to act under their rules of engagement when facing potential paramilitary threats. The information Bennett had at hand showed the battalion concerned in a positive light, and yet he was not permitted to cite it in his book.²⁶ What purpose does such obstructiveness serve, particularly for Banner veterans who feel that their service and sacrifices have not been appreciated by the general public?

This touches on a third point related to contact between former military personnel and academic historians, the majority of whom may never have served a day in uniform. As the Victorian scholar Sir John Fortescue put it: ‘Any civilian who attempts to write a military history is of necessity guilty of an act of presumption’, ²⁷ and they will have to start by learning to understand how an army works before critiquing its operations. Nonetheless, we can and should now recognise that outsiders can write excellent and authoritative military history through rigorous and extensive research.²⁸ Anyone who doubts this is invited (to take a couple of examples) to read the works of two recent Templer Medal winners, Aimée Fox and Helen Parr.²⁹ Military veterans may well feel suspicious of outsiders with no direct experience of the campaigns they study attempting to analyse, and criticise, their actions, hence the stereotypical response of the old soldier in this situation: ‘You don’t know what it was like!’. The academic historian’s response to this observation should be to politely ask: ‘How can we know and understand what it was like, if you and others involved will not talk to us, and share your records?’. Ex-servicemen and women who have fought in Britain’s wars have a right to not have their experiences caricatured or pilloried, but professional scholars cannot achieve fairness and accuracy in their research and findings if they are denied access to the relevant sources.

For their part, the British armed forces pride themselves on being ‘learning institutions’, and the British Army’s own think tank emphasises its role to ‘[support] the development of the conceptual component of fighting power across the Army and [inform] executive decision making’ through research into recent historical and contemporary campaigns.³⁰ The utility of military history in the professional education of the armed forces is also summarised by the soldier-scholar Sir Michael Howard (1922–2019), who emphasised its relevance as an aid to judgement, and the importance of studying the discipline in breadth, depth and with close attention to context.³¹ The author is fortunate enough to have taught at the Joint Services Command and Staff College for over 18 years, and he has seen from personal experience the readiness of military practitioners to engage with academia to study Britain’s military history to derive ‘lessons learned’. In the long term, however, how exactly are they to do this if the MoD makes it more difficult for anyone to discuss and debate the UK’s wars and campaigns, and their legacies? To paraphrase the military historian David French, poor history will produce poor doctrine.³² The powers-that-be may perhaps decide that an ‘official’ and controlled historical account may be the most beneficial to the armed forces’ institutional morale, but evidence of it contributing to military effectiveness is scant. If the opposite was the case, the Russian army would have taken Kyiv and concluded its ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine by now.

Bridging the Gap Between Defence and Academia

This article may be seen a one-sided philippic directed against those responsible in the MoD for information management and declassification, and no doubt the individuals involved will have their own side of the story to relate. In fact, it is the author’s hope that this article gets a response from officialdom to explain and justify what appears to be a growing trend towards unnecessary and undemocratic obstruction of academic research. A discussion on the balance between respecting the sensitivities of national security and the importance of external scrutiny and accountability which involves serving officers and civil servants on the one hand, and scholars on the other, is long overdue.

There is of course a gulf between the organisational culture, the professions, and indeed the lived experiences of those who have served their country (either at the front line, or in command, or in supporting positions at home) and academia. In the latter case, serious historians understand full well that there may be valid ethical and practical reasons for withholding archival evidence from declassification, but they will also react against restrictions that have no apparent purpose other than to frustrate any scholars who are not considered to be ‘tame’. On the other side of the divide, the readiness of military professionals to accept and engage with civilian scholars who will challenge their narratives and self-perception is a true test of how well they regard ‘critical’ thinking as an essential tool in their institutional and self-education.³³

In conclusion, I would appeal for a reappraisal by the MoD of its policy on declassification and academic engagement that (to use the Normandy analogy noted earlier) embraces the Eisenhower rather than the Montgomery mindset, and an approach to academia which does not treat scholars as potential enemies. This is not only in accordance with democratic norms but also ultimately more beneficial to military practitioners. The final words here best belong to the Irish historian of Operation Banner Edward Burke: ‘The attempt to hide archives/evidence enables those that construct uncomplicated myths – wholly demonising or eulogising the [British] army’.³⁴ A state of affairs similar to that Burke warns us of will damage scholarship and undermine the liberal democratic principles the UK is based on. It is also unlikely to help Britain’s armed forces perform the critically important task of defending the nation. ◼

The author would like to thank both Huw Bennett and Aimee Fox for their comments on the first draft of this article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Geraint Hughes

Geraint Hughes is a Reader in Diplomatic and Military History at the Defence Studies Department, King’s College London, teaching at the Joint Services Command and Staff College. He is also a former Territorial Army soldier who served in Iraq on Operation Telic in 2004. The analysis, opinions and conclusions expressed or implied within this article are his, and do not necessarily represent the views of the JSCSC, the Defence Academy, the Ministry of Defence or any other UK government agency.

Notes

1. Ian Fleming, Goldfinger (London: Pan, 1964), p. 143.

2. Huw Bennett, Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles, 1966-1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), pp. 277–81.

3. Jonathan Bailey, Richard Iron and Hew Strachan (ed.), British Generals in Blair’s Wars (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), p. xvii.

4. Mike Martin, An Intimate War: An Oral History of the Helmand Conflict (London: Hurst and Company, 2014), pp. 253–55.

5. Sian Cain, ‘“A Terrifying Precedent”: Author Describes Struggle to Publish British Army History’, The Guardian, 23 July 2021; Simon Akam, The Changing of the Guard: The British Army since 9/11 (London: Scribe, 2021).

6. David Morgan Owen, Aimée Fox and Huw Bennett, ‘A Haunting Past: British Defence, Historical Narratives, and the Politics of Presentism’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs (2023), <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/09557571.2023.2273375>, DOI: 10.1080/09557571.2023.2273375.

7. Sergio Catignani and Victoria S Basham, ‘The Gendered Politics of Researching Military Policy in the Age of the “Knowledge Economy”’, Review of International Studies (Vol. 47, No. 2, 2021), pp. 211–30.

8. Owen David Thomas, ‘Security in the Balance: How Britain Tried to Keep Its Iraq War Secrets’, Security Dialogue (Vol. 51, No. 1, 2020), pp. 77–95.

9. Bennett, Uncivil War, p. 280; letter dated 6 October 2023 from the Army Historical Branch to Huw Bennett, Ref: ArmySec/FOI2023/11037, 6 October 2023. I am grateful for Dr Bennett for forwarding this letter to me.

10. On current legislation for declassification and the various iterations of the Public Records Act, see ‘History of the Public Records Acts’, <https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/information-management/legislation/public-records-act/history-of-pra/>, accessed 30 January 2024.

11. David French, ‘Toads and Informers: How the British Treated their Collaborators during the Cyprus Emergency, 1955-9’, The International History Review (Vol. 37, No. 1, 2017), pp. 71–88.

12. Richard J Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence (London: John Murray 2001), p. 6.

13. Carlo D’Este, Decision in Normandy: The Real Story of Montgomery and the Allied Campaign (London: Penguin, 2004 edition), pp. 489–94.

14. Malcolm Sutton, ‘Index of Deaths’, Conflict Archive on the Internet, University of Ulster, <https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/sutton/tables/Year.html>, accessed 11 October 2023.

15. Peter Taylor, Brits: The War against the IRA (London: Bloomsbury, 2002), pp. 11, 30.

16. Bennett, Uncivil Wars, p. 28.

17. Thomas Hennessey, The Evolution of the Troubles 1970-72 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007), pp. 73–74.

18. Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (London: William Collins, 2018).

19. Edward Burke, ‘50 Years On, It is Time for the British Army to Learn from Bloody Sunday’, RUSI Commentary, 28 January 2022; see also the website of the Northern Ireland Veterans Movement, <https://nivm.co.uk/>, accessed 30 January 2024.

20. Claire Mills and David Torrance, Investigation of Former Armed Services Personnel Who Served in Northern Ireland (London: House of Commons Library, Research Briefing, 18 May 2022).

21. Edward Burke, An Army of Tribes: British Army Cohesion, Deviancy and Murder in Northern Ireland (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018).

22. See the ‘Terminal Lance’ cartoon dated 16 July 2013, <https://terminallance.com/2013/07/16/terminal-lance-278-that-guy/>, accessed 9 October 2023.

23. See Bloody Sunday Inquiry, Report of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry (London: The Stationery Office, 2010), <https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/report-of-the-bloody-sunday-inquiry>, accessed 10 October 2023.

24. Huw Bennett, ‘Denials, Excuses, and Roadblocks to the Truth about the British Army in Northern Ireland’, Irish Independent, 30 September 2023.

25. Bennet, Uncivil War, p. 274. 1PARA’s experiences of their first operational tour in 1969–70 and their relations with both Catholic and Protestant civilians were also far more amicable than was the case two years later. Taylor, Brits, pp. 37–38.

26. Bennett, Uncivil War, p. 281.

27. Quoted in Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins, The Battle for the Falklands (London: Michael Joseph, 1983), p. 315.

28. Aimée Fox and David Morgan-Owen, ‘Whose Voice Matters? The British Army in 2018’, The Wavell Room, 21 June 2018, <https://wavellroom.com/2018/06/21/whose-voice-matters-the-british-army-in-2018>, accessed 14 October 2023.

29. Aimée Fox, Learning to Fight: Military Innovation and Change in the British Army, 1914-1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Helen Parr, Our Boys: The Story of a Paratrooper (London: Penguin Random House, 2019).

30. Centre for Historical Analysis and Conflict Research, ‘About Us’, <https://chacr.org.uk/about/about-us/>, accessed 9 October 2023.

31. Michael Howard, ‘The Use and Abuse of Military History’, lecture delivered at the Royal United Services Institute, 18 October 1961, reprinted in RUSI Journal (Vol. 138, No. 1, 1993), pp. 26–30.

32. David French, The British Way in Counter-Insurgency, 1945-1967 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 255.

33. Sophy Antrobus and Hannah West, ‘“This is All Very Academic”: Critical Thinking in Professional Military Education’, RUSI Journal (Vol. 167, No. 3, 2022), pp. 78–86.

34. Edward Burke, ‘Ten years ago I met with few restrictions when visiting military museums. Now even uncontroversial files that were previously available are closed. The attempt to hide archives/evidence enables those that construct uncomplicated myths - wholly demonising or eulogising the army.’ [X post], 5 September 2023, <https://twitter.com/Edward__Burke/status/1699049503704182922>, accessed 9 October 2023.