Historically, the British Army has been an imperial force whose main role since the eighteenth century has been the defense of the empire. Conventional wars in Europe were aberrations. Although very active in and proficient at colonial warfare, the British Army did not have a well-defined, written counterinsurgency doctrine and indeed had an aversion to constructing one until late in the twentieth century, preferring a more pragmatic and flexible, evolutionary approach. This was partly because easy victories were frequently achieved against poorly armed indigenous armies rather than guerrillas, making it appear that a counterinsurgency doctrine was not needed. It was also partly the result of the army’s culture and of the great variety of indigenous foes, which made the formulation of a coherent doctrine difficult. There was, however, still plenty of material for officers to consult, notably W. C. G. Heneker’s Bush Warfare, T. Miller Maguire’s Strategy and Tactics in Mountain Ranges, and Francis Younghusband’s Indian Frontier Warfare. In particular, the publication of Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice by Major (later Major General Sir) Charles Callwell in 1896 filled the gap left by the failure to develop a written, formal doctrine, although the 1906 edition is better known. By synthesizing the lessons of past experience in colonial warfare, Callwell filled the vacuum by supplying the standard manual not just for the British Army but also for other armies because he assimilated the experiences of other armies and chose his examples from many periods and many armies. Thus, Callwell provided not only a comprehensive synthesis for the British and many other nations but also the basis for future discussion and development.1
In Small Wars, Callwell, called the “Clausewitz of colonial warfare” by one historian,2 clearly distinguished between colonial, small wars “against savages and semi-civilized races” and regular campaigns between organized, conventional armies. The operational experience gained in “imperial policing” of the colonies was a rich legacy, which was kept largely separate from the theory and practice of the home armies prior to World War II. In the colonial wars of the late nineteenth century, the army fought in numerous campaigns against irregulars along the frontiers of the empire. Callwell recognized the importance of vigorous leadership, good intelligence, and public opinion. In Small Wars, Callwell openly supported “scorched-earth” tactics, although they might “shock the humanitarian.” He specifically advocated the practice of seizing livestock and destroying crops and villages, as a means of weakening an insurgency. Callwell also explicitly justified reprisals and punitive actions against civilians, including collective punishments. He does not seem to have fully realized the negative impact of these techniques on the population and their counterproductive implications. British counterinsurgency campaigns continued to use such methods before 1945, notably in South Africa, Ireland, and Palestine, and then in the campaigns thereafter. These British counterinsurgency methods could be brutal when dealing with civilians, employing not “minimum force” but that required to defeat the insurgency by destroying its civilian infrastructure. Nonetheless, that said, the British Army generally behaved with greater moderation than other colonial powers and totalitarian states. Exceptions such as the Amritsar massacre in 1919 and the Irish War of Independence, 1919–22, reinforced the need for restraint and for deploying “minimum force.”3
The Easter Rising of April 1916, like those of 1798, 1848, and 1867, was an all-out attempt to achieve a “once-and-for-all” success, which committed its forces, some 1,200 members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), to a static battle. In this futile and reckless bid for independence, which was mainly limited to central Dublin, the rebels received little support and failed to make any serious effort to occupy any of the key sites of either strategic or symbolic significance, such as Dublin Castle or Trinity College. The insurrection lacked any substantial external support, as attempts by Germany to foment trouble in Ireland were unsuccessful. Most notable were the failed attempts by Sir Roger Casement, who was later captured in Kerry, to recruit an Irish Brigade from prisoners of war at Limburg in Germany, which received a largely hostile reception, and to supply German arms, which foundered when the ship carrying them was intercepted by the British. Nevertheless, the British administration had been surprised and unprepared for the revolt, lulled into a sense of security by the failure of the Kaiser to provide support for the enterprise. Like the earlier revolts, the Easter Rising was ruthlessly suppressed by the British Army, which then embarked on a series of arrests, executions, internments, and raids. Thus, although the scale of the rising was relatively minor, with some 500 dead and 2,500 injured, when compared to the contemporary slaughter on the Western Front, the political impact was massive. Ireland was governed under martial law between April and November 1916, and during this period emergency regulations were employed to curtail civil liberties, such as fairs, football matches, and markets, and to suppress protest, while even greater coercion was introduced in “disturbed” districts. Furthermore, some 2,000 were interned (the last of the internees were released in December 1916), and 16 rebels were executed. In the mythology of Irish republicanism, this “martyrdom” had an immense impact, alienating many of the Irish people who had hitherto supported nonviolent agitation for change in parliament. The execution of the rebel leaders provided martyrs for the republican cause and allowed a Republican recovery, which prepared the Irish people through extensive propaganda for a prolonged war of independence. Inspired by the guerrilla tactics of the Boers in the South African War, in this struggle the Irish Republican Army (IRA) was the forerunner of modern revolutionary groups, conducting a politically inspired campaign. The rebels employed terrorism in conjunction with guerrilla warfare in both rural and urban areas, rather than more conventional tactics, rendering Ireland ungovernable.4
Thus, the situation in Ireland worsened following the Easter Rising of 1916. This was largely the result of the British failure to find a political settlement and an adequate answer to Irish political aspirations. The British not only failed to repress the opposition but also contrived to alienate potential supporters, notably with its poor management of the aftermath of the rising. By 1918, political support in Ireland for independence was gaining momentum. Nationalist support drifted toward Sinn Féin (Ourselves Alone), which rallied the nationalists away from the Irish Parliamentary Party, who had neither delivered Home Rule, which had been deferred by the outbreak of World War I, nor prevented conscription. The Irish government remained unreformed, failing to find a political settlement or to understand the effects of the rising and the growing radicalization of Irish opinion. During 1917, the use of ineffective and poorly conceived coercion, such as the arrest and imprisonment of Volunteers, merely added martyrs to the republican cause, notably Thomas Ashe who died in Mountjoy Gaol in September 1917 after going on hunger strike, while weakening the morale of its own security forces. The application of conscription to Ireland in April 1918, although not enforced, brought moderates and the Catholic hierarchy behind the republicans. The arrest of the majority of the leadership of Sinn Féin by the new Lord Lieutenant, Field Marshal Viscount French, in May 1918, left the extremists with growing influence. It was followed up by the closing down of the whole Sinn Féin organization in July 1918, which merely drove the republicans underground. However, conscription was not enforced and little was done to prevent the spread of Sinn Féin activity. Having won the December 1918 general election in southern Ireland, winning 73 of the 105 Irish seats, Sinn Féin Members of Parliament refused to take their places at Westminster and instead proclaimed an Irish Republic and set up its own government, Dáil Éireann.5 As one officer noted that:
The rebel campaign in Ireland was a national movement backed by a large proportion of the population and was not conducted by a few hired assassins as was so often supposed.6
At the time, however, the British government attributed Sinn Féin’s gains in local elections and its victory in the South during the general election to intimidation, failing to understand that the very legitimacy of British rule was being challenged. When following sporadic outbreaks of violence during 1918, an insurgency was launched by nine Tipperary Volunteers with the murder of two catholic constables near Soloheadbeg on January 21, 1919, political support in Ireland was behind the rebels who were thus able to mobilize the population behind their cause. In contrast, the British Army was being demobilized and was already hamstrung and stretched by huge global obligations, notably intervention in the Russian civil war and the Chanak crisis, while Ireland was still primarily a training area providing drafts for overseas units. The garrison in Britain fell from over 2,000,000 in November 1919 to 25,000 in March 1920. There were never sufficient men, and the units were too thinly distributed and poorly trained to be able to establish close control over the countryside and dominate rural areas. In 1920, Irish Command had only 29 weak battalions, and even when this had risen to 51 battalions in January 1921, it was still understrength. The eight southwestern counties where martial law was applied from December 1920 contained less than half the troops that were deployed in Northern Ireland during the 1970s.7 As a result, the areas allocated to divisions, brigades, and battalions “were usually much too large to control effectively,”8 and as 5th Division noted, “there were never, during 1920 & 1921, sufficient troops for the continually increasing duties.”9
There were complaints by the army about the lack of transport and in particular of armored vehicles and of armored or rifle-proof trucks, which could operate under the constant threat of ambush. Many trucks were obsolete and unserviceable because of shortages of spare parts. They also made “an appalling noise” and were “particularly vulnerable to attack by ambush.” But in fact the army’s real handicap was not a shortage of equipment but poor training. These resulted in poor tactics and a lack of basic skills such as marksmanship and field craft, which were very important in defeating the IRA, who presented only a few targets. The troops lacked the expertise as skirmishers and snipers to track down and outfight the rebels in the few engagements, which offered fleeting opportunities. Of the three divisions conducting the operations in Ireland, only the 5th Division appears to have carried out any special antiguerrilla training, running a series of three-day courses for officers and NCOs at the Curragh during the winter of 1920–21. Indeed, one of the most promising developments during operations in 1921 was the abandonment of the use of noisy motor vehicles, which were too dependent on usable roads, in favor of greater movement across country by the troops on foot. This tactic was in support of the idea of “playing the enemy at his own game” and securing surprise and secrecy, which hitherto had been the preserve of the IRA. Nevertheless, area searches and “drives” were still conducted on a large scale during 1921 without much success. For example, in January 1921, one of the first large-scale area searches was undertaken in Dublin (Operation Optimist) when 600 troops sealed off and searched the city center for two days. No important arrests were made, and rebels caught in the area had been able to escape the cordon. This was the result of the hostility of the population, the IRA’s intelligence that was not caught out by such cumbrous operations, and the poor training of the troops who did not make the cordon effective enough.10
The commander of the 6th Division at a conference in April 1921 indicated that “no ‘driving’ should take place, except with a very definite object, based on sound information.” He observed that “it serves no purpose to be active merely for the sake of being active: men should be worked only with a good object in view.” Instead, “small and mobile columns should be formed,” which were “ready to move at short notice” when intelligence had produced “definite information of a suitable objective.”11 Drives on a big scale generally “had very little success” because “ it was found to be almost impossible to keep secret the preparations necessary for concentrating a large force.” Smaller, mobile columns, however, “were able to make use of the insecurity element of surprise and also considerably lowered the enemy’s moral[e] by creating in him a feeling of insecurity.” In addition, it was presumed that:
A great deal of local patrolling was carried out by each Detachment, so as to keep the enemy on the move, and prevent him resting, in any quiet area. The general idea was that there should be no quiet areas, and that the enemy columns should be constantly harassed.12
The IRA, the military wing of the political party Sinn Féin, made Ireland ungovernable between 1919 and 1921, with a classic guerrilla campaign that employed some 3,000 poorly equipped “volunteers,” despite the presence of 80,000 British troops at the zenith of the campaign. Unable to defeat the British Army in the field, the IRA resorted to guerrilla warfare with hit-and-run tactics conducted by local units against the security forces, which were widely dispersed in small detachments, and their lines of communication. They hoped to provoke the police and military into conducting reprisals. In the summer of 1920, they also developed the “flying column,” a small mobile band of insurgents based on the Boer commandos employed during the guerrilla phase of the South African War. Many of the Irish leaders, notably Michael Collins, who was sometimes known as the “Irish De Wet,” and Dan Breen and Tom Barry, who commanded flying columns, were influenced by Boer tactics. These flying columns were able to raise the tempo of the rebel campaign, being on active operations for several days harassing and attacking the security forces, before returning to civilian life to rest. Overly reliant on traveling by road in lorries, the army was often ambushed, notably at Bruree in Limerick in July 1920, Rineen in Clare in September 1920, and Kilmichael in Cork in November 1920. Most dramatic of all was the attempt to ambush and kill Lord French himself at Ashtown, near the Viceregal Lodge, on December 19, 1920. These tactics allowed the guerrillas to remain in the field supported by an infrastructure amidst the population, inflict greater casualties on the British, and maintain a presence in the countryside; however, such methods also presented larger targets for the British security forces. In early 1921, these columns were mostly broken up into smaller units that were less vulnerable to British attacks. The IRA also used improvised explosive devices (IEDs) against military convoys from mid-1920. It also issued weekly notes, An t-Óglach (The Soldier, the official in-house journal of the Volunteers), which outlined the lessons from their operations.13
There was also a campaign of arson, sabotage, shootings, and terrorism carried out in the United Kingdom during 1920–21, which was countered by arrests, imprisonment, deportation, and internment. While the guerrilla campaign was proceeding, a shadow government built up its own administration and judicial system, winning the support of the population while subverting the effectiveness of British rule. Irish republicans provided the template for modern revolutionary warfare, developed later by Mao, Tito, Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro, which employed a mass party, popular front, guerrilla warfare, underground government, and continuous propaganda campaign.14 Fifth Division admitted that:
Sinn Fein, by sheer terrorism, had got such a grip on the country by the winter of 1920 that the most severe measures of November and December could not show any immediate effect. Action on the part of the troops was followed by intensified acts of terrorism on the part of the rebel leaders—we were always too late.15
The British response was piecemeal, uncoordinated, and largely conventional. They also resorted to collective punishment, which had been employed previously in colonial wars. Instead of “winning the hearts and minds” of the population by offering incentives to support the government, the security forces attempted to make the cost of prolonging the insurgency prohibitive for its supporters. Some 4,500 suspects were interned without trial and “security zones” were formed, allowing large-scale cordon-and-search operations to be conducted. Raids and searches on private homes were also conducted to arrest suspects, to seize arms and documents, which provided intelligence on the republican organization, and to harass the rebels. The difficulty was that collective punishment, which included curfews, collective fines, and the destruction of homes, crops, and livestock, exacerbated the hostility of the population, penalizing the whole community in an indiscriminate fashion. In Ireland, the British policy of burning the houses of suspected IRA supporters was disastrous, driving many into the republican camp. It also resulted in retaliation in which the homes of loyalists were burnt, which added another element to the campaign of intimidation and murder by the IRA against loyalists, such as members of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), auxiliary policemen, ex-servicemen, magistrates, and civilians who collaborated with the British. By 1926, the Protestant population in what became the Irish Free State had fallen by a third in an “ethnic cleansing,” which had occurred mainly during 1920–22.16
Aware of the importance of publicizing the Irish cause, Sinn Féin appealed not only to international opinion, especially in the United States, but also to liberal opinion in Britain, causing a domestic backlash. British credibility was undermined by atrocities as they tried to force the Irish into loyalty through brutal suppression. The pattern was set by troops who wrecked the shops owned by members of a jury, which had refused to bring a verdict of murder at the inquest on a dead soldier from the Shropshire Light Infantry, who had been killed by the IRA in Fermoy in September 1919. Similarly, troops went on the rampage in Brandon in July 1920, Cobh in August 1920, and Mallow in September 1920 in retaliation for the deaths of soldiers. Control over the troops was reestablished by the high command, but much damage to the British cause had already been inflicted.17 A statement made by Colonel G. Smyth, the divisional commissioner for Cork, to the RIC in Listowel in June 1920 typified the lack of discipline that also existed within the police, fuelling the insurgency by alienating an already hostile population:
The more you shoot, the better I will like you, and I assure you that no policeman will get into trouble for shooting any man.18
Consequently, until much damage had been done, the British still failed to pay sufficient attention to “winning hearts and minds” or to countering IRA propaganda and the adverse publicity that was generated by it by highlighting the violence of the IRA and the atrocities committed during its terror campaign. An effective information service, the propaganda department led by Basil Clarke (a former Daily Mail war correspondent), was not created until very late in the campaign, in August 1920, and it was not until 1921 that its structure had been clearly established. Thus, as later in Palestine, Cyprus, and Aden, the British lost the propaganda war. Thus, the shooting of eight-year-old Annie O’Neill and the murder of Mayor Tomás MacCurtáin of Cork City in March 1920 made headlines not just in Ireland and Britain but also in the foreign press, notably in the United States. This was a result of the daily news bulletins issued by the Republican publicity department.19 To the army, the lesson was clear, namely that:
Strict control of the press is essential from the beginning. Rebel newspapers must be suppressed, and all others supervised. The assistance derived by the rebel cause from the ease and impunity with which certain journals circulated false accusations against troops and police, and misrepresented motives, was incalculable.20
A successful counterinsurgency campaign is built on good civil-military cooperation and, above all, an effective police force working closely with the army, providing local knowledge about the population and intelligence about the activities and infrastructure of the guerrillas. In Ireland, there was a failure to create a central command or to develop organizations, such as joint committees at different levels of the two forces, to ensure unity of command and good coordination of the counterinsurgency strategy. From 1916 onward, following the Easter Rising, there were communal pressures on the RIC, whose posts were often under attack and whose constables faced intimidation, and sectarian violence between the Catholic and Protestant communities. The abandonment of garrisons in rural areas during the winter of 1919–20 had far-reaching consequences, reducing the effectiveness of the RIC as a civil police force, which could control the countryside. This lowered the morale of the RIC while raising that of the rebels. This situation was made worse by the recruitment and influx of English recruits, who lacked training and local expertise, into the RIC and its Auxiliary Division. Friction between the army and the Auxiliaries, which exacerbated the lack of cooperation between the police and military, was revealed during the burning of Cork City in December 1920 by some Auxiliaries in retaliation for the murder of a comrade. The reprisals carried out by the Auxiliaries made the army, whose “full and searching” inquiry was critical of the conduct and behavior of the police, reluctant to work with them. These tensions remained unresolved and the failure to work together hampered intelligence collection, one of the key ingredients of any successful counterinsurgency campaign. It was also hindered by bureaucratic rivalries between Special Branch and MI5 in Whitehall, which weakened the gathering of intelligence during 1919–21. Throughout the campaign, there was a failure to develop a single, integrated intelligence system. The divisions remained unresolved and continued to hamper the creation of an efficiently organized counterinsurgency strategy, which was the key to success.21 As the 5th Division later commented:
We were much handicapped in 1920 by the unavoidable weakness of the military intelligence service. … Until a more efficient service could be brought into existence we had to rely, almost entirely, on the information in the hands of the police. The rebels realised this as well as we did, hence their attacks on the R.I.C.22
Exacerbating the situation was the fact that the British vented on the population their frustration at the failure of their operations to defeat an elusive enemy, driving the public into the rebel camp. The RIC was a paramilitary force—very different from the English police—whose main task was to locate and prevent political discontent and subversion. By 1916–19, it was in a state of disarray owing to constraints of political expediency and financial stringency, was in a lack of cohesion and leadership within its command structure, and became isolated from the Irish population. The government had failed to reform the RIC after the Easter Rising of 1916 and did not bring in outside experts, such as C. A. (later Sir Charles) Tegart, a police officer from India, until too late. By contrast, the IRA enjoyed the decisive advantage throughout the campaign of being able not only to obtain intelligence but also to deny it to the security forces. Through a combination of fear, loyalty, and respect, the rebels were also able to depend on the cooperation of the population, which was in turn also denied to the British.23 As one officer who served as intelligence officer with a battalion observed:
The [work of the] I.R.A. Intelligence Service was, of course, easy owing to the majority of the population being friendly, but nevertheless it reached a very high standard of efficiency, and every movement, and very often every intended movement, of the Crown Forces was known.24
The 5th Division believed that:
Perhaps the greatest handicap was the lack of knowledge of who was friend and who was foe; all civilians had to be regarded as potential enemies. What would have helped would have been the compulsory introduction of identity cards for every male and female above a certain age; this was only possible under strict Martial Law.25
Demobilized soldiers, the notorious Black and Tans, and Auxiliaries who wore khaki shirts and black-green trousers because of a shortage of RIC uniforms were recruited by Major General Sir Hugh Tudor, the head of the RIC from May 1920, to solve the shortage of policemen. Former army officers were also recruited by Tudor to staff the Special Auxiliary Division of the RIC. The Auxiliary Companies, known as “Tudor’s Toughs,” of the Auxiliary Division, which was commanded by Brigadier General F. P. Crozier, a veteran of the Ulster Volunteers and the 36th (Ulster) Division, possessed great potential for counterinsurgency operations. But their lack of either military or civil control, which resulted in brutal and savage treatment of the civilian population, meant that the opportunity was lost through inadequate discipline and training. Lacking police training and discipline, these Auxiliaries, when ambushed by guerrillas who then disappeared into the crowd, began to treat the Irish population as the enemy, committing reprisals and terrorizing inhabitants during raids and searches. Of particular notoriety was the Croke Park incident (November 1920) and burning down of part of Cork (December 1920). There were also allegations of assassinations of prominent republicans and summary executions and abuse during interrogations of suspected rebels. The British failure in Ireland was largely the result of a lack of restraint in a war that was fought in the full glare of world attention.26 One officer commented on one of the main lessons to be learned from Ireland:
In some places the attitude taken up was that the whole population was hostile, and should be treated accordingly. This was often the attitude adopted by the Auxiliaries. Personally, I was convinced that such an attitude was fundamentally wrong, and that in conditions of this nature, you must at all costs distinguish the sheep from the wolves. If you fail to do so, you drive the whole population into the hands of the enemy.27
The army relied on the police, notably the CID (Criminal Investigation Department) and Special Branch of the RIC, for intelligence, and the weakness of the intelligence services was a major factor in the failure of operations as it made it very difficult to target and arrest republican leaders. Well informed by an effective intelligence organization, the IRA unleashed a terror campaign from July 1919, which sought to break the key link between the police and the community by attacking police stations and killing informers, policemen, magistrates, and officials, causing the government’s intelligence from spies, informers, and police surveillance to dry up.
The police (including Special Branch), the postal, telegraph and telephone services, the civilian clerks employed by the army, and the civil service had been badly infiltrated by spies. The IRA also targeted intelligence personnel, informers, and anyone else who provided information. The most celebrated example of this was when “hit squads” of Michael Collins (director of intelligence for the IRA) killed a large number of the undercover branch of the Dublin Metropolitan Police on the morning of November 21, 1920—Bloody Sunday. The intelligence system that was beginning to reassert itself collapsed and had to be rebuilt during 1920 and 1921 without the invaluable knowledge that could have been available if the security forces had appreciated the importance of intelligence much earlier. The result was that the British were fighting in the dark, without the intelligence to identify the organization and members of the IRA. This in turn restricted their ability to target and eliminate the insurgents’ infrastructure.28
To remedy the deterioration in police intelligence, the army had to build up its own intelligence system. The intelligence staff at GHQ in Dublin was reinforced and created a registry and card index system to draw up “an Irish Republican army list.” Soldiers were deployed in 1920 in both Cork and Dublin to protect police posts, which in turn provided intelligence and local knowledge of their districts. Only Dublin District produced any consistent success in penetrating the rebel infrastructure, as a result of an expansion of Special Branch in mid-1919, which ran its own clandestine intelligence service. The army was slow to appreciate not only the significance of a well-defined system of cooperation with the police but also the importance of specialized intelligence officers, not appointing its own intelligence officers at brigade and divisional levels, who gathered some good information, until November 1920. At battalion level, it was left to commanding officers to decide whether or not to appoint them, and GHQ did not establish specialist intelligence officers in all battalions until December 1920. As in Malaya later, it was realized that good cooperation between the army and the police would only be achieved if they worked together for a long period of time, winning the trust of the local population and becoming knowledgeable about the area. Improvements in intelligence gathering meant that the army’s first offensive in early 1920 was able to accumulate much information, seize many documents, and capture many key insurgents. The British gradually built up an “Order of Battle” for the IRA and draw up “black lists” of IRA members from captured documents, the interrogation of prisoners, and informers. In April 1921, local centers were established to gather all intelligence from captured IRA documents. Reconnaissance flights and aerial photography undertaken by the Royal Air Force were also employed to locate and identify IRA units, bases, and supplies. Despite repeated attempts, the British never succeeded in infiltrating the IRA, but improved intelligence did reduce the IRA’s capacity to operate during 1921, while British operations in turn became more successful.29
At first, facing a sophisticated political and military insurrection, the British had failed to grasp the full challenge presented by the complex and unprecedented nature of the situation in Ireland. As a result, they made every cardinal error that the security forces can make when facing an insurgency. Civil-military cooperation was poor and as a result so was the collection of intelligence, which was the key to success. Above all, by failing to offer a political option other than Home Rule, they did not provide a “carrot” with which to “win the hearts and minds” of Irish moderates, who rejected the violence of the IRA. The army and the police were too reliant on the “stick,” employing conventional tactics, which were no match for the more mobile rebels. In particular, army and police units were too road bound, using motorized transport, which seemed to offer both speed and mobility but in practice provided easy targets for ambushes. As a result, the security forces were obliged to operate in larger convoys, which merely offered larger targets for the IRA.30
These large convoys and the dispersion of troops to defend police stations, to undertake searches of houses, and to man curfews surrendered the initiative to the guerrillas. Large-scale drives were employed to maintain the “offensive spirit,” but in attempting to encircle and destroy, the insurgents were largely futile as the rebels usually managed to escape; nevertheless, the authorities persisted with drives up to the end of the war in July 1921. When based on good intelligence, such moves achieved some success, forcing the rebels to break into small groups and keeping them on the move. By 1921, although never entirely abandoning large-scale operations, the British started to employ small units made up of volunteers and led by junior officers in operations known as “rebel hunting.” Carrying rifles, bandoleers of ammunition, and haversacks and marching distances of up to 25 miles at a stretch, these small units lived in the wilds and returned to base only to refit and rest. They acted on good information to retain the element of surprise and employed their superior discipline, equipment, and training to target and ambush specific IRA units and their leaders. These small “hunter-killer” units often adopted a retaliatory policy of “shoot to kill.”31
The British employed small “flying columns” of their own, which, often were wearing rubber-soled shoes instead of hobnailed boots, employed field craft and stealth to beat the guerrillas at their own game and regain the initiative. Augmented by constant patrols and air support, these tactics kept the insurgents on the move, lowered their morale, and gave them a feeling of insecurity. Intelligence-led ambushes and raids placed the rebels under great pressure and forced them to resort increasingly to terrorism. Many British officers were convinced that they were close to defeating the IRA, thanks to an improvement in British tactics and performance during counterinsurgency operations. Indeed, the Irish high command, notably Michael Collins and Richard Mulahy (chief of staff), feared that the increased success of the British, who had been massively reinforced by 17 infantry battalions in June and July 1921, would break their insurgency. The discovery of effective tactics came too late, however, although the losses sustained by the IRA and the reinforcement of the security forces during June and July 1921 strengthened Lloyd George’s position in the negotiations, which ended the war in July 1921. However, it was very difficult completely to nullify the IRA and, while it survived despite a shortage of arms, forcing the British to resort to heavy-handed tactics, the political pressure on the British mounted. It was the collapse of British political support for continuing the war, when combined with the collapse of the British administration, the poor security situation, and the decline in support for British rule in Ireland, which eventually led to British withdrawal from southern Ireland.32
Moreover, by the end of 1920, the army had restored discipline and put a stop to unofficial reprisals as part of an attempt to regain the initiative. But by that time the battle for “to win the hearts and minds” of the Irish population had been lost and the war could not be won without a ruthless campaign of genocide. As it was considered impossible to forcibly remove a white, European population, no effort was made to resettle the population to separate and protect it from the rebels. This failure of the British to provide security for the lives and property of the loyalists was a decisive factor in allowing the IRA to control the rural countryside through intimidation. The potential of involving “loyalists” was ignored, and no policy was developed to recruit them into a Home Guard to defend towns or rural communities from intimidation and free up more security forces to deal with rebel forces. Nevertheless, the use of special military areas as a punitive measure restricted and controlled the movement of the civil population. The introduction of martial law in the eight southwestern counties in December 1920, which allowed the death penalty for carrying arms, an extension of curfews, and the internment of IRA suspects, led to a period of sustained coercion lasting until the truce began on July 11, 1921. Prior to this, lacking sufficient manpower or government support for overwhelming military coercion, the British Army had been forced to apply moderate but counterproductive coercion, which had created a spiral of disorder and violence without overpowering republican resistance. By the end of June 1921, 4,500 had been rounded up and interned in camps at Ballykinlar, Bere Island, the Curragh, and Spike Island. Together with large-scale drives by the security forces in rural areas and systematic cordon and search operations in urban areas, this ensured that the IRA were continually harried and placed under some pressure. The requirement for householders to display a list of occupants meant that rebels who were on the run were deprived shelter in houses while their hiding places were identified by aerial reconnaissance.33
The IRA, however, recovered, and a stalemate then emerged in which despite some successes, neither side was able to gain the upper hand and to obtain a decisive victory. The IRA conducted a “war on informers,” which also targeted Protestants, ex-soldiers, women who befriended soldiers, and other minorities, such as social misfits or tramps, for assassination, expulsion, being burnt out or tarred, and feathered. Similarly, the British mounted a dirty war in a parallel campaign to terrorize the republican movement and its supporters. Both sides employed political murders and “death squads.” The IRA, which was increasingly vulnerable, and the British, who were facing growing international condemnation, eventually signed a truce in July 1921 and negotiated the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which was signed in December 1921.34
The Anglo-Irish War was the first true modern revolutionary insurgency, and the IRA was able to win a “people’s war” some 30 years before Mao’s victory in China in 1949, creating a model for Mao, Tito, and Ho Chi Minh. Inspired by the Boers during the guerrilla phase of the South African War, the Irish themselves would provide a model for other nationalists. Both Ba Maw and Subhas Chandra Bose, nationalists in Burma and India, respectively, during the 1930s and 1940s, studied Sinn Féin literature, which was translated into Burmese. The Jewish leadership in Palestine in the 1940s and George Grivas in Cyprus during the 1950s were also influenced by the IRA. Yitzhak Shamir, a member of the Stern Gang and a future Israeli prime minister, adopted the nom de guerre “Michael” in honor of Sinn Féin’s Michael Collins. The only Jewish member of the Irish Volunteers played an active part in organizing Irgun Zvei Leumi (National Military Organization) on the IRA model in the 1930s. The Russian-born Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of Irgun, and his successor, Menachem Begin, both followed the Irish model in shaping their insurgent strategy. In return, the books of Menachem Begin (Irgun) and George Grivas (EOKA) were studied by the IRA during the 1950s. Britain was unprepared to deal with the complex military and political problems posed by the new style of guerrilla warfare but learnt from its mistakes and had developed an effective counterinsurgency strategy by the spring of 1921. However, the ceasefire of July 1921 meant that it was never fully tested, and it is doubtful if by this stage victory could have thwarted Irish independence. The British did not have to conduct another major counterinsurgency campaign until the outbreak of the Arab Revolt in 1936.35 Fortunately for the British, the Arab insurrection lacked the political and military organization of the IRA in Ireland and of the later Jewish insurgency.36
However, this obscured the significance of the Irish rebellion, which would provide a template for later revolts against British rule and as such would be very influential. Soldiers did not yet recognize the crucial importance of political factors in overcoming an insurgency, failing to put enough emphasis on the “winning hearts and minds.” Books written during the interwar period, such as Imperial Policing by Major General Sir Charles Gwynn (1934) and British Rule, and Rebellion, a Staff College text, by Colonel H. J. Simson (1937), built on the work of Callwell but took the argument no further. They summed up admirably the traditional strengths of “imperial policing,” notably the use of “minimum force,” maintaining the rule of law, and civilian primacy and control of the military, which formed the core of British counterinsurgency from 1945. Thus, Gwynne emphasized the importance of cooperation with the civilian authorities, notably the police, but demonstrated little understanding of the increasingly political nature and importance of guerrilla warfare, failing to stress the need for redressing the population’s grievances. Similarly, although aware of the political nature of an insurgency, which necessitated a political as well as a military response, Simson based most of his theories on the Arab Revolt in Palestine, emphasizing the benefits of martial law and ignoring its negative aspects and limitations as displayed in Ireland. Major B. C. Dening, in his article “Modern Problems of Guerrilla Warfare,” which was published in the Army Quarterly and Defence Journal in 1927, predicted the increasingly political nature and importance of guerrilla warfare, but this was very much the exception. Both Gwynne and Simson largely ignored the lessons and wider political issues of the insurgency in Ireland, leaving the British unprepared doctrinally to respond to insurgencies after 1945 and when waging counterinsurgency campaigns during the retreat from empire fell back on the “small wars” traditions of numerous colonial wars.37
Nevertheless, as a result of revolts in Ireland (1919–21), the Malabar Coast of India (1921–23), Lower Burma (1930–32), and Palestine (1936–39) and continuous operations in the Middle East and along the North-West Frontier of India, the British entered the “counterinsurgency era” with more practical experience than any other nation. Britain adopted the use of “minimum force” as a key principle following the Hunter Commission’s report on the Amritsar massacre in 1919, accepting that the use of brutality and excess force created greater problems in the long term and could backfire politically. During the Moplah Revolt in India (1920–21) and the Burma Rebellion (1932–36), the British employed a “clear-and-hold” strategy, which was crucial for a successful counterinsurgency campaign, and in Burma they used “civic action” in combination with resettlement, a model for future campaigns, notably Malaya. After 1945, they would consolidate this into a counterinsurgency doctrine, building on the cooperation of colonial administrators, the police, and the army that had been developed between the wars and would culminate in the elaborate committee system used during the Malayan Emergency. The administrative and police skills gained on the North-West Frontier and elsewhere during the interwar period would be invaluable in fighting insurgents during the postwar period.38 Such “colonial” methods continued to work well in Malaya, Kenya, Borneo, and Oman where the insurgency continued to be mainly rural but rather less well in Palestine, Cyprus, and Aden where the insurgency was largely urban and political factors were much more to the fore as an important element in the battle to win hearts and minds.
1. Ian F. W. Beckett, “Introduction,” in The Roots of Counter-Insurgency (London: Blandford, 1988), p. 9; Ian F. W. Beckett, “The Study of Counter-Insurgency: A British Perspective,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 1, no. 1 (April 1990), pp. 47–49; Christopher C. Harmon, “Illustrations of ‘Learning’ in Counterinsurgency,” in Ian Beckett, ed., Modern Counter-Insurgency (Aldershot, Hampshire, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 355–56; T. R. Moreman, “ ‘Small Wars’ and ‘Imperial Policing’: The British Army and the Theory and Practice of Colonial Warfare in the British Army 1919–1939,” Journal of Strategic Studies 19, no. 4 (1996), p. 110; John A. Nagl, Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam: Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), p. 39; Hew Strachan, “Introduction,” in Big Wars and Small Wars: The British Army and the Lessons of War in the 20th Century (Abingdon, UK, and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 8.
2. Douglas Porch, quoted by Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon, “Securing the Colonies for the Commonwealth: Counterinsurgency, Decolonization, and the Development of British Imperial Strategy in the Postwar Empire,” British Scholar II, no.1 (September 2009), pp. 12–39 at 15, n. 9.
3. David French, The British Way in Counter-Insurgency, 1945–1967 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 65; Matthew Hughes, “The Banality of Brutality: British Armed Forces and the Repression of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–39,” English Historical Review 124, no. 507 (April 2009), p. 354; Matthew Hughes, “The Practice and Theory of British Counterinsurgency: The Histories of the Atrocities at the Palestinian Villages of al-Bassa and Halhul, 1938–1939,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 20, nos. 3–4 (September–December 2009), pp. 538–39, 543; Matthew Hughes, “Trouble in Palestine,” British Army Review, No. 154 (Spring/Summer 2012), pp. 103–5; Nick Lloyd, “The Amritsar Massacre and the Minimum Force Debate,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 21, no. 2 (June 2010), p. 384; Thomas R. Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 1919–60 (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 17, 57, 67; Victoria Nolan, Military Leadership and Counterinsurgency: The British Army and Small War Strategy since World War II (London and New York: I B Tauris, 2012), pp. 43–44; John Shy and Thomas W. Collier, “Revolutionary War,” in Peter Paret (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 830.
4. Ian F. W. Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies: Guerrillas and Their Opponents since 1750 (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 16; David Benest, “Aden to Northern Ireland, 1966–76,” in Strachan, ed., Big Wars and Small Wars, p. 124; Tom Bowden, The Breakdown of Public Security: The Case of Ireland, 1916–1921 and Palestine 1936–1939 (London and Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1977), pp. 60–63; David Fitzpatrick, “Militarism in Ireland, 1900–1922,” in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery, eds., A Military History of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 394–95.
5. Benest, “Aden to Northern Ireland, 1966–76,” p. 124; Bowden, The Breakdown of Public Security, pp. 95–97; Major Pete Cottrell, “Myth: The Military and Anglo-Irish Policing between 1913 and 1922,” British Army Review, no. 133 (Winter 2003), p. 15; Peter Hart, The I.R.A. at War, 1916–1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 3–4, 14–15; J. B. E. Hittle, Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish War: Britain’s Counterinsurgency Failure (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2011), pp. 42–54, 67–71; W. H. Kautt, Ambushes and Armour: The Irish Rebellion, 1919–1921 (Dublin and Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press, 2010), pp. 5–7; Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 1919–60, p. 65; Charles Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, 1919–21: Development of Political and Military Policies (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 1–16.
6. General A. E. Percival, “Guerilla Warfare, Ireland 1920–1,” Lecture I, p. 6, Percival Papers, P.18, 4/1, IWM.
7. Benest, “Aden to Northern Ireland, 1966–76,” p. 124; Bowden, The Breakdown of Public Security, pp. 95–96; Cottrell, “Myth: The Military and Anglo-Irish Policing between 1913 and 1922,” p. 16; Hart, The I.R.A. at War, 1916–1923, p. 15; Hittle, Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish War, pp. 46, 76; Kautt, Ambushes and Armour, p. 15; Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 1919–60, pp. 11–12, 65, 68, 143; Nolan, Military Leadership and Counterinsurgency, pp. 58–59; Charles Townshend, “The Irish Insurgency, 1918–21: The Military Problem,” in Ronald Haycock, ed., Regular Armies and Insurgency (London: Croom Helm, 1979), p. 39; Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, 1919–21, pp. 16–30, 43–44, 51–53, 205.
8. Percival, “Guerilla Warfare, Ireland 1920–1,” Lecture I, p. 11.
9. “A History of the 5th Division in Ireland, November 1919–March 1922,” p. 25, Jeudwine Papers 78/82/2, IWM.
10. Kautt, Ambushes and Armour, pp. 61–76; Brevet Major T.A. Lowe, “Some Reflections of a Junior Commander upon ‘The Campaign’ in Ireland, 1920 and 1921,”Army Quarterly and Defence Journal 5 (October 1922), p. 50; Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, 1919–21, pp. 143–46, 153–58, 176–77, 187; Townshend, “The Irish Insurgency, 1918–21,” pp. 42, 45–47. See also “A History of the 5th Division in Ireland, November 1919–March 1922,” pp. 134–35, for details of the antiguerrilla training.
11. “The Irish Rebellion in the 6th Divisional Area from after 1916 Rebellion to December 1921,” p. 100, Strickland Papers P.363, IWM.
12. Percival, “Guerilla Warfare, Ireland 1920–1,” Lecture II, pp. 1–3.
13. Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies, pp. 16–17; Benest, “Aden to Northern Ireland, 1966–76,” pp. 124–25; Bowden, The Breakdown of Public Security, pp. 107–10; Hart, The I.R.A. at War, 1916–1923, pp. 43, 63–73, 103, 177; Hittle, Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish War, pp. 72–76, 118–19, 126, 232–37; Kautt, Ambushes and Armour, pp. 7, 16–19, 60, 80–83, 89–118, 122–48, 151–80, 185–219; Lowe, “Some Reflections of a Junior Commander,” pp. 51–54; Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 1919–60, p. 11; William Sheehan, A Hard Local War: The British Army and the Guerrilla War in Cork, 1919–1921 (Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: The History Press, 2011), pp. 116–36, 145–46; Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, 1919–21, pp. 16–27, 30, 48–49, 59–67, 113–15.
14. Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies, p. 16; Hart, The I.R.A. at War, 1916–1923, pp. 153–59, 164–75; Hittle, Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish War, pp. 125–27.
15. “A History of the 5th Division in Ireland, November 1919–March 1922,” pp. 72–73.
16. Benest, “Aden to Northern Ireland, 1966–76,” p. 125; Michael T. Foy, Michael Collins’s Intelligence War: The Struggle between the British and the IRA, 1919–1921 (Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton Publishing, 2006), pp. 53–63; Hart, The I.R.A. at War, 1916–1923, pp. 223–51; Hittle, Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish War, p. 125; Kautt, Ambushes and Armour, pp. 77–80; D. M. Leeson, The Black & Tans: British Police and Auxiliaries in the Irish War of Independence, 1920–21 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 8–12; Paul McMahon, British Spies and Irish Rebels: British Intelligence and Ireland, 1916–1945 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: The Boydell Press, 2008), pp. 26–29; Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 1919–60, pp. 66–67; Nolan, Military Leadership and Counterinsurgency, pp. 56–57; Sheehan, A Hard Local War, pp. 24–47, 102–7; Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, 1919–21, pp. 53–54, 63–67, 119–23.
17. Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 1919–60, pp. 11–12; Nolan, Military Leadership and Counterinsurgency, pp. 58–59; Sheehan, A Hard Local War, pp. 24–47; Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, 1919–21, pp. 30, 96–97.
18. Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, 1919–21, p. 97.
19. Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies, p. 16; Bowden, The Breakdown of Public Security, pp. 96, 112–15; Nolan, Military Leadership and Counterinsurgency, pp. 58–59; Sheehan, A Hard Local War, pp. 107–12; Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, 1919–21, pp. 116–17, 168–69.
20. “A History of the 5th Division in Ireland, November 1919–March 1922,” pp. 142–43.
21. Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London: Penguin, 2010), pp. 106–9, 115–20; Cottrell, “Myth: The Military and Anglo-Irish Policing between 1913 and 1922,” pp. 16–19; Hittle, Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish War, pp. xvii–xix, 24–32, 81–87, 92–95; Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 1919–60, pp. 69–73, 93; Nolan, Military Leadership and Counterinsurgency, pp. 56–59; Townshend, “The Irish Insurgency, 1918–21,” pp. 36–37; Charles Townshend, “Policing Insurgency in Ireland, 1914–23,” in David Anderson and David Killingray, eds., Policing and Decolonisation: Nationalism, Politics and the Police, 1917–65 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1992), pp. 34–35; Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, 1919–21, pp. 31–32, 41–46, 55–57, 63, 138–40, 169.
22. “A History of the 5th Division in Ireland, November 1919–March 1922,” pp. 23–24.
23. Fitzpatrick, “Militarism in Ireland, 1900–1922,” pp. 402–5; Bowden, The Breakdown of Public Security, pp. 18–20, 26–28, 45–47, 121–23; Cottrell, “Myth: The Military and Anglo-Irish Policing between 1913 and 1922,” p. 17; Hittle,Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish War, pp. 11–12, 245–49; Leeson, The Black & Tans, pp. 34–38, 46–49, 156–90; Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 1919–60, pp. 11–12, 18–20, 65–68; Richard Popplewell, “ ‘Lacking Intelligence’: Some Reflections on Recent Approaches to British Counter-Insurgency, 1900–1960,” Intelligence and National Security 10, no. 2 (April 1995), pp. 327–28; Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, 1919–21, pp. 40–46, 63–65.
24. Percival, “Guerilla Warfare, Ireland 1920–1,” Lecture I, p. 8.
25. “A History of the 5th Division in Ireland, November 1919–March 1922,” p. 73.
26. Fitzpatrick, “Militarism in Ireland, 1900–1922,” pp. 402–5; Cottrell, “Myth: The Military and Anglo-Irish Policing between 1913 and 1922,” pp. 17–19; Hittle, Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish War, pp. 114–17, 137–40, 143–44, 153, 178–80; Kautt, Ambushes and Armour, pp. 78–80; Leeson, The Black & Tans, pp. 24–38, 157–225; Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 1919–60, p. 19; Nolan, Military Leadership and Counterinsurgency, pp. 56–57; Townshend, “The Irish Insurgency, 1918–21,” pp. 36–37; Townshend, “Policing Insurgency in Ireland, 1914–23,” pp. 33–37; Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, 1919–21, pp. 46, 58, 92–97, 109–13, 130–31, 138–39.
27. Percival, “Guerilla Warfare, Ireland 1920–1,” Lecture II, pp. 7–8.
28. Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies, p. 17; Benest, “Aden to Northern Ireland, 1966–76,” pp. 124–25; Bowden, The Breakdown of Public Security, pp. 88–89, 97–110, 123–35; Foy, Michael Collins’s Intelligence War, pp. 46–47, 93–96, 141–77; Peter Hart, British Intelligence in Ireland, 1920–21: The Final Reports (Irish narratives) (Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 2002), pp. 1–3, 10–15; Hittle, Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish War, pp. xxiii–xxiv, 117–37, 160–77, 231–32; McMahon, British Spies and Irish Rebels, pp. 27–29, 40–41; Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 1919–60, pp. 62–63, 73–74; Sheehan, A Hard Local War, pp. 70–77, 82–86; Townshend, The Irish Insurgency, 1919–21, pp. 42–43; Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, 1919–21, pp. 50–51, 123–30; Charles Townshend, “The Irish Republican Army and the Development of Guerrilla Warfare, 1916–1921,” The English Historical Review 94, no. 371 (April 1979), pp. 326–27.
29. Peter Hart, The I.R.A. and Its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork, 1916–1923 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 93; Hittle, Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish War, pp. 117–37; McMahon, British Spies and Irish Rebels, pp. 31–34; Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 1919–60, pp. 74–76; Sheehan, A Hard Local War, pp. 71–90, 145–46; Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, 1919–21, pp. 50–51, 56, 90–92; Townshend, “The Irish Republican Army and the Development of Guerrilla Warfare, 1916–1921,” p. 326.
30. Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies, p. 17; Bowden, The Breakdown of Public Security, pp. 96–97; Hittle, Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish War, pp. 113–14; Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 1919–60, pp. 11–12, 149–50; Nolan, Military Leadership and Counterinsurgency, pp. 57–58; Sheehan, A Hard Local War, pp. 116–36; Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, 1919–21, pp. 173–75.
31. Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies, p. 17; Hittle, Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish War, pp. 113–14; Lowe, “Some Reflections of a Junior Commander,” p. 55; Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 1919–60, pp. 12, 150–52; Sheehan, A Hard Local War, pp. 18–19, 136–59, 164–67; Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, 1919–21, pp. 175–99.
32. Fitzpatrick, “Militarism in Ireland, 1900–1922,” pp. 405–6; Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies, p. 17; Bowden, The Breakdown of Public Security, pp. 96–97; Hittle, Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish War, pp. 113–14; Lowe, “ Some Reflections of a Junior Commander,” pp. 54–58; McMahon, British Spies and Irish Rebels, p. 26; Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 1919–60, pp. 11–12, 149–52; Nolan, Military Leadership and Counterinsurgency, pp. 54–60; Sheehan, A Hard Local War, pp. 17–21, 136–59, 164–67; Townshend, “The Irish Insurgency, 1918–21,” pp. 48–49; Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, 1919–21, pp. 173–99.
33. Fitzpatrick, “Militarism in Ireland, 1900–1922,” pp. 402–3; Hittle, Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish War, p. 233; Kautt, Ambushes and Armour, p. 79; Lowe, “Some Reflections of a Junior Commander,” pp. 52–54; McMahon, British Spies and Irish Rebels, pp. 41–42; Sheehan, A Hard Local War, pp. 91–94, 98–102, 136–52; Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, 1919–21, pp. 63–67, 205.
34. Hart, The I.R.A. and Its Enemies, pp. 273–315; Hart, The I.R.A. at War, 1916–1923, p. 19; Townshend, “The Irish Republican Army and the Development of Guerrilla Warfare, 1916–1921,” pp. 327–29.
35. Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies, pp. 16–18; Hart, The I.R.A. at War, 1916–1923, pp. 3–4; Hittle, Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish War, p. 126; Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 1919–60, pp. 74, 76; Andrew Selth, “Ireland and Insurgency: The Lessons of History,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 2, no. 2 (August 1991), pp. 303–4, 311–12; Carlton Walton, Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire (London: HarperPress, 2013), p. 84.
36. Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies, p. 47; Bowden, The Breakdown of Public Security, pp. 177–214, 217 (fn. 65), 238–55; Hugh Foot, A Start in Freedom (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1964), pp. 52–53; Matthew Hughes, “From Law and Order to Pacification: Britain’s Suppression of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–39,” Journal of Palestine Studies XXXIX, no. 2 (Winter 2010), pp. 10–18; Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 1919–60, p. 159; John Pimlott, “The British Experience,” pp. 35–38.
37. Ian F. W. Beckett, The Roots of Counter-Insurgency (London: Blandford, 1988), pp. 7, 12–13; Ian F. W. Beckett and John Pimlott, Armed Forces & Modern Counter-Insurgency (Beckenham, Kent, UK: Croom Helm, 1985), pp. 4–5; Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies, pp. 44–46; David A. Charters, “From Palestine to Northern Ireland: British Adaptation to Low-Intensity Operations,” in David Charters and Maurice Tugwell, eds., Armies in Low-Intensity Conflict (London: Brassey’s Defence, 1989), pp. 189–90, 197; David A. Charters, The British Army and Jewish Insurgency in Palestine, 1945–47 (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 133–37; Tim Jones, Postwar Counterinsurgency and the SAS, 1945–1952: A Special Type of Warfare (London: Frank Cass, 2001), pp. 10–12; Alastair MacKenzie, Special Force: The Untold Story of 22nd Special Air Service Regiment (SAS) (London: I B Tauris, 2011), p. 4; Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 1919–60, pp. 181–83; Nolan, Military Leadership and Counterinsurgency, pp. 60–64.
38. Gad Kroizer, “From Dowbiggin to Tegart: Revolutionary Change in the Colonial Police in Palestine during the 1930s,” in Georgina Sinclair, ed., Globalising British Policing (Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2011), p. 80; Tim Jones, “The British Army, and Counter-Guerrilla Warfare in Transition, 1944–1952,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 7, no. 3 (Winter 1996), pp. 149–50; Caroline Kennedy-Pipe and Colin McInnes, “The British Army in Northern Ireland 1969–1972: From Policing to Counter-Terror,” Journal of Strategic Studies 20, no. 2 (June 1997), p. 206; Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 1919–60, pp. 12, 20, 24, 73–78, 83, 87, 118.