Sunday Life
Battling the Bombers
24 April 2005
**The Belfast Telegraph is running extracts from a book by Chris Ryder called ‘A Special Kind of Courage’. I have put them together and edited them somewhat and am including them for general interest.
Blow it sky high
The IRA wanted to raze the Europa to the ground. In their way stood a small band of courageous men. THE luxury Europa Hotel opened in July 1971, and quickly became a prime target for the IRA, which was determined to bomb the heart out of Belfast. The prestigious 12-storey, 200-room hotel became the base for journalists and TV crews covering the Troubles. It was also where bomb disposal experts risked their lives and pitted their wits against terrorists who taunted them, in full view of the media.
George Styles, the unit’s commanding officer, was involved in two hair-raising operations within 48 hours to save the hotel, in October 1971, for which he was awarded a George Cross. Major Styles, a Sussex man, married with three children, had taken command a year earlier. A man with a wry sense of humour, when asked how he would deal with the growing number of bombs, he would say: “I’m careful - like a cat!” But he confessed that as he tackled the Europa bombs, he was all too aware the devices could “blow your head from your shoulders, your arms and legs from your trunk…”
The first drama began on the afternoon of October 20, when a box was found in a telephone booth in the ground-floor Whip and Saddle bar, following an anonymous phone call. The 84 guests, including many media crews, were evacuated as Capt Roger Mendham and the Belfast bomb-disposal team raced to the scene. They had to use public telephones to communicate with EOD headquarters, Lisburn, such was the lack of proper equipment at the time. At HQ, Styles decided to join them because of the symbolic status of the target.
The team’s first problem was to move the box clear of the wall to get a clear image, from a portable x-ray machine. They knew from experience that the device probably contained two sensitive micro-switches, one to set it off if the lid was removed from the box, the other to detonate it if lifted. Moving it was highly hazardous but they inched it forward on the carpet, until it was in position to be X-rayed. But the portable X-ray reading equipment did not give clarity. A police officer came up with the idea of taking the plates to the Royal Victoria Hospital’s X-ray unit. The idea worked and the experts were able to recognise the handiwork of the sophisticated unknown bomb-maker they had called Mr X.
Back at the hotel, the bomb team carefully separated the firing mechanisms from the explosive, but there was still the risk that it contained an anti-disruption circuit. A rope was looped round the box to gingerly pull it through the bar and out the hotel entrance to a dismantling bay - a sandbag beehive, 3ft thick and 4ft high, built by Royal Engineers. It was a slow and cumbersome operation.
Styles and his team broke cover every few feet to check that the box had not tilted over, begun ticking, or shown any other signs of going off. He wrote in his memoir: “I had every reason to believe the bomb was now harmless, but you couldn’t avoid the feeling of menace each time you walked towards it. “Inside that box, secured by pulling line, was enough energy to blow your head from your shoulders, your arms and legs from your trunk, and your trunk straight through the plate windows of the Europa Hotel, and into the Hamill Hotel across the road. Your combat jacket, flak jacket, would just about keep your trunk in one piece.”
When Styles and his men had got the box into the beehive, they took a short break for coffee and fried-egg sandwiches laid on by the hotel, before starting on the final stage of the operation. It took two controlled explosions to expose the device, and finally separate the components. The operation ended in triumph at about 11 pm.
A large crowd and TV cameras had followed the tense operation from Great Victoria Street, and there was widespread acclaim for the achievement next day. The Belfast Telegraph noted: “…the gratitude and the thoughts of every decent person goes out to them (the bomb disposal experts) as they face their lonely, difficult and dangerous work.”
Two days later, the bombers give their own response.
Three masked men held staff at gunpoint while a fourth staggered in with a large, heavy box which he left by the lifts, close to reception. Styles along with Captains Clouter and Mendham set off for the evacuated Europa again, to begin another painstaking nine-hour operation. This time he saw the bomb in a box 18 inches square and two feet deep, with the message ‘IRA ? Tee-hee, Hee-hee, Ho-ho, Ha-ha’ scrawled on it.
Styles had no doubt that ‘Mr X’ had sent him a larger and more complex bomb this time. X-rays confirmed it had more than double the amount of high explosive, and a maze of wires and micro-switches obviously designed to confuse. Having identified the key components, as Styles put it, “we stunned the brute”. But, once again, it still had to be dismantled to remove all danger.
Styles decided to build a sandbag corridor around the bomb along which it would be pulled outside. Mendham discovered a piece of Formica in the hotel basement and the box, encircled with a length of fishing line, was carefully inched on to it. Slowly and with constant interruptions, the bomb was manoeuvred outside into another sandbag beehive.
When the all-clear was finally given at 1 am, Harper Brown, the Europa’s steely hotel manager, threw an impromptu champagne party at which Styles and his team were the lavishly-toasted guests of honour. The operation had caught the public imagination and earned wide praise. Prime Minister Brian Faulkner summed up the mood, praising Styles and his team.
“Theirs and their colleagues’ is a very special type of courage,” he said.
Battling the bombers: Hero’s near miss
A BLUNDER by an Army sniper almost cost George Cross-winning Europa hero George Styles his life.
He had a lucky escape when the IRA bombers struck inside the Army’s Palace Barracks, in Holywood.
A soldier, who was related to an IRA chief in Belfast, had helped terrorists penetrate the base of the 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment, in January 1972 and place two bombs. Styles, whose family had already returned home, and who was due to leave himself within days, arrived at the scene as one device went off, damaging several armoured vehicles.
After a second device was spotted beside the officers’ mess, Styles, the EOD squadron’s CO, called for a sniper, and asked him to put four bullets in the package. Then he went forward to neutralise the device.
At that point, he noticed four bullet strikes on the wall and realised the sniper had missed the bomb.
Styles condemned himself for “the sort of reckless carelessness that could get a bomb-disposal man killed”.
Paying the price
IT is the most decorated unit in the British Army - but 321 EOD Squadron has paid a heavy price in Northern Ireland. Twenty brave bomb disposal officers have been killed in action, since the start of the troubles. The worst year for 321 EOD was 1972, when six officers were killed. For the unit, which never had more than 100 officers on the ground, the casualty rate was simply unsustainable.
Pioneering devices, notably the remote-controlled ‘wheelbarrow”, made the missions a little less hazardous. But the risks remained high as the terrorists developed more complex devices. The Army calculated that the chances of a bomb disposal officer being killed were one in every 23 four-month tours, compared to one in every 1,142 tours for other military operational duties. So it is appropriate that the unit’s mascot is the cartoon cat ‘Felix’, with its nine lives.
As one senior officer says of the risks taken by his team: “We do not ask who planted the bomb or why. We simply put ourselves between the device and the public, and get on with the job.” Since 1970, Ammunition Technical Officers (ATOs) from 321 EOD have answered 54,000 call-outs in Northern Ireland, an average of one every six hours. And the record of gallantry in Northern Ireland is headed by two George Crosses, 36 George Medals, 75 Queen’s Gallantry Medals.
Tackling the tanker bombs
IT takes a special kind of courage to do the “long walk” of the bomb disposal expert - the lonely approach to a suspect device through a cleared street or country lane. But a series of IRA petrol tanker bombs tested even the steeliest nerves of 321 EOD squadron’s most-experienced officers.
Lt Col Derrick Patrick, the unit’s commanding officer at the time, personally defused three devices on board tankers filled with thousands of gallons of fuel. He is best remembered among bomb squad officers for the slaying of what he called “the Donegall Pass Dragon” on a foggy day, in February 1976.
A hijacked tanker carrying 2,000 gallons of petrol had been abandoned by a terrified driver, outside Donegall Pass RUC station. When Patrick arrived, the driver told him his tanker had seven 500-gallon sections. The front three were empty (but vapour-filled), the others full. As they were talking, there was a loud crack, like the sound of a gunshot. But no knew were it came from.
Breaking the EOD rules, Patrick went inside the evacuated police station to get a view of the vehicle’s roof. “This was against the rules,” wrote the commanding officer. “But as CATO (Chief Army Technical Officer) wrote the rules, there was no better man to break them.”
A suspect box could clearly seen on one of seven tanker caps. Remote control equipment including the EOD’s famous Wheelbarrow was useless in dealing with this incident. Patrick had to don his protective suit and get on top of the vehicle.
“If anyone wonders why I bothered to cocoon myself against the inferno which would result, if thousands of gallons of petrol went up, I can only say that at the time, any protection seemed better than none,” he said. “Besides the device might go up when I was some distance away.”
A large crowd had gathered at the edge of the security cordon, for bomb scares were a spectator sport in Belfast. Many of them crossed fingers and said a silent prayer for the figure shuffling forward in the bomb suit, carrying his pouches full of tools.
Patrick carefully circled the tanker before walking stiffly in his heavy suit, rung by rung, up the ladder to the top of the vehicle. He found a blackened detonator with two wires hanging from it on top of a petrol cap, which explained a mystery ’shot’ noise. Patrick said the terrorists had intended ‘to send up the whole show at the time we heard the crack’, but the device had failed to detonate. But he still had to clear each tank compartment.
In the first he found two feet of grey plastic piping, which he carefully removed with fishing line. It was full of explosive. He checked the other tanks and after five nerve-wracking hours, Patrick was able to declare the tanker safe.
The following night’s Belfast Telegraph declared: “Without the skill and courage of Col Derrick Patrick and his men, the people of Northern Ireland would stand naked against the threat of a holocaust.” Four weeks later, Derrick Patrick’s nerves were put to the test again, when he carried out a similar operation on a hijacked tanker, in suburban Dunmurry, this time loaded with 1,000 gallons of fuel.
Provos plan a ‘bomb surprise’
THIS one is for you was the message from the IRA, as they placed a booby trap device on a petrol tanker, designed to kill the Army’s chief bomb disposal officer. Lt Col Derrick Patrick had already defused two IRA petrol tank bombs, but it was the third and final such incident which tested his nerves to the limit.
Patrick, who was awarded an OBE for his courage, later admitted to being “very frightened” when it was revealed that Belfast Provos had brought in a booby trap expert to create a bomb for him personally. It came on 18 April 1977, when a petrol tanker was left outside an Army base, in Flax Street, in the Ardoyne area.
Patrick confessed he was consumed with apprehension, as he was driven to the scene, and what he heard from the trembling tanker driver made him even more anxious. The driver, who only recently returned to work after suffering a heart attack, had been held for three hours. The previous tanker hijackings had been swift, but this time the bombers had plenty of time to set a trap.
“I walked away from the Saracen with the realisation dawning that I was very frightened indeed,” he wrote in his memoirs. The driver said there were two devices, one in the cab, the other in one of the tanks. Three hours after the first alert, Patrick was finally suited up and ready to go forward. He had calmed himself and was once more the cold professional.
The rear bomb was in a puttybucket dangling at the end of a string from a piece of wood, jammed across the mouth of the tank. A bid to release it with fishing line and hook failed. “There’s nothing else for it, I’ll have to do it by hand,” he told the crew. Once more, he climbed the tanker steps.
From the roof, he was now sure that there was an anti-handling switch inside the bucket, which would explode, if even slightly tilted. He freed the piece of wood, and began lifting the bucket with supreme care. When it was clear, he fixed a hook and line and, again with the utmost caution, descended from the vehicle and let out the line. From behind the cover of a building, he pulled the bucket off the top of the tanker.
As he expected, there was an immediate explosion and the blast knocked over the second box in the cab, which appeared to be a hoax. After four tension-filled hours, the operation was safely cleared. But Patrick’s success had a profound effect on him.
Army intelligence revealed the Belfast IRA had imported a booby-trap specialist from Strabane, in a direct bid to kill him. “This was no amateurish affair with home-made blast mixture, but 2 lb of powerful industrial explosive,” he wrote later. “I never felt the same after the Crumlin Road tanker incident. I began to realise just how much I wanted to stay alive, and see out the rest of my tour,” he recalled.
Some of his closest friends spotted how deeply it had scarred him, and next morning the GOC himself told him: ‘You’ve done all we could ask of you, and there would be no stigma attached if you decided to go home now.”
Patrick immediately declined.
IRA tries double death bid
THE barbarity of the IRA bombers shocked even hardened bomb disposal experts early in the troubles.
One macabre incident was branded “a supreme obscenity” committed by “animals”, by the bomb disposal expert called to the scene. Warrant Officer Peter Dandy was shocked by a double booby trap - designed to kill two teams of rescuers - he uncovered in south Armagh, in April 1972.
It began on the afternoon of April 17, when part-time UDR corporal, James Elliott, a married man with three children from Rathfriland, was abducted by the IRA. The full-time lorry driver was making one of his regular working journeys across the border, when he was held up by armed men near the Killeen crossing.
His body was found in a field near Newtownhamilton, 36 hours later. The body, partly covered by a red tarpaulin, was booby-trapped. But nobody imagined the complexity of the ambush that had been put in place.
As the hedgerow where the body had been dumped was yards from the border and overlooked by several ideal firing points, the recovery operation was frozen until Irish police and troops moved in. The painstaking operation, which involved checking every inch of ground for a considerable area, uncovered four 10lb Claymore mines dug into the laneside. These were intended for the survivors of the first booby trap blast, and those coming to their aid. All the devices had carefully-concealed command wires leading to the cross-border firing point.
In the final stage of the operation, the ATO used a hook and line to pull the tarpaulin clear of Elliott’s body, lying on its right side. Dandy then cut the ropes binding the body and used the hook and line to move it five yards, and ensure there were no further booby traps. It was then removed by a stretcher party. Shortly afterwards, Dandy safely detonated the recovered explosives.
Provos bag space boffin
A NASA-trained electrical engineer gave the IRA a terrifying new expertise in the 1980s. US citizen Richard Clark Johnson, who worked for NASA on the Voyager programme, was a prize catch for the Provisionals. The New Hampshire man’s expertise and the electronic equipment he sourced, transformed the IRA’s capability with radio-controlled ambush bombs, particularly in south Armagh. He provided the bomb disposal teams with some of their most complex challenges.
Johnson had no known connections with Ireland, but some time in the late 1970s, he became involved with IRA activists and visited the island. After graduating with a degree in electronic engineering, he had worked for NASA on the Voyager and Space Shuttle programmes, as well as in other sensitive areas of the US defence industry.
For the IRA, he was able to rig-up sophisticated bomb-initiation devices from components readily available in electronics stores. He developed a remote-detonation device by adapting a radar alarm, originally designed to warn drivers of police speed traps. Johnson also identified a US weather-alert radio channel as a suitably obscure frequency on which the IRA could set off radio-controlled bombs, outwitting the EOD Bleeps.
His activities were finally halted in 1990, after his support network was unravelled by the FBI, and he was sentenced to 10 years in jail. The FBI had originally been put on his trail by forensic experts in Ulster, who identified serial numbers on switches and other components used in dismantled bombs, which US investigators traced back to source.
The ‘Gelly’ shock that wobbled the British
A TOP British official made an undercover visit to the Irish Republic’s only gelignite manufacturing plant, at the height of the IRA’s bombing campaign, government papers reveal. Britain’s Chief Inspector of Explosives carried out the secret visit to Irish Industrial Explosives Ltd in Enfield, Co Meath, in 1972, amid concerns that the IRA were capitalising on lax security. And in his damning report, EG Whitbread claimed “anyone working there… could get a case a day out without the loss showing up.” At the time, the bombers were causing mayhem, and the government was desperate to control explosives coming into the province.
But the inspector’s report to the British government was totally at odds with the picture being painted by the Irish authorities. In his report, Mr Whitbread told how he “contrived” a visit to the Enfield plant. The top civil servant wrote: “The ‘cover’ was that as a private individual and a friend of a Mr D Rumble, a director of IIE, I would be shown by him round the factory and would, in return, comment on their safety standards.”
He described security in the factory as “very poor indeed”. “As we approached, I was ‘warned’ that a military unit guarded the factory, and we would be stopped. “When we arrived, I found an impressive drop-arm military barrier, with a large notice warning that the army were guarding the factory. “The general effect was spoiled because the fence on either side of the gate and round the factory generally varies from rudimentary to non-existent, and at the time the gate was up (open), and a considerable amount of horn-blowing failed to produce the sentry.”
He was told that the guard consisted of a corporal and six men, but during the whole of the visit, he did not see one soldier. Whitbread was unimpressed by Commandant Gerald McDevitt, the Irish Inspector of Explosives, whom he described as ‘dispirited’. McDevitt confessed that he was ‘waiting to take my pension, and get the hell out of it’ to retire to Spain.
At the very edge of the Enfield site, he spotted a large barn in which ammonium nitrate was stored. “I took the opportunity to acquire a small sample of this, thinking that it might be useful as a reference material by both the Home Office lab and by Forensic labs Ulster.”
IIE claimed their ‘accountancy’ (loss) rate in the factory to be one per cent of the 32-ton annual throughput.
But Whitbread stated: “I would say that the standard of accuracy I saw corresponds with possible errors of nearer 5pc. Certainly anyone working there, who was not greedy, could get a case [50lb] a day out, without the loss showing up.”
