Lead Adventure Forum
Miniatures Adventure => The Conflicts that came in from the Cold => Topic started by: carlos marighela on November 02, 2024, 11:21:04 AM
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Found a fabulous little RTE doco with some fun what-iffing on the prospects of an Irish Army incursion into Northern Ireland in 1969/70. The Irish cabinet discussions, Lynch's speech and the planning/ discussion paper put forward by the Irish Army's general staff are all reasonably well known. Actually, there were revised plans and the whole thing got further consideration over the following year or so. The Irish Army did actually go as far as deploying field ambulances and a couple of hundred combat troops near the border.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5_SB5BCt1w
Personally. I've long harboured a desire to game this, despite the fact it would have been a very one sided affair. Just need to finish my Irish Army. Fascinating scenario and the Irish Army of the time is a great little time capsule of modern infantry weapons, a handful of Alouette helicopters, mixed with WW1 and WW2 era artillery, Comet tanks and both modern and inter-war armoured cars and yet reliant on civilian bus services to moblise its troops.
Will keep this as placeholder for an eventual roll out of the forces and hopefully a game or two at sometime in the future.
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Interesting stuff and a great concept for a game.
If your Irish Army is in 28mm we WILL meet up , me dragging my Brits along with me . 👍👍👍
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Hmm. Not having bothered to do any actual research on this myself, how did the Irish Army infantry look at that point in time? Much different then the Jadotville 10 years or so earlier?
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Hmm. Not having bothered to do any actual research on this myself, how did the Irish Army infantry look at that point in time? Much different then the Jadotville 10 years or so earlier?
Quite a bit, the Emerald Isle being somewhat less sunny and warm than the Congo. :D
For the regulars in the late'60s through to the mid 1970s, the look is basically British Army 1960 pattern combat dress with mostly '37 pattern webbing, toting FALs and the odd Swedish K submachinegun.
Differences with the British Army are relatively subtle at this point as the British Army was also still in 1960s combats for the most part, with the 1969 pattern DPM stuff just coming in to service. Obviously Irish rank slides are markedly different but other distinguishing factors include high black comabt boots (no puttees as per the Brits) and the FALs being uniformally wood buttstock and plastic/metal forestock types.
The Irish Army also used Mark 5 turtle helmets and they tended to be unadorned or at best covered in a net, rather than the fully cammed up tin hats you would see on the British Army outside of an urban context. I've also seen photos of the odd Armoured Corps steel helmet (same shape, different suspension system as the better known para pudding bowl HSAT) mixed in with the Mark 5s.
In the absence of figures (at this point) in combats with '37 pattern webbing, the best figures for an early 1970s Irish Army would be the Wargames Atlantic SAS/Commandos, who are wearing very un-windproof smocks but look a lot like 1960s combats. Add the Empress unadorned steel helmets (available separately) and source some FALs and you'll have a decent approximation. As so many of the WA figures are toting Thompsons or Brens, these woud be the easiest way to convert to pistol gripped rifles.
The other alternative would be Warlord British paras with the crotch flap filed off but these represent a lot more work. I know, I've tried. 1960s combats lacked the thigh pocket on the right leg, so just file that off if you want to be anal about it.
As the 1970s progress, you get increasing use of British '58 pattern webbing, typically without the respirator pouch. The battalions sent to the border tend to be in pretty much the same flak jackets as their counterpoints north of the border for patrolling but woud have likely ditched them on a general war footing as fighting order is not a comfortable or practical fit with M-1969 body armour. You can essentially use British Army figures (Empress, Crooked Dice, 1st Corps etc) for the Irish in the mid 70s to early 1980s. Just file off the puttees and paint the boots solid black. At least one figure per section need to be converted to carry a Swedish K but that's about it. There are the bare metal Empress heads if you want to show an identifiable difference.
By the mid 1980s the Irish Army are still in (slightly modified, locally made) green combats but are wearing Israeli Orlite helmets. Troops photographed on the border still wearing M-1969 flak jackets.
The Irish army reserves, the FCA, are pure WW2 at this point and remain largely so up until the end of the 1980s. Bulls wool jackets, WW1 era tin hats (if any) and they were still equipped with British Mk4 bolt action rifles and Bren guns both in .303 but again with the Swedish K for their NCOs. You'd be best off using WW2 British army in battledress.
In the later 1970s and 1980s many FCA members started to privately purchase combats , British, ex-Irish army and even the odd more exotic item from Europe or the US, so long as it was basically green. I understand that US M-1965 jacksts were quite popular. If, for some utterly quixotic reason, you wanted to model the 1980s FCA, you coud probably just use the 1st Corps Korean War Brits.
Now, the panoply of armour and guns is truly weird/ impressive. The Irish Army had a wonderful mix of 25 pounders and 4.5 " howitzers as its artillery park. The 4.5" were the pre-WW2 Parry conversions (pneumatic suspension) but the guns themselves date back to before the Great War. Toss in a handful of Bofors guns for anti-air defence of vital assets. They also had an interesting collection of French 120mm mortars to bolster their arsenal.
Armour, at the turn of the decade, was truly eclectic. The Irish Army had only just ditched the last of its handful of Churchill tanks a year or so before. There was a handful of similar vintage Comet tanks, for which the Irish army had largely failed to buy spares and whose HE rounds had been dropped due to unsafe fusing issues. One of the Comets suffered a turret fire in the 1960s and so they removed the turret and replaced it with a Bofors 90mm RCL on a ring race. Now there's a fun modelling challenge.
The armoured might of the Republic wasn't confined to tracked vehicles though. Still on strength until 1972 were the 1930s era Landsverks and Leylands and even then they weren't retired just passed down to the reserves, who at this time still had those fabulously Heath-Robinson Ford Mk VI armoured cars of Congo fame/infamy.
Meanwhile the Irish government had found some cash down the back of the sofa and in 1964 purchased a batch of Panhard AML-60s. These were primarily intended for peace keeping duties (Ireland was a contributor to the UN presence in Cyprus at the time and later would send battalions to Lebanon for decades to come) the surplus equipped cavalry squadrons in Ireland, alongside then supplanting the miscellany of ancient shite in service. They ordered some more in 1970 including the 90mm armed gun version and these would all be in place by the mid 1970s.
They would also order and receive the M3 APC version of the Panhard around the same time. These were very active in border operations from the late 1970s onwards, each infantry battalion along with the cav sqadrons getting a handful for patrolling purposes.
By the 1980s the Irish military behemoth had reached peak military power projection, having added Scorpion light tanks, a few Irish-Belgian APCs of dubious worth and some even more dubious scout cars based on a Unimog chassis, purchased second hand, that would roll in mild breeze. The skies woud be kept free of would be raiders by a handful of Fouga Magisters (replacing similar numbers of doubty Vampire trainers ) and bolstered in the ground attack role by the devastating fury of SIAI-Marchetti turbo prop trainers. The world trembled and neither the Warsaw Pact or Britain challenged Ireland's armed might.
Almost none of this would feature in the Jack Lynch goes bonkers scenario but the Irish Army was tasked later in the decade with reviewing options for intervention if the British Army was withdrawn from Ulster.
What I like about the period is that the Irish Defence force is almost the perfect post war 'Imagination' or AK-47 style nation. A developing country with a truly eclectic mix of modern and ancient hand me downs.
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Great info and lots of food for thought.
I’m pondering on using the 1st Corps figures. Both ranges , for Korea and cap comforter wearing Cold War range .
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The Irish Army on exercise 1977. Saving the oil fields and uranium mines of County Sligo from Red Land invaders:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT1Kz3ctZqE
The old 'bulls wool' uniform on display. What the FCA would have been wearing, save for the fact its berets were khaki as opposed to the black of the regulars. Green swatch behind the cap badge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEOcmqt672s
Recruitment ad from the 1970s;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9nCK9qaQns
Irish Army patrolling the Louth border 1973:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIvew6qnWdc
Similar thing a decade later. Note the changes to kit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD1Wq1Zcqsw&t=48s
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Very interesting stuff there, carlos. Thanks...
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Great stuff ..... getting me hooked in here ! 👍🤪🤪🤪🤪
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My cunning plan proceeds apace! lol
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Even if you don't fancy the Jack Lynch scenario there were dozens of little 'microagressions' that provide potential fodder for gaming scenarios.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaO-CjF8esY
Given the lack of direct communication between the respective armies (everything had to go via the RUC and Gardai) mistakes could potentially happen. Add in that there were known incidents of Gardai collusion with PIRA terrorists (just as there were with the RUC and loyalist terrorists) and you have some interesting what ifs, at least on a small scale, gameable basis.
There was more than one instance of the British Army straying over a poorly defined border, the captured SAS team being the best known. At Warrenpoint following the bombing of the Paras' truck and the follow up bombing on the QRF, shots were fired into the Republic killing two bystanders.
You just need to set the scene so that the security forces of either side can't be sure that the force venturing into their territory or brassing up their bit of the countryside isn't doing so as part of a deliberate military operation.
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I’m in …. on several levels !!
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Interesting stuff.
Once in a car with an Uncle we drove along a nice straight road.
He didn't stop at what I thought was the cheap petrol station. When
I asked why he said, 'That one is in Punts' (i.e. in the South).
'So we crossed the border ?'
'We crossed it six times' he told me.
How could you not have border problems with such a frontier? :D
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Just been looking for info on the armoured elements .
Got Mark doing some 3D printing of various armoured cars etc .
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Interesting idea - my folks drove across the border when this was happening and remember there being a load of Irish army vehicles parked up.
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The best thing is it's all at a potentially manageable scale. The 1969/70 planning revolved around two Irish company groups, one linking to Derry (Londonderry if you prefer) and the other to Newry. So pretty easy to imagine screening groups of platoon size. You have to bear in mind that a battalion group of the best trained soldiers were in Cyprus at the time.
Even the really hairbrained bits like seizing the BBC building in Belfast or raiding Aldergrove are going to be small scale. The Irish Army at the time had not established its Ranger Wing (didn't do so until 1980) so had no officially formed SF units but they had just started in Ranger training under the tutelage of the USSF at Fort Benning earlier in 1969. So there's a potential pool of trained men to carry out such raids. These would become the 'Special Assault Groups' moving forward into the 1970s. Nominally platoon sized.
There are commercially available 3D prints of Landsverks and Ford MkVIs out there not so sure about Leylands but then they are essentially Landsverk look alikes so near enough is good enough. Panhard AML-60s are available as diecasts. Dinky have 1/58 or 1/60 versions, Solido does a very nice 1/50 version but it requires a little work to get the mortar/ gun arrangement right ( the version offered actually has a .50 cal). Solido also produce a lovely little 1/50 Alouette III if you fancy some Irish Air Corps heli lift. I have a number of these bought cheap, including one painted up as an Irish machine.
Soft transport was pretty much Bedford 3 tonners and Landrovers at the time but the Irish Army was so short on transport that it required civilian buses to be hired simply to get the limited contingents up to the border.
You can deduce the organisation of contemporary battalions, right down to section level from the very helpful Irish Army unit histories for the contingents serving in UNFICYP. The Irish contingents at the time were typically a battalion group, supplemented by an armored car element (squadron minus, 8 X Panhard ACs ), an attched 120mm mortar battery along with a sections worth of engineers, military police and other supporting services.
https://www.militaryarchives.ie/en/online-collections/united-nations-unit-histories-1960-1982/cyprus-unit-histories
If you go to pages 76-84 of the 11th Infantry Group for example, you'll see a tabular breakdown of the manning and weapons of the battalion right down to section level. It's all FN's, Brens and 1X Carl Gustav SMG per section. Curiously the bloke allocated the SMG is the Section 2iC, the bloke in charge of the gun group, which is an odd choice to my mind. No AT weapons in the platoon save for Energas but there were a couple of C. Gustav RRs at Company level. Medium machine gun support at this time was the old Vickers in .303, a pair of which were allocated to each company group. Whether that pertained in Ireland i don't know but for the Jack Lynch Loses His Shit sceneario it would make sense, as the forces are essentially independent company groups.
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As the structure remained basically the same, it goes without saying that you can use those Unit histories to figure out the structure of the earlier Irish UN contingents to the Congo, if that's you area of interest.
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More great info.
Thanks mate 👍
I am now at the stage of gathering kit.
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This is an intriguing idea.
What was the expected / actual British level of troops in NI at this time? And how quickly could they have been reinforced from England?
It feels the Irish forces are far too small to do anything useful, beyond the initial surprise. And even then I’m not sure how much of a surprise it could have been given how porous the border was.
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This is an intriguing idea.
What was the expected / actual British level of troops in NI at this time? And how quickly could they have been reinforced from England?
It feels the Irish forces are far too small to do anything useful, beyond the initial surprise. And even then I’m not sure how much of a surprise it could have been given how porous the border was.
Even the Irish Army's general staff concluded that it would be a disaster. The original intention had been intervention against the rampages of the B Specials when the rioting had reached a peak in mid August 1969. By the time the planning had been sought and delivered, the British Army had been deployed onto the streets of NI. There were 3 resident regular battalions at the outset and that more than doubled with deployments from the UK by the end of August. They could have been reinforced very quickly from the UK and if need be Germany. That's of course not counting the paramilitary security forces in NI. The RUC and the B Specials.
Ironically, at leat one of the objectives of the mooted commando raids, the BBC studios in Belfast, had British troops deployed as a result of the rioting, so any attempt to storm them would not have been without active resistance.
Overall the idea, wooly headed as it was, was a quick intervention, maybe 48 to 72 hours allowing for Catholic/ Republicans in the North to escape their Loyalist tormentors and to call for UN intervention. I'm not sure how members of the Irish cabinet reconciled the idea of UN intervention and presumably the deployment of blue helmets on the streets of Derry and Belfast with:
a) The fact that under international law they would be the aggressor.
b) The tiny but somewhat inconvenient fact that Britain sits on the Security Council, with veto powers, of said United Nations.
c) The fact that Britain was a founding member of NATO, with all that goes with that.
None the less, the plan was roll over the border, declare victory and bugger off again. The Mouse That Roared seems to have been the basis for the concept of operations.
Surprise for the British Army/ Government? The old military maxim: 'the object of a successful operation is to surprise the enemy not astound him' comes into play here although, in this instance, it probably would have played to the advantage of the Irish Army, at least initially. Nobody in their right mind would have expected the Irish Army to roll over the border.
The deployment of large portions of the Irish Army was noted, it coud hardly be otherwise as it absorbed a sizeable portion of Ireland's public transport fleet , it was publicly announced and as you point out, the border is porous. Remember that the establishment of field hospitals and deployment of troops along the border actually took place. Then there was Lynch's speech which did cause quite a bit of alarm in Stormont and Whitehall.
That said, if the cover for the deployment is the establishment of field hospitals in the guise of humanitarian relief and given the physical proximity of the identified military objectives (lodgement in/ around Derry and Newry) then no doubt some level of tactical surprise could have been achieved. Both Derry and Newry are what? About a five to ten minute drive from the border?
Newry, ironically, is the more likely surprise. Newry had and still has an overwhelmingly Catholic population and had not suffered from the sectarian violence taking place in Belfast and Derry. It also had a Cathloic majority council. Quite a pointless objective really but the Irish Army was attempting to be realistic about what it could achieve in a military and logistical sense and had concluded it wasn't much.
So, given that the planning objectives were to hit RUC stations, no doubt there would have been initial firefights with the police. Sidenote: The RUC still had Shorland armoured cars in 1969 (shout out to Minifigs who make one in 28mm), so you potentially have more toys to play with.
What would Ireland have done in the face of the swift and inevitable order to cease and desist from the British Government? Well, that's examined fairly well in the RTE doco at the start of this thread and for gaming purposes, having the Irish government decide it couldn't afford to lose face domestically works nicely for a game or mini campaign.
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Now, the potential complicator for the British Army is what is happening elsewhere. If the sectarian violence continues to ramp up, then the resident security forces are going to be fairly busy as is. I'd say that an Irish Army invasion of NI, however limited is going to be a sure fire recipe for stoking intercommunal violence. That's the Loyalist community's worst nightmare, right there.
Now there were no known plans to arm republican terrorists at this point but you could easily weave that in as the invaders assisting 'local community self-defence forces'.
Early in 1970, a few short months after all of this was initially mooted, there was a an actual scandal, that saw a couple of Irish cabinet members given the boot for exactly that, seeking to purchase arms for the OIRA. One of those ministers was Charles Haughey, who would go on to become Taoiseach. The scandal very nearly caused the fall of Lynch's government and there are claim and counterclaim as to whether Lynch knew of the whole.
For gaming purposes no need to give your auxiliary/insurgent forces a hundred thousand quids worth of moody Belgian weapons, hand out the largesse of the Irish FCA's armouries, the thousands of .303s still in store. The OIRA were familiar with those having helped themselves to a few over the years.
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Thanks Carlos great write up - I’ll have a look at the videos if I get chance.
The various paramilitary groups would certainly take the chaos caused by a military intervention to take care of matters they wished too, but had felt constrained to do so from.
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The past is a different country.
I wonder if that was the inspiration for https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p016qh1n (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p016qh1n)
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The past is a different country.
I wonder if that was the inspiration for https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p016qh1n (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p016qh1n)
lol lol lol
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Great stuff lads .
The story develops and falls squarely into my ‘Anarchy In The UK’ project .
Just as well really as I collect this lot tomorrow !!! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🙏🤣
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Oh my God! What have I done? :o
lol
Here you go!
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Yep it’s 100 per cent down to you …. and I’m grateful mate . 🙏
Your kit is terrific …. I’ll be searching for the ‘copter . 👍
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The Alouettes come up quite frequently on fleabay. There was a bloke not far from me who had a whole stash of them and I ended up buying the lot cheapish for cash. He even included a Solido 1/80 something Puma as a freebie which I then donated to another member on LAF whose need for such a thing was greater than mine.
The decals I nicked from an Italeri Cessna or it might have been a Magister, I forget which. Digging it out I found it's moved around in storage so requires a bit of a touch up here and there but luckily diecasts are fairly robist bits of kit.
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This all quite fascinating. If not tempting. I need another period like I need another hole in my head, though....but I gotta admit, for some reason, various Irish, and Irish-inspired wars fascinate me. We've already gamed Ridgeway from the Fenians' raid across the Niagara River after the ACW. And I've oft thought about doing the '98 Rising, as well as the various activities between 1916 and 1923. And Jadotville, too. Maybe I'll add this little bit of "What If..." to that list...
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Funnily enough Ridgeway's always been of interest to me. I remember there was a really good piece on it in one of the wargaming mags back in the 1980s. Nearest I've got in time and space is half finishing Canadian Revolt figures.
I know what you mean about needing more periods. Just the other day I was looking at a thread on here and though hmm those look good and they started to rekindle my interest in doing Walker and the filibusters in Nicaragua. Earlier in the year it was how about kicking off that Colombus/Pershing Expedition project I've had on the back burner for a decade or so. I've always had a slightly morbid interest in off beat conflicts in the Western Hemisphere.
This place can be quite dangerous, in terms of temptation. :(
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Finally got round to watching the first video, very informative. It’s rather reset my image of the period, 1969 was a couple of years before I was born so my mental picture of the troubles is far more late 70s onwards.
Some tidbits from the what if part:
1) British air power, the senior Irish soldiers seem justly worried about this - and it seems this would have been a hugely decisive factor in any shooting war
2) Columns of Nationalist refugees heading south. This seems a bit fanciful, given the military operation was to move in on highly Nationalist towns, would people from these really want to leave everything behind to walk to the South? If they wanted to leave, they could have done this at any point earlier. But it these had happened they might have been quite effective at neutralising the RAF - can’t see bombing columns of civilians would have looked good on the TV
3) Nobody really seems to know what the Irish government was trying to achieve if they went with the military option. The whole triggering a UN intervention seems bizarre.
Feels a bit more real now, probably better to just think of it in terms of toy soldiers…
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Hmm. One UN country attacking another. I know Article V is defensive in nature, but I wonder what the UN would have actually done in the 60s...
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Sod all if one of the members is on the Security Council.
Article 5 involves taking action against a member state that the Security Council itself has placed in the naughty corner. Predictably Russia (PRC wasn't a member until 1971) would have vetoed any attempt to declare it against Ireland. Britain would have vetoed any measure to put them in the same spot and for all the noise that might have been invoked by the plastic paddies in Boston and New York, I doubt the US government would want to fuck around with a key ally who had been, however lamely, militarily attacked. They certainly didn't in 1982 when much more was at stake in terms of their geopolitical strategy. I think Al Haig did enjoy the frequent flyer points though.
Purely for moral suasion, the British government could also have invoked a somewhat more relevant Article 5 in the NATO treaty. Not that it would have required foreign assistance, just nice to put your opponent on the wrong side of the fence.
The hidden cost for Ireland would have been the effect on its pending EEC membership application. Probably not an endearing quality in a potential member state.