Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland (11 page)

…
before Charlie Hughes’s death, it must have been late 1970,
a seaman came off the
QE2
with this booklet. It was about this
weapon called the Armalite – the
AR
15. It folded, it could be dumped
in water, and we were fascinated by this weapon. The
AR
15
came in first and then the
AR
18, the 18 had the folding butt. We all fell in love
with this weapon. We were sitting in the [call] house [talking about
this] and we decided that, ‘We need to get these guns.’ We pushed –
or I certainly pushed – that this was the weapon we needed. We
needed the Armalite because we were using Garrand rifles,
M1
carbines and Thompsons … a lot of the ammunition and weapons
came from the 1940s era and they’d been lying in dumps all the
years … I remember getting a big consignment of.303 bullets. And
they were soaking wet. We got biscuit tins and put a layer of sand
in the biscuit tin, a layer of ammunition, layer of sand, layer of
ammunition, and put it in the oven to dry out the rounds. We
would be sitting in a wee kitchen house and the oven full of biscuit
tins drying out .303 ammunition or .45 ammunition or whatever. I
mean, weapons were so scarce. You had to be careful that you didn’t
overheat them or they very easily could have exploded. The other
problem was that very often you hit a dud round maybe in the
middle of a gun battle, and you’re constantly re-
cocking … It was
a daunting thought at the time … that we were going to take on
the might of the British Army with the antiquated weapons that
we had
…

From my point of view, all I was concerned about was arming my
Volunteers with the best weapons I could get. The problem and it’s
something I was never able to work out, was why the hell [the]
people in GHQ were not doing their job right. Did they not know
about Armalites or RPG rocket launchers? Why were they still
supplying us with Garrand rifles,
M1,
M2
carbines, which were not
the weapons we needed? The Armalite was much superior for street
fighting than any of those weapons. The Garrand was a great
weapon for heavy combat, but for the type of operations that we
were talking about, for street fighting, the Armalite was perfect. And
yet it took us from Belfast, not GHQ in Dublin, to get them in. I
don’t believe they had a clue, and that’s the most innocent explanation
I can come up with. The other explanation is that they didn’t
want us armed in Belfast, in D Company … I think we did push
the war forward more than anyone else. And I think Gerry Adams
was largely responsible for that … it was Gerry who sent me to
America to get Armalites. To escalate the war. Same reason for the
London bombings, to escalate the war, to bring the war to the
British. The Gerry Adams I’m talking about then and the Gerry
Adams I’m talking about now are two different people … [but] at
that time, the most important thing was the war, keep the war going
.
I went to Gerry, who was my O/C … [and] it was Gerry who sent
me [to New York]. We had people in D Company who were on the
QE2;
we had the American connection. I left Belfast to make
arrangements to go to the States and I stayed in Dublin with a guy
called Harry White who was an old 1940s man who had been in jail
with my father. And he was a pretty prominent guy, an uncle of
Danny Morrison. He arranged for me to get … a bum passport, the
plane ticket and the contact when I got to New York to pick me up –
all the arrangements
.

The Second Battalion decided I would be the best man to go because
I was regarded as a good operator. So I went, as I said, down to
Dublin … and eventually I got to New York. In New York, I met
this contact called ‘Bob’, an ex-Vietnam War vet and he was to help
me get the Armalites. We set up a meeting with Noraid; a guy called
Martin Lyons [who] was head of Noraid at the time who lived in
this big house, [with a] massive conference table. We sat around the
table, and I said, ‘We need these Armalites’, and Martin Lyons
replied, ‘But we were told by Dublin that you want Garrands and
m1 carbines’, and I said back, ‘Listen, I come from Belfast and we’re
fighting the war there, we want Armalites.’ And then I was brought
to this other house, to this other top Noraid man, and I went to sit
in this chair and he told me, ‘You can’t sit there, that’s Joe Cahill’s
chair.’ I says, ‘Right, right’, so I moved. Again I had the same message:
‘We want Armalites’, and again he said, ‘We have instructions
from GHQ to send you back to Belfast.’ Without the Armalites. I
said, ‘What do you mean?’ He says, ‘Well, we’re under instructions
from Joe Cahill [who was then Chief of Staff] that you have to go
back to Belfast, that you’re here unofficially.’ I says, ‘I’m here on the
direction of the Belfast Brigade’, and he says, ‘But you’re not here
under the directions of the GHQ.’ I replied, ‘Well, I’m not fucking
going without Armalites.’ The Noraid people were so conservative,
they had no understanding what the war was like in Belfast and
they were controlled totally by Dublin … and Dublin thinking, to
me, was very conservative, restrictive, and very: ‘The war’s OK but
don’t let it get out of hand; don’t give them weapons that were too
sophisticated.’ That was my opinion of Dublin, that was my opinion
of America, that was my opinion of Noraid. The Noraid contact
I had, the ex-Vietnam vet, talked about ‘gooks’ … which I had
a problem with, but at that time my main concern was getting
Armalites, so I’d have dealt with anybody … So, I was ordered to
leave New York. I refused and myself and Bob organised a group of
people to buy Armalites for us. At that time you could go into a gun
shop, and if you had a driving licence you could buy guns, so that’s
what we did. We set the group up, and … I think [we acquired]
something like twenty-six or twenty-seven Armalites. You know
the old John Wayne film about the Winchester rifle? Bob had a
Winchester in his house and I said, ‘Could I get that sent over as
well?’ ‘No problem,’ he said. So along with the Armalites came a
Winchester rifle
.

…
this is where the Southampton thing and the
QE2
came in
again. We sent the cars over, some [with] a woman and a child, to
pick up the stuff; it was hidden into the panels and sent back to
Belfast. Whenever a car arrived, we would leave it sitting for an
hour or so, and watch it to see if anybody else was watching and
then drive it into the Falls, strip the car and get the weapons out.
I remember the first time all the Armalites came in. They had just
arrived the day before, and we were involved in a gun battle in the
Falls, and actually the Sticks were still operating at that time, and I
drove into Balkan Street; the Brits were at the top of Raglan Street
and I had sixteen Armalites in the boot. I opened it and started
handing out Armalites and I remember the Sticks looking at us …
That was the start of the Armalites
.

The Sticks got night sights in and that’s what we needed badly. They
got them in and there was a wee man who was a Stick who jumped
over to the Provos, wee ——, who told us where the night sights
were. So, we went and robbed their dumps and then we became
effective at nights. The night sights fitted onto the Armalites lovely
.
The Armalites made all the difference, not just in the Lower Falls,
but in Belfast, and I loved them. I loved the Armalite. They were so
compact, so easy to fire, so easy to maintain, not like the old rifles
like the Garrand, the .303 – they had to be oiled all the time.
Armalites were much easier to handle
.

I remember that they used to drive down in Saracens with a Sacred
Heart picture tied to the front … thinking that we wouldn’t fire at
it. I mean, that’s silly. I wasn’t one of those who went to Mass, even
though I was brought up in a strict Catholic household. We said the
rosary every night, went to Mass every Sunday morning and you’d
be asked the colour of the vestments when you got back in for your
break fast! But these people obviously thought that we were such
devout Catholics that we wouldn’t fire on a Saracen with a holy
picture on the front of it. They were sadly mistaken. It was only a
picture
.

…
there was constant activity from the different call houses that we
had. Every day there would be a different call house, every day the
weapons were being used, every day there were Volunteers out in
what was called the ‘float’ which meant you had a driver – you had
to steal a car – possibly one or two men in the back seat, just driving
around looking for targets. While that was taking place, it was quite
normal for another squad of men – and women – to go and rob a
bank, or carry out a bombing mission in the city centre … D Com
pany
was very active there as well … my only agenda in that period
in the 1970s was to fight the war, to plant as many bombs as I could,
to rob as many banks as I could, to kill as many Brits and RUC as
I could, to develop the war to a higher level than it was
…

…
there wasn’t a [British] regiment that came into the Falls area
that didn’t go out with casualties, and the reason for that was that
we were on standby twenty-four hours a day. There was one particular
day, we were all sitting in the call house and, for some
strange reason, an open-back jeep came in through McDonnell
Street, across Leeson Street and up Cyprus Street – now they [had]
pulled open-back jeeps off the streets a year before. Whether it was
an act of bravado or an act of stupidity I still do not know. At this
time the British Army would never come in unless they [were] heavily
armed and in armoured cars. This particular day we weren’t expecting
anything like this; we were in an area that was practically
liberated. I had been over every yard wall in the Lower Falls area,
through every back door, through most people’s houses, everybody
knew who we were. Here was something that just came out of the
blue … It was a crazy fucking thing to do, because we walked round
the area with weapons over our shoulders, just walking through the
streets … I mean, it would be like sending an American open-back
jeep into Viet Cong territory in Vietnam. It was just so unbelievable
[that] actually we thought this could be a set-up. But we were so
confident and in such control of the area at that time that instinct
took over: ‘There’s a target’ and ‘Hit it.’ By the time the jeep had got
to Varna Gap, we had an ambush set up. I often wonder what the
hell happened; were they doing it for a bet or was it a mistake?
When I think back on it now, it frightens the life out of me. And
them poor Brits, whoever they were, and for whatever the reason
drove into Varna Gap and they were just wiped out!
†
You know.
There were three dead. I think one survived, but the jeep was just
cut to pieces
.
¹⁹

I’d gone from Volunteer to Quarter Master, to Adjutant and at
this stage I was O/C, and it was just an opportunity that could not
be missed … but then it wasn’t the first time that this had happened.
Some months before, two soldiers had been sent into the area
in the middle of the night under cover, and they were caught. The
Official IRA got one and D Company got the other one. The one
D Company got was shot in Sorella Street, just facing the Royal
Victoria Hospital. The other one the Official IRA allowed to go free.
I believed that the Official IRA were in contact at all times with the
British Army, and that this had started back in 1969, 1970, when the
British Army was based in Mulhouse Street Mill … they used to
have meetings [with the British] in the Bush Bar and I believed that
the Officials held their man there that night, and were in contact
with the British in Mulhouse Street. Whether there was a deal or
not, that they got something for releasing him, I do not know,
but it would not surprise me. In the case of the soldier caught by
D Company, he wasn’t unarmed, he was armed, he was the enemy,
and was seen as that. They were easily spotted and two IRA Volunteers
apprehended them. The Sticks, the Officials, appeared at the
same time and there was a bit of an argument between the Volunteers
and the Officials but everyone backed off. The soldiers didn’t
offer any resistance at all, the Officials took one away and the one
held by D Company was executed. I’m actually not 100 per cent sure
but I think he might have survived, that he crawled to the Royal
Victoria Hospital, but later he died. The Volunteers took his notebook
from him, which had names and addresses; mine was one of
the names he had in his book. He had photographs as well … but
none of me
.

…
they were two young lads sent in on an undercover operation
against D Company, in one of the most hostile areas you could send
soldiers into, and yet it happened. And they were both caught …
they weren’t going to do any damage to the IRA, trying to gather
information in the early hours of the morning. And they were spotted
by a local resident coming into the area, as most activity in the area
at the time was … everyone passed on information. Even the
Official IRA at this stage would have passed on information if
they thought your life was in danger or if they thought there was
a chance of you getting arrested; at least some of them would. Most
residents would have done the same. There were times when [British
Army] foot patrols would have come in – one from one end of the
area, one from the other end of the area – and within seconds you
knew exactly where they were; it would be passed from one resident
to another: ‘If you see any of the boys, tell them there’s a foot patrol
there, a foot patrol here
.’