No More For The Road

[Dan]

I had some fun at the end of this update.
-----------------------------------------

The KGB had not been idle, plans were made to extract, willingly or not, certain agents of theirs that were seen as high value and must be protected.On the otherhand, they had also determined that a number of those agents would have to be sacrificed in order to protect the others. There was a minor flaw in this plan - independently, a number of those that the Private Eye article had alerted, (while they had identified themselves from the articles, their colleagues had not), whom the KGB had identified as expendable, also began making plans to flee.

However, both Philby and Burgess remained in position, doing their best to deflect attention away from real agents, often onto innocent men whose careers would be destroyed, (The surviving people concerned, those that had stayed in England, were rehabilitated by Whitehall once post crisis investigations were completed, and compensation awarded, however, this number was in fact quite small, numbering no more than 20 or so out of the hundreds affected), while the guilty were either protected or given time to escape.

On the morning of Tuesday 3rd of July, Adam Shawcross, a cryptographer at GCHQ in Cheltenham, failed to arrive at work. He had telephoned in to his manager and advised that he had been suffering from a minor case of food poisoning. By mid-afternoon, he had caught the ferry from Dover to Calais, and that evening borded a flight under an assumed name with a false passport to Prague in Czechslovakia. The following morning, all sign of him ceased.
It wasn't until the evening of Thursday 5th of July that a work colleague went to Shawcross' home to find it unlocked and devoid of signs of life. His colleague immediately rang the Police and then his manager at GCHQ fearing that Shawcross had been kidnapped. While the Police worked on the basis that he was a missing person, his managers at GCHQ immediately began to check Shawcross' work and noticed that over 50 documents detailing British efforts to penetrate Chinese Naval signals were also missing. This changed things immediately, and officers from MI-5 began the task of questioning Shawcross' colleagues and surviving family to try to discover his intentions.
They were too late by a matter of three days.

Guy Burgess was as surprised as everyone else at the defection, Shawcross was not a name in his "other files".
Over the course of the years, a select team of officers fro MI-5 had been working directly under Burgess with the brief of identifying Warsaw Pact agents within the civil service and ministry of defence. The idea being to allow them to continue their work until such time when it would be required to "turn" them to feed false information to the enemy in a time of war.
Burgess had been involved breifly with the XX program during World War II, and was able to use this logic in order to get Prime Ministerial approval for this plan. The files created, were held solely by Burgess, no one else held access to them. Whether they were insulation against discovery or if he considrered them as an insurance policy in case of being discovered, we do not know, only that the files exist, and that they are scheduled for release from the former Soviet Archives in the CIS during the course of 2080 under the 100 year rule.


Shawcross was the first independent defector. The first "assisted" defector was not a KGB effort, but with their full blessings. Robert Van Der Grift, a senior civil servant in the Treasury, had been passing information to the Stasi. He had been blackmailed into it originally in order to facilitate the release of a cousin who had been held in East Germany on charges of espionage. The charges were dismissed 6 months after Van Der Grift agreed, however in order to continue his activities, he was offered "Compensation" from the Stasi for the suffering he had endured. Once the payment had been accepted, the blackmail continued, this time threatening to expose his duplicity.
Upon the release of the first article, Van Der Grift considered turning himself over and begging for mercy, until the public mood moved firmly against any suspected Soviet spy. Feeling that it was only a matter of time before the net closed, Van Der Grift asked his controllers for help.
The operators on the ground decided that a house fire would be a good way to delay any investigation and a date was planned. On Friday 3rd August, Robert Van Der Grift left the treasury office in Whitehall at 6.43pm. He was seen carrying a number of box files out of the building to a car provided by the Civil Service. It was not unusual at the time for senior civil servant to take confidential files home for the weekend to work on, so no comment was passed.
On the Saturday 4th August, he attended a function at the Conservative Club local to his home where he was seen to be drinking a significant amount, and at approximately 4.00am the next morning, a local Game Keeper contacted the emergency services after finding Van Der Grift's house well alight.
The house was a gutted shell by the time the Fire Brigade brought the fire under control, and the body of a late middle aged man approximately fitting Van Der Grift's description was recovered from the remains of the house, burnt beyond all recognition. A check of dental records noted that they matched the civil servant, however, a small tattoo on the inside of the arm of the body, a series of numbers, was missed during the post mortem examination, the only potential evidence that may have indicated that the body was not that of Robert Van Der Grift.

Van Der Grift was correct, the net had begun closing and there was nothing that Philby, Burgess, Blunt, Hollis, Cairncroft or any of the others could do about it.

Throughout August and into September, there was a steady stream of defections, and a steady stream of arrests. A few became public, most did not. Of those that did not become public, was the arrest of Anthony Blunt, the only one of the Cambridge Ring to face a court, at the end of September 1979.
With this arrest, first Philby, then Burgess resigned their posts.
This was spun by Margaret Thatcher as the final straw, and the Conservative leader tabled a motion of no confidence in the last government of Harold Wilson.
On Tuesday October 9th 1979, immediately after Prime Ministers Questions, the motion of no confidence was debated, Wilson, faced with jeers and cat calls, and having been informed by the whips that there was no realistic chance to win the vote, did not rise to defend himself or his government, instead, used his priviledge to speak last in the debate spoke to the house.
"It is with a heavy heart, that I must concur with the motion. In no way, has this governemnt set out to, nor willingly allowed itself to become influenced by, or beholden to, any foreign power. It is clear, that this government no longer holds the confidence of the house nor the people, and so this afternoon, I shall travel to the Palace, and seek leave from Her Majesty the Queen Elizabeth II, to disolve Parliament forthwith, and resolve to hold a general election no later than Thursday 22nd of November 1979. Ladies and Gentlemen of the House, I thank you for your devotions".

The Speaker of the House, George Thomas, asked the leader of the opposition if she still wished to divide the house, on the news that Parliament was to be desolved, Mrs Thatcher declined, and parliamentary business was brought to a close for the day.

The evening editions of the newspapers carried the story - the government had fallen, election called. Almost immediately, the London Stock exchange fell nearly 5%, the Pound fell against the Dollar, from a high point that day of $2.20 to £1 down to as low as $1.77 to £1 before rallying by close of business to $2.01 to £1.

It was clear from the outset that the Wilson government and the Labour Party were going to face trouble, opinion polls put the Conservatives, who had promised strengthened security laws, and refused to counter Peter Singlewood's suggestion of a return of National Service, almost 10 points over the Liberal Party with Labour in a distant third, their projected vote share in single figures for the first time since before World War II.
Even in traditional Labour heartlands, the Industrial West Midlands, the Ship building North East, and the Coal mining areas, their lead was slipping against the Conservatives and Liberal Party. Only in the North West, in Liverpool, did they remain strong compared to any other party.

In the end, it was a massacre.
Sinn Fein won 3 seats, (but never took them), the Liberal Party took 11 seats, the Scottish National Party took 34, Labour managed just 127 seats giving the Conservatives and their Ulster Unionist Allies a total of 444 seats. Britain had it's first female prime minister in Margaret Thatcher, the country looked forward to a fresh start, however they were not expecting the manner in which a number of the new government intended to deliver it.

Margaret Thatcher – Prime Minister
Norman Tebbit – Home Secretary
The Lord Soames – Lord President of the Council
The Lord Hailsham of St Marylebone – Lord Chancellor
Ian Gilmour – Lord Privy Seal
Sir Geoffrey Howe – Chancellor of the Exchequer
Teddy Taylor – Chief Secretary to the Treasury
The Lord Carrington – Foreign Secretary
Peter Walker – Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food
Norman St John-Stevas – Minister for the Arts and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
Paul Singlewood – Secretary for Defence
Mark Carlisle – Secretary of State for Education and Science
James Prior – Secretary of State for Employment
David Howell – Secretary of State for Energy
Michael Heseltine – Secretary of State for the Environment
Patrick Jenkin – Secretary of State for Health and Social Security
Keith Joseph – Secretary of State for Industry
John Biggs Davison – Secretary of State for Northern Ireland
Angus Maude – Paymaster-General
George Younger – Secretary of State for Scotland
John Nott – Secretary of State for Trade and President of the Board of Trade
Nicholas Edwards – Secretary of State for Wales

[James G]

Brilliant, the KGB did damage at the end too. The false guilt assumed of others, getting their key people out but leaving others and also the supposed death of a defector to cover their tracks (so no one knows) is a series of very smart moves.
You've left us with a cliff-hanger too. What is going to be done by the new government?

[Dan]

Depending on how busy things are, it could be late tomorrow or late Monday. As I stray further and further from OTL, ironically, I'm having to do more and more research.

However, for a sneak peak of what's coming, you might want to look up some of the names in the cabinet. There are four changes. The fictional Paul Singlewood is the obvious one, but if you spot the others...

[lordroel]

May 10, 2018 18:54:39 GMT Dan said:

Depending on how busy things are, it could be late tomorrow or late Monday. As I stray further and further from OTL, ironically, I'm having to do more and more research.

However, for a sneak peak of what's coming, you might want to look up some of the names in the cabinet. There are four changes. The fictional Paul Singlewood is the obvious one, but if you spot the others...

Well that is a problem with any AH timeline, how more they diverge from OTL, how more you need to do research to make it work.

[Dan]

A fair bit. There are certain people I want to bring in, and I need to make sure a good handle on their personalities and ensure the fit the times. It should be interesting going forward now.

[James G]

May 10, 2018 18:54:39 GMT Dan said:

Depending on how busy things are, it could be late tomorrow or late Monday. As I stray further and further from OTL, ironically, I'm having to do more and more research.

However, for a sneak peak of what's coming, you might want to look up some of the names in the cabinet. There are four changes. The fictional Paul Singlewood is the obvious one, but if you spot the others...

Norman Tebbit jumped off the page! He's there instead of Whitelaw at the Home Office.
Davison and Taylor were big Monday Club figures and that will mean a whole different Thatcher Government. Would it be fair to say some of that 'wets' - Pym and Atkins, maybe Willie - are gone?

[By the way, Tebbit is one of my favourite characters for a semi-dystopia 80s UK, so you using him makes me well-jel]

[Dan]

Semi-dystopia?

[James G]

May 11, 2018 6:43:33 GMT Dan said:

Semi-dystopia?

On yer bike!

[Dan]

The inclusion of Norman Tebbit in the cabinet in such a senior position, (Home Secretary), was due to a mixture circumstances, Tebbit's connection with the Monday Club, a group of right wing Conservative MPs and Lords, lobbying from his friend and colleague Peter Smallwood, himself placed in the cabinet as Secretary of Defence in part due to his previous career in the Royal Navy, and partly because of the impression that Tebbit himself had made on the Prime Minister in the run up to the election. Tebbit's inclusion also caused a little surprise amongst the observers of government business. He had ben known for his rather abrasive approach to dispute, during the Grunwick dispute he had made a number of exceptionally critical statements against the strikers, in private calling them "a bunch of trots, pikeys, pakis and paddies, (who) are lucky to have jobs and should be bloody grateful for that".
Soon dubbed "The Chingford Skinhead" for his rather less than subtle ideas, Tebbit, Singlewood and John Briggs Davison would signal a definate rightwards swing in the Conservative politics.

This was demonstrated in the actions by the home office, the Ministry of Defence and later, the Northern Ireland Office.
Initially, due to a lack of trust in the Security Services to investigate themselves, and with the resignations of the heads of counter intelligence of both MI-5 and SIS in the wake of the arrest of Sir Anthony Blunt following the defection of Andrew Shawcross, there was no one to be trusted available to head up the investigations. Instead, the Home Secretary appointed Detective Chief Inspector Robert Goodchild from West Midlands Police to head up an investigation, and to leave no stone un-turned.
Goodchild had already made his name leading the unit that secured the arrest and prosecution of the "Birmingham 6" - the men accused of being behind the UVF bombing of an Irish community centre in Selly Oak, Birmingham, which the UVF claimed was a centre for IRA Fund raising in the midlands, as well as a host of successful prosecution of organised crime figures from around the Birmingham area. Now with the blessing of the Home Secretary, Goodchild and his team were unleashed on Whitehall.
There were a number of complaints to the press regarding the approach taken to these investigations, however, these found short shrift and so, the investigations continued. The Whitehall Witch Hunt was underway.

Within the Ministry of Defence, Singlewood unleashed a similar "purge" through the armed forces. The majority of senior officers found the investigations, carried out ostensibly by the Special Investigations Branch of the Royal Military Police, assisted by the RAF Police and Royal Navy Regulating Branch where needed, and was used as an excuse to weed out anyone considered to be of "suspiciously 'left wing' or disloyal nature, presenting a security risk to the good order of the British Armed Forces". Informally, it is alleged that Smallwood personally instructed the SIB Officer leading the investigations, Lt Col Robert Fitzgerald, "If they even smell like a trot, I want them gone whoever they are". Often, officers or NCOs tried to use the investigations as an opportunity to get rid of men they considered unreliable or undesirable. Men of an individual bent for example, who, while excellent soldiers, had issues with authority or conventional soldiering, men who in the Second World War, for example, might have made fine commandos, however in the peacetime British Army, turned out to be square pegs in round holes. The famed "Barrack Room Lawyer", or his more politically active colleague - the "Barack Room Shop Steward" were driven from the armed forces in the first rounds.

No branch or area of the Armed forces was immune, and by January 1981, nearly 40,000 personnel, 98% of whom were either low ranks or newly minted Junior Officers, had been drummed out of the forces, and with black listing in force, (unofficially), many of them found themselves without work, unable to support their families, lacking direction and angry. Some found work outside of the UK, private security in the middle east, mercenary companies, offering high rates of pay and happy to receive an influx of well trained recruits and the French Foreign Legion were popular, however, of those that stayed home and remained angry, groups began to form to give an outlet to that anger.

The change in British politics saw an increase in defections. Not just to the Eastern Bloc either. Various European countries saw a sudden desire to retire and settle from a number of former government workers. Not all of these were Warsaw pact spies or even sympathisers, some were of a more liberal tradition, and felt that the sudden lunge to the right was not something they wished to live through first hand. However, those that did defect in those early days were overshadowed somewhat by later events.

Of those events, one that had a much more significant effect than expected was the election of Arthur Scargill to the presidency of the National Union of Mineworkers in December 1980. During the last years of the Wilson government, it had been policy to close unprofitable coal mines, and to supliment their output that would have gone towards power generation with a new generation of British designed and built Pressurised Water Reactors. David Howell, the Secretary for Energy considered this a sensible approach, and ordered Ian McGregor, head of the NCB to expand the list of unprofitable pits to earmark for closure. Colliaries in Yorkshire and Kent topped the list. It is also considered, in light of the times, that these pits were not only selected for being less profitable than pits in Nottinghamshire or Derbyshire for example, but were also pits where militant unionism held sway.
Scargill saw this as an opportunity to repeat what they had achieved with the Wilson Government - to dictate to the government the policies they expected to be followed, however, this was an incredible mis-calculation. While the labour Party was mindful of it's roots as the voice of the working man and the child of the Unions, the Conservatives were certainly not. In government, the significant proportion of representation of the Monday Club saw a very anti-socialist, and anti-union line actively supported. The NUM were about to put their head high above the parapet.

Before this could happen, two pieces of legislation were passed into law: Armed Forces Reform Act, (1980), and the Police Force Reform Act, (1980). The short version of the acts were that any form of union or unauthorised political activity were strictly forbidden within the armed forces, including membership or activity within The SSAMF, (Soldier's, Sailor's, Airmen's Federation - a proto-Union used for passing grievances to the armed forced, and taking up members' causes in the event of disciplinary issues). In their final action before disbandment, the SSAMF board voted to donate any remaining funds to the Royal British Legion, however, as the funds were held in MOD Bank accounts and the organisation banned, the MOD refused to transfer the money as requested, it vanishing instead into the MOD bureaucracy, never to be seen again. At the same time, a further round of sackings and resignations swept across the Army, with another 600 personnel leaving their contracts early.

In the PFRA, the Police Federation were not banned, however it's remit was cut and cut again until it became little more than a talking shop with no power to intervene on behalf of it's members. On the other side of this, the requirements on officers to be authorised to carry firearms was heavily relaxed, meaning in effect, that authority now rested with the most senior officer in a particular station rather than the Chief Constable of the Force concerned. The requirements on the senior officer to release firearms for use was similarly amended to "(issuing of firearms to officers) ...may be authorised if, in the opinion of the issuing officer, the Police Officer or Officers are of good standing and suitably trained in their use, and the law surrounding their use...". In essence, it led to a number of routinely armed patrols taking place in areas of the country with higher than average crime rates, including Birmingham, Manchester and especially London.

The first shooting by a member of the Police took place less than a week after the PFRA was signed into law.
Detective Sergant John Peters and Detective Constable Adam Centos had been dispatched by DCI Goodchild to apprehend a suspected Soviet agent from an address in Milton, Cambridgeshire. The alleged agent was a 68 year old History Professor based in Cambridge that had been working on a History of the Bolshevik Revolution.
A neighbour of the professor had seen the men approach the house and spotted the very poorly concealed handguns the men were carrying and contacted the Police.
The local station sent four of their officers, one armed with a scoped Lee Enfield Rifle, two armed with Webley .38 issue revolvers, and one armed with a Stirling Submachine gun requisitioned from the RAMC TA Barracks where the officer concerned was also a reserve soldier.
The Policemen arrived at the professors address as the detectives were exiting the property with the professor who appeared injured and with guns drawn.
The officers took positions and ordered the detectives, (at this point appearing to be unidentified gunmen), to lay down their arms and surrender. Accounts are confused as to who fired first, however, what is known is that the detectives fired three shots between them, the officers fired a total of seven shots, (one from the rifle, three from one revolver, a single shot from the other revolver and a single shot from the Stirling SMG). The two detectives were pronounced dead at the scene, and the professor was taken to hospital suffering from a close range handgun shot to his abdomen. The subsequent hearing cleared the officers of any wrong doing, the blame being lain at the feet of the dead detectives for failing to inform the local constabulary of their presence and purpose.

The coroner made a series of recommendations to the Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire and to DCI Goodchild regarding notification, however there were no formal actions taken, and the deaths ruled as lawful.

This shooting, a so called Blue on Blue shooting, was the first police shooting following the passage of the PFRA, but with events taking the turn they did, not the last.

[James G]

A confrontational government. Suspicion and division among the forces of the state. A military in crisis, which is bleeding men. The NUM's little fascist itching for a fight. People fleeing aboard (with probably money to follow them too in capital flight).
You're only going one way with this.

[Dan]

You mean the big smooshy happy ever after ending?

[James G]

May 11, 2018 21:02:53 GMT Dan said:

You mean the big smooshy happy ever after ending?

Yes, that is what I am sure is coming.

[Dan]

As things were heating up in the in England, things in Northern Ireland were about to boil over.
Under the Wilson government, the focus of security forces operations had mostly been against Unionist terror groups, with the Police mainly dealing with the organised crime that went hand in hand with the gowth of groups, both Unionist and Nationalist. With the backing of the Minister of Defence, Northern Ireland Secretary, John Biggs Davison, signalled a shift in operations. The organised crime activities of the Nationalist groups, the IRA and the INLA, who had been in a low level feud, were to be focussed on, and while the Royal Ulster Constabulary would lead the raids, the Army were to provide security and if needed, muscle, for these excusions. The change in focus was noted by the Nationalist groups, along with the harrassment of their known members and sympathisers by the Police. Complaints were madde through hitherto unrecorded back channels, however no response was recieved, the groups suspecting, correctly, that their contacts had been closed off and/or moved on.
As the harrasment became more entrenched, with sympathisers and those connected to the IRA or INLA being picked up and arrested on trumped up charges, the two groups arranged a ceasefire between themselves and issues a statement which was carried in the Derry Journal on 1st February 1980:

"The forces of Nationalism have worked in peace, for peace, in order to bring about a United Ireland, the forces of Unionism have attacked, maimed and killed indescriminately both here and on the mainland, and we have held our hand from retaliation. With the change of government in England, it is clear that the forces of Nationalism have enlisted the English government to act for them and have moved to declare war on the peaceful Catholic and Nationalist communities in Ulster.

To this we say, 'No More!'

From midnight tonight, we will work to protect the peaceful people of Ulster and Ireland as a whole from this insidious cancer that has tried to make it's home here. We shall act proportionately, and we shall act decisively.
To London and it's puppet masters in the Orange Order, the peaceful people of Ulster stand wholeheartedly against your cowardice and violence, we will be heard".

For all their talk of peace, the IRA and INLA, began a campaign of reprisals against the security forces and known nationalist agitators. Catholic members fo the security forces were visited and given a simple ultimatum, quit or else. Some of the visits were codial, some escalated to violence and in a few cases, deaths.
For those that quit, either immediately or gave notice to quit, the IRA left alone, for those that didn't, they found the return of the infamous Outlaw Notices.
A simple printed note that gave them 24 hours to quit their homes, to quit Northern Ireland or face punishment, even death, at the hands of the IRA.

Irish Historian, Joseph O'Breen, noted from the period:
"The IRA stated that only a tiny handful of the Outlaw Notices were ever posted, and that those that did recieve them left in peace. The British Government claimed that thousands of such notices were given out, mostly to innocent civillians and that hundreds were murdered on the basis of these illegal notices. The government in Dublin, who has worked with the United Nations in investigating the crimes of that period, has been able to identify over 300 cases where it was confirmed that an 'Outlaw Notice' was given out, of those, the majority moved out without an issue, in a small minority, there were some scenes of harrasment, three confirmed arson's and two murders.
It did seem however that on at least two occasions, the British were thinking along similar lines to the KGB. It is alleged by the UVF, and officially denied by the British, that two men, Thomas McCaffrey, and Shaun O'Hennessey, were in fact deep cover British Agents, placed into the Unionist paramilitaries in order to direct and discredit the movement. Sources within the UVF have accused the men of having been agent provocateurs, and personally responsible for the deaths of upwards of 80 victims.
However, in the papers of Harold Philby, selectively released by Moscow in the late 1980's, the two men were, along with an unidentified number of other men and women, indeed agents of MI-5. Their actual duties were never revealed, and the closest any government agenciy has come to acknowledging this was an accidentally recorded clip from the BBC Current Affairs program Panorama where Alan Clark, at that point Minister for Prisons is found saying "yes they were ours, well, I say ours, given who they reported to they may as well have been Moscow's".

The upshot of Biggs Davison's approach was that a low scale issue was turned into a virual insurgency within a matter of months. This was to see a very sudden escalation the following year, when the Ministry of Defence, at the request of the Northern Ireland Office sent a battallion of Grenadier Guards to assist in security operations. At the same time, Internment was introduced into Northern Ireland, meaning that with little more than the most basic intelligence gathered, suspects could be arrested and taken for questioning and isolated from society without the need for a trial. At midnight, On April 1st 1980, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, backed up by, in some cases led by the Grenadier Guards swooped on homes of known or suspected IRA or INLA men.
The majority of raids passed without incident. Pretty quickly the Police or Army realised they were in the wrong place, or the person on the list went quietly expecting to clear the matter up quickly, in other words, they were just civillians. In the time it took the security services to leave their barracks and arrive at their targets, most of them knew what was coming and had either fled, fled leaving a booby trap or decided to fight it out.
For those caught unawares, the raids had exactly the desired effects - shock and confusion, and went swiftly and efficiently. However, for those raids against targets that had been prepared, the toll was huge.
In one raid, before fleeing, one target had placed a flash bomb on a tripwire well inside the house, he had also severed the gas mains from the cupboard meaning that when the Police entered the property, the combination of the flashbomb and the gas leak killed two men entering the property instantly and injured a further 17 people, both local residents and Police and Armed forces in attendance, and also caused the collapse of the neighbouring houses either side of the raided property.

The worst case, came in one of the last planned raids of the night. An IRA Cell based on the Falls Road in Belfast had been tipped off that the raids were coming, and knowing that one of their safe houses was to be the target set an ambush.
The Grenadier Guards had arranged for two sections of soldiers, 20 men, travelling in three Humber Pig Armoured Personel Carriers, to carry out the raid on the safe house. The raid was to be a fast, aggressive 'Smash & Grab' and should work as well as the others they had carried out already. Captain Complacancy had settled in already.
The IRA men had gambled on there being no helicopter support and set themselves up on the flat rooftops over looking the target address with a mixture of weaponry - improvised and conventional. An improvised claymore type mine had been rigged in the hallway by the back door in case the Guards tried to enter via the back door. Blocking teams had been arranged and were in waiting a mile away in either direction.

As the raid approached, the streets were quiet, not so much of a surprise given the time, but there was nothing, no animals, no twitching curtains, no workers making their way to work. It was, what would later be described as a 'Derry Calm. The IRA men on the roofs huddled by the chimney stacks, storage bins, anything for cover. The weaponry they carried was a strange mixed bag of scrounged or stolen arms. Two Sten guns and a Bren gun of WWII vintage, a stolen SLR - the British version of the Belgian FN FAL battle rifle, a couple of armalite rifles of varying types, a shotgun, a few hand guns and two very highly prized AK 47 rifles recently supplied by the Soviet Union via Libya at significant expense. A few of the men carried no weapons, but instead, crates of milk bottles full strong smelling liquid, some with rags stuffed in the top, most without.

The Pigs pulled to a halt, their brakes squealing loudly as the founght to stop the heavy weight of the vehicles. The Guardsmen climbled out of the vehicles to the shouts of their NCOs telling them where to position themselves. Shouts of alarm from the soldiers as the first of the blocking parties approached from the north end of the street, swiftly turning the coach they had hijacked across the road. As the first flames began to become visible from the the inside of the coach, the gunfire started.
Shooting from an elevated position, from both sides of the road, the Guardsmen were trapped in the middle with virtually no cover, yet they stood and returned fire, neither side inflicting any casualties on the other yet. From the south end of the street, a dray lorry approached and swung across the road. This time, the soldiers opened fire immediately, and while the driver was hit and killed instantly, it was too late, the road was blocked in both directions. It was then that the bottles started to rain down over the Pigs. Initally, there was confusion as to the purpose of the bottles, filled with a mix, judging by the smell of them as the liquid splashed all over the pigs and some of the nearby troops, parafin and...
More bottles flew over the roofs and into the streets, this time with lit rags burning brightly as they arced through the night sky - Molotov cocktails hit the ground and ignited the liquid that had already landed, engulfing the Pigs in the middle of the road, catching some of the soldiers around them. Some of the men suffered horrific burns as their uniforms were soaked in petrol. A few more shots as Soldiers smashed their way into neighbouring houses to seek cover, and the IRA men withdrew through the back streets and alleys. The whole ambush took less than seven minutes, yet for those involved it felt like hours. Soon the only sounds were the screams of the wounded, the crackling of the flames as the armoured personel carriers burned and the sound of sirens converging on the scene.
The first shots of the "Troubles" had been fired. The British response in Northern Ireland would be brutal, and the lessons learned here would be applied ruthlessly elsewhere in the not too distant future.

[James G]

Ulster's dirty war is going strong.
Is Louis Battenburg alive due to butterflies or is he still dead?

[Dan]

Louis is still alive in this timeline, due to the lack of Nationalist activity, he's been happily sailing up and down the Irish Sea without a care in the world.