To Hell In A Handcart

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The attack on the PM & Cabinet leads to the right wing backlash that was feared for so long. Mountbatten and a group of senior serving and retired Army generals backed by the Parachute Regiment stage a bloodless coup.

The 'junta' issue a message on national TV to "Keep Calm and Carry on....as normal". Some regional authorities enact their civil defence plans. Left-wing councils such as Liverpool and Felpersham declare against the military backed government of national unity. Others such as Bristol, declare themselves open cities. 

An attempt to break the strikes at essential utilities and transportation centres using the army escalates into even more tension and violence.  A poorly reasoned order to fire on strikers causes a revolt amongst soldiers who themselves are economic conscripts, who join the strikers. An attempt to restore order and military discipline turns into chaos as the soldiers turn on their officers.

These photos send a shockwave through the country. Some part-time soldiers take the matter into their own hands. Equipping themselves from their TAVR Centre armouries and stores, they take control key local centres and transportation hubs. Spare weapons are used to arm local union militias and self-defence groups.

First blood in the shooting war happens 3 miles north east of Borchester.  A platoon of B Company, 2nd Benson & Hedges Fusiliers (TA) knock out a Chieftain of the Duchess of Duke Hussars.

Fusiliers pose with their bagged prize!

'Rebel' troops ditched their berets and donned the peaked combat cap known as "crap hat" with pride after this incident. An article in the News of the World would draw similarities to the cap worn by Fidel Castro so the name "Castro Cap" stuck and became synonymous with 'rebel' forces.

Cheers

Mark

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Brainstorming: Regional Government

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Why devolve the game setting to the Sub-Regional Seats of Government (SRSG)? Well, a couple of reasons.  I have to admit that I 'm having trouble rationalising how an armed revolution can be turned into a civil war whilst central government mainatins it's grip on a country the size of the UK. Not without it seeing it being a long and protracted affair.

Pushing the government of the hypothetical crisis out to the regions actually makes the whole thing more realistic - to me at least - and means we can define a specific region as our gaming area of operations to play out the ebb and flow of the revolution and onset of civil war.


I'm not sure how much of the sixties/early seventies national crisis/emergency and war Sub-Regional Seats of Government infrastructure existed in 1979 - Emergency Planning taking over from the defunct Civil Defence in the mid-1970's - but it works for me as an assumption for my games, especially as they were aligned with the local military command District.


For an outstanding work on emergency and war government in the UK see Steve Fox's excellent thesis THE STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL: Governing Britain After The Bomb, which is wholly available online. I'm sure you'll find plenty there for your own game setting.


There's a lot of potential within this framework - attacks on the regional centres of governments, local coups, military take-overs, division and civil war at a county or borough council level. Do the local Territorials who are local civilian workers after all, many of whom may be unemployed, follow orders or do they whole or in part declare for the local opposition - shades of the first days of the Spanish Civil War in Madrid and Barcelona?
 
Any thoughts are welcome.

Cheers

Mark

Brainstorming: Alternative Timeline

"I am in politics because of the conflict between good 

and evil, and I believe that in the end good will triumph."

Margaret Thatcher, PM

Just how do you model insurgency, revolution and civil war in late C20th Britain? Well, first we need a background, be it the chilling doomsday scenario of Exercise Grass Seed, 1966, or as in our case a "Workers United Will Never Be Defeated!" popular reaction to heavy-handed government measures. 

 "The only effective and permanent counter to a

revolutionary movement is good government......"

LAND OPERATIONS Volume III Counter Revolutionary Operations Part1

The political road map leading towards the tipping point that actually turns industrial unrest and peaceful protest into armed conflict against the state is still  in a state of flux - it's too easy to get mired within the
politics or carried away with creating an unnecessarily detailed background when focus at this stage should really be on the game. However, my thinking has examined several alternative timeline scenarios but ultimately keeps bringing me back here:

Jim Callaghan's handling of the 'Winter of Discontent' towards the end of 1978 leads to increasing industrial protest in the streets of Britain. The Army is brought in to break strikes and violence erupts. A state of National Emergency declared. Conservatives call a vote of  'No Confidence' in the Labour government precipitating the May election in 1979. Conservatives win. 

Margaret Thatcher, now PM, decides in a demonstration of strength to show who is in charge of the country. Militant Tendency hard-liners within the Trade Unions shut down critical power stations and bring coal distribution to standstill. Army move in, strikers killed in an accident. Next day first shots are fired. The Queen's appeal for calm is not seen due to a 'power failure' at the BBC. Militants severe the telephone network. Barricades are thrown up across streets up and down the nation.
 
The government COB-R committee sitting in secret declare that the UK has ceased to be a governable corporate political entity and places the Sub-Regional Seats of Government (SRSG) on a war footing......

London Calling.........
London Calling.........

Cheers

Mark

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Brainstorming: The People Armed

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“If you go to Liverpool… they are coming in from Ireland. 

Somebody says from Poland, from Italy, from France, from Albania.”

A quick brainstorm on firearm ownership in the UK in the 70's and early 80's.

Progressive arms controls in the C20th denuded the rights of individuals to legitimately bear arms. The 1968 Firearms Act brought together all existing firearms legislation in a single statute and formed the legal basis for British firearms control policy until 1988 when the Firearms (Amendment) Act hurriedly came about in the wake of the 1987 Hungerford massacre.

The number of legally held firearms during the period we are gaming can be gathered from the following statistics:

In 1969, there were 216,281 firearms certificates held by private individuals in the UK; in 1986 the figure was 160,285. Despite the first ever controls imposed on shotguns by the 1968 Act, in 1969, 637,108 people were licensed shotgun owners (i.e. permitted to own any number of shotguns); and in 1986 there were 840,951. Virtually all these certificate holders were either members of gun clubs (for target shooting), engaged in hunting game for sport (largely an elitist past-time, even in the seventies the United Kingdom was increasingly urbanised with relatively few areas where game could be shot in the wild), or gamekeepers/farmers (for the control of vermin).

Out of interest, the weapons legally licensed and owned by Michael Ryan, the Hungerford Massacre gunman included:

    * Zabala shotgun
    * Browning shotgun
    * Beretta 92 semi-automatic 9 mm pistol
    * CZ ORSO semi-automatic .32 pistol
    * "Type 56" 7.62x39mm semi-automatic rifle (Chinese copy of the AK-47)
    * M1 Carbine .30 7.62x33mm semi-automatic rifle

The licensed arms dealer who sold these weapons to Michael Ryan is quoted as saying "I wouldn’t really like to say how many guns I’ve sold over the years, certainly tens of thousands".
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The number of illegally held firearms in the 70's probably numbered 250,000 including many ex-service weapons and WW2 trophies. In a 1965 gun amnesty a man in Royston, Hertfordshire, handed over an anti-tank gun, four service rifles, 12,000 rounds of ammunition, several live grenades and three booby traps.

The 1968 amnesty would net 25,000 illegal weapons and in 1988 a further 42,000 weapons plus 1.5 million rounds of ammunition were handed in to police.

Criminals had no problem in acquiring firearms for robberies: from 1974 to 1984 the number of robberies using firearms in England and Wales rose from 650 to 2,098. A survey of 80 gun related crimes determined that 16 used sawn off shotguns, 20 9mm pistols, 13 revolvers and 7 automatic rifles or sub-machine guns  (mostly Uzi and Mac-10). Most of these appear to have come in via Liverpool Docks and many had an Irish connection.

So we are looking at over 1 million shotguns, mostly single and double bore hunting/sporting models, between half and one million assorted firearms - everything from Brown Bess through Mauser pistol to AK47 and Bren gun in private ownership (legally or otherwise).

And that's before our heroic revolutionaries turn to arms dealers, hardened criminals, old boys networks, the IRA and foreign diplomats and revolutionary movements (ETA) for aid.

Cheers

Mark

Brainstorming: Trained Manpower

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What was the pool of manpower with military training in the United Kingdom in 1979/80?

Here are my first thoughts.....

 NATIONAL SERVICE

National Service always rears it's head in this type of debate. Just like every squaddie in 1914 being regarded as a veteran of the Boer War. National Service ended on 31 December 1960, with the last National Serviceman being demobbed in 1963. Under National Service healthy males 17 to 21 years old were conscripted to serve in the Armed Forces for 18 month, and remain on the reserve list for four years. They could be recalled to their units for up to 20 days during these four years. Men were exempt from National Service if they worked in  coal mining, farming or the merchant navy.

National Servicemen served in Korea, Malaya, Cyprus, Borneo, Suez building up a good deal of miliutray experience but by 1979, we are looking at even the youngest National Servicemen being 39 years old. Essentially men between 40 and 50 years old of whom only a relatively small proportion would have more than basic training with the small arms of their day.

EX-REGULARS and RESERVISTS

The British Armed Forces were continually downsized in the 60's and 70's. So even if we put a round figure of 10% turnover in personnel it's difficult to come up with any realistic estimate at the number of trained ex-military personnel in the general population. The Regular Army Reserve in 1979 was 121,500, then 3,000 Royal Air Force Reserve and a similar number in the Royal Navy Reserve.  There were 58,900 serving Territorial Army soldiers as of 1st January 1979. Maybe 200,000 or more ex-Territorials/RAFVR/RNVR of varying ages and degrees of training and experience.

40% of the TA were infantry. We must also include ex-Territorial Army personnel. Though it's worth adding that Territorial Army units at this time had 60-80% of full complement and of these only around 50% undertook the minimum training to qualify for the annual bounty.

COMBINED CADET FORCE

In the late '70s some 28,000 public schoolboys served in the Combined Cadet Force (CCF) at any one time, in 288 schools across the UK ("Eton Rifles, Eton Rifles....."). In many of these schools it was compulsory to serve. For an exaggerated but interesting idea of what the CCF was like- see Lindsay Anderson's IF (1968).

ARMY CADET FORCE

Boys from all walks of life, between 12 and 18 years, 9 months old could join the Army Cadet Force (ACF). Girls were allowed to join in the early 80's. By 1979 it was estimated that 1 in 6 of the male population of the UK had been an Army Cadet.

OFFICER TRAINING CORPS

There were also 2-3,000 Officer Cadets serving in university Officer Training Corps (OTC) . These were organised in companies. Around 1,000 joined each year of whom maybe 50 went on to become officers in the regular army and 200 in the Territorials per annum.

Some mullings over...... The numbers rack up don't they! It would be wrong to write off the importance of any of the groups above in a popular insurrection or civil war scenario. Some military training is better than none and we are talking about potentially important groups of men (and women, but this is the seventies) who could bring military skills and experience to union militias, local defence forces and the like. We must not forget that many were Ncos and officers who had experience leading troops or as military specialists.

Found some House of Commons figures....... As of June 1978, the Regular Army forms 0.28 per cent of the total UK population. The Army reserves combined form 0.33 per cent.

Cheers

Mark