Bunch of Five

Product Information

Kitson wrote widely on gangs, counter-gangs and measures of deception, the use of defectors, and concepts such as pseudo-gangs and pseudo-operations. The British had used the mass ‘resettlement’ of women, children and elderly males during the Boer War to ensure Boer commandos could not access food. J. Hughes, ‘State violence in the origins of nationalism: British counterinsurgency and the rebirth of Irish nationalism, 1969–1972’, in J.

Ali was taken to Jau prison, where staff from the Foreign Office-funded company Northern Ireland-Co-operation Overseas were training 400 prison officers. Kitson went on to serve in Bahrain, Cyprus and Aden and would, naturally, proceed to Northern Ireland, in September 1970, where Michael Jackson, a future Chief of General Staff and the man in charge of British troops during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, said that Kitson ‘very much set the tone for the operational style in Belfast.Looking back he wrote of one night time operation: ‘Three Africans appeared walking down a track towards us a perfect target. There will be no sadness at the passing of Frank Kitson in Derry, Ballymurphy or in any other community where he plied his evil trade, leaving a trail of devastation behind. No general in recent times has provoked more intense and sustained controversy than Frank Kitson, a short and ramrod-straight figure with a jutting chin, nasal voice and dislike of small talk. In 1973, a Catholic joiner named Patrick Heenan was driving his workmates to a construction site, when a British-army-issue hand grenade was thrown into their minibus.

Kitson must have been well aware of all this and of the fact that when he was born in 1926 the sun never set on the British Empire. Little focus in the many plaudits from the predictable sources was directed at the politicians and government spooks who unleashed him onto the people of Kenya, Malaya, Oman, Cyprus and Northern Ireland – all of whom he appears to have viewed as little more than laboratory rats to test his military theories. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. General Kitson oversaw operations of the 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment, which opened fire on civil rights marchers in Derry in on Bloody Sunday, where 13 people were shot dead in January 1972. In 1962, Kitson married Elizabeth Spencer, whose father, Colonel Charles Spencer, was Colonel of the 12th Royal Lancers.

I had also written an account of my personal experiences during the Kenya emergency published in 1960. To place Bloody Sunday in its proper context, we also need to look at what British officials were up to elsewhere. Kitson described as “total rubbish” a report suggesting he was involved in a plan for the illegal march to come under attack, forcing the IRA to defend it so that military “snatch squads” could then be sent in to arrest suspect paramilitaries. General Sir Michael Jackson, who was an adjutant in 1 Para in the early 1970s, described Kitson as an ‘incisive thinker and military theorist’, and claimed that ‘he was the sun around which the planets revolved . According to the SDLP’s Paddy Devlin, Kitson ‘probably did more than any other individual to sour relations between the Catholic community and the security forces’.