In the Face of the Enemy—One Battalion’s Story
Written bny: Toby Harnden,
Pan Macmillan Australia, Sydney, 2011,
ISBN 9781849164214, 400 pp
Reviewed by: Brigadier Richard Iron, British Army
This is a book to make the blood boil for any military professional. Toby Harnden has written a biography of a single battalion’s tour in Helmand and presents first hand evidence, more convincingly than any government spokesman, of the reality of what happens when a nation bites off more than it can chew. It is the story of good men doing their best in impossible circumstances. Many died; more were maimed.
For those who don’t know the story, The Welsh Guards deployed to Helmand province, Afghanistan, from April to October 2009. They were part of 19th Light Brigade, the seventh British brigade into Helmand, all on rotational six month tours. The Welsh Guards were deployed into a relatively new battle group area of operations—Battle Group (Centre South), the populated area of the Helmand Green Zone to the east and north of the provincial capital Lashkar Gar. Despite initially being on the main effort, the battle group had insufficient manpower and resources to create a security framework that could provide effective security for themselves and the population; their more isolated bases in particular were under siege for much of this time.
The second half of the tour was dominated by Operation Panther’s Claw, a brigade operation to clear and hold an area north of Lashkar Gah. For this, the Welsh Guards were tasked to blocking positions along the north-south Shamalan Canal, at the western end of the brigade operational area, as a ‘hard shoulder’ against which the Taliban insurgents would be driven by the rest of the brigade on their sweep from the east. Despite all the media spin at the time, the operation was a failure. The brigade sweep failed to clear the whole area and there were never enough troops, British or Afghan, to hold the area they did clear. Furthermore, the Shamalan Canal was found to be easily wadeable, not 3 metres deep as thought by the brigade staff, and so the concept of the block was fatally flawed.
Most of the Welsh Guards’ casualties were suffered during Operation Panther’s Claw, attempting to seize the canal or holding non-effective blocking positions. The only access for the British was up a single skylined canal-side road, so it was relatively easy, tactically, for the Taliban to attack the initial advance and then subsequently interdict the resupply of the isolated bases by each of the vehicle crossing points over the canal.
Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe, the Welsh Guards commanding officer, was killed by an improvised explosive device (IED) on the banks of the Shamalan Canal during Operation Panther’s Claw. He was the first British battalion commander to die in combat since the 1982 Falklands war. Toby Harnden describes well the chain of events. Rocked by casualties since the start of the operation, morale was beginning to falter. So Thorneloe characteristically felt he had to be with his soldiers, putting himself into the most dangerous position in the convoy in an armoured vehicle that had clearly demonstrated its vulnerability to IEDs, but was all they had.
Harnden catalogues Thorneloe’s earlier struggles with his superior brigade headquarters, being critical of some staff officers who mocked the battle group’s attempts to gain the resources they needed to conduct their mission, renaming Battle Group (Centre South) as ‘Battle Group (Centre-of-the-Universe)’.
The email response ... when the Battle Group asked for an additional company was: ‘No ... why would you get one?’ A request for a vehicle logistics group to resupply his new areas was met with ‘No ... there are other BGs [Battle Groups] on this op as well you know.’
It is a long standing tradition in every army that each level of command feels the level above is out of touch. Every platoon commander criticises his company headquarters; every company commander criticises his battalion headquarters. But something else is happening here: in both Iraq and Afghanistan, brigade headquarters were and are more seriously distanced from their battle groups than before. In previous conflicts, part of the role of staff officers was to be the eyes and ears for their commander. They visited units constantly. In 1944 Normandy, it was part of a brigade major’s job to visit battalions every day. As an SO3 in Northern Ireland, I was expected to spend at least one day a week visiting battalions. In this way, staff officers are familiar with and sympathetic to the needs of the units of the brigade.
All this has changed in today’s wars. Distance, the IED threat, and shortage of helicopters all mean that the only person in a brigade headquarters who now regularly visits units is the commander himself; he is now the one who informs his staff of the realities of life in the field, not the other way round. Add to this the burgeoning size of headquarters, filled with specialists all busy with their own specialties, and we have the ingredients for ivory tower headquarters, more concerned about themselves than the units they serve.
This is a real issue which has fundamentally changed the nature of our formation headquarters—for the worse. I don’t know what the answer is, but it needs to be understood and its baleful effects catered for.
Harnden describes well the almost sexual nature of the thrill of initial contact in a fire fight, and the lightheadedness that comes with survival (although probably the best description of this phenomenon remains Patrick Hennessey’s The Junior Officers’ Reading Club). But as the tour grinds on, casualties mount, and the neverending IEDs inflict an inevitable psychological toll upon the Welsh Guards. It is here that everything that is truly great about the British Army becomes apparent: pride in regiment; junior leadership by officers and NCOs alike; stalwartness in adversity; and, for the Welsh Guards, a pride also in being Welsh and guardsmen too. It’s a formidable combination that keeps British infantry battalions fighting longer and harder than most, in the most difficult of circumstances.
Few soldiers set out to be heroes. In the Welsh Guards, as in any battalion, some are stronger soldiers, others are weaker. Yet the disciplined structure of the battalion sustained them through grievous losses. Harnden highlights the steadying influence of the older officers, commissioned through the ranks, who have so much more to offer a battalion in this kind of conflict than simply run logistics; they are invaluable in supporting the leadership and sustaining morale. In the end, they were all heroes, not because they wanted to be, but because the job demanded it and the structure of the battalion allowed it.
The circumstances of each fatality suffered by the battalion are described in detail. After a while, in the book, you begin to dread descriptions of a soldier’s family life back home, because you know you’re going to have to read of his killing in the following pages. But each death highlights the reality of life in Helmand in 2009: insufficient manpower, insufficient IED clearance teams, insufficient helicopters, insufficient ISTAR, insufficient mine protected vehicles and insufficient communications.
The US surge into Afghanistan gathered momentum during the Welsh Guards tour. This meant that in Helmand Province there were some 20,000 US Marines and about 10,000 British soldiers. But it wasn’t just the numbers that made the difference: the Marines also had sufficient of everything the British lacked. It is only when we operated side by side that, to Harnden, the comparison became stark. Harnden doesn’t specify whether he believes our insufficiency should be blamed on British political leadership which failed to support and fund the mission adequately, or on military leadership which consistently seems to have overestimated what we should attempt with the resources available.
But the reality is that the British Army in Helmand, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, was less well equipped for its task than the equivalent army in Northern Ireland some thirty years earlier—despite the introduction of attack helicopters, UAVs and digitised systems. In South Armagh, which had an equivalent IED threat, it would have been unthinkable to deploy vehicles by road, without first inserting several battalions who would dig in as a cordon for as long as the road move lasted. Instead, all movement was by helicopter. Charlie Antelm, Rupert Thorneloe’s replacement, is quoted saying that the real difference that helicopters made in South Armagh was not just taking movement off the IED-strewn roads, but enabling real tactical flexibility for operations. An eight-hour patrol, for example, might include three or four mid-patrol lifts to random drop off points, creating real uncertainty for the Provisional IRA who would rarely be able to predict British Army movement. Contrast this with the Taliban who are able to mass fighters to ambush a foot patrol on limited predictable routes, or wire up IEDs immediately in front of a British advance. We seem to have lost one of the tactical principles in counterinsurgency: strive to create uncertainty in the mind of the insurgent at all times.
Another depressing feature of the Helmand operation is the weakness of the surveillance operation. The security framework in previous successful operations was built around surveillance, which greatly limits insurgents’ ability to operate. Given the problem faced by IEDs on the roads, one potential solution is a comprehensive surveillance operation, both human and technical, specifically designed to cover the main routes through the area of operations.
But such long term framework operations appear, at least up to 2009, not be attractive to brigade headquarters that only have six months to make their name. More than any other factor, this has probably had the most damaging consequences on the campaign as a whole. It undermined our attempts to build long term relationships with the Afghans, it limited our understanding of the area and its peoples, and it built a rhythm of big operations (of which Panther’s Claw was one) every six months whether they were necessary or not. But perhaps the greatest negative impact was the lack of emphasis given to a long term campaign plan, including building the security infrastructure needed to support it; communications, intelligence databases and surveillance all needed a long-term approach. The absolutely correct emphasis given to cultural awareness in modern counterinsurgency should not blind us from the continuing necessity to do the basics well.
Many of the lessons that are implied in this book are obvious to military professionals; so why has it taken so long for the UK to absorb them? A clue lies at the tail end of the book, in the epilogue, when a Welsh Guards company commander thoughtfully muses that the battalion might not have achieved as much in central Helmand as they thought:
The British are very good at whipping ourselves up onto a sense of achievement. We almost have to, to make it bearable. You can’t do something like this and analyse it all the way through and think: Actually we got that wrong.’ You just can’t. It takes so much emotional investment. I’m not saying we lie to ourselves but there’s an element of telling yourself that it’s all right and it’s going well, just to keep going.
This emotional investment, keenly felt at battalion and company level, ripples all the way up the chain of command. The British Army is still remarkably paternalistic, in the best possible sense, to such an extent that no senior officer can undermine the efforts of those who have risked so much, by questioning what they did and how. So, instead, a positive spin is placed on every six-month tour of Helmand. This is partly, perhaps, to protect the reputation of a small number of senior officers in command, but it is mostly done out of loyalty to our soldiers.
But it is a misplaced loyalty. Our inability to analyse, in a rational manner, what happened and why endangers campaign success and costs soldiers’ lives. Although it has been a very long time since a senior British officer was removed from command for operational failure, in the United States such events do not damage morale. Rather, they have the opposite effect since they clearly demonstrate that soldiers’ lives and welfare are more valuable than a senior officer’s career.
Shortly before the publication of Dead Men Risen, the British Ministry of Defence insisted on some cuts to the book that have resulted in a number of sections being redacted in thick black ink. Harnden is remarkably understanding about this in his introduction, although I suspect that the Taliban know rather more about our IED clearance techniques and technologies than those who censored these passages.
I cannot recommend this book strongly enough. It is well written, exhaustively researched, and deeply revealing about the British campaign in Helmand (albeit now two years ago). It is also a fitting memorial to the Welsh Guards who performed so heroically in the most difficult of circumstances.
