IT was one of the British army's largest operations since World War II. A force of 15,000 soldiers and marine commandos—backed by 600 armored cars bristling with artillery pieces and machine guns—last week invaded the Irish Republican Army's barricaded sanctuaries in Northern Ireland and reestablished the Queen's Writ throughout the province.
The invasion, swiftly and precisely done, ended the "nogo" areas, both Catholic and Protestant, throughout Ulster. It was a military success that had inescapably followed upon a political failure. Since he became Britain's Secretary of State for Northern Ireland last March, William Whitelaw had attempted a policy of "reconciliation" toward the embattled province's Catholic minority, and had even entered into secret talks with the I.R.A. But when the I.R.A.'s militant Provisional Wing broke the carefully negotiated truce and unleashed a brutal bombing attack on Belfast last month—in which nine persons were killed and 130 injured in one afternoon—Whitelaw felt that he was forced to take a stronger stand in dealing with I.R.A. terrorism; he was now determined, he said recently, "to root out the I.R.A. and destroy their capacity for further acts of inhumanity."
Operation Motorman. To prepare for the assault, which was dubbed "Operation Motorman," the British government airlifted three additional battalions into Ulster from West Germany, thereby increasing British troop strength in Northern Ireland to half the size of Britain's entire NATO force. Armored Saracen and Saladin vehicles, still painted the color of sand for desert duty, were landed by Royal Navy vessels. On the eve of the operation, Whitelaw warned the populace that "substantial activity by the security forces" was imminent, and advised Ulstermen to stay off the streets. At 4 o'clock the next morning, as a drizzling rain fell, the first armored columns broke into Londonderry's Bogside and Creggan districts—which were known to Catholics as "Free Derry." Residents peered from behind blinds as troops with their faces blackened for camouflage in the darkness edged along the walls of the buildings, painstakingly scanning rooftops for snipers. On a plateau above the city, an I.R.A. siren began to wail—and continued until troops finally spotted its location almost three hours later and shut it off.
In the Bogside below, a huge combat bulldozer, its 76-mm. cannon shrouded in canvas and its turret turned backward (to avoid photographs reminiscent of the Soviet invasion of Prague), headed for its assigned target. It rammed through a barricade of cement blocks, twisted pipe and the hulk of a burned-out bus. Then, at the crossroads known as "Free Derry Corner," it halted—blocked by the Bogside's most formidable barrier, a truck chassis embedded in solid concrete. The bulldozer poked at it, broke the great blade that projected from its snout, and finally backed off and rumbled away. Two days passed before jackhammer crews finally dismantled the barricade.