The Deadliest Day Of The Troubles

August 27th, 1979, was the bloodiest day of the troubles. And was a wake up call to the British government that the formerly week and illequiped IRA had undergone a transformational process in to a thorough, well calculated group that had the capability and capacity to go on the initiative in their insurgency. . On this day, two devastating attacks were carried out by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). The first was the assassination of Lord Louis Mountbatten, one of Britain's most prominent military figures and a close relative of the Queen. The second was the Warrenpoint ambush, one of the deadliest attacks carried out by the IRA during the Troubles.

Narrator: The IRA had been planning the attacks for months, carefully researching the movements of their targets and selecting the best weapons for the job. Dictator of Libya Momar Gaddafi had upgraded the IRAs ability to wage an insurgency. Weapons shipments from Libya began in the early 70s, regular shipments made its way from Libya, which were loaded with around 1,000 AK-47 machine guns, more than 50 ground-to-air missiles and most importantly 6 tonnes of Semtex plastic explosives. Fully loaded, the IRA put there weapons to use and had a found two targets Lord Mountbatten was on holiday in Ireland, staying at his summer home in County Sligo. The IRA knew he was vulnerable there, and on August 27th, they struck.
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The ambush took place on the A2 road at Narrow Water Castle, just outside Warrenpoint, in the south of County Down in Northern Ireland. The road and castle are on the northern bank of the Newry River (also known as the Clanrye River), which marks the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.On the afternoon of 27 August, a British Army convoy of one Land Rover and two four-ton lorries—carrying soldiers of the 2nd Battalion, Parachute Regiment—was driving from Ballykinler Barracks to Newry.The British Army were aware of the dangers of using the stretch of road along the Newry River and often declared it out of bounds. However, they would sometimes use it to avoid setting a pattern.[] At 16:40, as the convoy was driving past Narrow Water Castle, an 800-pound (360 kg) fertiliser bomb, hidden among strawbales on a parked flatbed trailer, was detonated by remote control by IRA members watching from across the border in County Louth.[] The explosion caught the last lorry in the convoy, hurling it on its side and instantly killing six paratroopers, whose bodies were scattered across the road.[] There were only two survivors amongst the soldiers travelling in the lorry; they both received serious injuries. The lorry's driver, Anthony Wood (aged 19), was one of those killed. All that remained of Wood's body was his pelvis, welded to the seat by the fierce heat of the blast
According to the soldiers, immediately after the blast they were targeted by rifle fire from the woods on the Cooley Peninsula on the other side of the border,[][] and this view was supported by two part-time firefighters assisting the wounded, who were "sure they had been fired on from the Omeath side of the water".[] Shortly afterwards, the two IRA members arrested by the Garda Síochána (the Republic of Ireland's police force) and suspected of being behind the ambush, were found to have traces of gunsmoke residue on their hands and on the motorbike they were riding.[] The IRA's first statement on the incident, however, denied that any shots had been fired at the troops,[] and according to At 17:12, thirty-two minutes after the first explosion, another 800-pound (360 kg) bomb hidden in milk pails exploded at the gateway, destroying it and hurling lumps of granite through the air. It detonated as the Wessex helicopter was taking off carrying wounded soldiers. The helicopter was damaged by the blast but did not crash.The second explosion killed twelve soldiers: ten from the Parachute Regiment and the two from the Queen's Own Highlanders.[] Lt.Colonel Blair was the second Lt.Colonel to be killed in the Troubles up until then, following Lt.Colonel Corden-Lloyd of the 2nd Battalion Royal Green Jackets in 1978Republicans portrayed the attack as retaliation for Bloody Sunday in 1972 when the Parachute Regiment shot dead 13 unarmed civilians during a protest march in Derry.

These series of events would trigger two decades of Chaos in the cat and mouse game between the IRA and the British security forces, that would leave over a thousand British servicemen and women dead, over five times the amount that would be killed in Iraq and double the amount killed in Afghanistan. Alongside this, merciless bombings and shootings would kill just under 2000 civilians and injury nearly 50,000.
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