Huw Bennett’s Uncivil war offers numerous insights into military aspects of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’. The years chosen — 1966 to 1975 — are well-trodden, with their key events familiar to scholars, but Bennett’s choice of archival sources facilitates a much-improved understanding of how the British army functioned at the height of the violence. He examines government records from multiple departments across the holdings of both the U.K. National Archives and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, but has been particularly diligent in his examination of materials held by regimental museums, the Joint Services Command and Staff College, the Imperial War Museums and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s archives in Brussels. The outcome of this is a more thorough appreciation than has hitherto been available of the attitudes, arguments and actions of soldiers throughout the various ranks of the British army.

Uncivil war shows that the much mythologised ‘honeymoon period’ that followed the British army’s deployment in August 1969 was a very short one. Bennett identifies the wide variation in the attitude and conduct of British soldiers, arguing that the regimental system influenced when and how soldiers engaged in violence. That the majority of battalions were deployed on short tours is shown to have contributed to this range in conduct and to limits on how effectively the army could operate. Longer tours were resisted in the belief that discipline and alertness would falter after four months, but the knowledge acquired and relationships developed then fell away as replacement troops arrived and behaved in an entirely different manner. The total number of troops sent to Northern Ireland was reduced after 1972, ostensibly to meet Cold War commitments in western Europe but also because of fears of the degrading effect on soldiers’ morale of repeated tours to a hostile (and inclement) environment. Bennett convincingly asserts that such limits played a decisive part in the inability to confront loyalist militancy, with the army persistently settling for a neat division of labour with the R.U.C. in the policing of the two communities.

The book presents a careful critique of two opposing arguments on soldiers’ conduct: that the army’s effectiveness was hampered by legal constraints and that it behaved as though no such constraints were present. Instead, Bennett details the inefficacy of attempts to limit lethal violence through the issuing of rules on engagement such as the ‘yellow card’. While ministers and senior military officers modified their rules of engagement in the hope of stopping soldiers shooting, Bennett stresses that it was the courts that determined whether force was reasonable and proportionate, and that they habitually endorsed British soldiers’ defence that they were exercising the common law right to defend themselves and others from immediate danger. He, nonetheless, also argues that the army and government ministers were too quick to protest the innocence of soldiers when their actions were in doubt or to brush indiscipline under the carpet, in the belief that militant republican propagandising received too much endorsement in the press. This reached its apotheosis with Bloody Sunday but is shown to have been a continuous impulse.

Although Bennett adopts a heavy focus on the critical years of 1971 and 1972, he does successfully depict alterations in how the army operated up to the mid 1970s. Here he argues that the British military and the Provisional I.R.A. co-adapted. There is important detail on the changing forms of soldiers’ operations, whether patrolling methods, the frequency of house searches or the use of screening and observation posts. That detail is related to the increasing sophistication with which the Provisional I.R.A. prosecuted its own campaign. The book also benefits from a transparent and sensitive approach to the limitations of source material; important caveats are presented in the judgement of intelligence matters, and a helpful ‘note on sources’ is placed at the end of the book to delineate some of the obstacles faced by Bennett in trying to access archival material.

Some of Uncivil war’s arguments, particularly with reference to political dynamics, are less convincing. In August 1969, the Northern Ireland Cabinet Secretary warned London that abolishing Stormont would provoke a frightened reaction from the Protestant community that might result in a provisional unionist government and wholesale sectarian strife. Bennett’s characterisation of this as the Northern Ireland government having ‘effectively threatened organised insurrection against the crown’ (p. 33) is a leap, suggestive instead of an insufficient appreciation of how little control unionist governments felt they had over the community that sustained them. Bennett argues that the anger that followed the Falls Road curfew might have been dampened ‘if the Shankill had been searched soon after’ (p. 92), but the notion that those subjected to military operations would be more forgiving if the other community had to endure them also attributes far too much power to even-handedness.

There is an insistence throughout that the chief protagonists in the conflict acted strategically, not reactively, but this distinction is not always sufficiently evidenced. Bennett takes issue with Niall Ó Dochartaigh’s argument that violence escalated beyond the intentions or expectations of both British and militant republican leaderships, asserting instead that Britain’s escalation was entirely intentional. Bennett also, however, depicts how each ‘gradual change in tactics … seemed reasonable and carefully considered to those who gave approval’ (p. 91) — such gradual change was borne of cumulative decisions made in specific temporal contexts, and rarely reads like a singular, thought-out strategy. Bennett argues that it is a mistake to read the growth of loyalist violence in 1972 as ‘essentially chaotic’ (p. 180), instead depicting it as a calculated effort to prevent British withdrawal and protect Protestants, while the Provisional I.R.A.’s firing into a crowd of Protestant civilians in June 1972 on the eve of the organisation’s ceasefire is deemed to have ‘probably’ had two strategic purposes: inducing British fear of a civil war and to coerce loyalists into negotiation. Such heavy emphasis on rationale leaves too little space for the emotional dynamics of the conflict and neglects the important point made by Bennett elsewhere in the book that those in high-ranking positions had a limited degree of influence over those ordinary individuals who bore arms. None of this detracts, however, from the fact that Uncivil war constitutes a substantial and much-needed contribution to the history of the ‘Troubles’.