D-day: 75th Anniversary

Viscount Bridgeman Excerpts

Tuesday 4th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Bridgeman (Con)]

My Lords, in congratulating my noble friend Lord Reay on his maiden speech, I have to add my apologies for attempting to leave the Chamber as he rose to his feet to deliver a most impressive maiden speech.

Several references have been made in this debate to the meticulous planning by the joint British, Canadian and American teams in the two years or so before D-day. There is one aspect of these preparations that, perhaps, has not had the attention it deserves: the intensive training given to all formations that were likely to be involved in the Normandy landings. I am most grateful to the Minister for highlighting this point. I pay tribute to Mr Peter Caddick-Adams, a summary of whose findings appear in this month’s BBC History magazine. Broadly, the main areas where this training took place were, for the British forces, that surrounding Loch Fyne in the Clyde estuary; and for the American forces, south-west England, particularly Devon and Cornwall.

In order to make the training as realistic as possible, normal safety procedures had to be bypassed. Live ammunition had to be widely used. The inevitable result was that casualties were high. Among the infantry there were a number of deaths through drowning, not helped by the heavy equipment that many would have been carrying. There is a chilling account of a mistake made by a landing craft in one of those exercises: they mistook landfall, and 10 heavily armed infantrymen vanished into the sea, never to be seen again. Inevitably, casualties were also heavy among the airborne troops.

Perhaps the best known training disaster was Exercise Tiger at Slapton Sands in north Devon in April 1944, involving 30,000 US servicemen. A fleet of German E-boats came across the assault convoy and, unaware of the true purposes of the exercise, loosed several torpedoes before they made their way back to France. The torpedoes and the ensuing chaos caused the deaths of just short of 1,000 US troops. Occurring as it did close to the date of the planned invasion, the disaster was hushed up at the highest level and whole villages in north Devon were placed in quarantine, to which my noble friend has referred.

In May 1944 there was a massive rehearsal, Operation Fabius, designed to be as near as possible to real thing. Nobody below the rank of lieutenant colonel knew that it was not. Mr Caddick-Adams wrote:

“Everything possible was rehearsed and umpired: minesweepers cleared the sea; aircraft dropped ordinance; the coast was bombarded with live ammunition; command ships issued orders and monitored frequencies. Alongside swimming tanks, landing craft tanks shipped armour onto the beaches”.


Obstacles and real minefields were laid. Here again, the operation was made as realistic as possible. Casualties were regrettably high.

Mr Caddick-Adams has come to the chilling conclusion that probably more lives were lost in the preparations and training for D-day than in the first 24 hours of the battle itself. He wrote:

“The Allied servicemen who invaded northern France had experienced an incredible degree of rugged and realistic training that put them at the peak of physical fitness, acclimatised them to battle and equipped them mentally and physically to win”.

Commonwealth War Graves Commission

Viscount Bridgeman Excerpts

Monday 22nd June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Bridgeman (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lord Forsyth for initiating this very important debate. I wish to speak briefly about the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s care for Irishmen’s graves, particularly from the First World War. I speak as a member, at least in the last Parliament, of the British-Irish parliamentary group.

In the 80 years following the establishment of the Irish Free State, the official policy of the Irish Government was to expunge from the national consciousness any participation in that war of men from the south of Ireland. Not unnaturally, it was politic for the families of those men to follow their Government’s lead. I am advised by the CWGC that it cares for 8,500 World War I battlefield graves from the two southern Irish divisions and 7,200 from the Ulster Division. It is probably true to say that because of the previous attitude of the Irish Government many of the graves of men from the southern Irish regiments would not have had a visit from any of their compatriots—let alone members of their family—for virtually a century.

Since the transformation of British-Irish relations in the wake of the peace process—culminating, of course, with the visit two or three years ago of Her Majesty the Queen—one of the more heartening developments has been the reawakening in the Republic of interest in the history of the southern Irish contribution. For many families the story has been similar; forebears who were treated as black sheep and airbrushed out of family histories have been in effect rediscovered.

So in the context of this debate I would like to pay particular tribute to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission for the close and cordial relations it now has with the Government of the Republic, and in particular—which is a little known fact—for the responsibility it accepted from the outset for the upkeep of no fewer than 3,342 graves in the Republic of Ireland of Irish soldiers who fought in the British Army, most of whom would have died of wounds in hospitals in Great Britain and Ireland and would have been moved at the families’ request and at their expense to be buried with the familiar Commonwealth war graves headstone alongside their families in the Republic.

Queen’s Speech

Viscount Bridgeman Excerpts

Thursday 28th May 2015 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Bridgeman (Con)]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to my noble friend Lord Howe on his new appointment, and record my thanks personally for all the help and leadership he gave to this House in his previous role at the Department of Health.

I am privileged to be a member of the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly, consisting of Back-Benchers from all the devolved Administrations, plus Westminster and Dublin, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man. We meet at six-monthly intervals alternately in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. In the meetings in Dublin in the course of the last three years, I have come to know the Ministers and senior officials of the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Your Lordships will be aware of the successive milestones along the way to the most welcome state of British-Irish relations today which the two nations have achieved, starting with the British-Irish agreement in 1985 under Margaret Thatcher, followed by the Downing Street declaration by John Major and the then Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds. Tony Blair made no secret of the debt he owed to John Major, whose work enabled him to bring to fruition the Good Friday and St Andrews agreements. Crucial to the momentum which had been started was the sterling contributions of two successive Presidents of Ireland—Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese—which led to the historic visit in 2012 by Her Majesty the Queen. The impact that it had on the people of Ireland has in my opinion never been fully appreciated on this side of the Irish Sea.

This was followed last year by the very successful state visit to the United Kingdom of the current President, Michael Higgins. The visit by HRH the Prince of Wales to the west of Ireland last week was marked by a welcome by the people of that part of Ireland, the warmth of which I am told took even the organisers of the visit by surprise. The Prince made a moving and heartfelt speech, in which he reached out for a spirit of reconciliation regardless of creed, nationality or politics.

The background to all this has been the work done by officials in Dublin and London, the outcome of which is that, as one Irish official put it to me, “The high water-mark of Anglo-Irish friendship gets higher and higher”. He added, with an Irishman’s gift of phrase, “I continue to be surprised at my ability to be continually surprised at the transformation of relations between the two countries”.

The United Kingdom is the biggest trading partner of the Republic of Ireland and the UK’s exports to Ireland exceed this country’s exports to all the BRIC countries combined. In its closeness, the Anglo-Irish relationship is unique among any two countries of the European Union. Let me give just one example. Each year there is an informal meeting, alternately in the United Kingdom and in the Republic, of the principal UK permanent under-secretaries with their Irish counterparts. I am advised that these meetings are remarkably comprehensive and constructive, allowing the participants to identify opportunities for working ever more closely together.

It will therefore come as no surprise to your Lordships that the progress of the United Kingdom’s negotiations with the European Community, ahead of the coming referendum on our continuing membership, is being very closely watched by our friends in Dublin. In Dublin the—I hope—unlikely prospect of a British exit is being viewed with no little apprehension.

The implications for Ireland could be huge. Let me give just two examples. It would likely mean a re-hardening of the border between the Republic and Northern Ireland, since it would become part of the borders of the European Union itself. Whatever the reasons for it, it would be perceived by the people of Ireland, both north and south, as a disastrous psychological set-back in relations between the two countries.

There could also be considerable complications over the status of Irish citizens in the United Kingdom. The visa-free movement between the two countries predates the foundation of the Common Market itself. In the event of the UK leaving the Union, would Ireland be permitted under the treaties to continue to have a free movement arrangement with one non-member country, a facility that would be denied to citizens of, for instance, France and the Netherlands? These are but two considerations of many complications, which I hope will not arise.

I urge members of Her Majesty’s Government, in their negotiations over the reform of the Union and the United Kingdom’s membership of it, to have in mind the very special relationship that exists between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland.

Armed Forces

Viscount Bridgeman Excerpts

Monday 5th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Bridgeman]

My Lords, I am most grateful to my noble friend Lord Astor of Hever for initiating this debate. I am particularly grateful for his reminder that this debate is wide-ranging, because what I am about to say is not in the mainstream of what has been discussed—so far, certainly.

I am a member of the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly. Three weeks ago, we undertook a fact-finding visit to Belfast in connection with the decade of commemoration of the centenary of seminal events that took place in Ireland between 1912 and 1922. In the course of this visit we in the group were impressed by the growing interest on both sides of the border in the contribution of the Irish regiments in the Great War. The history of the 36th Ulster Division is well known and commemorated by the Ulster Tower on the Somme battlefield. Of the two divisions raised in southern Ireland—the 10th and the 16th—much less is known. It became clear in the course of our inquiries that for many nationalist families until very recently the service of great-grandfathers and great-great-grandfathers in the British Army in the First World War has been treated as a guilty secret never to be discussed and to be airbrushed out of the family history.

My honourable friend Conor Burns, Member of Parliament for Bournemouth West, is a Roman Catholic who was born in Belfast and raised largely in Great Britain. He is a colleague on the British-Irish parliamentary group and kindly agreed that I could quote his family as an example of the ignorance in which younger generations were kept, until very recently, about the service in the British Army of their forbears—in his case, his grandmother’s family, several of whom served in the Army.

However, in the recent past, there has been a perceptible change of attitude. What has caused this? Certainly, the internet has played a part. Records in places such as the National Archives in Kew and Dublin have become more readily accessible, and with the various ancestry search programmes there has been increasing curiosity about family histories, including regarding some aspects previously regarded as taboo. There continues to be research particularly on the five Irish regiments that were disbanded in 1922. In some cases, this has extended to individual battalions. For example, the 6th Connaught Rangers, a Kitchener or New Army battalion, was raised in Catholic west Belfast, and its recruits would have been almost to a man Redmond nationalists. The battalion fought on the Somme with the 16th Irish Division. Its history is the subject of a meticulously researched and well produced book, which in its appendix lists the careers and ultimate destinations of every member of the battalion, many of them sadly killed in action. This is but one of a number of initiatives of this nature in Northern Ireland and the Republic.

This significant change of attitude to a subject treated hitherto as an embarrassment by many an Irish family is part of the transformation of British-Irish relations in recent years. Much credit for this must go to the leadership shown by two successive Presidents of the Republic, Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese, and continued by President O’Higgins. It of course culminated with the visit to the Republic by Her Majesty the Queen in 2010, the impact of which on the people of Ireland is even now not fully appreciated on this side of the Irish Sea. Tangible evidence of this new outlook is the increase in the number of visitors from the Irish Republic to the battlefields of France and Flanders, in many cases to visit the graves of forbears of whose military history they were previously unaware. The defining moment of the Irish contribution in the Great War came with the Battle of Messines in 1917, when for the first time the 36th Ulster Division and the 16th Irish Division fought alongside in an action that many military historians regard as the most significant tactical victory in the whole of the Great War.

In the time available, I have not been able to research the detailed statistics of those who served and were killed in the First World War, but about 149,000 volunteered from the whole of Ireland, and just under 30,000 were killed. It is difficult to break down the figures of the war dead from the various provinces, but when one considers that there were one Ulster division and two Irish divisions, it is clear that the suffering must have been fairly widespread throughout the whole of Ireland.

[Lord Tyler]

I am very moved by what my noble friend is saying. It so happens that just a few weeks ago I visited the Somme—as I mentioned to him the other day—and was struck by the fact that Irishmen from both sides of what is now the border were standing side by side, with great courage and tenacity, particularly in the July Somme attack, as well as later in the 1914-1918 war. I visited a number of cemeteries because my three uncles were killed during the war, and I was moved when I met young people from both sides of the current Irish border who came together in coachloads to see some of these cemeteries. I entirely endorse what my noble friend is saying, and I am very pleased to be in the House to hear him.

[Viscount Bridgeman]

I am extremely grateful to my noble friend Lord Tyler for that intervention.

I should also mention that a large number of Irishmen, particularly from the south-east seaboard counties of what is now the Republic, would have served in the Royal Navy. It is against the background of all this that I should say that there was no conscription in any part of the island in either of the two world wars.

This debate, initiated by my noble friend, is timely, coming as it does on the week before Remembrance Sunday. I suggest that it is appropriate, within this debate, to place on record the contribution and sacrifice of so many Irishmen in the Great War, which for far too long has remained largely overlooked. The noble Baroness, Lady Dean, mentioned the phrase, “Lest we forget”. It is particularly comforting that this increasingly embraces the families of many of our friends in the Republic of Ireland at this time.