Armed Forces Bill

Viscount Slim Excerpts

Thursday 3rd March 2016 Grand Committee

[Lord West of Spithead]

We have gone down the route of the coronial system. As Plato said, only the dead see the end of war. Sadly, I am afraid that at some stage we will be in a war when we lose thousands of people, and I have no idea how the system will work at that stage or what the thought processes are about that.

[Viscount Slim (CB)]

Just to give noble Lords an example of an incident that might have involved an inquest and lessons learnt, in Korea, in an hour and a half, my battalion lost about—I am giving approximate figures as I do not remember them—probably nearly 30 dead and slightly more than 70 wounded. The reason was that during the battle, when we called for air support, we got some excellent American pilots, but they bombed us with napalm, instead of the enemy. We would call that “blue on blue” today, and you would have an investigation. Of course, it encouraged the enemy, who were the North Koreans at that time, to put in a counterattack, so we really had a very unpleasant time for a couple of hours. In those days, when we had a good number of soldiers, we had a reinforcement system, at the back of the Korean peninsula and in Japan, that sent you, within 24 hours, fully battle -trained soldiers to replace them—and we got about 100 or 110 good new soldiers.

Today, someone would want to have an inquest about why we were bombed. The chaps made a mistake, we had all those casualties—what use is an inquest? You have to get on with the battle. Lessons learnt—well yes, we can learn a lesson in 20 minutes about how to improve on what went wrong. In those early days of close air support, it was a lengthy process—not like today, when it is almost instantaneous. The military is the first to make amends for, and take decisions about, what went wrong and put that right. I do not see how a coroner with no military experience looking at that disaster would have helped at all. You must get on with the war.

The noble Earl was right to talk about what happens when a chap you have with you and who is your responsibility is killed. As the noble Lord, Lord West, said, you write to his mother, father, wife, daughter and whoever there is, and I am not sure that you write just a little—you write quite a lot. Those are the hardest letters to write of any kind. When everyone else is having a night’s sleep, you are up all night writing those letters—it is not just one. The commanding officer will write and so will his platoon or company commander. The wretched widow, mother or whoever gets two or three letters. On the whole, because you must explain how and why the son was killed, you write rather fully. You write in your own hand. When there are 30 of those letters to write, that is quite difficult. Do not tell me that the odd tear does not come down from the officer writing them.

Inquests play into the hands of the opposition nine times out of 10. On lessons learnt, nobody learns them quicker than the Army, Navy or Air Force.

[Lord Touhig]

My Lords, I will be brief. This debate is very important and shows that there has been a degree of overlap between inquests into the death of an individual and inquiries into perhaps wider problems that have arisen in conflict.

I spent 27 years working in newspapers and publishing before entering the House of Commons. I know only too well from my time as a young journalist covering inquests how important they were to a grieving family who had sometimes lost a loved one in the most tragic circumstances. With that experience of observing, I am not sure that inquests brought closure to a family coming to terms with a sudden and unexpected death but I have no doubt that they contributed to a sense of healing and understanding that the family was desperate for—an understanding of what happened and why some tragic death occurred to a son, daughter, husband or wife.

To no other group is that more important than to service families. A service family worries and frets as soon as its loved ones are sent on deployment somewhere in the world to defend Britain’s interests. We all agree that we have a duty of care to those who serve in our Armed Forces but we also have a duty of care to the families of those who serve. The noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, made clear that this is a probing amendment, really seeking to find out more about the present way in which these things operate. That is important and this is a step in the direction. It is fully supported on this side.