The Road From Sarajevo: British Army Operations In Bosnia, 1995-1996

by Ben Barry, Martin Bell

Overview

In 1992 Bosnia descended into a savage and bitter civil war, which by 1995 had claimed over a quarter of a million lives. Following the Dayton Peace Agreement between the warring Bosnian Serbs, Muslims and Croats, NATO began its first land operation, taking over from the UN Protection Force. With a total of only 200 men, a British battlegroup was charged to enforce the peace in a 100km area, through which wound a front line separating the territory of the Bosnian Muslims from that of the Bosnian Serb forces. In this updated edition of the acclaimed book A Cold War, Brigadier Ben Barry has produced the definitive account of the British Army's dangerous and groundbreaking operations in Bosnia.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780750968638
Publisher:	The History Press
Publication date:	02/04/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	328
File size:	14 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Brigadier Ben Barry joined the Light Infantry in 1976. After service in the UK, Northern Ireland, Germany, and the Far East he commanded Second Battalion Light Infantry in 1994-6. He returned to Bosnia to command a NATO Multinational Brigade in 2003. Martin Bell is a former broadcast war reporter for the BBC and former politician. 

Read an Excerpt

The Road from Sarajevo

British Army Operations in Bosnia, 1995-1996

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By Ben Barry

The History Press

Copyright © 2016 Ben Barry
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7509-6863-8

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CHAPTER 1

'Naming of Parts'

The British Army is organised into units called battalions or regiments. All are commanded by lieutenant colonels, aged between thirty-seven and forty-two, and have between four hundred and a thousand men and women. Some recruit their soldiers and officers from all over the UK, others from particular regions. Although many armies have specifically organised and equipped light infantry battalions, in the British Army the name 'Light Infantry' was applied to a particular infantry regiment.

Our origins were in the special purpose light infantry units first raised by the British Army to fight the French, Native Americans and rebellious colonists in North America, and subsequently for Wellington's army in the Peninsular War. Not only were these regiments lightly equipped to move faster and clothed in green uniforms for camouflage, both innovations of their times, but they also developed a new concept of operations, with more speed of movement, decentralised command, and freedom of action at low levels.

The First Battalion was an airmobile infantry battalion based in England and we, the Second Battalion the Light Infantry (abbreviated to 2 LI), were an armoured infantry battalion based in Paderborn, Germany.

We are equipped to take part in high-intensity warfare as part of an armoured brigade. The most important component of the battalion is the infantryman. Equipped with an SA 80 assault rifle, he is grouped into a fire team of three or four men led by a lance corporal or a corporal (the next step up the promotion ladder). All of the fire team will be capable of engaging targets out to a range of three hundred metres with their rifles. One of the soldiers will have a Light Support Weapon (LSW), a heavier version of the SA 80 rifle with a range of six hundred metres. The fire team will normally carry one or two Light Anti-Tank Weapons (LAW), large, heavy rockets with powerful anti-tank warheads. The weapon is heavy, bulky, and difficult to carry for any distance, but could destroy any of the tanks or armoured vehicles we might encounter in Bosnia.

The corporal is the section commander, responsible for both fire teams. The whole section lives and travels in the thirty-two-tonne Warrior armoured infantry fighting vehicle, with a crew of three more soldiers, a driver, a gunner and the deputy vehicle commander.

Warrior is over six metres long, three high and three wide, some two-thirds the size of a tank. In the centre of the vehicle is a squat turret, mounting a machine gun and a 30mm 'Rarden' cannon. The machine gun can engage infantry and soft targets, as well as suppress bunkers and fortifications out to eleven hundred metres. Similar targets can be engaged at longer ranges by high-explosive shells from the cannon, which also fires armour-piercing rounds to destroy light armoured vehicles. In the turret, the commander and gunner have excellent optical sights. At night image intensification sights amplify moonlight and starlight several thousandfold.

Despite having armour sufficiently thick to defeat small arms fire, the vehicle is fast and more reliable than any other armoured vehicle then in service with the British Army. But it still requires the crew to maintain it regularly. Replacing old, worn track with a new one is a tedious and backbreaking task for the whole section.

The back of the vehicle contains a rectangular crew compartment for the passengers. There is space for storing equipment, weapons, food and ammunition. Even so a Warrior carrying ten soldiers and a full load of combat supplies is extremely crowded. The infantry whose job is to fight on the ground (who we call the 'dismounts') and their vehicle should be considered as a single fighting system. Much of our training is devoted to integrating both of these components.

A platoon comprises three such sections, each in a Warrior. The platoon commander is a young officer, a second lieutenant or lieutenant. He and his platoon HQ, who travel in their own Warrior, comprise two serjeants, one his deputy for dismounted operations and one 'Warrior serjeant' who co-ordinates the maintenance of the vehicles. (The Light Infantry traditionally use the antique spelling of serjeant, with a 'j'.)

Three platoons comprise an armoured infantry company. All of 2 LI's company commanders are in their early thirties. A Company commander, Major Jan de Vos, B Company commander, Major Stuart Mills, and C Company commander, Major Rex Sartain, are all experienced and respected officers. Jan de Vos is the only Light Infantryman in the battalion to have war experience, having served as a staff officer in the 1991 Gulf War.

Armoured infantry companies have two captains. One is the company second-in-command, the commander's deputy and responsible both for co-ordinating the company's logistics and for running the company headquarters. The other officer is the company 'second captain'. Often known as the 'Warrior captain', he manages the company's armoured vehicles. If the company commander dismounts to lead the battle on foot, the Warrior captain commands and fights the Warriors.

All companies have a warrant officer as company serjeant major, supporting the commander in many functions, including discipline and administration. The company headquarters has two Warrior Command Vehicles with additional radios, tables and map boards. The vehicles are crewed by the small company signals detachment commanded by a corporal.

The company also has a small logistic team commanded by the company quartermaster serjeant (CQMS). He and his small team have a Land Rover and truck which they use to supply us with the essential commodities required by sustained operations.

All the battalion's weapons, vehicles and equipment need both maintenance and repair. Although simple routine tasks are the responsibilities of the soldier, weapon crew or vehicle crew, more demanding work is carried out by the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME). Each company is invariably accompanied by its affiliated 'fitter section' of two Warrior repair and recovery vehicles crewed by expert REME tradesmen. Commanded by a staff serjeant artificer or 'tiffy', they repair the company's vehicles and equipment, and can use power winches to recover vehicles bogged in soft ground or stuck in ditches or culverts.

The battalion's REME Light Aid Detachment (LAD) carries out more complex repair tasks. This seventy-strong group of electrical and mechanical engineers is fully committed to keeping the maximum amount of equipment 'on the road'. Our forward repair and recovery capability is invaluable in minimising the amount of time that the company's vehicles spend 'off the road'.

The battalion has its own combat support grouped in Support Company, commanded by Major Ian Baker. The reconnaissance platoon has eight Scimitar reconnaissance vehicles. Although these look like small tanks, armed with a 30mm cannon and machine gun, they are lighter than Warrior, with thinner armour. The platoon's role is to gain information and it fights only as a last resort.

The anti-tank platoon has twenty MILAN anti-tank missile launchers. They can knock out any armoured vehicles to be found in Bosnia, including tanks, which cannot be destroyed by the cannon of our Warriors. Like LAW 80, it also has a useful capability against bunkers and fortifications. An anti-tank detachment consists of six men in a Warrior with two MILAN systems. Three detachments make up a section, the platoon having three sections. We affiliate each anti-tank section to an armoured infantry company, thus guaranteeing each company an anti-tank capability with longer ranges than LAW 80 and greater punch than the 30mm cannons. The bulky firing posts and missiles are just about man portable and can be carried in helicopters or smaller vehicles such as Land Rovers, allowing us to deploy the missile and its thermal imaging night sight to places that could not be reached by Warriors.

The mortar platoon gives the battalion its own indirect fire support. It has nine 81mm mortars, each firing an extremely effective anti-personnel bomb with a range of over five kilometres. They can also fire smoke and illuminating bombs. The mortars travel in FV 432 armoured personnel carriers, known universally as '432s', which are little more than steel boxes on tracks. The mortars deploy in sections of three weapons in mortar 'lines', out of sight of their target. Their fire is directed by mortar fire controllers (MFCs) equipped with laser range-finders and hand-held thermal sights, who travel in Spartan, an armoured personnel carrier based on the same chassis as Scimitar. Each MFC party and mortar section is affiliated to an armoured infantry company, although the mortar lines are usually controlled at Battalion HQ.

The signal platoon mans all the vehicles of Battalion HQ. These consist of a 'command' variant of the FV 432, equipped with more radios and configured inside as a cramped armoured office. The platoon also has a few Spartan APCs and the commanding officer's Warrior.

All these men, weapons and armoured vehicles have to be capable of continuous operations for however long it takes the battalion to accomplish its mission. It is essential that ammunition, food, water, spare parts and other supplies reach the companies and platoons as and when they are needed. Obtaining these from logistic units and arranging distribution within the battalion is the role of our in-house logisticians in Headquarters Company, overseen by the battalion's two quartermasters. Fetching, carrying and delivering these supplies requires a fleet of trucks and fuel dispensers manned by the mechanical transport (MT) platoon.

Headquarter Company is commanded by Major Dave Wroe, the longest-serving member of the battalion. An immensely experienced officer, he and I had served together some years earlier in Northern Ireland, where I had acquired great respect for his logistic expertise and good-humoured common sense. The company also contains a small platoon of cooks from the Royal Logistic Corps and a team of clerks and pay specialists from the Adjutant General's Corps. At this time, women are not permitted to serve in roles involving direct combat, and the only women in the battalion are five clerical staff. The battalion has its own doctor and small medical section, maintaining health in peace and dealing with casualties in war.

There is much more to the British Army than armoured infantry. The battalion is part of 1 Armoured Division. This contains a reconnaissance regiment, tank regiments, engineers, artillery and armed helicopters, as well as a complex network of communications and logistics. We train to fight the 'All-Arms' battle, using the strengths and capabilities of each arm to achieve an effect greater than the sum of our parts. This requires us to train with armoured squadrons of tanks and an affiliated battery of artillery and combat engineers. We have to be able to combine our tactics with those of reconnaissance and armed helicopters and close support aircraft. This process of grouping forces for battle is called 'task organisation'. A battalion task organised in this way is called a battlegroup.

I had taken command of 2 LI at the beginning of June 1994, nineteen years after I had joined the Army. In 1976 I spent five months as a private soldier before officer training at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Joining the First Battalion as a lieutenant, I commanded a platoon in Hong Kong, and on operations in Northern Ireland. As a captain I had been an intelligence officer on the Cold War's front line in West Germany and again on operations in Belfast. After staff training, I spent two years working in the Ministry of Defence, and commanded an infantry company in Berlin as the Wall was opened and the Cold War ended. A year as a battalion second-in-command, mostly spent in the hostile environment of South Armagh, was followed by promotion to lieutenant colonel. Eighteen months as an instructor at the Royal Military College of Science had been a frustrating time, as I watched television reports of the war in Bosnia with interest, especially the work of the British troops pitchforked into this three-way civil war.

As a student officer at Sandhurst I had studied Yugoslavia. The Cold War was at its height and the country was seen as a potential flashpoint. Yugoslavia was a young state, its provinces coming from the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. The Second World War had seen the military defeat of the Yugoslav state by Germany, its occupation and the subsequent partisan campaign led by Tito. It had also seen nationalist tension between Croats, Muslims and Serbs flaming into bloody inter-ethnic conflicts. These were suppressed by Tito, who sustained himself in power with techniques of repression and manipulation similar to those employed by the communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe. For the next three decades the potential centrifugal forces of ethnic nationalism, were held in check stabilised by Tito's authority striking a delicate balance between the various Yugoslav republics and autonomous regions. But our instructors forecast that when Tito died, tensions between the different ethnic groups that made up the state would erupt, and the resulting sparks would have the potential to ignite a superpower confrontation.

Tito died in 1980. The predicted explosion did not happen, but throughout that decade the Yugoslav economy declined, and inter-ethnic tension rose, especially after Slobodan Miloševic became Serbian Prime Minister in 1989. In 1991 Croatia and Slovenia seceded from Yugoslavia; the fighting that resulted was especially intense in the Serb minority areas of Croatia. The next year British troops deployed as part of the UN peacekeeping force in Croatia. But no sooner had they arrived than Bosnia imploded into civil war between the Bosnian Government and the Bosnian Serbs. A British armoured infantry battalion became part of the UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR), conducting both humanitarian operations and peacekeeping.

In 1993 the battalion had set aside its newly learned skills in armoured warfare in order to conduct six months' operational duty in Northern Ireland. It returned to Paderborn at the end of the year with some relief, knowing that it would spend 1994 training in its primary 'war fighting' role.

I took over 2 LI in mid-June 1994. I was looking forward to getting to grips with command. With me in Paderborn I had my wife Liz and our young son, James. I had seven weeks to find my feet and to prepare for a period of war-fighting training in Canada. Exercise MEDICINE MAN, run by the British Army Training Unit Suffield (BATUS), required the battalion to train on the Canadian prairie as the framework of an all-arms battlegroup of more than two hundred vehicles and twelve hundred men. Formed around Battalion HQ, two armoured infantry companies and our recce platoon, the battlegroup included two squadrons of tanks from the Queens Dragoon Guards, our affiliated artillery battery, engineers, logistic troop and two reconnaissance helicopters. All training was conducted with live ammunition (of which a prodigious amount was expended) against a sophisticated target array.

The aftermath of the Gulf War, the reduction of the Army after the Cold War and the battalion's Northern Ireland tours meant that this was the first time the battalion had achieved a concentrated period of all-arms war fighting training since 1990. The battlegroup spent a month on the vast and desolate prairie, mastering individual and collective skills and living in the harsh arid environment, little dissimilar to a desert. The single component of the battalion least prepared or 'worked up' before the exercise had been Battalion HQ. To put this right required the replacement of one officer who was not meeting the demands of his appointment.

I spent a lot of time during the first two weeks on the prairie training the headquarters and myself in the critical functions of command and control, without which the battlegroup could not function. We achieved a great deal and battalion HQ improved beyond all recognition. It had to climb a steeper learning curve than the other components of the battlegroup, but on the final part of the training, Exercise GAZALA, everything suddenly seemed to gel. This exercise was a continuous five-day operation in which the battlegroup fought eight separate battles, including all the phases and operations of war that might be required of it.

We all learned a great deal about war-fighting tactics, our machines and ourselves. I had taken command only two months before, but was delighted with the way everyone thrived on the challenge, working extremely hard through the sweltering heat and choking dust. The exercise had thoroughly tested all parts of the battalion and all had passed with flying colours.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Road from Sarajevo by Ben Barry. Copyright © 2016 Ben Barry. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

PRAISE,
TITLE,
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS,
FOREWORD,
INTRODUCTION,
CHAPTER ONE 'NAMING OF PARTS',
CHAPTER TWO 'ACTORS WAITING IN THE WINGS OF EUROPE',
CHAPTER THREE ROADS TO SARAJEVO,
CHAPTER FOUR 'BURNING SKY',
CHAPTER FIVE 'START!',
CHAPTER SIX THE MUD FACTORY,
CHAPTER SEVEN 'ACROSS THE GREAT DIVIDE',
CHAPTER EIGHT 'BADLANDS',
CHAPTER NINE 'DARKNESS AT THE EDGE OF TOWN',
CHAPTER TEN 'THIS HARD LAND',
CHAPTER ELEVEN 'STRANGE TOWN',
CHAPTER TWELVE A HARD RETURN,
CHAPTER THIRTEEN 'YOU OUGHTA KNOW',
CHAPTER FOURTEEN 'UNFINISHED SYMPATHY',
CHAPTER FIFTEEN 'DON'T LOOK BACK IN ANGER',
CHAPTER SIXTEEN ROADS FROM SARAJEVO,
AFTERWORD,
FURTHER READING,
GLOSSARY,
PLATES,
COPYRIGHT,