UDR DECLASSIFIED—THIRD EXCERPT

Posted By: May 30, 2022

IRISH CONGRESSIONAL BRIEFING

Distributed to Congress by Irish National Caucus               

Smith, Michael. UDR DECLASSIFIED. Merrion Press.

Kildare, Ireland. (2022). Pages 192-193.  

        It is worth noting the colonial adventures adorning the CVs of some of the UDR’s commanding officers since its formation.  The first commander of the UDR, Brigadier Logan Scott-Bowden, was a career army officer with a distinguished war record.

 He was heavily involved in the long planning process for D-Day, and helped pilot ashore a wave of amphibious tanks onto Omaha Beach on D-Day- itself.  A citation for one of his decorations stated that ‘his individual feats of gallantry are almost too numerous to record’.  Among his postings after the war were two years in Aden, service in Palestine, and a term as brigade major ‘countering insurgency’ in Burma.  He was completing a course at the Indian National Defence College when he was recalled for the new post of commander of the newly formed Ulster Defence Regiment.

Succeeding Scott-Bowden in 1971, Brigadier Denis Ormerod was the first Catholic commander of the UDR.  Ormerod joined the army in 1940 and was commissioned into the British Indian Army.  He had served in Malaya and Palestine during internal security operations in the post-war period.  Brigadier Harry Baxter commanded the UDR from 1973 to 1976.  Baxter was an Irish-born fourth generation soldier and served as a second lieutenant in the Indian Army in the Second World War.  He later operated in Burma, Palestine, Egypt, Greece and Malaya –   where he was mentioned in dispatches.  The height of the British counter-insurgency war upon the Malayan Chinese population saw the high commissioner, Henry Gurney, ‘effectively absolve the security forces from their duty to act within the law [with] terrible results’, including the notorious Batang Kali massacre of December 1948, when twenty-four unarmed prisoners were murdered by British troops. 44  It is unclear what Baxter did to merit a mention in dispatches in such a notoriously vicious context.  Brigadier Baxter was the commander of the UDR at the time of the Miami Showband killings.

If, as Ed Burke has observed of such men, ‘colonial attitudes died hard’, what must the impact have been of all of that colonial experience and its attendant prejudices upon the policy and practices of the UDR’s commanders?