Operation Banner (Northern Ireland). On 19 March 1988 Corporal Derek Wood, aged 24, and Corporal David Howes, aged 23, both serving with the Royal Signals, were wearing civilian clothes and driving a silver Volkswagen Passat with civilian number plates after completing repairs of signal equipment at a military base and were returning to their barracks. After taking a wrong turning they came across a large IRA funeral procession and attempted to reverse in the opposite direction, but their escape route was quickly blocked by a taxi and a car. Their vehicle was then attacked by a crazed mob, Derek Wood fired a round from his Browning HP pistol in an attempt to scatter the mob, but both were quickly overpowered and dragged from their car. Wood and Howes were taken to a sports ground where they were stripped and beaten before being taken to waste ground and shot. Two men were sentenced to life imprisonment for murder but released in 1998 under the Good Friday Agreement. Certa Cito. RIP!
More on my YouTube channel Alan Malcher MA, military historian. – YouTube
The worst event for me as a Commander of fighting men, was during a busy two year tour based in County Down and now commanding a 120 man strong Rifle Company for the entire tour. I received a very short notice deployment instruction to move from our camp to support the Belfast Brigade Commander in the monitoring of a terrorist funeral in Milltown Cemetery on the boundary with the PIRA stronghold of West Belfast. Three days before a loyalist, Michael Stone, had attacked the funerals in the cemetery of three IRA men killed by the SAS in Gibraltar and we were deployed to prevent any repeat performance at this IRA funeral. To that end we were prepared for rioting so were fully dressed with shields, helmets and baton guns along with our “winged” pigs. We waited, parked on the M1 motorway out of Belfast, along the southern side of the Cemetery. My vehicle was directly behind the Brigadiers’ Pig and we had been blocking the M1 motorway for about an hour, watching the funeral procession moving slowly down the Falls Road towards the cemetery via the TV link broadcast from the overhead Army Air Corps Gazelle to the Heli-telly in the Brigadier’s vehicle. Suddenly we saw a car driving in the opposite direction towards the front of the cortege, but as we watched the driver tried to stop short of the hearse and the few thousand mourners that followed it. We watched in mounting horror, as the car was quickly surrounded and two men were hauled out. The helicopter crew had a clearer view and we listened to their commentary and watched with a sense of disbelief that turned to absolute ice cold fury. The IRA gunmen who were escorting the coffin appeared to capture the men, piling them into a car before driving off into the Turf Lodge estate where they were stripped naked and shot, their bodies dumped in a deserted garage area. We had absolutely no idea what was going on, but while we watched we heard from our Brigade HQ that two soldiers had reported over their radio that they were being attacked on the Falls Road and then radio contact was lost. At this stage we assumed them to be two plain clothes soldiers or perhaps special forces, but in fact it turned out that they were two signallers, Wood and Howes, who took the wrong turn on the way back to Lisburn and their barracks. One of them is now listed on the Eastergate War Memorial where my parents had resurrected the service on Remembrance day.
John, thank you for our recent telephone conversation and this first person narrative that addresses this terrible event. Regards Alan