Allan Mallinson: True soldiers, true heroes: a regiment that still fights with history and pride

I WAS proud to spending a morning on Salisbury Plain with, among others, 3rd Battalion The Yorkshire Regiment – 3YORKS. To many, however, they remain the Duke of Wellington’s, “the Dukes”, the name they bore for 150 years until amalgamation in 2006, but which is now relegated to brackets.

I was attending a “Media Day” for the 12th Mechanized Brigade, who are about to leave for Afghanistan. Some had already deployed, and some had been killed – including the five men of The Yorkshire Regiment last week.

I had gone not to see the battalion, however, but my former regiment, the Light Dragoons, who also happen to recruit in Yorkshire – the South, and the East Riding. “England’s Northern Cavalry”, they like to call themselves, proud of having the Freedom of Barnsley. They too are going back to Afghanistan, for the third time in five years.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Understandably, I found myself watching the media at the 3YORKS stand, which consisted of three young officers, dozen NCOs and private soldiers, and the equipment they use on patrol. But if the press were looking for signs of grief at the loss of comrades, or of increased anxiety, of fear even, they were disappointed.

One of the journalists, an experienced war reporter, said to me afterwards that the men must have been hand picked and carefully briefed. I shrugged. You always want to pick men who will give a good account of your regiment, and it would be unprofessional not to brief a man for the job he was going to do. But hand picked and carefully briefed in the sense he meant?

No. I’ve lived on Salisbury Plain for the past five years, and I see 3YORKS soldiers in Warminster, their Wiltshire base, all the time. They are one of the most soldierly-looking battalions I have seen in 35 years’ service, and in my experience regiments that look soldierly in barracks are unfailingly effective in the field.

When I was writing The Making of the British Army, a book which describes how its history has shaped the army of today, I looked for a good example of junior leadership during the Bosnia intervention: the man who stood out was a “Duke”, Corporal Wayne Mills, the first winner of the newly instituted Conspicuous Gallantry Cross, second only to the VC.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Corporal Mills’ gallant action came back to me when I found half a dozen 3YORKS soldiers having a smoke behind one of the buildings – no officers or NCOs, “just” private soldiers.

So I asked them about the five who had been killed: four had been from Dewsbury, Huddersfield and Bradford – the Dukes’ traditional recruiting area (the old depot used to be in Halifax); did the battalion think of itself as West Riding still? “Yes,” they said. Indeed, they were West Riding men themselves.

I asked if this was important. “Yes,” it helped team building, the sense of family, and when things happened like the deaths that week, it helped them to close ranks and soldier on. I smiled to myself and thought “Havercake Lads” – the Dukes’ old nickname.

I asked them about one of the five in particular, Corporal Jake Hartley, from Dewsbury. He had been a full corporal at only 20, a remarkable achievement. They nodded: he’d been a remarkable NCO, they said – passed out top on the army’s gruelling section commanders’ battle course in the Welsh mountains. But it was no big deal: “If you’re good, you get on in the battalion. That’s us ’istory.”

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

One of them, Private Elliot Brown, said he was from the regiment’s TA battalion, the Keighley detachment. I asked how his employers felt about releasing him for the best part of a year to train and go to Afghanistan. They’d been brilliant, he said: Yorkshire Hardwoods, also from Keighley.

Next day I rang their director, Mark Rushworth, and was surprised to learn they are a small firm, just 13 employees. It couldn’t be easy to lose one of them for so long, I said. “No, it wasn’t,” agreed Mr Rushworth. “But you just have to support them.”

Support. This was what the men of 3YORKS wanted – certainly not sympathy. They were doing the job they had joined to do, and they knew they did it well. Doing the job well, they explained, was the best way to honour their fallen brothers-in-arms, one of the reasons they were keen to get out to Afghanistan.

What frustrated them was all the talk of “Pull the troops out now; we can’t win”. People just didn’t seem to understand what they were going to Afghanistan to do. It wasn’t to win a war against the Taliban; it was to train the Afghan national security forces (ANSF – the army and the police) so that by the end of 2014 they themselves could take over the fight against the insurgents. In the early years, there had been big mistakes, but now there was an achievable plan, and it was building on the solid progress of the past two years.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

And there was another factor – reputation. In The Times the day after the Taliban mine, the Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir David Richards, wrote: “We are securing our legacy and the reputation of our Forces. In itself that reputation helps to secure our interests. It reassures our friends and deters our enemies.”

I sensed that the 3YORKS men understood this implicitly, so just before I left them to another cigarette, I asked why the battalion always looked so soldierly. “It’s us ’istory again,” replied the biggest of them. “And Yorkshire pride.”