Frank Kitson, 97, deceased; Helped shape the conflict in Northern Ireland
General Frank Kitson arrived in Northern Ireland in September 1970, charged with leading a brigade of British paratroopers in Belfast. The thirty-year struggle known as the Troubles, which pitted loyalists who wanted to remain part of Britain against Republicans who wanted to secede, was only just beginning – and over the next two years General Kitson would do much do to shape Britain's course. the conflict.
By this time, General Kitson was considered one of Britain's leading warrior intellectuals. He had just completed a year-long fellowship at Oxford and had used his time there to write a book, 'Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping' (1971), which drew on his decades of experience with fighting colonial wars in Africa. and Asia and has since been considered a classic text in the art of counterinsurgency.
General Kitson was short and stocky, with a ramrod stance and a high, nasal voice. He hated small talk and rarely spoke, but he had a martial charisma that won him widespread admiration among his ranks.
In his 2007 autobiography, “Soldier,” Gen. Mike Jackson, then a young officer in Gen. Kitson's brigade, called him “the sun around which the planets revolved,” adding that he “largely set the tone for the operational style.”
General Kitson used his overseas experience to change the British approach to problems. He set up an undercover unit, the Military Reaction Force, charged with surveillance and occasional killings of Republican fighters. He provided superficial information to local reporters and supported the British Army's campaign to intern thousands of suspects without charge.
On the morning of January 30, 1972, approximately 10,000 unarmed Irish Republicans marched through the city of Derry to protest against internment. They walked along the edge of a 'no-go' area, where British soldiers were denied entry and risked an armed attack if they did.
Soldiers from General Kitson's brigade waited for the demonstrators, with plans to arrest several leaders of the Irish Republican Army, whom they expected to head the march.
As the demonstrators approached the soldiers, some began throwing stones; the soldiers responded with rubber bullets, tear gas and water cannons. Suddenly shots were fired and within minutes thirteen demonstrators were dead; another died in hospital from injuries. The day became known as Bloody Sunday, one of the worst losses of life during the Troubles and a rallying cry for the Republican forces.
General Kitson was on leave when the shootings occurred, but when he returned he gave his deputy a dressing down – for not being more aggressive. Once the shooting started, he said, his soldiers should have taken advantage of the confusion and pushed into the no-go area.
“There was no doubt that we could have recaptured the 'no-go' area,” General Jackson, who listened to the conversation, wrote in his book, “although this would almost certainly have resulted in more deaths.”
Just weeks after Bloody Sunday, General Kitson was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire. He left Northern Ireland in April 1972 and later held a number of senior military positions, including aide-de-camp to Queen Elizabeth II and commander of the United Kingdom Army. He was knighted in 1980.
His death on January 2, at the age of 97, was greeted with cautious praise for his career by many London newspapers, detailing his innovative counterinsurgency tactics, while The Belfast Telegraph noted that his “controversial methods led to him becoming a hate figure became for Republicans” in Northern Ireland.
The death was announced by the Royal Green Jackets Association, a memorial organization dedicated to his original infantry regiment. The statement did not mention the location or cause of death.
Frank Edward Kitson was born on December 15, 1926 in London. He came from a 200-year line of armed forces officers. His father, Henry Kitson, was a vice admiral in the British Navy; his mother, Marjorie (de Pass) Kitson, was the daughter of a wealthy sugar and coffee importer.
He knew early on that he wanted to be an army officer, and he immediately joined an infantry brigade after graduating from Stowe School, a prestigious private academy, in 1945.
He was stationed in Germany for the first time, too late to see the fighting in World War II. But he was only at the beginning of a new era of warfare in the far-flung British colonies in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
General Kitson served as an intelligence officer in Kenya during the Mau-Mau uprising by pro-independence guerrillas and developed the concept of “pseudo-gangs,” which consisted of Kenyans who secretly worked with the British to disrupt rebel operations. .
The eight-year conflict resulted in more than 10,000 deaths, more than 1,000 executed and at least 100,000 prisoners in concentration camps, many of whom were also tortured by the British.
General Kitson subsequently served in what is now Malaysia, where communist rebels threatened Britain's hold on the resource-rich colony, and later in Cyprus and Oman. For his services he was twice awarded the Military Cross, one of Britain's highest honours.
Over time, he built on his innovations in Kenya to develop a comprehensive counterinsurgency doctrine. He emphasized the importance of gathering information, developing informants and double agents among the insurgents' ranks, conducting covert operations and using psychological warfare to root out guerrillas.
“If a fish needs to be destroyed, it can be attacked directly with a fishing rod or net,” he wrote in “Low Intensity Operations,” borrowing a metaphor from Chinese leader Mao Zedong. “But if the rod and net cannot work on their own, it may be necessary to do something about the water” – including, he added, “polluting the water.”
General Kitson married Elizabeth Spencer in 1962. She survives him, as do their daughters Catherine, Rosemary and Marion, and seven grandchildren.
His reputation as an expert on counterinsurgency earned him senior leadership positions as well as his Oxford Fellowship. After serving in Ireland, he led an armored division and an Army Staff College before taking command of the British Army, responsible for the defense of the homeland and other areas.
General Kitson retired in 1985, his time in Northern Ireland seemingly far behind him. But the end of the Troubles in 1998 brought renewed interest in Bloody Sunday. Prime Minister Tony Blair launched an investigation into the military's conduct during the event, and General Kitson was called as one of the key witnesses.
The investigation concluded with a report in 2010 blaming General Kitson's soldiers for firing the first shots on Bloody Sunday.
The investigation into General Kitson's leadership did not end there. In 2015, he was named a co-defendant in a lawsuit by Mary Heenan, the widow of Eugene Heenana worker murdered by a loyalist paramilitary group in Belfast in 1973. Elements of the group, the Ulster Defense Organization, had ties to the British military – making it, according to the indictment, a version of General Kitson's pseudo-gangs. long promoted in counterinsurgency campaigns.
Although he had long since left Northern Ireland at the time of the murder, General Kitson was accused in the trial of instituting policies and tactics that were “reckless as to whether state agents would be involved in murder.”
The lawsuit, which also named the British Ministry of Defense as a defendant, was still ongoing at the time of General Kitson's death.