Food for the Crows: The Whole Bloody History of Human Conflict

[Trollheart]

The Battle of Stalingrad (August 23 1942 – February 2 1943)

Timeline: 1942

Era: Twentieth century
Year: 1942/1943
Campaign: Fall Blau (Case Blue)
Conflict: World War II
Country: Russia
Region: Stalingrad
Combatants: Russia v Germany with her allies Italy, Romania, Croatia and Hungary
Commander(s): (Russia) Joseph Stalin, Georgy Zhukov, Nikolay Voronov, Aleksandr Vasilevsky, Andrey Yeryomenko, Konstantin Rokossovsky, Nikolai Vatutin, Vasily Chuikov, Nikita Khrushchev (yeah that one) (Germany) Adolf Hitler, Maximilian von Weichs, Friedrich Paulus, Hermann Hoth, Erich von Manstein, W.F. Von Richthofen; (Romania) Petre Dumitrescu, C. Constantinescu; (Italy) Italo Gariboldi; (Hungary) Gusztav Jany
Reason: Break Russian resistance
Objective: Take the city for Hitler
Casualties (approx): Slightly over 2 million
Objective Achieved? No
Victor: Russia
Legacy: The beginning of the end for Hitler in Russia, a major turning point in the Second World War. A humanitarian disaster for Russia and confirmation of the poor planning of the Nazis for the Russian winter.

If you were to pick the bloodiest, most brutal battle in World War I, you'd probably go for Verdun or the Somme, maybe Ypres. Sadly, there are plenty to choose from. For World War II it's most likely going to be Stalingrad. In fact, it's acknowledged not only as the battle which resulted in the most loss of life in World War II, but in history. Over two million dead, a huge percentage of these civilians, as their city was put under siege for five months, with even their own side unwilling to or uninterested in helping them, a battle which could have been cut short if Hitler had had the sense to call it quits and accept his army had been beaten, and order a retreat, and one that proved the superiority of the Russian soldier over the German one, which was all Stalin wanted. The fact that the city bore his name at the time made it all the more important to him that it was not lost, though he was certainly aware of both its strategic and propaganda value to both sides. A man who mass slaughtered people he even thought might be thinking about being his enemies, Stalin was not a man to give a pair of frozen timber wolf balls for the people of the city. If they died to a man, woman and child, but the city did not fall, he would have been happy.

And it very nearly came to that.

As anyone who has the most passing knowledge of World War II knows, Hitler originally partnered up with Stalin till he no longer needed him, in other words, until all of western Europe was under his control, and then turned on him. He had of course intended this all along, so it wasnt' as if it was a betrayal, but it does seem to have taken Stalin by surprise, who even castigated his generals for suggesting, almost just prior to the first tanks rolling across his borders, that Hitler would ever do such a thing. But Hitler had never made any secret of his hated for communism, his contempt for Russians and Slavs and anyone from Eastern Europe, especially of course Jews, so it should not have come as a shock. But it did.

Hitler wanted lebensraum (living space) for Germans, and intended to just kick all the Jews and Slavs and others he considered sub-humans out of Russia and move nice German families in. The only problem with that plan was that the Russians weren't just going to take an eviction notice from Berlin and fuck off somewhere else, leaving him to Germanise their country. So they fought, and they fought hard. But in the initial stages things went really badly for Russia, with the Red Army unprepared and, more to the point, jolly old Uncle Joe having had executed or exiled most of his best generals, in a Saddam Hussein-like paranoid terror of them plotting against him. So he had sort of made his own bed.

But the Russian people are a hardy bunch, and if there's one thing they're good at dealing with it's adversity, and they rallied, resisting the German advance. Mother Nature came to help out her cousin Mother Russia in the winter of 1941, driving Hitler's troops back from their almost-conquest of Moscow, but even at that, the war on the Eastern Front could be said to have been going relatively well for Der Fuhrer by the following spring. Not only that, his Afrika Korps had won a major victory in Egypt at the Battle of Tobruk, pushing British commander Montgomery back across the desert, and his U-Boat "wolfpacks" all but ruled the Atlantic, sending more and more tons of Allied shipping to a watery grave every day. Now all he needed was to emulate George W. Bush in 2003 and get that oil.

In order to accomplish the feat of taking the oil fields of Maikop and Grozny, the Wehrmacht (German Army duh) had to take the city of Stalingrad. It was a strategic objective, controlling as it did access to the Caucasus and providing cover for the northern and western flanks of Hitler's armies if it could be taken. Additionally, the city was a symbol, mostly because it bore the name of his once-ally-but-not-really-now-turned-hated-rival-though-always-that-in-reality. It would be a real slap in the face for Uncle Joe if Hitler could take his city and fly the swastika over it, so that was what he was determined to do, no matter how many German lives it cost. He was already licking his foaming lips as he envisaged having all the males shot and the women sent off to concentration camps along with their children. Stalingrad, once taken, would demonstrate the power of the Nazis and stand forever as a monument to the superiority of the Aryan race over the backward and savage Bolshevik.

Right. Good plan, Adolf. Didn't quite turn out that way though.

Again though, it started out like a dictator's wet dream, as Hitler's Panzers pushed into southern Russia, clearing the way ahead as Russian units fell back against their might, and he got so excited that 4th Panzer, the tank group which had been one of the ones ordered to attack Stalingrad, was pulled out to join the main attack. This, however, created a literal traffic jam when the roads were packed with so much moving metal on caterpillar tracks that Panzers became stationary, unable to advance – or retreat – anywhere, so Hitler, calming down, told the 4th to head back down to Stalingrad. With pressure released from the roads, the other group could now continue on, but we don't care about them, so let's follow 4th Panzer back down the road.

Stalin, who had expected another attack on his capital, rushed to arrange the defence of the city that bore his name, putting General Andrew Yer joking aren't ya, sorry Yeryomenko and future Soviet President, then a lowly Commissar, Nikita Khrushchev in charge. Also lending a hand was Lieutenant General Vasiliy Chuikov, and all three were told in no uncertain terms to hold the city at all costs, which they swore to do. Well, it's not as if they had any choice now is it? But the Russians surely hated the Germans, who, to them, would have turned out to have stabbed them in the back and who were now advancing like conquering heroes across their motherland, just as they had done when sweeping – all but unopposed really – into France. Unlike the French though, these guys were not in a surrendering mood.

The Red Baron at Stalingrad. Sort of.

Air support was crucial for the attacking armies, as in any siege, and this was provided by none other than the cousin of the world-famous flying ace of World War I, Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron himself. Wolfram, a generaloberst (I don't think that means he was too fat) was in charge and knew how important maintaining a supply line for the Panzer groups and the infantry was, so he requisitioned extra Junkers JU-52 transport planes and set up what he called the "Stalingrad transport region". This allowed the Luftwaffe to provide ammunition, food, fuel and other supplies to the attacking army. But of course air support functions best when it's pounding the shit out of the enemy, and Fliegerkorps VIII, under the command of his General Martin Fiebig, did exactly that, catching what the Russians laughably called the Soviet Air Force by surprise, on the ground, and shortly afterwards in smoking piles of burning wreckage. 91 Soviet aircraft were destroyed in one day, and to be honest, what passed for fighter aircraft in the Soviet Union, well, they were probably better off as tangled wrecks of metal. Saved the Germans the bother of shooting them out of the sky.

With their so-called air force out of action and many deaths already achieved, the Luftwaffe commenced bombing Stalingrad on August 23, dropping over 1,000 tons of bombs and reducing the city to smoking rubble. It says here that on that one day they flew over 1,600 sorties, but I can't quite get my head around that. In a twenty-four hour period that means they flew 70 attacks in an hour, which then equates to more than an attack per minute! Unbroken. The sky must have been choked with aircraft and the city never free of the rumble of engines and the whistle of bombs falling. Jesus. Even the River Volga caught fire, as destroyed oil storage containers and fuel tankers exploded and shot their flames out onto the river. Talk about smoke on the water!

So that was the end of the city, right? The Germans had bombed it to bits and just pissed off? Not on your life, kamerad! Oh nein, nein! FIVE MORE DAYS of bombing, and what meagre efforts the Soviet Air Farce sorry Force no wait I was right in the first place could scramble were quickly, well, scrambled to their separate components by the vastly superior Luftwaffe, who also outnumbered them. Anti-aircraft batteries took up the defence of what was left of the city, but there's only so much you can do, taking pot-shots from the ground. To add to their problems, these gunners were all women, with little to no training, yet they performed admirably before their guns were all destroyed by the advancing Germans.

The Lunatics Take Over the Asylum: "Not One Step Back!"

Mind you, the Soviets had sort of metaphorically shot themselves in the foot from the first, as they moved, while the German Army pursued their units towards the city, grain, cattle and railway cars out of the city (and therefore out of the reach of the Nazis) over the River Volga, thereby leaving themselves short when Stalingrad was cut off. Essentially, they gave away their supplies, perhaps ordered to do so, but also expecting they would be evacuated. This, however, was not part of Stalin's plan, and he forced the civilian population to remain in a bombed-out, blasted city which had few resources and less food for its inhabitants. Why he took this line is hard to understand, other than to save face and ensure the people fought as hard for their city as his army, but then we are talking about Stalin, only second in brutality to Hitler, and to be fair, until the end, in der Fuhrer's case this callousness did not extend to his own people. Stalin, on the other hand, cared for nobody and nothing except victory and appearance of being strong – was he not, after all, named the "man of steel"? Even if that was not his real name, it was how people saw him now (presumably anyone who tried to remind him what his real name was suddenly found themselves fighting sub-zero temperatures, if they were lucky) and an image he was determined to live up to.

As far as the German Army was concerned though, Stalingrad was not a major objective. Field Marshall Paul von Kleist remarked "The capture of Stalingrad was subsidiary to the main aim. It was only of importance as a convenient place, in the bottleneck between Don and the Volga, where we could block an attack on our flank by Russian forces coming from the east. At the start, Stalingrad was no more than a name on the map to us."

In addition to bombing the city back into the Stone Age, the Luftwaffe, having achieved total and complete air superiority, sent thousands of tons of Soviet shipping to the bottom of the Volga, sinking supply vessels and tankers, and targeting troop ships as they approached slowly across the river (towed by barges; that's how advanced they were!) as Stalin, realising what was happening, pulled all available reinforcements towards the city. The civilians inside, with no way to get out and most of their city destroyed, were nevertheless put to work digging ditches and building fortifications – even women and children – and the staff and students of one of the universities even arranged to cobble together makeshift tanks from one of the factories which had survived the aerial onslaught, while hastily thrown together people's militias took part in the defence of the city, often without any weapons at all.

By the end of the month of August, the Germans had the city entirely surrounded on all sides. Forays for supplies and reinforcements had to run the gauntlet of Panzer groups and Luftwaffe squadrons holding the Volga.

Beginning in September, the Russians tried to engage the Panzers but were constantly driven back by the air support, and their attacks lasted mere hours, with heavy losses on their side and few on that of their enemy. However when the Germans tried to take the city in an all-out assault on September 14, it was they who had to fall back nursing their wounds. Street fighting and house-to-house combat was a specialty of the defenders, and the Germans were without their air support, who could do nothing once the army was inside what remained of the city, for fear of bombing their own troops. A deadly game of tug-of-war ensued, with ground taken, lost, retaken, lost again – the Railway Station identified only as "Number 1" changed hands no less than fourteen times in the space of a few hours, neither side able to get the upper hand.


The battle for Stalingrad is replete with stories of incredible heroism and bravery, dogged defence and victory against what must have seemed like incessant attack and insurmountable odds. A Soviet company holding the main grain elevator did so for three days before being wiped out to a man; Pavlov's House, as it came to be known later, was a four-story building which a platoon commandeered, fortified, mined and held out against attacks for sixty days, taking out many tanks and holding the line across the Volga until they were eventually relieved.

Stalingrad can certainly be categorised as an irresistible force meeting an immovable object. Stalin had issued Order 224, commanding that the defence forces take "not one step back" while Hitler had issued a similar order, forbidding any withdrawal from the city, and demanding the attacking forces fought to the last man. Neither dictator was prepared to compromise or recognise the reality of prolonging the conflict – which was now taking place in a hollow, burned-out shell of what had once been a city – and Hitler's blinkered attitude towards taking Stalingrad resulted in his diverting much of the Luftwaffe away from the Caucuses, which had been his original target. When the Allies pushed into North Africa in November, he found he was forced to strengthen his defences there and accordingly ordered many squadrons away from the Eastern Front, and from Stalingrad.

Even with the reduction in air support, the dread Russian winter was closing in and the Volga began to freeze, great blocks of ice floating upstream and preventing the Soviets from taking advantage of the lull in air attacks to get their supplies across the river. While in 1941 it had been their ally, Nature didn't play favourites and the defenders were prey to its effects as much as were those who besieged the city. The Germans weren't having things their own way either though, losing over 60,000 men in less than three months. Better prepared for their native winter, the Russians launched a counter-attack on November 19, which took the Germans by surprise. Marshall Zhukov noted "German operational blunders were aggravated by poor intelligence: they failed to spot preparations for the major counter-offensive near Stalingrad where there were 10 field, 1 tank and 4 air armies."

The laser focus of Hitler on Stalingrad had left the River Don unprotected, and it was here that the Soviets now established a bridgehead from which to launch attacks. With heavy losses taken, their air support mostly redeployed to the African theatre, the Germans requested reinforcements, but Hitler could not spare any, and refused. Nor would he accept the slightest retreat or withdrawal, so as the Russians built up their forces the Germans were left to make do, unable to go backwards, unwilling to go forwards. By November 23 the tables were turned, as two Soviet armies linked up to surround Stalingrad, and trap the Germans in the city. Rushing to their aid was Field Marshal von Manstein, with twenty-two army divisions, believing he could break through the Soviet forces, with help from the Luftwaffe, and so advising his fuhrer to instruct the sixth army, trapped in the ruins of Stalingrad, to remain where they were.

Despite Manstein and Goring's assurances to Hitler though, von Richthofen was more practical, and knew there was only one operation airfield which could be used to supply Stalingrad. This, coupled with the much reduced amount of aircraft available on the Russian Front, meant that he could deliver perhaps a fifth of the supplies needed for the besieged sixth army, and Manstein, listening to him, concluded such an operation was impossible. He advised instead that the aircraft should be used to help the sixth army break out, but Hitler, stubborn as ever and unwilling to give up his prize, ordered that the army should stay where they were until relieved. To add to the Germans' problems, from December 23 to January 18 the Russians attacked all airfields the German were using, destroying almost 500 aircraft, aircraft they could not at this point afford to lose.

[Trollheart]

Operation Winter Storm: Out in the Cold

On December 12 Hitler launched his desperate attempt to relieve the Sixth Army, under the command of von Manstein, codenamed Operation Unternehmen Wintergewitter, or Winter Storm. This was the final roll of the dice for the Nazis; if they could not break through to rescue the besieged army, they would have to surrender and be taken prisoner by the Soviets, or die of starvation and exposure. Army Group Don, created in the heat of battle to relieve the beleagured attackers, was to have been comprised of four Panzer and four infantry divisions, and three Luftwaffe, but these were hardly the cream of the crop. The air personnel were untrained and had never seen combat in most cases, much of the infantry has sustained heavy losses in fighting on the Eastern Front already, and other forces promised to von Manheim were held back and never sent, while some divisions were redirected to buttress the defence of the River Chir, where the Soviets were making ground.

Nevertheless, the strength of the sudden German offensive took the Russians by surprise. They had assumed their enemy was demoralised, losing heart and would soon be retreating back out of Russia. They sustained heavy casualties before organising themselves.

It Takes a Village: The Battle for Verkhne-Kumskiy

A small village that commanded the best approach to Stalingrad, Verkhne-Kumskiy became the scene of the climatic battle between Soviet and German tanks, a battle which raged on for three days, and while the Soviets were eventually beaten back and the Germans held the village, the delaying action had removed any hope that the Panzers might link up with Paulus and open the road to Stalingrad, thereby providing a route for the Sixth Army to escape the city. With artillery assistance and air support, the Germans were able to drive the hundred or so Soviet tanks – many of which already suffered from previous battle damage – back and on December 18 their allies, the Italian 8th Army were overrun by another Soviet offensive, leaving von Manstein unsure as to whether or not to press the attack on Stalingrad.

With the Soviet attack on the airfield at Tatsinkaya, much of the supplies Manstein would have needed to have continued his offensive were now no longer in his reach, and to make matters worse, Hitler had refused the Sixth Army permission to break out from Stalingrad, so the only way to save them was for Manstein to attempt to break through, which he no longer believed to be a viable option. With fuel running low, and no hope of resupply, Hitler's insane order to the surrounded and trapped Sixth Army, and a blizzard blowing hard, Manstein was forced to call off his attempt at rescue and breakthrough, and return to the defensive, leaving Paulus and his Sixth Army to fend for themselves.

By now, the Battle of Stalingrad was lost. The German Panzer divisions were in full retreat, and there was no hope of the Sixth Army breaking out on their own. The men were starving, weakened, disheartened and demoralised, there was no fuel for the tanks and the harsh Russian winter howled outside the shattered remains of the city, taunting them, daring them to face it. Forced to ignore Russian overtures towards their surrender, as Hitler would not countenance it on any condition, Paulus and his men remained inside the city, isolated, cut off, all but forgotten and left to their fate. Their expected martyrdom was to be the propaganda the Nazis would spew out in German cinemas to support their story of "the gallant defenders of Stalingrad, who gave their lives rather than surrender the city". With their offer of peace dismissed, the Red Army began to move into the city and vicious house-to-house (or what remained of the houses anyway) fighting resumed, but the Germans were tired, weak and also running out of ammunition. They could not hope to survive long. Despite the generous terms offered them by the Soviets though, they had good reason not to surrender, even had it been allowed, as within the ranks of the Sixth Army were Russians who were fighting against their homeland.

Even amidst the horror you can find something to smile about. All right, it's hardly actually funny, but then it kind of is. It certainly demonstrates, if nothing else, the ingenuity of the Soviets, as they countered the attempts by the Germans to protect themselves from grenades being flung into the shattered houses by placing fishing nets over the windows. The Russians responded to this by embedding fish hooks into the grenades, thereby turning the Germans' defence tactics against them. Clever. Hook, line and... sorry.

On January 22, the Red Army made another attempt to force Paulus's surrender. With over 18,000 of his men wounded, and no medical supplies, no food and no water, he again requested permission to accept the terms, and was again refused. Hitler was determined to hold up the "heroic Germanic heroes" as role models for the nation, and told them they must fight "to the last man and the last bullet." In a matter of four days, the number of wounded tripled to almost 50,000 but still Hitler told them to stand fast. What he hoped to achieve, we will never know, but who can fathom the mind of a megalomaniac? Presumably it was now just a point of pride and, um, honour to him that his army did not surrender, even though all it could do now was sit there and rot away. A metaphor, perhaps, for Berlin three years later, as an increasingly desperate Hitler descended into madness and fantasy, imagining Panzer groups coming to the aid of his version of Stalingrad, tanks that were already smoking, twisted wrecks on the outskirts of the German capital.

He and Goebbels put the best face on the defeat and entrapment of the Sixth Army that they could when Hitler celebrated the tenth anniversary of his coming to power, January 30 1943: "The heroic struggle of our soldiers on the Volga should be a warning for everybody to do the utmost for the struggle for Germany's freedom and the future of our people, and thus in a wider sense for the maintenance of our entire continent."

It was a cleverly calculated ploy of Hitler's to promote Paulus to Field Marshal that same day, as the desperate commander, noting that his men were likely to collapse before day's end, hinted he would surrender, even against orders. Hitler told him no Field Marshal in the history of Germany had ever surrendered, leaving Paulus with a quandary: should he continue as ordered, he and all his men would die, probably from hunger, thirst and weakness, but should be surrender, he would be bringing great shame upon the tradition of German military history he had always served. In the end, though captured he maintained he had been "taken by surprise" and had never surrendered, though all of his other units did.

In the early hours of February 2 the final surrender signal was sent, and the Battle of Stalingrad was finally over.

Hitler, of course, lost it, calling Paulus a traitor, but that was no surprise. The city had been lost long ago, and I don't think you can accuse the recently-promoted Field Marshal of cowardice or of taking the first opportunity to betray his leader and lay down his arms. In fact, as noted, twice he refused the offer to surrender (although requesting permission to take the terms) and even at the end he attempted to fudge the issue by claiming he had been "surprised" by the Red army and had not surrendered. (Quite how he could say he had been surprised, when he had expected to be overrun any moment, is open to speculation, but we can assume he was trying to walk the difficult tightrope between duty and history here).

Why will this battle be remembered?

Stalingrad marked the first ever defeat for the Nazi forces in World War II. Up to then, the speed of Hitler's blitzkrieg attack on Europe had taken everyone by surprise, and he had easily pushed out the British forces from France, leaving all of western Europe at his command. In Africa, Rommel had won a decisive – at the time – victory at the Battle of Tobruk, the Americans were busy with a war on two fronts after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, and were unable to turn the full might of their military on the war in Europe. Russia was believed – by the Allies as well as by Hitler – to be all but doomed; the rapid progress his armies had made into the heart of the Soviet Union had mirrored the fall of Europe, and everyone expected it to be only a matter of time before Russia, too, fell.

So Stalingrad became a rallying cry for Hitler's enemies. It was proof, at last, of the Germans' not being invincible, of there being hope in the war against them. It emboldened the Red Army, who began moving west as the Germans retreated, and demoralised the German nation, who had until now believed nothing could stop them. As 1942 turned to 1943, Italy would soon surrender, changing sides in an almost Stalin/Hitler move, and Germany would lose one of its strongest allies. Stalin's fame spread after the battle, and he was not shy about making propaganda about the stunning victory. Friendly powers praised him – Turkey's consul in Moscow prophesied that the "land which the Germans had destined for their living space will become their dying space"; King George VI had a special commemorative sword made and presented to Stalin and Britain celebrated Red Army Day (bet that didn't last long!) on August 23 1943. Oh, I think it was a one-off; doesn't say it became an annual thing.

In the wake of the victory at Stalingrad, British forces in Egypt scored another in the Battle of El Alamein, which effectively spelled the beginning of the end for the Germans in the desert war, and across the Pacific, the US Marines took Guadalcanal, a major turning point in the war against the Japanese. From here, the war began to turn against the Axis, and D-Day loomed closer. Pushed out of Russia in humiliated defeat, Germany regrouped in Europe, determined to consolidate and hold what it had. But it would not hold it for long.

It should not, however, be lost in the stream of euphoria and self-congratulations by nations and leaders how many casualties this one battle produced. As I said in the introduction, it's believed that just short of two million people died in the battle for Stalingrad, a very large percentage of them the civilian population of the city. Historians argue over what period of time constitutes the actual battle, as opposed to the campaign itself, but either way the lowest estimates give us 647,000 (including those wounded or taken prisoner) while at the higher end we have a figure of 968,000 – almost a million, just for Germany and its allies. Factor in the Russian casualties and you get just over a million, including wounded, sick and missing – bodies are still, believe it or not, being recovered from the ruins of the city.

Apart from the terrible cost in human lives, there was a significant loss to the German Army in terms of machinery, with over 900 aircraft, 1,500 tanks, 6,000 guns destroyed and a further 744 aircraft, 1,600 tanks and almost 6,000 guns captured, making a total of over 1,500 aircraft, 3,000 tanks and 12,000 guns the Germans could no longer put into their war effort. With their factories being bombed and sabotaged, the chances of them replacing even half of their armaments were unlikely, and it can be said with reasonable confidence that Stalingrad effectively pulled most of the teeth out of the German tiger and left it, not defenceless by any means, but seriously crippled and ill-prepared for the invasion to come.

I'd have to check, but other than already-related Fallujah sixty years later, I don't recall any other time in modern history where the defenders or at least the inhabitants of a city were forced to remain, and die, by the occupying force. There are certainly examples where the attackers have ensured the defenders remained inside as they besieged the city, and in those cases nobody was allowed escape, but I'm not certain I'm familiar with an order to stay put such as Stalin decreed for the doomed citizens of Stalingrad.

If there was ever proof of Stalin's contempt for his own people, this was it. He effectively threw his own citizens in with the wolves, then barred the gate and set sentries on it to ensure they could not escape. And rather than be vilified for it, he was feted and praised and congratulated. They even made him a Marshall of the Soviet Union, for Christ's sake.

God, we're just as thick as shit really, aren't we?

[Trollheart]

Death to the Working Man: The Miners' Strike of 1984/5 and the Fall of the Coal Industry

The Miners' Strike, March 6 1984 - March 3 1985

Timeline: 1984/1985

Era: Twentieth century
Year: 1984 - 1985
Campaign: n/a
Conflict: Miners' strike
Country: England
Region: Nationwide
Combatants: The National Union of Miners (NUM) vs The National Coal Board (NCB), the British Government, the Metropolitan and South Yorkshire Police
Commander(s): (NUM) Arthur Scargill, Leader; (NCB) Ian McGregor, CEO; Leon Brittan, Home Secretary; Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister; Peter Wright, Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police
Reason: Protest against the planned nationalisation of the coal industry in Britain, with the ensuing closure of many pits and loss of jobs
Objective: Force a rethink of the government's position, retain all mines
Casualties (approx): 6 dead, 123 injured, 11,291 arrested of which 8,392 charged
Objective Achieved? No
Victor: British government
Legacy: In the end, a bad one. Thatcher nationalised the coal industry and eventually closed down all pits in Britain, and a way of life that had persisted for hundreds of years, a proud tradition was forever erased from British life.

All through history one truth has remained constant, and will continue to do so surely, unless or until we reach some unlikely Utopia, and that is that the working man and woman gets the short end of the stick. Time and again we've seen the little guy being beaten down by big industry, corporation, governments and other authority figures. And while it might be simplistic and trite to refer to the 1984/5 national Mining Strike as a David vs Goliath situation, in ways it does characterise the struggle of the ordinary working man against the implacable and uncaring monolith of government. The problem with that is the only place where David ever bests his huge and more powerful enemy is in the Bible; everywhere else, when the little guy takes on big business he generally tends to lose. Throw the adamantine champion of market forces, Margaret Thatcher, into the mix, and you have a recipe for disaster.

British political parties have never liked unions, especially when they're in power. Britain was built, during the heady days of the Industrial Revolution, on the backs of working men, women – and indeed children – who got paid little more than a slave wage, had no pension at the end of their many years of service, had no recourse to the law if they fell out with their employers or were treated badly by them, could be fired with little or no reason, or have their wages reduced, and had no health or safety benefit, no protection. So when they – as they invariably did, as safety practices were laughable in the early to late nineteenth century – had an accident at work, even a serious one that precluded them from working, and could be directly attributed to their employer, they were simply dismissed. Nobody looked after them, nobody helped them, nobody cared.

And this was exactly how the bosses liked it. Workers were two a penny (sometimes almost literally so) and easy to replace, and there were major profits to be made. The owners of steel or cotton mills had no time for the whining of a worker who had stupidly caught his arm in a machine due to there being no guard rail, or who had fallen into a hole and broken a leg because the area was inadequately lit, or who had died of tuberculosis or other diseases due to breathing in toxic chemicals in their factory. Who cared about them? These people were scum, and there were orders to fill! Get someone else in, and throw that cripple out of my factory.

Then came the union.

This was a disaster for employers. Suddenly they were supposed to, what, provide for the welfare of their workers? Pay them – what's that you say, I thought I misheard? A decent wage? Oh now really! Next you'll be suggesting we look after them if they should injure themselves while working for us! What a singular idea, sir!

But these were the "outlandish" ideas the bosses of factories, mills, and other places of employment slowly and grudgingly had to learn to accept, because now the union was power. Every man or woman who worked for the boss had to be in the union, or they weren't allowed to work. And every union member had to do as the union said. And like it or not, the employer's business was his workers. If he had no workers he had no business. Unions introduced perhaps the most chilling word ever to reach the ears of a rich, impatient, unfeeling boss.

That word was strike.

For the first time, if conditions were bad, pay was low, or anything else was wrong, the union could bring out the men and women on strike. This meant they did no work, and more, marched outside the premises with placards announcing their grievances against the boss, causing often irreparable damage to his reputation, and hitting him where it hurt: in his wallet. Not only that, but once one crew went out on strike, it gave others ideas, and soon every factory and firm had a union, and could sue for better wages or working conditions, shorter hours, health benefits, safety procedures... in short, they could take their grievances to the management and if the management told them stuff it they could walk out. Management would then be forced to deal with the union representative(s) and hammer out a compromise so that their workers would return and they could get back to filling their orders.

Labour relations would never be the same again.

Of course, sometimes a strike could be called against the majority's wishes – if the union demanded it, the workers had to comply or risk being ostracised as "blacklegs" or "scabs", a label that would stick to them for the rest of their working lives and ensure they would never work in any union-controlled environment again. The unions had become so powerful that it was seen as madness and folly to go against them. Governments of course hated them, as they saw themselves as being held to ransom; give us what we want or we go on strike, and people can walk to work, do their own operations, feed themselves, or whatever. The government in power had to cultivate a co-operative attitude towards the unions, but it was an uneasy truce at best, and easily broken, leading to strikes that could quite literally paralyse the country, and in some cases, bring down a government.


It had happened before, and in living memory too.

1969: End of the Summer of Love for Labour

The first proper strike action taken by miners was in 1969, when working hours for the older, surface workers, which were supposed to have been reduced due to the men's age and lack of ability to work underground (resulting in lower wages) were left as they were and union representatives, including a young Arthur Scargill, who would later feature in the 1984 strike, and who is covered in a separate piece later, pushed for strike action. It only took forty-eight hours after the vote for strike action for every mine in Yorkshire to come out, followed by those in Kent, South Wales and Scotland, and coal production ground to a standstill.

As per usual though, cash is king and money triumphs over morals, as the miners were offered an increase in wages if they went back to work, though the plight of the older surface workers – which had been the catalyst for the strike in the first place – was left unresolved. Workers voted with their wallets, or for their wallets, and returned to the mines. However it was now clear that, no matter who was in government, whether their political ideologies lined up or not (Labour always having been associated with socialism and communism, not so much today of course) the miners and the unions would take them on if they felt either that they had a good chance of winning or if the cause was, in their view, just. They would prove this to be true again, less than three years later, when the balance of power shifted to the right.

1972

This time the cause of the strike was pretty simple: the miners were not happy with how much they were being paid. This was the first official strike by miners – 1969 having been an unofficial one – supported strongly by the NUM (National Union of Miners) and the TUC (Trades Union Congress), and the first since the General Strike of 1926. The mood was militant, involving flying pickets (see the entry on Arthur Scargill) and made the more serious by having the dubious honour of being the first strike in which a miner was killed. This was not, as you might think, due to police violence or scuffles on pickets – not technically anyway – but occurred when a lorry driver who was not affiliated with the NUM tried to deliver to one of the collieries under picket, mounted the pavement at speed to get past them as he left and ran over Freddie Matthews. The driver did not stop (I assume he was terrified that the miners would attack him, both for being a strike-breaker and for killing one of their own, though that's hardly an acceptable excuse for what was basically a hit-and-run, even if it was an accident) and the police had to stop him about a mile down the road. A crisis point had now been reached.

Things got violent as the NUM members attacked members of the National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers (NACODS), which mostly comprised foremen and supervisors, who had refused to strike and continued to work. The worst of these clashes took place at Saltley Gate in Birmingham, and came to be known as the Battle of Saltley Gate.

Standing at the Gates: Miner Differences

There was huge support for the miners, as the unions representing the railways agreed not to take any action that could be considered strike-breaking, including but not limited to driving trains that were to carry fuel, while all colliery workers stood down and the pits closed. Dock workers turned away or refused to unload ships carrying coal destined for the power stations – some humanitarian exceptions were allowed, such as deliveries to hospitals, nursing homes, schools and so on – and the miners set about picketing the actual power stations themselves. This of course led to power outages as the electricity began to fail, and winter closed in.

One of the main plants to stay open was – although said to be Saltley Gate – Nachell Gas Works, where production had ramped up like nobody's business, and which, the strikers assumed (and probably correctly) if left open would lead to other works remaining open too, weakening their position, which of course depended on strangling the supply of coal to the nation and forcing the government to give in to their demands. A large force of police met them at the works on February 10 but could not hold them back, with reinforcements now from the engineering unions too, and they forced the plant to close. It was a huge victory for Arthur Scargill and his flying pickets, and a turning point in the strike. Nine days later the miners were offered a better deal, took it, and the strike was over.

Two major results of the strike were the Wilberforce Enquiry, which found that for the kind of dangerous, dirty and health-hazardous work miners carried out, they were very much underpaid, and in an attempt to ensure such events were better handled and responded to in the future, the government set up COBRA, which, though it sounds cool and CIA-like, merely stands for Cabinet Office Briefing Room A, where the ministers would all gather and discuss whatever crisis they happened to be dealing with. The equivalent, I guess, of the Situation Room in the White House.

1974

Less than two years later, another Conservative government tried to close the mines and paid the ultimate price of electoral defeat. It had begun with a round of pay freezes to combat high inflation, and ended in the fall of Edward Heath's government in 1974. Like the strike of 1984/5 this was a case of two polar opposites meeting, but with a different result. In 1974 the combatants were basically the British Communist Party and the Conservative Party, so essentially capitalism versus communism. The principle proponent of the latter half of that struggle was a man called Mick Mc Gahey.

Mick Mc Gahey (1925 – 1999)

Like father, like son. Mick was still in nappies, barely a year old when his father, founder of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) took part in the General Strike of 1926, which fell flat, despite the tacit support of no less a personage than the king himself, who suggested "Try living on their wages before you start judging them", mostly because of fears of the rise of communism in the wake of the end of World War I. This led to the government of the time (yet another Conservative one) enforcing the Emergency Powers Act (sound familiar, Mr. Hitler?), passed only six years previously in 1920, which allowed the sovereign to declare a state of emergency if required, and rallying support against the General Strike by pointing out that it was motivated and orchestrated by communists (which was, at least in part, true). This turned many ordinary people, who would have likely otherwise been on the side of the miners, away from their cause. In response to this claim, the national newspaper of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), the British Worker, hit back: "We are not making war on the people. We are anxious that the ordinary members of the public shall not be penalized for the unpatriotic conduct of the mine owners and the government".

Support among workers for the strike was overwhelming, and the country was brought to a standstill on May 4 when the Transport Workers Unions, the National Transport Workers Federation and the National Union of Railwaymen joined the strike. Under the terms of the Emergency Powers Act, the government set up a sort of militia to ensure supplies kept moving, though loyalties within the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies (OMS) were certainly divided, as evidenced by this constable's comment: "It was not difficult to understand the strikers' attitude toward us. After a few days I found my sympathy with them rather than with the employers. For one thing, I had never realized the appalling poverty which existed. If I had been aware of all the facts, I should not have joined up as a special constable".

The nascent Fascist movement in Britain also took the initiative to combat the strikers (is there anything fascists enjoy more than beating the shit out of reds?) but were not allowed to join the OMS because of their overt political agenda. They therefore formed their own quasi-military unit, Q Division. As the Army got involved, things could have got ugly, and there were some incidents, but generally speaking compromises were worked out with the union and by May 12 most of the men were back at work. Miners, more militant than other workers – and who had gone out on strike first, the rest coming out in sympathy with them – remained defiant for some months afterwards, but eventually the pressure of no money in their pockets and the exigency of putting food on the table forced them back to work.

Sadly, they ended up worse off than they were before they began the strike, having to accept lower wages, longer working hours and unwittingly contributing both to the demise of British coal as an industry and to two further strikes. The General Strike of 1926 also gave rise to the Trade Disputes and Trade Agreements Act of 1927, which prohibited mass picketing, general strikes and sympathy strikes. You would have to say that the 1926 strike achieved precisely nothing, but this did not stop our man Mick from kicking off another one fifty years later.

Having followed in his father's footsteps and joined both the CPGB and the newly-formed National Union of Miners (NUM) – well, formed in 1945, so twenty years after the General Strike – McGahey rose in the ranks of both organisations, becoming the Vice-President of the NUM in 1972 and elected to the Executive of the CPGB the previous year. This put him in a position to really make waves on behalf of his members, and he did not spurn the opportunity. When Heath passed the Three Day Work Order in 1973, his hackles were raised. The Three Day Work Order required consumption of electricity (of which coal was almost the only power source) to be limited to three days a week. TV stations had to shut down at 10:30 each evening, pubs were closed due to the lack of electricity to power them, and working hours were reduced.

Miners rejected a 16.5% pay rise offer the following January, and McGahey called for strike action. On hearing the army might be called in, he sneered "You can't dig coal with bayonets", and suggested the army should disobey orders if they received them, join in solidarity with their working class brothers. Despite being a militant communist – and presumably therefore a supporter of the Labour government – McGahey's call angered the MPs so much that over a hundred of them signed a resolution condemning him. Battle lines were clearly being drawn.

The strike began on February 5 and Heath called a General Election, using the striking miners as an example of the bolshevism that threatened to take over Britain, and the slogan Who governs Britain? It turned out to be the wrong tack to take, and Heath and his government had wrongly assessed the mood of the people; although his Conservative government was not defeated, it did not win either, and in what is known as a "hung parliament" - where there's basically a stalemate; neither side has achieved enough seats to form a government – Labour gained most and eventually formed the new government, returning Harold Wilson to power after a mere four-year gap in Labour governments.

Aware of the part the miners had played in his return to power, Wilson immediately authorised a pay rise of 35% for the miners, with a further 35% awarded the next year.

There would, however, be no happy ending for the miners of Great Britain. If one person could be said to have sounded the death knell of mining in the UK - hell, she practically danced on its grave! - it would be the enemy of the working man, the hero of the rich, and the worshipper at the altar of market forces.

She would be Britain's first ever female Prime Minister.

[Trollheart]

1984 Strike: Big Sister is Watching!

By 1984 the reserves of coal were dwindling in Britain, so far underground that they were difficult and expensive to get at, and the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher was anyway looking at other means of producing electricity, including nuclear power. Only a tenth of the collieries working before the war were now in operation, and mechanisation, seen as essential in mining what coal was left to be mined, was putting men out of work. Wages dropped as a result, since supply exceeded demand in terms of labour.


A Cunning Plan: Ridley and the War against the Unions

One man who had no time for the unions, or the miners, was right-wing MP Nicholas Ridley, who drew up a report in 1977 in the aftermath of the strike of 1974 and its – for the Conservatives – catastrophic results, a plan which bore his name and which was aimed at essentially smashing the power of the unions more effectively even than striker-breakers smashed heads in the previous century when such action was threatened. His plan was almost a declaration of war upon the working man, and consisted of eight main points.

The government should if possible choose the field of battle.
   
    Industries    were grouped by the likelihood of winning a strike; the coal    industry was in the 'middle' of three groups of industries mentioned.
    
   Coal    stocks should be built up at power stations.
    
   Plans should be made to import coal from non-union foreign ports.
    
   Non-union lorry drivers to be recruited by haulage companies.
    
   Dual    coal-oil firing generators to be installed, at extra cost.
    
   Cut off the money supply to the strikers and make the union finance    them'.
    
   Train and equip a large, mobile squad of police, ready to employ riot    tactics in order to uphold the law against violent picketing.

The language used here - "field of battle", "uphold the law", "Violent picketing" - show little concern for, or appreciation of the genuine grievances miners, and those in other nationalised industries had against their employers. They are draconian, concerned only with victory at any cost, contain no sense of compromise or mediation between the parties, and read like a challenge to the unions to do their worst, and a snub at the government (Heath's) which allowed itself to be bested by them. No wonder Thatcher loved it. And used it.

Although still around, Mick McGahey would have been too old at this point to have led the fight, but that didn't mean Thatcher would be unopposed. In fact, the Iron Lady met the Man of Coal, and each were pretty well matched in the long and violent struggle which was to come.

Arthur Scargill (1938 - )

One thing you can say about mining men is that they have coal in their blood, sometimes literally, but certainly figuratively. If a man was a miner, then it was a safe bet his father was, and his father too possibly. Arthur Scargill was no different, coming from a mining family that had lived in Yorkshire for generations. He first went "down pit" at the age of nineteen, and was so shocked at the conditions, and at the men who were working because they had no choice, but who should have been retired at their age, that he determined there and then to try to change things. Like McGahey, he got involved with the local communist party and rose through its ranks, also making waves in the NUM from an early age. He joined the Labour Party but became highly critical of the Wilson government's stance on nuclear energy, pointing out that "I can honestly say that I never heard flannel like we got from the Minister... he said that we have nuclear power stations with us, whether we like it or not. I suggest to this Conference that we have coal mines with us... but they did something about this problem: they closed them down. This was a complete reversal of the policy... that was promised by the Labour Government before it was put into office... this represents a betrayal of the mining industry."

Then he led the unofficial strike of 1969 and was involved heavily in the 1972 strike, organising what became known as "flying pickets", men who could be bussed to any location which required picketing but did not have enough workers to organise one, in order to have the place shut down, as he did most famously at the Battle of Saltley Gate. His reputation was boosted, and tensions were again heightened between the NCB and the miners, by the disaster at Lofthouse Collery, in which a poorly -researched mine shaft flooded and seven men lost their lives. Scargill spent six days on site, helping in the attempted rescue (which turned into a retrieval of bodies, only one of which was ever recovered) and vilified the NCB for not bothering to do proper checks which would have averted the disaster.

In 1981 Scargill became president of the NUM, having been elected president of the Yorkshire branch the previous year, and while he was popular with the workers and the public for the stance he took against Margaret Thatcher's repressive and uncaring attitude towards his members, he was not beloved by all. Seen as something of a tyrant by his office staff when they refused to relocate from London to Sheffield, he also lost some of his left-wing support when he refused to condemn the actions against Solidarity in Poland and the shooting down by Russia of a Korean Airlines jet. But his Waterloo was coming fast.

In March of 1983 Scargill commented, correctly as it turned out, that "The policies of this government are clear – to destroy the coal industry and the NUM." He had no time for Thatcher's government, which concentrated on making the rich richer and sneered at the poor for being unable to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps", despite the fact that it's a little hard to do that when your boots have no straps. He was not impressed with the rise to head of the NCB of Ian McGregor, direly prophesying the death of the industry at the hands of this man, assisted willingly by Thatcher's Conservative government. "Waiting in the wings, wishing to chop us to pieces, is Yankee steel butcher MacGregor. This 70-year-old multi-millionaire import, who massacred half the steel workforce in less than three years, is almost certainly brought in to wield the axe on pits. It's now or never for Britain's mineworkers. This is the final chance – while we still have the strength – to save our industry." He also had no issue comparing the Tories to Nazis: "My attitude would be the same as the attitude of the working class in Germany when the Nazis came to power. It does not mean that because at some stage you elect a government that you tolerate its existence. You oppose it".

Seems to have escaped his notice that this was a terrible analogy, as the amount of organised resistance against the Nazis in Germany was negligible: you either approved or you kept your head down and said nothing. Not so sure what he was trying to say here, but his message, for me, was lost in a totally inaccurate and frankly ludicrous comparison.


Sir Ian McGregor (1912 – 1998)

Born in Scotland, McGregor came from a line of industrialists and strike-breakers. His brothers had helped defeat the 1926 General Strike by running trams in defiance of the pickets, and he himself faced down the unions when he went to work at William Beardmore & Co. Forge, driving cranes himself when the operators went on strike. During the war he was moved to America, and remained there for over thirty years, his confrontational policies landing him on the wrong side of the Mafia and earning him the enmity of unions and workingmen. In 1977 he was brought back to Britain to manage British Leyland, where he dismissed the miitant communist trade union leader, and then British Steel, which he turned around from a loss-making to a profitable business in a matter of years.

Of course, as is usually the way, profits and sustainability were gained at the expense of layoffs, redunancies and wage cuts, and McGregor gained a reputation as a man who cared little about the ordinary folk as long as the shareholders were happy. A real Thatcherite, in other words. The Iron Bitch, sorry Lady (no I was right the first time) certainly knew what she was doing when she appointed him to the head of the board of the NCB in 1983, Arthur Scargill's reaction above telling you all you need to know about how the NUM felt about that. McGregor had about as much respect for miners as he had had for crane drivers or steel workers, comparing them disparagingly with women miners from the nineteenth century. This constant sniping, accusing and baiting, on both sides, played right into the hands of the Prime Minister.

[Trollheart]

Margaret Thatcher (1925 – 2013)

The first ever British Prime Minister, the most hated of all British political leaders, at least by the poor, the working and middle class, and the disadvantaged and disabled, Margaret Thatcher changed the landscape of British politics and left the country with a legacy with which it is still grappling today. A woman who had little pity for those she considered "lazy", she was of the school of thinking that anyone could make something of themselves if they tried, and that there was no excuse for failure. She had humble beginnings, the daughter of a greengrocer in Lincolnshire, and history could have been spared her tyrannical legacy as she had originally been interested in a career as a scientist, but in 1948 she joined the Conservative Association, and the die was set.

She married the next year and began standing for – and losing – elections, but after the birth of her children scaled this back as she concentrated on being a mother. As a backbencher in the Conservative government however in 1967, she essentially supported noted racist bigot Enoch Powell when he delivered his "rivers of blood" speech, railing against immigrants and predicting race war. She also demonstrated the cruelty and hard-heartedness that were, in part, to earn her the epithet of "The Iron Lady" when she abolished free milk for children age 7 – 11 during her tenure as Education Secetary and supported the retention of capital punishment and was against the relaxation of divorce laws. Yet she supported the legalisation both of abortion and homosexuality (which at the time was a crime in England, at least for men).

Like her later counterpart in the USA Ronald Reagan, she believed in a return to family values and simpler times, while at the same time doing her best to dismantle British industry by the privatisation of state companies. She noted that she wanted to see "a reversal of the permissive society", and bemoaned her belief that "there will not be a woman Prime Minister in my lifetime – the male population is too prejudiced." She was, of course, a bitter opponent of Socialism and Communism, the very antithesis of same, and most of her colleagues thought in similar ways. In 1975 she replaced Edward Heath as leader of the Conservative Party, and four years later she became the first female Prime Minister of Britain as Labour were swept out of power on the back of a damaging series of strikes and rising unemployment. She was swift to carry on Enoch Powell's racist legacy, sounding a "warning note" about immigrants and threatening to limit the numbers allowed in, basically advocating, if not a "Keep Britain white" stance, at the very least a "Keep Britain British" one. Her government – the longest lasting since the war – would preside over a period of social unrest, racial inequality (with nothing done to address it), rising inflation and high taxes on the lower paid with tax breaks for the rich, cuts in education and health spending, unemployment climbing to its highest level since 1930 with the attendant failure of British industry, and would only be saved, as her popularity plummeted to a low approval rating of 23% one year into her term, by a literal war.

But war of another sort was looming now, as Arthur Scargill's NUM became more militant and the government more intransigent. Thatcher responded with aggressive tactics: taking her cue from the Ridley doctrine, she began recruiting truck drivers to carry coal in anticipation of the sympathy of rail drivers which had characterised the 1974 strike, converting some power stations to burn heavy fuel oil, setting up mobile police forces which could combat the flying pickets, stockpiling coal reserves in anticipation and defiance of the coming strike, and characterising the unions as "the enemy within", aggressive, confrontational language which left no hope or possibility that she or her government would be interested in any sort of compromise or deal. Battle lines had been drawn, and it was time to marshall the troops.

Picket Lines, Police Lines and Hard Lines: The Miners go to War

On March 6 1984 the NCB announced its intention to close 20 collieries with the loss of 20,000 jobs. Scargill knew this was just the tip of the iceberg, and he was right. Though McGregor promised he had no intention of closing more pits, papers released in 2014 show this to be a lie, and that the real target of the NCB was the closure of up to 75 pits over three years. In response to this (the proposed closure of 20 pits, not the 75; that treachery would not be laid bare for another thirty years) regional miners went on strike. Scargill quickly supported them and, as president of the NUM, enjoined other collieries to strike also, though he stopped short of taking a vote in favour of strike action.

The first fatality occurred in the town of Oilerton, where David Jones, a miner picketing against the closure of the pit there, was struck by a brick thrown by a youth. Later medical examinations ruled though that the probable cause of death was being compressed and pushed up against the pit gates. Scargill came down to plead for calm, and the protest was called off. Things were not about to get any better though, and another man died in June when a lorry trying to deliver supplies to the colliery at Maltby struck and killed him. His death, of course, mirrored quite closely that of Freddie Matthews in the 1972 strike, and pointed to a general heedless attitude of truck drivers, and perhaps even a sense that if strikers or protesters got in the way they deserved what happened to them. That's only speculation of course. I don't see that anyone was charged with Joe Green's death though. Still, one thing seems certain – the police were looking for a fight, and they got one.

6,000 police met the pickets as they swarmed forward to try to stop the first trucks as they appeared at the gates, the police all in riot gear and supported by dog and mounted squads. They charged the miners, beat them back, charged again and then there was a break, during which many of the pickets left and went home. Later in the evening, for no apparent reason, as the remaining pickets were relaxing on the grass or playing football, the police charged them again, forcing them out of the field into which the police had coralled them earlier. Baton charges followed, and all hell broke loose.

The police charges pushed the strikers from the field into the village, where with complete lack of discrimination they laid into everyone around them, including villagers who had nothing to do with the pickets. In all, over 120 injuries resulted, spread about evenly on both sides, nearly a hundred arrests were made but the trials of the pickets collapsed in the revelations of police brutality, unlawful arrest and malicious prosecution. Compensation was paid but no police officer was ever charged for the reckless behaviour of the South Yorkshire Police. The Guardian thundered that the Battle of Orgreave (see further) "revealed that in this country we now have a standing army available to be deployed against gatherings of civilians whose congregation is disliked by senior police officers. It is answerable to no one; it is trained in tactics which have been released to no one, but which include the deliberate maiming and injuring of innocent persons to disperse them, in complete violation of the law."

While perhaps not a watershed moment, the incident again called into question the conduct and practices of the SYP, who had also been accused of heavy-handed and partisan behaviour towards football fans at the Hillsborough disaster, where 96 Liverpool fans lost their lives when clashes broke out between fans. Of course, nothing was ever done and nobody was held responsible, though in 2012 the Hillsborough families did receive justice of a sort. The SYP had been accused of fabricating evidence, deliberately coordinating statements so that they seemed to point towards a riot, and injuring innocent people in their rush to deal with the strikers.

Also coming in for serious criticism was the BBC, who broadcast the footage of the charge in reverse order, deliberately it seemed, or under orders, so as to make it look as if the police had charged after being assaulted with bricks and bottles by the strikers, and not the other way around. At the time, the BBC made some mumbling half-acceptances of their "error" and "marginal imbalance" in the reporting, and sulkily shrugged that they "might not have been wholly impartial." Says a lot, really. The coverage shows that the media was basically being used as a propaganda tool by the Thatcher government to give the people their side of the story and no other. Sound familiar, Herr Minister?

David Hart, a cabinet adviser and shill to the NCB confirmed that Thatcher had followed one of the major points in the Ridley plan, to choose the battleground, as he noted that Orgreave was a set-up by us. The coke [he's talking about coal here, not cocaine, in case you were wondering!] was of no interest whatsoever. We didn't need it. It was a battleground of our choosing on grounds of our choosing. I don't think that Scargill believes that even today. The fact is that it was a set-up and it worked brilliantly."

With typical contempt for the working people, nobody in power – not he, Thatcher, McGregor or the police or the BBC – seem to have had any concern about the injuries doled out to the strikers and the reign of terror the SYP presided over that day, nor what it would or could mean for the future not only of the police force but for public protesting in general. We've seen recently how former President Trump dealt with crowds who got in his way, and at this point Thatcher would be in power for another seven years. It didn't look good.

But back to the strike, now in full swing.

Nottinghamshire, one of the "scablands of '26" identified by Scargill, where miners refused to strike, became the target of violent picketing, all of which led to what was later called the Battle of Orgreave, as alluded to twice already. When Scargill found that the exceptions allowed the Orgreave Coking Works in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, in order to keep steel mills going, had been overreached, that the steel plants had demanded, and got, more coal than had been agreed upon, he was incensed. The problem began when a furnace exploded aboard the liner Queen Mary, necessitating the import of coal from Poland, for the transport of which McGregor's British Steel used non-union truck drivers. When Scargill heard of the plan he went loopy. His flying pickets swung into action, but under the orders and approval of Margaret Thatcher, the police now had their own mobile force.

This was called the National Reporting Centre (NRC) and allowed the police force to commandeer – even without their consent or knowledge – officers from other areas to bolster up the police presence at high risk areas, in effect a police version of Scargill's flying pickets.

NACODS, who had, you may remember, refused to strike during the 1972 action, and whose resistance to the strike had resulted in violent clashes between the two unions, took the same line. When the government threatened closures of twenty-three pits across the country in February of 1981, strike action was called and Thatcher had to back down, as she knew there were not enough coal reserves to avoid a repeat of 1974: she needed six months supply, and there was only six weeks. So the closures were deferred, the miners accepted a small pay rise and went back to work in defiance of their union.

That was, of course, nowhere near the end of it.

[Trollheart]

The pits slated for closure were dealt with singly, instead of in one go, and so by a combination of stealth and cunning Thatcher got the pit closures she wanted. Some workers were moved to the new Selby Coalfield, where conditions and wages were better, but many men were left without jobs, including an increasing number coming up to retirement age.

NACODS remained technically working but refused to cross picket lines, and when McGregor threatened to bring in blacklegs to replace them, they responded by also going on strike. A deal was negotiated – against McGregor's wishes – by the government and the North Yorkshire branch of the NCB and the NACODS went back to work. After this, pits which McGregor had been told to leave alone were closed.

On 16 July 1984 Thatcher called a ministerial meeting to consider the imposition of a state of emergency, which would have created a state of martial law, but this never came to pass. Strikers were not eligible for welfare payments but their spouses and children were, but new legislation passed in 1980 banned the receipt of "urgent needs" payments, even going so far as to take a deduction from the benefits they did receive, in an effort, said the government, to force their husbands back to work. Sounds like the argument advanced to support the Poor Law and make the workhouses even less attractive to the lower classes in the nineteenth century. Thatcher even had MI5, the British Secret Service, monitoring strikers and tapping their phone lines. Who said Britain wasn't a police state?

Although the miners had public support from the start of the strike, as the months wore on and the methods adopted by Scargill and the NUM became more militant and potentially violent, opinion began to swing away from them, until in July 1984 a poll conducted revealed that 78% of people believed the miners' methods were irresponsible. This had increased the next month to 81%. Nobody seems to have taken a poll on police methods, oddly enough, or if they did, it's not mentioned. As the money began to run out for the NUM, as its assets were seized by the courts, they turned to Russia (the Soviet Union at the time) for help, which did nothing to change the public's opinion of them, communism always being a sore point with Brits. Smear campaigns by major media outlets alleged Scargill and other union leaders were trading with Libya, also another country on the no-no list, and worse, were pocketing the money. These claims were never proven, and seem to have been complete fabrications made in order to turn what remained of public support away from the strikers.

Though the police were without question completely out of control and – excuse the term – a law unto themselves during the strike, it can't be ignored that the miners used very violent and intimidatory tactics to persuade and threaten those who continued to work, or crossed picket lines. Apart from physical attacks there were threats against families, damage to houses and cars, attempts to shame the "blacklegs", with the violence coming to a head in November when two pickets dropped a concrete post over a bridge onto a taxi which was bringing what they considered a "scab" to work. The man and the driver were killed, and the two miners convicted of manslaughter and imprisoned. Another miner was savagely beaten that same month when a gang of pickets invaded his home and beat him for five minutes with baseball bats. Two of the gang were sentenced for GBH (Grevious Bodily Harm). Although Scargill refused to condemn the violence, these two incidents served to cool tempers down.

Women of the Strike: Two Views

Although they did not picket with their men, women were also instrumental in the strike, sometimes supporting them and sometimes encouraging them to return to work. This latter attitude is of course understandable. While as wives or girlfriends they would have been anxious for their man to be paid more, or at least retain his job, in the case of projected pit closures, a lot of the women would have had to have looked at the practical side of the strike; the lack of food on the table, the absence of money coming in, even perhaps the social status of the strikers in the community, and with the escalating violence this desire for the strike to end would have only increased and become more expedient to them. On the other hand, there were the wives and girlfriends of strikers who thoroughly agreed with their men, and set up Women Against Pit Closures, who organised collections, soup kitchens and even benefit concerts in support of the strikers. Much of this was as a backlash against a protracted and concentrated campaign by the media to give the impression that the miners were striking against their wives' wishes, and that they had not the support of those who relied on them for a living. In some cases, as I said above, this was true, but in many it was not, and the women who set up WAPC wished to show that the media image of the "suffering miner's wife" was not the only one, that some women did support the efforts of their men.

Some strange alliances came out of the strike, such as the support given the miners from the LBGTQ community, when Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners held concerts to raise funds for them, cheekily under the banner of "Pits and Perverts." The perhaps unexpected sympathy for the miners resulted in more tolerance for these groups in areas where they might not have been so eaily accepted prior to the strike. Chesterfields Football Club gave discount tickets for their matches to the miners, and even Bruce Springsteen donated money to their cause.

The strike finally came to an end on March 3 1985, not as a result of any mediation or compromises or agreements, but simply as an expedient. Miners' families were struggling, unable to pay rent or buy food, and the harsh and draconian rules of the Thatcherite welfare system made it even harder for them to make ends meet. Essentially, I guess you could say they were starved back to work, like a siege that ended when the town had no food left to eat and had to surrender. Despite fundraising efforts at home and abroad, with its assets seized the NUM had only so much in its coffers, and when that ran out nobody was going to help re-fill them. By standing firm and not giving in to very reasonable demands from men unwilling to see their livelihood taken away, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher scored possibly her government's biggest victory since the recent so-called Falklands War, though this time it was against her own people, those she described with sneering rhetoric as the enemy within.

In the end, Arthur Scargill played right into her hands by advocating, or at least not condemning, violence which attended the riots and turned public sympathy to disgust and anger. His strong links with Communism also scared and angered many Britains, who may have believed he was trying to instil those sort of values in their country, and seen him as an agitator. He certainly earned few friends with his heavy-handed, unapologetic and implacable stand, calllng anyone who disagreed with him or got in his way a traitor. He came across as a militant, unbending figure, treated by Thatcher as all but an industrial terrorist, and in the final analysis his and the NUM's efforts came to nothing. Men lost their jobs, or were allowed to resume them at reduced wages – over 9,000 miners were dismissed simply for striking – and the coal industry staggered on for a few more decades, slouching along like Yeats's rough beast, but to die, not be born. The privatisation of the coal industry ten years later resulted in UK Coal, and by 2006 there were a total of eight mines left operating in the country. The final one closed in 2016, hammering in the last nail in the coffin of the coal industry and bringing to an end centuries of coal mining in Britain as the country looked to oil, nuclear, even wind power, moving away from its previous reliance on coal.

Perhaps the darkest legacy, though, of the miners' strike, outside of the hardship and loss of livelihood, is the uncaring, almost dictatorial attitude of the government, who never, so far as I can see, even attended talks with the NUM or attempted to bring the strikes to a peaceful conclusion. Using Ridley's plan, Thatcher chose her battleground, assembled her troops, and, to use a phrase popular with a certain Springfield billionaire, released the hounds. She didn't care who got hurt - probably the more the better, as long as she and the media she controlled could turn the blame on the miners - and she was prepared to bend the coal industry to her will, before snapping it altogether and tossing it away like a child who has lost interest in a broken toy. She displayed no understanding, compassion or sympathy for the working people who had, possibly, put her in power, but even if not, who she was sworn to protect and whose interests she should have been looking after.

Thatcher would remain in power for another five years, after which Britain would experience seven under John Major, when the destruction of British industry would be all but completed, the Conservative Party would be torn apart by scandals and give rise to the "Euro-sceptics", leading inevitably and by a long road to the eventual secession of Britain from the European Union in what has popularly become known as Brexit, and allow, in the end, Labour to pull off a triumphant victory after nearly twenty years in opposition. Britain's problems, of course, would hardly end with the Blair era, but that, as they say, is another story entirely.