Word: whitelaw
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...resumption of fighting was a bitter setback for William Whitelaw. In London, M.P.S from both sides of the House of Commons last week expressed their confidence in the man who faces perhaps the toughest task in British politics since World War II. Whitelaw acknowledged the praise but declared sadly: "I deserve none of these things because I am not succeeding." Nonetheless, he emphasized that he would "continue to soldier through" to repair the truce. Accordingly, the British government sent in additional troops, bringing its strength in Ulster to 17,000, the highest ever...
...Whitelaw also told the House of Commons that he had met secretly a few days earlier with six Provo leaders in London. He had taken the step, he said, because the situation had seemed "very dangerous," and he had wanted to "save lives in any way I could." He had hoped that he might talk the Proves into tearing down the Catholic barricades in Londonderry that the Ulster Protestants resent so deeply. Despite the I.R.A.'s demands that Britain move all of its troops out of Catholic neighborhoods immediately and withdraw all soldiers from Northern Ireland...
Three nights after Whitelaw's appearance in Parliament, the worst fighting of the guerrilla war broke out. I.R.A. terrorists stepped up their sniping attack on the army outpost in Belfast's Lenadoon Avenue by rolling a bulldozer laden with a 50-lb. gelignite bomb toward the sandbagged building. Though I.R.A. men fired on the rolling bomb, only a portion of the gel ignite exploded. The army responded by going on the offensive against I.R.A. strongholds, dispatching 700 troops to the Lenadoon Avenue area alone. Soon firing flared up in half a dozen Catholic areas, perhaps to divert troops...
Last week, after the I.R.A. called off its ceasefire, the U.D.A. threatened to become the "Ulster Offensive Association" and to "take steps to eliminate the terrorists from this country" if William Whitelaw, Britain's proconsul in Northern Ireland, does not. In one U.D.A. office, I was shown purported I.R.A. lists, giving names, addresses and, in some cases, brief physical descriptions of members of the Catholic underground...
...with the British army. "We couldn't tackle the British army as regards firepower," a company commander admitted. "But if the British army wasn't here, we could look after ourselves." The U.D.A.'s objectives, its leaders claim, are political, not military. They want to pressure Whitelaw by challenging British authority in the U.D.A.'s barricaded areas until he orders British troops to clean out the I.R.A. sanctuaries of Bogside and Creggan in so-called "Free Derry." As a slap at the British, the U.D.A. has set up free zones of its own. A sign...