The documentary record behind it can be found by consulting the following links. This blog post uses recently declassified sources from the UK National Archives in Kew to describe the origins and ending of Operation Hyperion. Aside from a 1986 article by John Mackinlay, a brief discussion in John Pimlott’s coffee-table book on post-war British military operations, and a couple of snide comments in Robert Fisk’s account of the Lebanese civil war, there is very little discussion on BRITFORLEB and its deployment. The UK had at most 115 personnel committed to this ill-fated operation in Lebanon, compared to the 1,800 US, 1,657 French and 1,291 Italian troops on the ground. Hyperion is one of these forgotten missions, partly because the British contingent to the MNF (BRITFORLEB) was far smaller than the US, French or Italian contributions. The British public are generally aware of conflicts such as the Falklands (1982), Gulf 1990-1991, Northern Ireland (1969-1998), Iraq (2003-2011) and Afghanistan (2001-2014), but there are other military interventions which involved British troops which have disappeared from popular memory. One commonly quoted statistic is that the British armed forces have been involved in combat operations since 1945, with 1968 as the sole year in which UK military personnel were not in harm’s way. This small-scale engagement of British troops has been overshadowed by the far more dramatic experiences of the US and French contingents, culminating in the Hezbollah suicide attacks on the US Marine and French barracks in Beirut on 23 rd October 1983. While researching the latter, I included a brief description of the British Army’s involvement in the US-led Multinational Force in Lebanon (MNF) from August 1982 to January 1984. This edition will contain articles on Gender and Peacekeeping, on Oceania’s role in UN and other operations, as well as chapters focusing on Bangladesh, Ghana, Malawi, Rwanda and the United Kingdom’s approach to this type of military operation. In August the Round Table, the Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs, will publish a special edition on ‘The Commonwealth and Peacekeeping’, produced to mark over sixty years of peacekeeping operations since the establishment of UNEF after the 1956 Suez Crisis.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |