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The Warrenpoint ambush, also known as the Narrow Water attack or the Warrenpoint massacre, on 27 August 1979 was a guerilla action that resulted in the British Army's greatest loss of life in a single incident during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Ambush

This Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) ambush resulted in the death of 18 British soldiers. A 500 kg bomb hidden in a lorry loaded with hay, parked close to Narrow Water Castle, was detonated as an army convoy drove past. The explosion killed six members of the Parachute Regiment ("Paras"). Twenty minutes later a second device exploded close to the gate lodge on the opposite side of the road. The IRA had been studying how the British Army acted after a bombing and correctly assessed that the soldiers would set up a command centre in the nearby gate house. The second explosion killed 12 soldiers, another 10 from the Paras and 2 from the Queen's Own Highlanders who had been airlifted into the area following the first bomb detonating.

Following the first explosion the British soldiers, believing that they had come under attack from IRA forces, began firing across the narrow (57m) maritime border with the Republic of Ireland. An innocent British civilian, Michael Hudson, was killed by British forces, and another seriously injured, in this small arms fire. It has been suggested that the soldiers mistook the explosions of live ammunition from one of the trucks destroyed in the original explosion for enemy fire from across the riverine border.

Consequences

Narrow Water happened on the same day as Lord Louis Mountbatten, a cousin once removed of Queen Elizabeth II, was killed by an IRA unit in Sligo. The death of such a senior royal made the Warrenpoint ambush a footnote in that day's British news although, ultimately, the death of 18 British soldiers increased the move to Ulsterisation. The ambush also reinforced the British Army practice, already in place since 1975, of supplying their garrisons in South Armagh by helicopter. The IRA had effectively denied them the use of roads in the region.

See also

• The Troubles in Warrenpoint

Notes

1. Soldiers die in Warrenpoint massacre — BBC News On This Day feature
2. Sutton Index of Deaths — from the CAIN project at the University of Ulster

• The Troubles in County Down
• Provisional IRA actions
• 1979 in Northern Ireland
• Military history of the United Kingdom
• PIRA killings