John Crawley
speaker
1,569 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 18 Apr
John Crawley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Well, because I wasn't in an area where that was a factor.
I was mostly around the border in rural areas, things like that.
That was really kind of a Belfast situation, Mid Ulster, things like that.
Most people were... The training was very poor.
Who saw?
I kept hearing from the British that the IRA was this highly trained, highly professional force, right?
But when I joined...
Even I found the basics.
For example, you know, men might be brought down and shown how to take a rifle apart, put it together, where to put the magazine and when and the bullet comes out.
But they weren't, you know, they weren't shown things like how to adjust the sights for accuracy, proper controls.
cleaning lubrication of the weapon, immediate action drills for malfunctions, basic infantry stuff, and no training that I ever saw in tactics, how to move, shoot, and communicate as a cohesive team, none of that.
The IRA was good at explosives, and they had a very good engineering department, and they were able to manufacture a wide array of improvised devices like mortars, rocket launchers, things like that.
And
they probably inflicted most of the casualties on what we would consider the enemy than gun attacks and things like that.
Also, I found that sometimes the training was counterproductive because sometimes people were told the wrong thing.
For example, I heard men being told at camps that the British Army helmet was bulletproof to high velocity rifle fire, which it wasn't.
And, you know, a lot of misconceptions like that.
And I found it hard to...
to really understand why that was the case, because the IRA was full of people who had professional military training.
There was a lot of people in the IRA who had been in the British Army.
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