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 over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.

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Anything Goes with James English · US Marine Fighting for the IRA - John Crawley Tells His Story · 18 Apr 2026 podcast

But the stuff in the Marine Island was, you know, some of, you know, there was some good stuff on it, but it was mostly just basic infantry stuff.

A lot of stuff thrown together, stuff we'd got from Weddy Bulger, things like that, you know, mishmash.

But the bottom line, it would have made no difference whatsoever to the IRA campaign if that had got in.

None.

It's a lot of weapons, but it would have made no difference to the IRA campaign.

It wouldn't because the IRA already had rifles and stuff like that, you know.

And I think the IRA needed more than...

weapons was proper training on the weapons they had and better tactics and things like that.

Well, in the States, we were just making progress on getting .50 caliber sniping rifles that would penetrate the jackets and the armor here in the North.

And, uh, we were, we were working on, um, uh, the Libyan, uh, shipment, which no secret now.

I mean, stuff came in from Libya and Dharan in the mid eighties that I'm not talking out of school here.

It's public knowledge.

Now, when I say we're working on it, I wasn't working on the, I was, uh, we were only supposed to transport it, but I, I, I had written a list to a member of the air leadership on stuff to get.

And one of them was like one of the 60 colors rifles, which had used the Marines, which is a cannon, uh,

And it turned out three shiploads of weapons came in from Libya with thousands of weapons.

I mean, a huge arsenal, the likes of which the IRA had never seen before.

But the real heavy stuff, the 106s, the 81mm mortars, the real heavy infantry stuff was on another boat called the Exxon, which was caught in November 1987.

So the real heavy stuff didn't come in, but still the IRA now had the capacity to fight an enhanced war of national liberation if it chose to do so.

You need three things to have any hope of success in fighting a war.

You need the skill, the capacity, and the motivation.

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