Chapter 7: Observations on the Balcombe Street Siege

Abstract

Joe O’Connell and his three companions did not set out on the night of December 6th with the express purpose of taking a middle-aged couple hostage in their own home. Their target was a shooting attack on Scott’s seafood restaurant and possibly other unknown targets in the West End. It is interesting that the four men chose to attack the restaurant with gunfire rather than with a thrown or placed bomb. This is probably best explained by the leak of the police dragnet operation in the London Evening Standard newspaper that outlined how the Met intended to flood the streets of London with unarmed plainclothes police officers, on the prowl for the IRA men. Pausing outside a restaurant to fire from automatic and semiautomatic weapons would take less time and expose the ASU to less risk of being apprehended than if they stopped and got out of their vehicle to mount a bomb attack. They also chose to use the folding stock M1 carbine and the WWII era Sten gun as the primary weapons during the attack and had the Sten fail on Butler again without firing a shot. Although the failure of the submachine gun probably save the lives of several police officers later that evening, we are forced to question the wisdom of the ASU’s strategy in depending on a notoriously unreliable weapon, just because it was easily concealed in Butler’s canvas bag. Nevertheless, the ASU did rely on the Sten; it