Page 89 - The History of the Royal Army Veterinary Corps 1962–2021

THE HISTORY OF THE ROYAL ARMY VETERINARY CORPS 1962 – 2021
in the first place?
This question was explored by Major Iain Rose
RAVC in his article ‘Why Are We There?’ for Chiron Calling (2005/6). In his feature, Major Rose reminds the reader that Cyprus has been the focus of military activity for over two millennia and conse- quently was destined to be ruled through conquest by whatever Empire or nation held sway in the Eastern Mediterranean at the time. Approximately 40 miles south of the Turkish coastline in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, Cyprus is around 300 miles from the Greek mainland, only 80 miles from the western seaboard of Syria. And only 250 miles to the South, lies Egypt’s capital city, Alexandria.4
Alexander the Great, the Romans, Richard the Lionheart and the Knights Templar all commanded the Island for a time. Later, under Venetian ownership, Cyprus became part of the Ottoman Empire and gained a Turkish Governor to head its administration. And so, it remained for 300 years until, in 1878, the Turks agreed to cede control of Cyprus to Britain in return for the British Empire’s guarantee to assist the Turks in repelling Russian expansionism into the Turkish land mass.
What the Turks maybe didn’t fully appreciate was that Britain’s interest in Cyprus was all about its proximity to the Suez Canal. The Canal had opened 11 years previously, in 1869, and was providing a new commercial route to India – the jewel in the British Empire’s Crown. The majority Greek-Cypriot population welcomed the new British administration, believing that it was a step towards “enosis” or union with Greece which, although only distantly linked geographically, was seen as the mother country by Greek-Cyp- riots, giving origin to their language, religion and customs. However, after Turkey entered the First World War on the side of the German Kaiser, Britain annexed Cyprus. After an offer of Cypriot union with Greece – in return for military assistance – was rejected in 1915, the island was finally recognised as a Crown Colony in 1925.
Tensions did not ease in the least and the outbreak of the Second World War only exacerbated the existing instability. The war realigned the Cypriot position alongside Britain and its Allies’ response to the Nazi threat spreading across Europe. The arrival of the RAVC in 1939 to assist the British Expeditionary Force with Pack Transport was well-timed and re-assuring but post-war, the Greek-Cypriot community once again started to rail against British administration in Cyprus, believing that the British government was behaving disingenuously towards their desire
for self-determination. Britain had called upon soldiers from its Colonies to fight for freedom and democracy, but then assiduously ignored the wishes of the people within its own Empire to have independence.
In 1950, Makarios III became Archbishop and also a driving force for enosis, taking the subject to the United Nations and touring the World to engender support for the movement. However, the option of creating a separate Turkish Cypriot province was rejected as being too painful and impractical to implement. The situation was complicated when Egypt gained independence in 1954 and the British Middle East Military HQ was moved to Cyprus making the British position on Cypriot self-governance much more inflexible. Fuelled by the situation, Colonel George Grivas, a Cypriot-born World War II veteran, secretly funded by Archbishop Makarios, created an IRA-type terrorist organisation, EOKA, in 1955 and commenced a campaign of violence against the British administration on its military sites across the island.
By the mid-1950s Cyprus was seen as central to Britain’s (and NATO’s) strategic overseas interests being the home of much of its signal intelligence tasked with gathering assets and vital information from the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War. The island was also about to become the forward mounting base for Britain’s flight of Vulcan bombers, which were located on Cyprus in readiness to carry a nuclear payload to halt any Soviet advance across Iran or Iraq which would threaten the Middle Eastern oilfields. Soviet control of Europe’s sole source of crude oil would have been dealt a crippling blow during a period of economic and industrial recovery from wartime impoverishment.
Between 1955 and 1959, the island descended into rebellion and inter-communal violence.
Major Rose refers to the Governor of the island, former Field Marshal, Sir John Harding and how he pursued a hard-line against EOKA, and at the height of the troubles controlled twenty thousand British troops in Operations against the rebels. The island’s terrain was ideal for the terrorists and searches were conducted on an enormous scale across the mountainous Troodos area. Just as they had in concurrent anti-terrorist campaigns in Kenya and Malaya, RAVC trained dogs were used extensively to defeat insurgent fighters. Guard dogs were used to protect government and military sites whilst Tracker and other Specialist dogs, in particular the Hide-search dog, flushed phantom
4 Noting the capital of Egypt was Alexandria from 331 BC until 641 AD, but is now known as Cairo since 972 AD.
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