"On Sunday 30 January 1972 soldiers of the Paratroop Regiment had stormed into the Bogside shooting dead thirteen unarmed Catholics and wounding a further sixteen. 'Bloody Sunday' was the army's most significant blunder in Northern Ireland, an iconic event that would dramatically alter the course of the conflict. On the verge of defeat, the IRA was instantly revived by a stream of embittered recruits, submerging hopes of peace under a wave of terror bombings, assassinations and ambushes." "Despite hundreds of contemporary eyewitness accounts an official government inquiry exonerated the army, blaming instead the organisers of the march and the IRA, whom it said had started the shooting. For nearly thirty years the hidden truths of Bloody Sunday were locked in government files." "Vital evidence was gathered at the time by Peter Pringle and Philip Jacobson who were members of the Sunday Times Insight team. Using their research plus recently declassified documents and new statements from soldiers, civilians and the IRA, they have pieced together the first narrative history of that terrible day. It provides an intimate portrait of a city in revolt and the climax of a failed military response that plunged Northern Ireland into three decades of armed conflict. This account recovers the faces of the soldiers and the gunmen, the stone-throwing youths and the civil rights marchers who came together in a fatal fusion when Britain was at war with its own."--Jacket
