Battle speech 'left men fearful''

The famous eve-of-battle speech from Colonel Tim Collins left the soldiers on the receiving end fearful, one of his subordinates has said.

Col Collins delivered his address to 1st Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment, before going into battle against Saddam Hussein's forces in 2003.

His speech earned lavish praise from the Prince of Wales.

But Captain Doug Beattie suggests, in a book, the oration gave troops "a little too much reality" by talking of death.

Capt Beattie, 43, from Portadown, was Col Collins's Regimental Sergeant Major at the time.

He is retiring in January after 27 years army service and in his book 'An Ordinary Soldier' he said he needed to use a "string of barely separated profanities" to kick the soldiers "back into life" after his colonel's speech.

"Whatever the men had been contemplating five minutes earlier, they certainly weren't now"
Dougie Beattie

Col Collins used his unscripted address to urge his men to be "ferocious in battle" but "magnanimous in victory" and "tread lightly" on Iraq's ancient landscape.

He told them: "It is my foremost intention to bring every single one of you out alive. But there may be people among us who will not see the end of this campaign.

"We will put them in their sleeping bags and send them back. There will be no time for sorrow."

Capt Beattie, said the speech had been rousing, but that the talk of casualties was "sobering stuff" that left "more and more frowns on men's faces".

"Maybe this was all a little too much reality," he said.

He said the speech had left the men "somewhere they shouldn't have been: thinking about home, wondering if they would ever return there again, fearful of the dangers that faced them".

Capt Beattie said he was "no orator", but that his profanity-strewn address to the soldiers had the desired effect.

"Whatever the men had been contemplating five minutes earlier, they certainly weren't now," he wrote.

However, when he saw his commanding officer he told him: "Sir, fantastic speech. The men are in no doubt about what you want and what they have to do to live up to the reputation of the regiment."

He noted that his commanding officer "seemed already to have forgotten what he had said".

Tim Collins told the Daily Mail newspaper that the speech "was never meant for public consumption".

"The very few soldiers there who had been on active service before knew exactly what I was talking about. It was a wake-up call," he said.

Colonel Collins said the speech's effect should be judged by his battalion's record in Iraq in the weeks that followed, when they captured "more territory than any other formation" but suffered no fatalities, or even serious injuries, despite fierce fighting.