On Saturday 10 June a meeting was being held in a half-finished social club in Ohio Street in the Woodvale. Around 150 UDA men were packed into the building which had previously been a corner shop. The windows were still covered with corrugated iron to deter prying eyes from the street outside but inside a new set of wooden stairs had been built and fresh cyclamen coloured wallpaper covered the walls which rose up to plastic tiles across a broad ceiling. It certainly didn’t give the impression of a paramilitary meeting place, but the men inside were wearing khaki combat jackets and bush hats pinned up at the left side which made them look like Boer commandos.
The atmosphere in the club was described by The Observer journalist Simon Smith, who had been invited to watch the meeting, as ‘desperately military’. [The Observer, 11 Jun. 1972, p.2] ‘Bottles and glasses have been sent back to the tiny bar, and card games abandoned. One man even asks the local leader, who is standing by a blackboard at the end of the room, for permission to go to the lavatory.’ The average age of the men was around 20 with several of those in attendance well into their forties.
As Smith watched the club fell into a hushed reverence. Dave Fogel stood up and began to speak to the men under his command, many of whom were crouched at his feet. ‘From 11 tonight until midnight Sunday there are going to be no-go areas. But not like the other no-go areas. This time we are going to block the main roads.’ Fogel understood the potential ramifications of his strategy. ‘Now the army has told us they won’t go into no-go areas unless we block main roads. So we can anticipate the army will move in against us’, he explained. Moving toward the blackboard on the wall Fogel proceeded to sketch a local street map in chalk. The WDA, he explained, were to use guerrilla tactics, put up total resistance to the army and continue to set up more barricades up and down the Shankill Road to keep troops on their toes.
‘What you’ve got to remember’, continued Fogel, ‘is that this is provincewide, and that the army are going to be really tied up. That means that the soldiers in Leopold Street, round the corner here, are going to be on the go for 48 hours.’ As the men listened intently Fogel told them ‘You must expect to provoke a lot of reaction from the IRA, so we’re going to lay on enough to defend ourselves.’
Three or four out of every fifty men would be armed but Fogel warned his men not to fire on the army under any circumstances. Cars, however, would be hijacked and burnt out to create barricades. Each hijacking squad was expected to steal five vehicles. One man saw the potential difficulty with this strategy, particularly as it meant stealing cars from people in the Greater Shankill area; the people they sought to defend: ‘What if they won’t give us their car?’ Fogel’s response was matter of fact: ‘Prod ‘em on the nose, then. But we don’t want no unnecessary violence. Don’t molest families. By families I mean a man and his wife. Let them through. Tell them they’ll get their cars back on Monday morning. Of course, if it’s destroyed, tough luck. This is Ulster we’re fighting for.’ One of the men asked Fogel, ‘What about Taigs? Do we have to let bloody Taig families through?’ Fogel glanced at Colin Smith and said ‘Everybody.’
One of the men asked Fogel what he meant by ‘total resistance’ to the army; ‘Does that mean we can beat the hell out of them without actually shooting the bastards?’ Fogel was adamant that the WDA tactics must be restricted to social disorder rather than military action: ‘Total resistance means you throw a few bottles and stones, and then run away. We don’t want to be shooting any soldiers or peelers.’
The atmosphere had become electric and there was talk of PIRA trying to bring car bombs into the area. As he made for the door of the club to go back out onto the street, the man who had earlier asked for permission to use the toilet sidled up to Fogel and handed him a .38 revolver. Smith wrote about what transpired when Fogel took the gun from his charge: ‘He breaks the weapon to check its load before slipping it under his combat jacket. Later, at one of the barricades, he exchanges the revolver for a large automatic pistol of the Browning type.’
Fogel reminded his men that if firing from the Ardoyne was heavy, the army should be allowed through the barricades. ‘If the IRA come out into the open, we don’t want to be accused of making the army miss a golden chance.’ As the evening wore on into the small hours a peculiar atmosphere of mild panic and anti-climax settled on the UDA men on duty. Smith wrote of the barricade at the Cambrai Street junction being fired on: ‘we are given to lying flat on the pavement at the very sight of an approaching car.’
The army stayed clear of the area until 1.00 a.m. when a young lieutenant of the Royal Regiment of Wales accompanied by a lance corporal approached the Cambrai Street barricade where Fogel was greeted on first name terms before engaging in friendly conversation with the soldiers. They were concerned about one of their Land Rovers which had been hijacked at a nearby barricade. Rather than open fire on their assailants the soldiers had surrendered the vehicle. A grey Vauxhall estate used for plain clothes duty by the Military Reaction Force had also been stolen and Fogel announced that the army wanted that back too but that he wouldn’t be helping them.
Despite this the military weren’t provoked into taking action against the loyalists. By 3.00 a.m. the long-desired confrontation with the army hadn’t happened leading a disappointed Fogel to turn to Smith and remark: ‘The army have got to come, haven’t they? They can’t allow barricades like this, can they? I feel it’s been a bit of an anti-climax for you so far, but they’ve got to come before the weekend’s over.’ Making his way out of the warren of side streets in the Woodvale, Smith walked ‘down the Shankill Road with the dawn’, stating ‘there are three main barricades up before you reach the city centre. At most of them there are piles of bottles and broken bits of pavement. Grey, shivering men, sometimes masked, rise out of doorways demanding identification. “Give us a good write-up, then.”’