Obituaries: General Sir Mike Jackson, former Chief of the General Staff

He had a gravelly voice and could be abrasive in manner if he felt a situation needed it but he was always a popular officer and always accessible to the media, with members of which he often enjoyed late night drinking sessions on his various tours of duty. Having carried on with these well beyond the chimes of midnight he would often be seen out for an early run the next morning.

He is perhaps best remembered for his crucial role in Kosovo in 1999 when he commanded a special Nato force deployed to avert the ethnic slaughter of Kosovan Muslims by Serbian forces who had already shown what they were capable of in Bosnia under the thug Ratko Mladic. Nato had already used its air power to bomb Serbia and Russia’s mercurial president Boris Yeltsin sent in Russian troops, ostensibly to help keep the peace.

His move was widely seen as an attempt to aid the Serbs and to upstage Nato’s role. The American General Wesley Clark, General Jackson’s superior as Supreme Nato commander in Europe, favoured a belligerent response and ordered him to block the runway of Pristina airport as a Russian force drew close to it.

Mike Jackson lived up to his reputation by facing down General Clark, telling him that a direct confrontation with Russian forces was outwith his mandate. The government in London supported him and Clark backed off.

There has been an element of hyperbole in talk of World War Three being averted. Some of this emanated from the fans of singer James Blunt. In 1999 he was, before finding fame and fortune in the music scene, a dashing young captain in the Life Guards and his role at Pristina was simply to obey General Jackson’s order and turn round the column he had been leading to the airport.

Nonetheless, bloodshed between British and Russian forces would have served little purpose and would have raised tensions in the area even more. General Jackson, skilfully defused any danger with his fluency in the Russian language and with a generous quantity of vodka and malt whisky he sharded with the Russian commanders. He went on, by his even-handed dealings with Serbs and Kosovans, to restore calm to an area whose ethnic problems have of course not gone away.

Inevitably, Northern Ireland cast its shadow over his army service. On Bloody Sunday in Derry 1972 he was a captain and adjutant in the First Battalion of the Parachute Regiment. Families of people shot dead that day by just a few members of the Battalion’s Support Company have been unforgiving in their response to his death.

He admitted in his memoirs Soldier that at the time he didn’t want to believe that discipline in his battalion had broken down on the day. In 2010 when the Saville Report, to which he gave evidence, came out he joined the then Prime Minister, David Cameron in his apology to the victims’ families for what had happened.

Nine years later he gave evidence to the inquest into the deaths of people in Ballymurphy in West Belfast in the violence which followed the introduction of internment in 1971. He urged all ex-soldiers who had been involved to cooperate with the inquest that 1 Para had come under heavy fire in the area.

There is evidence of IRA activity at this time but the inquest found that all but one of those killed had been innocent. General Jackson called events there “a hugely regrettable tragedy”. He was also a witness to the awful carnage at Warrenpoint in August 1979 when two IRA bombs killed 16 men from his battalion and two members of the Queen’s Own Highlanders. There is a graphic and moving account in his very fine memoirs.

Mike Jackson was born in Sheffield in 1944, His mother Ivy worked in the city’s museum and his father George was a regular soldier who reached the rank of major and took part in the D-Day landings in Normandy. In his memoirs he recalled a happy childhood though at the age of eight he went to a boarding school at Stamford in Lincolnshire.

He did well at languages there, including Russian, and joined the school’s cadet force. From there he went on to Sandhurst and was commissioned in 1963 in the Intelligence Corps but transferred to the Parachute Regiment in 1970, having taken time out to do a Russian studies degree at Birmingham University.

Promotions came in a predictable sequence for him. In 1981 he was seconded to the army’s staff college and reluctantly saw out the Falklands war at a desk job in the Ministry of Defence but he took command of a battalion of the Parachute Regiment. In 1990 he was back in Northern Ireland as a brigadier. 1995 saw him in the Balkans as a Major General. Kosovo followed and then he returned home as Commander in Chief, Land Forces. In 2003 he became head of the General Staff. Honours too numerous to name here were heaped upon him, culminating in his knighthood in 1998.

He threw his weight behind often unpopular reforms as historic regiments were merged and re-named. In retirement he was outspoken on defence matters voicing his doubts 30 years on from the Falklands conflict as to whether Britain still had the resources to re-run a similar operation.

He was married twice, to Jennifer Savery, with whom he had two children, Amanda and Mark, the latter of whom spent several years in the army. After a divorce in 1985, he married Sarah Coombe, with whom he had a son, Tom. She and all his children survive him.

Obituaries

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