Michael Jackson, British General Who Disobeyed U.S. Superior, Dies at 80
Labeled “the Prince of Darkness,” he refused to follow an order by NATO’s commander during the Balkans war, saying, “It’s not worth starting World War III.”
Gen. Michael Jackson, a former head of the British Army who was known as “the Prince of Darkness” for his heavy-hooded glare and gravelly voice, and who famously disobeyed an order by his American superior during the Yugoslav wars, saying it risked starting World War III, died on Oct. 15. He was 80.
His death was announced by the British Army, which did not say where he died or what the cause was.
General Jackson was Britain’s senior leader in the Balkans in June 1999 when NATO forces moved into the province of Kosovo to enforce a withdrawal of Serbian troops. Russian soldiers, who backed Serbia, made a surprise grab of the airfield outside Pristina, the capital.
Gen. Wesley K. Clark, an American and NATO’s supreme commander, ordered General Jackson to block the runways with tanks and troops to prevent more Russians from landing.
“No, I’m not going to do that,” General Jackson told him. “It’s not worth starting World War III.”
The insubordination was taken up by both men’s superiors — the American chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Henry H. Shelton, and General Jackson’s British commander.
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They resolved the dispute in favor of General Jackson, according to testimony that General Shelton gave to Congress.
In the British press, General Jackson was nicknamed “Macho Jacko” for his rebuke of General Clark. His words to the American were quoted as being sharper than they were in U.S. accounts. “I’m not going to start the Third World War for you,” he reportedly told General Clark.
In General Clark’s 2007 memoir, “A Time to Lead,” he omits General Jackson’s exact language in the incident but describes the Briton unflatteringly, as “exhausted and overwrought,” adding, “Washington backed down.”
In the end, General Jackson’s view — that Russia did not threaten NATO through control of the airport — proved correct. The Russians were absorbed into the international peacekeeping force.
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Rather than causing a career setback, General Jackson’s insubordination lifted him among his peers.
“The clash enhanced Jackson’s reputation as the most colorful character of modern soldiery,” The Telegraph wrote in a profile of him in 2007. The following year, Queen Elizabeth II named him a Knight Commander of the Bath.
In 2000, he was promoted to full general, also known as a four-star. He marched behind the coffin at the state funeral of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother in 2002. The next year, he became chief of the general staff, the professional head of the British Army.
Though he never experienced direct combat in his 44-year military career, he commanded the army during the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. He ordered an investigation into the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by British soldiers in Basra that year, which led to several convictions and to an apology to the Iraqis from General Jackson on behalf of the British Army.
Earlier in his career, he served as an officer in the Parachute Regiment in Northern Ireland during the so-called Troubles, the bloody clashes between Protestant unionists and Roman Catholic republicans.
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As adjutant of the First Battalion, he was in Londonderry in January 1972 when British paratroopers shot and killed 13 protesters during a march, an event that became memorialized in music and legend as Bloody Sunday.
In 2010, he offered what he called a “fulsome apology” for the shootings after the release of a government investigation known as the Saville report, which called Bloody Sunday a “catastrophe.”
The Guardian, in a review of “Soldier,” a 2007 autobiography by General Jackson, wrote that his account of Bloody Sunday was vague and unsatisfying. In the book, he expressed “his strong view that British soldiers would not have run amok, killing protesters,” added the reviewer, Peter Beaumont, then the paper’s foreign affairs editor.
The Telegraph, in its profile of General Jackson in 2007, noted that the prominent bags under his eyes, which contributed to a fearsome look — and to nicknames such as “Darth Vader” — had been surgically removed in his retirement. The eye bags, the newspaper wrote, had been “so seductive to his female following and such a gift to photographers.” They were removed to improve the general’s vision, not for vanity, the profile said.
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General Jackson commanded the Parachute Regiment’s First Battalion from 1984 to 1986 and was a leader of the United Nations’ peacekeeping force in Bosnia between 1995 and 1996.
When he retired from the military in 2006, the BBC said he was “one of the most widely known British generals since World War II.”
Michael David Jackson was born on March 21, 1944, in Sheffield, England, into a military family. His father, George, landed in Normandy on D-Day and retired after 40 years with the rank of major. His mother, Ivy (Bower) Jackson, was a museum curator.
Michael graduated from the Stamford School, an independent boarding school, and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He was commissioned an Army officer in 1963, in the Intelligence Corps, and at the height of the Cold War earned a degree in Russian studies from Birmingham University. He transferred to the paratroopers in 1970.
He was married in 1966 to Jennifer Savery, and the couple had two children, Amanda and Mark; their marriage ended in divorce. He married Sarah Coombe in 1985, and they had a son, Tom.
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He is survived by his wife, his three children and four grandchildren.
While serving in Northern Ireland in 1979 as a young officer, General Jackson witnessed the Warrenpoint massacre, when 18 British soldiers were killed in an Irish Republican Army ambush. The dead included friends of his.
“It greatly disturbed me,” he told The Telegraph in 2007. “Still does. But I don’t have nightmares. Fortunately, my temperament isn’t like that.”
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