So it was that in the early hours of 9 August 1971 a large-scale arrest operation, codenamed Operation Demetrius, was launched, with thousands of troops and police despatched to round up the IRA. The first swoops resulted in around 340 arrests, but almost immediately it became clear that little was going according to plan. It quickly emerged that the RUC Special Branch had not kept pace with the rapidly expanding Provisional IRA and that its files were out of date and inaccurate. In any event many IRA men, suspecting that internment was on the way, had already gone on the run.
