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While TBA loyalists have flown many different flags, this tricolour representing the British Armed Forces has become their most distinctive symbol.
The True British Army or TBA is a militant organisation based in and around the southeastern part of England. It first arose in the postwar years among settlements of displaced persons north of London, led initially by surviving former British and American army and air force officers and former police officers. It gained support among other people sympathetic to British nationalism, including supporters of the British National Front and the newly created British National Party (BNP).
This form of the TBA broke into competing factions in the late 1990s. Some units began to regroup in the lawless area centred around the counties of Rutland, Leicestershire and Northamptonshire. By the late 2000s, the TBA had formed a new organisation that turned to waging an ongoing war against Essex and Woodbridge. In 2011 the leadership and structure of this TBA were crushed in a series of military operations by the two city-states, together with East Britain (who together had founded the Organisation of British Nations or OBN). The True British Army thereafter was forced deeper underground.
In the zones occupied by the three OBN allies, the True Army fomented a resistance movement that had both armed and political wings. The resistance made the occupation difficult to sustain in many places. Newly independent communities in the region continued to give varying degrees of support to the TBA until the end of the decade. The bulk of the TBA's remaining fighters and supporters were absorbed in 2020 into the new Commonwealth of Great Britain.
Due to the nature of the True British Army, it remains poorly documented and large amounts of the following article are based on conjecture and unreliable accounts. A good deal of its history had to be pieced together from the accounts of defectors, freed captives, and prisoners taken during raids by Essex and Woodbridge.
History[]
Origins[]
A group of Royal Army soldiers in the embryonic True British Army execute race rioters outside Luton in the nuclear summer of 1986.
The roots of the TBA go back to the city of Luton in the period immediately following the Soviet nuclear attacks of September 1983. One of the largest English cities to survive the blasts, Luton became the natural hub for survivors in the northern Home Counties and southeastern Midlands. But it was never possible to organise a coherent administration. The sheer number of survivors from Greater London overwhelmed both Luton and the regional headquarters in the Kelvedon Hatch bunker in Essex, the authority supposedly responsible for administering the area. Feeding and caring for so many people was far beyond the capacity of anyone.
With civil governments unable to function, a disorganised mass of police and military took charge, both in Luton and the surrounding area. No one was clearly in charge, but the communities were able to come together to loosely coordinate their activities. Attempts were made to resettle urban survivors in the countryside and put them to work in food production. This was no easy task. Besides the lack of such resources as fertiliser, the communities faced a lack of knowledge. Many of the existing rural population had fled in the face of the wave of newcomers, while many others had died in the complications of the postwar years. By 1986, the armed force that held Luton presided over a shrinking population of hungry, hopeless transplants.
That environment was ripe for racial scapegoating. Black and Asian Londoners found it difficult to compete for scarce resources, and when there was not enough, they often were blamed. Xenophobia was also growing: with the cause of the war still unexplained, many had come to believe that it happened "because of the foreigners", and it was a natural progression to turn their rage against their neighbors. Luton officials tried to take a stand against discrimination and racial violence, and in the hot nuclear summer of 1986, this stance led to cries that people from racial minorities were getting preferential treatment. A race riot erupted; fires burned throughout the city.
The army in Luton cracked down hard. Rioters - or anyone caught in the same place as rioters - were summarily executed in large numbers in an attempt to impose order. The brutality provoked a reaction, including among the police and soldiers themselves. 1986 and 1987 saw a long struggle between the two factions: the old authorities who had suppressed the riots, and a now militant opposition that, in its anger at the crackdown, had overcompensated and now pursued the same aim as the rioters: the expulsion of nonwhite people. The fighting caused a severe depopulation in Luton and the breakup of the loose regional unity that had existed. It marked the effective end of organised civil government in the English interior; all remaining centers of power were around the coasts.
The fragments of Luton's militant movement eventually gathered around the town of Milton Keynes. This is where they became the True British Army. This Army kept its racist motives and militaristic attitude even after the Luton riots were nothing but a fading memory; they became the unifying ideals for building a replacement for a Britain now truly lost. By the middle of the 1990s, the TBA was securely in control of Milton Keynes and was attracting allies in other nearby towns. Most of these armed groups could claim descent from police or army units, but they had evolved into something new. Some civilians were repulsed, while others admired the Army's ability to impose order on a shattered countryside.
Height of the first TBA and the Lewis Insurrection[]
The TBA grew in the mid-90s by reaching beyond its original core of veterans to attract young men who had been children at the time of Doomsday, the so-called Robbed Generation. These men were old enough to remember the world before and were filled with a yearning nostalgia for it, angry at the lot they had been dealt. British nationalism was an outlet for this anger. By now, news was spreading that the largest nearby surviving governments, Southern England and Wales, had adopted republican constitutions. This seemed to add insult to injury, and TBA supporters claimed that they wanted to fight for a true restoration of the United Kingdom.
The decentralised nature of the TBA allowed it to spread quickly. At its height in 1998 the True British Army possessed something in the region of 22,000 troops and many thousands more auxiliaries and supporters. Indeed, it was the first mass movement for British reunification since Doomsday. It controlled a large swath of the English interior through allegiance, intimidation or force. Opponents in TBA-controlled towns faced a bleak existence that could include slave labor. So could nonwhite people unlucky enough to still be in the area - the Army had not forgotten its roots.
In 1997 an internal power struggle brought an end to this period of unity and control. Colonel Isaac Lewis was a legendary TBA commander in charge of a large assemblage of units and towns to the south of the capital, including what was left of Luton itself. As he lined up more of the outlying parts of the Army behind him, Lewis decided to make a bid for the center. Speaking at a rally of TBA troops in the capital, the colonel vocally denounced army leadership. He accused them of harboring ambitions to centralise control of the True British Army, claiming that they wanted no less than the foundation of an "English Empire" with one of their own sitting in Milton Keynes as Emperor.
Lewis was nearly captured and executed, but troops loyal to him resisted and helped him escape. In respect of his strategic prowess and leadership skills thousands of men were already fanatically devoted to his service and joined him as he fled the city. Some seven thousand men flocked to his side in the first months of the Lewis Insurrection, a count which would be constantly replenished despite the attrition suffered by his side. Indeed, the civil war was such a great drain on the TBA's resources it was forced to try and replenish them through new means - and would be rendered catastrophically weak, highly vulnerable to a future disaster.
The war flared out fairly quickly, but fighting between pro- and anti-Lewis factions continued for a decade. TBA units split up and left the area, bringing their ideology and organisation to new parts of England. The original TBA never reunited. The strength of the core army dropped drastically at the beginning of the Lewis Insurrection as troops rushed to join the rebels, reducing loyalist forces to 15,000. By late 2007 is was estimated that the TBA had roughly 7000 remaining troops divided into seven Battalions (of roughly 1000 men), each battalion split into four companies (of 250 men) and each company split into squads of 20-25 men.
Regrouping and conflict with Essex[]
By the mid-2000s, the conflicts that had produced the True British Army were all but forgotten. Its original core area north of London was depressed and depopulated. The pluriracial communities of London survivors had scattered to other areas, in particular Essex, Woodbridge, and the "New London" settlements on the Kennet. Those who had remained as captives or slaves were also gone, either fled or died of ill treatment and overwork. The TBA still existed, but as an idea and an identity rather than a coherent group. Numerous armed factions and local regimes claimed continuity with it.
New enemies and scapegoats meant that there was still a call for the TBA's brand of militant nationalism. Norfolk became a particularly fruitful base of support. While stable, orgaised government was still elusive, Norfolk was relatively peaceful and its people had access to food, which made it an attractive destination for people in nearby coastal areas of Belgium and the Netherlands. A growing foreign population stirred up resentment, and TBA agitators were happy to take advantage of that. In addition, Norfolk was removed from the factional fighting that continued to smoulder in the aftermath of the Lewis insurrection.
Another source of resentment was the expanding influence of those same two survivor states of Woodbridge and Essex, which together with a third community, the emergency government of East Britain in southern Lincolnshire, were enforcing their rule over ever more roads and rivers in the east of England. Law-enforcement actions against bandits and highwaymen led to larger-scale operations in more remote parts of East Anglia. People in all three city-states were coming to see themselves as the indispensable key to Britain's future restoration, and this set them on a collision course with partisans of the TBA, who of course believed the same thing.
The TBA factions in East Anglia managed to reunite in 2006. This new iteration of the True Army was even more decentralised, lacking any single leader. They utterly disregarded the old Army hierarchy. Platoons operated autonomously, united by their common goals and common enemies. Soon even the old capitals, Luton and Milton Keynes, joined this new confederation; officers connected with the old Lewis factions found that their men no longer found these rivalries to be relevant. The reunited TBA established new governing bodies in Milton Keynes that took on the planning and coordination of a new round of offensives. This time the targets were clearly Woodbridge and Essex. And soon they were able to halt the expansion of their rivals' influence in the interior. Straying too far into the countryside became ever more dangerous for state officials. It was quite clear that they were facing not random banditry but an emerging new power.
In mid 2007 the TBA raids escalated and began to target outlying settlements of Essex. They took prisoners for slave labour and burned farmsteads and villages. In October the TBA organised its largest attack yet on some 500 Essex troops making their way to the Luton. After around half were killed, the remainder surrendered and taken captive. No word was dispatched to Essex. This 'dead silence' was to become a common TBA tactic, as it was often more intimidating than an actual reply.
In early 2008 Essex threw its full strength into a land invasion of Milton Keynes. The nature and rapidity of the attack allowed Essex to find most of the leaders of the TBA, who were captured and then publicly executed. The new governing structures of the TBA collapsed without leadership. But TBA's lack of central control meant that it could survive an attack on its centre. In less than a year the East Anglian platoons had regrouped and resolved to continue making war against Essex and Woodbridge. Weakened, the TBA was now a guerrilla organization undertaking raids into enemy territories to take supplies and captives.
In the power vacuum that followed the war, the TBA was unable to regain control of its former central territory. As it deepened its hold on key areas of East Anglia, its adherents held only isolated pockets across the home counties. The new nominal capital was Corby in Northamptonshire, where the commander was none other than Colonel Isaac Lewis, who was able to use his past reputation to attract a new group of adherents. In this new base, the TBA was rebuilding.
The wars of the early Tens[]
The attack on Milton did not dispel the tensions that had caused the TBA to clash with the city-states in East Anglia - now formally joined in the Organisation of British Nations. Though officially an economic union, the OBN proved to be a platform for the three states to coordinate their defences as well. During the next two years, all three states continued their attempts to extend control over their hinterlands, and the revived TBA continued to resist these encroachments. Platoons conducted renewed raids on outlying hamlets and trading caravans belonging to the three larger states. The army tightened its hold over its borderlands and prepared for another war.
The TBA by now was active across the counties of Northamptonshire (location of the capital), Southern Leicestershire, North Bedfordshire, North Buckinghamshire, East Cambridgeshire and Rutland. Traders based in Woodbridge, East Britain and Essex experienced growing threats along the roads over the course of 2009 and 10, and outlying hamlets experienced raids and skirmishes.
It was a conflict of different nationalisms: the True Army represented the British nationalism of the interior hamlets, diffuse, unorganized, with little government beyond the army's hierarchy. The nationalism of the OBN allies was rooted in their experience as coastal cities, highly militaristic yet valuing Britain's traditions of common law and civil government and for the most part accepting of racial diversity. Both sides ostensibly wanted the same thing, a strong restored Britain; but their competing ideologies and years of fighting made them see each other as enemies.
Rutland Water from the air.
In late 2009 the East Anglian TBA began building a major military citadel on the Hambleton peninsula, which is surrounded by Rutland Water. The peninsula is 2500 feet across and 9000 feet long and has only a small access point to the west. Leaders of the TBA, as a response to the formation of the OBN, feared a large-scale invasion of the type that had scattered the cell at Milton. Therefore the Humbleton facility would be a redoubt in the most defensible part of the TBA's area of operation. The new base was 7 miles north of the other capital at Corby and had a main road (the A6003) running directly between the bases.
In the summer of 2010, the allies had built up their conventional forces to a point where their commanders felt ready for a decisive strike. They planned an assault against Bury St. Edmunds and its surroundings, a key forward position for TBA raids. Forces from Essex and Woodbridge advanced on the town and endured nine days of bloody guerrilla combat before forcing their way into the town center.
However, this was no great loss for the TBA. Their units could easily regroup and the flat, boggy terrain of East Anglia offered few defences for the invaders but many hiding places for the guerrillas. The OBN continued the war along three separate fronts: Norfolk, Southeastern Cambridgeshire, and the Isle of Ely. By the end of June, the OBN allies had occupied most of this land corridor. The project to form East Anglia into a true state was crushed, its center occupied. The True British Army was weakened and fragmented, but its adherents were more determined than ever to stop this forced unification.
In July 2011, the EAS Warrior, an Essex airship, undertook several recon missions over the area controlled by the TBA. They discovered that the town of Corby had been burned to the ground and been abandoned, while the area around Rutland Water also had been substantially armoured with walls and towers around the towns of Oakham and Empingham, and many newly built buildings on the Hambleton peninsula in Rutland water, including large walls and a ditch system to cut the peninsula off from the mainland.
The allied armies of Essex and Woodbridge, together with the Parts of Holland (East Britain had recently renamed itself), and this time with support from new OBN members Cleveland and Northumberland, launched a full-scale attack against the fortified town of Oakham and the main TBA base on the Hambleton Penisula in late July and early August 2011. This attack effectively destroyed the TBA's stronghold. A group of TBA leaders committed suicide by detonating a large bomb just as Clevelander and Essex troops were about to be captured. Mopping up work continued for a few weeks.
Following the wars, the TBA's territory in East Anglia was subjected to military occupation as the victors attempted to police a far larger area than they were accustomed to. The Parts of Holland included some areas in its existing Holland Military Administration Zone (HMAZ).
Underground operations and political movements[]
The successful campaigns of 2010-11 shattered the TBA's credibility as a force for someday uniting Britain. But it never totally disbanded, and many platoons continued to operate underground. The Army was able to reinvent itself yet again. This time its adherents could take advantage of growing discontent in the occupied zones and the overstretched resources of the occupying powers. The Army no longer controlled any clear block of territory, but it was still capable of harassing its enemies.
During 2012, the resources of the OBN allies came under increasing strain. In the spring months a corruption scandal toppled the government of Woodbridge, occupying the political attention of the region at a time when they should have been adopting long-term plans for the occupied territories. That summer, England was hit with a cholera epidemic quickly termed "the White Death." A clumsy response by Woodbridge and Essex shook people's faith in the Organisation, especially outside the three core members. Moreover the outbreak and measures to fight it hampered regional trade. An economic crash had already been coming after a period of rapid expansion, overproduction and government expenditure (including the expenses of the wars and occupations). The White Death now served as the trigger for a major recession up and down the island. Cleveland, economically hit the hardest, withdrew its military support from the southeastern operations.
The OBN allies had no choice but to reduce their commitments in the occupied areas. This presented new opportunities to True Army loyalists. While armed cells continued hit-and-run attacks along the main roads, other former Army members got involved in local politics. They were behind new calls for independence. The first successful such movement was in Rutland itself, the former TBA stronghold. The region was still relatively isolated from the rest of the east, far from any important trade routes. Holland and Essex were reducing their troop levels, and leaders in the town of Oakham published a demand for complete demilitarisation and home rule. It was clear enough that True Army sympathies underlay the movement, leading one Essex editor to label the movement "home rule, nudge nudge" - a reference to the open secret of a TBA resurgence. The phrase caught on. In towns throughout the occupied zones, members of the "Nudge-Nudge Movement" now put increasing pressure on the OBN to withdraw their troops.
During the next two years, the allies had little choice but to give in to these demands. The newer members of the OBN withdrew one by one, frustrated by the constant setbacks. The occupying forces had to concentrate on smaller areas along the major land routes, and independent governments were restored in other places. There was no restoration of the pre-2010 TBA hierarchy - people in the towns and villages would not tolerate that - but the new civil governments were largely under the control of Nudge-Nudge activists whose sympathies favoured the True Army and opposed the OBN. In this way local states emerged in Rutland, Milton Keynes, the Isle of Ely and St Edmundsbury. TBA sympathizers also organised new confederations in Kent and eastern Norfolk, both areas that the OBN powers had never fully pacified. Meanwhile armed attacks continued on a small scale in occupied parts of Cambridgeshire and western Norfolk, and the new civil governments denied any connexion to them.
Thus the mid-2010s saw a third form of the True British Army emerge. The angry "Robbed Generation" that had formed the army's backbone in the 90s had grown up. Many of the fighters had moved on to local politics. Young men of fighting age were from the tiny "Lost Generation," born during the time of rock-bottom birth rates in the aftermath of the missiles. They had no personal memory of prewar Britain. While the leaders continued to fight for a restored Britain, including a king and queen, the new generation fought more to defend their communities - the small, tough, independent villages where they had grown up. They still by and large subscribed to the True Army's authoritarian ideology, militant methods, and ethnic and cultural chauvinism. But their dream was of a Britain where the larger states left the small ones alone to be ruled by their own people and the fighters of the TBA in particular. Many citizens supported them not because they wanted to wipe out the larger states, but because they hoped that the True Army could make them strong enough to join the community of English survivor states on equal terms.
Toward the Commonwealth[]
For the next few years, the two sides remained locked in a tense standoff. Neither side was strong enough, militarily or economically, to launch any large-scale attacks, but conflict continued in other ways. The newest form of the True British Army continued to organise raids against OBN positions, while the OBN waged military operations within the remaining occupied zones. Sporadic patrols ranged as far as Rutland, Milton Keynes and Norwich, which was enough to prevent any large massing of True Army forces but not enough to ensure steady control of the territory. Meanwhile, pro- and anti-TBA factions competed for political control of towns and villages.
Some were not satisfied by the more moderate, locally-focused direction of the True British Army. A few men longed for the army's glory days that they were too young to experience, the era of camaraderie and fighting for the total restoration of Great Britain. Hit-and-run attacks against the odd wayward patrol caravan failed to satisfy them. But they did not have much of a place in the growing settlements in the east of England. Instead, they turned west, to the Midlands. A new militant group called the Sons of De Montfort emerged in rural Leicestershire around 2012 and began to draw away some of the most radical TBA fighters. This was a wild region of small settlements, but it also sat astride one of the main east-west routes across England. The Sons grew stronger as they extracted money and resources through tolls or outright robbery.
By 2018, the Sons had become a genuine threat to the small states of the east. Some outlying settlements in Rutland and Lincolnshire were abandoned. The situation called for a united response, something transcending the now decades-long divide between the OBN and the True British Army. All sides were affected: Holland, core member of the OBN; Kesteven, a smaller and newer OBN member; Lindsey, which had remained steadfastly neutral; and Rutland, still governed by independent-minded TBA loyalists.
The chief councillor of Kesteven Edward Poll now emerged as a rising diplomatic and military star. He managed to forge an alliance among this motley group of city-states on terms that were agreeable to all. He led the planning and execution of a land operation against Loughborough, a semi-abandoned town that was the key strategic point in the Sons' territory. The allied force successfully bottled up the Sons' core force in the Loughborough's abandoned nuclear bunker, at which point the leaders met to discuss terms. The settlement showed the same generous spirit as the alliance itself: Loughborough was allowed to remain an independent settlement and charge tolls on the overland trade, within limits.
The victory brought Poll extraordinary popularity both within and without the Organisation of British Nations. In 2019 he was selected to be the OBN's chairman. From this position, Poll fed a growing populist movement calling for a new body that could encompass the entire East while respecting the autonomy of the smaller settlements. The bulk of the TBA's adherents also got caught up in the fervour. The Pollist movement, many now believed, was the way to build a strong and united England led by the tough settlements of the east. Poll chose Ely, a city contested by pro- and anti-TBA factions, to lay out his plan for a Commonwealth of Great Britain under a Lord President, namely himself.
The Commonwealth became a reality in 2020 and signalled yet another great shift in what the True British Army was. Existing TBA units now came together with elements of OBN task forces to create a new British Army, reporting to the Council and therefore to Poll himself. The TBA identity endured, now designating certain British Army units, a few still-independent militias that cooperated with the new Army, and some local political factions. But it had been largely subsumed by the rapid rise of a new populism.
Organization[]
The True British Army has been through multiple incarnations, reappearing after each defeat and setback. It has changed from the age of the Luton race rioters of the 80s, to the military hierarchy of the 90s, the warring factions of 1997, the gathering state of East Anglia in the mid-2000s, the militant confederation under Lewis between 2008 and 2011, and finally the underground resistance movement of the 2010s. In the 20s, it continues to exist as an idea with which some parts of the new Commonwealth continue to identify. Through all these changes, there have been very few constants in the way the Army has organised itself.
Leadership[]
Prior leaders of the TBA took a variety of titles: 'His Lordship', 'The Boss' or 'The Colonel'. There was one leader who ruled the TBA with several dozen 'companies' lead by Captains and fellow warlords ruling over sections of the countryside. Although the true identity of the original TBA commander was always unknown, he was known to be a former British Lieutenant Colonel from the Royal Anglian Regiment, probably the Second Battalion and either C or D company (based in Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire, and Hertfordshire.)
In the late 1990s the most powerful commander was Colonel Isaac Lewis, a leader whose troops held him in fanatical regard. Following the anarchy after the 2008 war with Essex, Lewis managed to amass a new rebel army in a new capital, Corby in Northamptonshire, and proclaim himself the Army's top commander once again. By 2010 Lewis's headquarters was at St Ives, where he was captured in another attack by Essex.
Structure[]
The TBA was run on something of a feudal basis. It ruled over a patchwork of territories controlled by armed gangs. These gangs could almost always trace their roots back to prewar police and army units, or to criminal gangs and mercenary groups formed shortly after Doomsday. Collectively they were referred to as 'platoons' and could number anywhere between a dozen to a hundred men. The size of a platoon tended to be directly proportional to the size of the territory they controlled, with the smaller groups protecting villages and larger groups controlling swaths of farmland.
A larger TBA platoon on the outskirts of Luton. Balaclavas were both functional since they protected from radiation and very intimidating.
The disposition of platoons varied. Many were violent and abusive towards those under their control; this was particularly the case for platoons which controlled lands distant from their homes (for example, a Luton gang involved in conquering parts of Northamptonshire would have little care for the locals). Some more principled platoons would be more forgiving towards their populations and some were genuinely charitable. Platoons of more principled police and army units tended towards this. Many villages threw together their own platoons when TBA conquest seemed inevitable in order to pledge fealty and protect their number by making sure that their local representatives of the TBA were both light-handed and friendly. A few platoons were even genuinely subversive, protecting 'criminals' and the persecuted minorities. These platoons would be given a number and often adopt a name. A common fashion would be to have this tattooed onto the arm or, later on, on the neck.
Each platoon would swear fealty to a larger 'occupation battalion'. These controlled large areas of lands and were effectively the barons of the area, ensuring that there was no fighting amongst their vassal platoons (or only when it suited them). Occupation battalions got their name from their policing nature and the fact that they existed to step in and control the vassal territories directly when a platoon was away on campaign. Since platoons were often transplanted (or destroyed) because of this frequent movement and expansion, vassalage to the occupation battalions was a flexible matter. Occupation battalions tended to be from cities and were made of inexperienced troops. It was seen as a 'soft' way of introducing them to the harsh realities of post-Doomsday life and would be the first step into them joining a platoon and being permanently occupying a territory or on campaign.
Platoons on occupation duty differed only in how they ran their territories. When they were inducted into an army, though, they would quickly be given a role as per a conventional army, for instance as machine gunners, mounted or mechanised units. Selection was often based on what skills were already present within the platoons (large platoons with large territories needed to use horses or vehicles to get around so were understandably chosen as mounted or mechanised units) and was kept as consistent as possible, to avoid the wasted time (and wasted potential) retraining them.
Command of the True British Army was run in a more or less standard military fashion. In peacetime platoons had no nominal leader and were encouraged to work as a group, to avoid costly infighting over command positions. In wartime commanders would be selected from the top down, with the military government electing or selecting generals from their own number who were then expected to handpick the next layer of officers who would themselves select the next lowest rank of officers, and so on. Higher ranks possessed the prerogative to involve themselves in the selection process, an ability which existed to make sure that fresh blood was included in the command structure and to stave off cronyism and nepotism, though it was perfectly capable of allowing the exact opposite to occur. Field promotions were common given the high casualty rates in combat which created a certain fluidity amongst the lower ranks. Successful commanders of small grous of platoons would soon be noticed by higher-ups and be promoted. This created a dynamism inside the True British Army that ensured it had access to a steady stream of excellent commanders.
Occupation commanders were almost always retired officers from campaigns, and only rarely was the position achieved by climbing the ranks within the battalion. It had the added benefit of causing a healthy fear and respect amongst locals, an attitude which the True British Army was keen to foster.
The success of the TBA led some clans to claim to be part of the organization in order to exhort goods from the civilian population by way of protection rackets. When 'real' TBA platoons meet these fake ones retribution was swift and clear and involved torture and death.
Following the defeat in 2010-11 by the Organisation of British Nations, the platoon system persisted underground and came to resemble an organised crime ring more than an occupying army. A newly important activity was relations with local civic officials. Many local leaders following the invasions were TBA supporters, at first covertly, then more openly as the years went on. The continued use of balaclavas gave anonymity and plausible deniability to prominent people who wished to participate in the TBA. The armed cells continued to engage in violence against the OBN patrols, as well as intimidation of local politicians - both those who favoured links to the OBN states and reformers who saw the Army as a source of corruption.
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