THE TRADITIONAL/MODERN BODYGUARD

Historically speaking, there are two types of bodyguard – traditional and modern.

The traditional bodyguard required no great skill and basically was the brawn that stood in the way of the stone, spear, arrow, or in more recent times, the bullet. Two historical developments sounded the death-knell of traditional bodyguarding.

First was the rise of Parliamentary democracies from the 18th Century. This led to the formation of police forces, which also became the protectors of leading political figures. This also created the conditions in which non-democratic groups would resort to assassination and acts off terror in an attempt to seize control or influence social or political direction. Groups such as anarchists, communists, ultra nationalists and fascists.

The second important historical development was that of modern warfare. The American Civil War (1861-1865) was the first of the ‘modern’ wars. This saw the development of, amongst other things, submarines, scoped sniper rifles, tapping of telegraph lines, modern stable high explosive engineering, and of course the first machine gun.

These developments let directly to modern weapons and explosives, which lent themselves to acts of assassination, sabotage and terror. As an aside, the first Irish Republican acts of terror using IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) in England occurred after the Civil War, many of the Irish Republicans receiving their military experience in the Federal and Confederate forces.

Obviously, attacks on VIPs including IEDs, sniper rifles and revolvers presented challenges to traditional bodyguarding – challenges that history shows they failed to meet. Think of millions of lives that might have been saved if the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria had been foiled in Sarajevo in 1914. And, if the reformist Czar Alexander II had not been killed by the bomb attacks in 1881, Russia might never have drifted into revolution.

Hitler’s use of assassination and terror began in 1934 with the assassination of Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfus, and the subsequent annexation of Austria that led to World War II.