How did Britain Respond to 9/11?

On September 11th, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 were hijacked and flown into the World Trade Centre towers in New York. Within the hour, American Airlines Flight 77 was highjacked and crashed into the Pentagon. Minutes later, calls came in from United Airlines Flight 93, reported that they too had been hijacked and were headed for Washington. On this plane, the passengers managed to overcome the hijackers and crashed into a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.

The largest terrorist attack in American history shook the nation to the core, and the world would never be the same.

Over here in Britain, the events of September 11th were met with shock. Sky News, BBC and others scrambled to make sense of what was going on.

Included among the almost 3,000 casualties were 67 British nationals, making 9/11 the largest loss of British life in any terrorist attack in history.

No one had seen an attack on this scale before, 9/11 was unprecedented in scale, intricacy and consequence. It heralded in a huge shift in British security restrictions and policy. Counter-terrorism became a major priority, emergency responses were reinvented and renewed to focus on this new threat.

For the first time, the threat could be coordinated, in multiple locations, across the country all at the same time. Suicide attacks were practically unheard of, opening up a whole new world of violence and extremist opportunity.

Structural restrictions and obstacles were put in place: concrete barriers and fencing, airline-style searches and restricted access passes were almost immediately rolled out. Ever since 9/11, armed police have been a common fixture throughout London and many large cities. Airlines, landmarks, government buildings and iconic locations all upped their security, bringing in stringent policies and restrictions to try and ensure that nothing on the scale of 9/11 could ever happen again.

It wasn’t long before America made their intentions to eradicate the perpetrators of 9/11 very clear.

Almost immediately, Prime Minister Tony Blair pledged Britain’s allegiance to the American cause.

After the Taliban repeatedly refused to cooperate, and used their demands for extra investigations as a time-wasting tactic, America finally had enough. Operation Enduring Freedom began on October 7th 2001, with both British and American forces launching aerial bombings of Afghanistan.

And so began what would become one of the most complicated, political, and long-standing wars in modern British History, with the final soldier only leaving in 2021.