Massacre in West Cork (3 page)

Owing to the summary rejection by the German Government of the request made by his Majesty’s Government for assurances that the neutrality of Belgium will be respected, his Majesty’s Ambassador to Berlin has received his passports, and his Majesty’s Government declared to the German Government that a state of war exists between Great Britain and Germany as from 11 p.m. on August 4, 1914.
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By the end of August all of Europe was at war. Most people believed that this war, like many others, was just a small one and would be over by Christmas. Instead the war would last four years and be a mincing machine that claimed millions of lives.
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Soon after this declaration of war, Irish Home Rule and Welsh Church Disestablishment were enacted and then shelved on 17 September.
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However, when the war broke out there was much enthusiasm for the fight. The Irish Parliamentary Party leader, John Redmond, urged the Volunteers to:

Go on drilling and make yourself efficient for the Work, and then account yourselves as men, not only for Ireland itself, but wherever the fighting line extends, in defence of right, of freedom, and religion in this war.
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Eighty thousand new Irish recruits signed up in the first six months of the Great War. They were formed into three divisions and first saw action in 1915. The 10th Irish Division will always be associated with Gallipoli, while the 36th Ulster and the 16th Irish Division served in France. Both took part in the Battle of the Somme, with the 36th going over the top on 1 July 1916, the first day of the battle. In twenty-four hours the division suffered 5,500 killed, wounded or missing out of a total of about 15,000.

The mostly nationalist 16th Irish Division was introduced to trench warfare in early 1916. Out of 10,845 men, this division suffered 1,496 deaths (13 per cent) in the relatively quiet Loos Sector between January and June 1916. As well as this, 345 were gassed at the Battle of Hulluch between 27 and 29 April. In late July the division moved to the Somme Valley to draw the Germans away from ‘bleeding the French white’ at the great French fortress of Verdun, but the cost in men was appalling.
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Some 224 officers and 4,090 men of the 16th Division were killed or injured between 1 and 10 September (40 per cent), while capturing and holding the towns of Guillemont and Ginchy. Despite this huge attrition rate the division gained a reputation as first-class shock troops.

However, in the new nationalist Ireland there would be no triumphant welcome home for the troops. Listening to the reports of the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, Tom Kettle, a nationalist MP who would later be killed on the Somme, had correctly predicted: ‘These men will go down in history as heroes and martyrs; and I will go down – if I go down at all – as a bloody British officer.’
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The Rising surprised the British administration in Dublin Castle as much as everyone else in the country. However, as the Volunteers, the Irish Citizen Army and the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) were confused by a series of orders and counter-orders issued by Eoin MacNeill and Pádraig Pearse about the start of the Rising, whatever slim hope it had of succeeding quickly slipped away. Although MacNeill had ordered the Volunteers not to turn out on Easter Sunday, it was decided by Pearse and his comrades to start the Rising on Easter Monday instead. The small turnout in Dublin and the lack of action in the rest of the country meant that there was no hope of a favourable outcome.

The British government suppressed the Rising, but not without loss – 132 dead with more than 350 injured. Sixty-four rebels died. In total, 450 people died, 2,614 were injured and 9 were missing, almost all in Dublin. Military casualties were 116 dead, 368 wounded and 9 missing, and the Irish and Dublin police forces had 16 killed and 29 wounded. A total of 254 civilians died; the high figures were largely because much of the fighting had occurred in or near densely populated areas.
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Almost 3,500 were arrested; of these, sixteen leaders were executed at Kilmainham. Leader James Connolly had to be strapped to a chair for his execution as he was too badly injured to stand.

The Rising had little support from the Irish public, who blamed the rebels for the civilian deaths in the conflict. Dubliners jeered the prisoners as they were being transported to Frongoch internment camp in Wales. However, the executions shocked Ireland and public opinion swung behind the rebels. Asquith, who visited Dublin to see for himself what had happened, sacked the military governor Sir John Maxwell, which was taken as a signal that the response of executing the leaders had been too harsh.
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There is no doubt that the Easter Rising was an enormous shock to the British government and at any other time it is likely that its savage response might have been tempered by cooler heads. Within weeks the intelligence community in Ireland observed that ‘subsequently a feeling of sympathy with the rebels was entertained by many who had previously condemned the movement’.
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This included John Dillon, the new leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, who on 11 May told the House of Commons that he was proud of ‘these men’.
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Such was the confusion among British officials at their headquarters in Dublin Castle that a small nationalist party, Sinn Féin, was blamed for the Rising and catapulted from obscurity to the vanguard of the revolution when public opinion swung behind the executed rebels. It was not necessarily in control of the Irish Volunteers, but in British minds the two were linked. Yet despite the Rising’s iconic place in Irish history, it was not until the British government’s attempt to extend conscription to Ireland in January 1918 that the young men of the countryside flocked to the banner of the Volunteers. Many of the BMH statements note a large rise in membership at this time, which fell away when the immediate crisis passed in June 1918.

After the end of the Great War many returning soldiers across the world felt disillusioned. The sense of pointless sacrifice was particularly strong in nationalist Ireland,
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and the emotional double blood-sacrifice of the Somme and the Easter Rising destroyed the political centre ground where compromise might have been achieved. Irish nationalists gave up on the British parliament as it repeatedly failed to break the impasse. The parliamentary arithmetic in the British House of Commons meant that no deal that threatened the empire could be put on the table. Every line of the 1912 Home Rule Act was fought over by ‘die-hard’ Conservative members of the House who were not willing to modify the 1801 Act of Union in any way. In
The Unresolved Question
, Nicholas Mansergh, writing of David Lloyd George, Liberal British Prime Minister from 1916 to 1922, observes: ‘He desired, of that there can be little doubt, an Irish settlement, but not one at the price of his own and, what had become much the same thing, the Coalition’s survival.’
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As neither side was willing to compromise, war became inevitable.

As it happened many of the Curragh ‘mutineers’ had become leaders of the British Army both in the Great War and, following it, back in Ireland. Their unionism and their class consciousness had a bearing on their understanding and prosecution of both these wars. Evidence from the latter part of the Great War and late 1920 in Ireland suggests that after their victory at the Curragh this lethal military–conservative coalition was able to win the battles that mattered with the politicians who were nominally in charge of them. For example, in his memoirs Lloyd George clearly states that he felt intimidated by the military pressure into changing his mind and allowing the Battle of Passchendaele (in 1917), even though, when he had visited the Front just before the Battle of the Somme (in 1916), he was able to see for himself the folly of sending cavalry to face machine guns.
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The Cabinet Secretary, Maurice Hankey, later said that Lloyd George was afraid the coalition government would have fallen, so he ‘funked it’ over Passchendaele.
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The same happened in December 1920, when Lloyd George was persuaded by the generals, against his better judgement, to continue repression.

Many of these generals also moved effortlessly from the military to the political arena after the Great War, and the evidence shows that the military advice they were providing to the government over issues like Ireland was clouded by their personal politics.
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It is hard not to conclude that they had a wanton disregard for human life, and this dynamic should be borne in mind when the Irish War of Independence is discussed.
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2
The Politics of War

The Irish War of Independence officially began in Soloheadbeg, County Tipperary, on 21 January 1919, the day that the first Dáil Éireann was convened.
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This war was different to what the British were familiar with. They were used to fighting with people who openly showed themselves, but the Irish appeared, then disappeared back into the crowd, and the British forces failed to cope with this.
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It was not until after the Jews had humiliated them in the creation of Israel in 1948 that they started using the lessons the Irish war had taught them.
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Two years later in Malaysia they stopped the communist insurgency using their new tactics of isolating the insurgents by winning civilian ‘hearts and minds’,
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and these methods have been constantly refined since then.
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Yet, because such tactics are now not working for the US Army in Afghanistan, the merits of this British strategy are coming under renewed scrutiny.
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In 1919 the British Army was mainly a counter-insurgency force: it was too small to be anything else. The Army’s handbook for dealing with insurrection had been published in 1896 by Colonel C. E. Callwell and reprinted three times by 1906.
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It remained on the curriculum at Staff College in Sandhurst until 1923 and was the British officers’ ‘playbook’ for how to prosecute the Irish war.
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Its central theme was that in wars against ‘savages’ anything was acceptable, but when dealing with civilised opposition behaviour had to be toned down.
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Where the Irish came on this scale is unclear. Later reports to the cabinet by General Nevil Macready in July 1921 and Major Whittaker in September 1922 shine some light onto the imperial mindset. For example, General Macready, writing to Ian MacPearson, had revealed a vehement hatred of the Irish as early as 1919: ‘I loathe the country you are going to and its people with a depth deeper than the sea.’
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This was an interesting perspective, considering the fact that Macready’s grandfather was Irish and his wife was the sixth generation of her family living in Ireland. If the unconscious racism of these British military officers regarding subject races is typical, then it explains some of the behaviour tolerated on the British side during the war.
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The army did not have as free a hand in Ireland as it would have liked. When General Lord French arrived as viceroy in 1918, he wrote a memo to the cabinet explaining how he intended to enforce conscription, including a suggestion that aircraft should machine gun and bomb Sinn Féin ambush parties. The cabinet did not allow him to follow up on this suggestion.
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Ireland’s proximity to London had in previous centuries been a disadvantage, as the army could quickly move troops to quash rebellion. However, in a modern propaganda war, this close proximity actually worked to Ireland’s advantage, as the ‘enemy’ could stand up in the House of Commons and use information not in the possession of the relevant minister as a propaganda weapon. The stunning performance of a tiny opposition of 42 Labour, 5 Irish Nationalists and 36 Asquith Liberals in the House of Commons – which brought an enormous government coalition of 435 to account – was an essential, and often overlooked, part of the war. Ministers were often forced to reply to awkward questions about Irish issues without full knowledge of the facts, and made to look foolish when the real sequence of events emerged.

Much of the opposition’s information was supplied by war correspondents, many of whom went native and helped change perceptions of the struggle, both in Britain and around the world. Maurice Walsh’s well-sourced analysis of the British failure to control the news from Ireland during the war explains that it was only long after the British had lost the propaganda battle that they thought of putting measures in place to rein in the correspondents.
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Most of the war journalists could get the mail train from London at 11 a.m. and be reporting from Dublin by 8.30 that evening. More importantly, photojournalists – whose role was just coming to prominence – became central to the coverage. For instance, five days after the Kilmichael ambush of 28 November 1920, the
Daily Sketch
carried photographs of a burned army truck from the ambush scene. The photograph of the nearby farmhouse burned out as a reprisal, which appeared on the same page, would have generated as much sympathy.
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While the British
Rules of Engagement
allowed houses to be destroyed if British forces were attacked from them, the stark evidence of what this meant to ordinary people was not an image they would have wanted to appear publicly.
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Despite the fact that this tactic of burning property had been counter-productive in the Boer War and savagely condemned by English MPs for its stupidity and barbarity, the British forces used it again in Ireland, with equally disastrous results, as it strengthened support for the rebels and reduced support for the British.

When the House of Commons met two days after the burning of Cork, Sir Hamar Greenwood was questioned in minute detail about the events of that night and his efforts to blame them on the IRA were laughed and jeered out of the chamber.
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The British Labour Party report from its members who were in Ireland at the time of the fire put the blame firmly on the Auxiliaries. When the official report by General Strickland, Officer Commanding the 6th Division of the British Army in Cork and Military Governor of Munster from December 1920, was suppressed by the government in February 1921, there could be no further doubt as to who the guilty parties were.
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The speed at which the details of the burning of Cork emerged is in contrast to what happened at Amritsar in the Punjab on 13 April 1919, when troops under the command of General Dyer opened fire on an unarmed crowd of men, women and children, killing at least 349 and injuring more than 4,000. The first mention in the House of Commons was a two-line answer to a parliamentary question on 28 May.
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But it took a year for the full facts to come out.

For the Irish combatants there was absolutely no doubt about what was allowed and, more importantly, why many civilians were targeted. On 13 March 1920 New Zealand’s
Auckland Star
ran a report from its London correspondent about a series of warning notices that had been posted all over County Cork. Two examples will serve to show what was expected of civilians:

Civilians, who give information to the police or soldiery, especially such information as is of a serious character, if convicted, will be executed, i.e., shot or hanged (Catholic Church at Mitchelstown, County Cork). 

On and after August 24, 1919, every person in the pay of England (magistrates, jurors, etc.), who help England to rule this country, or who assist in anyway the upholders of the Foreign Government of this North-East Riding of Cork, will be deemed to have forfeited his life … (Knocklong, Co. Tipperary).
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No exceptions were made. Anyone could become a target, and the IRA was merciless in dealing with informers. Even to be seen talking to, or drinking with, the RIC was punishable by deportation or death, despite the fact that in some cases this was unjust. The logic was simple: a colonial power can govern only with the assistance of the colonised. Once those who assisted the colonial power could be compelled to stop, then, without complete repression, the coloniser would be compelled to leave.

When targeting government officials, the IRA made a distinction between ordinary civil servants and political civil servants. Police, revenue and legal officials like sergeants-at-arms were seen as legitimate targets. However, according to the statement of Richard Walsh, who was on an IRA committee to decide how to attack the British state during 1919 and 1920, the Land Commission, the Department of Education and the Post Office were off limits, because these departments did things that benefitted and provided funds to the general public including IRA supporters.
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As a result of this targeting, and especially the killing of Alan Bell, who had been investigating the whereabouts of Sinn Féin funds, many of the higher civil servants and the senior police moved their families into Dublin Castle, which became so crowded that wives were soon not allowed inside.
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From surprisingly early in the conflict, there were moves made on both sides to see if it could be ended through peaceful means. As early as 23 July 1920, a conference with the officers of the Irish government held at Downing Street had worked out that the absolute minimum the Irish would accept was what was eventually offered a year later – Dominion Status with fiscal autonomy and the permanent exclusion of that part of Ulster where the majority of the inhabitants wished to remain part of the United Kingdom. The people arguing most strongly for this settlement were the Irish, including W. E. Wylie, law adviser to Dublin Castle, and Sir James Craig, who provided evidence of loyalists in the south and west going over to the Sinn Féin side because it was running the country fairly.
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As was the case with any such meeting, views at this 23 July meeting ranged from the wildly pessimistic (Sir John Anderson’s ‘There would be a massacre of Protestants in the South and West’), to the optimistic (Major General Hugh Tudor’s ‘Given the proper support, it would be possible to crush the present campaign of outrage’).
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Initial peace moves began three weeks before ‘Bloody Sunday’ (21 November 1920), when the IRA killed suspected British agents in Dublin and the British fired into the crowd at a football match in Dublin’s Croke Park sports ground, killing fourteen people including the Tipperary player Michael Hogan, after whom the main stand in the modern stadium is named.
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While the negotiations were continuing, Lloyd George and Michael Collins were publicly talking up the war, proving yet again that great politicians may never lie but they certainly can omit a large amount of the truth.
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In a book published posthumously in 1923, Collins would claim:

Seven months before England granted the Truce of July, 1921, she wanted very much to withdraw the Black and Tans from Ireland and end the murderous war which she had begun to realise could never be won. A truce would have been obtained after the burning of Cork by the forces of the Crown in December, 1920, had our leaders acted with discretion … although terms of truce had been virtually agreed upon, the English statesmen abruptly terminated the negotiations when they discovered what they took to be signs of weakness in our councils. They conditioned the truce, then, on surrender of our arms; and the struggle went on.
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There is a large amount of evidence to support this claim. Galway businessman and IRB member Patrick Moylett left a detailed account of his dealings in London, on behalf of Sinn Féin founder Arthur Griffith.
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Equally, there are two documents in the Bonar Law and the Lloyd George papers from British civil servant C. J. Phillips which record his meetings in Downing Street with Moylett.
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Moylett claimed that Lloyd George took advantage of a telegram from Father Michael O’Flanagan, Vice-President of Sinn Féin, claiming to represent the party, and a motion from Galway County Council seeking a truce, to publish an impossible demand that arms be surrendered as a condition.
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He also said that a letter from Hamar Greenwood threatening his resignation if this demand was not included in any truce also persuaded the Prime Minister to tough it out for a little while longer. The Prime Minister told Greenwood on 1 December that the cabinet had agreed to his proposals of the night before (30 November), but the demand for the surrender of arms first appeared in public on 5 December.