The Squad (23 page)

‘Shut up,’ the leader said.

‘Why should this happen to me – what have I done to deserve this?’ Crawford’s wife asked.

‘You shut up too!’

‘You bloody well clear out of this country within twenty-four hours or we will come back tomorrow night and do for you.’

Charlie Dalton recalled the details of another operation: ‘On the Saturday night I stopped as usual in the “dugout” were we used to stay while on the run … This was located in the unoccupied portion of Summerhill Dispensary, and we gave accommodation for the night to several other Volunteers who were going into action in the morning.’ Before curfew he went to Harcourt Street to meet Paddy Flanagan and the men of the third battalion who were to accompany him to 28 and 29 Upper Pembroke Street and they fixed a rendezvous time for the morning.

‘When I arrived at Upper Pembroke Street on the Sunday morning,’ Dalton continued, ‘I met Flanagan and a few other Volunteers. I explained to Flanagan that we had no keys for the hall doors in order to gain admission, so we went over our arrangements.’ As it happened, when they reached the front door it was open, as the hall porter James Green was shaking some mats.

About eight men entered the house. Two men stayed in the hall while the others divided into two groups and went up the separate staircases.

‘I accompanied Flanagan and two other Volunteers to a room at the top of the house,’ Dalton explained.

Meanwhile Major W. Woodcock was heading down for breakfast and his wife was looking out their third-floor window while dressing when she noticed a man slip over the back wall and drop into the back garden. Leo Dunne had been ordered to secure the back entrance to the property and to hold up anybody in the back or the kitchen area of the house. Woodcock took a revolver out of his pocket and checked before creeping forwards towards the building. She screamed to her husband. He came back, witnessed what was happening and told her to keep an eye on the man while he rushed downstairs to warn his colleague, Lieutenant-Colonel Hugh F. Montgomery. As he went downstairs he saw Green talking to two men holding revolvers. The men ordered Woodcock to come down, put up his hands and tell them his name. When he replied one of the men said: ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes. Do not forget there are women in the house.’

‘We know it.’

Woodcock was ordered to turn around and face the wall. At that point he heard Lieutenant-Colonel Montgomery open the door of his room and he shouted to him to look out.

‘Hands up,’ one of the men shouted and Montgomery complied.

At that point Dalton and Flanagan had reached the top floor elsewhere in the house. One of them knocked at the door and when Major C. M. G. Dowling, who was already dressed, answered it, they shot him dead. They also mortally wounded Captain Leonard Price in the next room. He died within a matter of minutes.

Once those shots rang out one of the men fired at Mont gome r y, who fell forward, and the same man then shot Woodcock.

‘My husband and myself were awakened by a loud knocking,’ Captain B. C. H. Keenlyside’s wife recalled. ‘Men dressed in overcoats and raincoats, and wearing cloth and felt hats filed methodically into the bedroom. They shouted roughly at my husband, “Get up, and put up your hands”, which he did. They hustled him downstairs, clad only in his pajamas. I protested and begged them not to hurt him, holding the arm of one of the raiders. He assured me that I would not be hurt, and pushed me roughly back into the room. I followed them immediately out, and saw another officer being taken downstairs with his hands up.’ This was Lieutenant R. G. Murray.

‘They then placed him and my husband side by side in the hall, demanded their names, and fired at them, wounding the officer in the back and my husband in the jaw, both arms and upper part of the forehead,’ Keenlyside’s wife continued. ‘I ran down and helped him quickly upstairs to our bedroom. I had roughly bandaged him when doctors and nurses arrived, and he was conveyed to an adjacent nursing home.’

The experienced gunmen had been on the top floor. Most of their colleagues were young and anxious. This kind of cold-blooded killing was something new for them. They were so nervous that they could not shoot straight. Ned Kelliher had been left guarding the front door and had not seen what went on in the house, but the men coming out said that six men had been shot. ‘At the time they were under the impression that they were all dead,’ said Kelli her. They were so nervous, however, that they could not shoot straight. Although all of the six agents in the residence were shot, three of them survived.

One operation, on the East Road, did not come off at all as the spies had left that address the previous day and there was nobody in the house when the Volunteers arrived. The first battalion had no success either when they raided a house on North Circular Road. The lieutenant colonel was believed to have moved to another lodging on the eve of the attack. The targets in the East wood hotel – Colonel Jennings and Major Callaghan – were also missing. They reportedly spent the night in a brothel. Another target was missing from a guesthouse in Fitzwilliam Square.

Captain Nobel, another of the wanted men, was also absent when a group made up mostly of the fourth battalion raided 7 Ranelagh Road. Todd Andrews recalled that he walked the mile from Brighton Square to the canal at Charlemont Street Bridge, where he met up with Francis X. Coghlan, Hubert Earle and James Kenny at about 8.55 a.m. Joe Dolan and Dan McDonnell led the team. ‘We got a very ugly mission to perform,’ McDonnell explained. They were to kill a ‘British agent called Noble, and his paramour … They were both agents, and our information was that they both were the main cause of a member of our organisation, named Doyle, getting a very cruel death in the Dublin Mountains,’ McDonnell added.

Coghlan was carrying a walking stick which he stuck in the door to ensure it could not be closed when a teenage girl answered it. They brushed past her and walked straight up to the front first floor room where they expected to find Nobel. They had their guns out and cocked, ready to shoot him on sight as they burst into the room.

‘We found the room empty except for a half-naked woman who sat up in the bed looking terror stricken. She did not scream or say a word,’ Andrews recalled. The man they were looking for had apparently got up and gone on some assignment shortly after 7 a.m. When a man came out from the next room, Andrews almost shot him, thinking he was Noble.

‘He’s all right,’ Coghlan shouted. The man was a lodger in the house and was apparently the source of their intelligence.

Dolan and McDonnell turned the place over looking for Noble’s papers. There were only women and children in the rest of the house, but that did not prevent Dolan and his colleague from ‘behaving like Black and Tans’, according to Andrews. ‘In their search for papers they overturned furniture, pushing occupants of the house around, and either through carelessness or malice set fire to a room in which there were children.’

‘I felt a sense of shame and embarrassment for the woman’s sake,’ Todd added. But Dolan and McDonnell had no sympathy for her. Their orders were to shoot her and Noble, if the two of them were together, but not to shoot her alone. Hence Dolan took out his frustration on her. ‘I was so angry I gave the poor girl a right scourging with the sword scabbard,’ he recalled. ‘Then I set the room on fire.’

Coghlan, a married man in his mid-thirties with a couple of children of his own, was furious at such conduct. They were witnessing the tactics of the Squad for the first time. ‘Having seen the children to safety he directed Kenny to bring two more members of the company into the house, so that we could form a bucket chain from the tap in the basement (the only one in the house) to the first floor where the fire was becoming serious. Nearly half an hour was wasted putting out the fire before we were able to get out of the house.’ Neither Coghlan nor Kenny mentioned anything about the day, which later became known as Bloody Sunday, in their statements to the Bureau of Military History.

‘In our fourth battalion area there were at least four abortive raids,’ according to Andrews.

The operation at the Gresham hotel under Paddy Moran seemed to go smoothly. Twelve to fourteen men entered the hotel at 9 a.m. One of the men was carrying a sledgehammer. Some wore hats pulled down, but they wore no masks. They held up the staff and some guests in the lobby and ordered them to raise their hands and face a wall. ‘Our first job was to disconnect the telephone,’ Paddy Kennedy noted. They then checked the register. ‘Our party split up, as pre-arranged, and proceeded to the rooms allotted to them by Paddy Moran,’ continued Kennedy. ‘I remained with Paddy Moran while the shootings were taking place.’

Hall porter Hugh Callaghan was ordered take them to rooms 14 and 24. L. E. Wilde, aged thirty-nine, occupied the first. They knocked on the door, and he answered in his pyjamas. He was shot two or three times, and fell, fatally wounded, face down. The raiders then forced the door of Number 22 and shot Captain Patrick McCormack of the Royal Veterinary Corps as he was sitting up in bed reading a newspaper. He was hit five times, once in the head. To cries of ‘Shame’, Hamar Greenwood later told the House of Commons that McCormack’s body had been horribly disfigured. ‘The hammer was possibly used as well as the shots to finish off this gallant officer.’

Michael Collins later admitted that McCormack was a case of mistaken identity. His interests were in sport, not politics. He was actually due to leave for Egypt shortly, where he was to take up duty as starter for the racing club. The other target at the Gresham was not in his room. ‘The third man escaped,’ reported Kennedy. ‘He was a Catholic, I believe, and had gone out to early mass.’ The whole operation lasted less than ten minutes.

The men who called at 28 Earlsfort Terrace asked for Captain Fitzpatrick. They were told that there was no one of that name there, but there was a Captain John Fitzgerald, the son of a Tip-perary doctor who had been a prisoner-of-war in Germany. He had joined the RIC some months earlier and had been stationed in Clare, where he was lucky to survive an IRA kidnapping. He had been in Dublin having his wound treated. He was found in his bed, having been shot four times, twice in the head and once in the heart. The other wound was to his wrists as he was obviously protecting himself.

Captain Baggallay, a court martial official who had lost a leg in the war, was shot dead at his residence at 119 Lower Baggot Street.

Captain Newbury was living with his wife in a flat at 92 Lower Baggot Street. A housekeeper admitted about ten men, led by Bill Stapleton and Joe Leonard of the Squad. They asked if Captain W. F. Newbury was in, but the housekeeper did not know. The landlady, seeing the men, immediately fled upstairs and said that she did not see what ensued. But the raiders obviously knew where to look because they went up to Newbury’s first floor room and knocked on the door. His wife answered and, seeing the armed men, promptly slammed the door, but they broke it in. Newbury and his wife fled to an inner room and but he was shot through the door. He tried to get out a window, but they shot him some seven more times and he died on the window ledge. His distraught wife, who was heavily pregnant at the time, put a blanket over the body hanging halfway out the window.

‘Where are the papers?’ one of the assassins asked her, and they then searched the room. She gave birth to a stillborn baby a week later.

The ten-year-old son of Thomas Herbert Smith, the owner of 117 Morehampton Road, answered the knock on their door and some ten men pushed their way into the house. Captain Donald L. MacLean and his wife were asleep in bed when the men entered their room.

‘Get up,’ one of them said to MacLean. He got up and left the room with them. Kate MacLean tried to follow her husband, but she was ordered back into the room as they took him upstairs. She heard them ask her husband his name.

‘MacLean,’ he replied.

‘That is good enough,’ someone said. They shot him, along with the owner of the house (who was living there with his wife and three children), and Kate MacLean’s brother, John Caldow, who was a former soldier with the Royal Scots Fusiliers. Although shot just below the heart, Caldow managed to recover. It was Sergeant Patrick Mannix who first identified MacLean as one of the undercover agents. He later explained that Smith was also considered an agent and that was why he was shot.

Tom Keogh and Jim Slattery of the Squad had six men from E Company of the second battalion undertake the attack on 22 Lower Mount Street. ‘We knocked at the door and a maid admitted us,’ Jim Slattery recalled. ‘We left two men inside the door to see that nobody would enter or leave the house, and the remainder of us proceeded upstairs to two rooms.’ They already knew the number of the rooms of the men they wanted – McMahon and Peel, both
noms de guerre
.

The group then split up with Keogh and some of the men going to Peel’s room, while the others went up to the top floor to McMahon’s room.

Peel had locked his door and, sensing trouble, pushed some furniture to barricade the entrance. Unable to get into the room, the men outside began firing into the door, up to seventeen bullets, but Peel was physically unscathed. When he was finally relieved, he was almost incoherent with excitement. As the shots were being fired at his door, a maid shouted out the front window: ‘They are killing an officer upstairs,’ she cried.

At that moment a lorry with auxiliaries was passing. They had just left their Beggar’s Bush base en route to Kingsbridge (now Heuston) railroad station. Hearing her and the shooting inside the building, they stopped and rushed to the door. They tried to gain entry but the two men guarding downstairs were holding the door.

At one point Billy McLean put his hand around the door with a pistol and fired. The auxiliaries returned the fire and MacLean was hit in the hand.

Two of the auxiliaries – Temporary Cadets Frank Garniss and Cecil A. Morris, both Englishmen – were sent back to Beggar’s Bush on foot to get reinforcements, while some of their colleagues went in through No. 21 to get access to the back of No. 22.