Missing in Action

by Ralph Riegel

  Brave as he was, Fr Verfaille was reluctant to get too close to the armoured car in case he was shot by mistake by either the UN troops or the gendarmes. He knew that the other members of the Irish UN patrol had already taken shelter in a building adjacent to the communications complex. Their vehicles now lay strewn across the roadway in front of the Radio College. But there were dozens of Katangan gendarmes now swarming around the area and he knew that he was being carefully watched. The gendarmes were acting under the orders of mercenaries who had been flown into the country by Moise Tshombe to defend his regime. The cleric also knew that, at this very moment, there were probably guns trained both on him and the armoured car.

  The missionary understood that the Katangan gendarmes were now specifically acting under the orders of the mercenaries – but he wasn’t quite sure if they were French, Belgian, British or South African. Whoever they were, these men knew how to use the heavy weapons that had just crippled this armoured car. Smouldering behind him was the blackened hulk of the bus that had transported the UN troopers to Radio College.

  The cleric glanced carefully around him. Just down the road the second UN armoured car lay abandoned, though it did not appear to have been too badly damaged. The jeep and the bus were also still where they had braked to a halt. There was no sign of any of the UN personnel and there were no bodies lying near the vehicles. Fr Verfaille prayed that no one would die this night.

  The fighting, which had been going on for almost two hours, had now been reduced to an ominous silence. Less than an hour ago it had seemed as if the very gates of hell had opened such was the violence of the ambush. It was so bad that the occupants of the mission lay huddled for shelter on the floor behind concrete walls. But slowly, the balmy calm of an early African evening was returning.

  The missionary prayed silently that the soldiers would negotiate a truce and end the bloodshed. The peace of the previous decade now seemed a long-distant memory and, like his fellow missionaries, he was caught up in a hurricane of violence beyond both his control and understanding. He made up his mind to make one final effort to talk to whoever might still be alive inside the armoured car before withdrawing to safety. He edged closer to the armoured car and banged on the heavy steel door and he shouted out his identity one more time: ‘I am missionary.’

  ‘Mercenary’. Pat Mullins was sure he could make out the word that had been shouted above the din of the roaring in his ears. It was muffled and heavily accented, but surely that was what had just been shouted at him from outside the armoured car. As he glanced over at Mick Nolan, the icy ball in his stomach transformed into a red cloud of rage. Surrender was out of the question and yet there was no way he could defend all four sides of the armoured car while it was stranded almost in the middle of the road. If it stayed motionless the old Ford was a sitting duck for any anti-armour weapons the Katangans possessed.

  Besides, if he surrendered, what would happen to Mick? No one knew what the Katangans’ policy was towards wounded soldiers and Pat didn’t want to find out. Fresh in his mind was the realisation that the Katangans had themselves suffered heavy losses in the UN operations the previous day. They obviously weren’t going to take too kindly to the UN soldiers they held responsible for those losses.

  Pat decided to adopt the cavalry squadron adage that movement was the best strategy. He had to get the old Ford started up and moving again. He realised that he first had to get the gendarmes and mercenaries back from the car, then start the engine and try to limp back to base where Mick could get medical treatment. With his mind made up, Pat eased his aching body into a standing position to put his plan into action.

  The White Father stood and listened intently for any indication that someone was still alive inside the car. He had shouted ‘missionary’ as loudly and as clearly as he could but there had been no response. The silence of the evening was broken only by the distant ‘crack’ of small arms fire. He knew that his English wasn’t the best but surely it could be easily understood?

  Suddenly, the cleric heard the distinct ‘clink’ of metal against metal from within the armoured car. While he was a man of the cloth, he had been in Africa long enough to know what the cocking of a gun sounded like. Without thinking, he stepped back to see what would happen. A single, short burst rang out and the missionary and doctor turned and ran for their lives. He had done all he could, Fr Verfaille thought, as he ran for his life to the safety of the church building. Whoever was in the armoured car, they were now on their own.

  Pat fired a single warning burst into the air, desperate not to hurt anyone but to get everyone back from the blind side of the armoured car and buy himself a few precious minutes. He didn’t wait to see what happened and painfully swung himself into the driver’s seat to get the old Ford fired up and moving. He had trained as a driver back in the cavalry squadron in Fermoy, County Cork, but had shipped out to the Congo with the 35th Battalion before he had fully completed his training. His official rank was gunner-driver rather than specialist driver, but he knew the old Ford as well as most men and prayed that the legendary reliability of the V8 engine wouldn’t let him down.

  Pat pressed the starter – nothing happened. In desperation he tried again, and this time the V8 turned over but didn’t catch. He tried again and relief flooded over him when the engine bellowed into life as its ignition caught. There was nothing like the deep roar of the V8 rumbling into life he thought, as he eased the armoured car forward, careful not to let it stall. It took some time to get used to handling this 4.5 tonne chassis, but the Ford’s greatest strength was its brute of an engine.

  From the safety of the church building, the cleric stole a careful glance back to the road and saw the old armoured car slowly rumbling away. He wasn’t sorry to see it go. Maybe the Katangan forces would chase the car and leave him and his fellow missionaries in peace to tend the wounded. He noted the car slowly gaining speed as it jolted down the road towards the junction north-west of the Radio College where Avenue Wangermee met Avenue Drogmans. But, as he turned away, the missionary failed to realise the full significance of the armoured car awkwardly swinging to the left onto Avenue Drogmans instead of to the right. Had he known, the cleric would have prayed again for those inside the car. A right-hand turn onto Avenue Drogmans would have brought the car back to Rue de Liege and Avenue du Luxembourg, both of which were less than one kilometre from Prince Leopold Farm where the Irish UN detachment had established their base. The right-hand turn meant safety and medical treatment. A left-hand turn onto Avenue Drogmans – after a second swing to the left near the River Lubumbashi – brought the car directly away from the Irish battalion base and instead towards the headquarters of the local Katangan gendarmes less than four kilometres away. As the armoured car rumbled on, fate sealed the death warrants of both Pat Mullins and Mick Nolan.

  2 – From Thinning Turnips to Cavalry Trooper – Pat Mullins Joins The Army

  Few things make military life appear easy – but farming on Ireland’s Cork-Limerick border in the late 1950s is undoubtedly one. For the average farm labourer it was a never-ending litany of backbreaking, poorly paid, thankless and generally miserable work. Those that had jobs considered themselves lucky to be employed such was the grim economic situation – and those that complained about wages or work conditions were bluntly told they could easily be replaced.

  After twenty-five years working as a general farm labourer, most men were left either inured to the hardship or physically broken from it all. Others sought escape from the drudgery of working someone else’s land – with little or no chance of securing their own holding – in the bottle.

  For thousands of men, after a few years working as a farm labourer, joining the army or emigrating to Britain, Australia or the United States came as a blessed release. When Seán Lemass finally secured the position of Taoiseach in June 1959, emigration from Ireland had reached levels never experienced since ‘the Black 1880s’. Over the course of a decade, more than 400,000 Irish people emigr
ated and, between 1956 and 1961, net emigration had peaked at 42,401. The most damning indictment of just how brutal rural life could be came from the fact that, of the men who emigrated from Ireland in the 1950s, an astonishing seventy per cent described themselves as small farmers and agricultural labourers.

  The economy’s stagnation under Éamon de Valera had reached the point where analysts realised that without the ‘safety valve’ of emigration, Ireland would face social turmoil. By 1956, Ireland’s balance of payments deficit had reached IR£35.6 million – an astonishing increase of almost 650 per cent in the space of just three years. Should Ireland face a national crisis, there was little fiscal guarantee it could be coped with. In Irish cities like Dublin, Cork and Limerick, poverty was a grinding, soul-destroying fact of everyday existence. In Limerick, the appalling hardship spawned childhood memories that led Frank McCourt to write his 1990s international bestseller Angela’s Ashes.

  In June 1959, Pat Mullins (16) was thinning turnips on a farm not far from his home at Boher in Kilbehenny on the border between Cork and Limerick. On a bright summer morning the view from the pastures he worked was nothing short of breathtaking. To the north the Galtee Mountains rose to dominate the landscape with scudding clouds casting varying hues on its myriad crags and valleys. Above it all loomed Galtymore with its deceptively flat-topped summit. From up there you could gaze all over Cork, Limerick and Tipperary. On a clear day you could even see Waterford in the distance.

  To the south the countryside opened up into a rich panorama of farms, fields and forests. Some of the best land in Ireland was here and it had been fought over by Celtic tribes and Anglo-Norman families for more than 2,000 years. If you stared hard from Boher, you could make out the spires of Mitchelstown’s churches and, in the distance, the Kilworth Mountains that shielded Fermoy from view. Pat knew that in those distant mountains was Flagstaff Hill, which marked the biggest military firing range in the south. It was a realm of soldiers in a landscape dominated by farming.

  To the east, the River Tar and River Suir carved their way through forests and farms, overlooked by Slievenamon Mountain, so beloved of all in Tipperary. In the west, the Galtees gradually gave way to the Ballyhoura Mountains, which formed a northern bulwark for the majestic River Blackwater. The river traced its source all the way back to Kerry and nothing quite underscored the value of the local land like the Blackwater.

  Pat knew that the old Anglo-Irish aristocracy had nicknamed the Blackwater ‘the Irish Rhine’ and had built their sumptuous grand houses along its banks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, usually alongside the crumbling remains of old Norman and English castles. Each great house was the centrepiece of the famed Anglo-Norman estates that often encompassed tens of thousands of acres of prime farmland. The great landowning families in that area were the Kingstons, the Mountcashels, the Moores, the Hydes and the Barrymores.

  Not that Pat knew much about the grand houses. The only great house near Boher – Mitchelstown Castle – had been burned down during the Civil War in the 1920s and not even its scorched stones were still in place. They had been sold to the Cistercian monks for the construction of Mount Melleray Abbey in west Waterford and transported over a period lasting from 1925 to 1931. Pat, like everyone else in north Cork, spent his life in the fields rather than the marbled hallways of the great houses.

  Bright as this June morning was, it was still cold in the shade, although early summer was beginning to chase the chill of winter from the ground. Pat’s back was aching from hours spent on his hands and knees thinning the turnips. Of all the difficult jobs in farming, this was one of the worst. It was an annual task that Pat hated with a passion. By 6 p.m., when it was time to go home, Pat’s back and knees would be in spasm from hours spent crouched over. And all for the princely sum of £2 per week. It was hardly enough to maintain Pat, let alone a girlfriend or, God help us, a wife and children. Pat painfully straightened and sighed, ‘there has to be an easier way to make a living’. One of the other workers, thinning a line of turnips just yards away, overheard the young man and smiled to himself. Young lads always dreamed of better wages, shorter hours, pretty girlfriends and even being able to afford a car. And then they learned that in Ireland this was not the way things were.

  In the Ireland of 1960, the majority of people were happy just to have a job and an income. Ireland, along with Portugal, was the poorest country in Europe and farming was the poorest sector of the economy. With an average of six workers chasing each job, it was an employers’ market – hours were long and wages low. If you didn’t like it, well, there was always someone else willing to do the work. Without a job, little else beckoned except the boat to Britain, the liner to the United States or, if you were lucky, an aeroplane to New York or Boston.

  Pat’s £2 per week wage was the standard national payment for a farm labourer. It came with the promise of three meals a day to be supplied by the farmer and these varied in quality depending on the individual landowner involved. In this regard Pat was very lucky – he worked for neighbours, so the food was excellent and he was treated every bit as well as if he was a member of the family. But not all farm labourers were so fortunate.

  Pat’s week still involved six days of hard work and the hours were long, usually from 7.30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Workers were also asked to work on Sundays at harvest time, particularly if the farmer himself was not available for milking cows or feeding livestock. It was tough for labourers – but it was also tough for the farmers who were struggling with artificially low prices as a result of being tied to Britain’s cheap food policy for exports, as well as high input costs due to a lack of domestic competition. This meant that Irish farmers were forced to accept low prices for their produce which was being exported to Britain, Ireland’s biggest export market. Britain could dictate terms and prices because of our over-reliance on them as a customer. On top of this prices at home for consumer goods like clothes and footwear were artificially high due to the lack of true competition and import tariffs.

  Tractors were slowly becoming commonplace, but the majority of farm tasks still had to be done by hand – including milking and ploughing. A fifteen cow herd took a single man two and a half hours to milk by hand in the morning – the labourer then faced the same task each evening. Most farmers, particularly the small to medium operators, still took their milk to the local creamery by horse and cart.

  To make matters worse, Pat, like all other Irish labourers, was entirely responsible for his own work clothing and equipment. The disastrous economic policies pursued throughout the 1950s by Éamon de Valera’s government had driven consumer prices sky-high in Ireland. At this time, a basic pair of Wellington boots cost the princely sum of £1 and 10 shillings – almost two-thirds of an entire week’s wages. In 2010, it would be the equivalent of asking a farmer to pay €250 for a single pair of wellies. In 1960, a good quality pair of Wellingtons with heavy soles could cost as much as £2, yet labourers like Pat would be lucky to make a single pair last for more than three months.

  It was the same with work clothes. Clothing was carefully stitched and mended to make it last as long as possible – but Pat, when he couldn’t use hand-me-downs from his older brothers Dinny and Tom, had no option but to purchase his own work clothes. Most people considered themselves fortunate to have one pair of good shoes and one suit, which had to last for years and were reserved for special family events, Mass on Sunday and the odd dance.

  To make matters worse, there was no such thing as holidays or overtime. If extra work needed to be done on the farm, you just rolled your sleeves up and got on with it. The power of the church ensured that holy days inevitably meant a day off – but extra work to compensate had to be done both the day before and the day after. In that respect, Sunday came as a treasured relief. Afternoons were almost always free to attend a local GAA match, but money had to be saved to fund these activities. If one of the lads was lucky enough to have a car, everyone was expected to chip in towards the cost of petr
ol. Otherwise, distant GAA matches required a good bicycle and strong leg muscles.

  Living at home spared Pat some expenses, but he was still expected to make a financial contribution to the Mullins’ household. That left only a modest sum each week for social spending. Even the traditional Christmas bonus – a vast payment of £5 which was made in lieu of an entire year’s worth of overtime and late working – seemed to disappear on clothes, shoes and sundry expenses.

  Pat was the youngest of Ned and Catherine Mullins’ children. Ned farmed a medium-sized holding just over two miles from Kilbehenny village. Ned’s holding at Boher was typical of the period – he milked cows, kept sheep, tilled a few fields with potatoes and turnips and even kept a few pigs for extra food and income. While his farm was decently sized for the period, its location at Boher in the foothills of the Galtees meant that its land varied in quality – there were some top-quality pastures off the Kilbehenny road, but there were also some poorer hill fields. Yet Ned was a shrewd farmer and a hard worker throughout his life, resulting in the Mullins’ farm being regarded as one of the best run in the area.

  The Galtee Mountains on the Cork-Limerick-Tipperary border make a dramatic backdrop to the Mullins family home at Boher, outside Kilbehenny. The farmhouse is marked with a red ‘X’. (Photo: Paudie McGrath)

  Pat was born on 19 November 1942 at the height of Ireland’s ‘Emergency’ and just as the German 6th Army was fighting its way to an icy grave at Stalingrad. The Second World War meant shortages of most things and even after the war ended in 1945, Ireland’s consumer industry was bleak to say the least. Most families considered themselves well to do if they had enough food for the table and if one family member was employed. Emigration was part and parcel of Irish life.