Robinson’s dim view extended beyond Mulcahy to Collins himself – ‘a bit of an artful dodger’. In an odd episode, Collins allegedly told the Tipperary men there would be an attack on Lord French on his way from Kingstown to Dublin, and placed the Tipperary men at the last point before the Viceroy’s convoy reached Dublin Castle. ‘We were told that the convoy was to be attacked all the way from Dunlaoghaire [then Kingstown]; if French escaped these ambushes we two were to see to it that he didn’t get past us alive.’ Instead of a Viceregal convoy, Robinson and Treacy, nerved up for the fight near the Castle gates, heard ‘a number of men … talking loudly and laughing’ coming round the corner from Dame Street – Collins, with Seán McGarry and the Cork Volunteer commander Tomás Mac Curtain, shouting, ‘It’s all right … he isn’t coming!’ In fact, French had never been planning to make this journey. ‘Mick was able to give the impression to the Volunteer officers from all over the country that he not only organised the attacks on spies that had begun in Dublin but that he also led them, taking part in them!’
Just before Christmas, this hoax was followed by the real thing, when the Tipperary men took up position behind a hedge and dung-heap on the left of the road out of Phoenix Park, some 60 yards from Ashtown Cross. This time the Viceroy’s three-car convoy did indeed come, and ‘several shots were fired and hand grenades thrown’. Though the second car was ‘smashed up’ by grenades, French in the leading car drove through unscathed. According to Dan Breen, the attackers’ attempt to block the road with a cart was stopped by a local policeman; in any case, they had been told to ignore the first car.298 One of the attackers, Martin Savage, was killed, but the only governmental casualty was one of the G Division detectives, who shot himself in the hand while trying to fire back at the attackers.299 Lloyd George shocked Macpherson by laughing the attack off (‘they are bad shots’), but its impact was very real. As the Daily Telegraph commented, even if unsuccessful, it was ‘elaborately planned and carried out with remarkable daring and determination’.
The Ashtown attack signalled that GHQ’s resistance to risking fatalities and public rejection was being adjusted. The attack’s logic looks straightforward: killing the Viceroy would conform to time-honoured traditions of targeted assassination – traditions shared with many nineteenth-century revolutionary movements, including the Anarchists. (In fact, no Irish Viceroy had ever been assassinated, though one Chief Secretary had.) In this sense it was not a turning point or a signal of any new strategy. Some other attacks were more prophetic. The first, like the Soloheadbeg and Knocklong incidents, was in Tipperary six months earlier. The assassination of RIC District Inspector Hunt in Thurles in June had demonstrated not only the new aggression towards the police (no senior police officer had ever been shot down like this), but also the growing alienation or intimidation of the public. The attack was carried out in broad daylight in the middle of summer in the central square of the town, and the killers were undisguised. Yet no witnesses would come forward. Compared with Soloheadbeg, criticism of the deadly attack was muted. Indeed, the very next day the Irish bishops issued a statement denouncing British methods as ‘the rule of the sword, utterly unsuited to a civilised nation’.
The second kind of attack would have a material effect on the governance of the whole country. In late 1919 a number of units tried to rush their local RIC barracks, and though most of these assaults were unsuccessful, they triggered a radical shift in policing strategy. As early as August, some stations in Clare, Galway and Limerick were shut down. By the beginning of November, the RIC concluded that no barrack could be ‘considered immune from attack’, and on the 8th the immediate closure of vulnerable stations was ordered, ‘to augment the force in the remainder for defensive purposes and to enable patrols to be strengthened’. As the Inspector General gloomily reported, this ‘has caused apprehension among law-abiding citizens … who feel they are left without adequate protection’.300 Such apprehensions would prove to be well justified.
Assaults on a much more serious scale began in Cork early in January 1920.301 The Midleton battalion of Cork No. 1 Brigade, led by Mick Leahy, assaulted the RIC barrack at Carrigtwohill, blowing in a wall with explosives and forcing the garrison to surrender. This was the first time a semi-fortified police station had been captured. The idea for the operation – in fact for a somewhat more ambitious one – seems to have come from GHQ. The frustrated Cork city leadership, Tomás Mac Curtain (Lord Mayor of Cork and commander of Cork No. 1 Brigade) and Terence MacSwiney, who had suffered sharp criticism for their failure to ‘rise’ in 1916, first proposed mass attacks on all the police barracks in late 1919, as did Michael Brennan in east Clare. Though GHQ shied away from this, the Corkmen came back with the idea of a local ‘rising’, MacSwiney arguing that ‘they could last for a fortnight and in six weeks time the same could happen in Galway.’ Mulcahy again rejected this ‘travelling rising’ concept, but suggested instead that Cork ‘select three barracks in the brigade area and arrange to attack them all in one night’. The attackers should ‘go about their business the following morning as if not a dog had barked in the area’. In the event, one of these three attacks failed, and another was aborted. (Even so, a 33 per cent success rate would prove hard to sustain.) Mulcahy claimed that he had still insisted that ‘every possible precaution’ be taken ‘that those engaged in the attack will suffer no loss of life’ and not kill anyone inside the barrack.302 Once again this was an odd precondition for an armed assault.
For Mulcahy, looking back later, the Carrigtwohill attack, which was closely followed by an attack by sixty men of the Macroom battalion on the barrack at Kilmurry, marked the transition to ‘war’, or ‘the beginning of the nationwide offensive in reply to the suppression of Dáil Éireann’. (In the same vein Lord French told the Chief Secretary that the Cork barracks attacks ‘are nothing less than acts of war’.)303 At the time, even so, GHQ’s vision was less clear. Whatever Deasy’s experience, until November at least GHQ had been trying to create small squad-like units to carry out ‘special operations’, rather than launch general guerrilla war. It envisaged a single fighting force for each county, its ranks to be filled by men taken from local units. Since they would still have been part-time soldiers, their operational capability would have been quite restricted. A key advantage of this plan from GHQ’s viewpoint was that it would have brought professionalization along with central control – a tighter arrangement than the full-time flying columns that would eventually emerge.
GHQ did not get its way. Cork No. 1 Brigade dutifully polled its battalions about the scheme, and reported at the beginning of November that all but one had agreed to it. Plainly, though, the views of the dissentient battalion (the 1st) were shared by the brigade staff. Mac Curtain warned that the scheme would mean that units from which men were selected for the special unit ‘would fizzle out’. It was ‘difficult enough to keep the organisation going at the present time’, he pointed out, ‘and I am now convinced that the proposition would have a bad effect on the men not selected; they would get the idea of not being required, and would fall out altogether.’304 He reiterated his and MacSwiney’s belief that ‘to keep things going some action must be taken which will give all the men a chance of doing something.’ All the officers (battalion commanders and brigade staff) at a brigade meeting on 31 October had been ‘unanimous in requesting GHQ to reconsider the position’. Cork No. 1 wanted to be able to ‘carry out the work for which we were making arrangements at the time you summoned us to Dublin and called it off in favour of the other idea’.
Mac Curtain had particular reasons for worrying about the cohesion of his command. He had commanded the Cork Volunteers in 1916, when they had stayed holed up in their drill hall through Easter Week. While he remained a model of GHQ-style caution, some of his men had begun to break free of his control. Riobard Langford, a Gaelic Leaguer and founding member of the Cork Volunteers, had left for Dublin after Easter Week frustrated with his leaders’ inaction. When he returned
next year, he fell in with a group of like-minded ‘disgruntled militants’ led by Seán O’Hegarty, and together they carried out an unauthorized raid on the Cork Grammar School armoury, seizing nearly fifty rifles. For this, Mac Curtain had him court-martialled, though he could not make the charge stick.305 The brigadier’s desire for ‘some action … which will give all the men a chance of doing something’ suggests that he could envisage his command unravelling. When the militant group started taking potshots at policemen early in 1920, he again threatened disciplinary action. ‘We can’t have men roaming around armed shooting police on their own,’ he insisted after an off-duty constable had been killed on 19 March. A few hours after issuing this warning, he himself would be shot dead in his own house.306
Part Two
TWO GOVERNMENTS: 1920
Looking back, it was easy enough to see the winter of 1919–20 as a step-change, from confrontation to war. At the time, things were not so clear. Guerrilla fighting is a protean form of warfare, and has taken many shapes throughout history. As a strategy, it would become familiar as the twentieth century went on: famous texts, by leaders like Mao Zedong and Che Guevara, set out blueprints for the escalation of guerrilla action, and dramatic guerrilla triumphs, like the victory of the Viet Minh over the French army, or Fidel Castro’s overthrow of the Cuban government, would astonish the world. In 1920, though, guerrilla warfare was not well understood. Some people might know of the Spanish resistance to Napoleon’s empire, and a few might even have read Clausewitz’s short chapter on ‘people’s war’ in his great work On War. More would certainly have known of the surprising success of the Boer commandos against the British in the South African war – especially in Ireland, thanks to the role of John McBride’s Irish Brigade alongside the Boers. But military experts dismissed South African conditions as irrelevant to European warfare. The orthodox view was that victory would always lie with the ‘big battalions’ – as indeed it eventually had in South Africa. The Great War seemed to confirm that military power was above all about gargantuan forces and resources.
In 1920, the potential of guerrilla fighting was emerging. That year ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ first published his argument that the Arab revolt against the Turks launched in 1916 had demonstrated a new kind of revolutionary war, in which irregular forces would turn the very strength of regular armies into weaknesses. By reversing conventional military logic, dispersing rather than concentrating their forces, taking their time and getting the people on their side, insurgents could seize and retain the initiative.1 But few if any Irish Volunteers were likely to have come across Lawrence’s inspirational article, published as it was in the British Army Quarterly. Even Ernie O’Malley, one of the best-read republican activists, does not seem to have read Lawrence until several years later. At GHQ there were long-standing advocates of irregular warfare, but they had never managed to explain how it could overcome the army of a major power like Britain. A strategic appreciation that fell into police hands early in 1920 was still contemplating ‘taking to the field’ in something like open combat. Recognizing that an outright offensive would be suicidal, it argued that if all RIC barracks and post offices across the country were attacked simultaneously, three-quarters of the country would fall into the hands of the Republic. The Volunteers could then conduct an ‘offensive-defensive’, in which British counter-strokes might be parried; it even contemplated the concentration of ‘larger bodies of Volunteers on the garrison towns with a view to at least holding the military’ there.2
There was still some way to go before a realistic fighting method would be found, and it would be found by instinct rather than theory. Without a credible doctrine, the only way forward was trial and error. GHQ remained cautious: Patrick Riordan was summoned to Dublin early in 1920 to discuss the situation in Kerry; he remembered that Mulcahy ‘impressed on us not to tackle too much’.3 The future direction of the campaign seemed to be pointed by the Carrigtwohill attack, and a series of assaults on barracks, ten in January, nine in February, across several counties – Longford, Wicklow and Monaghan as well as Cork and Tipperary – helped to create a sense of coherent purpose and momentum. But though the RIC Inspector General (somewhat defensively) said that ‘all the attacks showed careful preparation and good discipline’, the learning process was erratic. The few successful attacks were heavily outnumbered by failures.
One of the successes, the attack at Ballytrain on 14 February, the first significant operation north of the Boyne, showed what it took to overcome even quite small police posts. Although the barrack was isolated, and garrisoned by no more than six police, the operation was meticulously planned by Eoin O’Duffy, who organized the blocking of approach roads and the cutting of all telephone and telegraph lines before the village was occupied by a substantial Volunteer force (all masked according to press reports). Ernie O’Malley, a GHQ organizer, arrived in time to watch the attack, and provide a demonstration of ‘the correct method of throwing a hand grenade’. The attackers opened fire around 2 a.m., to cover the laying of a mine under the gable wall. (O’Duffy seems to have hoped that the heavily outnumbered garrison would quickly surrender, but it contained two sergeants, one Protestant and the other Catholic, who were determined not to lose face. ‘We had no notion of giving in till we had to.’) When the mine exploded, O’Malley saw a policeman who had been at prayer blown through a partition wall without injury. At this point the garrison gave up the fight. Though one of them was seriously wounded, nobody was killed on either side.4
If the mine had failed to explode, the attack would almost certainly have failed with it. This was the reason for the abortive attack at Aghern, Co. Cork two days later, for instance, and it would recur all too often despite persistent efforts to professionalize the engineering sections of local battalions. The surprise, perhaps, was the effect that even a handful of successes had on the RIC’s comprehensive network of garrisons across the country. After the Ballytrain attack, the RIC abandoned half a dozen other small posts in Monaghan, leaving much of the county unpoliced. The same thing sometimes happened even when an attack failed – as at Allihies in Co. Cork, where the garrison fought on after the barrack wall was blown in by a mine, and the attackers eventually withdrew. The barrack was abandoned, along with most of the other small barracks, so that ‘a large part of the Beara Peninsula was cleared of enemy forces and made available as a safe place for tending wounded Volunteers of the Brigade.’5 In Mayo, the number of police garrisons fell from forty-seven in January 1920 to twenty-three a year later; eighteen out of sixty-one Tipperary barracks were abandoned in the same period. The abandonment of police posts became a sort of index of Volunteer activity. In the north of Ireland, for instance, the situation was quite different – no stations in Co. Londonderry were abandoned.6
When some units started burning down the vacated barracks, GHQ came up with the idea of a nationwide conflagration to celebrate Easter Week. Aside from the problem of finding enough petrol, the simultaneous burning of some 300 empty buildings on the Saturday night of Easter weekend did not present any military difficulty. (Only occasionally, as at Mayobridge in Co. Down, the neighbours went in and put the fire out after the Volunteers had left.)7 But it had a striking public impact, and Volunteers themselves were impressed. One ‘was very nervous as I felt sure that details of a plan on such a large scale were nearly certain to reach the ears of the enemy’, but when he read of the nationwide destruction in the Sunday paper ‘I realised that our organisation was effective and watertight.’8 Income tax offices in the main cities were also raided at the same time, and all their tax records burned – the Sinn Féin strategy of non-violent resistance being given a push by non-lethal violence. The torrent of arson advertised the retreat of government. By July, over 400 vacated barracks had been destroyed, along with nearly fifty courthouses.
But even this spectacular demonstration did not mean that the Volunteers had yet found a coherent plan of campaign. Many local units had still not taken any action, and GHQ�
��s small band of organizers was still stretched very thin. Ernie O’Malley, for example, was supposed to be sent to Kerry, but the Tipperary men in Dublin seem to have persuaded Mulcahy to divert him to South Tipperary in May 1920. O’Malley was acutely conscious of the weakness of the provincial Volunteer organization, and the rarity of determined leaders like Seamus Robinson and Seán Treacy – ‘officers who were really interested in their work and who understood it’. O’Malley liked to see himself as a non-political military technician; ‘in our minds Seán and I left the building up to the Irish Republic to others.’ But even he had no idea about the strategic direction of the Volunteer campaign. ‘Our fight was a beginning not an end we knew, but in what direction would it go?’ As the trio toured the brigade area, poring over ‘the microscope of our maps’ to assess the possibilities, it became clear that short-paced, pudgy Seamus Robinson, despite his appalling lack of any sense of direction at ground level, ‘was in advance of us in thinking things out’.9
Military experience was rare; though some British army veterans joined the Volunteers, at this stage they often had to overcome a barrier of suspicion before they were trusted with responsible roles. The rest were marked, as O’Malley saw it, by a pervasive unfamiliarity with military culture. ‘Officers and men have not the faintest idea or at most only a very faint idea of military work in general,’ he reported to GHQ in December 1919. ‘They know very little of the organization and systematic training necessary to turn out an efficient soldier.’ O’Malley fretted that outside the bigger towns the Volunteers did not ‘possess sufficient status’; ‘often a man – a non-Volunteer – will point with pride and awe to the local President of the Sinn Féin Club,’ but ‘would not dream of doing so where the local Volunteer Captain was concerned’. What was needed was ‘military propaganda’. In the meantime the minimum requirement was to get men to turn up at all: ‘I have instructed officers to court-martial men who have missed more than three consecutive parades.’10
The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence Page 16
