The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence

by Charles Townshend

  Operationally, these were formidable weapons. They were set with a four-second fuse, much shorter than the seven-second Mills bomb – so that they could not be thrown back, as the Mills could at close quarters. This was cut again to three seconds in response to the fitting of wire cages to ADRIC tenders as protection against grenade attack. Many grenades burst on the cages, leading to a popular misconception that the grenades had hooks to catch on the wires. In fact, the IRA engineers made strenuous efforts to produce an impact grenade, but without success. There would also be more upsetting failures.

  In the autumn of 1920 the intrepid Parnell Street engineering section tried to raise the stakes by building a version of the Stokes trench mortar. The prototype was successfully trialled with blank shells in October, but when live ammunition was tried, they could not get it to hit the ground nose first. Patrick McHugh believed that the problem was that the shell needed greater weighting at the front, but Matt Furlong decided to adjust the shell and try again. McHugh tried to dissuade him, but Furlong, ‘who was a very strong willed man … would not give in … He accused me of being windy and ordered me away from himself and [the] gun.’ As he was walking away he heard a muffled explosion – ‘the gun had disappeared and Matt was lying on the ground … the whole left side of his body was a frightful sight.’ Furlong’s first question was ‘Is the gun alright?’ Peadar Clancy, the new GHQ Director of Munitions, who was watching the trial, called an ambulance and took him to the Mater Hospital in Dublin, where he died. That was the end of the mortar-production programme.

  McHugh lamented that this was ‘a severe blow to Dublin Brigade and IRA generally’. They ‘could have easily shelled British positions … by mounting [the] gun on a small lorry’ (something the IRA would eventually get around to in its attack on Downing Street in 1991), and ‘it does not require much imagination to realise the effect such attacks would have had.’ But though McHugh wanted to go on, Clancy ‘seemed to have lost faith in our ability to produce a trench mortar’. Worse was to follow. Clancy himself, who had not been long in the job of munitions director, would be killed, not long after Furlong’s death, on Bloody Sunday. The workshop at 198 Parnell Street succeeded in doubling its production of grenades after the mortar disaster, but was eventually discovered in an Auxiliary search operation on 10 December. Though the engineers escaped, and mingled with ‘the usual Dublin crowd … watching our beloved premises being dismantled’, this was a definite blow: ‘our one and only working munition factory’ was gone.212 No successor to Clancy was appointed until late January 1921, and it took even longer to set up a replacement factory.

  ‘THE VERY AIR IS MADE SWEETER’

  The questions that can be posed about the efficiency of the Volunteer intelligence service generally can also be directed to the section directly under Collins’s control, and particularly to the most emblematic action in the Dublin ‘intelligence war’, the assassinations of 21 November 1920 – ‘Bloody Sunday’. Was this, as the legend has it, a singularly professional and decisive intelligence operation? It was unquestionably a dramatic one. Around 9 a.m., eight addresses – all, apart from the Gresham Hotel, in south Dublin streets like Morehampton Road, Upper Mount Street, Baggot Street and Earlsfort Terrace – were ‘visited’ by armed Volunteers. Twelve British officers were killed in their lodgings – nine of them still in their pyjamas – and several wounded; two Auxiliaries who found themselves at the scene of the attack in Upper Mount Street and tried to run back to the ADRIC depot at Beggars Bush barracks for help were also killed in the street.

  The drama went into a second act in the afternoon, when Croke Park Gaelic football stadium was raided by Crown forces, apparently on the assumption that some of the attackers would be there for a big Dublin–Tipperary game. The operation, using a substantial body of troops with armoured cars, ADRIC and regular police, aimed ‘to surround the whole enclosure and search the people as they were passed out’. Just before the game started, and more crucially before the military cordon had been set up, the Auxiliaries drove up to the entrance. The plan of ordering the spectators to leave the stadium immediately broke down. Claiming that gunshots had come from the grandstand, the Auxiliaries fired into the crowd – for three minutes, until ‘the attackers’ fire was silenced’, according to the official account. Gunfire erupted all around. A military machine gun (possibly in an armoured car) posted by the entrance fired off fifty rounds, according to the military court of inquiry; and at least 220 shots were fired by the Auxiliaries. Twelve people died and eleven were seriously injured, either shot or crushed in the panicking crowd.213 The army blamed the Auxiliaries, and the Auxiliaries blamed the regular police. The whole operation looked to many people like a reprisal.

  A final act was to follow. In the early evening, three men who had been arrested the night before and were being held in the Dublin Castle guardroom were killed; one was the Dublin Brigade commandant Dick McKee, another was his former vice-commandant, Peadar Clancy. These high-profile Volunteer officers joined the list of those ‘shot while attempting to escape’ – which they may indeed have done, though as in other cases it was never clear why they had to be killed. Republicans have always believed that their interrogators tortured and mutilated them, though there is no evidence for this. (Edward MacLysaght, a friend of the third man killed that evening, Conor Clune, saw all the corpses when he collected Clune’s body from the military hospital, and insisted that ‘they were not disfigured.’)214 But they were indisputably dead – and apart from the unlucky Clune, who had no military role, the deaths were a serious blow to the republican command.

  Why were the morning attacks launched? It is worth raising this question, in light not just of their deadliness but of their still deadlier sequel. The Castle shootings were a personal disaster for Michael Collins. Did he believe that the British secret intelligence group had really been on the point of blowing his own organization apart? There was some evidence to suggest this; in October Liam Tobin and Tom Cullen had been pulled in for questioning, and Frank Thornton held for ten days. Did this mean that ‘it was only a matter of time before they and he [Collins] were finished’?215 Or was the operation essentially a gesture, designed primarily for its psychological impact – demonstrating the power and ruthlessness of Collins’s outfit? It has been suggested that its primary significance was as ‘a calculated political act’.216 Collins himself justified it, rather oddly, as ‘the destruction of the undesirables who continued to make miserable the lives of ordinary decent citizens’.217 If, as Thornton and others always maintained, all the targets were secret service agents, their actions would surely not have affected anyone outside the IRA.

  A careful recent study sets the operation in a context where the balance of power on the Dublin streets seemed to be teetering.218 Conditions in the capital were hard to compare directly with those in the provinces, but the level of threat through most of 1920 was lower. Though the city’s military command identified a dozen ‘Bad Areas’ in May 1920 (areas like Upper Sackville Street, Parnell and Capel Streets, North King Street, Aungier Street and Portobello Bridge), it was not until October that it felt it necessary to issue a warning that all troops should expect to encounter ‘resistance’ in moving about.219 The attack in North King Street on 20 September was the most serious so far.

  The Dublin Brigade’s response to the arrival of the Auxiliaries had been ineffective; McKee had still not set up ASUs for the brigade itself, so that in effect the Squad was the only full-time striking force operating in the capital. Harry Colley believed that the brigade’s morale was being undermined by the fact that ‘the Auxiliaries were now so much in evidence everywhere and we seemed to have withdrawn completely from the fight.’ There was a feeling that ‘some action would have to be taken to counteract this influence.’220 Mulcahy said, ‘the pressure on us was very great; we were being made to feel that they were very close on the heels of some of us.’ He suffered a serious, potentially disastrous loss when a case full of his papers was s
eized in a mid-November raid.221 Collins himself was definitely upset by the execution of Kevin Barry on 1 November. So were ordinary Volunteers like Todd Andrews, who recalled the ‘deep emotion’ with which his company debated how to make ‘some gesture of retaliation’.

  According to Thornton, a joint meeting of the Dáil ministry and GHQ (the only one before the Truce) was convened to approve the operation. Who decided to call it, and why, is not known – nor which ministers were there, apart from Brugha and Collins. They were evidently presented with a target list, with Thornton’s assurance that ‘each and every man on my list was an accredited secret service agent of the British government.’ Brugha seems not to have challenged the concept of the operation, but tinkered with the hit list on the grounds that there was not enough evidence in some cases. But evidence of what? It is not clear exactly how the threat the agents presented was described or assessed. The term ‘Cairo Gang’ was later used to suggest that they were an organized group – but while some took this to mean that they had formed in Cairo, a centre of British wartime intelligence, others said that they frequented the Cairo Café, a well-known place on Grafton Street, one of Dublin’s busiest (which would seem odd for secret agents). Ironically, a much more concrete threat was posed by the information captured in Mulcahy’s collection of documents – ‘some amazing good stuff’ as Mark Sturgis exulted – in which some 200 Volunteers were identified (and classified as ‘very good shots, good shots, etc.’). The British started to raid for ‘these beauties’ on the night of 19 November.222

  In later statements we find dramatic assertions such as that ‘the life of every IRA man in Dublin was at stake.’223 Assuming that the intelligence group was believed to pose an immediate threat, and the attack on them was likely to be a one-off operation that would be impossible to repeat, it was obviously vital that all the men targeted were actually members of this group, and that as many of the group as possible should be hit. The list of men attacked on 21 November would seem to fall some way short of such an operation, but the original list was evidently much more extensive. Even attacking eight addresses simultaneously was a big operation that called for well over sixty gunmen (in squads of at least eight, led by a Squad member and a GHQ intelligence officer), together with scouts a total of more than a hundred men. Seán Russell, given the task of co-ordinating the operation, had to bring in many untried men. Todd Andrews – like a number of men who had backed off from service in the Squad – worried about the morality of the operation (‘killing a man in cold blood was alien to our ideas of how war should be conducted’), as well as its likely risks, now looming larger thanks to the ‘terror’ inspired by the Auxiliaries (‘I had increasing fears that we might be surprised by the Tans’).

  Simon Donnelly warned McKee of the difficulty of getting enough volunteers. (He recalled later that one of the officers of his battalion, ‘when detailed for the job, asked permission to be relieved of his part in it as he had some scruples about this type of operation’.)224 McKee’s reply was simply ‘if we don’t get them, they will get us.’ Russell’s plan sought to reduce the risk of the attackers being recognized by having them operate outside their own battalion areas, though this brought problems of unfamiliarity. To minimize the risk of uncertain gunfights, targets were to be attacked while still asleep at 9 in the morning (Sundays were notoriously lazy days). To calm the nerves of the attackers, quite elaborate plans were made for their escape.

  No copy of the original target list has survived; presumably the list Thornton presented to the joint meeting was etched into his memory, but he did not reproduce it in his later account. It was undoubtedly longer than the eventual casualty list, but we do not know how much. Some targeted men were certainly missed – two escaped even from the scene of the heaviest slaughter, at 28 Upper Pembroke Street – and other men were killed in error. There are many vividly detailed accounts, but, like most recollections of intense violence, they do not dovetail exactly. Clearly not all went to plan in the Pembroke Street attack, though the attackers were helped by the maid, a contact of the Squad man Charlie Dalton. Dalton recalled the attack as ‘the longest five minutes of my life – or were they the shortest? I cannot tell, but they were tense and dreadful.’ The caretaker was shaking out the doormats when the eight attackers – supported by fourteen scouts – walked up the steps at 9, so the front door was fortuitously open. In the hall they split into two groups of four to go up the two thickly carpeted staircases, and on the landing Dalton’s group split again into two to enter two bedrooms simultaneously. They identified the men they wanted, who each had a revolver at his hand, but both were shot before they could use them. Dalton was supposed to search for papers, but his unit commander, Captain Paddy Flanagan, brusquely dismissed him with ‘Get the hell out of this!’225

  Todd Andrews could not decide ‘whether I was glad or sorry’ that his target, ‘a man who was regarded as a key man in the British network’, who ‘went under the nom de guerre of Captain Nobel’ and lived in Ranelagh with ‘his wife, or some woman’, was not at home when his group arrived. They found only ‘a half naked woman who sat up in bed looking terror-stricken’ – as well she might – and causing the chaste Andrews ‘shame and embarrassment’ despite his excitement. He was surprised when two armed men, ‘from Collins’s squad’, turned up to search for papers, and so apparently was his company commander, F. X. Coughlan. When they started ‘behaving like Black and Tans … overturned furniture, pushing the occupants of the house around, and either through carelessness or malice set fire to a room in which there were children’, Coughlan was furious, and insisted that his unit put the fire out. This took them half an hour of forming a bucket chain from the only tap in the house, in the basement, to the burning room on the first floor.226

  Many believed that only one mistake was made – Captain McCormack, shot in the Gresham, ‘an innocent veterinary officer’ in the words of one historian. Even this low error rate was disputed by an author who analysed the victims’ service records. McCormack was not on the Army List, but his career pattern ‘indicated’ Secret Intelligence Service; this appeared to be confirmed by a remark in Mark Sturgis’s diary that ‘two secret service men were assassinated in the Gresham Hotel.’ The fact that McCormack had recently arrived from Cairo was suspicious in itself, and there was ‘the possibility that he was in Ireland to assess the threatened use of germ warfare by the IRA’ (a threat revealed in Mulcahy’s lost documents). ‘The professionalism of Michael Collins’s organization and the quality of his information’ meant, it has been suggested, that ‘there was a specific reason for the presence of each man on his list.’227

  But Sturgis had no special knowledge of the ‘secret service’, and of course the list was not drawn up by Collins himself. As he admitted in a remarkable note to Mulcahy in 1922 – when McCormack’s mother protested against the suggestion that her son was a British spy, and offered a quite plausible explanation for his visit to Dublin – ‘we had no evidence that he was a Secret Service Agent.’ Moreover, ‘several of the 21st November cases were just regular officers. Some of the names were put on [the list] by the Dublin Brigade.’228

  Lieutenant Colonel Woodcock, wounded in the Pembroke Street attack, has been identified as ‘probably the officer in charge of the intelligence group’, because his military record ‘speaks for itself’. It certainly spoke of exemplary military service, though not obviously of the ‘swashbuckling bravery common to men of the intelligence service’.229 (Woodcock had a DSO but not, for example, a Military Cross.) He was actually commanding a battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers, and living in Dublin with his wife (like a number of the victims). She gave a remarkable press interview the day after the attacks, later written up as an article and then a book.230 In it she made no attempt to deny that ‘hush hush men’ were known to be living in the lodgings, but insisted that her husband was not one of them. Was this an elaborate hoax by the secret service?

  The British authorities never denied that some
of the men killed on Sunday morning were indeed undercover intelligence agents. But while their claim that many of them were merely ‘court-martial officers’, and that half were not serving officers at all, may be partly true, they naturally did not offer any direct evidence. The republican case was that their targets represented an immediate and deadly threat to them. (In view of this, and the risks the attackers faced, the fact that they made even a few mistakes may seem surprising.) The precise balance may never be established beyond doubt, though the most careful recent analysis has concluded that, as far as concerns the twelve members of the Crown forces killed, ‘if there was a Cairo Gang’ (in the sense of a group trained in Egypt) ‘these men were not in it.’231