The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence

by Charles Townshend

  The mixed messages of the Dripsey ambush persisted. The 3rd Cork Brigade column’s attack on Drimoleague RIC barrack, for instance, saw the first successful detonation of a mine under the barrack wall, but in spite of that the structure stayed intact and the barrack was not captured. On the same day, an attack on a train carrying troops at Drishanebeg (Millstreet) netted a haul of fifteen rifles and 700 rounds of ammunition. This showed effective co-operation between local companies and the battalion active service section, though the brigadier’s decision to give all the guns to that section angered the company commanders. ‘I only admire them for their fighting spirit, but we must make the best use of the arms,’ he reported.33 Unfortunately a more ambitious attempt against a troop train at Upton station on 15 February went awry when the troops turned out to be in greater numbers than expected, and were distributed through the train instead of occupying separate coaches. Three Volunteers were killed and several others seriously wounded (including the brigade commander); six ordinary passengers died in the gunfight and another ten were wounded. This setback – which Liam Deasy judged ‘the most serious reverse suffered in the Brigade’ – was due simply to inadequate information.34 Five days later the twenty men of the 1st Cork Brigade’s 4th Battalion column were surprised in a supposed safe house at Clonmult: after a desperate struggle twelve were killed and eight captured, the Volunteers’ biggest loss in a single action.

  This was a shocking blow – ‘a very grave disaster’, as Seán Moylan said – which underlined the perilous situation created by inadequate intelligence. (Although the British account did not mention prior information, suggesting that the rebels had revealed their presence by opening fire as troops approached, the IRA blamed the disaster on an informer.) The same fate might have overwhelmed the 1st Cork Brigade column itself, which after taking up an ambush position at Coolavokig, near Ballyvourney, went back to it three more times after the expected patrol failed to turn up. The news may have reached the local ADRIC Company (J), which sallied out on 25 February in almost full strength – seventy cadets with seven regular RIC men – though it then drove right into the ambush site rather than deploying to surround or outflank it. Even so, the ambushers were surprised – ‘there was a great deal of scampering and confusion.’ (The brigade commandant, Seán O’Hegarty, saw this as evidence that the Auxiliaries did not have information – or they ‘would have come in greater strength and in open order’; he blamed his scouts for failing to signal the enemy’s approach.)

  This strong column – fifty-six riflemen and ten shotgun men, with two Lewis guns – ended up retiring in some disorder, thanks to one of the Lewis gunners running off, forcing his co-gunner to abandon his ammunition and get his gun away. ‘Some of our men in the eastern portion [of the position] evacuated their posts without orders, and so gave the impression to some of the men in the western portion, who were not in action, that something like a retreat was on foot. Some of them, too, became demoralized.’ When orders were sent to the western section to move up to encircle the police cars to the east, ‘it was found that the section commander had evacuated his post practically at the first shot and demoralized 9 men, all of whom had retreated.’ By the time ‘[Lewis] Gun No. 2 and sufficient force had been swung round it was found that all our eastern positions had been evacuated and 2 pans [of ammunition] left in the position of Gun No. 1’. The remaining column men concentrated their fire on a house where several of the police had taken shelter, but shortly after 10 a.m. reinforcements from Macroom approached. ‘It was found necessary to break off the action, and a general movement north was carried out, without any enemy pressure.’35 GHQ’s verdict was damning: ‘Bad scouting, bad inter-communication between units, bad control of units, lack of initiative and sense of responsibility on part of subordinate commanders’. The column commander should not have been engaged in ‘eleventh-hour reconnaissance’. But for the ‘bold and steady action of small groups, which did not operate as one whole, but in isolation’, it ‘might easily have been a disaster’. Operating like this was ‘skating on very thin ice indeed’.36

  Things looked up next month. At Clonbannin in Kerry on 7 March the commander of the British army’s Kerry Brigade, Colonel Hanway R. Cumming, was ambushed and killed as he drove from Killarney to Buttevant in a touring car escorted by an armoured car and troops in three Crossley tenders. Seventy men (fifty from 4th, 6th and 7th Battalion ASUs of Cork No. 2 Brigade and twenty from Kerry No. 2) under the vice-OC of Cork No. 2 (Seán Moylan) had taken up an ambush position for two days before deciding to move (‘as the fact of our party being in ambush was known to all the countryside’). ‘It was a beautiful calm morning, and we had an unusually strong force,’ Moylan later wrote. ‘We also had one of the Hotchkiss guns captured at Mallow and half a dozen road mines.’ The ambush positions were set by Paddy O’Brien, the Kerry No. 2 commandant, while Moylan supervised the laying of the mines. They had changed their intended target from an ADRIC pay detail to General Strickland, the MLA commander, who they had heard was on an inspection tour in Kerry. ‘At 10.30 hours three Crossley lorries went west and took no notice of our positions,’ according to Moylan’s official report. Why the ambushers left them alone is not certain: Moylan later asserted that he and O’Brien had ‘made it quite clear that General Strickland and his party were the objects of our attack and we intended to ignore every other opportunity … no matter how tempting’.37 This seems doubtful (good targets were too rare to be ignored), and O’Brien remembered it differently: they had indeed intended to attack, but Moylan’s detonator failed and – by a bizarre coincidence – O’Brien’s own rifle round proved to be a dud. ‘In that minute of anticlimax the three lorries passed through the position, a soldier in one of them playing an accordion, the others singing, blissfully unaware of the mishaps that saved them from disaster.’38

  Around 2 p.m., after another ‘weary wait’, compounded by anxiety that ‘if our prediction was wrong any shred of reputation we had was lost,’ Cumming’s convoy was reported approaching from the west.

  We attacked but our mines failed to explode owing, probably, to the knocking about on the journey from Kerry. Our men opened fire on the leading lorry, and stopped it by killing the driver. The second lorry pulled up, and the touring car and armoured car almost dashed into it … The rear lorry came on until stopped by our rifle fire. There must have been a big roll of casualties in this car, as a very effective fire was poured into it from the north and west. After a 2 hours’ fight, in which the enemy machine guns searched the whole countryside, and which finally developed into a series of skirmishes over a large area, we retreated in good order after inflicting heavy casualties and without suffering any on our side.39

  In fact the British had four killed and three wounded.

  The 6th Division called Clonbannin ‘one of the worst reverses suffered by the Army’, and Cumming’s death was a sensation almost as great as Moylan would have achieved if he had got his intended target. His body was taken to Dublin and a big funeral parade escorted it from Arbour Hill barracks to the North Wall for its journey back to Britain. But the attack was not an unqualified success for his killers. Though the men had all ‘fought well’, and the signallers had played a vital role, Moylan reported that one section leader ‘showed a regrettable lack of initiative’. ‘It is difficult to keep in touch with all sections during an extended fight,’ so ‘we need to train more section leaders.’ The multiple mine failures were just as significant. He later explained that he had targeted the armoured car for the middle of his three mines. ‘As it passed over the mine I pressed the switch on the battery. I got a shock that almost knocked me over. It had short circuited.’ The Cork brigades’ semi-official historian, Florrie O’Donoghue, offered a slightly different explanation: the first mine failure (which Moylan omitted from both his report and his memoir) was found to have been due to using ‘high tension wires … with a low tension battery’; as a result, during the afternoon ambush ‘no attempt was made … to use the
mines.’ But the bottom line, as O’Donoghue said, was that ‘the Cork Brigades were all handicapped by lack of expert knowledge of road mines.’ Though units had been instructed to establish engineering sections many months before, the ‘slow process of trial and error’ was not delivering results.

  The brigade command itself was not entirely harmonious, either. While Moylan and O’Brien were waiting for Strickland to arrive, ‘a messenger arrived from the Brigade OC in search of me. A meeting of the Brigade Council had been called while we were in Kerry and due to the secrecy of our movements the Brigade Despatch Riders had been unable to get in touch with me.’ The messenger told some of Moylan’s men that ‘the Brigade OC was in a towering rage with me.’ The Brigade Council members had been waiting for him at brigade HQ for several days, and Lynch ‘had had no report from me for more than a week’. Moylan remarked that Lynch’s ‘pre-occupation … with written reports was too much for men who had been constantly hunted and harried for several months’, and they ‘suggested with, I’m afraid, an insubordinatory lack of respect for the Brigade OC that if he was so fond of reading and had no other business in hands [sic] he might concern himself with the reading of the newspapers of the past few months’.40

  Outside Munster, there was a welcome ray of hope for GHQ that the burden of fighting might be spreading, with the North Longford Brigade ASU’s brilliantly successful ambush of an eighteen-strong ADRIC patrol in two tenders at Clonfin on 2 February. Its commander, Seán MacEoin, was becoming celebrated as ‘the Blacksmith of Ballinalee’. His role in the successful fight in his home town in November 1920, when a large British force was driven back by a flanking attack, has been disputed. The manoeuvre, some said, had been devised by an ex-British army sergeant who died in the battle and never got the credit for it.41 But MacEoin’s skilful choice of ground and posting of his fifty men at Clonfin was beyond doubt.42 Moreover, his mine worked effectively for once, destroying the first of the two tenders, and the result – killing four Auxiliaries and capturing ten, along with all eighteen rifles – could plausibly be seen as a triumph. (A Lewis gun was also taken, though it seems to have been disabled.) MacEoin apparently had to intervene to stop his men killing the prisoners, and was fulsomely praised by the surviving Auxiliaries for his chivalry.

  In late March, West Cork’s most successful engagement suggested a step-change in the whole campaign – ‘the nearest approach to actual warfare, as contrasted with ambushes, that has yet occurred’, in Macready’s judgment. A major British search operation in the area around Crossbarry (based on information from a prisoner taken at Upton) found the 3rd Cork Brigade flying column on 19 March. It was lying up after an abortive ambush attempt at Shippool on the Bandon–Kinsale road, and once again was taken by surprise. It suffered a serious blow when the brigadier, Charlie Hurley, who had been badly wounded at Upton, was killed. But it was an unusually strong unit – it had been reinforced to a total of 104 men – and Tom Barry directed a skilful fighting retreat. His decision to throw his whole force at the nearest of the approaching British units can be seen as brave or reckless – especially since he seems to have thought his opponents much stronger than they actually were.43 But, with the luck that successful commanders need, he picked the weakest point in the loose British attempted encirclement, and encountered a British officer who broke the basic rules about maintaining flanking guards. After a sequence of firefights and cross-country movements, Barry got his column away, a remarkable enough achievement even if the casualties inflicted were lower than he claimed. (The British army lost eight men killed, with two men and two officers wounded; they laid some of the blame for the setback on the poor physical condition of the young soldiers themselves.)44

  BATTLING FOR DUBLIN

  Dublin lacked an ASU until December 1920, thanks perhaps to Dick McKee’s relaxed approach. But the city presented a very different military environment from the rural areas which had generated the column idea. Urban anonymity and a mesh of backstreets provided a substitute for the protection of open countryside, but the idea of a full-time unit subsisting on local hospitality was inconceivable. Though ambushes were carried out, they had to be very quick operations. (The high risk of collateral damage to civilians also made them very unpopular.) Fighters could not think of staying in position for a day or more to wait for the enemy, and no ambush site was more than a few minutes away from major British military or police bases. Even the limited protection that could, as will be seen, be secured by cutting rural roads could not be provided in the city. Moreover the complexity of the street network, though it offered some security of movement to attackers, also meant that their targets were unlikely to be confined to a single road, as they so often were in rural areas.

  It has been suggested that apart from the headline operations – assassinations – mostly carried out by the Squad, most Dublin units found little to do in the way of meaningful military action. This was not because of munitions shortages. Ammunition supplies seem to have been less critical than in rural areas (men bought their own at 4d a round). Simon Donnelly of 3rd Battalion stoutly maintained that ‘the Dublin Brigade and ASU had hundreds of brilliant operations to their credit all during the reign of terror,’ but he admitted that some of their key targets – notably the so-called ‘Igoe Gang’, a group of police intelligence officers who patrolled the streets on the lookout for wanted men – were never hit. His battalion OC Joe O’Connor (the battalion claimed forty-six ‘attacks’ in 1921) noted a little lamely that even though ‘the whole Dublin Brigade were watching them’, and they always operated on foot, ‘they seemed to be fortunate in evading all our attempts to trap them.’45 Donnelly attributed the fact that the IRA ‘never got a favourable opportunity of attacking this murder gang’ to the strict rules of engagement imposed in 1921. ‘The IRA made many efforts to engage this gang in a position favourable to themselves,’ but ‘to have attacked when and where seen would have entailed considerable casualties on the civilian population.’ Because of the number of units operating in the city, ‘very careful planning and supervision became an urgent matter to guard against any two units of the IRA clashing in their anxiety to engage the enemy.’ Eventually all operations had to be approved by either GHQ or Dublin Brigade, and ‘instructions were issued that street attacks and ambushes would have to be more carefully planned and the points selected to be such as would cause the least casualties or inconvenience to the civil community.’46 This was a potentially crippling restriction.

  The difficulty of making contact, and the likelihood that most contacts would be accidental, was recognized in the emergence of a more flexible form of action – the patrol. Dublin units were urged to patrol their areas constantly, but though plenty of patrol reports were submitted to GHQ (particularly copious for April) it is hard to judge how effective they were. According to Joe O’Connor, patrols had an advance party of two unarmed men, with the main group and their officer following, then a rearguard of two armed men, with another two unarmed men behind them. ‘When the leading man saw enemy forces he gave a pre-arranged signal to the man behind, also unarmed. He passed the signal back to the armed party … That prevented their being taken unawares. They had to keep constantly moving.’ This suggests that they were not really disputing control of the streets so much as laying down a symbolic marker. O’Connor ‘admired the courage of the unarmed men in doing their particular task as they were very often the first to be shot down by the quickly advancing enemy sometimes before the actual fight opened’. Company patrols had ‘very emphatic’ orders to ‘avoid prolonged action’, since there was always an enemy post within a few minutes’ drive of any action. Patrols were also forbidden to go to help other patrols, ‘this to avoid big formations’.47

  The brigade ASU under Paddy Flanagan (also of 3rd Battalion) necessarily remained a part-time unit. Its target strength of 100 men was probably never reached. In effect it remained four units, one drawn from each of the city battalions. With a more fluid operational procedure than t
he rural model, the ASU linked up with either local company men or the Squad for particular jobs, most of which were planned rather informally, through personal contacts as much as formal brigade-level planning. Though it was tasked with confronting the ADRIC, there was not much sign of any systematic approach to this. Influenced, naturally enough, by the environment and the precedent of the Squad, the ASU aspired to headline-grabbing targets such as the British police and military chiefs, Tudor and Macready. Several attempts were made, but never came close to success. Dublin units seem to have had less reliable operational intelligence than their country cousins – urban anonymity may have cut both ways – and spent ‘most of their time … wandering around their battalion area looking for an opportunity’.48

  The brigade operations diary begins on 10 January 1921, when seven men of the ASU mounted an attack on an ‘enemy motor car’ at Charlemont Bridge. As normal in Dublin, the men were armed with handguns (in this case revolvers, more reliable than automatics) rather than rifles. They claimed to have wounded one of the car’s occupants. Heavier attacks on enemy lorries followed in Bachelors Walk (13 January), Harolds Cross on the 18th, Parliament Street on the 19th and Ushers Quay on the 26th, when the attackers used five grenades and killed five of the enemy. On the 23rd C Company of 4th Battalion burned 650 shell boxes at a depot by the Grand Canal. The total of thirteen operations, the majority in the last ten days of the month, suggest a rising tempo of attacks. Their outcomes were sometimes modest, however, as when an enemy car was ‘temporarily disabled’ in a grenade and revolver attack by E Company of the 3rd Battalion in Mespil Road on the 30th. There was one serious setback: when the ASU attempted an ambush at Drumcondra on the 21st, the nine-man party was surprised by the enemy and had six men captured, one of whom died from a serious stomach wound.49 This disaster seems to have been due to a surprising decision by the unit’s leader to move to Drumcondra Bridge after his first attempt at an ambush at the Royal Canal Bridge had failed. This meant that his men walked nearly half a mile up the main road in full view. Was this carelessness or overconfidence in their invisibility? According to the ASU commander, ‘Lt. … instead of dismissing his men proceeded to the Tolka Bridge to prepare a new ambush. He had only reached the bridge when a tender of Auxiliaries came along towards the city. Two of the men captured opened fire with grenades without orders.’ They then retreated down Richmond Street, ‘but soon found themselves inside an enveloping movement’. Several ‘cars of B. and T.’ arrived from different directions, together with two armoured cars.50 The British alleged that the captured men’s revolvers were loaded with dum-dum bullets, and four of the five surviving prisoners were executed.