1916- the Easter Rising

by Tim Pat Coogan

  Carson met the Kaiser at a luncheon party in Homburg in 1913 at which he agreed with the Kaiser that his opposition to Home Rule was based on a refusal ‘to be ruled by the priests’. A month later the German strategist, General von Bernhardt wrote an article in the Berlin Post under the heading ‘Ireland, England and Germany’. In it he said:

  …it is not without interest to know that if it ever comes to war with England, Germany will have allies in the enemy’s camp, who in given circumstances are resolved to bargain, and at any rate will constitute a grave anxiety for England, and perhaps tie fast a proportion of the English troops.

  The lunch with the Kaiser sparked rumours of German support for the Orangemen in Ulster to such an extent that The Irish Churchman declared, on 14 November:

  We have the offer of aid from a powerful continental monarch who, if Home Rule is forced on the Protestants of Ireland, is prepared to send an army sufficient to release England of any further trouble in Ireland by attaching it to his dominion… And should our King sign the Home Rule Bill, the Protestants of Ireland will welcome this continental deliverer as their forefathers under similar circumstances did once before.

  It was later reported in 1917 to the House of Commons by John Dillon, the Irish Parliamentary Party leader, that Von Kuhlmann, the respected counsellor of the German Embassy in London had visited leading Unionists in Belfast incognito as close to the outbreak of war as 12 July, 1914. His report, said Dillon, made the Emperor ‘determined to go on with the war’. Quoting a variety of sources, including Lord Riddell’s War Diary and the Daily Telegraph, an historian of Republicanism, Dorothy Macardle notes that:

  It was the view of Mr Gerard, United States Ambassador in Berlin at that time, that the German Department of Foreign Affairs, and indeed all Berlin, believed that England was so occupied by rebellion in Ulster and agitation throughout Ireland that she would not declare war.

  The Austrians also seem to have taken the possibility of ‘allies in the enemy’s camp’ into consideration. The historian of unionism, A. T. Q. Stewart notes that:

  On 26 July Dr E J Dillon, a special correspondent in Vienna, telegraphed his newspaper that one of the reasons why Austria expected a free hand in dealing with Serbia was that the British Government was absorbed ‘in forecasting and preparing for the fateful consequences of its internal policy in regard to Irish Home Rule, which may, it is apprehended, culminate in civil war’.

  Whatever the weight of the Orange component of the Irish argument in the German decision to go to war may have been, once it was made the Green side immediately contacted the Germans through John Devoy in New York. Devoy and a delegation from Clan na Gael were met by the German Ambassador to America, Count von Bernstorff and his military attaché Captain Franz von Pappen. Devoy informed von Bernstorff that it had been decided to seize the opportunity presented by the war to stage a Rising with a view to ending British rule in Ireland and setting up an independent government. The Irishmen told the Germans that they wanted no money, what they sought were arms and trained officers which they lacked. As a result of the meeting Devoy subsequently sent an emissary, John Kenny, to Berlin with a document outlining the Clan’s history and the revolutionaries’ requirements. The Irish delegation felt that it had been well and sympathetically received but in fact, in reporting to Berlin, the Ambassador opposed the Irish request because he feared it would give American Anglophiles ammunition to use against Germany. The von Bernstorff approach of sympathy but little tangible assistance was to characterise German dealings with the IRB, as Roger Casement in particular was to discover for himself.

  Casement was born in 1864, the son of Ulster Protestants of County Antrim. After entering the British Consular Service he did distinguished work in exposing the illtreatment of native labourers in the Belgian Congo and in the Putumayo in Latin America. In recognition of this, he received a knighthood. He wrote poems, articles and diaries and subscribed money towards the restoration of the Irish language. His espousal of the Irish cause inspired the British to regard him with loathing, particularly after he went to Germany. Birrell customarily referred to him as ‘the Lunatic’. Casement’s habit of interpolating his diary with comments which indicated his homosexuality, helped to get him hanged. The British circulated copies of the diary particularly in Washington, where their contents diminished support for his reprieve. Birrell also induced John Redmond to be less ardent in Casement’s defence by showing him the diaries.

  Casement travelled from New York to Germany under an assumed name, having first shaved off his beard to disguise himself from the British agents who followed him everywhere. At Christina in Norway the British Consul made an unsuccessful attempt to have him murdered, but he reached Berlin safely on 31 October, 1914 and began a series of meetings at the Foreign Office. On 20 November the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung published an official statement of the German Imperial Government’s friendly attitude towards the Irish people and wishes for their attainment of independence. On 27 December an undertaking was signed in Berlin between Casement as ‘Irish Envoy’ and the German State Secretary Von Simmerman, and stamped with the Seal of the German Chancellor.

  By this it was agreed that an Irish Brigade should be formed from among the prisoners-of-war, and this brigade was to serve Ireland solely and not to be employed or directed to German ends. None but Irish officers were to conduct military operations of the brigade. It was to be furnished and equipped by the German Imperial Government as a free gift to aid the cause of Irish independence. No member was to receive any pay or money from the German Government: it was to be a Volunteer Brigade. In the event of a German naval victory, the German Government was to send the Irish Brigade to Ireland with an ample supply of arms and ammunition. If with the help of the Brigade the Irish people should succeed in establishing an independent Irish Government, the German Government was to give it public recognition, support and goodwill.

  The Irish Brigade never materialised. With a handful of exceptions the Irish prisoners-of-war refused to join (back at home their relatives were still drawing their allowances) and Casement became increasingly disillusioned with his mission and the sincerity of his host’s intentions towards Ireland. However, Joseph Plunkett, who also visited Berlin early in 1915, was promised a shipload of arms to be sent to Ireland the following spring. Plunkett and the Foreign Office official, Von Bethmann Holweig, agreed that an Irish insurrection timed to coincide with a German offensive on the Western Front would be of help to Germany. Plunkett and Casement were also led to believe that the original Devoy request for German officers, preferably accompanied by an expeditionary force armed with artillery, was a real possibility.

  Back in Ireland the IRB now faced more problems than they had realised in their preparations for the promised spring Rising. The war had disrupted communications across the Atlantic. The IRB believed that it had circumvented this difficulty by using one Tommy O’Connor, a steward on an Atlantic liner, to carry messages between Dublin and Devoy. Using O’Connor would obviate the risk of telegraphic interception. In fact, interception had taken place – by British Naval Intelligence. Captain, later Admiral Sir Reginald Hall and his team in Room 40 at the Admiralty had cracked the German codes so that everything that passed between the German Embassy in Washington and the Foreign Office in Berlin was known to London. Putting together this information and various letters seized in the mail (and thoroughly studied before being passed on to their recipients) had alerted the Admiralty to the fact that something was likely to happen during Easter 1916.

  But Murphy’s Law also affected the British. The Dublin Executive took no action despite being informed that a ship had left for Germany to arrive in Ireland on 21 April where ‘a Rising had been planned for Easter Eve’. Lack of liaison between the naval and military authorities meant that the message was not properly assessed – Lord Wimborne apparently thought that the ship was coming from America. The ship was the Libau, renamed the Aud, an allegedly neutral Norwegian vessel which sa
iled from Lubeck under the command of Lieutenant Karl Spindler, on 9 April. Aboard were 20.000 rifles, a million rounds of ammunition and ten machine guns.

  The original plan was for the arms to arrive off the Kerry coast at a time between nightfall on Holy Thursday and dawn on Easter Monday. But Murphy’s Law set in. The conspirators decided that if the arms came in as early as Holy Thursday, the British would be alerted and could strike at them before the planned date of the Rising, Easter Sunday. Therefore it was decided to ask the Germans to delay the landings until after the Rising had begun.

  Philomena Plunkett, a niece of Joseph Plunkett’s, was sent to New York to explain the change in plan to John Devoy. However, she arrived almost a week after the arms ship had left from Germany. Devoy passed on the change of date, but the Germans decided that as the Aud had no wireless there was nothing to be done. Devoy’s message to Dublin informing the revolutionaries of this, either did not get through or simply was not acted upon. In fact the Germans could have made contact with the Aud, because two days after it left Lubeck, Roger Casement also sailed for the Aud’s destination from Wilhelmshaven, aboard the submarine U19. It should have been possible to contact the submarine and have it notify the Aud.

  Aboard the U19, under the command of Lieutenant Weisbach, the man who fired the torpedoes which sank the Lusitania, apart from Casement, were Daniel Bailey, one of the few Irish prisoners whom Casement had been able to recruit, and Robert Monteith, an officer in the Dublin Brigade of the Volunteers. By now Casement was neither a well nor a happy man. He was, in fact, returning to Ireland not with a view to taking part in a Rising but to calling it off. Casement had risen from a hospital bed in Munich in great anger and distress at the discovery that the Germans had no intention of sending either officers, an expeditionary force, or artillery to Ireland. His protests fell not only on unresponsive, but on contemptuous ears, his liaison officer with the Germans, Captain Nadolny, telling him bluntly that the Germans had little interest in Ireland beyond the hope of some military diversion and threatening him with the possibility of cancelling even the shipment of rifles. Ultimately, apart from sending the Aud and the U19, the most tangible evidence of German assistance would appear to have been a series of Zeppelin raids and a naval raid on the east coast of England during the first few days of the Rising. The raids, though they naturally created a certain amount of panic, were militarily insignificant.

  But not merely does Murphy’s Law stipulate that if things can go wrong, they will go wrong, its corollary is that when things go wrong, they can only get worse. Michael Collins was charged with the task of sending three radio experts to Kerry to destroy a government radio station at Valentia and to set up the Volunteers’ own transmitter in some hiding place from which the Germans could be guided as they made landfall. But the car carrying the three took a wrong turning and drove off Ballykissane pier about two miles north of Killorglin, drowning all three. An even worse self-inflicted wound on the part of the insurgents was the failure to erect the two green lights at the designated landing place, which caused both arms ship and submarine to sail fruitlessly up and down Tralee Bay, waiting for a signal from the shore that never came.

  In theory, neither vessel should have been able to reach the Irish coast because as a result of Admiral Hall’s activities, the British Naval Command at Queenstown (now Cobh), County Cork, had instituted a high state of alert along the west coast of Ireland. Several ships were involved from St Patrick’s Day onwards in searching the fjords and inlets of the coast and checking on the identity of approaching ships. These were augmented on Holy Thursday, the original date for the commencement of the arms landing period, by a cruiser and three destroyers. However, by a combination of skill and determination, Spindler won through to Tralee Bay. He first sailed so far north into the North Sea that by the time he turned for Ireland, he could well have been a genuine Norwegian. The Aud sailed past a couple of British warships before she reached Inishtooskert Island in Tralee Bay, the rendezvous point with the U19, on the afternoon of 20 April.

  However, there was no sighting of the submarine. And Spindler sailed on into the bay, where after dark he began signalling Fenit Harbour in the unfulfilled hope of being shown the promised green lights. After hours of fruitless signalling, he anchored off Inishtooskert where he was accosted by a British vessel the following morning. Incredibly Spindler managed to bluff his way out of the danger by telling the vessel’s captain that engine failure had forced him to anchor. A combination of forged papers and a sight of the pots and pans which were alleged to constitute the Aud’s cargo convinced the English captain of the truth of Spindler’s story. He was not to be so lucky a second time. The Naval Authorities received a message that there was a suspicious vessel in Tralee Bay and sent an armed trawler, Lord Heneage, to investigate.

  Seeing the boat bear down on him, Spindler hoisted his anchor and made full speed in a south-easterly direction. On the high seas, Spindler was intercepted by two British warships that initially let him pass but then orders were received from Queenstown that the Aud be brought into port. Spindler again tried to bluff his way past the vessels, maintaining that he couldn’t understand the signals he was receiving until he was sent one that he could not pretend to misread – a shot across his bows. Spindler dutifully sailed for Queenstown but ordered his men into German Naval uniforms, transferred them into small boats and departed, leaving timed explosives to send the Aud to the bottom, taking with her what little prospect there had been of the Rising succeeding.

  Meanwhile, the submarine commander, Lieutenant Weisbach, had also put in a stint uselessly searching for green lights. He had sighted Spindler quite close to him but for some reason made no effort to contact the Aud, and concentrated his efforts on locating the promised green lights which never materialised. The green lights had been furnished by Sean MacDermott to the Kerry Volunteers some weeks before the German vessels arrived, but were left hanging in the Volunteers Drill Hall in Tralee. Austin Stack, the Volunteer Commandant in the area, seems to have believed that the arms shipments were due to arrive some time between midday on Holy Saturday and the early hours of Easter Monday. He made no effort to hire a pilot until the day the Aud was actually sighted, Holy Thursday. On his return home from meeting Stack, the pilot actually saw the Aud lying in anchor, but as Stack had told him that the vessel would be a small one which would not arrive until Easter Sunday, he took no action. Neither did Stack, and the green lights remained hanging uselessly in the Drill Hall.

  Finally, as Holy Thursday night wore on into Good Friday morning, Weisbach decided that he was risking his submarine unnecessarily by loitering in Tralee Bay and decided to put Casement and his companions ashore. At approximately 2.30 a.m. and a mile or so offshore the three men, none of them seamen, were put into a small collapsible boat to row into the darkness. A few hundred yards from shore the heavy surf that characterises Kerry beaches overturned the boat, and they were lucky to get ashore, albeit in an exhausted condition. For a time, Casement was immobilised by hypothermia and was chafed back to life by Monteith, who later said that it was the regret of his life in view of what was to befall Casement, that he had not left him to die at the water’s edge.

  For Murphy’s Law rapidly took a cruel turn. The collapsible boat was discovered shortly before dawn, as was a dagger, a thousand rounds of ammunition and three loaded revolvers. The police were sent for and shortly after midday on Good Friday, Casement was discovered hiding in a ruin known as MacKenna’s Fort. Casement attempted to pass himself off as Richard Morton, a Buckinghamshire author. However, his claim to have written A Life of St Brendan, the Navigator, who was said to have discovered America after sailing from Kerry in a currach, weighed less with the policeman than the fact that some coded documents were found on him. He was sent by train to Dublin on the first leg of a doomed journey that ended on the scaffold the following August.

  While the U19 cruised the darkened waters of Tralee Bay, in far away Dublin the nominal leader of the
Volunteers, Chief of Staff Eoin MacNeill, was discovering that he too had been operating in a darkness of a different kind. Bulmer Hobson, then the Volunteer’s Secretary, had been alerted by two leading officers, J.J. O’Connell and Eimer Duffy, who had learned that Volunteer units throughout the country had received orders to take part in a Rising timed for Easter Sunday. The thunderstruck Hobson got MacNeill out of bed to tell him the startling news. MacNeill changed out of his pyjamas and, driven by Hobson, headed for Pearse’s home to tell him in sulphuric terms what he thought of (a) his deception and (b) his Rising. After an angry harangue, MacNeill summed up his message by saying:

  There’ll be no waste of lives for which I am directly responsible. I will not allow a half-armed force to be called out. I can promise you this; I’ll do everything I can to stop a Rising – everything, that is, short of ringing up Dublin Castle.

  However, later in the day MacNeill cooled somewhat. Pearse had rallied MacDermott and MacDonagh to his side and they called on MacNeill who received them but stipulated that he would talk only with MacDermott, saying that he would have nothing to do with Pearse any more. Knowing nothing of what had happened in Kerry, MacDermott attempted to be straightforward at last about the IRB’s plans. He told MacNeill that an arms landing in Kerry was imminent and that MacNeill would have to change his stance. MacNeill, however, continued to state his opposition to a Rising and his intention to do everything he could to prevent one. MacDermott pointed out that the IRB was the real controller of the Volunteers and that they were in a position to stop him preventing the Rising. But MacDermott’s main point was that the arms landing meant that hostilities now were inevitable and that the Rising would have to go ahead.