by Ralph Riegel
The Swedes and Irish left the Congo with a deep mutual respect for each other’s peacekeeping skills. Both European nations were also deeply impressed by the fighting qualities of the Dogra and Gurkha solders with the Indian contingent, but regarded them more as fighting troops than peacekeepers. They took a similar view of the Ethiopian troops, who were considered to be trigger-happy by virtually everyone in the theatre. In contrast, the Irish were less than impressed with the Malaysian forces when they effectively refused to put their armoured units in harm’s way in 1962–63.
The cause of UN peacekeeping was similarly not helped by the misguided bombing missions undertaken by UN jets in late 1961 and throughout 1962 and 1963, which hit the Catholic cathedral in Elisabethville, the crowded Prince Leopold hospital and a local mine among other things. UN mortars also missed assigned targets and hit a mission run by the Seventh Day Adventists. Worst of all were the rumours that continued to swirl around what precisely happened when Indian troops captured the Radio Katanga building. In official terms, the UN did little or nothing to quash the rumours and that, in turn, damaged the fledgling reputation of the blue beret. Not until the ethnic strife in Somalia and Bosnia would the UN be willing to run such a gauntlet again.
Congo and Katanga also – unlike Suez – underlined how difficult it was to match military realities with rapidly shifting political priorities. The US was the UN’s primary driving force and every UN operation depended, to varying degrees, on US support and goodwill. It is worth remembering that Ireland could never have deployed its battalions to the Congo without US air support via the Globemaster II transport planes. Similarly, US bases like Wheelus Field became major staging posts for UN troops en route to and from the Congo.
With the removal of Patrice Lumumba and the emergence of a western-friendly Mobutu regime in Leopoldville, the US saw no reason to deepen the UN’s involvement in the Congo. President Dwight Eisenhower had once famously commented that Africa should be left to the experts – Britain and France. The US was wary of a deepening UN commitment to Africa – which it would ultimately be asked to either fund or facilitate – when its forces were already committed in West Germany, South Korea, Japan, Cuba, central America and, increasingly as the 1960s wore on, in South Vietnam.
If the US showed a rekindled interest in African affairs with the election of President John F. Kennedy, his assassination and the nascent presidency of Lyndon Johnson ensured a swift cooling of that ardour. In areas where there were no strategic interests at play and no obvious threat of Soviet-Cuban involvement, the US was willing to accept the local pro-western strongman. With the US reluctant to deepen its involvement in African affairs given the mounting Vietnam crisis, the UN’s commitment to the region was always going to be short-term.
Another disincentive for western countries to get involved in African affairs – particularly in southern Africa – was the status of the Republic of South Africa. Run on an apartheid basis, with its black majority effectively disenfranchised, South Africa was wealthy thanks to its vast gold and mineral reserves and, equally as important, was militarily independent. South Africa had the largest and best-equipped army south of the Sahara and was willing to use that power to destabilise bordering countries that it perceived as a threat to itself and its regime. South Africa did not appreciate excessive European interest in its African affairs and, in the 1960s and 1970s, still had the power to make those feelings known. The Congo was generally outside the South African sphere of influence, but neighbouring countries, particularly Nyasaland and southern Rhodesia, were hugely important to Pretoria and could not be destabilised.
For Ireland, the Congo represented a similarly steep learning curve. Politicians and military commanders realised that you couldn’t send soldiers into harm’s way in the 1960s and 1970s with equipment designed for combat in the 1920s and 1930s. The Vickers machine gun may have set firing records in the First World War, but was it really suited to the UN operation in the Congo? Communication was now also appreciated as a vital element of battalion co-ordination, as was proper logistical support for isolated units such as the one at Jadotville. The importance of air support, armoured support and operational co-ordination would never be underestimated again.
The reality was that the Congo was like a classroom for an army that, in its forty-year history, had only ever undertaken static defensive tasks. In the space of just two years, the Irish army went from using Lee-Enfield rifles and doing combat marches between major Irish towns, to deploying a modern assault rifle and dealing with firefights against more numerous and better-armed opponents.
After Niemba, Irish units never again made the same mistakes about clearing roadblocks. After Jadotville, troops were never again assigned to isolated locations unless they could be properly resupplied by air or by road. Within a few years of returning from the Congo, Ireland quietly replaced the old Ford AFVs with modern French-built Panhard armoured cars that offered vastly greater flexibility and potency in operations. It is worth noting that Ireland deemed the Fords of such low worth that most were simply left in the Congo despite the fact they were still fully operational. The Air Corps – until then reliant on British hand-me-downs such as the Supermarine Spitfire and De Havilland Vampire – moved to purchase helicopters that, as the US was to shortly prove in Vietnam, were a crucial weapon in modern warfare.
Having witnessed the havoc that even a humble jet-trainer armed with machine guns and rocket pods could cause against opponents with no air cover, the Air Corps also decided to acquire a new jet aircraft. The aircraft chosen was the Fouga Magister with its distinctive butterfly tail, which, until its retirement in the 1990s, remained Ireland’s principle air defence weapon.
The Congo was so important because it gave the Irish army a chance of proving itself in a combat situation. For the first time since the War of Independence, Irish troops were thrown into a combat situation from which they emerged wiser and more skilled. Irish troops displayed admirable courage throughout the four-year Congo deployment and, as Tpr Pat Mullins personally demonstrated, were capable of the most incredible acts of bravery, loyalty and sacrifice. If the soldiers who served throughout ‘The Emergency’ were the core of the Defence Forces in the late 1940s and 1950s, the soldiers who returned from the Congo between 1960–64 formed the bedrock of the army which, in the 1970s and 1980s, emerged as one of the UN’s most respected and skilled peacekeeping forces.
Irish troops who arrived in the Congo and Katanga ‘green’, went home as experienced operators who had witnessed the best – and the worst – elements of modern conflict. Some of the things that Irish soldiers witnessed in the Congo would remain with them for the rest of their lives. Most of the experiences helped make the young troops better soldiers by reminding them that warfare is a terrible thing and that simple mistakes can sometimes have catastrophic consequences.
‘There is no substitute for having been under fire. You either have combat experience or you don’t. And you never really know how a soldier is going to react under the pressure of combat,’ Des Keegan explained. ‘We were all pretty innocent when we went out there, but the Congo had a way of shocking you and showing you that it wasn’t all stories like Beau Geste. I remember during the fighting of late 1961, after the ceasefire following Operation Morthor in September had broken down, a Katangan sniper started taking pot-shots at the Irish camp at Prince Leopold Farm. He only started shooting at night, usually as we were sitting down in the mess tent for something to eat. His shots all fell high which meant he wasn’t in the best of firing positions. It was more of an annoyance than a threat I suppose. But we had an ex-Congolese army sergeant [working on the base] with us. He had no love for the Katangans and, one night after the sniper started shooting, he turned to us in the mess tent and said, “I will fix sniper.” He borrowed a combat knife and slipped out of camp into the darkness. He was so black himself that he blended into the night like a shadow.
‘To be honest, none of us took much notice. I think a few
of us thought he only wanted an excuse to get out of camp and maybe go looking for a woman or a beer. But then, about an hour later, we noticed that the firing had stopped. Not long after that, the Congolese sergeant slipped quietly back into camp and walked proudly over to a group of us having a smoke outside our tents. He handed one of the lads a soggy newspaper, which had been wrapped in a ball. “Here is sniper,” he grinned. The Irish lad opened up the package and almost vomited up his dinner. In the newspaper in his hand was a bloody penis and a pair of testicles. The sergeant had crept up on the sniper and cut his throat. He only cut off the guy’s penis and testicles just to prove to us that he had done what he said he would.’
It wasn’t just the military that discovered that the Congo could be a bruising classroom rife with conflicting interests and priorities. In December 1961, Conor Cruise O’Brien resigned as UN Special Representative in the Congo. Irish Independent reporter, Raymond Smith, writing in 1962, was prescient when he mused that, had Operation Morthor proved a success on 13 September, Dr O’Brien ‘would probably have emerged as a world hero’. But the reality was that, far from being a success, Morthor had come close to wrecking the UN mission.
In announcing his resignation just three months after Operation Morthor, the Irish diplomat said that nothing should be left in place that might impact on settlement talks between the various Congolese parties. ‘As most members of the [UN] Security Council have laid great stress on the necessity of conciliation in the Congo and as some powers have maintained that my contribution has been an obstacle to conciliation, I feel it would be better for me to go lest I should be thought to be frustrating the policy of conciliation. By its nature the UN must pursue such a policy by every means, setting aside any obstacle that there may be in the way,’ Dr O’Brien explained.
However, the politician shortly to be famed as ‘The Cruiser’ was never shy of courting controversy and in 1962 he caused outrage when he accused Great Britain of playing a hidden agenda in the Congo, supporting the UN Security Council position in relation to the Congo on the one hand, while doing everything possible to frustrate the implementation of UN policy on the ground in Katanga. It was a claim that provoked a storm of controversy not just in Britain and Westminster, but also in Rhodesia, where it was felt Dr O’Brien had effectively accused them of offering tacit support to Katanga, which, if true, could have had serious diplomatic and security consequences for this neighbouring state.
Britain has a long memory and Conor Cruise O’Brien’s accusations were never forgotten. Thirteen years after the Congo crisis, when ‘The Cruiser’ was part of Liam Cosgrave’s Fine Gael-Labour coalition government, a British diplomat threw Katanga back in his face. Dr Garret Fitzgerald, writing in his autobiography All in a Life, recalled that in the mid 1970s Katanga was used to try to discredit the coalition government’s support for the Council of Ireland. ‘Dublin political correspondents were invited to Belfast to meet the Secretary of State [Willie Whitelaw]. A very senior British civil servant referred to Conor Cruise O’Brien and myself in Whitelaw’s presence as “third rate academics”, one of whom had been in charge of a “second class” colonial area – a reference to Conor’s role some thirteen years earlier as UN Administrator in Katanga. Whitelaw had looked at the journalist to whom these remarks were addressed, showing no inclination to demur at them,’ he wrote.
The truth was that in the 1950s and 1960s Anglo-African politics were about as clear as mud. The British government was deeply concerned about the aftermath of independence in a host of its former colonies from Kenya to Uganda and from Rhodesia to Nyasaland, and their biggest fear was that chaos in Katanga could destabilise adjoining countries – most of which were former British colonies – in their race to independence.
The Congo mission drew to a close in 1964 when the UN, having effectively disarmed Katanga, handed the country over to a government that promised to be inclusive of all provincial and tribal groups. Moise Tshombe – having returned to the Congo after fleeing at the start of Operation Morthor – was even given a ministerial role. Yet, within twelve months of UN troops leaving, the deal fell apart and Joseph Mobutu copper-fastened his iron grip on power by abolishing parliament. Mobutu – privately assured of US support for his promised pro-western policies and anti-Communist stance – had transformed the Force Publique into his personal army. He was now unassailable.
Tshombe fled for his life for the final time, and Mobutu imposed direct rule. The US was happy with the new status quo and saw no reason to take a stand for democracy in the Congo once Mobutu maintained his pro-western policies. The powerful mining interests were immediately promised stability and non-interference in their affairs by the new government and were equally quiescent. Once the mines paid a stipend to Mobutu and his cronies, all would be well – or so at least they hoped.
Between 20 July 1960 and 15 May 1964, more than 6,000 Irish soldiers served in the Congo. The involvement formally ended when Ireland’s 2nd Infantry Group under General Redmond O’Sullivan formally stood down and returned home. In a fitting link, the armoured car unit of the 2nd Group was under the command of Captain Art Magennis. He formed a connection between the last Irish armoured unit in the Congo and the armoured unit that suffered the heaviest casualties in the African country two years earlier. The 1963 unit was again reliant on the Ford AFVs, but the decision had been taken that they simply weren’t worth the trouble of bringing back to Ireland. The three vehicles that weren’t hors de combat were formally handed over to the Congolese National Army at a special ceremony in Kolwezi. The cars were handed over by Lt Ken Kelly, and Captain Magennis took a special photograph of the ceremony. Showing how little things had changed, an African officer casually smoked a cigarette as he inspected the armoured cars – while a Belgian officer commanding the Katangan-born soldiers watched.
The UN formally ended Ireland’s mission in the Congo in May 1964, although as the Irish troops departed Kolwezi on the first leg of their marathon journey home, an ironic sight greeted them. One of the Ford AFVs was left abandoned, effectively impaled on a steep roundabout where a Congolese crew had crashed it a few hours earlier. It was the last thing the Irish unit saw as they left Kolwezi.
The next month the UN formally ended its mission, although fighting would continue in the Congo through rebellions and coups for the next forty years. Irish troops had acquitted themselves with honour in the Congo. Furthermore, they had shown an empathy with the indigenous people who had suffered under colonialism that could only be offered by a nation that had endured similar suffering. That reputation earned Irish soldiers a unique kind of respect and made them extremely useful to the UN in the world’s hotspots.
Perhaps the greatest proof of Ireland’s new-found peacekeeping skill and respect comes from the case of the Baluba tribe itself. The Balubas had attacked and butchered Irish troops at Niemba and yet, within a matter of eighteen months it was Irish troops who were protecting the Balubas from persecution. Irish troops defended Baluba refugee camps in and around Elisabethville during the fighting of 1961 and 1962. At one point more than 35,000 refugees were in the care of Irish and Swedish troops in Elisabethville. Far from seeking revenge for Niemba, Irish troops had followed a noble course and left the Congo with a reputation for fairness and decency that would only be enhanced through deployments in Cyprus and Lebanon.
As it turned out, the Defence Forces didn’t have long to wait for their next UN assignment – in fact Irish soldiers were dispatched on UN duties to Cyprus before all units had been withdrawn from the Congo. The Cypriot involvement – while always a smaller logistical deployment than Katanga – continued for years. Tortuous negotiations over the fate of the Turkish-speaking northern section of the island continue to this day.
But the major application of the hard-won experience in the Congo came in Lebanon, when Ireland was asked to deploy peacekeepers following the eruption of a ferocious civil war. The UN had mounted a small deployment in Beirut in 1958 and had helped successfully sta
ve off civil war, but by 1978 tensions within Lebanon could no longer be contained. After an influx of hard-line Palestinian factions from Jordan over previous years, fighting erupted. The UN deployed troops under the UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) mission. The situation in 1978 was complex and violent as the various Lebanese factions allied themselves to outside influences including Israel, Syria and Iran, and at times Lebanon served as a proxy battleground for these countries.
Irish troops would ultimately remain in Lebanon for twenty-three years, until 2001, when a painstaking peace deal was finally agreed. Lebanon remains Ireland’s biggest and longest-running UN mission – and ultimately cost twenty-seven lives.
The speed with which Ireland switched from peacekeeping duties in the Congo to those in Cyprus meant the Irish military had new priorities. The army suddenly had a major logistics operation on its hands; therefore, there was less time to focus on the lessons and tasks still remaining from the Congo. Amongst these was the fact that when the 2nd Infantry Group took down their tents, packed up their gear and stowed their rifles for the long flight back to Ireland in 1964, one Irish soldier was still unaccounted for in the Congo.
The search for Trooper Pat Mullins was about to dip below the radar for almost thirty years.
The rains transformed the Congo in a matter of hours, with everything covered in a lush blanket of greenery. Captain Art Magennis (centre) is pictured at a temporary camp in the bush. Note the FN rifle propped against a tree. (Photo: Art Magennis)
12 – A Family’s Fifty Year Campaign for Answers
It is hard to explain precisely why the case of Pat Mullins faded so quickly from the national consciousness. The Defence Forces maintain that his case file was always kept open and inquiries were repeatedly made about his fate. But it is curious to note that rather than being officially deemed ‘Missing in Action’, which is factually what happened to Pat Mullins, the young trooper was accorded a different official status. Instead of being recorded as ‘MIA’, he was regarded as being: ‘Dead, presumed to have been killed’. The decision to omit the word ‘missing’ from his status has never been fully explained.