Tom Barry

by Meda Ryan

  Barry, Spud Murphy, Flyer Nyhan and Mick O’Herlihy observed what had happened and jogged closer. They were now about 25 yards behind (moving towards) the enemy who spotted them. In their sandwiched position, the Auxies again shouted a surrender.

  Realising that the Auxies had again opened fire with their revolvers. Barry shouted: ‘Rapid fire, and do not stop until I tell ye!’ Barry and the three men dropped down and ‘let them have it from behind’. No. 2 section also responded to Barry’s ‘Rapid fire’. The Auxies realising that they were jammed, kept firing. Barry shouted to his men to keep firing. At this stage the Auxies were shown no mercy, regardless of whether some had thrown away their arms or not.

  ‘We advanced into them still firing, making sure they were all dead. Now for that I take full responsibility. The only blame I have to myself is that I didn’t warn these young lads about the old war trick of a false surrender,’ said Barry. He never forgave himself for this. ‘They stood up because they were green and I didn’t warn them.’[55]

  Scattered on the road all the Auxiliaries appeared dead. Barry gave the ‘cease-fire’ command and an eerie silence followed as the sounds of the last shots died away.

  Barry climbed the short distance to where he had seen his men fall. Two Volunteers were dead – Michael McCarthy, who originally came with Barry to mark out the site of the ambush, and Jim O’Sullivan shot through the jaw. Pat Deasy, Liam Deasy’s young brother who had followed the column and implored Barry to allow him to fight was bleeding profusely from bullet wounds.

  Barry sent a scout to summon a doctor, another to get a priest, he detailed four men to get a door as a stretcher for Pat Deasy. When Barry spoke to him, Pat smiled. Barry records that he himself turned away and had to refuse his dying wish for a drink of water. This lad, not yet sixteen, died later in a neighbouring house.[56]

  Eighteen Volunteers were told to collect the arms and documents of the dead Auxiliaries and to pull the bodies away from the lorries and the remainder of the column were ordered to soak the tenders in petrol and prepare them for burning.[57]A flask of brandy was found in each of the Auxiliaries pockets.[58]

  Some Volunteers were in a state of shock. Unlike Barry, they had never seen so many dead men with severe body wounds. Barry, conscious of this and of the necessity of jerking them back to reality, gave the command, ‘Fall in at the double!’ The men from each section closed upon their leader, got the ‘attention’ command, were numbered off and ordered to re-load. Their commander ordered them to slope arms; then he inspected them. He felt the only medicine available to counteract strain and shock was foot drill among the dying and the dead. If they encountered more British troops during retirement, inefficiency would show. ‘If they didn’t keep discipline, we might lose everything. Discipline was all we had.’ Barry marched and counter-marched his column, their faces lit in the winter twilight by the flickering light from the burning vehicles, their boots slipping in pools of blood. ‘His iron will as much as anything else was the stuff of survival, of victory’.[59]

  Before they left Kilmichael some of the men were physically sick. The shock of the fight and the drill beside the bodies and the blood were too much for one man whom John Whelton knew. ‘He came home shortly after, and was a physical wreck. He shouldn’t have been there in the first place, as he couldn’t take that type of thing. Within six months his hair was snow white. After that Barry decided he would emphasise stronger than ever what they were facing, and if they couldn’t take it, they were out.’[60]

  The column was halted before the rock where the bodies of the two dead Volunteers lay and was ordered to ‘Present Arms’, as a final tribute to their comrades. The men were again formed into sections; then the order to march was given. Some Volunteers from the local company as well as those who had come earlier in a grey horse and side-car helped with the care of the dead men. Taking the bodies cross-country through bogs, burying them by day, re-digging and moving by night, it took over a week to reach Castletown-Kenneigh graveyard for burial.[61]

  Critics have said that Barry should have accepted the second surrender call. In Liam Deasy’s Towards Ireland Free published in 1973, there is no mention of a false surrender.[62]The absence of this detail angered Barry. In a booklet The Reality of the Anglo-Irish War 1920–1921 in West Cork that Tom Barry wrote, afterwards, he cited commander of Section No. 3, Stephen O’Neill’s version in The Kerryman, 12 December 1937: ‘after the false surrender, fire was again opened by the Auxiliaries with fatal results to two of our comrades who exposed themselves, believing the surrender to be genuine. We renewed the attack vigorously and never desisted until the enemy were annihilated.’[63]Responding to criticism Barry wrote, ‘perhaps, I should have taken a second false surrender and let a few more Volunteers be killed treacherously.’[64]

  General Crozier, commander at the time of the Auxiliaries in Ireland, in his book Ireland Forever accepted that there was a false surrender. ‘It was perfectly true that the wounded had been put to death after the ambush, but the reason for this barbarous inhumanity became understandable, although inexcusable,’ he wrote. Because, ‘arms were supposed to have been surrendered, but a wounded Auxiliary whipped out a revolver while lying on the ground and shot a “Shinner” with the result that all his comrades were put to death with him.’[65]

  Initially I investigated the false surrender for The Tom Barry Story.[66]After a brief surrender call, fire was re-opened. Was this the time the Volunteers were killed? It appears as if Pat Deasy jumped up during the fight to have a good shot and was wounded before the surrender call. However he had two wounds, one was a grazed side-stomach wound and the other higher up, internal nearer his heart, believed to be the fatal wound. Pat O’Donovan and Tim O’Connell at either side of him, both knew of the side graze wound before the surrender call.[67]He got up during the surrender, as firing began again. The shot which hit Jim O’Sullivan had first struck the bolt of his own rifle and then hit him in the head, killing him instantly. This, it seems, was after the surrender call. Barry was certain that two men fell from shots fired after the surrender call. ‘We saw three of our comrades on No. 2 section stand up, one crouched and two upright. Suddenly the Auxiliaries were firing again with revolvers’, Barry wrote.[68]

  Certainly in the second stage of the fight when Barry and the three men from the command post advanced, there were surrender cries. There was a lull. Tim O’Connell, Pat O’Donovan and James O’Mahony all in No. 2 section, in the direct line of fire (where the three men who were fatally wounded were positioned), were certain that the ambush was over. Then shots from Auxies guns rang out once more.[69]Barry’s response was decisive. He commanded his men to return fire. Whether or not some of the ‘Auxies’ had dropped arms, they were shot – some at point blank range.

  One Volunteer, Jack O’Sullivan told me that he had come behind a man and ordered him to drop his gun, which he did. He was walking him up the road when a shot dropped him at his feet.[70]At this stage Barry didn’t want prisoners – especially men who used deceptive tactics. Most of the Volunteers present to whom I spoke said, ‘It was either them or us.’ Barry said he accepted full responsibility for shooting them outright. ‘Soldiers who had cheated in war deserved to die’.

  ‘We had to; if three or four more of our lads stood up, they’d have got it too. I couldn’t take the chance that they wouldn’t grab a gun.’[71]In the Liam Deasy book the account of the ambush differs in vital parts from other written accounts.[72]Paddy O’Brien’s account begins: ‘We paraded at 5.00 a.m. on Sunday morning, and after a breakfast of tea, bread and butter we set out on the five mile march to Kilmichael ... Tom Barry divided the column into two sections, taking charge of one section himself.’[73]The facts are: they had a late evening meal, had their confessions heard and set out from there shortly after 3 a.m. for their 18-mile cross-county journey against the lashing rain. Because O’Brien (as per Deasy) states: ‘I was given orders to maintain contact with different units’, Barry in his booklet The
Reality of the Anglo Irish – asks, ‘by whom and for what purpose?’ He also asks why the Deasy account has O’Brien ‘practically taking over’ the ambush as well as the training camp prior to it though ‘he never held any rank’.[74]Rev. John Chisholm edited Liam Deasy’s book Towards Ireland Free, and said: ‘I endeavoured to preserve the style found in the manuscripts supplied to me, but I am conscious that all too often it is my own style which prevails.’[75]Flor Crowley, a West Cork teacher with an intimate knowledge of West Cork brigade events ‘gleaned’ that the book ‘was ghost written from incidents supplied by Liam Deasy.’[76]

  In Paddy O’Brien’s account of the ambush, there are passages such as: ‘Time seemed to move slowly. Yet in spite of the tense air of expectancy spirits were still high, though here and there a pale face glimpsed through the shifting mist reflected the inner fears of a youth facing the ordeal of battle for the first time, and possibility of death ... The enemy was coming. All weariness vanished, the quiet talk ceased, safety catches were released, rifle-bolts were drawn and a bullet filled the breach ... ’ In dealing with the horse and side-car crisis and Barry’s order, the O’Brien report calls it ‘a pony and trap’ and states: ‘Never on the dramatic stage was a transformation scene carried out with such dispatch nor indeed with such efficiency.’[77]When I questioned Fr Chisholm if Paddy O’Brien wrote or spoke in this manner, he admitted that he himself had ‘a free hand’ in the composition.[78]

  In his Refutations, Corrections and Comments on Liam Deasy’s Towards Ireland Free, Barry said that of all the inaccurate accounts, in Towards Ireland Free that of Kilmichael, ‘angered me the most’. In particular he was angry with the ‘presentation of the engagement at Kilmichael and the training camp immediately prior to it ... would appear to be like a scene from “Dad’s Army” whilst the fight could be summed up as a galaxy of names and “we waited; Auxies came, we shooted and all dead”.’[79]

  As Barry implies, it was an extremely abbreviated description of the ambush, containing numerous errors and omissions. He took up the point in the Deasy book that the men knew of the forthcoming attack, whereas for security purposes only Michael McCarthy and himself knew the exact location.[80]Most significant was the account in the book that the column was divided into only two sections, rather than the three, with No. 3 section sub-divided, plus a command post. The Towards Ireland Free accounts of several incidents at Kilmichael vary from other written accounts.[81]Barry said that the absence in the Deasy book of any mention of the false surrender of the Auxiliaries was questioned by ‘reviewers in national daily newspapers … without getting any answer from Deasy’ regarding ‘its omission … the account of the false surrender, which brought about the extermination of the surviving terrorists, had never been challenged until Deasy’s book by its omission, almost fifty-three years afterwards.’[82]Barry was angry as he felt it depicted him as ‘a bloodthirsty’ commander. ‘I challenge Deasy and his editor, Reverend Professor Chisholm, to state publicly why they omitted from such a voluminous and presumptuous account of history the salient historical fact of the false surrender of the Auxiliaries at one of the major military victories of its kind in 1920–1921, not alone in County Cork, but in all Ireland.’[83]

  There are errors and omissions in the O’Brien account of Kilmichael such as: (a) the omission of No. 3 section and the sub-section; (b) four men listed beside Barry rather than three; (c) Barry’s actions are incorrect: the Mills bomb did not kill ‘all’ in the first lorry instantly; (d) three Volunteers did not die during the ambush, two died, one died later of wounds; (e) most important of all, this account does not mention any surrender, it just describes a fight to the finish.[84]Neither does this account ‘describe an accepted surrender and a subsequent execution of all prisoners.’[85]

  Unknown to Barry, Liam Deasy had been ill for some time before the publication of Towards Ireland Free. Barry’s Reality of the Anglo-Irish War … Refutations and Corrections ... was in the hands of the publishers when Deasy died on 20 August 1974.[86]

  After publication of Tom Barry’s booklet, some former members of the West Cork Brigade disassociated themselves from the contents of Barry’s booklet. Only one of the men, Paddy O’Brien fought in Kilmichael. He was ill when he signed the form, and told me afterwards that he was not aware of what he was signing. He believed that his signature was ‘to help with the book’ and confirm that ‘Liam Deasy was a great officer who knew all about the Third West Cork Brigade’. He was unaware that there were errors in the account of Kilmichael ‘in the book’, as he hadn’t analysed it.[87]Paddy’s son Liam said ‘I grew up with the knowledge of the false surrender. From my meeting with these men, they always said that Tom made men of them.’[88]The other eleven Kilmichael survivors did not sign – not all were asked. Those who were, and knew of the omission and the controversy, refused. (As many of the signatories regretted signing, the facts of this controversy will be dealt with later – in chronological order). Liam Deasy died in August 1974, and the original letter with signatures ‘in the possession’ of Flor Begley was published in December 1974.[89]

  (Paddy O’Brien was among the many participants in the Kilmichael ambush who mentioned the false surrender to me: ‘... Well sure, it was that false surrender, that’s how our boys were killed. The Auxies paid for their tricks. Those boyos did a lot of havoc [in] ... the country.) [90]Paddy O’Brien did not see the men fall as he was in the sub-section of No. 3 section (across the road), but he did hear the surrender call, the lull and the resumption of Auxiliary firing. ‘They were not far away from us.’ For the Bureau of Military History collection, Jack Hennessy, James ‘Spud’ Murphy, Patrick O’Brien, Michael O’Driscoll and Ned Young, Kilmichael ambush participants, related some of their War of Independence activities in brief, answered leading questions, but were not queried on any omissions or inaccuracies. Familiarity with the subject would have been necessary in order to query, clarify and rectify certain aspects – names, section place locations and details of engagements such as Kilmichael. The men signed the statements that were thus compiled. None of these men mentioned a surrender, nor a false one, during the Kilmichael ambush. (Unless participants were queried specifically on a particular aspect, they just didn’t mention it.) Jack Hennessy, who doesn’t mention the sidecar or other relevant details or sequence of events, was in No. 2 section where the three Volunteers were fatally wounded. Without detailing, he mentions that when the Auxies got out of the second lorry and into positions, he was ‘engaging them on the road’. He doesn’t mention that Barry O/C and the command post men had come to the area behind these Auxies, but says, ‘We heard three blasts of the O/C’s whistle. I heard the three blasts and got up from my position, shouting “hands up”. At the same time one of the Auxies about five yards from me drew his revolver. He had thrown down his rifle. I pulled on him and shot him dead. I got back to cover where I remained for a few minutes firing at living and dead Auxies on the road. The Column O/C sounded his whistle again. Nearly all the Auxies had been wiped out.’ (This is a false surrender: after the ceasefire whistle was blown an Auxie who had thrown down his rifle ‘drew his revolver’.) Barry had reservations about the method of BMH collection. ‘At least every statement made should have been submitted to a Brigade Committee which would have verified or rejected it …’[91]

  Den Carey remembers Tom, in his latter years, after he had had a few drinks, ‘he’d talk about Kilmichael and tears would fill his eyes. “It’s the one thing I’ll never forget till the day I die. It pierces my heart to think of the lads being shot down by an enemy,” he’d say, “while they held the white flag.” He’d always ask, “why didn’t I warn them? I’ll regret it forever. ’Twas an old trick of the British – the false surrender!” He’d go mad over it.’[92]In an interview with Nollaig Ó Gadhra in 1969, Barry spoke of the Auxiliaries’ deceptive methods of the false surrender. ‘I have a vivid recollection of that … if they hadn’t done the false surrender … for what they had done I hated them, but no! No
! I wouldn’t have killed a prisoner.’ His voice tone and the content of the interview conveyed that he would not and did not kill prisoners. The Auxiliaries had resumed the fight; therefore, they were not prisoners.[93]

  (On Sunday 28 November 1982, after a ceremony in Castletown-Kenneigh graveyard where the men killed in Kilmichael are buried, a discussion, which began in Mrs Peggy O’Callaghan’s kitchen and ended in Creedon’s Hotel, Inchageela, centred on the Kilmichael ambush. Two survivors, Ned Young and Jack O’Sullivan could recall exactly where they were and how they felt. Because of the occasion, ‘the false surrender’ and its consequences for their comrades was discussed. I can recall The Tom Barry Story had been published. The discussion was wide-ranging and the two survivors regretted the wedge that had been driven between Tom Barry and Liam Deasy. I took no notes. Many of those present are still alive.)

  Tom Barry’s Guerilla Days in Ireland was first serialised in The Irish Press in 1948 and published in book form in 1949. Before this Barry wrote a full account of the Kilmichael ambush in An Cosantóir, 1941, and in Rebel Cork’s Fighting Story, March 1947. Barry stated, in 1973, that the false surrender account was never challenged until its omission from Towards Ireland Free ‘fifty-three years afterwards’ caused reviewers to question the omission. Neither Deasy nor any of the men who had participated in the Kilmichael ambush made any correction on Barry’s published accounts at that time.[94]Furthermore, in November 1969 a television programme Seven Days invited veterans from the Kilmichael and Crossbarry ambushes to the studio. The false surrender aspect was not refuted by any of the men. When asked if he had any regrets Ned Young replied, ‘No. None!’ Jack Hennessy said, ‘all we wanted to do was to get rid of the enemy in our midst’. Nudge Callanan who signed the statement (was not at Kilmichael but at Crossbarry) told Brian Farrell of the need to tackle the Auxiliaries as ‘they were terrorising the country’. In answer to the presenter’s question to the group if any of them had regrets, there was a chorus: ‘None. No. No. None.’ Barry said, ‘People who weren’t born then will never appreciate the spirit of those who fought.’[95]