‘Yes. Do not forget there are women in the house.’
‘We know it.’
Woodcock was ordered to turn around and face the wall. At that point he heard Lieutenant-Colonel Montgomery open the door of his room and he shouted to him to look out.
‘Hands up,’ one of the men shouted and Montgomery complied.
At that point Dalton and Flanagan had reached the top floor elsewhere in the house. One of them knocked at the door and when Major C. M. G. Dowling, who was already dressed, answered it, they shot him dead. They also mortally wounded Captain Leonard Price in the next room. He died within a matter of minutes.
Once those shots rang out one of the men fired at Mont gome r y, who fell forward, and the same man then shot Woodcock.
‘My husband and myself were awakened by a loud knocking,’ Captain B. C. H. Keenlyside’s wife recalled. ‘Men dressed in overcoats and raincoats, and wearing cloth and felt hats filed methodically into the bedroom. They shouted roughly at my husband, “Get up, and put up your hands”, which he did. They hustled him downstairs, clad only in his pajamas. I protested and begged them not to hurt him, holding the arm of one of the raiders. He assured me that I would not be hurt, and pushed me roughly back into the room. I followed them immediately out, and saw another officer being taken downstairs with his hands up.’ This was Lieutenant R. G. Murray.
‘They then placed him and my husband side by side in the hall, demanded their names, and fired at them, wounding the officer in the back and my husband in the jaw, both arms and upper part of the forehead,’ Keenlyside’s wife continued. ‘I ran down and helped him quickly upstairs to our bedroom. I had roughly bandaged him when doctors and nurses arrived, and he was conveyed to an adjacent nursing home.’
The experienced gunmen had been on the top floor. Most of their colleagues were young and anxious. This kind of cold-blooded killing was something new for them. They were so nervous that they could not shoot straight. Ned Kelliher had been left guarding the front door and had not seen what went on in the house, but the men coming out said that six men had been shot. ‘At the time they were under the impression that they were all dead,’ said Kelli her. They were so nervous, however, that they could not shoot straight. Although all of the six agents in the residence were shot, three of them survived.
One operation, on the East Road, did not come off at all as the spies had left that address the previous day and there was nobody in the house when the Volunteers arrived. The first battalion had no success either when they raided a house on North Circular Road. The lieutenant colonel was believed to have moved to another lodging on the eve of the attack. The targets in the East wood hotel – Colonel Jennings and Major Callaghan – were also missing. They reportedly spent the night in a brothel. Another target was missing from a guesthouse in Fitzwilliam Square.
Captain Nobel, another of the wanted men, was also absent when a group made up mostly of the fourth battalion raided 7 Ranelagh Road. Todd Andrews recalled that he walked the mile from Brighton Square to the canal at Charlemont Street Bridge, where he met up with Francis X. Coghlan, Hubert Earle and James Kenny at about 8.55 a.m. Joe Dolan and Dan McDonnell led the team. ‘We got a very ugly mission to perform,’ McDonnell explained. They were to kill a ‘British agent called Noble, and his paramour … They were both agents, and our information was that they both were the main cause of a member of our organisation, named Doyle, getting a very cruel death in the Dublin Mountains,’ McDonnell added.
Coghlan was carrying a walking stick which he stuck in the door to ensure it could not be closed when a teenage girl answered it. They brushed past her and walked straight up to the front first floor room where they expected to find Nobel. They had their guns out and cocked, ready to shoot him on sight as they burst into the room.
‘We found the room empty except for a half-naked woman who sat up in the bed looking terror stricken. She did not scream or say a word,’ Andrews recalled. The man they were looking for had apparently got up and gone on some assignment shortly after 7 a.m. When a man came out from the next room, Andrews almost shot him, thinking he was Noble.
‘He’s all right,’ Coghlan shouted. The man was a lodger in the house and was apparently the source of their intelligence.
Dolan and McDonnell turned the place over looking for Noble’s papers. There were only women and children in the rest of the house, but that did not prevent Dolan and his colleague from ‘behaving like Black and Tans’, according to Andrews. ‘In their search for papers they overturned furniture, pushing occupants of the house around, and either through carelessness or malice set fire to a room in which there were children.’
‘I felt a sense of shame and embarrassment for the woman’s sake,’ Todd added. But Dolan and McDonnell had no sympathy for her. Their orders were to shoot her and Noble, if the two of them were together, but not to shoot her alone. Hence Dolan took out his frustration on her. ‘I was so angry I gave the poor girl a right scourging with the sword scabbard,’ he recalled. ‘Then I set the room on fire.’
Coghlan, a married man in his mid-thirties with a couple of children of his own, was furious at such conduct. They were witnessing the tactics of the Squad for the first time. ‘Having seen the children to safety he directed Kenny to bring two more members of the company into the house, so that we could form a bucket chain from the tap in the basement (the only one in the house) to the first floor where the fire was becoming serious. Nearly half an hour was wasted putting out the fire before we were able to get out of the house.’ Neither Coghlan nor Kenny mentioned anything about the day, which later became known as Bloody Sunday, in their statements to the Bureau of Military History.
‘In our fourth battalion area there were at least four abortive raids,’ according to Andrews.
The operation at the Gresham hotel under Paddy Moran seemed to go smoothly. Twelve to fourteen men entered the hotel at 9 a.m. One of the men was carrying a sledgehammer. Some wore hats pulled down, but they wore no masks. They held up the staff and some guests in the lobby and ordered them to raise their hands and face a wall. ‘Our first job was to disconnect the telephone,’ Paddy Kennedy noted. They then checked the register. ‘Our party split up, as pre-arranged, and proceeded to the rooms allotted to them by Paddy Moran,’ continued Kennedy. ‘I remained with Paddy Moran while the shootings were taking place.’
Hall porter Hugh Callaghan was ordered take them to rooms 14 and 24. L. E. Wilde, aged thirty-nine, occupied the first. They knocked on the door, and he answered in his pyjamas. He was shot two or three times, and fell, fatally wounded, face down. The raiders then forced the door of Number 22 and shot Captain Patrick McCormack of the Royal Veterinary Corps as he was sitting up in bed reading a newspaper. He was hit five times, once in the head. To cries of ‘Shame’, Hamar Greenwood later told the House of Commons that McCormack’s body had been horribly disfigured. ‘The hammer was possibly used as well as the shots to finish off this gallant officer.’
Michael Collins later admitted that McCormack was a case of mistaken identity. His interests were in sport, not politics. He was actually due to leave for Egypt shortly, where he was to take up duty as starter for the racing club. The other target at the Gresham was not in his room. ‘The third man escaped,’ reported Kennedy. ‘He was a Catholic, I believe, and had gone out to early mass.’ The whole operation lasted less than ten minutes.
The men who called at 28 Earlsfort Terrace asked for Captain Fitzpatrick. They were told that there was no one of that name there, but there was a Captain John Fitzgerald, the son of a Tip-perary doctor who had been a prisoner-of-war in Germany. He had joined the RIC some months earlier and had been stationed in Clare, where he was lucky to survive an IRA kidnapping. He had been in Dublin having his wound treated. He was found in his bed, having been shot four times, twice in the head and once in the heart. The other wound was to his wrists as he was obviously protecting himself.
Captain Baggallay, a court martial official who had lost a leg i
n the war, was shot dead at his residence at 119 Lower Baggot Street.
Captain Newbury was living with his wife in a flat at 92 Lower Baggot Street. A housekeeper admitted about ten men, led by Bill Stapleton and Joe Leonard of the Squad. They asked if Captain W. F. Newbury was in, but the housekeeper did not know. The landlady, seeing the men, immediately fled upstairs and said that she did not see what ensued. But the raiders obviously knew where to look because they went up to Newbury’s first floor room and knocked on the door. His wife answered and, seeing the armed men, promptly slammed the door, but they broke it in. Newbury and his wife fled to an inner room and but he was shot through the door. He tried to get out a window, but they shot him some seven more times and he died on the window ledge. His distraught wife, who was heavily pregnant at the time, put a blanket over the body hanging halfway out the window.
‘Where are the papers?’ one of the assassins asked her, and they then searched the room. She gave birth to a stillborn baby a week later.
The ten-year-old son of Thomas Herbert Smith, the owner of 117 Morehampton Road, answered the knock on their door and some ten men pushed their way into the house. Captain Donald L. MacLean and his wife were asleep in bed when the men entered their room.
‘Get up,’ one of them said to MacLean. He got up and left the room with them. Kate MacLean tried to follow her husband, but she was ordered back into the room as they took him upstairs. She heard them ask her husband his name.
‘MacLean,’ he replied.
‘That is good enough,’ someone said. They shot him, along with the owner of the house (who was living there with his wife and three children), and Kate MacLean’s brother, John Caldow, who was a former soldier with the Royal Scots Fusiliers. Although shot just below the heart, Caldow managed to recover. It was Sergeant Patrick Mannix who first identified MacLean as one of the undercover agents. He later explained that Smith was also considered an agent and that was why he was shot.
Tom Keogh and Jim Slattery of the Squad had six men from E Company of the second battalion undertake the attack on 22 Lower Mount Street. ‘We knocked at the door and a maid admitted us,’ Jim Slattery recalled. ‘We left two men inside the door to see that nobody would enter or leave the house, and the remainder of us proceeded upstairs to two rooms.’ They already knew the number of the rooms of the men they wanted – McMahon and Peel, both noms de guerre.
The group then split up with Keogh and some of the men going to Peel’s room, while the others went up to the top floor to McMahon’s room.
Peel had locked his door and, sensing trouble, pushed some furniture to barricade the entrance. Unable to get into the room, the men outside began firing into the door, up to seventeen bullets, but Peel was physically unscathed. When he was finally relieved, he was almost incoherent with excitement. As the shots were being fired at his door, a maid shouted out the front window: ‘They are killing an officer upstairs,’ she cried.
At that moment a lorry with auxiliaries was passing. They had just left their Beggar’s Bush base en route to Kingsbridge (now Heuston) railroad station. Hearing her and the shooting inside the building, they stopped and rushed to the door. They tried to gain entry but the two men guarding downstairs were holding the door.
At one point Billy McLean put his hand around the door with a pistol and fired. The auxiliaries returned the fire and MacLean was hit in the hand.
Two of the auxiliaries – Temporary Cadets Frank Garniss and Cecil A. Morris, both Englishmen – were sent back to Beggar’s Bush on foot to get reinforcements, while some of their colleagues went in through No. 21 to get access to the back of No. 22.
The second group ‘had only just gone upstairs,’ Slattery said, ‘when we heard shooting downstairs.’
The door to McMahon’s bedroom was unlocked and they found him sharing a bed with another officer who was still asleep. The other officer woke up with a start as somebody shouted, ‘Hands up’. He later said that he opened his eyes to see some seven men in a semi-circle around the bed.
One of the raiders searched a cabinet but found nothing.
‘Where are your guns, Mac?’ the same man asked.
‘Look here, we are two R.C.’s; the guns are in the bag,’ McMahon replied, pointing to a portmanteau.
The portmanteau was put on a table, broken open, and two guns were taken from it. At this stage they could hear shooting in the street. ‘Are you fellows all right?’ somebody shouted. ‘They are surrounding the house.’
The raiders began to withdraw from the room. McMahon and the other man were still in the bed. ‘A s I was turning over in the bed I saw McMahon raise his right arm,’ the other man said. ‘I heard a shot, and he rolled over on the right hand side of the bed. Then came a whole lot of shots.’
The other man rolled under the bed and lay on the floor:
‘I saw McMahon’s two legs stuck out underneath the bed. I spoke to him and felt his heart, but I knew he was dead and he was lying face downward.’
While he lay under the bed, he heard somebody smashing glass as if trying to break out a back way. ‘Come out this way,’ he heard one of the men shout. ‘I lay quiet for some time, as I thought they might come back and I had no revolver.’
‘We succeeded in shooting Lieutenant McMahon,’ Slattery said. But they left the man who had been sharing the bed, ‘as we had no instructions’ to shoot him. ‘We discovered afterwards that he was an undesirable character as far as we were concerned, and that we should have shot him,’ Slattery added.
‘We went downstairs and tried to get out but found the British forces in front of the house,’ Slattery continued. ‘We went to the back of the house, and a member of E Company, Jim Dempsey, and myself got through by getting over a wall.’ Frank Teeling followed them but was shot by auxiliaries in the garden of No. 21.
‘I am done lads,’ Frank Teeling cried as he slumped back on the ground while the others escaped.
‘Are you wounded?’ one of the auxiliaries asked.
Teeling did not answer. He opened his pistol and shut it again, having obviously loaded it. The auxiliaries shouted for him to throw the pistol away, which he did, over his right shoulder. It was found to be fully loaded.
The officer upstairs remained under the bed for some minutes. He then dressed and went downstairs to look for Peel. He was told at first that there was someone lying in the yard, but that was Frank Teeling, whom he recognised as one of the men who had been around the bed upstairs.
The two auxiliaries who had gone for help had been intercepted crossing the Canal Bridge by the IRA covering party, who took them to a house on Northumberland Road, where they were questioned and then taken out the back and shot dead.
A nurse and another person who had witnessed those shootings raced to Beggar’s Bush, where Brigadier General Frank Crozier was re viewing a parade.
Crozier promptly took a lorry load of men to Mount Street and entered No. 22. He remarked that ‘the dingy dirty house resembled a bad billet in France shot up by French mutineers.’ One of his men had a pistol to Teeling’s head and was counting, giving him until ten to start naming his colleagues. Crozier promptly put a stop to this and ordered that the wounded Teeling be brought to King George V Military hospital.
While all of that was going on Vinny Byrne’s team had been going about their business less than a quarter of a mile away in Upper Mount Street. They had mobilised outside St Andrew’s church, Westland Row, at 8 a.m. Herbie Conroy brought a sledgehammer, in case they had to break in any doors. He had some ten men reporting, including a first-aid man. They all turned up on time. ‘As we proceeded up Westland Row, I called my first-aid man and asked him had he got plenty of bandages, etc.’
‘I have nothing,’ he replied.
‘Did you not hear the instructions I gave you last night?’
He found that there was no first-aid stuff when he got home.
‘I may be able to get some in Jackie Dunne’s dump in Denzille Lane,’ Byrne said. ‘I went into the dum
p, met Jackie there and asked him had he any first-aid outfits. He searched around, but found none.’
‘Would this be any use to you?’ Dunne asked, producing a .38 revolver.
‘Give it to me,’ Byrne replied. ‘It might come in handy.’
‘When I returned to my group, I handed the .38 to the first-aid man, telling him he might find use for it.’
They walked up Holles Street, into Merrion Square, and turned into Upper Mount Street. ‘When we came to No. 38, I detailed four of five men to keep guard outside,’ Byrne said.
Michael Lawless was stationed on the steps outside the front door, while Byrne and Ennis went to the door and rang the bell.
As soon as the servant girl opened the door Byrne put in his foot to ensure that she could not close it again and said they were looking for Lieutenant George Bennett and Peter Ames. He entered the hallway beckoning the other men to follow.
‘Lieutenant Bennett sleeps in there,’ the maid said, pointing to the front parlour, ‘and the other officer sleeps in the back room down there.’ Byrne told Ennis and Tom Duffy to go to a back room and look for Ames.
‘I gently tried the handle to open the door, and found that it was locked,’ Byrne continued.
‘You can get in by the back parlour. The folding doors are open,’ the maid said.
‘Thank you.’
‘I went into the back parlour, with Seán Doyle and Herbie Conroy each side of me,’ Byrne continued. ‘A s I opened the folding door, the officer, who was in bed, was in the act of going for his gun under his pillow. Doyle and myself dashed into the room, at the same time ordering him to put up his hands, which he did.’
Doyle went around the bed and pulled a Colt .45 from under the pillow. Frank Saurin entered and began searching through Bennett’s stuff. ‘I was interested principally in the papers these intelligence officers might have,’ Saurin explained.
Byrne noticed a Sinn Féin tie in one drawer along with what he thought were photographs of the 1916 leaders. ‘I ordered the British officer to get out of the bed. He asked me what was going to happen.’
The Squad Page 18