There is a slightly different issue to consider as well: how effective was the operation? Frank Thornton grandly claimed that ‘the British Secret Service was wiped out on 21 November 1920’ – understandably enough, since he had drawn up the original hit list. But even if we add the qualification ‘in Ireland’, the claim is obviously overblown. The fact that at least one attack, on the Standard Hotel in Harcourt Street, was aborted, shows that a number of the intended targets were missed. Some have suggested that this attack was abandoned because the targets were absent, others that the commanding officer got cold feet. Dan Bryan of C Company, 4th Battalion, who would later become head of the Irish intelligence service, joined one of the attacking units at the last moment. It was ‘regarded as a big job’, with men from two companies involved, and his company commander after ‘some conference with the other officers’ in the street decided ‘it was … too big.’232 This seems to suggest that several targets were missed here.
Oscar Traynor, McKee’s successor as commander of the Dublin Brigade, suggested that the military intelligence system in Dublin was completely paralysed. If we add ‘temporarily’, this may be plausible. The shock effect of the morning attacks was tremendous – on the city as a whole as well as on the intelligence service. But in the longer term Collins ‘knew the operation had fallen far short of his vaulting ambitions’. As far as the ‘intelligence war’ went, it was not decisive. The British intelligence machine was still in its infancy, and this was a beginning rather than an end. The loss of even ten agents was not like the earlier crushing of G Division. More survived than were killed, the institutional memory survived, and security lessons were learnt. Indeed, the British military command in Dublin did not interpret the attacks as targeting the intelligence system at all, hypothesizing (even with the benefit of two years’ historical perspective) that ‘the object of this outrage was probably to smash the machinery of Dublin District Headquarters.’233 The addresses ‘visited’ were all houses where Dublin District staff ‘lived out’, and they still believed that ‘the murderers became confused and took lives that were not intended.’
And in any case, as the army dismissively put it, ‘Secret Service was on the whole a failure in Ireland.’ It simply did not represent the threat that Mulcahy implied when he later talked of ‘a scheme that was, in a considered and deliberate way, planned as an espionage system for the definite purpose of destroying the Directing Corps of the Volunteer activity’, and said that killing the agents ‘completely saved the situation’ by allowing Dublin to remain the seat of republican political and military power.234 But, seen as an element in the wider republican resistance, the Bloody Sunday attacks were far more effective. Their public impact was huge. Big crowds lined the Liffey banks and bridges when the bodies of the dead officers were taken to North Wall on their way to London; ‘reverent and quiet’, according to one British reporter, who did not see ‘any man who did not take off his hat and stay uncovered until the gun-carriages had passed’ (though he also heard that elsewhere ‘a great many hats and caps were forcibly removed by Auxiliaries and thrown into the Liffey’).235 In London the victims were given a state funeral, with a procession down Whitehall to Westminster Abbey. This no doubt generated an impulse to revenge in some; but it also strengthened the views of the small but thoughtful ‘peace party’ which accepted that some compromise settlement must be found, the sooner the better. The day after the attacks, Griffith received a message – apparently from Lloyd George – urging him ‘for God’s sake to keep his head, and not to break off the slender link that had been established. Tragic as the events in Dublin were, they were of no importance. These men were soldiers and took a soldier’s risk.’236
Collins found ‘the very air is made sweeter’ by Bloody Sunday morning, though in the end the day’s outcomes were less agreeable. The afternoon killings formed a grim kind of balance to the morning’s. Collins never ceased to lament the loss of McKee in particular, and neither he nor Mulcahy would afterwards have the same close relationship with Oscar Traynor and the Dublin Brigade. For the British, 21 November was a step-change. While the police were blazing away at Croke Park, a meeting of the Irish Executive launched a new military programme – large-scale searches, roadblocks, curfews and internment on suspicion. Military personnel would no longer be allowed to live outside barracks in ‘no man’s land’. Five hundred arrests were made by the army inside a week (including Arthur Griffith, arrested in defiance of political instructions). This stepping-up of the counter-insurgency campaign certainly intensified the physical pressure on the republicans: raiding made the maintenance of administrative offices much more hazardous. But raising the stakes also carried a psychological cost: the more the British took the gloves off, the greater the expectation that they would land a knockout blow.
Fortunately for the Volunteers, the intelligence service on which the British campaign rested was still less efficient than theirs. Though Collins may have played a complicated game in Dublin, the Volunteer intelligence organization was essentially a single system. The British state, like so many others, undermined its own intelligence capacity by creating multiple agencies with different agendas and operating principles. When the army took the lead role in early 1920 it judged police intelligence useless, and had to start from scratch. Although it made fair progress, the intelligence effort ‘unravelled overnight’ after the release of the hunger strikers in April. The new intelligence chief appointed in May, Ormonde Winter, was an artilleryman like Tudor, and a friend of his. These facts, rather than for any skill or experience in either intelligence or police work, seem to have been the reason he got the job. He certainly cut a distinctive figure, striking the layman as the perfect image of a spymaster. But cloak-and-dagger operations, however attractive to him and to many historians, could not be his main concern. He was well aware that building up an effective intelligence system was a slow business – ‘not a task that can be accomplished in a day, a week, or a month’ – but that time was not on his side. He had to make the best of the system that existed, and that meant using what survived of the old police structure. ‘The psychology of the police sergeant must be taken into consideration.’ This meant that the parallel systems of police and military intelligence, which Macready believed it was Winter’s purpose to bring together, remained separate – indeed increasingly so as time went on. Winter himself attributed this to two things: ‘one was a large increase in the activity of the rebel organisation, and the other the fact that the Army itself became a target for attack’. Why these things should have had this effect is not clear.
But Winter exemplified the besetting failing of all British intelligence work – internal competition. In the summer Charles Tegart, a brilliant Indian CID officer, was co-opted – apparently on Lloyd George’s personal initiative – as Winter’s chief assistant. A Trinity College graduate, who would go on to become a leading troubleshooter in imperial counter-insurgency campaigns, Tegart had become famous in Whitehall for his success in countering terrorism in Bengal. In reality, he was probably far better qualified than Winter to direct the intelligence effort now needed. He did not last three months. His view that Ireland required the same building-up of an organization for ‘five years plodding and patient investigation’ that had succeeded in Bengal was anathema to Winter, and more fatally to Lloyd George as well.
‘THEY SHOT THE WHOLE LOT OF THEM OFF?’
Bloody Sunday’s significance was ambiguous – and the same was true of the iconic fight of the West Cork flying column near Kilmichael a week later. This small battle, the climax of the autumn campaign, was the first to be seen by the British (at least privately) as ‘a military operation’, and it certainly altered the psychological environment. In the most active republican areas of the south-west, the arrival of the Auxiliaries had a similar effect to that in Dublin. Volunteers were conscious of failing to counter the reputation of the new force as ‘super-fighters and all but invincible’, and the impact of the intensified programm
e of raiding and patrolling.237 The two cadets killed in Mount Street on Bloody Sunday were in fact the first members of the division to die. The first deliberate stroke against the Auxiliaries was planned in West Cork by a man who had a personal as well as organizational point to prove. Tom Barry – no relation of Kevin – was a veteran of the Mesopotamia campaign. As an artilleryman in the Tigris Corps that failed to relieve the siege of Kut in early 1916, he had developed a healthy disrespect for the quality of the British (or at any rate the Indian) army’s officer corps. (He later breezily asserted that Kut ‘would have been relieved by one battalion of aggressively led troops’.)238 Like other war veterans in the Volunteers, his military experience was respected, but nobody was unaware that it was gained on the wrong side. In late 1920 he was in provisional charge of the Cork No. 3 Brigade flying column, and in November took it into combat on his own responsibility. His target was the ADRIC company stationed in Macroom Castle.
Barry, following the standard republican publicity line, held that the Auxiliaries were ‘openly established as a terrorist body’ aiming to break Irish resistance to British rule by armed force. (In his last book, he repeatedly referred to them simply as ‘the terrorists’.) Even their special uniforms, he suggested, were ‘calculated to cow their opponents’. He painted a picture of their ‘special technique’ in garish colours. ‘Fast lorries of them would come roaring into a village, the occupants would jump out, firing shots and ordering all the inhabitants out of doors. No exceptions were allowed. Men and women, old and young, the sick and decrepit were lined up against the walls with their hands up, questioned and searched.’ They would invariably beat up at least half a dozen people with their revolver butts. ‘For hours they would hold the little community prisoners, and on more than one occasion … they stripped all the men naked in the presence of the assembled people of both sexes, and beat them mercilessly with belts and rifles.’ The fact that so far ‘not a single shot had been fired at them … by the IRA in any part of Ireland’ had a ‘very serious effect on the morale of the whole people’ as well as the Volunteers. Barry’s conclusion was that ‘there could be no further delay in challenging them.’239
Barry, like many others, stressed the indiscipline of the Auxiliaries. But Macready, who had warned about this issue from the start, pointed out that ADRIC companies varied a lot in this respect. Some, under effective commanders, were well controlled, and C Company at Macroom under Lieutenant Colonel Crake seems to have been one of these. Though they had killed one man, James Lehane, in disputed circumstances, they spent most of their time fruitlessly patrolling. Did they operate as Barry described? Undoubtedly they saw their mission as to impress if not intimidate the people, and they found the people ‘hostile and unfathomable’. The result was a high degree of casual brutality in their day-to-day encounters. But, even short of information, the effect of their intensified patrolling activity in an area which had been effectively abandoned by the security forces for six months was marked, turning an area described by the County Inspector at the time of their arrival as ‘practically in a state of war’ into ‘about the quietest part of the county’ just before the Kilmichael attack.240
Their most serious error – fatal for them – was their failure to vary their patrol routes. As winter came on, patrolling in open trucks became a ‘most unpleasant’ activity, and the cold men, whose coats could not keep out the rain, were less inclined to ‘deviate from known roads’. No. 2 Section always took the same road towards Dunmanway and on to Bandon. This enabled Barry, with a force made up of men from the training camp he was running at Clogher, to select the ambush site near Kilmichael with some confidence. Or at least he did according to his own later account. In the first written report of the fight, included in a collection of captured IRA documents assembled by the British army in mid-1921, the ‘OC Flying Column, 3rd Cork Brigade’ described it a little differently.
The column paraded at 3.15 am on Sunday morning [28 November]. It comprised 32 men armed with rifles, bayonets, five revolvers, and 100 rounds of ammunition per man. We marched for four hours and reached a position on the Macroom–Dunmanway road in the townland of Shanacashel. We camped in that position until 4.15 pm and then decided that as enemy searches were completed it would be safe to return to our camp.
On this account, it would seem that the column moved not to mount an ambush but to evade a British search operation. In contrast to Barry’s later version, the fight that followed was not planned, but happened by chance: about five minutes after the column started the return journey, ‘we sighted two enemy lorries moving along the Macroom–Dunmanway road at a distance of about 1,900 yards.’ The column was in an exposed position – the terrain being ‘of a hilly and rocky nature’, suitable for fighting but not for ‘retiring without being seen’. So ‘I decided to attack the lorries … I divided the Column into three sections, viz – one to attack the first lorry. This section was in a position to have ample cover and at the same time to bring a frontal and a flank fire to bear.’ The second section was 120 yards further up the road: ‘its duty was to let the first lorry pass to No. 1 section and attack the second lorry.’ The third section ‘was occupying sniping positions along the other side of the road and also guarding both flanks’. ‘The action was carried out successfully, 16 of the enemy who were belonging to the Auxiliary Police from Macroom Castle being killed, one wounded and has escaped and is now missing.’ The column had captured fourteen rifles, five bayonets, seventeen revolvers, 719 rounds of .303 and 136 of .45 ammunition, with equipment – and the two lorries, which were burned out. It had lost one man killed in the fight, and two who died of their wounds. In a postscript, the column commander attributed these losses ‘to the fact that those three men (who were part of No. 2 section) were too anxious to get into close quarters with the enemy. They were our best men and did not know danger in this or any previous actions.’ They had ‘discarded their cover’; ‘it was not until the finish of the action that P. Deasy was killed by a revolver bullet from one of the enemy whom we had thought dead.’241
Tom Barry later published more than one account of the ambush (in the Irish Press in 1932, in his celebrated Guerilla Days in Ireland in 1949, and finally in his angry rebuttal of Liam Deasy’s memoirs, The Reality of the Anglo-Irish War, in 1974), and several members of the column also wrote accounts. These vary on several points of detail, such as the number of riflemen in Barry’s column, the number of scouts attached to it, and the number of sections in the ambush position (two in some, four in Barry’s 1949 account). But they agree on others, notably that the column lost three men in action and, more importantly, that the ambush was deliberate: the column moved into the ambush position after breakfast on Sunday and stayed there all day until the Auxiliary patrol appeared around dusk. Barry’s most detailed analysis of the distribution of his force made the military logic of the operation clear.242 The position was chosen because a sharp bend in the road would force the patrol to slow down (the column had no mines with which to spring the ambush), and the sections were posted to deal with at least two vehicles. It is also undisputed that the decision to mount the operation was taken personally by Barry, without consulting the brigade commandant. This, coupled with the fact that the ambush took place outside the brigade area, has been suggested as a reason why it might initially have seemed a good idea to report it as an encounter fight.
It has also been suggested that, to justify the annihilation of the police patrol, Barry later rewrote the story, alleging that some of the Auxiliaries had opened fire after their surrender had been accepted. As he told it in Guerilla Days in Ireland, after killing the nine occupants of the first lorry in ferocious hand-to-hand combat (with no survivors or prisoners), he and the three riflemen of his Command Post section ran back to attack the other group in the rear. ‘We had gone about fifty yards when we heard the Auxiliaries shout “We surrender.” We kept running along the grass edge of the road … and actually saw some Auxiliaries throw away their rifles.
’ When some of No. 2 Section stood up, the police drew pistols and fired at them – whereupon Barry ordered fire to be kept up until they had all been killed. In Barry’s account, the three fatal casualties his column suffered resulted from men standing up after this false surrender. He reacted angrily to the publication of Paddy O’Brien’s account of the ambush (in Liam Deasy’s memoir Towards Ireland Free), which he felt depicted him as ‘a bloody-minded commander who exterminated the Auxiliaries without reason’. Yet the earlier bald accounts, which ascribed the casualty level simply to the intensity of the hand-to-hand fighting – ‘they like the IRA had fought to a finish’ – had not seemed to carry this implication.
There is a hint of this false surrender in the original account, and the six accounts of Kilmichael in the Bureau of Military History’s collection of witness statements certainly suggest that some of the Auxiliaries surrendered and were then killed. The wounds of some of the dead, the medical evidence suggested, indicated that their arms were raised when they were shot. It seems entirely possible that several of them surrendered individually, while others were still firing. But some of the column men interviewed by Fr John Chisholm on Liam Deasy’s behalf said that no surrenders were accepted.243 ‘They shot the whole lot of them off?’ Chisholm asked Ned Young, who replied ‘They did.’ In the chaos and stress of any fight, even a small one like this, participants always remember different things. In his rebuttal of O’Brien’s ‘fantastic story’, Barry snorted that ‘O’Brien has Lordan wounded when he was not even scratched’; yet others had the same memory as O’Brien. The recollection of some that there was never any intention to take prisoners seems perfectly plausible, since the column could scarcely have coped with them, but that would of course not have been admissible in public since the Volunteers claimed to observe the laws of war. (The killing of prisoners has been lamentably common in regular war, though never admitted.) Though all sources are consistent in their account of the column’s casualties, the witness statements suggest that the men who died were shot earlier in the action, and not as Barry described.
The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence Page 29