The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence

by Charles Townshend

  General Jeudwine, arguing with Hamar Greenwood for ‘full’ martial law, made a list of its advantages. Military courts would impose ‘heavy sentences for carrying or being in possession of arms’ and for ‘harbouring known rebels’. The ‘internment of suspects’ (Jeudwine’s emphasis) would be possible ‘at discretion of Military Governor’. He could also impose restrictions on movement and identity checks, and exert ‘control of the press’ (one of the army’s most cherished objectives). But at the top of his list were ‘promptitude in action and administration’ and ‘unity of command’. When his fellow divisional commander Gerald Boyd worried that martial law might be a last resort – ‘our last reserve’ – committed prematurely, and that if it failed it would make the situation worse, Jeudwine confidently assured him that any drawbacks would be outweighed by ‘one great advantage’, unity of command.3

  It was not only soldiers who lambasted the dysfunctional structure of the British administration. ‘Lack of unity of Command is most hampering,’ Sturgis had noted in mid-August 1920, after confusion in the arrangements to take Terence MacSwiney to England. ‘Soon we must have a central Dictator, civil or military, to be obeyed by everyone.’ A few days later he repeated that ‘if it is war we must have a virtual Dictator.’ ‘As it is we are a great, sprawling, jealous hydra-headed monster spending much of its time using one of its heads to abuse one or other of the others by minute, letter, telegram and good hard word of mouth.’ But of course it was not ‘war’ in the government’s view, and Sturgis remained in a minority. When Ernest Clark was made under secretary in Belfast to start setting up a Northern Ireland administration, Sturgis saw this as another retrograde step – ‘too many heads already’. A long letter to Lady Greenwood (not, significantly, to her husband) urging the need for unity of command, perhaps through some sort of war council, got a reaction only from Macready, who predictably ‘would prefer a Military Dictatorship to a “War Council” ’.4 He sent a copy to Warren Fisher, who had criticized the disorganization of the Irish Executive, but nothing changed.

  On the face of it, martial law should have resolved the issue; as Sturgis noted, the army expected ‘to have full control of everything in two two’s’. But the government had no such idea. Paradoxically, martial law not only would fail to deliver military control over the police and administration, but would actually reduce the unity of the army itself. 6th Division became more of an ‘independent force’, with the central control and co-ordination of intelligence ‘more difficult than before’. When Fisher returned to Ireland in February 1921 he was amazed to find the situation even worse than on his first visit nine months before – not only was ‘the use of force not singly directed’, but there were undoubted signs of ‘an untimely lack of sympathy and uncomprehension’ between the military, police and civil ‘elements’.

  The most serious failure to secure unity came in the vital sphere of the law itself. When the Cabinet discussed martial law it was clear how little the principle of it was understood; martial law had never been used in Britain in modern times, and its use in South Africa had been highly contentious. It had been formally declared in Ireland during the 1916 rebellion, but in practical terms this had meant very little. No martial law tribunals had been held; the rebels had been tried by courts martial under the Defence of the Realm Act. The distinction was lost on most people, though: Ireland was believed to have been under martial law, and the government was left in no doubt that in political terms it carried a heavy cost. Hence Lloyd George’s determination to restrict its operation in 1921. Even so, the army assumed that where it was applied, the civil courts would be superseded by military courts, and that the normal appeal processes would be suspended.

  In the event, things proved more complicated. Appeals were launched on behalf of the first men to be sentenced to death by military tribunals in the Martial Law Area, Joseph Murphy and John Allen, in January and February 1921. Allen’s case seemingly produced a decisive military success, when the high court ruled (on the basis of Macready’s affidavit that a state of war existed in the MLA) that it could not, ‘durante bello, control the military authorities or question any sentence imposed in the exercise of martial law’. That seemed to be that; but just a day after the Allen judgment two local military governors (the commanders of 16th and 17th Brigades) were served with writs in actions for damages caused by ‘official reprisals’. In March the King’s Bench issued writs of habeas corpus for the seven men sentenced to death after being captured at Clonmult.5 The case of Garde v. Strickland in early April advanced the argument that the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act had actually circumscribed the Crown’s powers and made it impossible to declare martial law except by statute. Despite the obvious dangers of this argument, Anderson thought that since the appeal was lodged in Dublin, it would have to proceed as long as Dublin was not under martial law itself. Macready protested that the functioning of civil courts under martial law was ‘an anomaly’, and in mid-April he was driven to issue a proclamation suspending the jurisdiction of ‘all Courts of Justice’ in the MLA.

  The reality of martial law fell short of the soldier’s dream – or the politician’s nightmare – of instant, untrammelled repressive action. Macready’s staff grumbled that ‘an arrangement by which the Military Authority is publicly made responsible for the government of a country, but in reality is not responsible at all’ was ‘illogical’. They could have been forgiven for choosing a stronger adjective. In political terms, the Military Governor’s acts were ‘still those of the Civil Authorities, who behind the scenes claim not only to dictate what his policy is to be, but the exact manner in which he is to carry it out’.6 In military terms, the army’s repertoire remained constricted. The history of one new measure, ‘official reprisals’, illustrates this. The justification for it was more negative than positive. The War Office had been as worried as the C-in-C about the involvement of soldiers in ‘unofficial’ reprisals, which the army liked to attribute to the police. In September 1920 the Director of Military Operations suggested that ‘the only solution to this problem’ was ‘to institute a system of official reprisals’. He proposed that if a ‘definite scheme’ was set out, it would make it easier to ‘get the troops to restrain their unofficial efforts’. As a bonus he added the argument, familiar by then, that ‘the deterrent effect on the Sinn Fein cannot be inconsiderable’. Macready had immediately backed this idea by pointing out that, however worrying from a disciplinary standpoint, wherever reprisals had taken place the ‘whole atmosphere of the surrounding district’ had changed: hostility had given way to ‘cringing submission’. And not only were the people tipping their caps, they were starting to give information. Macready had pressed for the destruction ‘as a military operation’ of houses from which shots had been fired, or whose occupants ‘must have been well aware’ of a nearby ambush.

  This was not likely to appeal to either the Prime Minister or the War Secretary, with their known preference for ‘gunning’ rather than burning. Churchill only put it up to the Cabinet with obvious reluctance, and his colleagues unsurprisingly decided (on 10 November) that the moment was ‘inopportune’ for a decision. The idea was notably missing from the plans for action under martial law set out by General Jeudwine in his discussions with Greenwood, but it suddenly resurfaced on 29 December, when six houses in Midleton, near Cork, were destroyed after an ambush. Technically known as ‘punishments’, these actions were to be authorized by brigadiers who were satisfied ‘that the people concerned were, owing to their proximity to the outrage or their known political tendencies, implicated’. The punishments were ‘to be carried out as a Military Operation’.7 After their inhabitants had been given an hour to remove their possessions (except furniture), the targeted homes were blown up. In the case of terrace houses, to avoid fires, the furniture was hauled out into the street and burned there. Sometimes, though, even the army was so short of explosives that it could destroy the buildings only by fire.

  More than thirty off
icial reprisals were carried out every month across the MLA over the next five months. They alienated many more people in Ireland than their direct victims. Like most collective punishments they also made British liberal opinion very uneasy. And of course these dismal little dramas were bad publicity. The proof of implication in IRA activity was often alarmingly vague (where it was recorded at all), and even if the tenants were disloyal, the financial loss of destruction was very often carried by landlords who were the government’s allies. Indeed the first official reprisal cost the Earl of Midleton, a prominent Conservative and former Cabinet minister, £1,500. He duly made his annoyance clear to the helpless Hamar Greenwood.8 But the most damaging effect of official reprisals, in political terms, seems to have taken the military authorities by surprise. They had not considered how easy it would be for the Volunteers to carry out their own counter-reprisals, burning ‘big houses’ after the British troops had destroyed the cottages and terraces. After the practice began to spread outside the MLA – the RIC Divisional Commissioner in Galway launched a programme of official reprisals in March–April without any authorization – political disapproval hardened.

  The deterrent effect of martial-law measures as a whole was harshly assessed, two months after the first proclamation, by Sir Warren Fisher. The ‘gunmen’, he said, had set out to make martial law look silly by concentrating ‘most of their best organisers and most of their best trained fighters’ in the Martial Law Area. This shows that Fisher’s confidence in his own judgment was not equalled by his knowledge of the real situation; but the feeling that they had been made to ‘look silly’ certainly afflicted the army. The soldiers knew where the responsibility lay – the independence of the police, the geographical limits of martial law and the persistence of the civil courts – but still they were troubled by martial law’s failure to live up to its fearsome billing.

  ‘THE NATIONAL ARMY OF DEFENCE’: REPUBLICAN ARMY AND STATE

  For all the defects in the martial-law regime, the British counter-insurgency effort at the turn of the year was the heaviest and most sustained pressure yet exerted on the republican structure. Could it withstand it? Early in the new year, Volunteer GHQ produced a fairly sober assessment of the shape of the republican military campaign. Its opening claim, that, ‘having carefully weighed all the circumstances, the Irish Republican Army Command elected to adopt the method of guerilla warfare,’ was slightly disingenuous: it hardly had any choice. But in saying that it ‘realizes the indecisive nature of such warfare and does not seek immediate results’, it said something important. Strategically, ‘such warfare if conducted with skill always preserves the initiative.’ Whereas ‘the Regular Army by its very nature presents objectives everywhere, the guerillas never form an objective at any time or place’ (a phrase that suggests the writer may indeed have read T. E. Lawrence). ‘Guerilla strokes may be laughed at as “flea bites”, but those of the Regular Army are blows in the air.’ This had an air of sophisticated theory.

  GHQ insisted that the republican army could ‘fairly lay claim’ to a number of achievements in 1920. It had ‘destroyed the unique efficiency of the RIC, and thus struck an irreparable blow at the English Administration in Ireland’. Its campaign had cost ‘England’ a million pounds a week, ‘gravely inconvenienced the English Army by the special type of operations imposed on it’, and incidentally ‘hampered the power of England to interfere’ in the rest of the world. It had ‘militarized the young men of the country’, and ‘formulated a system of guerilla warfare capable of being continued practically indefinitely and with ever-increasing effect’. Finally, it had inflicted serious blows on ‘English prestige, both in the ethical sphere and by exhibiting how far England is from being invulnerable’.9

  These level-headed assessments showed a clear-eyed grasp of the strengths and limits of the Volunteers’ military capacity. They were almost certainly written because a critique of the military campaign was emerging within the republican leadership. The sort of worries expressed by Eamon O’Dwyer about the moral implications of the ambush system were amplified at the end of the year when Eamon de Valera at last returned from the USA. For various reasons (Collins thought they included delusions of grandeur), the President suggested that the style of operations looked too much like bushwhacking and too little like a war of national liberation. He clearly believed that guerrilla warfare was not generating the kind of image that republican propaganda required. For the first time, there was a whiff of dispute, or at least debate, about strategy at the highest level.

  Politically, as Liam Mellows pointedly told the Dáil on 25 January 1921, the elaboration of republican institutions had not altered the basic relationship between the army and the counter-state. ‘Were it not for the Volunteer movement, they could not talk of Ireland abroad, and if it were not for the Volunteers they could give up any idea of the Republic.’ Although the IRA had taken an oath of allegiance to the Dáil, the Dáil had still not assumed public responsibility for the army. This was a situation that probably suited Mulcahy, the Chief of Staff, who was unquestionably dedicated to the principle that the army was subordinate to the government, but not at all happy that ministers should interfere in actual military decisions. The first serious discussion of military methods in the Dáil, a month after de Valera’s return, indicated that the President was starting to push for greater political control over military policy. The debate showed that while some TDs were unhappy with the direction of the campaign, most disliked de Valera’s suggestion that the Volunteers might reduce the threat of reprisals by ‘delaying’ some of their actions. They thought that easing back would indicate weakness. Mulcahy avoided commenting on policy, merely insisting that communication between parliament and army should take place only through the Minister for Defence. In a situation where many TDs were also army officers, the possibilities of irregular contacts and pressures were obviously worrying to him. For Mulcahy, the absolute separation of army and legislature was a hallmark of the democratic state, but there was little chance of securing it in these circumstances.10

  De Valera was determined to link the military campaign to the governmental mandate of the Dáil. He insisted that the 1918 election had placed ‘the Republic of 1916’, which had previously been ‘provisional and liable to question’, on ‘a foundation of certitude’. Those who questioned its moral validity ‘now must challenge the foundations of Democracy and the constitutional rights of peoples everywhere’. Because it would be ‘vain and contemptible’ to wish for independence without being willing to ‘make the efforts necessary to achieve it’, the government of the Republic had gone beyond principles to action. It had ‘undertaken the responsibility of marshalling the resources of the nation and directing its strength’. Crucially, ‘from the Irish Volunteers we fashioned the IRA to be the military arm of the government.’11 This notion of deliberate ‘fashioning’ became vital. De Valera’s pamphlet The Irish Republican Army set out to calm any fears about the army’s potential political role. He insisted that it was ‘A REGULAR STATE FORCE under the civil control of the elected representatives of the people, with an organisation and a discipline imposed by those representatives, under officers who hold their commissions under warrant from these representatives’. This suggested a degree of control which the Dáil had never tried (or indeed wished) to exert. In spite of this, he declared that ‘the Government is therefore RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ACTIONS OF THIS ARMY.’ His point was to insist that ‘these actions are not the acts of irresponsible individuals or groups,’ and that the IRA was ‘THE NATIONAL ARMY OF DEFENCE’ and not ‘as the enemy would have you believe, a praetorian guard’.12

  The strict constitutional relationship between army and state does not seem to have been a concern; the casual intimacy and overlap between ministers and military staff felt as useful as it was inevitable. In retrospect, though, Ernie O’Malley identified the porous border between military and political leaderships as a problem. ‘Why didn’t the Staff pay attention to pure staff wo
rk, leaving the political field to others? The Chief of Staff was a member of Dáil Éireann, the Director of Intelligence was a Minister of Finance, the Director of Organization was a Secretary to the Dáil, the Director of Engineering was the Secretary of the Local Government Board [sic].’

  De Valera’s effort to shape military policy contrasted sharply with Griffith’s sense of powerlessness. Griffith had no aptitude for controlling either military or civil policy; he remained at heart an agitator rather than an administrator. De Valera was very different; on his return he called for a briefing on the state of affairs from every department, and tried to ginger up departments that had lost their way, or their nerve, under the impact of the British autumn surge. He had no dislike of long committee discussions; his preference was to reach agreement by letting Cabinet meetings go on until dissent was silenced by persuasion or exhaustion. According to Ernest Blythe he now tried Collins’s limited patience by frequently regaling ministerial meetings with anecdotes of his American experiences. When he described one of his stays at the Waldorf Astoria in the suite once occupied by the Prince of Wales, the Finance Minister chided him for extravagance. Another time, when he started to tell a story he had told twice before, Collins brusquely pulled him up short.13

  De Valera now made a determined effort to have Collins take his place as the Republic’s representative in America. On 18 January 1921 he sent Collins ‘formal confirmation of the unanimous approval of the Ministry’ of his proposal that ‘the Minister of Finance be asked to proceed to the United States as a Special Envoy on behalf of the Republic’.14 Among the arguments he deployed was Collins’s ‘fame, or notoriety if you prefer it’ (an interesting psychological sideswipe). He instructed him ‘not to be too modest to exploit’ this to impose order on the American finances, open American agencies for republican enterprises, encourage the American boycott of British goods, improve communications, undertake relief work, promote propaganda, bring back into the official fold ‘many of the excellent people in the Clan who have been misled’, and ‘execute commissions for the Minister for Defence’. He added a further argument that the Republic should not ‘have here, so to speak, all our eggs in one basket’; in America Collins would be out of Britain’s reach, and that ‘whatever coup the English may attempt, the line of succession is safe, and the future provided for.’