Several things had gone wrong here, notably that the unit’s movement was seen and reported, and that there seems to have been no prepared escape route. As outside Dublin, things would improve, with a heightening tempo of operations – twenty-five in February and fifty in March – even if success remained patchy. On the evening of 7 February, for instance, 2nd Battalion tried to mount an ambush on an ambitious scale near Amiens Street station. Crown forces were to be drawn in by a telephone message to Dublin Castle reporting Volunteer activity in Seville Place. Parties of twenty men from C Company and thirty-five from B Company occupied posts round the railway bridge between Seville Lane and Coburg Place, while forty men armed with shotguns and grenades ‘commanded the bridge facing Portland Row’, with another ten covering the rear of 100 Seville Lane (an escape route that the fake warning call had drawn to the Castle’s attention). Another forty men of F Company were placed in Portland Row. Together with other outpost groups, this elaborate plan involved a total of 165 men – a big investment in what turned out to be a hit-and-miss plan. ‘After a period of half an hour’s waiting, there appeared to be no sign of the enemy approaching the vicinity of our positions, with the exception of two armoured cars (fitted with searchlights) and three Crossley tenders containing a force of RIC, who drove swiftly down Amiens Street, past the mouth of Seville Place at 7.50 pm, and proceeded in the direction of Fairview.’ The armoured cars pulled up at 8 p.m. and played their searchlights on the railway line ‘as if endeavouring to locate the position of our men’. At 8.15 ‘it was deemed advisable to begin to retire’.51
The battalion report dwelt admiringly on the orderly retirement of the various sections, and the British intelligence officers who analysed it grudgingly acknowledged that the Volunteers had not been ‘afraid of assembling 165 men, armed with such visible weapons as shot guns, in a busy part of the city’. Their dispositions were ‘carefully thought out’; but ‘as always when they have been in position for any length of time, they soon became nervous of discovery and departed without firing a shot.’ Some of Dublin’s wider operational problems can be glimpsed in a GHQ memo in late March, noting that bombing lorries had been only ‘partially successful’, especially at Broadstone, ‘a death trap at present for our fellows’. The Director of Organization raised the rather elementary question, ‘do all the bombing squads take into consideration the speed at which lorries move?’, and suggested that in any case ‘Peter the Painters [Mauser automatic pistols] and revolvers of heavy calibre’ would be more effective, or at least more reliable, than bombs.52
WOMEN’S WORK
It is not easy to recover anything like the full measure of women’s contribution to the republican campaign: it remains more or less a footnote in most accounts. In the ‘Fighting Stories’ series produced by the Kerryman in the 1940s – and still current – ‘the role of the local Cumann na mBan branches’, as one historian says, ‘was relegated to a couple of pages at the end – presenting a definite appearance of an afterthought’. Even when women were accorded a special essay, as in Dublin’s Fighting Story, most of it focused on 1916, with a short paragraph on the war of independence.53 After all, the Kerryman billed the story as ‘told by the Men Who Made It’. Although nearly 150 women supplied witness statements to the Bureau of Military History, a significant number, they still formed well under a tenth of the total. Women’s applications for military pensions repeatedly fell victim to the attitude expressed by Ernest Blythe when, as minister for finance in 1927, he flatly denied that Cumann na mBan was a military organization.54 But it can be argued that the armed conflict ‘revolutionised the role of women in the republican movement’. Women had become ‘the idealised republican citizens’ through their support for the military campaign, and ‘in the process they had transformed themselves’.55
In the most active areas, the Cumann na mBan organization was recast after 1919 to mesh more closely with the Volunteers. The Director of Organization told local units in March 1921 that the CnmB Executive proposed ‘to place at the disposal of the O/C in each fighting area four or five well qualified girls who would superintend the arrangements for tending the wounded. They would be directly under your orders and could be moved around particularly in any operational areas.’56 It seems that in some places the Volunteers actually directed the recasting – the brigade intelligence officer in south Leitrim ‘organised a branch of the Cumann na mBan’ with about fifteen ‘girls’, who ‘worked for us much in the same way as the Fianna boys’. (‘They were getting to be extremely useful when the Truce came along,’ he added.)57 Though in Leitrim their activities remained auxiliary, their range was clearly extended – the organization later judged that five-sixths of its functions were ‘concerned with military matters – first aid, dispatches, carrying arms, transferring arms, intelligence, etc’, entailing ‘running into serious risks’.58 The first of these, like activities such as fundraising, and the catering and mending frequently cited by Volunteers, was a traditional female task, but the rest were not. Ironically, it was gender stereotypes themselves that enhanced women’s usefulness in these guerrilla activities. Only fifty or so women were arrested during the 1918–21 war. ‘By reason of our sex we could get through very often with dispatches where men would not have a hope. The enemy did not always have lady searchers with them,’ and even when they did, ‘only in very limited numbers’. The British gradually became conscious of this problem, and sometimes (so Bridie Doherty believed) cheated – once she was ‘put into a room in my house where I was undressed almost naked by two female searchers. I am positive that one of the searchers was a man dressed up as a woman.’59 The intelligence work done by women such as Piaras Béaslaí’s cousin Lily Mernin in Dublin, Josephine Brown O’Donoghue in Cork city, Siobhan Lankford and her successor (after Lankford aroused suspicion and lost her job) Annie Barrett in Mallow Post Office made a vital contribution.
Though many stories of women’s aptitude for underground work have survived, many more have been lost. When Auxiliaries raided one of Collins’s offices, at 5 Mespil Road, and waited for Collins to turn up, a woman doctor, Alice Barry, was able to spirit material out. Under the pretext of visiting a patient, who was one of Collins’s secretaries, she picked up a set of files, ‘stuck them inside my jumper and put on my coat. The Auxies were in the hall and let me pass without question.’ Dr Barry judged them ‘an innocent, unsuspecting crowd to allow anyone in or out of the house in those circumstances without searching them’ – adding sharply that ‘the Free State soldiers would not have been so remiss at a later stage.’60 (It must be added, though, that the Auxiliaries seem often to have been just as easygoing with men – Oscar Traynor’s driver recalled the ease with which he got a carload of gelignite and bomb-making equipment past them by throwing a few cabbages over it.)61
At the height of the guerrilla struggle, women were probably closer to full equality than ever before. There may still have remained a common assumption that women could not enter into the full sacrificial role available to men; they were ‘in no real danger of execution if arrested’.62 And unfortunately, perhaps, from the feminist viewpoint, it was traditional attitudes to femininity that remained most effective in propaganda terms. These invoked a more passive role, in which women were helpless victims rather than active participants. Republican publicity repeatedly stressed the traumatic effect on women of police or military brutality – during house searches especially. A series of articles by Erskine Childers for the New York-based Irish World, for instance, carried headline titles like ‘Wrongs and Indignities Our Irish Sisters Endure at Hands of Brutal English Soldiers’, or ‘Defenseless Irish Women Robbed of Money and Jewelry in Their Own Houses’.63
Women were, naturally, praised for sacrificing their menfolk – another deeply traditional female role. Here, though, a less traditional political development took place as some of the bereaved women went beyond merely preserving the memory of their dead husbands and brothers to become active custodians of their ideological
position – and indeed perhaps to reshape that position. Mary MacSwiney, for instance, would go on to deliver ‘seemingly authoritatively’ her brother’s ‘putative views about events that happened after his death’.64 In early 1921 she was wowing audiences in the USA on a lecture tour – including many who, she thought, had ‘never before heard a word on the Irish Question’, but who had been impressed by the saga of her brother’s hunger strike.
‘TINKERING WITH THE HONOUR OF THE NATION’
In March GHQ set out to assess ‘the war as a whole’. It divided the country into four – the ‘War Zone’ (the area under martial law in the south-west), the secondary country areas, the Dublin area and ‘Ulster’. Surprisingly, perhaps, it classed the south-west, formidable as its forces were in comparison to those in the rest of the country outside Dublin, as ‘a secondary theatre’. This was because its ‘geographical circumstances’ made it ‘impossible to ever secure a decision within it’. GHQ argued that if ‘feeding the battle in the War Zone resulted in a real deprivation of other areas, then it would mean that the Enemy had secured the initiative and was making us conform to his strategy’ (though just what that was GHQ sensibly did not say). An ‘exact balance’ must be achieved. The factor GHQ identified as vital was that, unlike any previous struggle for independence, ‘the National Military Command is securely established in Dublin.’ In all previous efforts, the English hold on the capital had ‘turned the scale’.65
Its grand strategy therefore hinged entirely on Dublin. ‘The grip of our forces on Dublin must be maintained and strengthened at all costs,’ while ‘strong flanking units’ in the rural hinterland should ‘bring the Capital into closer touch with the Country’. Ulster, which had now become the ‘vital bridgehead’ for the English with their ‘loss’ of Dublin, must be ‘attacked steadily and persistently’. But the message was unequivocal – ‘it cannot be too clearly stated that no number or any magnitude of victories in any distant provincial areas have any value if Dublin is lost in a military sense.’66 The terminology used here – like ‘flanks’, ‘bridgeheads’ and ‘winning’ and ‘losing’ a city – lay at an odd tangent to the IRA’s developing doctrine of guerrilla warfare, the war ‘without fronts’. It was indeed potentially quite misleading if it was read in a technical rather than metaphorical sense, and it would perhaps have a bearing on GHQ’s eventual view of the possibilities of continued resistance.
It is not easy to evaluate the IRA’s performance at the height of the war. The repeated failure of operations did not necessarily indicate weakness. Attempted ambushes, even if abandoned, arguably showed that the Volunteers were in business, that public support was keeping their movements safe, and perhaps that the Crown forces were keeping out of the way.67 This may have been particularly true in urban areas like Cork and Dublin, where guerrilla action was difficult, police and military were present in strength and could more easily vary their patrol routes. Even so, most Volunteers probably did not see things like that. They hankered after dramatic action. There was a hope, even in ‘quiet areas’ – of which there were too many, as GHQ well knew – of emulating the most aggressive Volunteer units. But the odds against doing this were lengthening rather than shortening in 1921. Despite GHQ’s persistent efforts, the War Zone was never significantly enlarged. Areas which had not developed a fighting capacity early found it difficult to get going, not least because in 1921 enemy activity grew increasingly effective.
For Ernie O’Malley, Kilkenny was a prime example of the uneven development of the republican campaign. ‘County Kilkenny was slack.’ It was difficult to meet officers, and communications had been neglected: ‘dispatches took a long time to travel.’ Observing a brigade council summoned to elect a brigade staff, O’Malley judged it ‘poor material … no direction from above and no drive’. Their answers to questions ‘showed that none of them had tried to solve the problem of their commands … Quietly, somewhat dully, they sat around the table in awe.’ Unlike the opinionated, energetic Corkmen whose ‘intelligence flared up’ in meetings, they ‘would talk when the meeting was over’, but ‘whilst they voted a staff there was mute acceptance’. Unimpressed by the new brigadier’s lack of ‘any show of energy or resolution’, he concluded that ‘in an area that had not seen fighting the elective system was not satisfactory.’68 But the situation there was not helped by O’Malley’s own capture, complete with a notebook naming all the officers of one of the brigade’s more active battalions, several of whom were rounded up.
After his column had been surprised at Uskerry when the enemy came from an unexpected direction, the brigadier noted that ‘our men were all raw as they never were in anything before.’ The commander of the Kilkenny Brigade flying column told the Adjutant General, Gearoid O’Sullivan, ‘we did not know for a long time that a Brigade existed in Kilkenny’; ‘we never got any assistance from the Brigade.’ According to the commandant of the 7th Battalion ‘there was no such thing as Brigade orders … We had no contact with Brigade Headquarters and, in fact, [in April 1921] … I do not think we even knew who our Brigade Commander was.’69 After congratulating the brigade on the ‘dash and coolness’ of the men involved in an April operation, Mulcahy dismissed its call for more weapons by mildly pointing out that ‘Kilkenny is much better armed than some areas who do a considerable amount of work.’ Later the brigadier, George O’Dwyer, was charged by some with responsibility for the failure of an ambush on 18 June, and with general cronyism – ‘men are shoved on by him for Commissions to which they have no qualifications or right.’ ‘Dry rot and canker is setting in rapidly.’70 The brigade reported that although dugouts had been made in most company areas, many had to be abandoned ‘owing to location by civilians’.
In some areas, the situation was critical. ‘I assure you’, the South Roscommon brigadier told Mulcahy on 26 March, ‘it takes a great amount of zeal to keep many of the (so-called) companies here in existence at all.’ There had been ‘wholesale desertions’ in places. GHQ became seriously alarmed about this, and held that ‘the death penalty should be inflicted for the graver class of crimes if the situation calls for it.’ Unless sharp disciplinary measures were taken, there was ‘a good prospect of large numbers running away in the Western areas’. It was ‘absolutely essential to stop this rot’.71
In late March, just after he had escaped from prison, Simon Donnelly, vice-OC of 3rd Battalion, Dublin Brigade (with which he had served under de Valera in 1916), was given the task of inspecting no fewer than eleven brigade areas for GHQ. They included all three Clare brigades and mid-Limerick as well as Meath, Athlone, Mullingar, Offaly, Leix and Kildare. ‘I was ordered to carry out inspection of Battalion and Brigade staffs and discuss the general situation, give lectures and reprimand officers and staffs who were not producing results.’ He was told to ‘brush aside’ such excuses as shortage of arms. Ginger O’Connell ‘called me [to] one side and in a personal chat, asked me to stress the importance of increased activity and the continuous blocking of roads, etc.’.72 But the most crucial issue was still the quality of officers. Mulcahy urged that inspectors like Donnelly ‘should be given a formula as to the way in which they will proceed to remove Officer after Officer, until they get the best men available’.73 He told Liam Lynch next month that he was ‘sending a memorandum suggesting how to allot marks to officers and companies generally in order to assess “military worth” of various companies in a battalion area’. This would have been an instructive document, but it does not seem to have survived.74
Donnelly’s mission followed a highly critical assessment of ‘Serious Deficiencies in Country Units’ drawn up by GHQ earlier that month. Local units were widely convicted of ‘failure to recognise responsibility for coordination’, or ‘to recognise the relative importance of internal Brigade Organisation’. Company councils were too casual – without agendas or minutes; orders were ‘verbal and inexact’, and statistical information was not readily available. Special services were still neglected – specialist officers
failed to work up their subjects. Most strikingly perhaps, intelligence work was castigated; even at this late stage, as we have seen, GHQ denounced the army’s grasp of the subject as ‘very faulty’, and insisted that men who ‘clamoured for arms’ would do better to work on this branch, which they ‘can perfect unarmed’.75 Mulcahy’s criticism of some units was blistering: he excoriated the ‘whole story of incompetency and slovenliness’ revealed in Offaly No. 2 Brigade’s reports, for instance, telling the brigadier that ‘work of this kind is simply tinkering with the honour of the Nation and playing with the lives of the men who are acting under you.’76
The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence Page 34