On 3 May the south Mayo column under the brigade commander, Tom Maguire, ambushed a police patrol passing through the village of Tourmakeady. The ambush was successful enough for Mulcahy to exult that it demonstrated that ‘we have the intelligence and courage and the military skill to bring the present struggle to a very definite victory.’ But the British reaction, a pursuit in which Maguire was badly wounded and his adjutant killed, sounded a warning; his column escaped thanks to the chance arrival of the west Mayo column. Mulcahy advised him to avoid over-ambitious operations, until his men could ‘gain confidence in themselves and get the best possible use out of their weapons’ through harassing operations. But dispatch work and many other activities became more difficult, one Mayo Volunteer recalled, ‘as the roads were swarming with Crown forces, particularly after the fight at Tourmakeady’.191
Columns often had similar narrow shaves – one escaped from an attempted ambush on the Piltown–Fiddown road in Kilkenny thanks only to the ‘coolness and experience’ of an ex-soldier in its ranks, who understood cover and lines of retreat.192 When Ernie O’Malley met up with Dinny Lacey’s Waterford column that month, he reflected that, though Lacey had brought it ‘many times through South Tipperary … it had seen very little fighting … due partly to bad luck, the uncertainty of enemy movement, and our faulty intelligence system’. Local scouts were still unreliable, O’Malley thought: ‘they were never alert save when an objective danger was pressing.’193 GHQ pronounced Waterford No. 2’s action at Knockyoolahan on 6 June ‘another lost unsuccessful ambush through putting inexperienced men scouting’.194
At Rathcoole on 16 June Cork No. 2 Brigade was at last able to combine exploitation of the restrictions imposed by road cutting and belated development of explosives expertise. A big ambush party – over a hundred men from five battalions, with a Hotchkiss gun – laid seven mines in the road, three of which were detonated to trap an ADRIC ration party in four Crossley tenders. These mines were used in a more sophisticated way, and worked better (‘fairly well’, at least, said George Power) than before, but they were still short on impact. Though the first and last trucks were immobilized, all but two of the police survived the explosions, and were able to hold off the attackers until shortage of ammunition forced them to withdraw after an hour.195
O’Malley found that many of the thirty-two battalions in his division remained resistant to development. ‘In many companies … only a few of the men had seen grenades or rifles, and … training schemes had never been enforced or orders carried out.’ Some companies failed to block roads even when directly ordered to do so, negligence that exposed ‘our small columns … to sudden raids or round-ups’, as did frequent failure to forward ‘information captured or sent through our intelligence’. To sit down and ‘attempt to direct’ his 7,000 men like a conventional divisional commander ‘might have been possible if battalions had any uniformity in armament, ability, experience or desire for action’, or if he could get information quickly enough to keep in touch with local situations. But these conditions did not exist. Kilkenny remained notably recalcitrant: ‘the brigade staff had seldom sent our orders to battalions; they had never been on inspection.’196
The self-critical O’Malley worried that the 2nd Southern Division, the second strongest IRA unit, ‘was not fighting enough, and was not helping to draw off troops from the First Southern’. It might have been easier for him to build divisional spirit, he thought, if he had emerged through the local unit structure as Lynch had – having a ‘brigade of my own to back me’. But GHQ’s efforts to gee up inactive areas were not much more successful, and even Lynch’s had trouble with ineffective units, particularly in Kerry and Waterford. The Kerry No. 2 brigadier, John Joe Rice, recalled spending ‘all my time tramping from one company to another, fixing disputes and squabbles’.197 Mulcahy judged Kerry No. 1 ‘very disappointing’, complaining in June that ‘probably not three reports of operations have reached me’ since brigades had been ordered (in November 1920) to submit a monthly diary of operations and enemy activity.198
This was the trigger for one of the most explosive showdowns between GHQ and a local unit. GHQ judged the Kerry brigadier, Paddy Cahill, incompetent, and no fewer than three GHQ inspections in a short space of time produced a comprehensively crushing verdict. There was very little activity and almost no co-operation between battalions; worse, indeed, there was ‘an amount of ill-will and in some cases actual clashing of interests’. Although companies mostly met regularly they did little. There was ‘no systematic training’, especially in musketry – ‘hardly ten per cent of the men being able to use a rifle’. One organizer, though he needed more time to make a ‘final judgement’ on the quality of the officers, suggested that ‘the removal of nearly 50 per cent would lead to improvement.’ Practically no attention was paid to special services, notably engineering. Though there was ‘a fair amount of arms’, they were ‘badly distributed with regard to suitability of ammunition’. Intelligence and communications were weak. All this was the fault of the brigade, which took no interest in these issues. The brigade HQ itself was wrongly placed, in the Dingle Peninsula, ‘strategically at the wrong end of the Brigade’, but did ‘absolutely no training, its energies being devoted to eating, sleeping and general amusement’. The brigade’s only saving grace was that with one exception (Tralee) the battalion commanders were ‘fairly good’.199
Cahill himself was suspended, but many of his officers cold-shouldered the replacement appointed by GHQ, Andy Cooney, who had previously been the organizer for Kerry No. 2. ‘All of us known as “Cahill’s men” ’, the brigade quartermaster wrote, ‘absolutely refused to serve under the new man.’ One inspector recognized that Cahill’s influence was ‘enormous’, and ‘whatever his faults there is a general conviction that no man could have done better.’ Liam Lynch apparently agreed and thought that, since no local officer would take on the job, ‘it would have been best to leave him.’ The problem was that even a better quality of brigade staff might not have helped, since Cahill preferred ‘to act by himself without consultation with any staff’. The senior staff were ‘never continually in touch with him’, and the quartermaster ‘could not give me a list of arms in the brigade’. Cahill believed that ‘his removal was the result of a conspiracy on the part of GHQ’, misled by reports from the previous organizer. As for that officer, his successor caustically remarked that ‘even apart from his relations with Cahill, Byrne was a complete failure here, and I can find absolutely no trace of his having done anything by way of organisation.’200 ‘Cahill’s men’ remained recalcitrant, and eventually GHQ was more or less forced to allow them to form a separate battalion, operating outside the brigadier’s command.
If anyone had read GHQ’s memo on ‘Serious Deficiencies’, they had evidently not felt obliged to respond to it. But though Kerry No. 1 drew a lot of GHQ’s fire, it was hardly out of line with many other brigades. Technical services had not kept pace with the development of the campaign. The shortage of key munitions like grenades, landmines and buckshot cartridges remained a crippling problem across the country, and though local workshops kept turning them out production fell far short of GHQ’s aim of self-sufficiency. GHQ complained that manufacture of these munitions was ‘virtually at a standstill’ in June, while far too much attention was being devoted to what it called ‘side-shows’: ‘incendiary bullets, armour-piercing bullets, and bomb-throwers are being experimented with’. None had got past the experimental stage.201 In fact the Dublin Brigade factory that replaced the Parnell Street workshop was highly productive – three months after the loss of the old factory it was turning out a thousand grenades a week. In mid-1921 Peadar Clancy’s successor as director of munitions, Sean Russell, was organizing production of .303 ammunition. Mulcahy presumably knew this, though according to Patrick McHugh he did not visit the main factory in Luke Street until December 1921.202
Mayo was hardly alone in complaining that it had ‘absolutely no stuff’, but Mulcahy
began to bristle at units ‘making the poor mouth’. He told the Sligo Brigade to stop complaining about its lack of arms and get organized, asserting that ‘with organisation and system, we shall win this War, if we are left with nothing but picks and shovels to wage it’. Grim humour might not be enough, however.203 Ammunition shortages could not be talked away; they hamstrung even the most active units. Frank Thornton reflected after the Truce that, if the fight had gone on, the shortages would have meant that ‘we would have found ourselves very hard set to continue it with any degree of intensity.’
One reason for the increase in British casualties was simply that there was more military action: more searches, more encounters. A dramatic expansion of military strength in June added to Macready’s forces no fewer than seventeen infantry battalions, together with a ‘mounted rifle’ brigade (formed from divisional artillerymen) – an increase of a third in the space of a month. This new surge represented Henry Wilson’s last attempt to crush the republican campaign before the nerve of the ‘frocks’ cracked. It certainly created, maybe for the first time, a real possibility of sustained intense activity in Dublin and the Martial Law Area. It would also make the extension of martial law viable – though, as we have seen, Wilson himself believed that ‘real’ martial law would not need extra troops to make it effective. ‘Round-ups’ became more frequent, and commanders were urged to ensure that there was ‘no “driving” except with a very definite object’. (‘Concentrate on intelligence,’ General Strickland insisted, ‘and watch them.’)
The resulting pressure was not yet fully comprehensive. Offensive operations certainly caused a lot of inconvenience. In South Tipperary ‘we were subjected to two of those ordeals … All young men were ordered out of bed and marched off before the advancing hordes. All were assembled in Hollyford village for inspection and interrogation. Some were assaulted, others threatened, but all were released … those of us on the run eluded them each time.’204 Still, IRA GHQ maintained that drives could be countered. Since the troops could not carry more than three days’ rations – more than that must be ‘sent up’ if it could not be commandeered – ‘the importance of trenching and retrenching roads behind British drives, and removing, destroying or hiding food supplies in “drive” area is obvious.’205
More threateningly for the Volunteers, the British army also began to develop its own ‘flying columns’, whose aim was ‘to get troops and police in touch with the people in a friendly way, so as to enlist the waverers on our side’. They were also intended to search for the dugouts that ‘the rebels are getting very fond of making in isolated hilly places’. Their operating logic was simple enough – the fact that ‘directly our people appear the gunmen clear out’ meant that ‘they cut a poor figure’. ‘That cannot fail to lower their morale.’206 Still, this remained an indirect effect of force. Actually locating republican units needed more flexible formations which could mimic guerrilla methods, but in some places – notably in Cork – such methods were at last being tried out.
Perhaps more worrying than any military issues, though, were signs that Volunteer discipline was hanging by a thread in some places. O’Malley reported to Mulcahy in early July that there had been numerous cases of looting in Tipperary No. 2, and that the ‘evil influence’ was spreading to the neighbouring 3rd Brigade. He thought that nothing short of capital punishment could arrest the spread, but seems to have been unsure whether he could impose it. He was reassured that ‘Divisional Commandants have power to inflict any punishment they think fit for military crimes.’ O’Duffy suggested that ‘if this looting gets started it will be hard to stop it, but if a few are shot now for it, it will be all right.’207
THE PROPAGANDA BATTLE
British leaders always felt that, even when counter-insurgency action was successful, its positive effect was negated by superior republican propaganda. They took the propaganda battle seriously, and saw themselves losing it. Some of this they blamed on political restrictions: even the moderate nationalist press could take an anti-government line with impunity. When the Castle belatedly moved in late 1920 to prosecute the Freeman’s Journal (a far from republican paper) for ‘spreading a false report’ – a classic wartime charge – the government quickly backed down in face of protests. Macready wrote contemptuously of this ‘abject surrender’, and went on trying to get both the Freeman and the Irish Independent suppressed as ‘nothing less than daily propaganda of rebellion’. But he also lamented the failure of Britain’s own publicity agencies to project a positive image of British policy. The head of the Castle Publicity Bureau, Basil Clarke, had sophisticated theories of news presentation, but though these have been portrayed by some as pernicious, they were not really effective.208 His bureau never rivalled the Irish Bulletin’s influence on British reporting of Irish events.209
But the famous republican publicity machine had its share of malfunctions as well, even at this advanced stage in the campaign. At the end of March 1921 the Department of Propaganda suffered a serious setback when a mass of its papers and material was seized in a raid. De Valera was, according to Diarmuid O’Hegarty, very concerned that ‘the enemy should not be allowed to feel that he has disorganised us by this capture.’ And in fact the captured typewriters and duplicators were used to produce forged issues of the Irish Bulletin in April and May. Though the first forgeries were ‘obviously bogus’, later efforts were more convincing. While the domestic audience could, the department hoped, be ‘forewarned’ against these, they ‘do cause some confusion amongst foreign readers’ – who were of course always its main target audience. ‘The fraud is one that is exceedingly difficult to counter.’210 Still, the circulation of the official Bulletin was steadily increased. In March it went daily to 200 ‘English newspapers and public men’, and weekly to 300 ‘other persons including many Continental and Colonial newspapers and journalists’. By May, over 650 copies were circulated.
On 9 May Erskine Childers was arrested, like FitzGerald and Gallagher before him. Unlike them, though, he was quickly released. (Collins was frankly baffled by this, telling Art O’Brien, ‘I cannot say I properly understand what the reason of the release was. Their ways are very extraordinary.’)211 In line with the Dáil ministry’s acceptance of civil responsibility for the army, Childers modified what has been called the ‘reticence’ of the Irish Bulletin in reporting military operations. Its tone had been ‘consistently defensive’, in ‘sharp contrast with the belligerent An tOglaċ’. But its attitude was still rather different, even after Childers took over as editor. The emergence of the army was portrayed in much less proactive terms than the Volunteers themselves now used. In June the Bulletin noted that ‘eighteen months ago the Irish Volunteers were a territorial reserve rather than an army in the field. But when a price was placed on the heads of its more active members, these men went into permanent active service, determined to defend their liberty with their lives.’ This view of the army as a kind of local self-preservation society was only partly counteracted by the more regular publication in 1921 of IRA GHQ orders implying a regular, centralized national organization.212
But a big part of the ‘reticence’ about publishing details of military operations was due to the sheer difficulty of getting accurate information about them. This seems to have persisted to the end, and was surely a reason for the Bulletin’s odd remark in late 1920 that it did not issue statements (beyond ‘correcting mistakes’) because ‘sufficient publicity’ was given to military actions by Dublin Castle, British MPs and ‘the English Press’. The Propaganda Department had never had great success in persuading republican administrators or TDs to supply accurate (or often any) information either. FitzGerald found it necessary to remind the Dáil in August 1921 that ‘information was no good unless detailed and accurate’: it ‘should stand investigation afterwards’. And however ‘belligerent’ it may have been in comparison to the Bulletin, even the army’s own journal had the same problem. Just like his British counterparts, Piaras Béaslaí’s te
mper was repeatedly strained by the reluctance of local units to supply timely information. ‘I am greatly hampered in my work by the failure to get vital information,’ he complained in early July. A couple of instances show the sort of problems that persisted. When Cork No. 1 Brigade abducted and shot Mrs Lindsay without securing authorization from GHQ, it refused to submit a report of the incident. Her disappearance was a serious propaganda setback, and Béaslaí wanted to construct an acceptable official story. But, though he made ‘repeated efforts’ to get information from Cork No. 1, he never got it. Just a few days before the Truce he was fed a story that she had been released but was ill in hospital. Fearing that he might ‘already have made a serious mistake in handling this matter’, he pressed Brugha ‘as a personal favour’ to get a written statement confirming her fate – and indeed ‘what her offence was’. ‘It is urgent that I know for certain.’213
After labouring to justify, through an editorial in An tOglaċ, another increasingly unpopular policy, street ambushes in Dublin, he found ‘casually in the course of conversation’ with the Assistant Chief of Staff that an order had been issued to suspend these attacks owing to the danger they posed to non-combatants. ‘I do not know who issued the order,’ he protested to Mulcahy, ‘but I think it is pretty bad that information so vitally important to me in my work was not at once officially conveyed to me.’ Even information that was not so time-critical often proved impossible to extract. Early in 1921 – none too soon it may be thought – GHQ had the idea of compiling a ‘Roll of Honour’ of all the Volunteers who had died in the fight. Brigades had been asked to supply returns of all those ‘killed in action or murdered by the enemy’.214 Béaslaí could see that these would ‘give us some chance of comparing our casualties with those of the enemy’ (‘I fancy the result would be encouraging’), but though he claimed that the President was ‘very keen about this matter’, no returns seemed to have been received. ‘I do not think OCs generally realise the importance of it.’215 The boot could sometimes be on the other foot, though; in a July article entitled ‘Two against Two Hundred’, An tOglaċ attributed the action it described to the wrong brigade, provoking a complaint from the east Clare brigadier. (‘Now look what you have done,’ the Adjutant General chided the editor.)
The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence Page 40