The Irish War of Independence in 1920 Gerry OShea
After the
1916 Easter Rebellion was crushed, Michael Collins, the future leading Irish
revolutionary, reportedly said to one of his colleagues as they were marched
off to jail that an Irish army should never again directly confront the
military might of the British Empire. He promised that the next time they would
face England on their terms, not as doomed targets in open warfare.
After the
Sinn Fein victory in the December, 1918, Westminster elections, the Irish
Republican Army (IRA) started a guerilla war, where local battalions of their
forces ambushed Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and British army groups on patrol
or just moving from one place to another.
While they were very short of weapons, they took
advantage of their superior knowledge of the local terrain and used the
powerful element of striking first in surprise attacks to inflict serious
losses on the enemy before withdrawing to nearby mountains or other safe
havens.
This war
lasted from January 1919 until July, 1921 when a truce was agreed between the
IRA and the British Government. However, 1919 is often seen as a preamble with
only a few engagements, resulting in just seventeen deaths which hardly
qualifies as a year of war.
By the end
of that year, the IRA chief-of-staff, Richard Mulcahy, declared that they were
ready to engage the enemy, and by April, 1920, 300 police barracks had been
burned and the Irish War of Independence was in full swing.
The Royal
Irish Constabulary (RIC) had a mixed policing record in the country since they
were formed a hundred years earlier. On the one hand, they were often respected
arbiters of local disputes, but they had to implement government policies in,
for instance, clearing destitute tenants out of their holdings during the
famine years, which seriously besmirched their record. Most of the ordinary
policemen were Catholics but the command structure, the men giving orders, were
nearly all English or members of the Unionist population.
Faced by a
national uprising, many policemen were shunned locally, leading to low morale
and some resignations from the force. The British government responded by
raising the salary for the RIC and sending in help from the mainland.
The police
had two semi-military support groups, mostly recruited in England to help deal
with the upsurge of violence in Ireland. The Black and Tans, who came to be
known disparagingly by local communities as the Tans, arrived in March 1920,
numbering about 10,000, mostly English
soldiers disbanded after the First World
War.
The other
group, the Auxiliaries, were formed a few months later in July and numbered
about 2,300. They were an elite outfit, recruited from retired army officers,
paid the princely sum of one pound a day, and, despite the awful reputation of
the Tans, the Auxies, their common name, were even more feared and hated by most
Irish people.
Lloyd George
and his cabinet colleagues in Westminster talked about the Irish war in terms
of some local squabbles that the police were well-equipped to deal with. This
was true in 1919 but by the second half of 1920 the authorities realized they
were confronting a major insurgency.
All the police were armed except for the
Dublin Metropolitan Police, who followed the unarmed Bobby tradition in London,
and about 40,000 members of the regular British Army supported the war effort.
The IRA had superior numbers, about 115,000, but they only had around 3000
rifles at best, and just a small percentage of IRA volunteers were involved in
military actions, mostly in their elite flying columns.
Understandably,
the hit and run guerilla tactics of the revolutionaries drew serious
condemnation from the establishment forces. They dismissed the IRA as cowards
who wouldn’t stand and fight. The three branches of the RIC, Tans, Auxies and
regular police officers - and army contingents too - buried their dead but,
usually, couldn’t find the killers. Often, they resorted to reprisals,
including torturing civilians and burning the homes of suspected IRA members or
sympathizers.
Their
frustration was cogently expressed in the editorial of a police newsletter called the Weekly Summary: “ Reprisals
are wrong, but reprisals do not happen just by accident. They are the result of
brutal, cowardly murder of police officers by assassins who take shelter behind
the screen of terrorism and intimidation they have created. Police murder
produces reprisals. Stop police murders.”
Cork was a
hotbed of resistance to British rule in Ireland. The Lord Mayor of Cork, Tomas
MacCurtain, was shot dead on March 20th, 1920 near his home in
Blackpool, almost certainly by a group of rogue RIC officers. In August, his
replacement as mayor, Terence MacSwiney, was court-martialed for sedition. He
refused to recognize the British courts and went on hunger strike in Brixton
Prison in London.
Later that
month, Oswald Swanzy, the RIC commander believed to be responsible for
MacCurtain’s death, was gunned down in his home town, Lisburn, by volunteers
acting on orders from Michael Collins. In late October, Terence MacSwiney, at
this stage, a freedom fighter seen as an international cause celebre, died on
his 74th day on hunger strike. He correctly predicted that his death
from fasting in prison would be far more beneficial for achieving Irish freedom
than if he was killed in a military engagement.
On November
28th, men from the 3rd Cork Brigade of the IRA under the
leadership of British Army veteran, Tom Barry, carried out the largest ambush
of the War of Independence at Kilmichael, an area between the towns of Bantry
and Macroom. It was Barry’s response to the wild boast by British Prime
Minister, David Lloyd George at a banquet a few nights before in the Guildhall
in London when, with the IRA in his sights, he declared “we have murder by the
throat.”
Seventeen
Auxies were killed in that encounter, which included savage hand-to-hand
combat, and the battle was commemorated by a ballad that is still popular at
Irish events.
And over the
Hill went the Echo
The peal of
the rifle and guns
And the smoke
from their lorries bore tidings
That the Boys
of Kilmichael had won.
In early
December the Cork No 1 Brigade planned an attack on a group of Auxiliaries at
Dillon’s Cross, close to the city. One member of the Auxiliaries was killed and
eleven were injured in that clash. This attack resembled the final straw that
broke the camel’s back as two groups of angry Auxiliaries arrived in the
Patrick Street area in the city center.
Amazingly,
they burned down Grant’s Drapery Shop and Cash’s Department Store and by the
time their rampage ended the following day, December 12th, City Hall
and the Carnegie Free Library were set aflame. Altogether, 40 businesses and
300 homes were lost to fire.
This was
widely understood as the Auxies’ unfettered revenge for Dillon’s Cross and
especially for Kilmichael.
There were
many other reprisals by the British forces, but the burning of a city by policemen
really caught the attention of the international community. The Prime Minister,
David Lloyd George, admitted later that the policy of reprisals, culminating in
the burning of Cork, caused heavy pressure on his government by the Church of
England and from the leaders in Washington which resulted in a military truce that
started in July, 1921 and led to the Anglo-Irish Treaty five months later.
There were
other major happenings in the war outside of Cork. In September, in Balbriggan,
County Dublin, two policemen were shot dead in a bar. The official response led
by the Tans included the bayoneting of two suspects and burning many houses in
the town.
Also, in
September three British soldiers, including Private Harold Washington, who was
just fifteen years old, were killed in a surprise IRA attack in Dublin. Kevin
Barry, an 18-year old student, was convicted and hanged for his part in that
operation – and quickly earned a hallowed place in the growing list of Irish
martyrs.
Again, in
the same month five RIC men and one Black and Tan were killed in an ambush in
Rineen in County Clare. The police reprisal ended the lives of five civilians.
Early in the
morning of November 21st, what came to be known as Bloody Sunday,
Michael Collins’ special squad assassinated 14 British agents. That afternoon
in a chaotic scene the police and Tans shot wildly into the players and the
crowd at a football game in Croke Park. Later in the evening, three senior IRA
men were executed in Dublin Castle, bringing the total dead for the day to over
30.
For most
Irish nationalists the support Sinn Fein received in the 1918 election provided
a sufficient mandate for the IRA to engage militarily with the British to
achieve the Irish republic that was central to their agenda. Without
diminishing the bravery of the men and women who fought in the War of
Independence, some recent historians of the period point out that there was a dark
side to the revolution.
196 civilians were killed by the IRA during
the 1919-1921 period. Dubious accusations of spying or double-dealing with the RIC
plus occasional targeting of big-house Protestants by a few IRA commanders resulted in executions that
leave a black mark on the whole insurgency.
The year
1920, a hundred years ago, ended with the passage of the disastrous Government
of Ireland Act which partitioned the island.
Gerry
OShea blogs at wemustbetalking.com
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