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2. Guerrilla war—war in the shadows 4 страница
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£ 250, 000. This money would enable the Dá il to function. The bonds were to be issued in denominations of £ 1, £ 5, £ 10, £ 20, £ 50 and £ 100, and the general population were invited to subscribe. The purpose of this range of certificates was to enable individuals on small incomes to subscribe. Each certificate would qualify for a five per cent rate of interest paid half-yearly. The appeal for subscriptions was published ‘in national newspapers’. The National Loan was marketed as the means by which the general population could contribute to and have control of the future of Ireland. From the outset, its purpose was to finance the operation of the government, not to finance the war effort or arms purchases. An unpublicised exception was for the purchase of Thompson machine-guns from the US.
While a dribble of small arms continued to be smuggled in from England and Scotland, there was no importation of arms of any quantity during the war with the exception of one small lot of Thompson machine- guns from the US in 1920. As in all successful guerrilla wars, the IRA not only adapted their tactics to give them the greatest advantage but also sought out the latest technological weapons of which they could avail themselves. The Irish were the first to use the new Thompson guns that would change the guerrilla wars that followed, but they did not just purchase the guns as they became available; the remnants of Clan na Gael in the US were the ones to whom General John T. Thompson turned for major investment. Thompson’s partner was Thomas Fortune Ryan, an American entrepreneur with close ties to the Clan. Upon the gun’s development and availability for sale in late 1920, Ryan placed an order for 100 of the weapons, but funds were lacking. Then Harry Boland took over the financial end and began channelling Dá il funds for the purchase. 124 Only the first few weapons of the initial consignment made it to Ireland, with two former US Army officers, Major James J. Dineen and Captain Patrick Cronin, as instructors.
The Thompson guns were introduced in November or December 1920. The first introduction of these guns followed the arrival of two ex-officers of the American Army, one was Major Dineen and the other, whose rank I forget, was named Cronin. These two men were made available to the Brigade for the purpose of giving lectures and instructions in the use of the Thompson sub-machine guns. The lectures, which were given to selected men of the Dublin Brigade, consisted in the main of taking the gun asunder, becoming acquainted with the separate parts and securing a knowledge of the names of these parts, the clearance of stoppages, as well as the causes of these stoppages. In the early stages it was not possible to give practical demonstrations of the shooting powers of these weapons, but the handling of the guns, together with the methods of sighting, made the men reasonably proficient. 125
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The first few Thompson guns arrived in late autumn 1920, and to try them out Collins and others went to the Marino Casino in Clontarf, where there was a disused, wide, dry tunnel leading to Charlemont House. The interconnecting chambers and tunnels run underneath the grounds surrounding the Casino. On 24 May 1921 Collins, Boland, Gearó id O’Sullivan and Tom Barry126 fired and practised with the Thompson guns that Clan na Gael had purchased in America. 127 The tunnels are only a few feet below the ground, however, and the neighbouring local Christian Brothers alerted the rebels that the supposedly secret target practice could be heard all over Marino and further afield. Nearby was an orphanage run by the Christian Brothers, who allowed Collins’s men to use the grounds for drilling, but the Brothers warned Collins that any further firing of the guns would attract attention. After this demonstration, Collins enthusiastically ordered another 500 of the machine-guns, but the ship East Side carrying them was raided in NewYork harbour. The guns and a sizeable amount of money were lost.
The Thompsons were first used in combat on 16 June 1921, when the IRA ambushed a trainload of soldiers from the West Kent Regiment in Drumcondra, wounding three of them. In its rather typical hyperbole, An t-Ó glá ch heralded their use and called them ‘our latest ally’. The paper told
the Volunteers that ‘with such a superb weapon available to us it is up to the individual soldier to lose no opportunity of learning all he can about the construction, use and care of it’. 128 The guns were used in several Dublin ambushes and had a psychological effect on both the Irish and the British, but there were too few of them, and too late, to materially affect the war. 129 On 13–14 December 1920 a meeting of GHQ was held in Barry’s Hotel on Great Denmark Street to finalise plans to import arms from Italy. Donal Hales, whose brothers Seá n and Tom were both in the IRA, lived in Genoa and was the contact trying to buy the weapons. Cathal Brugha, Collins, Liam Mellows, Joe Vize, Liam Deasy and O’Donoghue attended. Michael Leahy, second-in-command of Cork No. 1 Brigade, and Seá n O’Shea left Dublin for Italy on 2 January 1921. 130 Arms were to be distributed throughout the south-western counties of Kerry, Cork, Limerick and Tipperary. Leahy and O’Shea soon returned to Dublin, however, after
the project failed.
About three or four months before the Truce a messenger came from Ireland to Italy for arms. We were requested by an Italian General to accompany him down to Rome to the military department. The man who came over first was a Mr O’Shea, I think. O’Shea had gone over to France to buy arms, being commissioned to do so by Collins. He failed to get them there. He was merely a messenger. I think he lives in Dublin but I do not know his Christian name. He was sent by Michael Collins to get in touch with me for the acquisition of arms in Italy. … Another man was also sent out from Cork called Leahy. They both came for arms …
…
I approached the Italian General who accompanied me to Rome for the arms. At that time contact would not be difficult. In fact, through the good offices of the general we found we had no difficulty in getting the guns. We could get as many rifles as we wished—up to 100, 000. These rifles were Italian rifles which had been used in the previous war; they were in good condition and only required cleaning. We could also get ammunition. There was some talk as to what ammunition would fit these rifles.
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Things were in such a position in Ireland that we could not get quickly in touch with it.
O’Shea had returned to Ireland to report to Collins regarding the position and I did not hear anything further about sending the arms.
Just on his return to Dublin many raids and burnings, effected by the Black and Tans, took place in the city which may have been the reason I could not have any news from him or from Michael Collins for some time after. I believe the truce came on shortly after this. These rifles were not removed. However, the British Consul-General must have been told by someone that I had hidden these arms in Genoa. He was informed probably by his Intelligence officer, that the guns were in Genoa awaiting shipment. That was not true because they were in Rome. They were not paid for and were never called for. My sister spoke to Collins then who said the money would present no difficulty at all. He mentioned the sum of £ 100, 000 which she thought would be sent immediately. No money was sent and they were never removed.
My opinion is that the arrangements to procure the arms may have been to bluff England. If the Irish were fully armed they could hold out longer and kill most of the British soldiers here. The idea of getting the arms, I believe, would be to influence England to come to terms with Ireland. Collins may also have had the idea of trying to get in Ulster. Ulster would come in if there was a final settlement. There would have been some difficulty in shipping these arms to Ireland, now the British got the knowledge of them. 131
Collins continued to seek arms from abroad as the war progressed, and large quantities were en route from Hamburg but had not arrived at the time of the Truce. 132 Robert Briscoe, later lord mayor of Dublin, was a major gunrunner for the IRA, and purchased boats in Germany to run the guns to Ireland. Charles (Charlie) McGuinness was the captain of these vessels, and it was actually after the Truce that the largest single shipments were imported from Germany. In November 1921 McGuinness piloted the Frieda
with a load of weapons from Germany; she was originally scheduled to land at Ballinagoul, Co. Waterford, but was forced by fog to offload at Cheekpoint on the Suir River. Her cargo consisted of rifles, Luger pistols and 1, 700, 000 rounds of ammunition. He also piloted the Hanna to Ballinagoul on 2 April 1922 to deliver another load of weapons, including machine-guns, which were picked up and used by the anti-Treaty forces of the IRA. 133
In addition to the widespread use of machine-guns, the Irish War of Independence was the first guerrilla war in which there was a significant counter-insurgency use of mechanised and armoured vehicles. 134 The Irish had to develop tactics, techniques and procedures to disrupt and disable the more mobile British forces. 135 To limit their mobility in the country, roads were trenched and bridges were demolished. It is important to note that many of the British vehicles had wheels with wooden spokes, and a blow to the wheel in a road trench was most likely to completely disable the vehicle. Such deep trenching could not be undertaken extensively because it would cripple the economic life of the country. The selective use of road- cutting and bridge demolition forced the British onto fewer routes, forced them to carry repair materials and slowed their movements through constant fear of encountering fresh obstacles or an ambush while in the process of repair.
It is notable that modern insurgencies have gone through the very same stages in terms of tactics as the IRA did from 1920 to 1921—from massed assaults on barracks to ambushes with small arms, and finally more sophisticated ambushes using what are now known as Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). The remotely detonated IED, in modern terminology, combines the advantage of relatively low risk for the guerrillas with the potential for causing mass casualties among troops or police even in armoured vehicles. The British started out using high driving speeds to avoid an ambush. In response, the Irish would dig a shallow trench in the roads to disable the British lorries. As guerrilla wars are always evolving, the Irish found that their simple answer was soon unsuccessful, so by autumn 1920 their ambush tactics began to change. To counter the use of armour, the IRA began to rely on interdicting the roads particularly by the use of IEDs.
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While the IED is sometimes described as a new technology, it actually has a lengthy history, but the use of such weapons in the past was fairly
limited and certainly without strategic consequences. The very name ‘improvised’ was originally meant pejoratively: an IED was used ‘when you couldn’t get something better’, not something to be widely emulated. Ships loaded with explosives were used as far back as the 1500s, while various jury-rigged bombs and mines were used in the American Civil War, such as at the naval battle of Mobile Bay and the land battle of Petersburg. Captain Gabriel Rains became infamous for ‘booby-trapping’ dead Seminole Native Americans with explosives—when the bodies were collected after the battle they would explode, killing more Native Americans—and used similar tactics as a Confederate general in the Civil War. 136 Further, the Irish were not the first to use explosives in ambushes; the first recorded roadside assassination effort by explosives was an attempt on Napoleon in 1803. Irish revolutionaries used explosive devices in the mid-nineteenth century, as did the Fenians in the latter part of the century, but mostly in attacks on barracks and other buildings, not in ambushes. 137 TheVolunteers/IRA were really the first to manufacture explosives, casings, springs and all the other necessary bomb components from raw materials, and to use them as tactics changed with the advent of armoured vehicles.
An IED is a bomb fabricated in an improvised manner incorporating destructive chemicals and designed to destroy or incapacitate personnel or vehicles. In some cases IEDs are used to distract, disrupt or delay an opposing force, facilitating a follow-up type of attack. Irish IEDs incorporated military or commercially sourced explosives, and often combined both types, and they were otherwise made with home-made explosives. Any IED designed for use against armoured targets such as armoured cars or lorries will be designed for armour penetration. The Irish IEDs were extremely diverse in design and contained many types of initiators, detonators, penetrators and explosive loads, and their effectiveness varied greatly because they were not uniformly manufactured. At the outset of their use, the IRA ‘mine’ was usually made of civilian explosives such as gelignite, placed in a petrol tin or milk churn and detonated using an electrical charge via a cable.
The IRA IEDs came from three sources:
• stolen from civilian companies, particularly Scottish quarries and mines;
• stolen from the British military;
• manufactured in Irish munitions factories.
At the beginning of the war the most common explosive used was gelignite (a nitric-based explosive) stolen from quarries, along with detonators customarily used in collieries. Gelignite, however, was susceptible to freezing and could not be left in the ground for long periods in cold weather, and as a commercial explosive was simply not powerful enough unless used in very large quantities. The supply was insufficient and became more difficult to obtain, so the Irish turned to chemists and others with military experience from World War I to develop home-made explosives.
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Irish units throughout the country tried making explosives, and many were ad hoc combinations made by aVolunteer with little or no experience in explosive or bomb manufacture. Joe Good worked as an electrician at the Phoenix Park Works on Dublin’s Parkgate Street, and in 1918 the British used part of the building as a shell works. In his work he learned a little bit about the construction of explosive devices, and was asked to pass that on to his fellow Volunteers. Good described his knowledge as dangerous:
Richard Walsh of Balls, Co. Mayo, brought many of his officers to the house where I lived. I instructed them in the elementary use of explosives. My knowledge was very elementary. I used and demonstrated only with batteries, that is, accumulators. I had not the necessary technical knowledge to make exploders, and I believe at that period we lacked technical knowledge from those who were competent to give instructions. In retrospect I dread to think of the possible consequences of my ignorance. 138
Some of the stories are almost unbelievable and had tragic consequences.
On one occasion while grenades were being made, we received a quantity of gelignite to be used in their manufacture from the 3rd Battalion area [Castlecomer, Co. Kilkenny]. This particular lot had been taken from the coal mines near Castlecomer and was frozen when we got it. To thaw it out Joe [McMahon] put it into the stove of a gas oven in [Peter] De Loughry’s workshop and lit the gas on full. Missing the gelignite, I asked him where
he had put it and when he told me, I went to the stove and I was shaking as I turned the gas off. Poor Joe! He was subsequently killed when giving a demonstration of those same grenades in Cavan. 139
The need for ‘experts’ to make explosive devices was apparent.
James (Sé amus) O’Donovan was the primary ‘chemist/inventor’ of explosives for the IRA, and the person most responsible for developing and establishing Irish-centred explosive manufacturing. A postgraduate chemistry student at UCD, he worked directly for Collins. 140 In 1918 he began producing explosives from fulminate of mercury, a notoriously unstable compound. In 1919 Collins directed him to develop an explosive that was more powerful but that ‘men with no technical skill could produce it in a farmhouse kitchen … They have to be fairly foolproof because we can’t have people all over the country having their heads blown off! ’ Irish War Flour was O’Donovan’s first original explosive, named after its appearance; a nitrated resin using the ingredients of resin, flour, acid and potassium chlorate, it was quite unstable and didn’t have the explosive power he wanted, so he kept experimenting. His second explosive compound, nicknamed Irish Cheddar, again because of its looks, was a form of cheddite, an explosive used quite extensively in the early twentieth century. Its ingredients were paraffin, potassium chlorate, nitrobenzene and castor oil.
The first use of a road-mine in the war occurred at Annascaul on 18 August 1920. 141 The IRA detonated a small charge in the roadway, a lorry was upset, the British surrendered and the Irish took their weapons. The attack utilised a very small mine, the first to be used against a vehicle, but an IED was not the norm in ambushes at that time. In autumn 1920 and thereafter there was an increase in IRA anti-road and anti-bridge attacks, and they also began to use IEDs in ambushes with regularity. In the British War Diaries there were reports of 172 ambushes from then until the Truce in July 1921, and 109 of them involved explosive devices of some sort. The British records of their use are the most accurate, and they indicate that of the 109 attempts there were about 23 instances in which the bombs did not cause much damage.
British tactics taught at the Curragh directed that ‘Lorries should be so disposed in depth that it becomes difficult for the ambushers, without
employing a large force, to ambush the whole column’. The IRA quickly learned the trick of laying multiple roadside IEDs at the same spacing as the British vehicles in a convoy, which usually travelled 300 yards apart. From their first use, the British regarded improvised explosive devices as a weapon of shame, atrocity and cowardice. Today’s IEDs have the same reputation as their early ancestors and are used in precisely the same way as the Irish used them in wars from Iraq to Afghanistan.
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Having the explosives was not enough; proper placement of IEDs was difficult for the inexperienced Irish—they had little enough training in how to conduct ambushes and placement of men, much less in how to use explosives in these attacks. As the war progressed, they found that their IEDs were best initiated not by pressure/contact detonators but by electrical detonators attached to hidden wires buried in the road and exploded just when they were crossed by a lorry or armoured car.
The first major IRA ambush that used what we would now recognise as an IED with sufficient explosive power to bring the fight to a quick end took place on 2 February 1921 at Clonfin, Co. Longford. 142 Under the command of Seá n MacEoin, the IRA attacked two lorries of Auxiliaries, disabled one, killed four (including the O/C Lieutenant Commander Francis Craven) and wounded nine. After a short fire fight the Auxiliaries surrendered; the Irish recovered twenty rifles and over 1, 200 rounds of. 303 ammunition. Towards the end of the war the IRA showed increasing proficiency with explosives, in part because they were so short of infantry weapons. Although on many occasions they failed to explode, ‘mines’ could be devastating when they did. In May 1921 a remotely detonated bomb at Youghal, Co. Cork, killed seven military bandsmen and wounded 21. By the end of the war the ‘mine’ was one of the IRA’s most utilised weapons.
O’Donovan also developed what he called
[p]articular compositions made up for certain jobs; one of these that I remember was quantities of a solution of Phosphorus in Carbon bi-Sulfide. This was packed in small bottles of grenade size and was used in the attack on the L. N. S premises [London North Western Railway Hotel] on the North Wall, at that time an enemy outpost. 143
The hotel was used as a barracks by ‘Q’ Company of the Auxiliaries and was attacked on 11 April 1921. This was one of the first uses of grenade- sized, throwable chemical weapons.
By the time of the Truce in July 1921 the IRA had eleven foundries making bomb components. Collins also had his engineers working on armour-piercing ammunition, because his sources could not buy them at any price; however, the Irish were never able to manufacture their own. (It is of note that the IRA’s use of explosives did not stop with the end of the War of Independence. During the Civil War, on 18 August 1922, a fuel delivery lorry was packed with explosives and exploded in Dundalk by the anti-Treaty IRA in order to stop the Free State army who were marching on Dundalk barracks, which had been taken over by anti-Treaty forces under Frank Aiken on 14 August. ) Although Collins wanted to utilise IEDs as much as possible, he knew that their primitive explosives were unreliable and that the Irish were inexperienced in their use. As a result, there were few ambushes in which the IEDs were crucial, rather than ancillary, to the attack itself.
Guerrilla wars that followed have consistently utilised IEDs; while the technology has changed drastically, their strategic and tactical use remains vital to guerrillas. Che Guevara wrote:
One of the weakest points of the enemy is transportation by road and railroad. It is virtually impossible to maintain a vigil yard by yard over a transport line, a road, or a railroad. At any point a considerable amount of explosive charge can be planted that will make the road impassable; or by exploding it at the moment that a vehicle passes, a considerable loss in lives and materiel to the enemy is caused at the same time that the road is cut.
…
The technique of lying in ambush along roads in order to explode mines and annihilate survivors is one of the most remunerative in point of ammunition and arms. The surprised enemy does not use his ammunition and has no time to flee, so with a small expenditure of ammunition large results are achieved. 144
Since the Irish war, IEDs have radically altered counter-insurgency actions. They have forced patrols to move down the centre-line of roadways, disrupting traffic and alienating the population. Further, they usually cause civilian casualties, making locals wary of patrols and frightened to be near them. Far from finding such ‘presence patrols’ reassuring, the public finds them threatening and a source of danger. 145 Thus the intelligence value of patrols is reduced, along with their ability to disrupt insurgents. As a result of the use of IEDs by the Irish, and adaptations by the guerrillas who followed, classic patrol tactics have required substantial modification.
As regards its influence on future guerrilla actions, in addition to tactical innovations in the field the Irish War of Independence also introduced the Thompson machine-gun, the IED and the car bomb to the catalogue of guerrilla weapons.
Following the war, A. E. Percival, who served as an intelligence officer in Cork and was one of the most hated British officers, wrote:
The rebel campaign in Ireland was a national movement backed by a large proportion of the population and was not conducted by a few hired assassins as was often supposed. 146
An t-Ó glá ch editorialised thus:
TheVolunteers of Ireland have made history both from a political and military point of view. They have brought the practice of guerrilla warfare from a casual thing to a science, and in that science have exercised a trained and disciplined skill which has revealed unsuspected possibilities to the student of the science of war. 147
By spring 1921 the IRA had become a force in Dublin and its flying columns had become feared throughout the counties of Cork, Kerry and Clare. The columns were still mobile units of from ten to a hundred men, who could strike in devastating ambushes and then melt into a hinterland that they knew far better than the British military units who were deployed to fight them. Most IRA units, however, were chronically short of both weapons and ammunition.
At this particular time things were so bad with all the units that it was a question of how long they could last, would we last a month, a fortnight? The only reason was we had little left to fight with. We had no ammunition; we had a few guns. So bad was it that they cut down Winchester ammunition to fit. 45 and several members of the A. S. U. and other units met with serious accidents as a result. 148
Earlier in the war, Collins had said that ‘without guns you might as well be dead’. Now the emphasis was on a lack of ammunition. By spring 1921, though a formidable opponent, the IRA had not been able to dislodge the British forces, and it became clear to Collins that the Irish could not defeat those forces in the field.
The IRA’s guerrilla war was a curious compound of the admirable and the unpleasant—the chivalrous soldier and the cruel killer, the selfless patriot and the swaggering jack-in-office, the devout Catholic and the self- conscious martyr. 149 In the end, its campaign overcame all practical failings. As O’Malley remarked, the folk imagination could give the smallest action a ‘heroic and epical’ quality, and the saga concealed many acts of cold- blooded violence, cowardice and betrayal. 150 The IRA was heir to a tradition of agrarian terrorism, a succession of secret societies to which it remained akin, and its elemental quality of political change was one of its main sources of strength. 151
On 11 July 1921 the Truce was agreed. It was a product of exhaustion and did not signify a military victory for either side. Nevertheless, the IRA had achieved a great deal in forcing the British government to meet the representatives of the republican movement in formal peace talks, although the decision of the republican leadership to negotiate inevitably meant that the demand for an Irish Republic would be compromised. The Truce, and the follow-on Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921, had to be based on the extant facts and circumstances of the situation—realpolitiks. Many Irish commanders felt that since the British ‘agreed to’ a Truce, that they had been fairly beaten. They thought the treaty negotiations to follow would be that of a victorious Irish and a supplicant British delegation. However much the British commanders and politicians dismissed the Truce, or
however some of the Irish viewed their position as victors, that cannot negate the essential truth of the situation. Regardless of what the positions on the battlefield were thought to be by either side, the fact was that the IRA fought the conflict until British politicians were ready to negotiate with them.
It is dangerous to mix ideology and operations. It clouds one’s thinking and makes one see only what one wants to see. So often we see that people make their decisions based on what the facts mean to them, not on the facts themselves. The fact that many IRA volunteers were unaware of the limitations of what could be achieved through physical force and political pressure would become an intractable problem after the Truce.
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