Stories of Irishmen in World War II

Neil Richardson

Dark Times,

DecentMen

IRISH BOOK AWARD WINNER

First published 2012 by The O’Brien Press Ltd., 12 Terenure Road East, Rathgar, Dublin 6, Ireland. Tel: +353 1 4923333; Fax: +353 1 4922777 E-mail: books@obrien.ie Website: www.obrien.ie

ISBN: 978-1-84717-297-6

Text © copyright Neil Richardson 2012 Copyright for typesetting, layout, editing, design © The O’Brien Press Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or in any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

A catalogue record for this title is available from The British Library.

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Typesetting, editing, layout and design: The O’Brien Press Ltd

Printed and bound by MPG Books Ltd. The paper in this book is produced using pulp from managed forests.

CONTENTSINTRODUCTION 9

1 ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH

– THE BATTLE OF FRANCE AND THE DUNKIRK EVACUATION 29

2 THE DANGEROUS SKIES – THE WAR IN THE AIR 57

3 FIGHTING ON THE EDGE – FROM NORTH AFRICA TO ITALY 104

4 D-DAY – 6 JUNE 1944 151

5 A LONG WAY FROM HOME – THE WAR AGAINST JAPAN 175

6 DEEP, DARK WATERS – THE WAR AT SEA 211

7 STRANGER THAN FICTION 238

8 FIGHTING THE FINAL SOLUTION – IRELAND’S JEWS AND WWII 260

9 MODERN WARFARE 278

EPILOGUE 311

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING 338

SERVICE RECORDS 340

WAR DIARIES 340

INTERVIEWS 340

PICTURE AND TEXT CREDITS 342

INDEX 343

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Hitler, flanked by the massed ranks of the Sturmabteilung (SA) – the Nazi party’s early paramilitary wing – ascends the steps to the speaker’s podium during the 1934 Nazi Party Rally at Nuremberg.

9

INTRODUCTION

‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil

is for good men to do nothing.’

Attributed to Edmund Burke, Irish philosopher

Twenty-one years between the ending of one world war and the beginning of

another. Enough time for a new generation of soldiers to be born and grow

to adulthood. Enough time for economic and industrial forces to recover to

fight again. But not enough time for the memories of past horrors to have faded, or for the

bitterness of the defeated to have dissipated.

Part of me decided to write this book as a natural follow-on to A Coward If I Return,

A Hero If I Fall: Stories of Irishmen in WWI, because I had family who also served with the

British forces during the Second World War, and because I believed that – like our involve-

ment in the First World War – the Irish participation in the Second World War was equally

forgotten about, if not doubly forgotten about.

With the recent increase in books on the subject of the Irish in the First World War,

and the return of annual commemorations, modern Irish people are steadily becoming

more and more aware that 200,000 of their countrymen served in the British Army in the

trenches during 1914−1918. They were joined by 300,000 Irish emigrants, or sons born to

Irish parents, who served in other armies around the world, bringing the total Irish contri-

bution to roughly half a million men. Out of those who served in the British Army, at least

35,000 never came home.

However, with regard to the Second World War, the stories that most southern Irish

people have to tell revolve around the ‘Emergency’, and tales about rationing or the hated

‘glimmer man’ – whose job it was to make sure that a home or business was not using gas

outside of regulation hours – are usually what is remembered. Occasionally, there might be

a memory of receiving gas masks in case of air raids, or cardboard shoes – introduced to deal

10

dark times, decent men

with leather shortages – that disintegrated as

soon as they came into contact with the Irish

weather, or about the absence of cars on

city roads due to the lack of petrol, but the

stories usually end there. Even the memo-

ries about anything military invariably only

ever involve the Irish Army – and usually

focus on a family member who enlisted

as the army expanded after war broke out,

or who served as a reservist with the Local

Defence Force (LDF). Mentions of men in

other armies are normally confined to the

British or German aircrews that bailed out

over Ireland or crash landed before ending

up in internment camps on the Curragh.

And so, as the southern twenty-six coun-

ties of Ireland were independent and neutral

during the Second World War – as opposed

to being a part of the United Kingdom and

officially at war – the Second World War is

not considered to have concerned southern

Ireland.

As a result, the majority of modern Irish

people are still unaware that during the

Second World War, at least 130,000 Irish

served in the British forces – the 20,000

Irish already serving in the British forces

when war broke out being joined by

approximately 110,000 wartime volunteers

(roughly 66,000 from southern Ireland and

64,000 from Northern Ireland). However,

this figure is only a conservative estimate

based on bottom line academic consen-

sus. Some researchers have quoted figures of

150,000 and 200,000, and one source – First

World War General Sir Hubert Gough in a

letter to The Times in August 1944 – suggested

Above and opposite: Two cards made up by men from Lurgan, County Armagh, and sent to their families back home. Above: Eric McClure is pictured, while opposite is Frederick Mathews from Carnegie Street. McClure survived the war; Mathews was killed in action on 28 June 1942 in North Africa, aged thirty-four, while serving as a driver with the New Zealand Army Service Corps.

INTRODUCTION

11

that over 165,000 volunteers from southern Ireland alone had joined the British forces by

that time (which, when added to the 64,000 volunteers from Northern Ireland known

to have enlisted, would total 229,000). Furthermore, these are the numbers for the Brit-

ish forces alone – they do not include the Irish who are known to have served with the

US, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand militaries. Based on this, the numbers of Irish

who served in combatant armies during the Second World War might be very close to the

numbers who fought during the First World War. Finally, in the British forces alone, at least

7,500 Irish are known to have died during the Second World War.

I felt that the experiences of these Irish soldiers, sailors, and airmen must also be pre-

served, especially those who kept no diaries and were never written about in official his-

tories – the people whose stories and experiences were known only to themselves or their

families, stories that would vanish forever if not recorded.

Once again I submitted articles to national newspapers and websites appealing for Irish

Second World War veterans – from anywhere on the island of Ireland – or their families,

to contact me and pass on their accounts. Hundreds of people did so, and I am extremely

grateful to all of them.

However, another part of me wanted to write a book on the subject of the Irish in the

Second World War because in so many ways

this was a very different war to the conflict

of 1914−1918. Trench warfare, waves and

waves of infantry walking towards walls of

machine gun bullets, thousands of artillery

pieces pounding mile after mile of territory

into a cratered no-man’s-land, a thousand

yards of progress taking a year to achieve, and

death tolls like the 60,000 British casualties

incurred on the first day of the Battle of the

Somme in 1916 – they were now a thing of

the past. But replacing these features of an

old war were a new set of horrors: rocket

technology and the large-scale bombing

of cities, Blitzkrieg (‘Lightning War’) and

the true mechanisation of warfare – where

the plane and the tank became a terrify-

ing and dominating force on the battlefield

– the fight against fanatical units like the

Schutzstaffel (SS) and Hitler-Jugend (‘Hitler

12

dark times, decent men

Youth’) or the soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army, inhumane treatment in POW camps,

the Holocaust and human experimentation, and, ultimately, the advent of atomic weapons.

There was no patriotic rush to the recruiting offices this time – people knew the

terrifying cost of twentieth century warfare – but, in retrospect, this new war could also

be labelled as a just war. Unlike the 1914−1918 conflict, the Second World War could be

considered an ultimately necessary struggle to stop a very real force of evil. And so, the Irish

who fought in the Second World War experienced something very different to their fathers

in the trenches and, for that reason, their story must be told also.

Furthermore, the Irish who served in the combatant armies of the Second World War

grew up in an Ireland, and a world, that had changed drastically since the end of 1918.

While their fathers had been raised in an Ireland that was still a part of Britain – where,

aside from political tensions between nationalists and unionists, the country had been pre-

dominantly peaceful – many of the new generation were born during the War of Inde-

pendence of 1919−1921 or the Irish Civil War of 1922−1923, or in the aftermath when

Ireland was divided into the southern twenty-six counties of the Irish Free State and the six

northern counties of Ulster that became known as Northern Ireland and remained a part of

the United Kingdom (a division that was only finalised and made official on 3 December

1925). While the 1916 Rising was, for the most part, history to Irish Second World War

soldiers, many were born into an Ireland that was actively at war at the time of their birth.

This was true in the case of James Murray – who was born during the War of Independ-

ence in a one-room tenement on South William Street, Dublin in 1921. The night James

was born, there was a curfew in effect in Dublin. But when his mother went into labour,

James’ father – a driver for Jacob’s biscuits – was forced to go outside in order to fetch the

midwife. British forces saw him running through the streets and, thinking he was an IRA

man, opened fire. Luckily, James’ father was not hurt, and James Murray went on to land on

Sword Beach on D-Day while serving in 2nd King’s Own Shropshire Light Infantry.

However, being born during a violent period in Irish history was not the only difficulty

that Irish Second World War soldiers had to face before 1939 and the start of their war. The

so-called Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 took the lives of 280,000 people in Ireland and

Britain in a one-year period and 50 million people worldwide – an event which killed the

parents of many Irish children, including the mother of Eamonn ‘Ed’ O’Dea from Kildimo,

County Limerick. She died of the flu in 1919 when Ed was only four years old, leaving him

to be raised by his father and two aunts – Ed later served as a Stoker Petty Officer with the

Royal Navy during the war.

Modernity and the ideals of a new leading class had also changed Ireland in many ways

since 1918. On 3 July 1924, Eoin MacNeill – then minister for education – made the teach-

ing of the Irish language compulsory in all schools, and in 1928, for the first time in over

INTRODUCTION

13

a hundred years, an Irish currency began circulating again. Several organisations with roots

in Irish nationalism also began enforcing their ideals. After attending a ‘foreign sport’ rugby

match between Ennis and Nenagh in 1931, sixteen members of the Ennis Dalcassian Gaelic

Athletic Association (GAA) were expelled from their club, and in 1934, the Gaelic League

wrote to Dublin Corporation that it was ‘determined to crush ... [the] denationalising ...

present day instrument of social degradation ...’ that was jazz music, a campaign that was

fully supported by Irish bishops.

With regards to the strengthening of the bond between Church and State that was also

taking place during this time, in 1925 a resolution was passed in the Dáil (Irish parliament)

making it illegal for an Irish citizen to divorce and then re-marry in the State. By 1931,

the first Saint Patrick’s Day parade was held in the Free State, and over the following two

years, two pontifical masses were held in the Phoenix Park – one in 1932, attended by

over a million people, to celebrate the close of the thirty-first Eucharistic Congress, and

another in 1933, where 300,000 people gathered to celebrate a hundred years of Catholic

emancipation. This Church-State relationship ultimately led to the ‘special position’ given

to the Catholic Church in the 1937 Irish Constitution. Furthermore, while for a Catholic

to attend Trinity College Dublin remained, at the very least, frowned-upon, at worst, a

crime worthy of excommunication (official Church disapproval of Catholic attendance at

the university was only lifted in 1970), it was considered a mortal sin to be a communist.

Meanwhile, reflecting the recent political division of the country, work began on the con-

struction of the Northern Ireland Parliament Buildings, in the Stormont area of Belfast,

on 19 May 1928. It was opened four years later on 22 November 1932, giving Northern

Ireland its own seat of government.

As for the modern world bringing change to Ireland, the BBC made its first broadcast in

Northern Ireland on 14 September 1924 with the station 2BE. Two years later on 1 Janu-

ary 1926, the Irish Free State’s own new broadcasting service – 2RN – began transmitting.

Electricity came to the Free State with the opening of the Shannon hydro-electric scheme

at Ardnacrusha, County Clare, in 1929. At the time, it was the largest hydro-electric station

in the world and was built by the German engineering firm Siemens – who attempted to

raise the wages of under-paid workers on site, but were overruled by the Irish government

(Just over ten years later, Siemens would have factories in the vicinity of Nazi concentration

camps where forced-labour was used to manufacture electrical switches for the German

military.) And so, with broadcasting and electricity, the ‘wireless’ radio soon became a central

feature of Irish home life, providing a new form of entertainment and access to news. There

was also a growth in the number of cinemas in Ireland during this time, with Ireland’s first

talking film being Al Jolson’s The Singing Fool, shown at the Capitol Theatre off O’Connell

Street, Dublin in 1929. In many ways, Irish life was starting to become more international.

14

dark times, decent men

By the time of the Second World War, there were only nine surviving Irish regiments in the British Army. During the First World War, there had been fifteen. Top Row, left to right: Cap badges of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, Royal Irish Fusiliers, Royal Ulster Rifles. Middle Row, left to right: Irish Guards, Liverpool Irish (TA), London Irish Rifles (TA). Bottom Row, left to right: 5th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards, 8th King’s Royal Irish Hussars, North Irish Horse.

INTRODUCTION

15

However, while many things had changed since the days of their fathers’ youth, some

aspects of life in Ireland remained exactly the same. Before fighting in the trenches, many

Irishmen had known terrible poverty – living in dilapidated city tenements or barely sur-

viving on a tiny rural farm – and the Great Depression that began with the Wall Street

stock market crash ensured that their sons and daughters would be familiar with it as well.

In 1929, when most soon-to-be Irish Second World War soldiers were in their early teens,

unemployment rose sharply all around the world, with the heavy industry, construction

and farming sectors being particularly hard hit. In Ireland, around the same time that many

young men were approaching the age when they would leave school and be expected to

get their first job, there were now simply no jobs to be had. Approximately 250,000 out of

a population of 4.2 million were soon unemployed across the island.

In Northern Ireland, construction in the Belfast shipyards nearly came to a complete halt.

The city had once been known as the largest producer of linen in the world – now, 8,000

linen workers were unemployed – and it was not long before the Belfast Executive Com-

mittee noted that 20,000 children living in the city’s slums were suffering from malnutri-

tion. Meanwhile, in the Free State, infant mortality was high (a figure that was, as noted in

a Department of Local Government and Public Health report, still on the rise by 1938) and

in Limerick – in a three month period in late 1932 – 108 cases of diphtheria and sixty-eight

cases of scarlet fever in children were admitted to Limerick City Hospital. Grants to initi-

ate public works schemes that could provide employment, housing schemes, and welfare

or benefit programmes were widely requested, with ‘We Want Work’ being the slogan of a

march through Listowel, County Kerry by members of the local Workers’ Union. Similar

protest marches, along with work strikes, soon became regular occurences across the island.

The economic and social situation was grim across Ireland, but due to the worldwide

effects of the Wall Street Crash, emigration was no longer a solution to unemployment.

Irish people never stopped leaving the country to find work – travelling to places like Brit-

ain, the US, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand – but after 1929, the numbers were nothing

like they used to be. While just under 21,000 Irish people a year had emigrated to America

between 1920 and 1930, during the period 1931 to 1940, the number dropped to roughly

1,500 a year. There were simply no jobs to be had on the other side of the Atlantic. Emi-

gration to Australia and New Zealand similarly dropped to 2,500 a year during this time.

In fact, the economic situation was so bad, that between 1931 and 1938, while Ireland had

8,480 people leave the country, 15,859 actually emigrated into Ireland – desperate former-

emigrants who were coming home, hoping to escape the new poverty in America.

And so, well into the 1930s, the economic situation in Ireland was certainly bleak. This

would ultimately be a deciding factor in many (but certainly not all) men’s decision to join

the British Army during the Second World War.

16

dark times, decent men

Similarly, in the way that Irish First World War soldiers had grown up in a politically

changing world, so too did the Irish who went on to fight in the Second World War. But

while their fathers had known the struggle between nationalist and unionist, they expe-

rienced the clash of socialism/communism and fascism. In a devastated post-war Europe,

many turned to either the political left or the political right in an attempt to replace the

styles of government that had led to the war and its aftermath. For the Irish, the Spanish

Civil War was the first war that dealt with this divide of political ideals.

In 1932, Éamon de Valera and Fianna Fáil came to power for the first time. The party

had a strong anti-Treaty heritage and replaced the pro-Treaty Cumann na nGaedheal gov-

ernment which had been in power since 1922. One of de Valera’s first acts as President

of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State (the future position of Taoiseach) was to

lift the ban on the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which had been illegal up to this point

and was now a completely anti-Treaty organisation, and release many political prisoners

from jail. The IRA immediately started disrupting Cumann na nGaedheal events, which

brought them into violent clashes with the Army Comrades Association – also known as

the National Guard, or by their nickname the ‘Blueshirts’, for their Saint Patrick’s blue

uniform shirt. Many of the Blueshirts were former Free State soldiers who had fought the

anti-Treaty IRA during the Irish Civil War, and they firmly supported Cumann na nGead-

heal. Suddenly, the old anti-Treaty versus pro-Treaty struggle of the Irish Civil War period

was brought back to life.

In 1933, de Valera declared the Blueshirts illegal, and so they merged with Cumann na

nGaedheal and the National Centre Party to form Fine Gael on 3 September that year.

However, former Blueshirt leader Eoin O’Duffy – also the first leader of Fine Gael – soon

left this new party as the majority of its members did not support his strongly right-wing

views. He then founded the openly fascist National Corporate Party in 1935, whose mili-

tary wing became known as the ‘Greenshirts’. In terms of political opinion, they were com-

pletely opposed to Ireland’s other main paramilitary group – the IRA.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, the IRA and the National Corporate

Party/Greenshirts saw a conflict that seemed to mirror their own in Ireland. The IRA had

become more left-wing and socialist since the Irish Civil War, which brought them to

empathise with the Spanish republicans, while the right-wing, conservative National Cor-

porate Party/Greenshirts identified with the pro-Catholic, anti-communist aims of Franco’s

nationalists. Soon, both sides sent troops to fight in the war – many from the IRA, along

with other Irish socialists, formed the left-wing ‘Connolly Column’, named after 1916

martyr James Connolly, and served on the republican side, while 700 men who supported

Eoin O’Duffy fought in the right-wing ‘Irish Brigade’ on the nationalist side.

In fact, several Irishmen who would go on to serve during the Second World War were

INTRODUCTION

17

involved in the Spanish Civil War. From Morley’s Bridge, near Kilgarvan in County Kerry,

Michael Lehane was a student at Darrara Agricultural College – near Clonakilty in County

Cork – until hard times forced him to move to Dublin where he found work as a builder’s

labourer. He fought on the republican side during the Spanish Civil War – at Cordoba in

1936, at Las Rozas de Madrid during the Battle of the Corunna Road and at the Battle of

Brunete (where he was wounded) during 1937, and at the Battle of the Ebro (where he

was again wounded) in 1938 – before serving in the Norwegian Merchant Navy during the

Second World War. He disagreed with wearing a British uniform, but still felt that it was his

duty to do something to stop Hitler and Nazi Germany.

Michael Lehane was not the only Irish republican veteran of the Spanish Civil War to fight in the Second World War. Patrick O’Daire from Glenties, County Donegal – who initially served in and then later com-manded the Major Attlee Company of the British Battalion, 15th International Brigade (pictured here on the Ebro front in 1938) – went on to become a major in the Pioneer Corps during the Second World War. Ironically, he had started his soldiering career by fighting with the IRA against the British during the War of Independence when he was only sixteen years old, making his story a particularly unique one – he went from Irish rebel to British officer during his lifetime. O’Daire later settled in Llanberis, Wales and died in 1981 – aged seventy-six.