Massacre in West Cork (27 page)

24
The GAA Archive, ‘Bloody Sunday’:
http://www.crokepark.ie/gaa-museum/gaa-archive/gaa-museum-irish-times-articles/bloody-sunday,–1920
(accessed 18 December 2012).

25
See comments by Michael Collins dismissing Dominion Home Rule in
Southern Star
, 25 September 1920, at a time when peace feelers had already been put out by both sides. Collins was TD for Cork South in the first Dáil of 1919 and Director of Intelligence for the IRA. In 1919 he had become President of the secret Irish Republican (Fenian) Brotherhood (IRB). During this period he was also acting President of the Irish Republic following the arrest of President Arthur Griffith. In 1921 he would be a member of the Irish delegation during the Treaty negotiations. In 1922 he would be Chairman of the Provisional Government and would command the National Army until his assassination by anti-Treaty forces in August of that year. See also Lloyd George’s Guildhall speech on 9 November, when he said, ‘We have murder by the throat.’ Earlier that afternoon he had opened discussions on a truce with Sinn Féin. British Houses of Parliament Archives, Bonar Law papers, BL/102/7/4 and BL/102/7/5.

26
Collins, M. and Talbot, H., 1923,
Michael Collins’ Own Story
(London, Hutchinson and Co.), p. 123.

27
BMH WS 767, Patrick Moylett; Hittle (2011), p. 182. See Smith, R. N., 1997,
The Colonel: the life and legend of Robert R. McCormick, 1880–1955
(Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company), for the involvement of John Steele of the
Chicago Tribune
in the negotiations, pp. 232–3. Both Smith and Hittle confuse the sequence of events, which is unsurprising as this is not central to their research.

28
British Houses of Parliament Archives, Bonar Law papers, BL/102/7/6, ‘Memo by C. J. Phillips, Foreign Office’, 19 November 1920; LG/F/91/7/7-24, ‘Correspondence about C. J. Phillip’s interviews with Moylett’, October–November 1920; see also Robert Dudley Edwards Archives, University College Dublin, for a second Moylett statement. Moylett makes it clear that Collins, Éamon de Valera (President of the Irish Republic and senior surviving commandant of the 1916 Rising) and Griffith (the Deputy President) were speaking with one voice.

29
National Archives, Kew, CAB 23/23/13, 9 December 1920.

30
House of Commons debate, 10 December 1920, vol. 135, cols 2601–16:
http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1920/dec/10/prime-ministers-announcement
(accessed 26 July 2013).

31
In a September 1922 report to the cabinet, Major Whittaker estimated that 200,000 troops and millions of pounds would be needed to hold southern Ireland against a hostile population. National Archives, Kew, CAB 24/139.

32
National Archives, Kew, CAB 23/38, p. 21. See also I. O. (Street, C. J. C.), 1921, Th
e Administration of Ireland, 1920
(London, Philip Allan), pp. 160–1, which shows that the British could not understand why the Government of Ireland Act providing Dominion Home Rule without taxes was unacceptable to the Irish.

33
BMH WS 1413, Tadhg Kennedy, pp. 111–12. The British intelligence officer arrived in Tralee by plane and Kennedy ‘welcomed’ his visitor by organising the column to fire on the plane once it touched down just to get his point across.

34
Kostal, D., 2007, ‘British military intelligence-law enforcement integration in the Irish War of Independence, 1919–1921’, in
Can’t We All Just Get Along? Improving the law enforcement–intelligence community relationship
(Washington, D.C., NDIC Press), p. 138.

35
National Archives, Kew, CAB 24/122/83, ‘Irish Situation. Deputation to the Right Hon. the Lord Chancellor’, Friday, 15 April 1921; see the first part of this meeting on 28 March. Birkenhead was Frederick Edwin Smith, whose fervent support of armed resistance by Ulster unionists gave way to authoring the ‘Articles of Agreement for a Treaty between Great Britain and Ireland’, which formally ended the Irish War of Independence.

36
BMH WS 883, Lieut.-Col. John M. MacCarthy, Appendix N, ‘Single original copy of captured British intelligence summary’; see also p. 91 of this witness statement, where he discusses how the document came into his possession and its contents.

37
There is a copy of the report in O’Donoghue, F., 1986, No Other Law (Dublin, Anvil), Appendix 1. Extracts in the text are from BMH WS 883, Appendix N.

38
Searches by the military, police and Auxiliaries had increased to 6,311 between 1 October 1920 and July 1921 from 1,500 the previous year, according to Jeffery, K., 1987, ‘British military intelligence following World War I’, in Robertson, K. G. (ed.),
British and American Approaches to Intelligence
(Basingstoke, Macmillan), pp. 55–84.

39
The drought ended in mid July; Shaw, N., 1923,
The Air & Its Ways: the Rede Lecture in the University of Cambridge
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).

40
See also the unsuccessful Millstreet British round-up of IRA suspects in June 1921, according to BMH WS 838, Seán Moylan, p. 235. In that case the IRA had sufficient intelligence at Millstreet that the British were coming so waited for lunchtime and slipped through the net.

41
Flor Begley, who became known as the ‘Piper of Crossbarry’ after he played the bagpipes to raise Irish morale during the fighting, dismisses Barry’s claims that there were 1,300 troops and, basing his figure on the number of lorries that converged on the area, puts the figure at 350, which was far better odds for the 100-strong flying column. He also confirms that the Auxiliaries from Macroom arrived late, thus allowing the flying column to escape, in BMH WS 1771, p. 3. In cases like this, where we are relying on the protagonists’ memories, it is hard to know who is right in their estimation.

42
BMH WS 832, William Desmond, p. 38. He also states that he attended a funeral for eighteen British soldiers in Bandon Barracks after Crossbarry, p. 48.

43
BMH WS 348, Captain E. Gerrard, A. D. C. 5th Division British Forces in Ireland 1916–1921, p. 8. Gerrard also mentions that Lloyd George had asked for and received a copy of Prendergast, J. P., 1922,
The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland
(Dublin, Mellifont Press).

44
Jeffery, K., 1984,
The British Army and the Crisis of Empire: 1918–1922
(Manchester, Manchester University Press), pp. 89–92. See also Callwell, C. E., 1927, Field-Marshall Sir Henry Wilson, vol. 2 (London, Cassell), p. 299, which shows that there was difficulty getting officers to go to Ireland when sent, which was tantamount to mutiny.

45
While the Black and Tans were not significant in West Cork, these paramilitary police, who were inserted into the ranks of the RIC to stem the flood of resignations, had such a poor reputation in the rest of Ireland that the War of Independence is often named after them.

46
National Archives, Kew, CAB 24/126, ‘Weekly survey of the state of Ireland’, 13 July 1921.

47
Three companies was about 500 men. National Archives, Kew, CAB 23/25, ‘Conclusions of a conference of Ministers held in Mr. Chamberlain’s room, House of Commons, S.W., on Friday, 8th April, 1921, at 3.30 p.m.’, 15 April 1921, Appendix VII, p. 62.

48
On 16 March 1921 there were fifty infantry and seven cavalry battalions, thirty-three artillery batteries, four Royal Engineer companies and three Signal companies in Ireland,
The Irish Times
, 16 May 1921, p. 5, col. 5. McKenna, J., 2011,
Guerrilla Warfare in the Irish War of Independence
, 1919–1921 (Jefferson, N.C., McFarland and Co.), p. 252, suggests the total was 57,000 plus support staff, which is greater than David Fitzpatrick’s estimate of 15,000 effective troops in Bartlett, T. and Jeffery, K., 1996,
A Military History of Ireland
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), p. 406. Once the strike was called off on 17 April the troops were returned to Ireland. Evidence presented by General Macready in October 1921 says the sixty-seven battalions in Ireland were under strength by 15,000, suggesting that the number of troops in June 1921 was approximately 46,000.

49
Wilson’s military solution was to concentrate forces in India, Egypt, Ireland and Germany, but that would have meant giving up on large parts of the British Empire so it was politically impossible.

50
Sloan, G. R., 1997,
The Geopolitics of Anglo-Irish Relations in the Twentieth Century
(London, Leicester University Press), pp. 134–96; National Archives, Kew, CAB 43/2/Admiralty, ‘Naval Defence’, pp. 82–7, 22 October 1921.

51
Pattison, G., 2010, ‘The British Army’s Effectiveness in the Irish Campaign 1919–1921 and the Lessons for Modern Counterinsurgency Operations, with Special Reference to C3I Aspects’, The Cornwallis Group XIV:
Analysis of Societal Conflict and Counter-Insurgency
, pp. 88–103.

52
National Archives, Kew, CAB 24/124;
The Irish Times
, 23 May 1921; de Valera, É., 1921,
The Struggle of the Irish People
:
address to the Congress of the United States adopted at the January session of Dáil Éireann
,
1921
(Washington, D.C., U.S. G.P.O.) gave a civilian figure (including IRA members not shot in battle) of 270 between 1 January 1920 and 28 February 1921. Sir Hamar Greenwood, House of Commons debate, ‘Oral answers: Ireland: kidnapping’, 16 February 1922, vol. 150, cols 1196–7: ‘The number of persons kidnapped during the period in question is 170, of whom 34 were police, 5 military and 131 civilians. Of the police, 17 have since been released, 15 are believed to have been murdered, and 2 are believed to have left the country. All the military kidnapped have since been released. Of the civilians, 115 have been released, 8 are believed to have been murdered, and 8 are still unaccounted for [from 1 August 1920 to Truce July 1921]’.
http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1922/feb/16/kidnapping
 (accessed 26 July 2013).

53
Donnelly Jr, J. S., 2012, ‘Big House burnings in County Cork during the Irish Revolution, 1920–21’,
Éire-Ireland
47, pp. 141–97, provides an excellent overview of this topic.

54
BMH WS 1607, Charlie O’Donoghue, pp. 8–9. In contrast, each British soldier carried 150 rounds of ammunition as part of his standard uniform.

55
BMH WS 792, Tadg O’Sullivan, p. 9.

56
Broom, J. T., 2002, ‘The Anglo-Irish War of 1919–1921: “Britain’s Troubles–Ireland’s Opportunities” ’, in Huber, T. M. (ed.),
Compound Warfare: that fatal knot
(Fort Leavenworth, Kan., U.S. Army Command and General Staff College Press). Available at:
http://norwich.academia.edu/JohnBroom/Papers/998074/The_Anglo-Irish_War_1919–1921_Englands_Troubles--Irelands_Opportunities_
 (accessed 9 September 2012). For a similar conclusion from a very different perspective see Mitchell, A., 1995,
Revolutionary Government in Ireland: Dáil Éireann, 1919–22
(Dublin, Gill & Macmillan), p. 399.