Blood-Dark Track (25 page)

Some observers felt that the split between Lynch and Leddy reflected their respective loyalties to Tom Barry and Seán Russell. Seán Russell had been elected leader of the IRA in April 1938. Barry strongly opposed Russell’s election and (on the grounds that there were plenty of targets in British-occupied Ireland) Russell’s plan for the bombing campaign in England. Less clear is what stance, if any, Barry took in relation to Russell’s dealings with Nazi Germany. These began in October 1936, when, during a visit to the United States as the IRA Quartermaster-General, Russell wrote to the German ambassador in Washington regretting the refusal by the ‘puppet Irish Free State government’ of landing rights to German aeroplanes, ‘a right apparently conceded without question to England, the traditional enemy of the Irish race’. This diplomatic overture was followed up in February 1939 when Russell, now IRA Chief of Staff, sent an agent to Berlin to receive instruction in the procurement of small arms and hand grenades and to try to secure the provision of German military supplies. When the Second World War broke out, Seán Russell was on the run from the authorities in the United States, who had served him with a deportation order. He finally escaped that country by accepting a German invitation to travel via Genoa to Berlin, where he arrived in May 1940.
Russell took bomb-making classes with the Abwehr and sought out German assistance for the IRA. In August 1940, he set off to Ireland by U-boat. He never made it. On 14 August 1940, the leader of the IRA died from perforated ulcers and was buried at sea wrapped in the flag of the Third Reich.

On board the submarine with Russell when he died was Tadhg Lynch’s old comrade from the 1937 anti-Coronation march, Frank Ryan. Ryan had had an extraordinary few years. In the late summer of 1938, he was captured by fascist forces in Spain. For nine unimaginable months he was one of a group of eighteen prisoners of whom nine were shot dead each morning and replaced by nine others. In July 1940, after representations from the Irish and German governments, the frail and deafened anti-fascist was released to Nazis and driven to Berlin, where he joyfully met up with Russell and accompanied him on the fateful U-boat journey to Ireland. After Russell’s death, Frank Ryan returned to Germany, where he died in a sanatorium in 1944 and was buried in a grave bearing his German cover-name, Francis Richards.

The circumstances of Ryan and Russell’s deaths had, of course, a symbolic resonance. They stood for the ease with which political extremists can lose their way and, in the case of Seán Russell, the fallibility of the tenets of Irish republicanism as a general guide to political conduct. Directed by the imperative of breaking the connection with England, it didn’t occur to Seán Russell – a devout man with no personal vices – that England’s misfortune, in the context of war with Nazi Germany, might have a significance other than Ireland’s opportunity. Once removed from the backwaters of Ireland and Irish America, Russell and the organization he led were in every sense out of their depth.

It so happened that there was, in the dissident faction at the Curragh, a group of internees who took a wider view of international affairs. The Connolly group was led by Neil Gould, a communist who had lived in the Soviet Union, and its members absorbed and discussed left-wing literature and closely followed developments on the Eastern Front. Following their ideas through to their logical conclusion, some even argued that the right course of
action would be to help the Soviets to defeat the Nazis by signing out and joining the British army. Even for the relatively flexible IRA camp leadership on the dissident side, this went too far. Gould was refused permission to teach Russian and, eventually, removed from the Curragh. The Connolly group had a strong Cork element, and Hut C1 was pro-Soviet, and Jim O’Neill was a socialist; nonetheless, it was doubtful that my grandfather came significantly under Gould’s influence. Described by one veteran as a man with a strict sense of discipline and little interest in political development, Jim would most probably have approved of the decision to remove Gould and quash any talk of IRA men joining the British army. Certainly, he never discussed Neil Gould with his wife or even his son Brendan.

Nor did he discuss the Germans, whose presence at the Curragh was barely recorded in the reminiscences of Irish internees. To a degree, this was an understandable hiatus – after all, the men had plenty to say, and plenty that needed to be said, about their own day-to-day experiences, and it might have been that they were simply according themselves a natural historical priority. Even so, given the proximity at the Curragh of the two national groups – separated only by a trench, they were within shouting distance of each other – and the extraordinary dimensions of the world war, it seemed wrong-headed to relate the story of the internment without meaningful reference to the events occurring beyond the Irish encampment’s barbed wire: the very events, in fact, that were the cause of the men’s internment. It was remarkable how republican discourse, although influenced by the transnational principles of socialism and Roman Catholicism, was impermeable to ulterior narratives. Of course, there was an obvious reason for the non-appearance of the German internees or, for that matter, the Second World War, in the movement’s self-history: these subjects raised the issue of the IRA’s complicity with Nazi Germany.

I had no reliable idea of where Jim O’Neill stood on the IRA dealings with Nazi Germany, which very few, if any, Cork volunteers knew much about. But in the course of a conversation about Ardkitt in the old days, Grandma said to me, unprompted, ‘During the Second World War, we didn’t know how bad the Germans were;
we saw it only after, on the screens, and heard it on the radio. What Hitler did … Oh, my God, what he did.’ Grandma was sitting in the front room with clasped hands, next to the photograph of her husband aged around fifty: with his smiling, chiselled face, and his white shirt, dark tie, cardigan, and checked tweed jacket, my grandfather was the very image of the hard, handsome IRA man. ‘At the time,’ Grandma said, ‘anyone that was beating the English, we were for them. We thought that way. But how wrong we were. How wrong we were.’

Jim O’ Neill

5

Something very wrong must have happened to make my life take so false and unnatural a turn.

Thomas Mann, Letter to the Dean of the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Bonn, 1937

O
ne evening in 1939 before the outbreak of the war, the Hittitologist John Garstang and his wife were having dinner at the Ankara Palace Hotel, in Ankara, when Franz von Papen, the recently appointed ambassador of the Third Reich to Turkey, walked into the restaurant surrounded by animated and fawning officials. The group sat at a table in full view of the Garstangs. Mrs Garstang, an excitable, disapproving Frenchwoman from Carcassonne, looked on with increasing fury as Papen was toasted and congratulated by his fellow diners. Eventually unable to restrain herself any longer, she strode across to Papen’s table and, wagging a finger at his face, berated him and the regime he represented. The famously suave Papen took the reproof with a smile. He had been in, and extracted himself from, far stickier situations before.

John Garstang, a small, elderly, burly man with a full beard, did not pay much attention to the German diplomat. Garstang took no
real interest in politics. He was absorbed, to the exclusion of almost everything else, by the Hittites. He didn’t care for card-games or tea parties, and his preferred conversation – over breakfast, lunch and dinner – was archaeology. His principal diversion was methodically to practise his golf swing with the iron he always brought on his digs. Occasionally, however, the extra-Hittite world had to be reckoned with. In 1907, the year he travelled on horseback through north-east Turkey in search of Hittite monuments, Garstang’s application for a dig was frustrated by the Kaiser, who personally procured the relevant permits from the Sultan for the German orientalist Hugo Winckler. Another setback for the Englishman occurred in 1936, when the Arab Revolt obliged him and his young nephew, O.R. Gurney, to flee their dig at Jericho and escape, via Syria, to Turkey. Forced to look for something new to do, John Garstang arrived in Mersin in December 1936 to prospect for sites. He stayed at the Toros Hotel and befriended its owner, a refined and helpful man with an enthusiasm for antique civilizations. In the winter seasons of 1937–9, Garstang dug in Mersin at the ancient mound of earth called Yümüktepe, which was situated alongside the Soğuk Su (Cold Water) river that trickles through Mersin; then the world war intruded and he was forced to drop the expedition until 1946. That year, Garstang met O.R. Gurney off the boat in Bootle, Liverpool; when the two met (Professor Gurney told me with a mild smile when I saw him at his Oxford home)
without pause
Garstang began to talk about his latest research in Hittite geography, not once inquiring where his nephew had been for seven years.

And yet, for all of his preoccupation with work, John Garstang was distressed and embarrassed when he learned, on his return to Mersin in 1946, of Joseph Dakak’s experiences at the hands of the British; and he urged his Turkish friend to seek redress. On 9 April 1947, Garstang wrote to my grandfather from Ankara, stating that, as promised, he had spoken to the British embassy and had been heard out with some sympathy. The upshot was that Monsieur Dakak was invited to write to the Head of Chancery at the embassy. ‘Be brief, polite and direct,’ Garstang advised, ‘and don’t discuss the matter with anyone.’

As a consequence, my grandfather wrote the following letter (in English), dated 15 April 1947:

Sir

1.  I left Mersin on the 24th March 1942 with a Turkish passport and British visa for Palestine in order to buy lemons.

2.  After spending three weeks in Palestine and having arranged my business, I was arrested on my exit in Nakura and brought back to Jerusalem where I was detained as a suspect.

3.  After spending various periods in several prisons in Palestine and Beirut I was returned in April 1943 to a special detention camp in the monastery of Emwas (between Ramleh and Jerusalem) where I remained until the middle of September 1945, 4½ months after the official declaration of the end of war in Europe and the Middle East.

4.  Each time I was interrogated I requested that I should be returned to Turkey or given a trial in order that I could prove my innocence, but the answer received on each occasion was that the investigations had not finished.

5.  My sympathies are and always have been for the Allies and if I had been pro Axis it is quite certain I would not have applied for a visa for Palestine.

6.  All the investigations made against me during the 3½ years of my detention proved nothing. With the result I was returned to Turkey which proves my innocence.

7.  Previous to my leaving Turkey and being detained I was the owner of an Export and Import office, part owner of Günes and Korum Cinemas, owner of Toros Hotel and Restaurant; but as a consequence of my detention and having no one to look after my various business undertakings, my wife had to 1. Liquidate my Export and Import Office. 2. Close the restaurant at the Toros Hotel. 3. Cancel my partnership in the working of the Günes and Korum Cinemas. Only the Toros Hotel was left to my wife to run and as the income from this was not sufficient to support my wife and three children also to have money sent to me in detention through the British Consulate in Mersin, my savings had to be used.

8.  As a consequence of my detention, and my emotions as an innocent man, has left me nervous and also with a weak heart which has disabled me for the rest of my life and which makes it necessary for me to see specialists in Istanbul from time to time.

9.  Although my losses are much larger and such questions as mental suffering, loss of health could not be compensated by any amount, I estimate the very lowest and reasonable amount for the losses described in paragraph 7 at £5,000, but I leave it to your judgement and consideration to assess an amount which you may consider has been actually lost owing to my wrongful detention and I am sure you will deal with this on traditional British lines and see that I am justly compensated for the losses I have had.

I am Sir,

Yours obedient servant.

This letter, together with Garstang’s letter and a very few other papers, turned up in my grandfather’s old safe in the Toros Hotel in the spring of 1996. I was impressed by the clarity and conciseness of my grandfather’s letter to the British embassy and, one or two shaky moments aside, by his grasp of English, which extended to a feel for legal phraseology and tone; and I caught a glimpse not only of the appealingly adaptable intelligence for which he was remembered but also of a less commemorated streak of courage. By an act of will, the spooked narrator of the testimony had been discarded and replaced by a self-possessed, measured complainant who made the best of a not very strong case: because, for all of the claim’s careful assertiveness, its central proposition – that the claimant’s innocence was demonstrable from his repatriation – was, of course, flawed.