Massacre in West Cork (5 page)

Despite this Macready was stung by the suddenness of the Truce. On 16 July he was trenchantly expressing the view that, while the IRA was talking up its ‘victory’, the officers on the British side were convinced that they had gained the upper hand in the struggle and were annoyed with IRA propaganda:

I am quite clear in my own mind that the present negotiations have only been made possible by the fact that the unceasing efforts of troops and police together with the arrival of reinforcing units from England have brought home to the Sinn Féin leaders the advisability of coming to some terms before the rebellion is openly and obviously crushed … It is, therefore, most unfortunate that the desire to create an atmosphere has been carried so far as to give the appearance that Sinn Féin is being treated as an honourable foe who has got slightly the better of the Crown Forces in the field.
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Macready and his officers seemed lost in the fog of war by this stage.

In the end, geopolitics determined strategy on the British side. The army was overstretched after the Great War, with the need to deploy forces in Germany, Austria, Russia, India, Africa, Palestine, Mesopotamia, Persia and even Scotland at the same time as Ireland. Such were the difficulties in April 1921 that a proposal was agreed at cabinet to create a paid volunteer defence force of 30,000 civilians to cope with the threatened general strike planned in England and Wales for 15 April. The army could send only three companies to control the South Wales coal pits, which the Secretary of State for War admitted would be of no use in the ‘valleys’, so they were deployed in Cardiff instead.
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The British cabinet was meeting daily to deal with the miners’ strike and was in complete disarray. It was even agreed that four of Macready’s fifty-one infantry battalions would be withdrawn from Ireland to shore up the situation.
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Both Lord French and Macready were vehemently opposed to this, while Sir Henry Wilson once again gave up on the ‘frocks’ – his pet name for politicians.
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Yet the ‘frocks’ had little other choice: they had bitten off more than they could chew by taking on the League of Nations mandate in the Middle East just as the vicious post-war recession was gathering pace.

The British naval establishment was also opposed to any settlement that did not allow it free access to Irish ports during times of war. However, as long as Britain could retain its strategic naval bases at Queenstown (Cobh), Berehaven and Lough Swilly the actual island of Ireland was of little value. If these ports could be retained and free wartime access allowed, then a negotiated settlement was the logical outcome.
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All this possibly explains both the initial anaemic response to the Irish insurrection and why the British government went from an intention to escalate the war in early 1921 to agreeing a truce by July of that year.
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As the war came to a close it was easy to see how small a conflict it actually was. This is not to denigrate any of those killed or injured, but on the first day of the Somme British deaths alone were 19,000, or 27 per minute, between 6 a.m. and 7.30 p.m., when the day’s action ceased.

Table 1 gives the official British tally in the War of Independence to the end of May 1921.
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T
ABLE 1:
O
FFICIAL
B
RITISH TALLY OF RECORDED INCIDENTS IN THE
I
RISH
W
AR OF
I
NDEPENDENCE TO 21
M
AY 1921

Between 14 June and 7 July 1921 seventeen more infantry battalions were sent to Ireland. This represented another 22,000 men and was a contributory factor to the IRA’s burning of ‘big houses’ to prevent their use as barracks. All other large accommodations – workhouses and the like – were already occupied.
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Five days later the Truce was agreed.

Speaking from within the prism of the West Cork Brigade, Charlie O’Donoghue had a different perspective from the British as to why the war ended:

A special check, after the Truce, revealed that only 37 rounds of .303 rifle ammunition were left on that date. The strength of the 1st Battalion at that time was 1,023 officers and men. Morale, training and organisation were never better.

Were it not for the ammunition position, the fight, in my opinion, could go on indefinitely. No arms were being lost to the enemy and arrests were being offset by young Volunteers coming in. The battalion organisation had stood up to everything the British had put up. The fight at Crossbarry seemed to have been the turning point.
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West Cork Brigade quartermaster Tadg O’Sullivan put the entire brigade strength at 5,750 at the time of the Truce. Of course, not all of these were on active service, but the British had a maximum of 3,000 troops in the brigade area, so the Irish had a tactical advantage, at least on paper. They had one other advantage: even if the British had captured all of them, what could they have done with them? As they could not have been held indefinitely, they would have had to be freed to start again, and this was only one brigade.
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In his analysis of the war, J. T. Broom observes: ‘Militarily far stronger than the IRA could ever hope to be, the British government, in the end, sought to secure only what was truly vital to British interests: domestic tranquillity within Britain itself, the independence of the unionists, and the semblance of imperial unity.’
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At the imperial conference in June 1921, this strategic analysis was reinforced by the dominions, led by Jan Smuts of South Africa. Smuts had an excellent understanding of the Irish position as he had received a letter from Roger Casement’s brother Tom at Madeira while en route to the conference at the end of May 1921.
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As the two were personal friends from fighting in the Great War, the documents were not ‘thrown overboard’ as Tom feared they might have been.
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According to both George Berkley and P. J. Little, contact was made by Colonel Moore (once Inspector General of the National Volunteers) and others with the South African government to ensure that Smuts brought a message seeking a truce without preconditions from Éamon de Valera.
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As early as 30 September 1920, Smuts had telegraphed the British cabinet offering to mediate a truce.
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And Smuts would write much of the conciliatory speech King George V made at the opening of the new Northern Irish parliament at Belfast City Hall on 22 June 1921. This speech, combined with adverse public opinion at home, even from government supporters and Liberal grandees like Asquith, pushed the cause of truce over escalation – the Truce would begin three weeks later at 12 noon on 11 July.
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Equally, the replacement of Bonar Law, ‘an Ulsterman by descent & in spirit’,
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by Austen Chamberlain in late March as leader of the Conservative Party and Lord Privy Seal was crucial to the outcome of the War of Independence. Chamberlain played a much overlooked and central role in dismissing the outrage of Craig, soothing the King’s panicked private secretary and tempering Smuts’ enthusiasm during the final drafting of the speech.
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Once the King had nudged things along in June 1921, Smuts attended the cabinet to ‘discuss’ the King’s suggestion and travelled to Ireland to ensure that Lloyd George’s offer of talks was explained and accepted. His aim was to create a free association of independent states instead of an empire, and he believed that if Ireland joined the club it would only help his cause and that of the dominions other than South Africa.
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His calculations proved correct, as the Irish worked tirelessly with the other dominions in their first imperial conference to change the form of the British Empire into the British Commonwealth of Nations.
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While imperial unionist diehards, including Sir Henry Wilson, described the Treaty settlement of December 1921 as ‘a shameful and cowardly surrender to the pistol’, Lloyd George told the cabinet, with no hint of irony, ‘that the freedom of Ireland increases the strength of the Empire’. Lord Curzon went so far as to claim it was ‘an astonishing victory’.
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But the obvious question needs to be asked. If the settlement was such a resounding success, what then was the purpose of the prolonged war? Was it over the concept of a republic? Apparently it was, as Lloyd George told the cabinet on 6 December:

The attention of the Cabinet was drawn to criticism which might be expected on the lines that the settlement now effected might equally have been reached some time ago. It was generally agreed, however, that a year ago Sinn Féin would not have entertained or even agreed, to discuss proposals similar to those which the Irish Representatives had now signed, and that the change in the attitude of Sinn Féin was mainly attributable to the rough treatment to which the Irish extremists had been subjected during the last twelve months.
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As British imperial interests were best served by peace with partition in Ireland, that is what the British conceded. According to Lloyd George’s rewriting of history, the latter part of the war was nothing more than a softening-up exercise and in the early months of 1921 the British had not actually persuaded themselves they were going to win. As a piece of historical bunkum this is hard to beat, but it was the line to be spun out in public. After they lost the propaganda war, the politicians – like politicians everywhere – compromised, declared victory on all sides and moved on.

The frank comments of Michael Collins about how the end of the war came about, published after his death in 1923, agree with the British political analysis contained in the cabinet papers. Ever the politician, he quoted anti-Treaty Robert Barton’s admission in
The Republic of Ireland
of 21 February 1922 that:

… it had become plain that it was physically impossible to secure Ireland’s ideal of a completely isolated Republic otherwise than by driving the overwhelmingly superior British forces out of the country.

Collins used this to support his claim: