The City of Strangers (51 page)

But Germany was where he fully intended to go.

As Robert Monteith watched the IRA leader drive away from the Shrine of the Little Flower in Dominic Carroll’s car he crossed himself; he prayed that what he and Roger Casement had failed to do twenty-three years ago, Seán Russell would do now. Irish America would hide the man easily enough, but it was the Abwehr that would spirit him out of the United States. It was German Intelligence that would get him to Berlin. And when England was breaking, as even the American papers said it must, under Germany’s irresistible machinery of war, a U-boat would take the IRA chief of staff to Ireland, as one had once taken Robert Monteith and Roger Casement to Banna Strand. He would reunite the IRA’s warring factions and make the Republican movement the soul of Ireland again; he would hold out the hand of old friendship and old comradeship to Éamon de Valera. And they would win.

The same thoughts were in Seán Russell’s head as Dominic Carroll drove towards Detroit. The words of the First Sunday in Advent’s Preface to the Holy Trinity were there too; it was a kind of omen. ‘Dominus dabit benignitatem.’ The Lord will grant us his blessing to make our land yield its harvest. The snow was heavier; it was settling on the windscreen. He was a lot less sure than Robert Monteith about how Éamon de Valera would react to his outstretched hand when the Abwehr eventually got him to Ireland. But if Dev’s neutrality ended up doing England’s work instead of Ireland’s, it was clear enough what would have to be done. If the Long Feller really had turned himself into Michael Collins over the years, then there would be an IRA bullet for Dev, just as there had been one for the Big Feller before him. And Seán Russell knew he would have no hesitation in pulling the trigger himself.

THE END

As war between Britain and Germany looked more and more inevitable in 1939, a lot of people thought it could still be avoided. Even the British government, despite the warmongering imperialism that apparently lay behind all its tedious democratic whingeing, reckoned that throwing Czechoslovakia under the German bus might do the trick. A lot of small countries in Europe didn’t much like that, but they consoled themselves with the fact that, well, they weren’t Czechoslovakia, and what was happening there, as the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain so reasonably put it, was a quarrel ‘in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing’. Only a few out-of-power British politicians and the irritatingly Polish Poles, with most of their country to lose, still seemed concerned about Hitler’s plans to expand his bus routes. Everyone else said the threat of war had gone. Everyone said it, and there may have been some who believed it.

On either side of the Atlantic two predominantly English-speaking countries, still with the closest familial ties to Britain, were busy announcing their intention to stand aside from any forthcoming conflict, as neutrals.

In Ireland where the Second World War, once it started, would be referred to euphemistically as the Emergency, neutrality would always be a strange beast, best summed up not by anything Irish politicians had to say about it, but by what actually happened. Small things tell the bigger story. Once the war was underway any German aircrew landing in the Republic of Ireland were interned for the duration of the war; British and Allied aircrew were given a cup of tea and put on a bus for Belfast. The transatlantic flying boat service that had started up in June 1939 didn’t really stop, as popular history has it, in September; the Clippers flew from Foynes throughout the war, out of range of German fighters, carrying British and American diplomats, politicians, industrialists and military officials, who were all about the business of planning war, even while America was supposedly neutral. The flights were an open secret. But tickets weren’t available for any Germans who might have wanted to make the trip.

The rhetoric was very different of course. Éamon de Valera had a lot to say about how meticulously neutral Irish neutrality would be, and he kept on saying it as the war continued. From time to time Winston Churchill had a lot to say on the subject too, about Irish betrayal and all that frolicking with fascists in Dublin, though he usually said it after lunch and his daily bottle or so of champagne. Talk of occupying Ireland to gain control of ‘essential’ Atlantic ports was also thrown around a bit, though it was President Roosevelt who would eventually get most exercised about Ireland’s refusal to join the Allies once America was in the war, and would seriously suggest invasion. Churchill had to calm him down and tell him it was grand to shout about invading the bloody-minded Irish, but no one intended to do it, not even after a few drinks too many. The truth was, at least in the early stages of the war, that Irish neutrality suited Britain in many ways. The idea that, say, after Dunkirk, regiments of British troops and at minimum a squadron or two of fighters could have been spared, not only to protect Ireland from German invasion but simultaneously to fight a rejuvenated IRA, rescued from disarray and unpopularity by a new English incursion, was something most of the British military establishment saw starkly and realistically as unhelpful, to put it at its politest. They were right too. There was a day in the Battle of Britain when air cover that might have been needed for Ireland would have given sure victory to the Luftwaffe.

The hope of the IRA and Republicans generally that a swift German victory in the upcoming war would bring about a free and united Ireland was shared by a relatively small part of the Irish population. Tens of thousands of Irishmen would volunteer for the British forces; IRA membership barely increased. German hopes that Ireland could become a serious threat to Britain, either as a base for sabotage or as a platform for invasion, were ill-informed and ill-founded. For de Valera though, neutrality was really the only option he had, and naturally enough plenty of
realpolitik
came into that. It looked very unlikely in 1939 that Britain and France could beat Germany. Much of the world saw Hitler’s victory as inevitable. Ireland itself was in a fragile situation economically and it simply had no resources to draw on to fight any kind of war, with anybody. But if Ireland would never join a war against Britain, as some in German Intelligence believed it might, it could not, in the light of its recent history, fight beside its neighbour either, let alone invite British troops back into Ireland.

Supporting Britain was probably never in de Valera’s head; it would certainly have divided the country and given new strength to his Republican opponents; it could have meant a serious renewal of civil war. Yet de Valera’s sympathies, scrupulously kept in a box as they were, were by no means as neutral as he made them appear. Whatever his bitterness towards Britain he knew well enough that what there was of democracy in the tired decline of British imperialism, was still all that was available of democracy to fight against totalitarianism. And although de Valera isn’t noted for his democratic instincts, a belief in the freedom of small nations was something that mattered to him a lot. That had been forged not only out of the struggle for Irish freedom but out of his years working in the League of Nations.

Real freedom, in a world where small, independent states would not be under the thumb of great powers, was not something de Valera could seriously imagine being realised by Adolf Hitler’s march through Europe. He didn’t talk a lot about democracy but it is probably no coincidence that he was an Irishman born in America. Irish neutrality was far more one-sided than it suited either Éamon de Valera or Winston Churchill to admit. The fact that Winnie and Dev hated the sight of one another usefully helped disguise that.

In America in 1939, where neutrality was being much debated, the atmosphere was very different. While de Valera had most of Ireland behind him in his vision of a neutral stance in the event of war, Franklin Roosevelt was fighting to take sides openly, even if the official American position was loudly proclaimed neutrality. President Roosevelt saw the coming conflict very clearly as a struggle between democracy and totalitarianism, and he had no doubt which side America should be on. How far ahead he saw in terms of America’s involvement in a war itself is arguable, but he fully intended to do everything he could to arm and aid Britain and France and their allies. If America wasn’t fighting, it would nevertheless be the arsenal of democracy.

A lot of Americans didn’t agree. Most simply didn’t want to get dragged into another European war. Some genuinely supported Germany and the other fascist states, in the belief that ‘democracy wasn’t working’ and that the coming war was about defending civilisation from socialism and communism. There were powerful pro-German advocates on the right, and there was also a strong and influential Irish-American lobby too, that saw the prospect of war not in terms of America itself, but in the same way the IRA saw it, as an opportunity to finally kick the English out of Ireland. In early 1939 opposition to Roosevelt’s pro-Allied policies was in the ascendant; his plans to arm Britain in particular had been scuppered in Congress, though those decisions would eventually be reversed. For a lot of Americans it wasn’t only Czechoslovakia, which many had not even heard of, that was a far-away country ‘of which we know nothing’; it was the whole of Europe. It didn’t only suit the isolationists to keep it that way. It also suited the pro-Germans and the pro-fascists, the anti-Semites and the anti-socialists and anti-communists, and even those like many Irish Americans who were none of those things, but who saw an opportunity for Britain to get its comeuppance at last in a way surely no country on earth so richly deserved.

Raymond Chandler said that one of the characteristics of crime fiction, for want of a better name, is the unnatural squeezing up of timeframes. The same thing applies to history when it is dragged, willingly or otherwise, into that world. This book, like
The City of Shadows
, contains, alongside fairly straightforward fiction, real events and real people, as well as characters and events that skim history a little more loosely. I hope that from time to time there is some truth to be found in what may often be inaccurate, but as it is not unknown for untruth to insert itself into what passes for meticulously accurate history, I can only say that I make no claims at all in the truth area.

The book opens with a myth. The story of a man buried alive on an Irish beach during the War of Independence first appears in
Tales of the RIC
, essentially a work of populist pro-British propaganda designed to expose the brutality of Irish Nationalists. It never happened; the death of a magistrate called Alan Lendrum lay behind the story, though there was never a beach. The myth survived the years to be included even in historical accounts of the War of Independence and the Civil War. Whatever brutality it reflects here is the lazy, sometimes unthinking brutality of any war, especially those wars in which there is righteousness to hand.

The Coventry bombing that connects to the way this story is told did happen, though no one called Aidan McCarthy was involved. The real nature of the bombing remains unclear to this day. It does not reflect Seán Russell and the IRA’s determination to avoid civilian casualties, and it feels as if it emerged out of a dangerous mix of desperation and incompetence as the Sabotage Campaign in Britain fell apart. Two IRA volunteers were tried by jury and hanged for their involvement in the bombing in 1939. The executions were protested widely in Britain and naturally enough in Ireland. It is no defence of the capital punishment generally accepted at the time to say that the Irish government’s protest has to be taken in the context of its own executions of several IRA prisoners during the Second World War, also using the English hangman.

In terms of squeezing up history a number of real events in America have been brought together to make the story of
The City of Strangers
. The flying boat service from England to New York via Foynes didn’t start operating commercially till June 1939, but trial flights had been running for some time before that. The World’s Fair opened at Flushing Meadows several weeks later than is suggested here. Seán Russell, the IRA chief of staff, was in America from the early summer of 1939 and was arrested in Detroit on suspicion of planning some kind of attack or disruption during George VI’s visit to America, which took place at the beginning of June. The king did go to the World’s Fair in New York. There was a strong suspicion that his visit to the USA was secretly about cementing an alliance that might eventually drag America into war; it was absolutely true.

In 1940 a bomb exploded at the British Pavilion at the World’s Fair; two NYPD police bomb squad officers were killed. It was clear even in a surprisingly lacklustre NYPD investigation that the suspects were likely to be pro-German or pro-IRA, or both; no one was ever arrested. The various pro-German, pro-fascist American organisations mentioned in the story are for the most part real, as are the links between them and some Irish-American groupings. There was an organisation called the Ethiopian Pacific Movement that believed that Hitler and Japan had an interest in promoting black freedom and turning Africa into a kind of black-apartheid paradise. Father Charles Coughlin, the Radio Priest, was for a time the most powerful voice of isolationist neutrality in America but, as his notorious mitigation of the events of Kristallnacht had demonstrated, his stance was often more pro-German than it was anti-war. Robert Monteith, the almost forgotten survivor of Roger Casement’s U-boat landing in Kerry in 1916, did work for Father Coughlin.

Longie Zwillman was a Jewish-American gangster operating out of New Jersey who played an active part in the uglier side of anti-fascist protest in both New York and Jersey City; street fighting was promoted on both sides. Such activities were the unlikely prelude to the equally unlikely but well-documented liaison between the FBI and the Mob, in all its various forms, during World War II.