Crossbarry (The Crossbarry Ambush or The Battle of Crossbarry) Date: 19 MAR 1921
Forces Engaged: Ireland -
Óglaigh na hÉireann (Irish Republican Army
1) - Flying Column of the 3rd (West) Cork Brigade of the 1st Southern Division.
The "flying column" that fell in on that Saturday in March included a total of 104 irregular infantry in seven roughly 14-man (13 troopers and a section leader) sections.
These are listed below with the name of the section leader in (parentheses):
#1 Section (Hales)
#2 Section (John Lordan)
#3 Section (Crowley)
#4 Section (Denis Lordan)
#5 Section (Kelleher)
#6 Section (Kearney)
#7 Section (O'Connell)
Now, obviously, a hundred troopers are not a "brigade" or anything close to it, but the fighting equivalent of a regular army company. Where the company would be typically divided into 30-40 man platoons and the platoons subdivided into 10 to 12 man squads (or sections, in British usage), the West Cork "brigade" was a guerrilla organization and used to operating in small groups. The platoon level organization was not really useful, so the individual section leaders - the guerrilla equivalent of corporals - simply worked directly for the equivalent of the company commander.
We'll talk about this more in a bit, but the IRA was an unusual sort of guerrilla organization. The bog-standard for "guerrilla" is the mob that turned out where the term originated; the Spanish
guerrilleros who fought the "little war" against the occupation forces of Napoleonic France.
The original
guerrilleros were, and most "guerrillas" still are, true non-state forces. In Spain they could be sponsored - if at all - by a local
junta but were as often as not little more than a rabble of armed men existing on the ragged edge of banditry. Guerrilla war is by its nature a brutal and unconstrained business and on land just as at sea it often straddles the line between privateering and open piracy. Through history, the line between guerrilla and freebooter is typically not a bright one.
The IRA, however, was a bit different; it saw itself, and was seen by the Dáil Éireann, the organization that had set up as the legitimate government of an independent Ireland, as the formal Army of that aspiring nation. As such it tended to think of itself more as an "army" - albeit a hit-and-run guerrilla army - than as partisans like the original
guerrilleros or even the more formalized unconventional warfare outfits like the
franc-tireurs of 1870 or Mosby's Rangers of the American Civil War.
But. While the IRA had pretensions of military regularity, in 1921 it was still an "army" without a country, without a regular logistical base, and without the ability to operate or even recruit openly. The
Wiki entry for the IRA states that although the notional strength of the Army during the War of Independence was said to be 70,000, only about 3,000 fought in the field. Of that small group the notional army command could exercise command and control of an even smaller number at any time, making the "brigades" effectively independent of any sort of strategic and particularly tactical direction. Their grand strategic mission was, purely and simply, to make life miserable for the British occupiers and their Irish supporters. That they could do, and did.
Mind, as in every guerrilla war, the cost to the guerrillas making this misery was punitive.
Here's a list of the leadership of the West Cork Brigade. Of the fifteen names on the list, seven were killed in action between 1919 and 1922. The "little war" is hard on everyone involved, and that doesn't even take in the secret war fought in the shadows that included murders - guerrillas shot out of hand, "informers" and British prisoners murdered in retaliation - that were barely justifiable, if that, under the rubric of "guerrilla war".
The IRA field forces were typically young, single men, and overwhelmingly Catholic; although the rebel army was officially non-sectarian and open to all Irishmen (or, for that matter, anyone who would fight for Irish independence; the roster included men who were English and Scots by birth) Hart (1999) was able to find only three adhering Protestants in the active rolls of the IRA for the War of Independence period, and that - as we all probably know - was a problem for the future.
We'll go into this in more detail when we discuss the campaign that led to Crossbarry, but the IRA organization at Crossbarry that day was the product of evolutionary stress on the Irish rebels.
The earliest guerrilla bands were just that; little groups of local men who took time off from their day jobs to kill policemen.
That sounds flippant, but it was the way the first IRA groups worked; they attacked the nearest symbols of the British government, and those were almost entirely other Irishmen working for the Brits. And keep in mind that the Royal Irish Constabulary, the RIC, weren't "coppers" of the
"'Ello, 'ello, 'ello, what's all this, then?" sort.
That was the Dublin Metropolitan Police, and the DMP was largely left alone by the guerrillas. The RIC was armed, which as most of us know British coppers typically aren't, and were encountered as units out of barracks rather than in singles or pairs working out of a police station. They were seen as what they were; the base of an occupation force, and as such took it in the shorts when the IRA started hitting them in 1919.
Arms and equipment taken from the RIC grew the local force IRA units into larger, more effective local force units, but that didn't help much when the Crown imposed martial law and British regulars and their adjuncts - and, again, we'll talk more about these later - began operating in force. That's when the IRA had to develop what in Vietnam were called the
Chu Luc, the full-time soldiers of the Main Force units.
In the third decade of the Twentieth Century this term wasn't invented. Instead, the name for these light mobile guerrilla infantry groups was "flying column". The most active and aggressive of the IRA local guerrilla bands were collected into these units, which typically had to operate in the countryside to avoid the heavy occupation presence in the cities and towns. So it was the West Cork "main force" unit that was operating southwest of Cork in March, 1921, that we're discussing.
The flying columns were the best equipped units of the IRA, but were still by conventional terms, underarmed and underequipped. The Irish Volunteers that survived the Easter Rising of 1916 were disarmed, and by the end of the First World War the proto-IRA was still
scuffling for weapons. One of the Volunteers is quoted in Dorney (2015):
"In 1919 we had little arms, some shotguns, a few pin fire revolvers-of antiquated make and some ammunition for the revolvers. We had to rely on what we had or on what we got by raiding for arms. I purchased a few revolvers myself. This was all the purchase of arms as far as I know in the Company area."
The Irish had to get creative to arm themselves. As is often the case with guerrillas many of those arms came from their enemies, in particular the paramilitary Royal Irish Constabulary, but included whoever the IRA could dry-gulch or suborn.
The Cork units tended to be better armed simply because that's where much of the fighting took place.
Here's Dorney (2015) again:
"One well-armed IRA force, for instance comprised of about 70 men from various companies of the Cork No 1 Brigade, assembled at the Ballyvourney ambush in West Cork in February 1921, equipped with 56 service rifles, two Lewis machine guns and ten shotguns."
Obviously, since their principal source of supply was the British army and its proxies, the Cork men would largely have been armed with the issue Lee-Enfield bolt-action rifles and Webley revolvers. Ammunition was a constant problem; the accounts of Crossbarry emphasize that the IRA troopers began the day with only forty rounds a man and no resupply.
Hotchkiss or Lewis light machineguns were a great prize, but were unsurprisingly difficult to get and even more difficult to feed given the ammunition troubles. No machineguns are reported in Irish hands at dawn on 19 MAR.
That would change.
Although "Mills bombs" - the British WW! grenade - found their way into the IRA arms rooms no grenades were used at Crossbarry which, given the tactical situation, suggests that the Flying Column did not have any on hand.
Improvised mines, however - what we would call today "IEDs" - were on hand. These are reported to have been Mcgyvered out of civilian explosives and whatever materials could be found. As we'll see, they were dangerous but not particularly discriminating.
So roughly a company of irregular infantry, under the overall command of Commandant (CDT) Thomas Barry.
1(Note: Although we know them as the "IRA", at the time of the War of Independence the term doesn't seem to have been widely used by the rebels themselves, and was probably confined to the political organizations of the would-be Republic of Ireland and the higher echelons of the fighting force. The guys in the flying column that day in Crossbarry would have probably thought of themselves by the older name, "Irish Volunteers", that had been in use at the time of the Easter Rising.
Great Britain - Elements of the 6th Division, Royal Army.
Well, now
here's a problem you don't usually encounter.
Commonly when searching the historical records you tend to have much better luck with regular armies and established polities. Armies are bureaucracies, after all, and there's nothing a office pogue likes better than making a note to file.
Regular armies typically generate tons of what the British like to call "bumf"; memos, reports, duty rosters, order books...most regular soldiers can't go from the supply room to the latrine without filling in several forms in triplicate.
Unfortunately, that obsession with documentation doesn't seem to have bled over into the digital age for the area around Cork in 1921.
I cannot find anything that breaks down the British forces present at Crossbarry in detail. Cork was a balefire during the war;
Borgonovo (2017) says:
"Five of the nineteen RIC Auxiliary Division companies operated in County Cork (26 per cent); eighteen of the British army’s seventy-seven battalions or equivalent units (23 per cent) deployed in Ireland by July 1921 were based there."
So while we know that there were a crap-ton of Brits milling about Cork in 1921, I can't find anything that details the order of battle on that March day in Crossbarry.
Every number of British forces in this fight seems to lead back to Tom Barry. In his
Guerrilla Days in Ireland (Barry, 1946) he says that 1,200 Royal troops were tasked to close on the Crossbarry region on 19 MAR, their mission to encircle and destroy the West Cork flying column.
But Barry lists these troops only by number and their points of departure, and that's how
all the secondary sources list them. That's why I think that Barry is the ur-text for the British "order of battle" and that documentation from the British side is either missing, was never collated, or is buried too deeply for anyone but a hardcore historian to find.
Which is a problem, by the way; while the Flying Column must have had fairly good intel about their enemies - guerrillas don't live long if they don't - details about enemy units and commanders are ephemera that Barry, writing twenty years after the events, couldn't be arsed or just didn't remember. He had the rough numbers, but that was all, and that's what we're stuck with.
Here's an example, from McKenna (2011):
"Unbeknownst to the Volunteers as they arrived in Ballyhandle, the British encirclement operation was getting underway. Some 400 soldiers left from Cork, 200 left from Ballingcollig, 300 left from Kinsale, and 350 more left from Bandon. Later in this time co-ordinated operation (sic) 120 left from Macroom, and later more troops left from Clonakilty."
That's it. No unit names, no "The 1st Battalion Essex Regiment left from Bandon...", not even "...two companies left from Kinsale", just numbers and places.
But...
fuckadoodledoo. That ain't how it works. Regular armies - even in counterinsurgencies - don't work like that. They operate as units, and this tells us nothing about which units were where.
Before we go on, let's agree that a 1919 British regular infantry platoon was authorized 50 all ranks. A company was authorized 227. We all know that "authorized", "assigned", and "present" are three often totally different things, but let's make our lives simple by assuming that any British troop unit numbering under 200 is some combination of platoons. Anything over 200 is a company and change. A battalion would have been authorized 600 to 800 - Barry (1946) says that post-WW1 drawdowns had left the British infantry battalions shorthanded, so they seldom had more than 800 out of their authorized 1,000 or so. But in Ireland it doesn't look like the British infantry conducted battalion-strength sweeps, so we can pretty much forget about the battalions.
So what
do we know?
Well, from the casualty reports after Crossbarry we know three of the units that were involved, two British - The Essex Regiment and the Royal Army Service Corps - and the Royal Irish Constabulary. A
witness statement from an Irishman picked up by the Crossbarry force on the day of the fight also puts troops of the Hampshire Regiment at the scene of the action.
Later in his autobiography Barry (1946) gives us two specific units that were in the Cork AO in March, 1921; the Essex battalion was the 1st, while the Hampshire unit was the 2nd Battalion of that regiment.
But even
that doesn't really help us much to pin down exactly who was doing what where. Let me give you an example; Major Percival.
Major A.E. Percival - here's the bucktoothed gimlet on the right. Percival, by the way, turned out to have been quite the player in counterinsurgency in Cork: he's supposed to have been a sort of one-man
MAC-SOG. The Irish Volunteers hated and feared him to the point where they put a price on his head, 1,000 pounds, not chump change back in those days. Bagging the West Cork Flying Column would have put a hell of a big spoke in the Southern Division's operations, so of course our boy Percival wanted a piece of
that.
(Later in life he turns out to be the guy who's outplayed by GEN Yamashita in Malaya and screws the Singapore pooch. Might have done better to have stayed in Ireland, Archie...)
The entertaining website "
The Cairo Gang" contains a number of witness statements from the war, and, specifically, about MAJ Percival. In one of them (WS1234, Jack Hennessey) Percival is identified as the officer commanding the Essex detachment in Bandon. If the Barry account is correct and the 350 troops from Bandon are all or mostly Essex Regiment that poses a problem; 350 is too big for a company but too small for a full battalion. A reinforced company? A battalion with one and most of another company detached?
We just. Don't. Know.
To complicate matters further, a second witness (WS 832, William Desmond) recounts that:
"Here I met Major Percival for the first time. He came up across the fields from Forde's house. The soldiers who had taken me didn't belong to his regiment, the Essex. They were belonging to the Hampshire Regiment, stationed in Cork at the time. He was a tall vicious looking man and moved with an easy gait. About this time now, just as it was bright, the firing started at Crossbarry. I heard Percival give order 'Come on, Kinsale party' and I was told come on with them..."
So were the 300 troops from Kinsale the Hampshires? The official
history site of the Hampshire Regiment states that the unit was posted to Cork, though, and not Kinsale, and several sources including Barry (1946) state unequivocally that the unit at Kinsale was from the Essex Regiment.
But...you'd think that Percival would have known his Essex guys well enough that he'd have yoicked them forward with something more like "All right, you lot, get off your asses" or "Move off, then, D Company" rather than referring to them as "Kinsale party".
That suggests that he was, as Desmond says, in the middle of another unit, and that the Hampshire Regiment had the better part of two companies coming from Cork but something like a reinforced company, the Hampshire company plus two platoons - and who the fuck
does that? - posted in Kinsale.
It's all very opaque, and we may never know exactly who was where when unless we have the time and money to burrow into the Imperial War Museum's archives or the Royal Army records. For now, let's just take Barry's numbers and what we know about who was where and run with it.
But...here's another problem; an encirclement operation of this size and complexity requires a high level of C3I. Pattirson (2009) says that the British 6th Division had the responsibility for Munster, but it's indicative of our problems that I can't identify how the British counterinsurgency forces were organized below that.
Whether the operation was being directed from 6th Division, or from whatever brigade that had the Cork Area of Operations, that higher should have been closely coordinating the movement to contact as well as directing the tactical operations once the British forces were
in contact.
As we'll see, this doesn't appear to have happened, but we can't be sure of why or how simply because we have no evidence of who was or should have been doing all this coordinating and directing.
We'll get to this in "Sources", but there do appear to be official records extant; that "bumf"
was produced, collated after the end of the war, and archived. But it doesn't appear to have been scanned and posted online. To get it I'd have to travel to Dublin, or London, and that's not really practical even if we weren't living in the Plague Year.
So we'll have to be content with what we have from Barry (1946); the British forces involved included approximately 1,250 all arms, including regular infantry from at least two regiments; the 1st Battalion, The Essex Regiment, and 2nd Battalion, the Hampshire Regiment, and service support troops from the Royal Army Service Corps.
The operation was intended to use another 120 Royal Irish Constabulary paramilitary troops as well as an unknown number of British reinforcements (presumably from one or the other infantry regiments - given they were supposed to arrive from the southwest, presumably from the Essex Regiment) but due to command and control failures these did not arrive in the right place at the right time to engage the Flying Column.
The overall commander of troops should have been the brigadier commanding the AO that included Crossbarry; Barry (1946) says that the commander that did the Crossbarry planning was LTG Strickland, the 6th Division commander, but that seems like just barracks talk. Here he is, just in case.
Certainly it would have been a general officer, given the size of the force involved, but whether Strickland or one of his brigadiers I cannot tell.
I apologize by my lack of solid information regarding the British at Crossbarry, and can only beg pardon. I'll try to make up for that as we go on.
Sources: We've kind of gone over this, but the big issue with Crossbarry is the difficulty in accessing the primary sources.
The Irish Army opened records of the war to the public in the middle Oughts, and the
Bureau of Military History (BMH) website contains a treasury of witness statements about the engagement. As with the Barry (1946) account, these are tremendously helpful for details of the operations and movements of the Flying Column, but contain little detail of the British actions outside of their direct encounter with the IRA witnesses.
It's obvious from our discussion that the primary primary source for this engagement is Tom Barry's autobiography of the war,
Guerilla Days In Ireland, originally published in 1946. It's been reprinted and is availabile through most bookstores as well as online through the Kindle Reader.
Barry (1946) has the same strengths and weaknesses as the BMH site; lots of detail on the Volunteers, mostly generalities about the British along the lines of an S-2 briefing rather than an overview of the action from a military history.
The Barry work is the primary source for everything I could find online covering this engagement, including the
Wiki entry for Crossbarry, a summary of the engagement at the
"Wild Geese website, and another at
Eire.com.
A worthwhile read of the larger Anglo-Irish War from the Irish perspective is Joseph McKenna's 2011
Guerrilla Warfare in the Irish War of Independence, 1919-1921. I picked it up through Amazon Kindle for under ten bucks.
As noted, the British side of the hill is much less well documented on-line; the bulk of the works are in print, and those difficult to find and expensive when you do.
The Irish Command published an official history of the British campaigns in 1922. The
Record of the rebellion in Ireland in 1920-21, and the part played by the Army in dealing with it is long out of print, although Volume 1 has been reprinted and annotated as
Ground Truths: British Army Operations in the Irish War of Independence by W.H. Kautt (2014). A search for the original work turned up only a single copy of Volume 2 held in the library of Boston College.
Charles Townshend's 1975
The British campaign in Ireland, 1919-1921: The development of political and military policies seems like a useful source, but the copy advertised at Amazon is offered at $899.99, and even at a penny less than $900 is a
trifle too spendy for me.
The National Archives of the United Kingdom are difficult to search and produced nothing of value.
One of the single biggest issues we have for this engagement is the fog surrounding the British higher headquarters because of the degree to which British troop performance rested on the tactical and operational
nous of the commander. In
Doctrine and Organization in the British Army, 1919-1932 (French 2001) notes that
"...throughout the interwar period, units and formations often practiced widely different interpretations ofthe principles laid down in the manuals...senior commanders evolved their own doctrines; when you changed your commander you changed your doctrine."
Presumably this information exists, but where, and how to get at it, I am unaware.
The Campaign: It's a bit of a stretch of the neck, but if you look
reeeeal hard at the horizon you can see down the road that wound past Harold's farmhouse down to the bridge at Crossbarry all they way back to the little village of Abbots Langley, in the English county of Herfordshire, where on an idle evening some time around 1099 CE a character named Robert Breakspear and his missus had some time to kill and no better ideas, so nine months later along came baby Nicholas, who grew up to be a churchman and the only Brit to ever wear the papal crown as Adrian IV.
Wait.
What!?
Yep.
The whole rolling clusterfuck that is the thousand-year history of England messing about in Ireland gets kicked off in the 12th Century, when the first Angevin king of England, Henry, second of that name, received (or cadged) something from his fellow Brit pope - it might have simply been a nice letter, or it might have been a bull (that is, a papal decree) called
Laudabiliter - that recommends that Henry go kick some Irish ass in the name of the Lord and the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.
The idea was that the Irish Church wasn't as Catholic as Roman-type Catholics liked. And there may be some possibiility that English Nick and English Hank both thought that a little conquering in Ireland would be a good thing, in terms of loot and land as well as orthodoxy, as it were, so they may have cooked up this macguffin to make it all legal.
There's only one big problem.
There's no extant copy of this thing, so we can't be sure exactly what the cunning plan - if there was one - was.
There seems to be historical agreement that it existed, but beyond that there's a lot of questions about it. The bull is supposed to have been produced in 1154 or 1155, but there's no mention of it when the Norman-English - first as filibusters invited in by one of the many fractious Irish kinglets in 1167, and later, in 1171, when Henry II himself popped off across the Irish Sea to do a little feudalism - turned up in the Emerald Isle.
Supposedly the first time it turns up is in 1174 or 1175, some time after Henry had made his Victory Tour of Ireland and gotten the Irish kings to swear fealty. Henry is said that he'd been sitting on this papal order for twenty-odd years before doing anything about it.
Mind you, the only authority we have for this is some joker named Giraldus Cambrensis, who wrote something called
De Expugnatione Hiberniae and has been characterized by modern historians as well as some of his near-contemporaries as something less that reliable. He did have some fun illustrators, though; that delightfully gory little scene to the right? That's one of Giraldus' Irishmen settling an Irish dispute with another Irishman using an Irish axe
There's also the possibility that the papal document was just a forgery; apparently that was not uncommon in the 12th Century.
But whether there was a real papal order or not, the Norman-English swarmed over Ireland as they had over Saxon England a century before, and with about as much enthusiasm from the locals.
There's no real space here to go into the succeeding 900-odd years of English versus Irish. Suffice to say that the Irish had not played well with each other before the English came, and they didn't afterwards and that with their new bosses being sort of right bastards (as anyone who couldn't speak Norman French in England at the time could have told them...)
(The dramatic tableau below is a 19th Century confection called
The marriage of Strongbow and Aoife; these two lovebirds were a political hitching ginned up in during the Norman incursions, and their nuptials were immortalized by
this daub which was supposed to go in the British House of Commons. Not quite my taste in decor, but
de gustibus and all that...)
So the Irish got bossed by the Normans for a while, until Angevin and then Plantagenet political troubles and then the Black Death and then the Hundred Years' War and
then the Wars of the Roses
(deep breath...) kinda took the edge off the occupiers. Some of the newcomers ended up going native; picking up Irish speech, Irish ways, and, undoubtedly, Irish husbands and wives and lovers just because that's how people are. So a sort of re-Irish-ization rolled things back from the middle of the 14th to the beginning of the 16th.
By this time there were two Irelands; the bulk of the island, that was Irish with a sort of Norman wash, but largely still not feeling the whole big "United Kingdom" group-hug...and "The Pale", an English plantation centered around Dublin.
That was enough of a beachhead, though, for Henry Tudor, him of the six wives, to come roaring back.
The Tudors soon developed another problem, though, one that added a huge-assload of troubles onto the troubled British rule over Ireland; religion.
We moderns with our cafeteria religions and our casual attitude towards things like deadly sins and heresy often have a difficult time understanding what a damn deadly difficult problem this was for the people in Renaissance and Reformation times. We understand conflict because of politics, but
religion..? Seriously? It's hard for us to get that in 1580 or 1620 religion
WAS politics, and
deadly serious politics. An Irish Catholic was, by nature of their religion, an enemy of the English crown. Protestant English rule over Catholic Ireland was...well, the Duke of Parma would like word.
Trouble.
So despite the Act of Union in 1800 a hell of a lot of Irish never believed they were "British", and looked for any opportunity to show their occupiers just so. So you had your Desmond Rebellions and your Nine years War in the 16th Century. You had your Williamite Wars of at the end of the Seventeenth, where as my Orange grandfather used to say Good King William saved us from Popes and popery. You had troubles helped on by the Spanish in Tudor times and French in Georgian, and you had famine, and Fenians and Specials murdering each other, and all the while most Irishmen saw themselves as a nation apart, as Irish rather than British - as millions of young Irishmen took the red coat and served in Victorian wars, mind - and so we come to the beginning of the 20th Century with all the old resentments and grievances, and some new ones, still intact, and the whole I'm-Irish-damn-you thing still wedging between occupied and occupiers.
The problems that lead directly to Crossbarry really begin with the new century.
Since the 1870s Irish - and some English - politicians had been trying to work out a sort of solution to the Irish Question. The term for this was "Home Rule"; the interpretation of the term varied with the temperament of the hearer. Some - most of the conventional Liberal and Conservative pols who were willing to entertain the ides at all - wanted an Irish Parliament that would deal with domestic affairs while London still ran the Empire.
Some - the Fenians and the Republican Brotherhood - heard it was true independence.
The Unionists - the Orangemen, the Irish Protestants - heard it as popery, rule by Catholics who would bring back smells and bells and the Dark Ages and oppression of all things Protestant.
In the Teens two things happened.
One was the end of the House of Lords veto. The Lords were violently anti-Home Rule and had killed it every time it had been in their power.
The other was World War One.
With the Lords impotent the "Third Home Rule Bill" passed...and was then voided by the outbreak of the war.
For over forty years the English and Irishmen who had been working to loosen the bands - many Irish would have called them "chains" - that bound Ireland to the rest of Britain through parliamentary action and political means. By and large the inevitable hotheads on both Republican and Unionist sides had been reined in by the promise (to Republicans; threat, to Unionists) of a legislative Home Rule arrangement. All the energy went into trying to work out a peaceful, procedural way towards an agreement.
I'm not sure if it was the length of time, or the energy invested, or both, or something else, that made the success and failure of Home Rule in 1914 so damning.
But it was.
Because the next move in the death dance was the
Easter Rising.
Again, the Rising, and the British response, are topics worth entire volumes. For now, the tl:dr version is that:
1) The Rising was doomed before the start by wishful-thinking-level planning and haphazard execution,
2) The British also doomed themselves with a rebellion-suppression that could not possibly be Roman enough to put enough terror into the Irish public but was too vicious not to turn that public - many of whom had been somewhere between disinterested in the rebellion and furious with the rebels for provoking the British to destroy big chunks of Dublin - to looking sympathetically at the rebels.
The most significant political result of the Rising was the defenestration of the old moderate Home Rule pols in Ireland. Things like British artillery live-firing in the streets of Dublin and the court-martial death sentences for men who had not fired a shot in Easter Week led to a crushing defeat for the old parties in the December 1918 elections. The rising power - the Sinn Féin - was unapologetically separatist, and immediately declared independence and the formation of an Irish legislature. The Republic was declared in January 1919.
The British responded as you'd expect if you'd been paying attention in 1775 or 1972; they sent troops to crush the rebels.
A Digression - On Teacakes: For those of us born in the 1940s and later Great Britain, and, more particularly, the "Little England" part of the United Kingdom, has always seemed sort of quaint and precious.
Even someone who has spent as much time reading and thinking history has to stop myself thinking of Great Britain as a sort of sleepy geographical backwater, a minor appendage to the European Union (or not; hello, Brexit...) and sort of chuckling when it seems like the English don't agree with that outlook, when they see themselves as something more that a nice little country that's sort of a mini-US only with funny accents and tea instead of coffee and soccer instead of "football".
The Great Britain of today always feels like the opposite of significant.
So I think it's seductive to look at the England of 1921 and see the England of 2020. Viewed in that light, the war of 1921 looks more like a little scuffle between rival polities than what it was; a vicious knife fight between a Great Power and one of its subject peoples. The Irish Volunteers did some pretty awful things by the standards of the laws of war. It's very tempting for Americans (as the current Great Power) to see someone like Tom Barry and see a terrorist and to see someone like MAJ Percival and see one of our own counterterror officers.
And what makes that even more likely is our England today; polite and quaint. Sort of kitschy. Chuck and Di antimacassars, high tea, little shops in the High Street, cute little soldiers and sailors bounding alongside their Big American Brothers excited to be allowed to play with the big kids, meaty shaven-headed drunken football (OK, "soccer"...) fans with bizarre tats...
...castles and Shakespeare and adorable accents and Hugh Grant looking sheepish and just a sense that the whole "England" thing is a kind of open-air-historical-theme-park.
But then I remember that for something like 300 years the English - and although a lot of the boyos behind the rifles were Scots or Irish, the chap with the revolver giving the orders was likely a "Little Englander" - were global Huns. Ask a Pakistani or a Nigerian or a Boer or a Sri Lankan; the Brits went through the globe like a fucking dose of salts. They were ruthless in taking what they wanted, and unapologetic about keeping it from those who had it before the English arrived. They weren't cute and quaint to the Indians or the Irish who wanted out of the Empire; they were their worst nightmares
Does this make England, and the English "bad"?
Well, sure; to the Pakistanis and Sri Lankans and so on. It was good as hell to the English, who grew powerful and wealthy from it. But for their restless subjects?
Pretty bad.
The Brits had the power and those they colonized and ruled didn't and, as Thuycidides noted, the strong do what they can. We can both accept that this imbalance of power leads some to suffer, and agree that the suffering is painful for the sufferers, and that in a perfect world those with the power to do better could have done better, while also accepting that such forbearance and nobility is rarer than diamonds in human history.
The British in Ireland did much ill to the Irish. That doesn't make them uniquely evil. That makes them human.
Mind you, does it make it easier to accept when those stronger make us suffer what we must?
Ohfuckno. Of course not.
But I am not here to make some sort of moral judgement on what took place at Crossbarry or anywhere else in Ireland, either on the British soldiers and their government or on the Irish Volunteers and their political leaders. Both were tough, ambitious groups who wanted what the other had or the other was fighting to gain.
Had the Irish had the sort of political unity and military power the Norman-English had in the 12th Century or the Tudors had in the 16th or the English had in the 18th, would they have colonized and ruled the English, instead of the other way around? Could that alternate reality have been an Irish Army closing in on English rebels in arms in some village outside of York?
I wouldn't bet against it. Us humans are violent, greedy, grabby sorts of monkeys about things that the "Others" have. So, sure. The Irish just never got the opportunity.
The English did the Irish no favors by ruling them for centuries. The Irish have not forgotten that. That makes the English and Irish, as peoples, no different than any of the rest of us, and the only thing that changes is the skies, not ourselves.
Today's England may be teacakes. But in it's day it was a naked blade to their unruly subjects, and what has changed are the skies not ourselves; not the English, not the Irish, not any of us.
We would do well to remember that now that blade is in our own hands.
Resuming our story...
The guerrilla campaign didn't really begin until late in 1919 or early 1920. I can't get a good sense of why the long delay, but my guess is that the Irish republicans were trying to keep things on the downlow whilst they organized and built up their military capacities, and the British were wary of coming down hard after the backfires of 1916.
But when it did, it hit the Royal Irish Constabulary hard.
The RIC was on the ground in the rural bits of Ireland most favorable to guerrilla operations, and so they tended to get ambushed a lot. Many RIC barracks were also in small towns and villages where they couldn't be defended. In early 1920 the IRA started hammering these; by March 1920 something like 500 barracks and outposts had to be abandoned, and the rebels destroyed something like 80% of these by June
One thing the British did early on, however, that turned out to be another mistake, was trying to bolster the RIC using British volunteers. These were the to-become-infamous Black and Tans - that were recruited largely from demobilized British troopers - and the "Auxiliaries", who were former British officers.
As the United States has discovered all over again, the British found that the problem with trying to bulk up an unpopular local police force (or a quasi-army, in this case) is that you tend to get people who are not...all that good at being popular with the locals.
The Tans and the Auxies were supposed to be the base of the counterinsurgency, the best hope for seining the guerrilla fish out of the Irish sea but, instead, developed a reputation for a sort of casually random viciousness and indiscipline that any GI in Helmand Province would recognize from the Afghan police.
That didn't help them; increasingly the Constabulary (including the Tans and the Auxiliaries) were ineffective at suppressing IRA activities. Then, in November 1920, the war got more a lot more brutal.
First, Michael Collins' hit squads killed a bunch of British intel officers in Dublin.
The RIC responded by driving to a sporting event and doing an Amritsar, shooting randomly into the crowd, killing and wounding.
Then our boy Tom Barry bushwhacked an RIC patrol and wiped them out, killing seventeen of the eighteen.
That was it; the British command in Ireland declared war in Munster, putting it under martial law and authorizing "reprisals" for IRA attacks. Remember how the British
did this in Afghanistan? Well, okay, there's a difference between hucking rocks in an Afridi well and burning down fucking Cork City center, as the Tans did in December 1920.
Keep in mind that although the British Army, like all imperial armies, had extensive experience in suppressing "native" rebellion, this was different. As Tom Barry puts it: "What might be tolerated in Iraq, India, or Africa, was unacceptable in Ireland, whose people were still considered to be British." (Barry, 1946).
Let's be frank; it had nothing to do with Britishness. It was race; the Irish, as irritating as they were, were white. Murdering dusky wogs out of hand and burning their villages and pulling their houses down was just the cost of doing imperial business. No London businessman was going to start up from his kippers and toast in outrage because what he'd call "some nigger hut" had been put to the torch. But white men? (Even
Irish white men..?)
That was just too far...
By January 1921 both sides pretty much concluded that is was game on. As the Wiki entry puts it:
"During the following eight months until the Truce of July 1921, there was a spiraling of the death toll in the conflict, with 1,000 people including the RIC police, army, IRA volunteers and civilians, being killed in the months between January and July 1921 alone. This represents about 70% of the total casualties for the entire three-year conflict. In addition, 4,500 IRA personnel (or suspected sympathizers) were interned in this time. In the middle of this violence, de Valera (as President of Dáil Éireann) acknowledged the state of war with Britain in March 1921."
And that brings us here, to Crossbarry.
March, 1921 - The West Cork Flying Column: The Flying Column had been busy in the first two months of 1921. According to Barry (1946), the boys had:
22 JAN - Set up an ambush on the Bandon-Ballineen road near Mawbeg. No enemies turned up.
23 JAN - Shot up both an Essex Regiment barracks and the RIC barracks in Bandon. The IED planted to blow a hole in the military barracks failed to explode, but the rifle fire pinned the defenders down. The IRA lost one man, but their opponents refused to come out of their defenses, and the column retired.
25 JAN - Attacked the RIC barracks at Innisshannon. Again the mine failed to detonate, and the column retired.
28 JAN - Two sections (about 30 troops) returned to Bandon and shot up the barracks again.
1 FEB - Prepared to attack the RIC barracks as Rosscarbery. The group took a British sympathizer's house to stage the attack in, but were surprised when the postman showed up. They were in a spot; if the postie didn't complete his rounds they'd be blown, so they swore him to secrecy and let him go. He was an ex-squaddie, so he beat cheeks directly to the cops and dimed the boys off. A force of Black and Tans and regular Constabulary were dispatched to take the rebels, but their incautious approach let the IRA ambush them and withdraw in good order. They returned later to torch the house, shot up the barracks, and grabbed a hat.
4 FEB - Evaded an attempted encirclement near Maryborough, losing one man.
8 FEB - An attack on the town of Skibereen included capturing three privates of the King's Liverpool Regiment (who were whisked out of town, fed, and then released to their unit's gratitude, at least according to Barry (1946), and shooting up the army and constabulary barracks without response.
11-12 FEB - Shot up the RIC barracks at Drimoleague. This time the fucking mine went off, but did no damage to the barracks, and after a desultory fusillade the IRA withdrew.
12 FEB - Attempted to ambush a motorized column of Auxiliaries. Barry (1946) notes, interestingly, that the Auxies - who had four truckloads, so probably a decent-sized unit - had detected the ambush but chose to withdraw rather than engage the column.
15 FEB - Attempted to ambush a troop trail (or, rather, a group of British troops traveling on a civilian railway) at Upton; a platoon of fifty or so Brits had been added to the original 15-man section the IRA intended to hit, and the numbers told. The Volunteers lost three KIA and several wounded and were routed - Barry (1946) admits this was both a military and propaganda win for the occupiers.
16-18 FEB - Tore up rails and trenched roads throughout west Cork to prevent British and constabulary movement.
In the third week of February the Cork Volunteers had a bad time, losing a total of 51 KIA, including ten men captured and shot out of hand. As a result of the losses the 3rd Brigade's flying column attacked Bandon again.
22 FEB - Attacked British forces on the streets of Bandon; killed 6 Tans, four Essex Regiment troopers, withdrew without loss.
After six weeks in the field the West Cork Flying Column stood down in the countryside to get some R&R.
The Engagement: The original engagement was planned for 16 MAR and was intended to be an ambush of a motorized comvoy of the Essex Regiment along the Kinsale-Innishannon road at the village of Shippool. The Volunteers were at the ambush site before dawn, but after a long boring day of waiting in the cold spring rain had no contact. Barry (1946) says that the convoy left Kinsale but halted a short distance outside the village and returned to their billets, presumably warned by an informer that the IRA was waiting for them.
The evening of 16 MAR a British reconnaissance aircraft overflew the Volunteers, who went to ground.
Barry (1946) says that this was a hint that the Brits had some sort of big operation laid on, although what he didn't know. The flying column marched north to someplace named Skough (or Slough, which Barry says is near Innisshannon) where the troopers laid up the next full day to rest, and then moved out in the darkness on the evening of the 18th, arrived a the farm of one John O'Leary, located northwest of Crossbarry about 1am, 19 MAR 1921.
At this time the British forces were on the move; here's what seems like the most likely units and their movements over the night of 18/19 MAR, largely per Barry (1946) with my best guess on some of the more confused units and locations:
McKenna (2011) says that:
"They (the British forces) proceeded to four points north-northeast, south-southeast, and west of Crossbarry. There they dismounted and formed up in columns. While half their number then proceeded on foot, the remainder reboarded their trucks and continued slowly after the foot patrols. It was intended that the motorized soldiers could then be rushed to any point where contact was made with the flying column."
This suggests that the British OC either had a general idea where the IRA force was but didn't know either the location or the ground well enough to be sure - that is, he planned the operation as a broad movement-to-contact - or was uncertain of the disposition of the enemy forces and wanted flexibility to move his troops to where the IRA was most numerous.
Regardles of the British plan, the IRA listening posts reported the British troop movements in the early hours of the morning. About 2:30 the approach from the west was detected; about 20 minutes later farm dogs started barking to the south, suggesting troop movements from that direction.
This is where Tom Barry made an interesting decision.
The lights and noises in the night suggested that the British hadn't closed the circle; the fields to the northwest remained quiet and dark. It would have been easy and quick for the West Cork Volunteers to simply slip away through the hole in the circle and get away.
But CDT Barry noted that the British column to the west appeared closer - presumably significantly closer - than the others.
He concluded that he could take a slap at this group and get something out of his predicament before having to grab a hat. Barry (1946) lists the commandant's reasoning, and it's worth listing in full here because of the insight it gives into a combat commander's mindset. According to Barry:
1) Because it was obvious that the Flying Column was heavily outnumbered, "it was extremely doubtful if the I.R.A. column could retire in any direction without being met by numerically superior forces." Barry says that even though a withdrawal to the north looked most promising it was not only chancy, but the ground to the north was bad; a British force there would hold high ground and could "man the ditches in a "holding" operation while the remainder of the encircling force closed in, a good option which we'll talk about in the "Outcome" section, below.
2) The column didn't have enough ammunition for a long running withdrawal under pressure. With only forty rounds or so a man the best option was "...a short and intensive fight at close quarters..." that would knock the enemy back and make their rounds count.
3) The Volunteers had been taking a lot recently, and needed to prove they could dish out some damage, for their own morale, and for the larger public support gained from knowing their mob was hurting the British.
4) Most particularly, the western British force looked like easy meat. "(T)he Column was supremely confident of being able to defeat it and thus smash one side of the encircling wall of troops." Interestingly, given what he then knew of the enemy movements and what that suggested about the enemy plans, Barry's "commander's intent" seems to have been to smash his way out to the west rather than take the enticing route to the north. The western ambush would also present the opportunity to police up more ammo from the British casualties.
The column was formed by 3am, when CDT Barry gave his operations order. This is worth quoting directly, for it sums up in four paragraphs how a well-trained infantry ambush works:
Thus briefed, the flying column moved out to the southeast at about 4am and occupied the ambush position along the road leading into Crossbarry from the west at about 4:30.
Here five sections - 70 troops - of the Volunteers dug in, finding covered firing positions in the farmhouses and farmyards along the north side of the road.
Number 5 Section was dropped off to the left rear to pull flank security on the east approach, while #7 Section deployed to the right rear of the ambush line to cover the west side.
Two IEDs - mines - were laid along the Crossbarry road, both in the left front - the southeast of the ambush line. The idea seems to be to trap the most vehicles in the kill zone by mining the lead vehicle(s) at the far end of the ambush. Destroying lead and trail vehicles with mines at both ends of the convoy doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone, though possibly the length of the convoy made this impractical.
The IRA positions were within ten meters - some less than three meters - from the road, and with flank security (and a three-man patrol roaming the fields to the north for rear security, the Volunteers settled in behind their rifles to wait.
Then the sound of firing was heard to the north, around 6:30.
The flying column didn't know this, but what was happening was a British patrol had surprised the commanding officer of the West Cork Brigade in the farmhouse where he had been hiding out after being wounded in the Upton railway station debacle and killed him in a firefight. The flying column leadership seems to have been spooked by this; McKenna (2011) says that they discussed it, and CDT Barry was at the point of pulling his troops back when the sound of truck motors coming along the Crossbarry road announced the arrival of the convoy they'd planned to ambush.
At about 8am the first two trucks and a Crossley Tender rolled into the western edge of the kill zone.
Barry (1946) complains that someone in his two right-hand ambush sections (#1 and #2) broke ambush discipline and was seen moving by the soldiers in the first three trucks. The British began to deploy, and the IRA opened fire before the entire convoy - twelve trucks and tenders - got into the killzone. Part of the problem is that the first three had bunched up and broken contact with the five vehicles behind them. Now that their position had been revealed the remainder of the IRA ambush element opened fire, as well.
According to Barry (1946) this fire was effective, and deadly. The troops in the vehicles taked under fire - at least the first three and presumably several of the trailing group - were overwhelmed by fire shock and many were disabled or killed in seconds. There was no attempt by the British to make the desperation throw of a close-ambushed unit and rush the ambush line; even presuming that the Essex troopers could have been able to respond effectively, the Volunteers were in tight behind walls and within buildings. Instead those of the the British that could fled south into the fields.
Within 20 minutes the portion of the British convoy in the killzone was effectively destroyed, the embussed troops killed, wounded, or fled.
This is the battlemap from Barry (1946), and the best map of the engagement itself extant.
It that shows the disposition of the IRA flying column at about 8:30, as well as the attacking British elements; unfortunately it does not differentiate the British attacks by time, instead suggesting that they were simultaneous. This was not the case, as we will see, and was part of the troubles the British had that day.
At this point firing began around #5 Section in the left rear. This was a unit - if we believe Barry (1946) about a company-sized element - of the Hampshire Regiment (though he doesn't identify it as such). CDT Barry shifted five troopers from the unengaged #6 Section at the left end of the ambush line north to reinforce #5, and hurried his ambushers to complete their policing of the objective. The spoils - twelve rifles, a Lewis gun, and a haul of .303 ammunition - were distributed and Section #1, #2, and #3 moved out to the north.
The firefight in the IRA left rear had forced the Hampshires to deploy and slowed their attack to the point where the remainder of the column was able to bypass the #5 defenses to the west and take possession of a hilltop - the Skeenahaine Height - to the north.
Two sections were tasked with rear security, and before they could move #4 and #6 Sections were engaged.
McKenna (2011) gives a highly detailed description of this, which he describes this as a "pincer movement", although it's difficult to be sure whether there was tactical coordination or simply two disparate groups of British troops converging. The engagement as described in McKenna (2011) is difficult to square with the battle map.
The latter shows almost 750 troops moving towards #4 and #6 Sections; 350 from Kinsale crossing the river along the railroad trestle southwest of Crossbarry and moving north, while 400 from Cork - presumably both of the Hampshire Regiment and a full battalion in strength.
However, McKenna (2011) mentions only the Cork unit, and describes it as "twenty to thirty British soldiers in extended formation" that were attempting to cut to the north to flank the ambush. This does appear to mirror the avenue of approach of the Cork unit shown on the map, although presumably the "twenty or thirty" was only the point element of the Cork companies. CDT Barry's 2IC took charge of the two sections and place fire on this British platoon (if that is indeed what it was) and Barryr (1946) says that the British were "driven back to Killeen's farm, where they had started from."
The problem with that is that Killeen is located to the northeast of the ambush positions, not the southeast. A British unit moving towards the ambush site from Killeen's farm seems more likely to have been detatched from the unit attacking #5 Section, also from the Hampshire Regiment but more likely the company coming down from Ballincollig.
Whoever these unlucky Brits were, they were hit hard enough to cease troubling the Volunteers, who had been taking casualties. One of them was a man named Monaghan, who had been tasked with triggering the IED. Although the mine had been rendered superfluous when the ambush had initiated too soon, it was still live, and when Monaghan was killed he either triggered, or fell on, the detonator.
McKenna (2011) describes the event thusly: "In the surprise and confusion of the explosion, Lordan succeeded in withdrawing his troops..."
I can only guess that the detonation of the IED made the British commander nervous of the possibility that the IRA had more of these mines planted along the road - not an unreasonable supposition - and pulled his troops' attack back to recon the approaches to the IRA position more thoroughly. As he did so the Volunteers were able to hat out; #5 Section provided covering fire for the withdrawal.
While this was going on the leader of #5 Section, a man named Kelleher, detached a small unit, to occupy the ruins of Ballyhandle Castle, to cover any British attempt to loop around the IRA unit to the north. In this they were successful; #5 Section's left flank party cut down another attack with fire and withdrew to the north, covering the main body's movement.
Barry (1946) describes the actions on the west flank that were taking place during this period briefly, noting only that "a platoon" attempted to flank the main road to the north at about the same time as the Hampshires engaged #5 Section and were met by fire from #7 Section that "surprised them and the British hurriedly withdrew"; no further pressure from the west or southwest is described, so presumably between that and the main ambush the Essex had received a bellyful.
The IRA flying column rallied on Skeenahaine Hill, and from there exfiltrated north to another high ground, Raheen Hill, about two miles north of the engagement area. Barry (1946) recounts that while halted on Raheen Hill movement to the northeast revealed another motorized column, this the Auxiliaries that had been tasked to close the north side of the circle. CDT Barry dropped a three-man rear detatchment to ambush the Auxiliaries; they did, and the paramilitaries bolted rather than engage.
Minor contacts continued through the day as the flying column continued to exfiltrate the ambush area north and west, moving through fields and woods to avoid the patrolled roads, then looped out wide to the west, and finally southwest, crossing the Brinney as a place Barry (1946) calls the Rearour Bridge.
I cannot find a Rearour anywhere near this river, which joins the Bandon west of Inisshannon and some distance south and west of Crossbarry, so I assume that this was a small rural bridge well out in the countryside. Ner here the column finally halted at Gurranereigh for "...a meal provided by the local people." (Barry, 1946) and to presumably debrief and count up their gains and losses.
Their losses had been small, for the intensity of the fight; three killed, and several wounded. Their gains included the weapons from the convoy, and the satisfaction that they had given the British a bloody nose and gotten clean away with it. But the war would resume in the morning, and the Volunteers surely had a hard sleep that March night, knowing that more fighting lay ahead of them.
The Outcome: Decisive IRA victory.
It's worth stopping to note here that we - we professional soldier types - like to talk about the importance of hard, realistic training, individual and unit proficiency, morale and cohesion, and understanding things like SOPs, means and methods, doctrines, and the commander's intent.
But Crossbarry points out that none of that means jack shit if the commander on the ground doesn't read the METT-T correctly and make quick, decisive, and accurate decisions.
Whoever the hell the British commander-of-troops was, whatever his intent for this operation, and however meticulously it was planned, once the British boots hit the ground the operation went completely and thoroughly to hell.
For one thing, without effective radio communications the whole "let's all diddly-bop across Ireland and all converge like a bunch of barefoot girls doing a fucking Maypole dance" thing...
...was a rolling clusterfuck waiting to happen. One unit getting lost, or held up, or - as happened to the Essex Regiment - getting out of contact with and too far forward of their left- and right-hand units meant that an aggressive guerrilla commander could - as Barry did - take a vicious whack at that isolated unit.
What would I as LTG Strickland have done better?
Well...one thing you learn in statistics is that the more you reduce the variables the easier the problem is to solve. Or, as soldiers like to call it; KISS. The most practical way to "keep it simple" seems to have been keeping a large part of the circle stationary. Find good ground and dig in. Set up your own ambush, then send out the beaters to push your guerrillas into the killzone. That was what worried CDT Barry the most; getting caught between the hammer and the anvil.
Spread out your hammer force wide so the guerrillas can't slip away, but keep a substantial reserve in hand right behind that screen, so when contact is made you can pile your reserve on the G's. If they're smart they're not going to want a standup fight at heavy odds, so you can drive them.
Would that have worked? Hard to say; Tom Barry was a hard man and a clever guerrilla with a nose for the main chance. But it could hardly have done worse than the historical British did.
So the take-home lesson here is that training and experience and planning and doctrine is important.
But so is the right commander on the ground. All the good planning in the world can't make up for piss-poor command, control, communications, and intelligence on the day of battle.
Here's the other thing.
The British had to
win. Had to destroy the IRA, or, at least, drive them down so hard as to make them beg for peace. And had to do it without making a new guerrilla for every one they caught, or killed, or drove out of the business.
As with George Washington and his Continental Army, the West Cork IRA's job wasn't to drive the British out of Ireland. They couldn't do that; the British were too big, too rich, too strong. But the IRA, like the American rebels, could win by not losing, not being destroyed or captured. Every Crossbarry was a Trenton and Saratoga for the Volunteers, making the occupation of Ireland more and more costly.
Tom Barry would have been the first to admit that he had his good days and his bad days. He wasn't the Napoleon of County Cork. Given the nature of guerrilla war it's not surprising that he lost as often as he won. But he had a hell of a good day in March of 1921, and he made the best of it, and that's about all any guerrilla soldier or officer can do.
The Impact: Crossbarry is often touted as "the" successful IRA engagement that helped push Britain towards a negotiated peace and an independent Ireland. Looking at the record of the time I don't see it. It was a good day for the rebels, but just one day in a campaign that ran all through the winter and spring of 1921 and well into the summer. Barry (1946) devotes a long chapter to the events of 19 MAR as well as the reaction of both the British as well as his own people.
But four days later the West Cork Flying Column was on the march again to attack the RIC battacks at Rosscarbery. That time the damn mine worked, and the whole garrison was taken and the barracks destroyed.
From there April found the IRA forming into "divisional" size units and the British and Constabulary pinned in their barracks, free to move only in large sweeps that were usless against the guerrillas; Barry (1946) notes that not a single West Cork Brigade Volunteer was killed, wounded, or captured in April. But the fighting went on in April and May. On 14 MAY CDT Barry and a Ford-full of his boyos drove into Bandon and shot up the Essex billets.
This vicious little war went on into June 1921, when the British government finally decided that the game wasn't worth the candle and began negotiating with the Republic.
A truce went into effect in July, 1921, and the independence of the Republic was assured by treaty in December. That treaty, mind, was viciously divisive within Ireland; our man Barry was a "Republican"; that is, he refused to accept the partition of the six northeastern counties into Northern Ireland, and was imprisoned by his own former buddies of Volunteer days. While he was in stir his old commander, Michael Collins, was assassinated by some of Barry's former West Cork guerrillas. The Civil War was, if possible, even uglier than the War of Independence.
Still.
By simply being in the field. By days like 19 MAR at Crossbarry that hammered the British Army and by that the British public and the British government. By not being decisively defeated, the West Cork Flying Column helped build a road from places like Crossbarry and Roscarbery to the treaty table at Knightsbridge in Britain and the free nation of Ireland today.
Touchline Tattles: There's nothing the Irish - hell, there's nothing people in general - love so much as romance in the middle of a good tale of blood and thunder. Amid the thunder of the guns and burning trucks at Crossbarry the romanctic part of the tale is the Piper of Crossbarry.
Flor Begley was the piper, and Barry (1946) says of him; "...this (having a piper on strength) was an innovation and we were to soon test an opinion I had formed, that the best of soldiers willl fight even betterstill to the strains of their traditional war songs, and that the harsh wild music of the bagpipes would have a demoralizing effect on our Sassenach foes."
I love the picture below; there's the Boys, all full of age and sin. That's Tom Barry front and center, and supposedly Piper Begley is the guy on the far left of the back row.
Anyway, according to the tale Begley started belting out something when the ambush initiated. Barry doesn't elaborate: "Begley played martial airs on his warpipes as four of our sections attacked" is his only recollection of a moment when he must have had much more on his mind that the playlist. I've read various accounts that Begley kicked off with "Men of the West", and others that it was "Fenien Men", which puts me of nothing else other than George MacDonald Fraser's
The Whiskey and the Music that came up when we discussed
Dargai Heights.
It's the exact sort of thing that everyone was too wired to notice at the time but probably wasted tons of time "remembering" afterwards; "No, it wasn't Men of the West, dammit! It was..."
But the point is that right in the middle of a vicious little guerrilla war our rebel band took the time to rock their tunes, and that's probably the most "yeah, well..." thing I can think of.
But let's not forget that, fine irregular officer and martial music enthusiast that he was, Tom Barry was no saint. In particular, the war he and his troopers fought to free their country from the British didn't help free it of the sectarian divide that remain, deep and deadly and would lead to Troubles more than three generations later.
So I want to leave you with Barry himself, described in detail exactly why the orange-against-green divide has lingered so long and poisonously in the Emerald Isle; this from the April attack on Rosscarbery in his autobiography.
After recounting a childhood eposide involving a riding-cow and an unexpected dog, Barry tells us of his young exploits in the town:
"Likewise the footpath the Column would walk in a short time on was not on the North Square. This would be remembered for Bateman's bakery and sweet shop, which for a few glorious days had a broken window pane. There was a round hole less than an inch in diameter, and by great luck it was directly in front of a large box of soft jujubes. With a bent pin on top of a large stick the sweets were cleared. When one of the gang got a remorse of conscience and said it was a mortal sin to steal the sweets, that we would have to tell it in confession and make restitution he was silenced immediately by the irrefutable prnouncement that the Batemans were Protestants, it was no sin at all for us Catholics to take their sweets. Taking from a Protestant wss nnot stealing; as a matter of fact, it was the bounden duty of all small Catholic boys to relieve Protestant of their goods, especially the sweets."
Sure, and that's not how you're going to get the Prods to get along with you, Tom, me boyo.
I don't think they'll like that, no, not atall, atall...
