The Cedar Lounge Revolution

What if Hitler had invaded Ireland? Seriously? July 16, 2010

Ah, Tom Clonan’s recent article in the Irish Times on ‘What if Hitler had invaded?’ (accompanied by perhaps the most tasteless graphic I’ve seen in quite a while in the IT – and inappropriate too given that it was about the conduct of the Emergency rather than the contemporary period) managed to get the sackcloth and ashes brigade out in the IT letters page. A fine example of which was the following:

By the way, on a purely pedantic point it’s highly unlikely that Leinster House would have retained any political or administrative function with such being transfered as they were in other conquered territories to other installations.

It would be nice to think that this would comprehensively end the myth that our neutrality is anything other than the result of an historic act of cowardice during Europe’s darkest hour, but somehow I doubt it.

Well, I think the correspondent would do well to reexamine Clonan’s article. Firstly we should note that Operation Green was a plan, not an operation. So therefore all discussions of this hypothetical invasion must be positioned with regard to the rather large possibility that it in itself was a hypothetical plan.

For he notes that:

In military terms, the Irish Army would have been wholly ill-equipped to challenge a German invasion in the summer of 1940. In 1939, there were approximately 7,600 regulars in the Army with a further 11,000 volunteers and reserves of the Local Defence Force, forerunner of the FCA. By May 1940, this number had dropped by 6,000 due to financial constraints. The Irish government’s recruitment campaign only began to bear fruit by the autumn of 1940.
Had the Germans come ashore in the summer of 1940, they would have been met by an Army with no experience of combined arms combat and capable only of company- sized manoeuvres, involving a maximum of about 100 men. In addition, the Irish Army was poorly equipped, possessing only a dozen or so serviceable armoured cars and tanks. In terms of small arms, the Army did have plenty of Lee Enfield rifles – of first World War vintage – but had only 82 machine guns in total for the defence of the entire State.

Many Irish units also moved about on bicycles – referred to at the time as Peddling (or Piddling) Panzers. Had they been engaged by the Wehrmacht, the Irish would have been slaughtered.

And there’s the small matter that Ireland was under threat from both the Germans and the British, hardly something to instill confidence in the idea that this was an existential battle between good and evil in which the Irish bottled it, a point Clonan makes explicitly in the article.

Ironically, the Germans were not the only foreign power making plans for the invasion of Ireland in the summer of 1940. In June of that year, Gen Montgomery drew up plans for the seizure of Cork and Cobh along with the remainder of the Treaty ports.

That British invasion plans were logical, and understandable from the context of her national survival doesn’t negate the fact that they somewhat takes the gloss off the bona fides of those who would see this as a virtuous struggle in which Ireland besmirched her name and reputation (consider that Icelandic neutrality was violated by the British in 1940 and subsequently by the US in 1941). And that they indicate just how much would have been asked of the Irish state to align with them.

But even to say that is to do no justice to the true complexity of the relationships extant between the two islands.

It’s also to ignore the small point that a German invasion of Britain, or England to be more precise, looks as if – given the disposition of German forces in the crucial 1940 period – it were unfeasible in and of itself. In truth a political armistice of some form or another was always a slightly more likely route to an exit by the UK from the war than invasion, and at some points in time within British political circles those championing such an approach were relatively powerful. But that too muddies the notion that this was a ‘clean’ conflict before whose purity the Irish, in this state, must bow their heads from shame.

What’s most notable about this is not the above, but the following sentences where it is clear that in such an eventuality Irish and British forces would have combined in some fashion.

When Britain’s prime minister, Winston Churchill, became aware of Operation Green, the British military set out detailed plans to counter-attack the Germans from Northern Ireland. Codenamed Plan W, it envisaged Irish Army units regrouping in the Border areas of Cavan-Monaghan and being reinforced by British troops moving south from Northern Ireland. In this scenario, the Irish and British armies would have fought alongside one another to repel the German invasion.

And that merely points up a further reality which is that Irish neutrality was always skewed heavily towards British interests as discussed here.

To be honest I think that neutrality given the political and military balances that were in play was a rational and sensible choice in terms of ensuring national survival. Of course had things gone differently… well, they’d have gone differently. But to try to posit that a state with utterly limited military assets available for its own protection let alone for offensive operations, living in the shadow of a neighbour who barely two decades previously had finally exited part, but not the whole of it (and had only left military bases on its territory a few short years previously) actually working very closely with that nation despite that shared history and present, exhibited ‘an historic act of cowardice’ is absurd rhetoric given the realities of the situation.

Indeed a much more tenable argument can be made that Irish neutrality provided a cover for Britain on its western approaches blunting the impulse of the Germans to invade outright while offering most, if not all, of the resources that the twenty-six counties could offer to the Allied war effort from man power to materiel.

That’s not particularly heroic, but it’s entirely utilitarian – and even highly efficient, and in a struggle with fascism [and even to phrase it in that way requires caveat upon caveat - so perhaps a struggle for national survival is a better way of putting it] I doubt either de Valera or Churchill found that particularly wanting as a means of negotiating that shared history mentioned above.