Deserters songs: Irish soldiers who deserted to the British Army in World War Two

The issue of those soldiers who deserted from the Defence Forces to the British army during World War II has come back into the spotlight. What’s of particular interest to me is not so much the issue as the response to it – and some of that I’ll discuss elsewhere. But the issue has to be addressed.

It’s difficult to not feel some human sympathy for those who deserted for whatever reason. But the problem is what principle other than sympathy is at work here?

Because it’s difficult to discern any other than the view that Britain’s needs, or actually the inclinations of those individual soldiers, were greater than those of this state. And that seems to me to be very very shaky ground upon which to construct a defence of their actions.

Joseph Quinn had a piece recently in the IT that argued:

The story can count itself as another sad chapter in the history of the State, but an important question remains unanswered. How does one define desertion if it takes place in a country whose government’s stated position is a policy of strict neutrality, while almost every nation in the same hemisphere is at war?

This seems to me to be an ahistorical reading of the situation. The immediate answer is we define it as desertion, because the context, short of war crimes – and this by the way is legislated for in international law, is irrelevant.

If, for example, the campaign, was arguing for the pardon of any Irish soldiers who had deserted the British army to defend their homeland, those hypothetical soldiers would have each faced imprisonment of six months to three years as the customary punishment. And in other armies the sanctions were considerably worse.

But of course there’s more.

5,000 is quite tiny in relation to the mobilised British armed forces during World War II. The figure of 3.5 million is generally accepted to be the number who served at one time or another between 1939 and 1945 in the British Army. Whatever about individual motivation and individual heroism and sacrifice in various circumstances their general contribution could only have been minimal. So to paint this in existential terms from the point of view of the British state is a mistake.

But to some degree that is what is being done. And in doing so it neatly sidesteps the question that this was an existential issue for this state.

Éire was a small impoverished state with limited resources. The main resource that it had in military terms was numbers of men able to serve in the army. Obviously they would have been a thin defence in terms of any effort by the major protagonists to land on these shores, but their nuisance value should not be entirely underestimated, at least in blunting an invasion or forestalling one. So from an Irish perspective the ability to put the largest possible number of personnel into uniform was central. This was the defence, much more so than invocations of neutrality.

But in all this it seems to be forgotten that British national interest saw no issue at all in detailing comprehensive plans to invade the South in order to forestall a German invasion [as noted by Dr. X they invaded Iceland in May 1940] – and it hardly needs mentioning that had the opportunity/necessity arisen the Germans would have invaded.

And that leads to a linked point. Neutrality, whatever some of the rhetoric now emanating from various quarters, was inextricably positioned in relation to Britain. For all the public complaints from Churchill (and more hypocritically – given the late and forced entry of the US to the war – David Gray, the US ambassador to Dublin who seems to have developed a near-pathological aversion to Éire and belief that of some sort of collusion with the Nazi’s was extant) the reality was of incredibly, and I use the word advisedly, strong links at military and military intelligence levels between the UK and Éire, the extent of which have taken decades to emerge in full, much less to be acknowledged in general debate on this topic. Given the history between the two states in the preceding two decades this was a remarkable turnaround. Note too the extremely strong economic links – one telling anecdote is that the regular Collinstown/Liverpool Aer Lingus service was often filled by business men involved in the lucrative cattle trade, an anecdote that is probably not that far from the truth.

But neutrality was a deliberately chosen course which, in retrospect, seems to have been the best possible way for the state to survive. Had it thrown in its lot with the British this state would have been unable to defend itself, and this would have placed a corresponding pressure upon the British to take up that burden. Given how stretched that state was in the early years of the war it is hard to see the military justification. But politically that was absolutely impossible. It is not a case of an Irish population that was pro-German, though that undercurrent did, without question, exist and waxed and waned depending on the progress of the war, as much as an Irish population that saw an overtly pro-British stance as anathema – given the historical legacy and the reality of partition. And while it is easy to paint this in atavistic colours at this remove, the grand narrative of a war against fascism was simply not extant then as it is now, and how could it be with a US that was neutral until 1941, a Soviet Union that signed a pact with Nazi Germany and a Britain whose political classes largely were acquiescent or appeased German expansionism during the mid to late 1930s and who were palpably unwilling to go to war. To allow many of the inhabitants of Éire a degree of scepticism during this period is far from unreasonable.

Ironically, partition offered both Éire and the United Kingdom a way through with a means of projecting British power further into the Atlantic to protect vital convoys. So better by far to allow the status quo to persist, an Irish neutrality which was effectively pro-British in intent and effect [one of the most fascinating aspects of this is the way in which De Valera is painted as anti-British, when the historical record would suggest that the issue of Irish independence aside he was in fact mildly Anglophile throughout his life].

So perhaps what we see here is a reification of British national interests over Irish national interests. But what we also see is an effort to diminish Irish agency. For all its myriad failings the government of the day was a democratically elected one and more broadly this in the context of societies where desertion was regarded in a particularly negative light [and conscientious objection as well, it’s quite enlightening to look at the situation of those who sought that status in Britain during the same period, and the attitude of the military and the broader society to them].

Quinn argues that:

Soldiers such as Shannon and Kehoe, who, for whatever motive, contrary to the precise definition of desertion, abandoned a post of safety for a post of extreme danger, suffered consequences that were not only harsh, but entirely unnecessary – the danger to Ireland, and the wider world had long receded.

There is nothing imprecise about the definition of what those soldiers did. It’s only by modifying the term desertion – in frankly an unconvincing way – that that case is sustainable.

Tom McGurk in the Sunday Business Post puts it quite well. He notes the evasiveness over the concept of ‘desertion’ and also some of the unusual political agenda’s that appear to have entered the campaign. He continues:

We should, of course, pardon the deserters – but it should be done in a way that also recognises and distinguishes the service given by the 40,000 full-time and the almost 200,000 part-time soldiers who didn’t leave the country in war-time.

Furthermore it would help if the campaigners were to accept that what the 5,000 deserters did was wrong. Then we could all happily consign this episode to the footnotes of our history.

I’m probably slightly less generous than he. I wonder is there a concept of a conditional pardon, but granted some gesture is probably the right way to engage with this at this point. But his central point remains. Whatever the rhetoric what happened was wrong and that should be faced up to before this goes forward.