More on the Emergency… February 9, 2012
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Irish History.trackback
I’m not mad keen to keep the pot boiling on the War pardons issue. In part because as noted previously I’m not sure that the issue holds any happy outcomes for anyone. All positions taken by the protagonists neutral and otherwise during World War Two were and remain open to question.
I should add as well, that I have no problem at all with those who went and fought in the British and other Allied armies during World War Two who weren’t already serving Irish soldiers. This state has only slowly – though for obvious reasons – recognised that they even existed or that their contribution was worthy.
But a letter from Professor Geoffrey Roberts in the Irish Times this week is an odd addition to an earlier letter he wrote on the topic of pardons. He responds to Diarmaid Ferriterrs reasonably balanced article a week or so back entitled ‘Complexity of era defined Irish neutrality’.
Roberts argues that:
Ferriter (Opinion Analysis, February 4th) depicts Ireland’s wartime neutrality as a pragmatic response to difficult circumstances and as an assertion of Irish independence. He also urges us to view the war through the eyes of the time rather than in retrospect. One contemporary view was that of Robert Brennan, Irish ambassador to the United States. In a speech in 1942, he compared neutral Ireland to the medieval Ireland of saints and scholars who kept the light of civilisation burning during the dark ages. He speculated that after the second World War, Ireland might be called once again to a mission of enlightenment.
And Roberts continues:
Brennan’s comments reveal that the Irish political elite – and a good part of the population, too – considered neutrality to be morally superior to the position of all participants in the war, including the anti-fascist Allied coalition. Such was the hubris that led Éamon de Valera to deliver his condolences on the death of Hitler.
That’s not an entirely fair reading, not least in its rather retrospective use of the term ‘anti-fascist Allied coalition’. Again Roberts ignores the point that US involvement in the war was precipitated by a Japanese, not a German, attack. The entrance of the US to the war in the West may well be considered a [genuinely] happy byproduct of that, but it wasn’t the prime motivation of that state and to paint it as such is to do a disservice to the historical record. Indeed an interesting and useful question to ask at this point is whether Nazi Germany had reined in its appetite for expansion into certain states would the US have entered the war at all? Or another question is whether a pull back by the Nazi’s in late 1939 or early 1940 before the Fall of France would have seen some sort of peace treaty between the combatants? One can argue about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and whether it was sleight of hand on the part of both signatories as they sought to gain time and advantage, but the reports of Stalin’s surprise, indeed disbelief, at the reports of the German invasion are fairly well founded and suggest that even the visceral antagonism of the two states and ideologies might have provided no barrier to its continuation considerably further into the war period had the Germans not attacked.
But to also draw a conclusion from one speech by one individual as regards the motivations driving Irish neutrality is far too limited a means of sustaining the argument. As Claire Wills rather fine history of the period notes – and indeed Ferriter himself references it – there was clearly an element of moral superiority involved on the part of some. Wills also makes the point in her concluding chapter that de Valera didn’t recognise how much the war changed the world, but in fairness to him how could he? There’s an argument that in fact neutrality in the post-War world served the state reasonably well. But Wills makes a much more profound point in her closing thoughts:
For most Irish people the question of whether neutrality had been right or worn, moral or not, had always been the wrong one. The political quarrel over neutrality, and the story of the triumph of democracy that followed the war [though how hollow that narrative seems given the history of Eastern Europe, one doesn’t have to subscribe to the thesis that Soviet domination was equivalent to Nazism to see the problematical aspects of that history - wbs], left no room for their edgy experience. Their concerns had been about how to be neutral, how to keep themselves apart from the war without denying that, inevitably the war was also a part of them.
There’s also a certain amount of reworking of the historical record as to what was politically possible or not in 1940s Ireland. Roberts continues:
Had Irish neutrality been a purely pragmatic stance, it would have been abandoned when it was safe to do so in 1942 or 1943, when the country could have aligned itself with the Allies. Such a policy shift would have obviated many of the negative consequences of neutrality noted by Prof Ferriter, such as the country’s postwar isolation. It would also have asserted unequivocally Ireland’s independence not only as a sovereign state but as a free and democratic one.
To be honest that’s a dubious proposition. There was no popular or political appetite to enter the war in 1942 or 1943, and indeed it is brave of him to argue that it was ‘safe to do so’. Safe by what metric? This state despite increasing the size of the army had limited military assets. During the war period industrial production alone declined by over a quarter. The economy contracted, the means to field the sort of military necessary to ensure the territorial integrity of the state was vastly beyond the capacity of the state. Again, the point that so many men were brought into the army is central to this. Relatively speaking that was a cheap enough means of bolstering the appearance of defence.
Even had it had more assets does Roberts genuinely believe that the state could have stood easily against the weight of the Luftwaffe? To give a sense of what that threat was consider the situation in the UK where despite a modernising air force equipped with good technologies endured massive bombing. Birmingham alone, a city where my mother and ran came from and where my gran served as a nurse during the war saw the ‘Birmingham Blitz’, a campaign of heavy bombing that is regarded as starting in August 1940 and continuing to April 1943. As late as January to May 1944 the Luftwaffe was able to mount a bombing campaign of southern England – the so-called ‘Baby Blitz’.
The point being that to sit in the comfort of 2012 and argue for certainty on the part of those in 1944 is ahistorical. One can, using sources from the time note that there was considerable pessimism about the prospects for the D-Day landings with fears that the War in Europe could be dragged out if they failed or even turned about. Roberts entirely ignores the antagonism in Ireland towards the Soviet Union. That antagonism may or may not have had a basis in fact, but it was very real and in part based on a sense of a totalitarian state as bad as or worse than Nazi Germany. Roberts also ignores the fact that this state was giving very real aid to the Allies, well beyond what the legal constraints of neutrality would suggest was appropriate – and had been doing so from a point in the war when Allied victory looked all but vanishingly small. Indeed it is this which is perhaps most irritating about his thesis.
There’s no sense that he appreciates that public opinion in a small, impoverished state isolated on the periphery of Europe and having been through both a war of independence and a civil war might find it difficult, if not indeed impossible, to easily align with the imperial power which had dominated it for centuries. His line ‘ Ireland’s independence not only as a sovereign state but as a free and democratic one’ is a perfect exemplar of how the analysis is distorted. This was a partitioned island. Whatever ones thoughts about that partition, whether pro or not it unarguably had an emotional and political resonance then [as now, albeit in different ways] that he simply doesn’t address.
Add in religious aspects, ideological – in the sense of a profound anti-communism, a tendency towards insularity – perhaps driven by the experience of a famine which incorrectly, but for understandable reasons, some saw as close enough to genocidal, and to ask that Irish people should act with greater moral rigour than, say, the Swedish or the Swiss or the Turkish is near enough another absurd proposition.
There’s also the point that had Ireland declared war in 1943/44 such a gesture would have been as supremely opportunistic as the later ‘entry’ of Turkey into the war when they aligned with the Allied side in 1945. To have resiled when it was expedient and entered when it was likewise – accepting momentarily his thesis that it was ‘safe’ to do so, is not an argument based on any moral rigour either.
But it’s his parting shot which is perhaps most gratuitous:
Prof Ferriter chides Minister for Justice and Defence Alan Shatter for politicising the historical debate about Ireland’s wartime neutrality but he must surely be aware that his own contribution to the discussion is political, too, and part of a long tradition of attempts to justify neutrality by reference to the complexity of the situation. It is the job of historians to represent past reality in all its complexity. But we also have a responsibility to analyse that complexity to get to the heart of the matter. – Yours, etc,
To criticise Ferriter [who by the way is nowhere near above criticism] for introducing the contingent – and yes, complex – aspects to this case but to ignore them himself is unconvincing in the extreme.
Do the Swiss and the Swedes have this sort of navel-gazing discussion of how horrible and selfish their fathers and grandfathers were in not hurling themselves into the European struggle in 1939?
The latter two countries remained neutral because they were useful to the the Germans (the former for its iron ore, of which German had little, and the latter as a financial centre for Nazi loot). The South was permitted to remain neutral because all of things the Allies would have got from a belligerent Ireland they got anyway (and with the ports and bases in the North, they didn’t need to commit troops and resources to what might have become a troublesome conquest of the Treaty Ports, for example). The Germans saw an Irish invasion as at best a diversionary attack subsidiary to an invasion fo the British mainaland, which they never came close to getting around to.
We tend to forget that most of Europe was officially neutral at the start of the war, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Greece, Yugoslavia, Norway as well if memory serves. These countries all happened to be in the way of the Axis powers, so they had involvement in the anti-fascist alliance thrust upon them. Does their initial neutrality (which they would have undoubtedly preferred to maintain) make them morally culpable? If Eire had happened to be in the way of one or the other of the belligerents, then it wouldn’t have stayed neutral, or independent for that matter, for very long.
I’m also not sure I buy the argument that remaining neutral somehow sapped Ireland’s ability to benefit from post-war developments. It certainly didn’t stop either the Swedes or the Swiss from becoming prosperous-and certainly neither were lily-white in terms of their relations with the Axis.
DC – Iagree and am amazed nobodymentions all teh otehrs European states who did not declare war with the UK and France and hoped to say neutral and out of it. They were invaded and so now are “absolved” of any “guilt” for their neutral stance but I bet they would have preferred to have stayed neutral and out of it.
It is assumed, by Brits (do the French moan about Irish neutrality?) that the Irish should have joined the war, on the allied side, because, well, really the Irsh are Brits, sort of!! It was disloyalty to the UK they are really complaining about, and this seems to be taken up by some Irish commentators. As tou and WBS described, in reality the Free State aided the allies quite considrably and in the end neutrality helped the allies probably more than Ireland joining the war.
One thing I do disagree with, if you were implying it – the allies weren’t an anti-fascist alliance. It was in many ways WWI Pt 2 – a war of imperialist rivalry.
There was something in the Observer recently about the prosecution of a Spanish judge who wanted to investigate Franco’s crimes, many of them committeed during and after WWII. Franco survived the war and long after with not a squeak forom the “ant-fascist alliance” . Well, Soain was in NATO, which was part of teh “anti-communist alliance”.
apologies for all the typos!
The Guardian is reporting just now that that judge in Spain (Baltazar Garzon) has been found guilty of corruption.
I have to disagree. WWII saw two capitalist
democracies (Britain and the US) and a communist
dictatorship (the USSR) fight against two fascist dicatorships
(Italy and Germany) and a semi-fascist dictatorship
(Japan). So it was anti-fascist war, and you don’t have
to subscribe to Alan Shatter or Geoffrey Roberts’ views
to accept that.
Spain didn’t join NATO until 1981.
Roberts, it should be noted, is an English historian. The tenor of the man’s unionist politics can be gleaned easily enough:
Sir, – Gay Mitchell’s comment that he “would be positively disposed towards Ireland joining the Commonwealth if that was the price of a united Ireland (Home News report on debate hosted by Today FM and The Last Word presenter Matt Cooper, October 12th) raises an important point.
If and when the European project collapses or fragments, Ireland could find itself isolated internationally. The country would need to strengthen its links with our closest neighbours – Britain and Northern Ireland – and with the members of the Commonwealth, which contains a huge and growing Irish Diaspora and with whom we already have deep economic, political and cultural links.
In that context it would certainly be advantageous to have a president open to the idea of Irish membership of the Commonwealth. – Yours, etc,
Prof GEOFFREY ROBERTS,
Head of the School of History,
University College Cork,
Cork.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/letters/2011/1013/1224305706346.html
Agree with all this here from World.
going back a bit, i do agree with a pardon to the deserters. They committed a crime, but the fact that we can now (or indeed post-WWII) see that the moral gulf between the western allies and the Nazis was so great, that their crimes seem fairly small in comparison, and certainly outweighed by the contribution they made to the greater human good.
I appreciate this view is not particularly intellectually rigorous!
by the way, I came across this article about another war hero who is in need of a pardon:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/the-northerner/2012/feb/07/alan-turing-pardon-lord-mcnally-lord-sharkey-computers
Dont think we’ll see the usual suspects mention him however…
The difficulty with the deserters is that they abandoned the defence of Ireland (for whatever motives-one has to presume they wanted to biff some Nazis, which is laudable). If Ireland had been one of the unlucky minor countries in the way of the Wehrmacht, every rifle would have counted, especially as the government of the time had been criminally negligent in arming the state for a modern war. Of course, one could argue that contributing to the Allied war effort was the best measure to forestall a German invasion of Eire (in that a defeated Germany wouldn’t be invading anyone).
I think that with hindsight one can say that condemning a man for fighting one of the worst regimes in human history, even if it meant abandoning his post in his home country, is a difficult thing to contemplate. But in the context of when the conviction was originally made, it was an understandable reaction on the part of the military authorities in Ireland.
For example, what would have happened if Ireland had been attacked, let us say by a German invasion. We know that the British contingency plan in that case was an invasion from the North, which the government of Eire had apparently secretly agreed to. If the Defence Forces had then split between pro-Grman and pro-British factions, as was not unlikely, then no efective defence could have been sustained for any length of time, and whatever the outcome of the battle, independent Ireland would effectively have ceased to exist.
If Germany had invaded Ireland, they would have occupied Dublin within days and the rest of the country within two weeks. The Irish Defence Forces had absolutely no ability to withstand an invasion.
The original article similarly misses the point that the Allies were not interested in the pathetic military capacity of the Defence Forces. What they wanted was the use of Irish ports and territory to facilitate transatlantic convoys and to make life difficult for the U-Boats. Even in 1943 or 44 when the war was obviously won, such assistance could have saved the lives of thousands (including many Irish merchant seamen) on the North Atlantic.
It is to this country’s eternal shame that we bottled the greatest moral choice of the 20th Century. Roberts’s comment about Robert Brennan is apt; one might add that the Irish Chargé d’Affaires, William Warnock in Berlin was openly pro-Nazi.
Thank God for men like Paddy Finucane (youngest Wing Commander in RAF history), Harold Ervine Andrews VC, and David Lord VC. At least they and 50,000 others restored a bit of honour.
That’s a retrospective reading of the history. The progress of the war is as follows. 1939-1940 – a war in the east. Britain and France wait and largely conduct an ineffective and unconvincing effort even in defence of their supposed allies. 1940 to 1941 France falls and Britain stands entirely alone in a war of national survival which it seemed at some points unlikely to survive. 1941 onwards the USA and the USSR enter the war following direct attacks on them. Previous to this one was neutral, the other in a pact with Nazi Germany.
At what point did the ‘moral choice’ present itself?
Moreover at what point were we in a position to support such a moral choice? In 1940 de Valera went to Maffey, then UK representative in Éire and requested arms and aircraft. The British refused unless Ireland entered the war. De Valera pointed out that that was politically impossible – and it wasn’t just de Valera, it was the totality of the political spectrum bar a few isolated individuals.
So what happened next was that Éire exceeded the constraints of neutrality in favour of the British even from mid 1940 onwards on when British survival was as noted above far from certain.
You mention the inadequacy of Irish defences. Well and good, though part of the Irish defence was to put as many men into the field as possible, not to stop an invasion should it take place – the plans were already in place for cooperation with the British should there be an invasion of the South with tight military and intelligence coordination, but that this might just deflect the Germans [and indeed the British should they become a little too focussed on their own survival at the expense of their rhetoric - though that didn't stop them occupying Iceland etc]. You can critique that as a bluff, but it wasn’t ignoble and it was the only sensible course forward for a state which sought to protect its autonomy.
But is it realistic that the UK could, given the pressure on her air defences during the Battle of Britain etc provided sufficient aircraft etc to protect this state? The concern in British official quarters about her ability to defend herself during that crucial summer and indeed well into 1941 demonstrates the opposite. And it’s telling to read in both Wills book and Fisk’s older but still solid research the opinion of British military and intelligence figures who on balance thought that a neutral but essentially pro-British Éire was the best possible option for forestalling a German intervention and – with the irony of a partitioned island of Ireland – still providing a means of the UK securing the North Atlantic and her western coasts.
It’s really far too easy to condemn this state without actually examining the military balance, what was politically possible, etc. Fine if one wants to indulge in a bit of ahistorical bashing of the Irish. But a little pointless and like Robert’s thesis, not very convincing.
As regards those who fought legitimately in the UK forces, as I said above, no problem at all with them. My own relatives did so [as both English and in one case IIRC and Irishman]. But let’s not paint this conflict in colours it didn’t actually have.
How would Ireland have defended itself against the Luftwaffe in 43 or 44 ?
That is a genuine question, as I agree that Ireland should have joined the war, just at a point when they wouldn’t have been wiped out.
The moral shame point etc I guess you would also address to all other countries who were neutral until they were attacked?
I’ll just add three more thoughts. Personally I think a neutrality tilted towards the British and [de facto] the Allies, though less so the latter, was a positive moral choice given what the state had to offer and its responsibiltiy to its own citizens. Through the efforts of individuals and the state itself in allowing free transit of workers and those who sought to legitimately fight in the UK armed forces it played a not ignoble part.
Re the war being ‘won’ in 1943 or 44. That’s simply wrong as I noted in the original post. Eisenhower had a second ‘failure’ speech written for D-Day. A failed landing in Europe could have set the war back at least a year, possibly more and brought into play the possiblity of atomic warfare on the continent. Or perhaps more fancifully Roosevelt losing the election, a mere half year later, to Dewey and US policy shifting towards the Pacific theatre [a possibility covered in an interesting essay Stephen Ambrose].
Worth noting too, as above, that the greatest moral choice resulted in a half great moral chioce as regards signing away eastern Europe into the sphere of influence of Stalin. I’ve no problem asserting that defeating Naziism was of an order of magnitude more important than combatting Stalinism, but…
Ramzi, that’s a very interesting point you raise about an Ireland militarily capable of joining the war actually doing so. Not sure where I stand on that. I guess in theory yes.
Even high-ranking German officers knew the war was lost after Stalingrad; that’s why they started plotting to overthrow Hitler to see if they could sue for peace with the Allies. Goering himself said defeat was inevitable after he saw the first Mustang fighter escorts over Berlin in late 1943. Had the Normandy landings failed, the Allies would still have won albeit only in 1946/7. Their overwhelming economic superiority and the sheer numbers of Russian cannon fodder would always have proved decisive, even without a second front in France. Remember that the Soviets had already pushed the Germans back to Poland by the time of D-Day.
Your comments about Britain actually favouring Irish neutrality simply do not square with the fact that Churchill twice made genuine offers of Irish unity to De Valera in exchange for Irish participation in the war. The British also considered invading Ireland, as he more or less admitted in the 1945 broadcast.
The comparison with the American position does not reflect very well on Ireland either. Roosevelt was always eager to enter the war on Britain’s side and provided huge material assistance through Lend Lease from early 1941 whilst making speeches about how the US would be “the Arsenal of Democracy”. In contrast to our slightly pro-Allied neutrality, the US was thus overwhelmingly and substantively pro-British from the outset of hostilities. Only the isolationist instincts of Congress prevented the US coming openly into the war before 1941.
The arguments being made here about other neutral nations amount to saying that just because the Swiss and the Swedes were worse, we were somehow alright. I can’t see how anyone finds this to be a morally tenable position. I mean, Hitler was a bit worse than Franco, wasn’t he? Doesn’t make Franco into a nice guy, does it?
A better comparison would be with Australia, Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa or indeed Brazil which all freely rallied to the Allied cause when it might have been more comfortable for them to stay out.
As for the Luftwaffe attacking Ireland and the lack of air defences, that is the price that we would have had to pay; but the US and Britain would definitely have provided us with AA guns and fighter planes (as they did to the Soviets). Given the extra distance and the lack of heavy industry, we would probably have gotten off lighter than London or Coventry. Moreover, post-1941, the Luftwaffe posed no substantial offensive threat in the west.
Don’t you mean they wanted to overthrow Hitler so they could sue for peace with the capitalist powers and concentrate their resources against the USSR? (it’s to the credit of the British and Americans that such a deal was unacceptable to them)
Seeing as you mention Franco. I don’t hear you criticising the free state government for not partaking in the Spanish Civil War to fight fascism there – why not? And why not criticise the British and the Americans, and to a lesser extent the French, for letting the fascists crush the democratic government of Spain? Why just the Irish state for not getting involved in WWII?
Wasn’t it Roosevelt out of step with public opinion in the US over entering the war, and not the Congress? Besides which, I note that it was the Germans and the Italians who declared war on the US first. So where does that fit into your scheme of things?
On the contrary, I believe that “Non-Intervention” during the Spanish Civil War was a disgrace. I don’t see why this doesn’t make Irish neutrality during WWII equally disgraceful.
In reply to DC, were Mexico and Brazil in the Commonwealth? And my whole point was that Canada, Australia etc. all freely consented to join the war effort. They were not obliged to do so since the Statue of Westminster.
If you think the Spanish policy was equally disgraceful, why not mention that? Why not come on here and say that the Irish state’s policy was one of a number of policies adopted by states throughout the 1930s that were morally reprehensible when it comes to not combating fascism?
I think that the difference between having the ability to do something and not is a big difference. For example, the Irish state could have done little about the Spanish Civil War. The UK, US and France could have done quite a lot. There is a hell of a difference there, so I’d say that was a lot more disgraceful. And yet we hear nothing about that until the question is asked.
Besides which, where was this anti-fascist crusade that the Irish state could have joined? It wasn’t there when Stalin offered an anti-fascist pact to the UK and France in 1939 which they rejected, resulting in the Ribbentrop/Molotov pact.
What you had was a series of states operating in their own interests (although I do think the character of the war changed later). Why should the Irish state – still riven by tension due to the civil war and partition and at risk of another civil war if it fought on the side of the country that had denied its democratic wish for independence only 20 years before – be held to a different standard?
Where does the issue of British imperialism figure in your analysis? Would it have been right for the Irish state in 1939 to have entered a war the UK entered ultimately to preserve its colonies and to continue the oppression of them?
The dismissal of an anti fascist pact by France and the Uk is enormously problematic as regards any argument about the morality, let lone the inevitability o the morality of the war. I’m no fan of Ribbentrop Molotov, but it’s cynicism in terms of th existential needs of the USSR is arguably less than that of other players. And again the cynicism of Yalta is no better, and given the rhetoric of democracy, perhaps worse.
Just as an aside, on the whole “ant-fascist crusade” / moral force thing.
Britain and France declared war on Germany when it invaded Poland. Am I right in thinking they didn’t declare war on the Soviet Union when it invaded Poland from the east a few weeks later? Or if they did, did they somehow un-declare it after Operation Barbarossa began?
Your position is that Ireland was particularly morally culpable in not joining the Allied war effort…because it was a Commonwealth country. This argument essentially comes down to the notion that Ireland owed Britain that cooperation in 1939. Thats a highly debateable position, to put it mildly. Ireland was just another European minor state wanting to avoid a high technology modern war that they a limited capacity to defend against. They happened to have been spared the fate of Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, etc, none of whom were rushing to war in 1939 either. Lastly, a neutrality that involved extensive covert intelligence cooperation with the Allies probably is morally superior to keeping the Third Reich well stocked with iron ore, munitions and bank accounts.
Ireland was not a Commonwealth country like any other, as well. The other commonwealth countries were the products of colonial white settlement, not anti-colonial settlement. They were thus far more psychologically dependent on the “mother country” – New Zealand didn’t ratify the Statute of Westminster until 1947, for example.
That should read “anti-colonial revolution”, naturally. Not “anti-colonial settlement”. Which would be silly.
Little time but a couple of points. Read the histories and those British military and intelligence involved with Eire during WW2 post war argued neutrality tipped towards Britain was on balance better than an irish entry. You may not like that but read the histories and thats the consensus opinion.
The prospect of a British invasion also inverts the moral equation. Impoverished newly sovereign state is subject to whim of its former imperial master? Not a great calculus in terms of ‘freedom’.
To be honest I think it’s glib to write off Irish lives in terms of attacks by the Germans. The bombing of North Strand and more pertinently Belfast indicate how thin defences were on both sides of the border.
A failed Normandy could have precipitated any number of evemts up to an agreed peace with Germany, albeit without Hitler, just indeed as Andrew Roberts has noted that the capture of the BEF at Dunkirk could have seen an armistice on German terms.
The problem is in seeing this in terms of your original post as us ducking some great moral challenge. You evade addressing that entirely. There was no monopoly of moral rectitude in that war. A slight diversion in history and it might have taken any number of routes.
That reifies us to an exaggerated degree and to what purpose.
I’ve no problem in seeing th defeat of fascism necessary but there were many parts to play in that and I genuinely don’t think that of Eire was ignoble given the local context and history.
‘Only the isolationist instincts of Congress prevented the US coming openly into the war before 1941.’ Since Congress is the U.S govt. branch closest to the people, and, constitutionally, the branch with the power to declare war, its unclear what you are suggesting here. It would be more correct to say that the democratic will of the American people prevented entry before Pearl Harbor even though FDR was pursuing military Keynesianism before that, and like many upper crust Anglo-Americans favored their British cousins in the conflict.
‘Roberts, it should be noted, is an English historian.’
Of far more importance than that is that Roberts was a long-time activist in the Communist Party (GB)and a trade union activist. (And is author of Stalin’s War-a notable defence of Uncle Joe’s leadership). The CPGB was very hostile to Irish neutrality and international communism generally held it very much against De Valera. hence the USSR vetoing Irish membership of the UN.
It’s interesting. I’d heard he was a euro-communist. No shame there in my book. But if true does that indicate that the general attitude across the various CPGB strands whether tankie or eurocommunist re the Irish in the war was more or less the same?
Didn’t the CPGB depose its leader (Harry Pollitt?) when he failed to adopt the Moscow line that they oppose Imperial Britain in its war against Nazi Germany, fraternal ally of the Soviet Union until june 1941?
Pollitt it was in an uncharacteristic display of independence.
‘Roberts, it should be noted, is an English historian.’
And? Of more importance is that he was a long time communist and trade union activist in London. The CPGB despised Irish neutrality in the war and always held it against De Valera.
Ooops…thought original didn’t post, sorry…
No worries. WordPress has an odd system for comments.
The always dependable Joe Lee has a great take on the issue. He is of the opinion that for reasons of state, neutrality was the best policy for the entire war.
He criticises the cloaking of the utterly pragmatic policy of neutrality in the mantle of self righteousness, as it prevented any real lessons from being learned as a result of the war time experience. He dismisses Ireland’s social and economic performance during the war as “pedestrian.” Yet he is sceptical about the idea that the country would have been positively transformed by participation in the war. There was no cadre of experts to draw on who would have improved governmental performance. There was no possibility of creating a heavy engineering industry during the war. Ireland would simply have served as a supplier of raw materials and manpower to Britain – a role it performed anyway.
The experience of Northern Ireland suggests that participation in the war didn’t lead to a transformation in post war attitudes. The north might as well have been a neutral of “Eire vintage” for all the lessons it learned from the war. Lee believes that in general it was the experience of defeat, rather than participation, that was the greatest spur to the improvement of post war social and economic performance in Europe. Britain in spite of Keynes / Beveridge etc. would fall behind within a generation. In Lee’s view the only way the existing entrenched and utterly mediocre Irish order could have been transformed was if the country had experienced total defeat!
He doesn’t make the obvious judgement that the only way this could have come about would have been for Ireland to have declared war on Britain. The post war disentanglement from such a situation mightn’t have been entirely orderly.
DSCH, that’s brilliant re the total defeat idea. Lee is great. I think he’s a very unpretentious historian whose approach is sceptical and grounded.
I think that’s also a fair point re the functional role of the state in relation to the broader war effort.
There’s something terribly cosmetic about some of the calls for participation [retrospectively, obviously]. A salve on the conscience ‘whatever the price to be paid’ although in real terms the state gave up what it had as it had done previously and would subsequently.
Ireland wouldn’t have had to worry about protection from German/Nazi/Luftwaffe bombers in 1943/44. By then The Allies were bombing the crap out of Germany and there was no Luftwaffe worth mentioning.
Why not read the OP and consider the fact that as late as the first five months of 44 Britain was in he south subjected to the Baby Blitz? A less well defended Dublin could have proven irresistible as a target during that period, whatever the situation as regards bombing Germany or not.