German Bombers refueling in Ireland during WW2

Reekwind wrote: »

I wouldn't call Irish neutrality a sham but it was pretty tilted in favour of the Allies. Ireland rendered as much assistance to Washington and London as it could without openly joining the war

True and this ' benevolent neutrality ' earned Ireland a few brownie points which De Valera regrettably pissed away with his appalling decision to visit the German legation to offer condolences on the death of Hitler - in my view an unforgiveable act which was probably the greatest disaster in Irish foreign relations ever.

HellsAngel wrote: »

Couldn't ( and they probably did ) the Germans if they wanted weather data from Ireland just listen in to Radio Eireann ? Couldn't their own navy and U boats monitor the weather and signal back from out in the Atlantic ?

Another little fact from history, the D-Day Invasion hung on a weather report from Blacksod Bay in Co. Mayo. Irish weather information always found its way to the Allies (not the Axis). A report of a calm spell between the 5th and 7th June 1944 as predicted with info from Blacksod gave Ike the window to launch the invasion. Weather info from spies, Focke-Wulf Condors and subs were the usual German platforms for forecasts. The German forecasts for early June 1944 were indicating bad weather, therefore all the Generals were off on leave or involved in wargames.

We weren't that neutral:

http://www.thepost.ie/archives/2006/1231/neutral-irelands-secret-war-19898.html

ThePost.ie Archives for: Sunday, 31 December 2006



Neutral Ireland's secret war
31 December 2006 By David O'Donoghue

Even before war broke out in September 1939, Ireland had a problem with Nazi spies. Since the early 1930s, Germans and Austrians loyal to Hitler’s regime had been active in Ireland, sending material back to Berlin that could be of use to the German military in the event of an invasion here.

Senior civil servants had warned the then taoiseach Eamon de Valera of the threat, but his hands were tied. If the German spies weren’t breaking the law, he couldn’t arrest them or have them thrown out of the country.

What made life even more difficult for de Valera was that at least six of the 50-strong Nazi group in pre-war Ireland were on the state payroll.

They were Dr Adolf Mahr (director of the National Museum), Professor Friedrich Herkner (College of Art, Dublin), Otto Reinhard (director of Forestry, Department of Lands), Friedrich Weckler (chief accountant of the ESB), Heinz Mecking (Turf Development Board), and Colonel Fritz Brase (director of the Army School of Music). All six joined the Nazi party between 1931 and 1939.

At the outbreak of war, the small German community in Dublin met at the Northumberland Road legation of ambassador Dr Eduard Hempel, himself a fully paid-up member of the Nazi party. The Germans were afraid that, if they remained in neutral Ireland and the British returned to seize the treaty ports at Cobh, Berehaven and Lough Swilly, they might be interned.

Consequently, after three tense meetings, they approached the taoiseach to seek safe passage through Britain to reach home. Dev was only too happy to oblige, getting Westminster’s permission for their return home.

The 50 Germans sailed aboard the mail boat Cambria from Dun Laoghaire to Holyhead on September 11, 1939, and eventually made it across the channel. But their departure left a serious intelligence gap for the Nazis in neutral Ireland, one they would try to fill by dispatching no fewer than 12 agents here in the 1939-to-1943 period.

The code-breakers’ war began in December 1939, when both the BBC and G2, Irish army intelligence, began monitoring broadcasts in Irish from Berlin. The 15-minute propaganda talks were given every Sunday night by Professor Ludwig Muhlhausen, who had studied Irish in the 1920s and 1930s in Kerry, Connemara and the Donegal fishing village of Teelin.

London was so alarmed by these broadcasts and convinced they contained coded messages that they recruited Angus Matheson, an expert in Celtic languages at Glasgow University, to join the BBC’s secret monitoring centre at Caversham in the Home Counties.

The Irish Army also had a monitoring team at McKee barracks, complete with shorthand typists and linguistic experts.

Col Dan Bryan, deputy head of G2, chose UCC lecturer Joe Healy to translate and, if necessary, decode Muhlhausen’s talks. Healy didn’t find any secret codes in the talks, but he knew the German professor well, having stayed with his family in Hamburg when learning German in the late 1920s.

Muhlhausen had stayed with Healy’s family in Cobh on his way to the Blasket Islands in 1927 and 1928. Later on in the war, Healy was ordered to translate a German army plan to invade Ireland, which had been found in liberated Brussels in September 1944.

The invasion blueprint contained detailed maps of every part of Ireland, including coastal charts and even a glossary of Irish terms for use if the Germans landed in Donegal.

Despite de Valera’s attempts to portray a strictly neutral image during the 1939-to-1945 conflict, the links between G2 and MI5 were almost brotherly in nature. Bryan regularly swapped intelligence with MI5’s counter-espionage chief, Guy Liddell, whose brother Cecil ran MI5’s Irish section.

It was a family affair, with the MI5 brothers occasionally visiting their cousin, Lord Revelstoke, on Lambay Island.

The Americans also kept close links with Dublin, with Ervin ‘‘Spike’’ Marlin acting as liaison officer between the US Office of Strategic Studies (the forerunner of the CIA) and Bryan.

The counter-intelligence team, under the leadership of G2 chief Col Liam Archer, included Dr Richard Hayes, the director of the National Library and a noted cryptologist; Commandant Eamon de Buitle ar, who took over as Bryan’s deputy in G2 in June 1941, when Archer became assistant chief of staff; and German language specialist Douglas Gageby, the post-war editor of the Evening Press and The Irish Times.

Both MI5 and its Irish counterparts in G2 were right to be wary of the radio talks from Berlin. On February 24, 1943, Berlin radio’s Irish service flagged an advert in that day’s Irish Independent, which contained a thinly veiled message summoning members of the Irish Friends of Germany group to meet in Dublin’s Red Bank restaurant - a favourite pre-war Nazi haunt in D’Olier Street.

But there were more sinister aspects to the radiobroadcasts.

In January 1942, Dr Hans Hartmann - a protege of Muhlhausen at Berlin University - began broadcasting extracts from Wolfe Tone’s diaries in Irish.

Hartmann also asked his fellow broadcaster, John O’Reilly from Kilkee, Co Clare, to read the same extracts in English.

At first, O’Reilly protested, telling Hartmann that few Irish listeners would be interested in hearing Wolfe Tone’s diaries either in Irish or English.

But the German lost his temper and insisted that O’Reilly carry on reading them. Their importance only became apparent in 1944 when barrister Donagh MacDonagh tipped off G2 after finding a cipher in the English version of the diaries. There is no evidence that G2 was able to crack the code used by Hartmann.

The first Wolfe Tone extracts were broadcast on January 28, 1942, just two days after the arrival of American troops in Northern Ireland. The most likely explanation is that the broadcasts carried coded messages to IRA units to gather information on US and British troop movements in the North.

The information for Berlin could have been sent via a secret IRA transmitter in the North, another held in Dublin or the German legation’s shortwave transmitter.

Under pressure from US ambassador David Gray, de Valera eventually ordered the seizure of the transmitter in December 1943, which was locked up in the taoiseach’s own bank, the Munster & Leinster on Dame Street.

But if the code-breakers in Irish military intelligence thought they had a hard job decoding messages on the airwaves from Berlin, it was nothing compared to the elaborate codes used by the ‘‘dirty dozen’’ agents dispatched here during the war.

From 1939 to 1943, the Abwehr (the Nazi counter-intelligence service, run by Admiral Canaris) and the SS-controlled SD, or Sicherheit Dienst (security service) - landed 12 agents in Ireland by sea or air.

Some agents parachuted from Luftwaffe bombers, while others arrived aboard u-boats or small surface vessels. The number of agents landed here was prompted by the dearth of information coming from Ireland due, among other factors, to the departure of those 50 Nazis aboard the mail boat from Dun Laoghaire on September 11, 1939. Clearly, de Valera knew what he was doing when he agreed to repatriate them.

In addition to those 12, Professor Eunan O’Halpin of TCD lists five others: Jan van Loon, a Dutch sailor who jumped ship in Belfast and offered his services to the German legation in Dublin; John Codd, who was trained as an agent but never sent to Ireland; James O’Neill, who arrived here with encoding materials in late 1942; Henry Lundborg, an IRA courier on the Dublin-to-Belfast train; and Christopher Eastwood, who acted as an undercover courier on the Dublin-to-Lisbon shipping route.

The first bona fide German agent to arrive here was Werner Unland, an Abwehr employee who disembarked from a passenger ship in Dublin Port in August 1939. His mission was to collect general intelligence on British matters, communicating with the Abwehr by sending coded letters in the ordinary post. Unland operated with some measure of success, before being arrested in March 1941.

Hot on Unland’s heels came the second agent, Ernst Weber Drohl, an Austrian who was landed by a u-boat off the Sligo coast in February 1940. He was acting as a courier, bringing a radio set and a large amount of cash for the IRA.

But Drohl was no stranger to Ireland, having toured the country in the 1930s as a circus strongman. He had been photographed in various Irish newspapers lying under the front wheels of a car and doing other weight-lifting tricks.

Now in middle age and suffering from degeneration of the spinal cord, Drohl did not last long as a spy - he was arrested on February 27,1940.

The third and by far the most effective German agent to land in neutral Ireland was Dr Hermann Gortz, who arrived by parachute in Co Meath on May 12, 1940. His parachute drop( during which he managed to lose his radio set, which fell separately) gave rise to the shortest conversation on record between a Meath farmer and a German spy.

It went as follows: Gortz: ‘‘Am I in Northern Ireland?"

Local farmer: ‘‘Would you happen to know Ballivor?"

At that point, Gortz gave up his attempts to engage in conversation with the locals and set off on foot to a safe house in Co Wicklow owned by Maud Gonne’s daughter, Iseult.

Gortz had been given her address in Berlin by Iseult’s husband, the writer Francis Stuart, who was at that time lecturing in Berlin University with his colleague Hans Hartmann (both men made regular radio broadcasts to Ireland during the war).

Gortz only spent a short time at the Stuarts’ home in Laragh, before being spirited away by a senior IRA man, Jim O’Donovan, who worked at the ESB’s head office in Dublin.

Gortz remained one step ahead of the police for the next 18 months, staying in a variety of safe houses, including O’Donovan’s home Florenceville in Shankill, south Co Dublin.

Most historians debunk the idea that Gortz was a master spy, pointing out that he had served time in a British prison when caught taking photographs of British air bases in the mid-1930s. He had a criminal record and, in addition, was past his best spying years - Gortz was a former World War I Luftwaffe pilot and in his 50s.

His mission to Ireland entailed making contact with IRA leaders and furnishing the Germans with data on Northern Ireland. Far from evading the authorities, it is thought that Gortz was deliberately left on a long leash so that he would inadvertently identify his contacts to special branch officers.

During his long period on the run, Gortz met a wide variety of people, including republican sympathisers, IRA leaders, a few politicians and a senior Irish army officer, Major General Hugo McNeill, who was assistant chief of staff from August 1940 to June 1941.

At one stage, McNeill approached the German ambassador to Dublin to discuss cooperation between the Irish Army and the Wehrmacht.

Gortz was eventually arrested on November 27, 1941 at a house in Clontarf.

As he was bundled into a special branch car, the spy protested: ‘‘You are arresting the best friend Ireland has . . .your government knows why I am here; there is no room for a military attache - that’s why I am here."

It was then that G2’s codebreakers got to work on trying to decipher the strange codes the German used in his letters home. But they were faced with a seemingly impossible task because Gortz’s code consisted of separate blocks of four or five letters, which appeared meaningless without a key.

During the interrogation process - first at Arbour Hill prison and later at Athlone barracks - Dr Hayes and his team tried to wheedle the cipher key from Gortz.

The German spy offered only piecemeal data, so Hayes hatched a plot to dupe the spy into spilling the beans. Gortz asked a soldier in Athlone barracks to pass his coded messages to sympathisers on the outside, in the hope of getting the letters to Berlin.

Hayes and de Buitlear then began working on the messages, with the aid of a decoding machine - ironically purchased by de Buitlear on a pre-war visit to Germany. They eventually cracked the code in March 1943 and, after waiting for a decent interval, got the same soldier to give Gortz a reply ‘‘from Berlin’’.

Hayes and de Buitlear continued the double game with Gortz, asking the German to prepare a detailed diary of his actions since landing in Ireland.

Gortz complied, providing a massive 80-page report on all his contacts during his 18 months at liberty.

Later on, Hayes decided it was time to reward Gortz, so ‘‘Berlin’’ sent a message promoting the spy to the rank of major. When Gortz got this news, he reportedly wept in his cell. The bogus rank still appears on Gortz’s gravestone in the German military cemetery at Glencree, Co Wicklow.

He committed suicide in 1947 while awaiting extradition to Germany.

Despite the seemingly smooth cooperation between the Irish and British intelligence services, there were internal wranglings in G2.

Professor Mark Hull of St Louis University notes that de Buitlear clashed with his G2 boss, Col Dan Bryan, on supplying Gortz’s code to MI5.

De Buitlear did not approve of the intelligence exchanges with the British, so he delayed telling Bryan about the breakthrough.

To his credit, Bryan did not censure his deputy but, after Bryan’s death in 1985, de Buitlear told Raidio na Gaeltachta that ‘‘the chief of staff [Lt-Gen Dan McKenna] and his advisor Col Dan Bryan, really did not know their job [and did not have] the knowledge to carry out intelligence work."

Gortz was followed to Ireland by nine other agents.

Their arrival dates were: Walter Simon (12/06/40), Wilhelm Preetz (25/06/40), Henry Obed (07/07/40), Dieter Gaertner (07/07/40), Herbert Tributh (07/07/40), Guenther Schutz (12/03/41), Joseph Lenihan (18/07/41), John O’Reilly (16/12/43) and John Kenny (19/12/43).

John O’Reilly was the same person who had broadcast from Berlin from 1941 to 1942.

The man from Clare was dropped by parachute over his parents’ home in Kilkee, but was turned in by his father Bernard (a retired RIC man who arrested Sir Roger Casement on Banna Strand in 1916), who pocketed the IR£500 reward.

He used this money to buy a Dublin pub after the war.

Under lock and key in Arbour Hill prison, Dr Richard Hayes challenged 27-year-old O’Reilly to a code-breaking test. But when the Clare man was in the exercise yard, Hayes gathered the paperwork that O’Reilly had burned in the fireplace.

The scorched papers were then photographed at the Garda Technical Bureau in Kilmainham, so the cipher could be cracked. The code was passed immediately to MI5. It was all part of neutral’s Ireland’s most secret war.

Dr David O’Donoghue is an author and historian. His most recent book is The Irish Army in the Congo 1960-1964: The Far Battalions (Irish Academic Press, Dublin).

This story appeared in the printed version of the Sunday Business Post Sunday, December 31, 2006

Is there any evidence of black propaganda by anyone concerning the south?

owenc wrote: »

I'm sorry but you don't know what your talking about you are from Dublin or somewhere anything couldve happened and I think if it did the locals would know... There was alot of secret things in the war you know

I think you have a point and my Dad who was a child during WWII remembers the Nazi bombing of Wexford. He was brought up with no illusions that the Nazi's were bad.

When the planes flew over they knew they were about to be bombed.

tricky D wrote: »

We weren't that neutral:

http://www.thepost.ie/archives/2006/1231/neutral-irelands-secret-war-19898.html

Nice one

Fratton Fred wrote: »

I think Churchill would have had a problem with anything Dev did or said. I don't think it is any secret that Winston had no time for Eamon.

.

Really, the Churchill Centre seems to characterise their relationship differently.

And indeed, DeV's visits to London pre-WWII relating to the Economic War and Treaty Ports had left him with a different world view than that which he had when he came to power in 1932.

Anyway.

Winston Churchill enjoyed a good joke. According to Dennis Kelly, one of Churchill’s former literary assistants, the following was one of his boss’s favorite stories, one that ‘he used to adore telling’: ‘British bomber over Berlin, caught in the searchlights, flak coming up, one engine on fire, rear-gunner wounded, Irish pilot mutters, “Thank God Dev kept us out of this bloody war.”’i
http://www.winstonchurchill.org/support/the-churchill-centre/publications/finest-hour-online/833--winston-churchill-a-eamon-de-valera-a-thirty-year-relationship

Churchill recognised the Southern Irish volunteers in the British forces and Irelands relaxed view to people volunteering.

DeValera recognised Churchills respect of Irish Independence.

Eamon de Valera responds to Winston Churchill : 16 May 1945
On 13 May 1945, towards the end of the Second World War, Winston Churchill in his Victory in Europe speech, broadcast to the world, was critical of Taoiseach Eamon de Valera and Ireland's policy of neutrality throughout the war.
"Owing to the action of Mr de Valera, so much at variance with the temper and instinct of thousands of Southern Irishmen who hastened to the battle-front to prove their ancient valour, the approaches and the Southern Irish ports and airfields could so easily have guarded were closed by the hostile aircraft and U-boats. This was indeed a deadly moment in our life, and if it had not been for the loyalty and friendship of Northern Ireland we would have been forced to come to close quarters with Mr de Valera or perish forever from the earth."
Three days later, de Valera, in a much anticipated reply, outlined Ireland's right as an independent state to remain neutral. His response was praised widely in Ireland for its strength, dignity and restraint.
In this extract from de Valera's broadcast, he gives credit to Churchill for not violating Irish neutrality:
"It is indeed fortunate that Britain's necessity did not reach the point when Mr Churchill would have acted. All credit to him that he successfully resisted the temptation which I have no doubt many times assailed him in his difficulties and to which I freely admit many leaders might have succumbed. It is indeed hard for the strong to be just to the weak but acting justly always has its rewards"


http://www.rte.ie/laweb/brc/brc_1940s_a.html

The two met twice in 1948 and 1953 when DeValera went to dinner in Downing Street.

DeValera's gaucheness was legendary ,of course, but he also sent his new friend a birthday card for his 80 th birthday.

With the publication of the first volume of his memoirs in 1948, Churchill took one last jab at de Valera over the matter of the Treaty Ports. After this he let the issue go, and in the following year the two men finally came face to face for the first time at a Council of Europe meeting in Strasbourg. Accounts of this chance meeting vary. Approaching the bottom of a staircase, de Valera unexpectedly found Churchill at the top naturally surrounded by members of the Press. Churchill, some reported, smiled encouragingly, but this may not have registered with de Valera who was nearly blind. In any case, de Valera himself later stated that he did not wish to be photographed with Churchill and chose instead to execute an orderly retreat.



Finally, after much encouragement, de Valera did agree to meet with Churchill on 16 September 1953. By then both men were in their second go-round as heads of government. The momentous encounter took the form of a lunch at 10 Downing Street. Unfortunately, we only have de Valera’s account of what was said. Churchill’s secretary, Anthony Montague Browne, refused even to be in the same building as the Irish leader. An RAF veteran, Montague Browne first considered and then dismissed the idea of making a citizen’s arrest of de Valera. Instead he contented himself with ‘the sort of silly joke’ he knew Churchill sometimes appreciated: ‘I hope the Taoiseach,’ he remarked, ‘is not followed by an unpleasant supper surprise.’xlix Afterwards, Churchill described his lunch with de Valera as ‘a very agreeable occasion’ and told his physician Lord Moran: ‘I like the man.’l



For his part de Valera reported that Churchill ‘went out of his way to be courteous.’li This time a photograph was taken.lii It was reported that at lunch ‘they had mainly talked about “the higher mathematics,”’ de Valera’s subject in his teaching days. Though as historian John Ramsden notes, ‘how Churchill kept up his end on this particular subject is something of a mystery.’liii De Valera did make a request for the return of the remains of Sir Roger Casement, executed for treason in 1916. Churchill replied that he personally favoured the idea but would have to refer the matter to the law officers.liv Inevitably, they also spoke of partition. By this time, however, the Attlee Government had guaranteed that Northern Ireland would never without the consent of its majority be made to leave the United Kingdom. Churchill candidly informed de Valera that on this issue ‘there were also political factors which no Conservative would ignore’ by which he meant that at that moment his own thin parliamentary majority rested almost entirely upon the Ulster Unionists in Westminster.lv



De Valera astonished and no doubt pleased Churchill with the assertion that if he, de Valera, had remained in office in the late 1940s he would not have taken Eire out of the Commonwealth as the Costello Government had done. And so the first, last and only meeting between the two leaders came off well enough that Churchill cheerfully waved goodbye as de Valera’s car departed. In the following year upon his eightieth birthday Churchill was delighted to receive the best wishes of the Long Fellow. After a lifetime of acrimony a magnanimous settlement had at last been reached between the towering statesmen of twentieth-century Britain and Ireland.

Check the Churchill Centre's DeValera analysis here

http://www.winstonchurchill.org/support/the-churchill-centre/publications/finest-hour-online/833--winston-churchill-a-eamon-de-valera-a-thirty-year-relationship

We'd a German Luftwaffe pilot stay with us in the B&B recently in Kildare. He'd crashed on a beach in Wexford after taking damage on a raid in the UK. He was interned in the Curragh for the duration of the war and worked in the "Rising Sun" pub in Suncroft and lived freely enough in Newbridge.

He left for home a few years after the war and retuned only a few years back with his family to show them where he'd spent most of his war years. The best part of the story was when he returned to the Rising Sun he stepped through the door of the pub and behind the counter still working there was a guy he'd worked with all those years ago.

He was an amazing man to talk to and his story stunned me. He'd pictures of him and his bomber crew. As far as I remember they didn't all survive the crash landing.

My dad saw the Duncormack bombing and said that the german's regularly flew over Wexford and as a child he had no doubt they were the baddies.

German bombers also used to drop their loads in the sea off Wexford.

He was playing outside and is in no doubt that the Germans knew where they were and the bombing was deliberate.

That a bomber deliberately crash landed there does indicate that they knew where they were.

We didn't have much fuel (aviation or otherwise) for ourselves, let alone give it away to Jerry.

tac foley wrote: »

If anybody cares to read 'Guests of the State' by T. Ryle Dwyer they might learn more about POWs in the Free State.

tac
vcrai.com

Trying to get thru Irish history is a minefield.

C'mon tac, whats you assessment ?