Collins Barracks This Saturday November 7th 2009

Morlar

I read this article today which may interest some people here. It is about an event at Collins Barracks Military Museum Dublin this saturday November 7th - an all day free event which looks very interesting.

It is primarily a WWI event - though also covers WWII.

Kevin Myers: Irish lives lost in WWII probably exceed the death toll for all domestic political violence in 20th century

By KEVIN MYERS

Wednesday November 04 2009

This Sunday is Remembrance Sunday, when we may choose to remember the Irish dead of the two world wars, or not. Whereas once Ireland shied in horror at any commemoration of these wars, they are now accepted as part of the Irish history of the 20th century.

So it stands to reason that the National Museum is part of the process of historical retrieval: for a museum's job is to revisit the past, independently of political context.

This Saturday, the Collins Barracks arm of the museum is hosting an open-day to enable people to discover their own connections with the Great War, and the hundreds of thousands of Irishmen and women who served in it.

There is an exception to the programme: to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World World II, I will be presenting a paper on the Irish involvement in that war -- or rather, a talk about the Irish losses. Because we now know that some 7,000 Irish servicemen and women died in that war, roughly equally divided north and south, and maybe another thousand Irish civilians were killed in Luftwaffe bombings. This is more than were killed between 1916-1923 or 1966-96: indeed, Irish losses in World War II, including civilian casualties, probably exceed the death toll for all the domestic political violence in the entire 20th century.

This time last year, writing on the first Irish (and British) fatal casualty of the war, Pilot Officer Willie Murphy, from Mitchelstown, Co Cork, in September 1939, I reported that the sole survivor of the raid he led, Laurence Slattery of Tipperary, had after the war lived as a recluse above a shop in his home town of Thurles. I was told this in good faith. It is apparently not true. He returned to Ireland, got married and settled down. I hope he lived the rest of his life in peace.

That story is an allegory for how we get things wrong. Which is what we do, the whole time. The truth is a mist in a darkened room full of mirrors, in which the occasional flash of light might tell us a truth, or mislead us with a mirage. Thus my research into the Irish soldiers of the war. Systematic analysis of casualty figures, which is now possible on CD Rom, has revealed that the so-called "Irish" regiments of World War II were in fact no such thing.

For contrary to widespread belief, political unionism was a clear factor in the composition of "other ranks" in the three northern infantry battalions before 1939: the Royal Ulster Rifles, the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers and the Royal Irish Fusiliers.

A study of casualties in those regiments in 1940 suggests that NO soldiers resident in what was then legally Eire had been enlisted in them. Now this could be explained by an oversupply of recruits from within an impoverished and hungry Northern Ireland: except this is not the case. For 28pc of the soldiers of those northern Irish regiments were English.

A few southern-born soldiers resident in the UK at the time of enlistment were serving in the Northern regiments. But the simple truth is that if you were from and lived in southern Ireland, you were clearly not welcome as a private soldier in the three northern infantry battalions. Yet, 281 southern-born Irish soldiers were good enough to be killed in other regiments of the British army by the end of 1940.

Matters changed after 1940, but just how they did is something I will be talking about on Saturday. Yet what is clear is that southerners thereafter were far more dispersed through the British army than they had been in World War I.

The Munster family name Power gives us a snapshot into the disparate nature of Eire service in British colours. In all, 11 Powers from Eire died in 10 British army regiments. Captain John Joseph Power (26), from Kilmallock, Co Limerick, was killed in action in Italy with the Wiltshire regiment in 1944. RAF Sergeant James Patrick Power, an air-gunner from Tramore died in a Japanese POW camp in China, in February 1945.

One Irish Patrick Power died in France in 1940 with the Bedfordshires, and another Patrick Power died with the North Lancashires in the Far East in 1941.

And now a tale of three John Walshes. John Patrick Walsh from Belfast was a gunner with the Glamorgan yeomanry. He was 22 when he was killed in September 1944, the son of Mary and John Walsh from Belfast.

Company Sergeant-Major John Walsh of the Highland Light Infantry, aged 36, was from south of the border. He was husband of Eileen Walsh, formerly O'Donoghue, and he was killed in action in Holland in 1944.

Sergeant John Walsh was also from Eire. He was an air dispatcher serving with the Army Service Corps and was killed at the Arnhem fiasco in September 1944.

Most of these minor insights do not form part of my talk on Saturday, which is just part of a day-long Remembrance weekend commemoration, and which is far more about the Great War than the Second.

Log on to www.museum.ie for a full outline of the day, and I trust my fellow contributors and I will see you there.

kmyers@independent.ie

He is referring to this event - which is labelled as a WWI event but as per the above column it will also include a talk/paper on Irish losses in WWII

http://www.museum.ie/en/list/calendar-of-events.aspx?eventID=849



* Title: Family Day: Ireland and the End of World War One
* Date From: 07/11/2009
* Date To: 07/11/2009
* Time: All Day
* Event Type: Family Events
* Event Topic: History
* Audience: ALL AGES
* Venue: Collins Barracks
* Content: A day of talks and events to mark Ireland’s involvement in World War One. All welcome.

Collins Barracks is an excellent museum for anyone who has not been and I am glad to see an event like this, the WWI day long event and also the WWII talk/paper per the above. I will definitely be attending and if anyone else wants to have a mini-ww2 board meetup let me know.

FiSe

Nice one....and I'll be stuck in the RDS for the day....wearing my poppy

Morlar

FiSe wrote: »

Nice one....and I'll be stuck in the RDS for the day....wearing my poppy

By an odd coincidence there is a ww2 related thingie on there in about 40 mins

http://www.rds.ie/cat_event_detail.jsp?itemID=80

Morlar

I was at this talk today and it was very informative and interesting. Lots of noteworthy Irish stories from WWII, so many families where the son followed their fathers WWI footsteps and joined up for WWII and both were lost. Stories of the Irishmen in the SAS, captured tortured and shot, how the first allied casualty of WWII was Irish, as was the longest serving allied Pow and so on. Other stories of Irish who died at Normandy, Arnhem, Burma etc etc One particularly notable story was of an Irish nurse, who signed up with 4 of her Irish friends and one english, they all ended up being sunk by torpedo and then being depth charged by their own side. Another woman in the audience spoke of her mother having been a nurse who was also sank only to have their own side plough through the lifeboats as it was a lights out convoy and did not see them in the darkness. Another story related how a u-boat sank a boat (can not remember the name) with approx 600 souls aboard - it stopped surfaced picked up one single survivor and left. Another story of a man who was sank 3 times during WWI and on the first boat sank in WWII and lost his life (also an Irishman).

From the analysis of the data, the conclusion seemed to be that unlike WWI the Irish in WWII were completely dispersed, many examples of groups of Irishmen who all died in seperate regiments etc. There was the conclusion that the WWII period northern regiments had almost no catholics, and that in comparison the Republic of Ireland middle class Irish contributed far more than the northern protestant middle class. Some very interesting if sometimes dense information, quite hard to digest it all - it would be good to see the paper online somewhere. There was a packed audience, q&a session afterwards and a pretty successful event all round.

There were a lot of WWI events in Collins barracks today as part of their WWI open day too, hopefully the museum will take a more proactive role from now on as judging by the crowds it was the busiest I have ever seen it.