Buying and Moving the “Stuff”
Those rifles had long been a source of secret heart-burning to us. Every time a man handled his old single-shot, short-range shotgun, he thought of those beautiful Lee-Metfords. Five
By 1919, the republicans’ experience over the previous few years argued decidedly against the old method of a single, large shipment, such as with the 1914 Howth and the 1916 Aud affairs, for overseas arms smuggling. While these episodes were great propaganda fodder, they were too haphazard and amateurishly executed to be of continuing use. Although valuable, such propaganda displays were not as important as they had been, while failure could expose the group to ridicule. Further, these types of operations exposed the movement’s leaders unnecessarily to arrest or surveillance.
As those earlier incidents demonstrated, luck was necessary for success, and while fortune smiled on the Irish Volunteers at Howth, she was disastrously absent from the Aud operation. The outcome of the Aud affair, especially for Casement, was also a stark demonstration of what usually happened when one planned for luck and of the consequences of failure. The new rebel leaders were unwilling to spend lives and treasure in such ventures, at least until they could plan an operation with precision while having sufficient resources to execute it properly.
Several other reasons argued against large shipments, not the least of which were the assets required. At the same time, the British authorities were watching more diligently than in the past. The wartime laws and those that followed cleared many obstacles to countering the rebel efforts.1 Further, the immense resources required for large-scale smuggling operations were beyond the capabilities of Volunteer units at the start of the War of Independence. The Volunteers encountered considerable difficulty with transportation, destination, and personnel.
The rebels could not just march up, take the rifles and ammunition, and march away as in the summer of 1914; that only worked once, which was why they did not try to do it at Kilcoole. The commencement of the war only increased the threat: British forces would have loved to attack a mass formation of rebels. To accommodate a massive arms shipment, the Volunteers needed to control the area long enough to land the arms and transload the shipment to safe and secure land transportation. This also meant controlling the routes to the area, which required a pier or road that could accommodate heavy transportation, either motor vehicles or draft animals, up alongside the docked ship or for those boats bringing the arms ashore. These practical shipping issues limited potential landing sites and required considerable planning for mobilization of resources and men.
Assuming the rebels found a suitable landing site, mobilized adequate manpower to secure it and the approaches to the site to offload the cargo, and had sufficient land transportation to haul it, they needed secure locations to store it. There was, of course, a shortage of suitably large and secure locations at the outset of the war, as mentioned in the previous chapters. Dispersal also protected the weapons from discovery and seizure of the whole shipment. Considering the UVF took most of the night and mobilized tens of thousands of men to land thirty thousand rifles, the Volunteers could expect to require no less.
Even a herculean effort such as Operation Lion was not going to win the war. The thirty thousand rifles that Lion brought in did not arm the remainder of the UVF. Therefore, there were limitations to what a massive operation could achieve, so the Irish Volunteers sought other methods. For these reasons, mass shipments were impractical from the outset. The leaders needed to focus the group’s energies on using its inherent strengths rather than attempting to meet the unrealistic expectations of outsiders or out-of-touch republican leaders such as Cathal Brugha and Eamon de Valera. For instance, in the late summer of 1918, Clan na Gael and John Devoy decided to land arms at Kinvara, County Galway. Mick Staines was there a week before and “found that there was great police and military activity around Kinvara. I begged of them if they were going to land arms not to land them there.”2 Harking back to the power struggles between the Irish Americans and the Irish in Ireland, the IRB, the Irish Volunteers, and the Dáil Éireann needed to remove the American Irish from the scene or at least from decision-making roles. In no small measure, this is what the establishment of the Irish Volunteers GHQ did. The new war needed a system that was more consistent than in the past but necessarily slower. The constancy of a sophisticated arrangement would prevent the Volunteers from trying to get too much too soon, thereby attracting undue attention, at least until they felt their forces were ready to transition toward conventional mobile operations as they were beginning to near the end of the war.
Capturing arms from the police and other British forces was the necessary beginning of the arduous process of rearming the IRA, but this could not satisfy the desperate need. The rebels needed suppliers with access to modern arms and munitions in sufficient quantities to provide a consistent, but relatively small, flow of arms. When they located these sources, the Volunteers found they needed full-time men in place. By far the next best source of arms and munitions for the rebels was a series, later a network, of republican arms-smuggling operations in Britain.
The arms centers obtained arms through various networks that reached out from the British Isles to the European continent and North and South America. This network consisted of scattered operations working directly for IRA units and IRB circles in Britain.3 The Irish republicans maintained five major arms centers in Britain—Bir-mingham, Glasgow, Liverpool, London, and Manchester—as well as numerous smaller satellites throughout the country that fed the larger ones. Traffic analysis provides the rough organizational structure since the major centers communicated directly with GHQ, while the satellites reported to one of the centers instead of Dublin. The large centers mostly predated the start of the new war; Glasgow and Liverpool shipped weapons and munitions to Ireland before the Rising, and many men from both went over to fight. The major centers opened the satellites either at Dublin’s suggestion or on their own.4
“Traffic analysis” is a process whereby one intercepts messages and examines their contextual aspects to understand the message-movement patterns. These analyses assemble a picture of the internal structure of a group, providing insight into its size, organizational structure, function, and so forth. This process exploits the fact that communications flow in set patterns directly in concert with organizational structure.5 When looking at GHQ in this way, one quickly finds a traditional top-down organization with just a few people at the top. In mapping out GHQ, Collins looks like a spider in the middle of its web. Perhaps a more apt analogy would have Collins as an octopus with tentacles in many domains at once representing his several key positions. He was also quite good at finding very competent staff members to work for him in the background.
This chapter surveys the arms centers and the lines of supply. By looking at how the British-based IRA and IRB got the “stuff” and how they moved it to those in the fight, the next piece of the puzzle comes into view and makes the overall picture clearer. The premiere arms center at the start of the war was Glasgow, not because it was efficient, well organized, or productive. It was none of these.6 It became the premier center during 1919 due to the efforts of a republican organizer.
Joe Vize and the Scottish Volunteers
When Collins rose to prominence in 1918, he found the arms center in Glasgow and the Volunteers there floundering. The men there had not undertaken any operations or sent anything for over a year. Collins wanted to know why. In January 1919, he sent Cmdt. Joseph Edward Vize, a certified marine engineer, Volunteer officer, and IRB member, on a fact-finding mission about the state of the local republican movement in Glasgow. As with so many of Collins’s actions, the lines of authority were somewhat gray.7
The Glasgow Battalion had formed in 1917 from four preexisting companies in and around the city. Although there were insufficient numbers, the transplanted Irish republicans formed four understrength companies so they could have a battalion. That same year, the rebels elected Seamus Reader battalion commandant.8 When Vize arrived eighteen months later, he found the republican movement there in such disarray, due to arrests and other troubles, that he just took charge of the Volunteers and the IRB. He then started reorganizing and resolving disputes between various feuding factions.9 After two failed attempts to reform, Vize asked GHQ to assume direct control of the Glasgow Battalion. Collins, never one to pass up a chance at taking control, accepted.10
Vize grouped nine companies, each formed by IRB circles in nearby towns, into the Second Battalion. From there, membership increased rapidly; by 1920, he had formed five battalions from the twenty-two companies surrounding Glasgow and created the Scottish Brigade. Its mission was clear. As Vize, told its members in 1919, the republic did not need them to fight; their most significant contribution to the war would be to provide weapons and munitions for the war.11
Dealing in the “Hardware Line” in Scotland
With the internal situation of the Volunteers and Sinn Féin finally in good hands, Vize then turned his attention to arms smuggling, the reason for his intended quick trip. The records do not provide any hints of how he did it, but Vize got the arms flowing again within just a few months of arriving. It is likely that the experienced smugglers in the units were quite ready to get back to work. By May 1919, he reported to Collins he would devote himself to “the hardware line,” using his not-too-subtle code word for munitions. For example, he hoped to get “new rifle parts complete except for the wood work, which could be made at home,” and he expected dramatic results. On 15 May 1919, the first smuggled shipment of arms from Glasgow in well over a year reached Dublin.12
Although arms and munitions were moving, there were also many disappointments. In May 1919, Vize wrote Collins saying the Glasgow center was about to receive “400 revolvers and 200,000 rounds of .303, don’t think I’ve made a mistake in the figures, its [sic] right.” This would have been momentous, but the next month he wrote back to Collins saying his unnamed source had been arrested for selling twenty-five pairs of pilfered army boots. Vize understood well the desperate nature of the Volunteers’ arms shortages in Ireland and apologized to Collins, saying, “The worst part of it is filling you and the boys up with such hopes only to be dashed to the ground.” However, this was only a temporary setback; Vize quickly resumed shipments to Ireland.13
By the latter part of 1919, Vize had made more significant inroads into the local area. In September, he met with an arms factory worker who claimed he could supply weapons. The man was ready to deliver, but the Scottish Brigade could not “rush this job because the man (Storekeeper) will not take money from us until after we get the stuff so must wait for him.” It is unclear from the fragmentary record if this source ever came through. They also began to exploit the many shooting ranges in that area of Scotland, which, lacking substantial security, were easy targets, but their yield was considerably less than the other major sources. Still, in a raid on a Dumbarton range, the republicans took eight thousand rounds of ammunition and expected similar a yield from another at Barrhead.14 This was when Vize expanded the operation and recruited men to act as purchasing agents throughout Scotland.15 To hold the larger amounts of matériel coming in, the growing center established a new arms dump on Dorset Street in Glasgow. Not surprisingly, the new buyers worked with Vize to systematize the purchasing process in Scotland (see chapter 6).
Britain was a good source for weapons; with the end of the Great War late in 1918, the British army started the normally slow process of demobilizing its massive force, which had been built up over the preceding four years, releasing three and a half million men in less than two years. This was neither carefully timed nor implemented. Soldiers turned in equipment and weapons at processing stations, leaving the few army demobilization centers with tens of thousands of weapons. Such large stockpiles of rifles were obvious targets for exploitation and, considering the speed of the demobilization, proper accounting must have been difficult. It was not that the rebels were going to raid a demobilization station and take hundreds of rifles—this would have brought on a host of problems, not the least of which would have been transportation. They needed to take advantage of the rapid drawdown and contact someone inside a station that was willing to sell a steady supply of weapons over time. Vize did this just about six months into the demobilization in the summer of 1919.
In August, Vize received rifles from an army quartermaster sergeant at Hamilton Barracks in Lanarkshire. The following month, he met an ex–sergeant major who promised weapons from the various military posts in the area; the same source also said he might be able to get Lewis guns. After the debacle of their source’s arrest in May, Vize was loath to provide too many details for fear of giving false hope. The ex–sergeant major came through with some of the weapons and provided other contacts. Unfortunately, the records are fragmentary, and the next correspondence with Collins on this issue was four months later, in January 1920, when Vize reported that he had people inside Hamilton Barracks,16 Maryhill Barracks,17 Glasgow, and the Georgetown and Kinross demobilization stations. He said they “have all started working together” and then asked for £1,000 to purchase more weapons from these suppliers.18 By February 1920, the flow of rifles and pistols was steady, albeit slow.
Vize found a sergeant in the machine gun section at Dunfermline who was willing to give him ten guns. Unfortunately, the records do not indicate why this sale did not go through. It is difficult to believe, however, that a sergeant would have access to that many machine guns that would not be missed. It is not altogether clear why Vize had so much trouble finding machine guns to buy. In fact, he complained to Collins in mid-1920 that he found it impossible to get them, even having “offered up to £70.”19 The few machine guns the IRA had were mostly captured in combat or stolen in raids in Ireland.
Explosives Acquisition
Although Vize began buying weapons and ammunition early in his mission, the Glasgow arms center was most robust, with explosives that it obtained from miners in the Glasgow area. By mid-1920, Glasgow was already responsible for most IRA explosives coming from overseas. At about the same time, the center also reached a level of specificity that it began procuring types of explosives for varying capabilities and different needs. Vize even sent some of the new types back to James O’Donovan and Rory O’Connor for testing to understand the explosives’ capabilities.20
There were two methods of stealing these substances and their associated detonators and cords. The local battalion could raid the stores of a commercial company using them. This was simple and direct but risky. It had considerable drawbacks beyond the chances of getting caught. It could shut the operation down by possibly cutting off the supply to the company permanently. Most importantly, it would alert authorities to these substances being in the hands of the rebels, and they might have been more inclined to search more vigorously on their own soil.21
The other approach involved a safer and more reliable, but slower, process. The miners using explosives during their regular work had already been stealing explosives. As many of them were Volunteers, this was their contribution to the war. Others, however, were paid for what they stole. This method was also a useful for obtaining a variety of explosives. When describing it to Collins, Vize said that “they can only get these [sticks of explosives] in ones or twos, the watch is so keen on them, but between this place & three others I expect to be able to meet your demands.” Even with this slow method, operations were moving sufficiently in Scotland that in mid-1920 Vize expanded to other regions and asked for more money to continue the flow of equipment and weapons.22
The British army, private companies, and rifle ranges were not the only sources of weapons for the Glasgow arms center; it had its sources overseas too, primarily Germany. Vize, working in the ports, developed contacts in them. An unnamed captain of a boat sailing directly to Hamburg came back with seventeen revolvers and new contacts there. Vize also said he was working on new suppliers in other parts of Ger-many. While the other arms centers also had contacts in Germany, GHQ thought it was essential to have multiple links with the Germans in case one was cut off.23 The Glasgow center was critical to supply activities for many reasons, especially the volume of traffic, but it had trouble moving the “stuff” to Ireland, and so it reached out to the other centers in Britain.
Manchester, London, and Birmingham
As mentioned already, Manchester reported directly to Collins and trafficked arms by shipping them through Liverpool, as did the other centers. Under the direction of Patrick O’Donoghue, it had a robust arms trade, which was mostly from within England and Wales. For instance, O’Donoghue found a dockworker who handled government cargo and could get small amounts of weapons and other equipment. Gerard Noonan recounts that by November 1920, Manchester, with GHQ’s approval, had opened a line directly to Cork to ease some of the arms-supply problems there. Manchester had tendrils in Newcastle and South Wales. London also acquired weapons but, being a port city, also had shipping duties like the Liverpool center and may have operated occasionally under its direction.24
The London center developed from the Liverpool and Manchester operations, as both worked in the city’s arms trade. By mid-1919, when this became too much for either center to oversee, Steven Lanigan in Liverpool recommended that GHQ appoint someone to serve as London purchaser. Collins appointed Sean McGrath, already residing in London and secretary of the Irish Self-Determination League. While McGrath was the London purchasing agent, performing the same tasks as Neill Kerr and Patrick O’Daly in Liverpool (see below), Vize in Glasgow, and O’Donoghue in Manchester, Art O’Brien was the “senior” republican in London, although his relationship with McGrath is uncertain.25 What is also unclear is O’Brien’s relationships with the other center chiefs in Britain. It appears the main effort of the London Volunteers was to establish contact with sources, transmit information to the other IRA battalions in Britain, and steal passports.26
Although dependent on Liverpool for some of its shipping needs, the London center soon produced as much as the other centers. In this, McGrath was helped by the Browne brothers, Robert and Edmond, of Islington.27 London received arms and ammunition from the United States and Buenos Aires directly and then sent them overland to Liverpool. McGrath also opened satellite offices throughout England and Wales but focused primarily on the northeastern coast. He continued his operations until his arrest and internment in early 1921. Sam Maguire, the IRB head of center in London,28 took over after McGrath’s arrest. In many respects, Maguire was a perfect choice to lead London. Sam and his brothers Dick and Jack were sorters in the post office and from a staunchly nationalist Protestant family.29
In any research into arms trafficking in this era, one naturally encounters Birmingham, long a center of industry (including firearms manufacturing) due to its proximity to coal and transportation. As demonstrated in chapter 2, it was a prime source for the UVF and the early nationalist Volunteer movements. After the Rising, however, Birmingham saw little republican traffic until 1920, when a welder and Glasgow IRB man, James Cunningham, helped to establish a Volunteer company in the city. The Volunteers raised funds for arms but then began to obtain arms and send them directly to Dublin’s Third Battalion. In early 1921, Cunningham went to Dublin, met with McMahon, then QMG, and Collins and convinced them to establish an arms center at Birmingham with Cunningham in charge. This appears to have been under IRB auspices. On his return, Cunningham went through Liverpool and met with O’Daly, the new head there, to establish shipping protocols. The Birmingham center commenced smuggling operations and began sending munitions through Liverpool to Dublin for GHQ.30
Liverpool: The Transport Office
As with Glasgow, the Liverpool arms center was also active and a significant component of the growing republican arms network in Britain. Initially established by the IRB within the first decade of the century from about 1914, it was under the leadership of IRB head of center Neill Kerr.31 Although Kerr later described himself as “chief transport officer” in Liverpool, Joe Vize said Kerr was in “charge of the purchasing of Arms, Ammunition, and all war material in Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, etc.” From contemporary correspondence, Kerr was the senior-most IRA or IRB man in the Irish republican arms network in England and Wales.32 The relationship with the Scottish Brigade was to provide transportation. Reporting directly to GHQ, this group, supported by the Liverpool Volunteers under Michael O’Leary, also an IRB man, was more of a relay, transportation, and contracting station. At the same time, it acquired arms locally, although on a smaller scale than some of the other centers. By 1919, Kerr and O’Leary decided to combine the Volunteers and the IRB locally, under Kerr, since they mostly did the same work. This decision came back to haunt them when the leadership of both organizations in Liverpool was arrested together in November 1920, crippling their operations for several months.
The unification of effort, the ensuing simplification of operations, and the streamlining of processes made the Liverpool center the natural conduit and way station to Ireland. Liverpool was also the most significant and busiest seaport in Britain, so having the center there serve Manchester made practical sense since Manchester’s seagoing traffic passed Liverpool via the Manchester Ship Canal anyway, but Glasgow and London received arms directly from overseas.33 Thus, it is somewhat counterintuitive that it was easier and safer to transport the cargo to Liverpool rather than directly to Ireland from Glasgow and London.
The leaders in Glasgow recognized as early as 1918 that their units were more successful getting arms than transporting them. Rail and motor vehicle were the only realistic means of transporting them the approximately 220 miles from Glasgow to Liverpool. Accordingly, Glasgow’s leaders detailed nine men of A Company (Motherwell), Second Battalion, as a transportation section. The procedure these men established was to take the six-and-a-half-hour passenger train to Liverpool with the weapons in their luggage. On arrival, they contacted the center and transferred the arms stereotypically in a pub. There does not appear to have been a regular schedule, but it is likely they warned the Liverpool leadership that they were coming. After returning to Glasgow, they usually headed to their jobs to avoid losing pay. The Volunteers continued these arms runs to Liverpool during the truce.34 The risks and hardships they endured in this were considerable, but it appears that none were captured doing this, nor did they lose any weapons.
The arms network transportation trouble culminated in late 1919 in Glasgow when Vize realized that his rapidly filling storage space was hampering procurement because he had to wait to receive new weapons or exploit new sources until he had sufficient room for them. By mid-February 1920, Vize sent two men to Kerr to establish the communications protocols and procedures between the two centers. By mid-March, Glasgow was shipping large amounts of munitions, usually several pounds of high explosives and dozens of firearms, each month to Dublin via Liverpool. This system worked well but became an accounting nightmare for GHQ recordkeepers.35 The centers did not always label the packages, allowing them all to mix; thus, Collins, a stickler for keeping meticulous records, did not know whom to reimburse.36
In May 1920, after Vize left Scotland to assume duty as director of purchases, Henry Coyle assumed leadership of the Glasgow arms center. Vize had wanted the Liverpool men to pick up shipments twice weekly, but Coyle instead decided to use a truck to transfer the munitions from Glasgow to Liverpool.37 During one such trip, in November 1920, Coyle and Charles Strickland were driving their truck to Liverpool when the headlights went out, a strangely common occurrence with Coyle. The pair pulled into a garage to have them fixed, where the mechanics found the munitions and called the police. Coyle and Strickland were arrested, and tried with the defendants from the Liverpool Docks fire (see below), getting ten years at hard labor.38
As mentioned already, the Liverpool IRA had its procurement and other operations. For, although arranging the shipment of arms from the other centers was a full-time job, the center also got weapons and munitions locally, from its satellite offices, and through overseas suppliers. In 1920, for instance, it raided the Gordon Institute on Stanley Road for rifles and ammunition, but much of their weapons acquisition took place in nearby cities and towns, and the main thrust of its operations was receiving from overseas sources.39
From early on in the war, the men of the Liverpool and Manchester battalions wanted to conduct combat operations, but the leaders resisted, thinking this would hamper their primary function. By late 1920, the leadership finally agreed, and, with the assistance of GHQ, the two battalions planned to destroy the Manchester Ship Canal locks, docks, and any ships moored within.40 In an astounding lack of security, police captured the plan in a raid on Professor Michael Hayes home in Dublin, when Dick Mulcahy barely escaped, supposedly in his pajamas, leaving his briefcase and papers behind. The diversionary mission plan, setting fire to the Liverpool docks warehouses, however, was not mentioned in the captured documents.41 The Liverpool and Manchester battalions went through with this part of the plan as the main effort and caused £2,500,000 in damage.42 Afterward, the police conducted sweeps and mass arrests, primarily in Liverpool, and captured most of the leaders and many of the members. This halted all transportation operations from the Liverpool center.
After the arrests, GHQ did not know who was in charge in Liverpool or, indeed, if anyone was left. About two weeks later, Collins received word from Patrick Gabriel O’Daly,43 one of the few remaining Liverpool men, that he was in charge, but Collins did not know O’Daly or anything about him.44 Eventually, O’Daly went to Dublin and met with Collins and the relevant GHQ staff, and Liverpool started pushing matériel to Dublin at an accelerated rate. In some respects, he was a better logistician than his predecessors and was more responsive to GHQ requirements.45
Part of the fallout from the arrests was not only a backlog of matériel awaiting shipment from Liverpool but also the compromise of its storage. At the scene of one of the fires, police found burned a “unique” paraffin container. An informant named Kathleen Brown, a primary schoolteacher, and her younger sister Sheila, a pharmacy clerk and captain of the Liverpool Cumann na mBan, as the purchasers.46 When police raided their mother’s house at Laburnam Grove in Litherland, they arrested the widow, both daughters, and some Volunteers staying with them. Although policemen searched the house and found some weapons, they did not find the primary cache of weapons hidden there. O’Daly wanted to get the remaining supplies out of the house, but the police kept it under continual surveillance for several weeks. The women, in jail for almost three months, were finally released on 12 February 1921 when the prosecution dropped the charges against them. O’Daly removed the munitions in March 1921.47
The republicans drew great matériel support from the arms centers in Britain. They also communicated with the Irish diaspora and the rest of the world. Although their “combat operations” were limited, the British IRA brigades were the conduit for arms to Ireland, without which the IRA would likely have lost the war outright. However, obtaining the arms was only part of the struggle. The rebels also needed to move them to Ireland.
Transportation
Getting the arms to those who needed them was a critical factor in the fight to keep the war going. It did not matter what they cast in the foundry on Parnell Street or what they smuggled into Britain or what O’Donovan concocted in his laboratories if these items did not get into the hands of the rank-and-file Volunteers. If ordinary rebels did not have rifles and ammunition, they could not fight. Considering the government surveillance under which the Volunteers were operating, this was a tall order. To be successful, any network had to be sufficiently robust to withstand the regular flow of matériel from multiple locations around the world, while evading capture by the various police organizations, Customs, the army, the coastguard, and the Royal Navy, among others.48 Moreover, the Volunteers needed substantial numbers of arms; one rifle was hardly a threat to anything but individuals. Firepower resided in groups, not individuals.
In addition to this, the transportation system had to function within Ireland where there were fewer prohibitions on search and seizure. Thus, arms smuggling was divided into two closely related categories: local and nonlocal. Local smuggling included all intra-island transportation once reaching Ireland’s shores. Since the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) or the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act (ROIA) were in place through the duration of the conflict, any movement in Britain had to be considered nonlocal. This section examines these aspects of internal and external transportation, the means and methods of smuggling and transporting, and the arms trade in Britain.
Local Trafficking
The Dublin Brigade was more sophisticated and mature than the brigades in most other counties. In one sense, this meant it was more capable. The problem was Dublin was the only substantial urban area in which the Volunteers operated. No other city came close in size and threat, save Belfast, and the IRA more than had its hands full there.
As mentioned in chapter 4, the QMG Department included a transportation officer in its organization. Each brigade, battalion, company, and, eventually, division, had a quartermaster staff that mirrored, in theory at least, the QMG’s. The positions in this structure became more critical at the battalion and brigade levels; whether this happened in practice at the company level depended on location, era, strength, enemy disposition, and so forth. Jack Teegan, for instance, became the company transportation officer of A Company, First Battalion, Cork First Brigade, in January 1921, while Andrew Kirwan acted as such for the West Waterford Flying Column. Depending on locale, sometimes even small units needed quartermasters.49
Transportation officers essentially had the same job at each level of the hierarchy: to move anything that needed to be moved anywhere in their regions.50 In practice, when a shipment came into a brigade, the brigade transportation officer received it. If the matériel needed to be distributed to the subordinate battalions, he did this through the lower units’ transportation officers, although the actual means is somewhat obscure.51 In theory, the system used receipts to track items from one end of the cycle to the other.
The duties of the transportation officer revolved around conveyance. Indeed, it appears that one of the more common qualifications to be a transportation officer was either owning a car or at least knowing how to drive one.52 Early in the war, animal-powered transportation and bicycles were most common, but by late 1920 and early 1921, motor vehicles were more practical, and transportation officers frequently kept records of available transportation in their areas. For instance, for use in an emergency, the Sixth Battalion, Dublin Brigade, had a seventeen-page typed list, by name of owner, address, make, model, and number of seats, of all motor vehicles in its area, indicating that greater mobility and speed was becoming necessary.53 Such battalion and brigade lists also speak to the rebels’ excellent information-gathering abilities.54 They were supposed to update their lists quarterly.
Many of the men who served in these positions slipped into relative obscurity after the war, and they are largely forgotten. Thus, it is unclear who was the GHQ transportation officer before Joe Vize’s appointment as director of purchases and director of transportation in the summer of 1920. John “Jack” Plunkett performed the duties, if not actually held the title, before him. Brother of Joseph M. and George and son of the formidable Count Plunkett, Jack maintained a motor pool to ensure communications, with bicycles and motorcycles for dispatch riders.55 He usually worked in Rory O’Connor’s Engineering Office of GHQ, but he sometimes worked directly for the QMGs or Collins.56
If GHQ needed to transport cargo within city limits, Plunkett sent a motorcar or a van. There is no indication how many motor vehicles GHQ owned or, indeed, if it owned any at all; having lists such as that of Dublin’s Sixth Battalion was one method around ownership. The problem with ownership was the paper trail it left, and while there were indeed ways around this, GHQ did not find it beneficial enough to outweigh the costs. The outlying brigades also tried to obtain motor vehicles but also found it too expensive.57 By the end of the war, this began to change, especially in the south.
The other, more straightforward, means were either to use the motorcars of sympathizers, which shifted the financial burden to them, or to steal them. The former endangered supporters’ vehicles, while theft, although enshrined in republican song,58 was also problematic as the theft report to the police could go out at any moment, so holding onto the “commandeered” vehicle for any longer than necessary was dangerous.
Developing Secure Transportation
The IRA had to move the weapons, ammunition, chemicals, components, equipment, explosives, raw materials, or even information to whoever required them. This part of the war was crucial, yet this one area of logistics is frequently misunderstood. In the early part of the war, transportation was not difficult because the various government authorities were lax in their surveillance, but over time they became more attentive and more sophisticated. Thus, when they applied pressure in the form of increased searches of the various means of transportation, primarily trains and ships, IRA transportation became increasingly more difficult. The QMG, Sean McMahon, in that truce-era report to Cathal Brugha, put it succinctly:
The purchase of materials is a simple matter compared with our transport difficulties. The removal of material from point to point on land and sea until it reaches this country. The difficulty in landing, storing and distributing materials in the country, cannot be grasped by the average man, even in the army, but can only be realized by those who have to overcome the difficulties.
Their answer to this challenge took time to develop but was well organized.59
Messengers
It has become somewhat cliché in Ireland that seemingly everyone’s grandmother (or, nowadays, great-grandmother) carried messages for Michael Collins during the war. Remarkably, one should not automatically discount what some might see as flights of fancy on the part of aged women or wishful thinking of their progeny because Collins employed numerous couriers, many of them young women.
Republican couriers came from two categories of people: men who traveled as part of their work and women. Neither group aroused suspicion due to circumstances. In his memoirs, the last British military commander in Ireland, Gen. Nevil Macready claimed that even milkmen carried messages for the IRA on their deliveries,60 which is possible because the rebels organized messengers by route. For instance, rail and transportation workers, truck drivers, and delivery men in Ireland worked intra-Ireland transportation, while sailors maintained communication with the outside world in accordance with the lines and routes they worked. Considering the large numbers employed, this lack of suspicion was not bound to last for long.
Once British authorities discovered seafarers were working for the rebels (there are no indications how they found out), they began searching them at debarkation, necessitating more creative means of dispatching rebel cargo. In the first few months of 1921, British authorities raided seamen’s lodgings in Liverpool looking for evidence against them. Luckily for the rebels, they found nothing.61
There were also times when Collins needed someone to work on a specific route but was unable to recruit a trustworthy man already working on it. In these instances, there was another option. Collins used agents working in the British sailors’ union to get men hired, which was not an easy process because the candidate needed to clear through apprenticeships. One such agent was Barney Kiernan; another was Thomas Hoare. Sometimes personality conflicts got in the way. For instance, in early 1921, O’Daly wrote to Collins saying that Hoare worked in the sailor’s union and was “rather luke-warm and must be approached in a certain way to get a favour [emphasis original] from him. He is almost indispensable as he is very useful in getting sailors registered.” These agents smoothed the process and, in several cases, placed men on most of the essential routes using old union personnel books. Of course, the agents also assisted the recruitment among the people already working at sea. Collins was rarely concerned about not being able to get a man aboard a route or vessel; it merely took time.62
Most of the male couriers to Ireland were able seamen or worked on these ships in another capacity, frequently as stewards. They worked for the major shipping companies, such as the White Star and the Cunard lines, for transatlantic runs; the British and Irish Steam Packet Company (B & I), Moore & McCormick, and the City of Dublin Steam Packet Company, for regular service between Liverpool and Irish ports, especially Dublin; and other vessels, such as the Guinness Boats.63 O’Daly said the B & I ship ss Blackrock was essentially the Liverpool republican “flagship” and had multiple men working aboard, while SS Wicklow had Paddy Weafer.64 There was a Michael Blythe on SS Kildare hauling arms and munitions for them, while the Guinness Boat SS Clarecastle had a man called Tom McGlew working for the IRB. The Drogheda Steam Packet Company had W. Gardiner of North Strand on SS Colleen Bawn. An Englishmen, Billy Humphreys, on the ocean liner RMS Celtic, was instrumental in hiding de Valera on his return from the United States. The mate of the Dublin Steam Packet Company’s SS Lady Carlow, a man called Hackett, brought “the Chief” to the North Wall after changing ships in Liverpool.65
Easter Rising veteran Paddy Supple, who had been interned in Knutsford for a time, was a courier between Liverpool and Glasgow. It is not clear what brought him to Liverpool, but like so many others, he remained active in the republican cause. He also demonstrates a difference with the oceangoing couriers. He was a member of the IRA and was working in the arms trade before he became a courier.66 The oceangoing couriers were unassociated with the republican movement beforehand. The transatlantic men, according to O’Daly, received pay for their trouble but not “in proportion to the risks taken.” He did not say why the payments started, but “it may have been started to compensate” for expenses incurred. There was also no indication why the other couriers were not paid.67
Cork, Dublin, Dundalk, and Londonderry also had enough sea traffic to make them valuable for smuggling, mostly from Britain but occasionally from the United States or the continent. Belfast, although an important port, was usually too dangerous to use regularly. The Volunteers and IRB had men in many countries (see table 5.1). The primary hub for inbound arms traffic in Ireland was Dublin, and Liverpool acted in the same capacity for Britain and the continent; New York served the same purpose for the Western Hemisphere. Indeed, Sean Nunan, in New York, was in charge of the clearinghouse for the IRA, Sinn Féin, and the Dáil from his Fifth Avenue office. He transmitted money, weapons, ammunition, and messages between the rebel contacts throughout North and South America to Liverpool and sometimes to Collins directly.68
O’Daly was correct when he said the payments to the couriers were not enough to pay for the risks they took. Quite a few couriers were caught and detained. This could prove disastrous. For instance, Volunteer William Barry, a stoker on SS City of New York, was arrested on debarking at Southampton in October 1920 with his dispatches. Collins asked his contact to “repeat all messages. I can only hope they were not as important as I fear they were.” Interestingly, there was another courier on the same ship, who “got through without interruption.”69 Collins believed Barry had acted suspiciously and attracted attention.
The other factor evident from this incident was that the couriers did not always know each other. This also meant that the leadership in Dublin or Liverpool could watch their couriers surreptitiously. This factor still did not prevent some couriers from discarding their packets or packages at the slightest hint of trouble, real or imagined. Not only was this aggravating due to the loss of vital supplies but also regarding information that did not get through under such circumstances. While the couriers usually did not know the contents of their parcels, they could guess accurately enough based on size, shape, and weight. Collins had to punish some couriers with suspension or relief for such actions. Couriers carried not only documents and parcels but cash, checks, bearer bonds, and other valuables too. Some couriers were downright dishonest and just stole valuable cargo, then vanished.70
Couriers transported the materials using various means depending on the size and required security. The easiest method and the least secure was merely to carry them on their person. Another simple way was to place them in their baggage. Since it was impossible for the British officials to search all bags and cargo coming from a ship, this was a simple issue of odds. The authorities narrowed their searches by looking for suspicious activities in conjunction with whatever intelligence was available, but the couriers usually had the advantage by keeping close watch of how officials were conducting dockside inspections.71
Table 5.1. International Republican Representatives
| Country | Representative |
|---|---|
| Argentina | Eamon Bulfin |
| Chile | Frank Egan |
| Germany | John Chartres |
| London | Arthur O’Brien |
| France | Sean T. O’Callaigh |
| Italy | George Gavan Duffy |
| Soviet Union | Dr. P. McCartan |
| United States | Harry Boland and Sean Nunan |
Sources: “Republican/Dail Representatives Abroad,” 6 June 1921, TNA HO 317/49. See also Brian P. Murphy, John Chartres: Mystery Man of the Treaty (Dublin: Irish Academic, 1995), 31–36.
Getting the “stuff” aboard the ships was tricky due to government surveillance; police and Customs officers roamed the docks when not actively searching vessels, again looking for anything suspicious. Most of the people involved in rebel smuggling were low-ranking members of the working class, which, in a class-conscious world, provided an advantage. In this, seamen, stevedores, and train porters and guards all had a hand in transportation work since they were the few people who could tamper with cargo without attracting undue attention. Still, they had to walk right past policemen or Customs officers while carrying arms and ammunition, explosives, and documents. One preferred means was to pack the weapons, usually rifles, in sailors’ large seabags. Based on O’Daly scolding Collins several times for not returning the bags promptly, one would have to surmise that the seafarers hid items well among their dirty clothing and other personal items. Not returning the bags quickly enough meant the couriers probably lost the use of their items and clothing until they were. Of course, many of these men were effectively transient; these items may have been virtually all they owned.72 Another method was to sling the disassembled rifles around the neck on a cable and hang them down the back and sides of one’s body, which was covered with a long overcoat, reminiscent of the smuggling of grenades in Dublin.73 Still another means was shipping the metal parts in containers with false bottoms and in barrels with corn, flour, or anything else that could mask them.74 Many of these same techniques worked for overland transportation too.
In at least two instances, however, the arms centers had higher-ranking help: two ship captains volunteered their assistance to the cause. Capt. John Higgins, master of SS Kittywake, brought undisclosed matériel to Manchester from the Continent.75 This certainly may have eased some of the problems, but if the availability of the materials did not match the sailing schedules, their willingness to assist was moot. At the same time, it is questionable how quickly a ship’s captain could smuggle certain arms; his presence in the hold might attract the notice of his crew, and if it was not wholly reliable, he could have trouble. Of course, he could smuggle smaller loads without being questioned; as a ship’s captain, he was mostly above suspicion.
Collins was open to reasonable suggestions that might improve smuggling success rates. A good example came from late in the war when O’Daly, sent a letter to Collins in the middle of June 1921, forwarding an idea from a man called Boylan suggesting they could ship arms and ammunition in bacon barrels directly into Ireland. He mentioned that Sean McMahon was a bacon wholesaler and had an established reputation. Although he was then on the run, they could use his still functioning company as a front. Another alternative was to establish a new company, something he did not want to do for fear of attracting unwanted attention, or acquire a firm in Leeds to do so.76 GHQ was still exploring the idea when the truce came.
All of this was mere preparation because all the expenditure in time, lives, and property only brought the matériel to the United Kingdom or Ireland. On arrival in Ireland, the real fight began, for the “stuff” needed to be received, counted, and inventoried and then dispersed to the rest of the IRA. To do this required considerable skill and coordination with the other internal modes of transportation, especially the railways.
Railway Workers and Arms Traffic
Railways were the primary mode of transporting large quantities of goods over a distance in Ireland, supplanting rivers and canals. Typically trains were the speediest means of transportation too. Railways were much more than this, for not only did the railwaymen take an active part in the war against British logistics in 1920 with the “Munition Strike,”77 they also were invaluable because they transported information, arms, munitions, and other cargo surreptitiously for the republican cause. During the war, there were innumerable guards, engineers, firemen, ticket clerks, stewards, and other rail personnel working for the IRA throughout Ireland, just as many seamen did overseas. They seemed to have agents on every route—sometimes several at the same location—making the Volunteers appear omnipresent. Not surprisingly, they focused on ensuring “the railway communications should be as perfect as we can possibly make them.”78
In March 1920, Collins wrote to Sean Gormley, commandant of the Louth Brigade, saying the Monaghan Brigade would help establish railway communications linking Dundalk and Derry. After two months, Collins wrote him again asking if he had done anything with this. A few days later, Gormley replied saying he had a man at Dundalk who would receive and transmit anything to and from Enniskillen and Dublin.79 Another example of rail communications came from the Cork Second Brigade and the Kerry First Brigade, to whom Collins could send anything needed through Mallow. For their part, the Cork Second Brigade came up with three additional men, all porters, who could work at Mallow: Dennis Bennett, Tom Healy, and Jack Roche. They started the flow of information and arms shortly thereafter.80 On 5 June 1920, Collins again wrote Gormley saying they needed to focus attention on this again because it would “open up communications with the North West.” Collins wanted to use a Fermanagh Brigade officer, Andrew Breslin, a guard on the Dundalk-to-Enniskillen line. Gormley responded over two weeks later that Breslin changed trains in Dundalk and there was insufficient time in between trains for him to be very useful but that they were now relaying packages and that the communication with Enniskillen was “definitely arranged.”81 In November 1920, Collins wrote the Longford Brigade asking for more information about its communications situation. On 18 November 1920, it responded, saying there were three reliable people at the Longford Station: a Ms. Skeffington, who worked in the booking office as a clerk; Patrick McKeon, a signalman; and Owen Kilmeade, the platform foreman.82 There is no indication in the records whether they employed any of these people for shipping duties, but there were people everywhere willing to help. Similar organizational development continued around the country through to the end of the war.
The Roles of Women
It was with women that the republican ideals clashed with traditional Irish mores. The men were entirely willing to invoke Our Lady of Knock or call for the intercession of Saint Bridget but were frequently unwilling to accept women as equals generally. While Sinn Féin allowed women to act as judges and advocates in its court system, that became the extent of women’s official participation in the hierarchy, with the exception, of course, of Constance Markievicz as a teachta dála, or TD (similar to an MP), in the Dáil Éireann. Women were generally unable to use their full potential because of paternalistic attitudes.
Thus, the roles women filled in the revolution were like those of other revolutions of the era—mainly the roles their society expected of them. This was, in many ways, a conservative revolution. The members of Cumann na mBan, formed in April 1914, sought to provide money and assistance to the Volunteers. Although they were not usually permitted to fight as soldiers, women still performed critical services. This work was arduous, thankless, and usually corresponded to traditional feminine roles but needed to be done. Worse still, it took decades for women to receive any recognition, let alone what they were due.83 According to the documents presented to the Military Service Pension Board (MSPB), Margaret Skinnider oversaw the antitreaty IRA QMG accounts in the Four Courts building up to the fall. She then claimed to have acted as QMG under Mellows’s direction until Boland became QMG in July. On his arrest later that month, Skinnider said she was again “acting” QMG until her arrest at Christmas 1922, after which Nora Connolly O’Brien took over under the direction of Austin Stack.84 This may have been due to their sex, but it may have also been due to the original difficulty antitreaty republicans had obtaining pensions, as well as that the board had already recognized Joseph O’Connor as QMG of the antitreaty side.85 It is likely that O’Connor, as quartermaster of the First Southern Division, simply took over as QMG with the official vacancy.
Women constituted a separate group altogether because they were not recruited in the same manner as men, nor could they be used in the same way. The patriarchal nature of Irish society at the time led to the underestimation of women working in the republican cause. The women of the republican movement, primarily Cumann na mBan, were usually relegated to supporting, but no less critical, functions. The sex-specific and dirty tasks fell to them: cook, washing, mending and sewing, secretarial and clerical duties, nursing, and so forth.86 However unglamorous these tasks were, they were absolutely imperative. While it is too bad that many women were forced into these roles, it is also too bad that later generations have underrated the value these activities brought to the fighting men. This is not, however, the whole story, because the republicans, although governed by patriarchal ideas and mores, still recognized them in their foes and exploited them.87
Since many men seemed to hold them mostly incapable of serious political thought, women turned this nasty attitude around and moved smoothly, and almost unmolested, through city streets during daytime. Since British men were generally loath to search women, Macready asked for more female personnel to assist in searching suspects. For these reasons, women were outstanding short-distance intracity couriers.88
The women who operated as couriers invariably were likewise members of Cumann na mBan. The members of Cumann were invaluable to the struggle and, while the war would have continued without them, the cost would have risen significantly indeed. Women in the railway industry worked primarily as ticket clerks, and their duties did not require them to travel. Their duties did, however, placed them in a position to access to critical links in the transportation hubs. They could receive and transfer packages, provide transportation to rebels, and generally act as points of contact along the line. Some ran way stations for other couriers.89
Since most women did not usually travel alone over long distances, they were less frequently used for cross-country transportation, but such opportunities were certainly exploited when they arose. Exceptions to this were Alice Coogan, who transported great amounts of matériel, especially ammunition, pistols, and explosives, from Glasgow to Dublin; Annie Mooney, who, with Pridge Robinson, transported ammunition to Dublin from Glasgow somewhat regularly; and Madge Hales, who had three brothers in the movement and acted as a courier between her brother Donal in Genoa and Ireland.90
Through the organizational acumen of Collins, Vize, Kerr, O’Daly, and other leaders, the hard work of countless men and women, the far-reaching network of republicans and sympathizers worldwide, the infiltration of various public and private bodies, and the determination of regular Volunteers, the IRA slowly armed and equipped itself. Although rebels in the field were usually not satisfied and wanted more, it is safe to say that this is almost always the case; one rarely hears of armies complaining of being oversupplied. The struggle continued to escalate and showed no apparent signs of abating by the end of the war. Indeed, the scope and scale of the IRA’s support activities expanded through the truce.