The Irish Trench Raiders Were Way Worse Than You Think
The men who had been through Mons through the retreat through first Epra carried a specific quality of knowledge about what the war actually was.
This knowledge was transferred not always explicitly to the men who arrived later.
The Irish regiments absorbed their dead, rebuilt, and went back into the line with the accumulated weight of what had happened to them already shaping how they approached what came next.
The second Royal Dublin fuseliers were at second in May 1915 when the Germans released a poison gas cloud against the Allied positions in the salient.
The Dublins were one of the units directly in the path of the attack.
They had entered the line with 666 personnel.
21 survived the gas attack intact.
645 men were killed, wounded or incapacitated by chlorine gas in a single operation.
The battalion that had existed as a functioning military formation ceased to exist in terms of its original personnel in the time it took for a windborn gas cloud to move across no man’s land.
The royal in his killing fuseliers had been engaged simultaneously at secondra at Gallipoli in 1915 and at the som in 1916 in different battalions sustaining enormous losses in each theater.
The first inniskillings at Gallipoli, the ninth and tth inkillings at the Schwaban redout on the som and multiple other battalions in multiple other engagements were all rebuilt from the same regimental depot in a mug refilled with dairmen and firm men and donagal men and sent back into the line.
The Canort Rangers went through the same process in a different theater, fighting at Salonica and in Mesopotamia and the Middle East, while other Irish regiments were ground through Fllanders and the Psalm.
By 1916, the Irish regiments had been through enough to have a specific relationship with violence that was different from units that had spent less time in the war and lost fewer men to it.
This is not a comfortable observation, and it is not presented here as either praise or condemnation.
It is a documented characteristic of formations that have been subject to sustained extreme attrition.
The survivors develop a pragmatic relationship with killing that lacks the moral complexity their initial recruitment might have carried.
The monsters who conducted the Levven raid had been through langar loose and Gallipoli.
The men who went over the parapet in June 1916 were not the men who had enlisted in 1914.
They were the men who had survived everything that had killed the men who enlisted in 1914.
And they understood the war in a way that the dead did not.
Now we come to the men, the specific individuals whose stories carry the Irish raiding experience beyond abstraction and into the particular.
Michael John Olirri was born on September 29th, 1888 at Kilbury Lodge in Inagilla near Mackram in County Cork.
His father was a small farmer.
He enlisted in the British army as a young man.
left after his service was complete and immigrated to Canada in 1913 where he joined the Northwest Mounted Police.
When war broke out in August 1914, he returned to Britain and rejoined the Irish Guards.
By November 1914, he was in France serving as orderly to Lieutenant Inis in First Battalion Irish Guards number one company.
On January 30th, 1915, the German army launched a successful operation near Quenshi on the Labase Canal and seized a stretch of canal embankment from a company of Coldstream guards.
The position known as the hollow was tactically important because it protected a culvert running beneath a railway embankment.
The Irish guards were tasked with retaking it in a joint operation with the Cold Stream Guards beginning at 4:00 on the 1st of February.
The attack ran immediately into problems.
Four company of the Irish guards which went first was met with heavy machine gun fire.
Most of the assault party was killed or wounded within minutes including all of the Irish guards officers.
The attack had stalled before it began.
What happened next was Lance Corporal Michael’s own decision.
He was off duty and was not formally part of the assault party.
He slipped away toward a railway cutting on the right flank.
Moving along the cutting, he came up behind the first German barricade, which was defended by five Germans with a machine gun.
Olirri opened fire.
He killed all five.
He then moved to a second barricade 60 yards further along, where a German machine gunner was in position to fire directly into the flank of his advancing comrades.
Olirri shot the machine gunner.
He shot two more Germans at the barricade.
The remaining five Germans at the second position surrendered.
Olirri had attacked two defended barricades alone, killed eight Germans, and taken two prisoners.
The Victoria Cross citation published in the London Gazette on February 18th, 1915 stated, “Lance Corporal Olyri thus practically captured the enemy’s position by himself and prevented the attacking party from being fired upon.
That is an understatement so severe it functions as a different kind of emphasis.
” Olirri’s reception when he returned to Britain was extraordinary, and not just in the military sense.
He was promoted to sergeant.
He was received by thousands of Londoners in Hyde Park on July 10th, 1915.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes, commented publicly, “The Irish have always had a reputation of being wonderful fighters, and Lance Corporal Michael Olirri is clearly one of them.
The Irish Times described his Victoria Cross as a propaganda gift for the British War Office.
A recruitment poster featuring his face was distributed throughout Ireland.
The first British recruitment poster to prominently feature an Irish soldier as its central image and was used as a direct counter to Sinfine’s argument that Irishmen should not enlist.
What the propaganda did not fully convey, and what the official citation’s precision about his method obscures if you do not look closely, is the specific nature of what he did at the first barricade.
He came up behind five German soldiers who were manning a machine gun and killed all five of them.
The two men who survived the engagement at the second barricade survived because they surrendered before Olyri reached them.
The five at the first barricade had no such opportunity.
Olirri had come around behind their position and killed them before they were aware enough of his presence to consider surrendering.
This is not a criticism in the context of a military assault on a defended position.
It is exactly what the tactical situation required, but it is worth being precise about what happened because precision is what these stories deserve.
Olirri survived the war.
He was commissioned as an officer, rose to the rank of major, and died in London on August 2nd, 1961, age 72.
He is buried at Milh Hill Cemetery in London.
He is remembered in Cork.
He should be remembered everywhere.
The Easter rising of April 1916 created a situation for the Irish regiments on the Western Front that has no parallel in the military experience of any other group of soldiers in the war.
While the 16th Irish Division and the 36th Olter Division were in the line in France, Republican forces in Dublin rose against British authority in the name of the Irish Republic.
The German army recognizing the propaganda value of the moment manufactured placards and arranged for them to be placed in the German trenches opposite Irish units in the loose sector.
The placards were written in English.
They told the Irish soldiers in the British trenches opposite that their countrymen were rising in Ireland.
The English guns were firing at their wives and children and that the Irish soldiers were fighting for the wrong side.
The Royal Monster fuseliers occupying positions near Levvin in Northern France became aware of the placards.
The eighth monsters war diary for May 10th, 1916 records what they did about it.
A raiding party under Lieutenant Biggan went out to the German SAP.
They brought back two notice boards.
The German propaganda operation was over.
The newspapers reported it under the headline brave monster fuseliers.
Capture of German insulting placards.
The Times described a raiding party, a number of whom were badly wounded, who crawled across no man’s land, and seized the obnoxious placards which they bore back in triumph.
What neither the newspaper account nor the dry war diary entry fully conveys is the specific quality of that operation.
The monsters went out through the wire in the dark, crossed no man’s land under fire, badly wounded some of them, retrieved the German propaganda, and brought it back.
Not because it had military value, not because intelligence was required, because the placards were an insult and the monsters were not the kind of regiment that left an insult unanswered.
The Hulk gas attack of April 27th to 29th, 1916, Easter week, the same days the Easter Rising was happening in Dublin, killed 550 men of the 16th Irish division in the Lu sector.
The German attack used a mixture of chlorine and phosgene released from cylinders along a wide front opposite the Irish positions.
The men of the 16th division in the front line when the gas cloud arrived had inadequate protection.
Their gas masks the box respirator had not yet been issued in sufficient numbers were earlier ineffective models.
The gas moved through the dugouts and funk holes in the dark killing men who had taken cover from what they thought was artillery.
When morning came, 550 men were dead.
The battalion shattered, the line held only because the Germans did not immediately exploit their success.
The men who died at Hulock were largely the same men who had been reading in their letters home about what was happening in Dublin that same week.
The 16th Irish division was a nationalist division raised from Redmond’s Irish volunteers, predominantly Catholic and predominantly southern Irish.
The men in it had complicated feelings about the Easter Rising that were different from what the British newspapers reported and different from what the German propaganda placards assumed.
Most were not revolutionaries.
Some were furious at what the rising had done to the prospect of home rule through constitutional means.
Redmond had staked his political life on the argument that Irish loyalty in the war would produce home rule as a peaceime reward, and the rising had damaged that argument severely.
Some men were quietly sympathetic to the rebels in Dublin.
A small number were privately proud of them.
None of them stopped fighting.
What is documented is that the 16th Irish division raided German trenches continuously through May and June 1916.
In the weeks immediately following both the Hull disaster and the Eastering executions.
The raids are recorded in the divisional history as sustained operations prosecuted with consistent aggression at a rate that kept the German garrison in the opposing sector under permanent pressure.
They produced casualties on both sides.
They also produced the specific pattern of behavior this video is about, applied by men who were simultaneously processing the news from Dublin, mourning the dead at Hulish and going back out into the dark to do it again.
The specific psychological weight of that combination, the gas dead in the field, the executed rebels at home, the German placards mocking them in between was not something that made the Irish soldiers of the 16th division more restrained in what they did in German trenches.
The Levven raid of June 1916, in which no quarter was asked for or given, took place 6 weeks after Huluk and 6 weeks after the first Easter rising executions.
The documented connection between those events and the conduct of the raid is the sequence and what we know about what grief and exhaustion and rage actually do to men under fire.
William Mcfadzian was born on October 9th, 1895 in Luren County, Armar and grew up in the Kraog area of East Belfast.
His father was a linen yarn salesman.
William was educated at Mount Pottinger Boy School and the Trade Preparatory School of the Municipal Technical Institute in Belfast.
He was an enthusiastic rugby player.
He was apprentice to Spence Bryson and Company engaged in the linen trade.
Before the war, he was a member of the Olter Volunteer Force, the Unionist paramilitary organization that had been preparing to resist home rule as a member of number one battalion, Balinifi, and Newton Breeda East Belfast Regiment.
He enlisted in the 14th Battalion, Royal Irish Rifles on September 22nd, 1914.
The 14th Rifles was one of the battalions formed from the Olter Volunteer Force to create the 36th Olter Division.
He trained in Ireland and then at C4th in England, embarked for France on October 5th, 1915, and arrived in the Som sector in early 1916.
The 36th Ols Division had been holding the line north of the river Ankra since February 1916, facing the German positions at Theipval.
The sector was dominated by the Schwaban redout, a German defensive complex 500 to 600 yd long and 200 yd wide.
Constructed from 1915 and defended by the 26th reserve division from Suabia in southwest Germany, the redout consisted of interconnected machine gun imp placements, trenches, and dugouts cut 30 ft and more into the chalk.
By July 1916, the German front line in this sector was protected by 16 rows of barbed wire.
In the early hours of July 1st, 1916, William Mcfadzian’s battalion was assembled in Thiefful Wood preparing for the assault.
It was the anniversary in the Julian calendar of the Battle of the Boone in 1690, a date of specific significance to the Olter Protestant soldiers of the 36th Division.
At least one man, Sergeant Samuel Kelly of the 9th Iniskillings, was wearing his olster sash into battle.
Major George Gaffin, commanding a West Belfast company, had taken his orange sash off during the advance, held it high, and roared the cry that his men had been raised to understand as the expression of irreversible commitment.
The 36th Olter Division went over the parapet, crying, “No surrender.
” The way their grandfathers had cried it at the boy, and they meant it.
William Mcfdzian was among the bombers organizing the distribution of grenades in the assembly trench.
A box of grenades was being passed along the crowded trench when it fell.
As it struck the trench floor, two of the safety pins were dislodged.
The grenades lay among the packed men of his platoon.
The trench was so crowded that there was nowhere to throw them where they would not kill soldiers.
Mcfdzian threw himself on top of the grenades.
The Victoria Cross citation describes his act precisely.
He well knew his danger, being himself a bomber, but without a moment’s hesitation, he gave his life for his comrades.
The grenades exploded.
Mcfadzian was blown to pieces.
One other man was slightly wounded.
Every other soldier in the immediate vicinity of the grenades survived.
His Victoria Cross was the first of four awarded to the 36th Olter Division for actions on July 1st, 1916.
He was 20 years old.
He has no known grave.
He is commemorated on the memorial to the missing of the SO at Theepval, the same ground he died trying to capture.
His father received the Victoria Cross from King George V at Buckingham Palace on February 28th, 1917.
He is remembered in murals on the walls of East Belfast, in the church where his memorial service was held, in the rugby club where he played, and in the linen trade where he worked.
He is a name among tens of thousands, on a wall at Theval.
He deserves to be named separately.
The 36th Olter Ster Division’s assault on the Schwaban Redout on July 1st, 1916 was in its opening phase one of the most successful operations by any division.
On the worst day in the history of the British army, Major General Nent, commanding the division, had made a decision that distinguished the Olter attack from most of the other assaults along the Somr.
That morning, he had ordered his leading battalions to leave their assembly trenches before zero hour and move forward to start lines in no man’s land under the cover of the artillery barrage, accepting the risk of casualties from their own guns in exchange for the advantage of being much closer to the German wire.
When the barrage lifted at zero hour, when the British guns moved forward, the olster were already moving.
The ninth and 10th Royal Inncling fuseliers leading the assault of 109th brigade broke through the German front line and drove into the Schwaban redout.
Some elements of the division pushed even further reaching what the German defensive plan designated the Dline part of the German second defensive zone.
A depth of penetration achieved by no other British unit on the entire somront that day.
German artillery observers in the staff redout described looking up at 9:00 in the morning to find Olster soldiers outside their wire.
A German officer wrote afterwards that if the English could have got through, they would have only met clarks, cooks, ors, and such like.
For a distance of several hundred meters, there were no German soldiers.
But the flanking divisions had failed.
The 32nd division to the right had been stopped at the start line by German machine gun fire from Theep Val.
The 29th division to the left had not broken through.
The Olter division, having achieved what no other British formation on the SO achieved that morning, was therefore isolated with German positions still operational on both flanks and no reinforcement coming forward.
By 9:00, the men in the deepest positions could hear firing around them from three directions.
By evening, with nearly all the officers casualties, ammunition exhausted, and the flanking divisions still unable to advance, the remnant of the 36th Olter Division withdrew.
5,104 casualties, 2,69 dead.
When the division was relieved by the 49th Division on July 2nd, and at roll call on July 3rd, Captain Montgomery of the 9th Royal Irish Rifles recorded what he saw.
Not a few of the men cried, and I cried.
The 16th Irish division’s part in the SOM came later in September in a different sector against different German positions in the fighting that produced some of the most explicitly documented accounts of the Irish approach to close quarters combat in the entire war.
Gilimo September 3rd, 1916.
The village of Gilmore had resisted every British attack since July.
It sat on high ground with observation over the surrounding battlefield and its German garrison had used that observation advantage effectively for two months.
Four previous attempts to take it had failed.
On September 3rd, the 16th Irish division was committed to the assault alongside the 20th light division.
What the correspondent Persal Phillips of the Daily Express wrote afterwards appeared in newspapers across Britain and Ireland.
He described the Irish assault in terms striking even by the standards of wartime journalism.
Gilimone, Philillips wrote, involved the sort of fighting the Irish liked best.
Bayonet bursts, close-range bombing, and plenty of hand-to-hand struggles in narrow trenches, followed by breathless rushes after panic-stricken fugitives.
He described the village being swept clean through and over a quarter of a mile beyond.
The 16th Irish Division had cleared and secured the position with such unity and skill that the operation might have been the smooth performance of a long rehearsed maneuver.
The phrase breathless rushes after panic-stricken fugitives is doing some work in that sentence.
It describes the German defenders retreating from their positions and Irish soldiers pursuing them.
It describes what happened to German soldiers who were overtaken.
The newspaper account does not elaborate on this because it did not need to.
The phrase says what it says.
Thomas Hughes was from Castle Blay in County Monahan.
He was serving as a private in the six Canort Rangers when the Rangers attacked at Gillimmon on September 3rd.
Hughes was wounded early in the assault.
He had his wound dressed.
He then returned to the fighting alone under fire.
He located a German machine gun post that was holding up the advance and attacked it.
He disabled the position and the crew.
He was awarded the Victoria Cross.
Private Groen of the Canort Rangers in a different action recorded in the regimental history is described in a single sentence that captures the quality of individual violence the Rangers were capable of.
On one occasion the history records Private Grogan rushed seven Germans who had occupied a section of trench.
He killed all of them.
It cost him a cut forehead and four teeth.
The Rangers regimental nickname was the devil’s own.
The specific operation described above is one reason why.
Lieutenant John Holland of the third Linster regiment attached to the seventh Linsters led a bombing party at Gilmore on September 3rd that cleared German trench positions and captured approximately 50 prisoners.
He was awarded the Victoria Cross.
Holland was the son of a veterinarian from Athi County Kildair.
He survived the war.
6 days later, September 9th, the 16th Irish division attacked Ginchi.
Ginchi had resisted all previous attempts.
It sat on a crest ridge from which German observers could direct fire across a wide area of the S battlefield.
The seventh Linsters and the ninth Royal Dublin fuseliers were among the leading units.
The Dubs had already been under German artillery fire for 9 hours in their assembly trenches before zero hour, and during that time their own artillery had also been dropping rounds on their position.
The seventh Royal Irish Rifles war diary records the commanding officer sending three separate warnings to the Royal Field Artillery that their shells were falling short in the British trenches.
By the time the ninth dubs were ready to go forward, the seventh rifles had been reduced to 150 bayonets for the assault.
When the ninth dubs passed through the seventh rifle’s positions and went forward, many of the battered riflemen who were technically in support were so stirred by watching the dubs advance that they went with them, advancing beyond their designated objective before being recovered by an officer and brought back to consolidate.
The Irish of the 48th Brigade carried Ginchi at 5:25 in the afternoon.
Half the attacking force were casualties.
An officer in the Royal Irish fuseliers described Ginchi as belching forth smoke like a volcano.
A private soldier who walked through what remained afterwards said, “There was no village there now, only a hole in the ground.
” Between September 3rd and September 10th, the 16th Irish Division suffered 224 officers and 4,90 other ranks killed or wounded.
Despite these very heavy losses, the official record noted the division gained a reputation as first class shock troops.
First class shock troops is the formal British military designation for a formation that could be relied upon to take heavily defended positions at close quarters under the worst conditions.
It is the highest tactical compliment the language of the period contained.
Robert Downey was born in Glasgow in 1894 to Irish parents.
He served as a corporal in the second Royal Dublin fuseliers.
On October 23rd, 1916, near the village of Lesb on the Som, his company came under severe fire and most of the officers became casualties.
Downey took charge.
He went forward alone, reached the German trench and used his bayonet and grenades to clear a section of it.
He then returned and led the rest of his company forward to occupy the position.
He was awarded the Victoria Cross.
He was 22 years old.
Now the battle that placed both Irish divisions on the same ground at the same time in what became the largest concentration of Irish soldiers at any single point on the western front for the entire war.
Messines June 7th 1917 the Messinez ridge in Belgium had been held by the Germans since November 1914.
From it they could observe directly into the British positions in the salient and direct artillery fire across a wide area below the ridge for two years.
British, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand tunneling companies had been digging galleries through the blue clay.
By June 1917, they had placed 19 mine chambers beneath the German positions charged with approximately 1 million pounds of aminal explosive.
On the night of June 6th to 7th, the infantry of the British second army moved into position.
On the right of the Irish sector, the 36th Ulster division faced the village of Msine.
On the left, the 16th Irish division faced the village of Vichita.
At 3:10 in the morning of June 7th, 19 mines detonated simultaneously.
The blast was heard in London.
The ground shook across a 10-mi front.
German soldiers described the earth opening beneath their feet, bodies thrown into the air, the pre-dawn dark turning orange with flame.
The defenders who survived the detonations were so profoundly disoriented that they could mount no coherent resistance.
The creeping barrage that followed walked ahead of the advancing infantry across the ridge.
The first Royal Monster fuseliers took all their objectives on schedule despite losing almost all their supporting tanks in the opening phase of the advance.
The 36th Olter division captured Msen.
The 16th Irish division captured Vicheta.
The two Irish divisions had attacked side by side and taken a ridge that the Germans had held for 31 months.
The formal observation made by the historians of the campaign is that this was the largest concentration of Irish soldiers on a single battlefield in the war.
But the more specific observation is what it meant to have the 36th Olter division, Protestant Unionist, formed from the Olter Volunteer Force, who had been arming to resist home rule, and the 16th Irish division, Catholic nationalist, formed from Redmond’s Irish Volunteers, who had been preparing to enforce home rule, fighting side by side, taking ground that neither could have taken alone, on a battlefield in Belgium in June 1917.
The Island of Ireland peace park at Messen commemorates this.
It was built by both communities after the war.
It took until 1998 to build it.
That delay says something.
We come now to the specific quality of the Irish raiding reputation in the context of what the German military understood about it, which is a different question from what the British newspapers reported about it.
German military intelligence assessments from 1916 and 1917 identified specific Allied formations by their tactical characteristics and assigned ratings based on the difficulty of opposing them.
The Irish formations, particularly the 16th and 36th divisions and the battalions of the Irish Guards, were assessed in terms that reflected the same quality the British press described.
From the opposing perspective, German units rotating into sectors facing Irish formations could expect aggressive raiding operations.
Reluctance to negotiate in formal sector truses, and a specific pattern in close quarters engagements that meant encounters with Irish raiding parties in no man’s land tended to produce German casualties at a higher rate than encounters with raiding parties from other formations.
The reason for this, which the intelligence assessments did not fully articulate, but which the pattern of evidence supports, was the Irish regiment’s approach to the question of prisoners in raids, where prisoners were not specifically required.
This approach was consistent across the Irish formations, and it was related to what happens to close quarters violence when the men conducting it have been through enough to have lost the theoretical restraints that training imposes on men who have not yet experienced combat at that level.
There were no charges.
There were no courts marshall arising from the Levven raid or from the other operations where the same phrase or its operational equivalent applied.
The army that ordered the raids understood at the institutional level that the outcome of a strike raid in which men are sent into a defended position with clubs and knives and grenades would not always include prisoners.
This was accepted.
The officers who planned the raids, who debriefed the survivors, who wrote the afteraction reports, and who submitted the reports up the chain of command, accepted this as a feature of the operational environment, not as a war crime.
What changed, what the Irish experience illustrates particularly clearly because the documentation is unusually explicit, was the relationship between the institutional acceptance of this reality and the individual willingness to act on it.
The Irish regiments acted on it.
They did so consistently and without apology.
And the evidence for this is in the published accounts that appeared in newspapers during the war, in the regimenal histories written after it, and in the specific phrase that appears more than once in the record of their operations.
No quarter was asked for or given.
The soldiers of the Irish regiments who conducted these raids were not uniquely violent in any individual sense.
They were men who had been through etc and Hulk and the Schwaban Redout and Gallipoli and who understood that the war they were fighting was not the war that had been described to them when they enlisted.
They had rebuilt their battalions from the dead multiple times over.
They had buried friends and brothers and men from their towns and streets in Belgian and French fields that were not where those men were supposed to die.
They had been gassed on Easter week while their countrymen were being shot in Dublin.
They had read German placards telling them they were fighting for the wrong side and they had gone out in the dark and brought the placards back.
They were also in the specific context of trench raiding extraordinarily effective.
The 16th Irish division’s capture of Gilamont and Ginshi in September 1916 after four previous attempts had failed produced the formal designation of firstclass shock troops.
The 36th Olter Ster Division’s penetration of the Schwaban Redout on July 1st, 1916, the deepest Allied advance anywhere on the Som front on the worst day of the war, was achieved by men who went over the top crying no surrender and meant it in both directions.
The Messen’s operation of June 7th, 1917, in which both Irish divisions fought side by side and took a ridge that had been German for 31 months, was assessed as one of the most successful British operations of the entire war.
The Irish regiments paid for these achievements at a rate that is difficult to absorb as individual numbers and impossible to absorb fully as human experience.
Between 30,000 and 35,000 Irish soldiers died in the war out of 200,000 who served.
The 16th Irish division reduced to Cadre strength by the losses of the SA Pandale and the German spring offensive of 1918 required a substantial refit in England in mid 1918 that involved introducing many non-Irish battalions to bring it back to operational strength.
The six Irish regiments whose recruiting grounds lay in what became the Irish Free State, the Royal Monster Fuselers, the Royal Dublin Fuselers, the Canort Rangers, the Linster Regiment, the Royal Irish Regiment, and the South Irish horse were disbanded in July 1922 when the Free State was established.
Their colors were laid up at St.
George’s Hall, Windsor Castle in a ceremony on June 12th, 1922, at which King George V spoke of their valorous deeds and hallowed memorials.
The monsters first battalion remained predominantly Irish to the end of the war.
On November 11th, 1918, the battalion was billeted in Leel.
The guns stopped.
The monsters had been at the war since August 1914.
They had been destroyed at Trro in the first weeks.
They had rebuilt.
They had gone back.
They had done it again and again at Langmark and Loose and Gallipoli and the Som and Msines and Passandale and Camry and Epra and in the Gas at Hull during Easter week and in trench raids across the entire Western Front in the dark with clubs and grenades and knives and no quarter was asked for or given.
The colors of the Royal Monster fuseliers are at Windsor Castle.
The colors of the Royal Dublin fuseliers are at Windsor Castle.
The colors of the Canort Rangers, the Linster Regiment, the Royal Irish Regiment, all at Windsor Castle, laid up in 1922 in a ceremony presided over by a king who understood, at least in the formal sense, what he was receiving.
The men themselves are at Tinot and Theipval and the Men & Gate and Gilmore Road Cemetery and a thousand other locations in France and Belgium and Gallipoli and Mesopotamia in graves marked and unmarked, identified and unknown.
Their names are on the men in gate.
Over 54,000 names of men who have no known grave.
and Irish surnames appear on that wall at a rate that reflects what 200,000 Irishmen contributed to a war that their country after 1922 officially did not acknowledge.
Robertwig was a private in the 12th Royal Irish rifles 36th Olter Division at Hamill on July 1st, 1916.
While the main assault was proceeding further south, Quig went into no man’s land to look for his platoon commander, who had gone forward and not returned.
He found no trace of the officer.
He then went back out seven times in total under continuous German fire and brought back seven wounded men one by one.
One of them dragged by the leg through the mud for 500 yards because the man was too badly hurt to be carried any other way.
He received the Victoria Cross.
Quig was a farmer’s son from Bushmills in County Antrum.
He survived the war.
He lived until 1955.
Eric Bell was a captain in the 9inth Royal Inniskilling Fuseliers, 36th Olter Division at Deepval on July 1st, 1916.
His trench mortar battery was under intense fire and most of the team were casualties.
Bell continued to operate the battery alone.
He then went forward and threw bombs into a German position that was holding up the advance.
He did this multiple times.
He was shot and killed while attempting to rescue a man from no man’s land.
He was 20 years old.
He was awarded aostumous Victoria Cross.
These men, Olyri and Mcfadzian and Quig and Bell and Hughes and Holland and Downey, represent the documented individual instances.
Behind each of them are hundreds of raids, thousands of operations, tens of thousands of hours in no man’s land, and a body count on both sides that the surviving records capture only partially.
The Irish regiments were not unique in conducting raids where prisoners were not taken.
They were not the only formation on the Western Front that operated in ways the official rationale for trench raiding did not fully account for.
They were however among the most explicitly documented cases because they were among the most aggressive raiders and because the men who wrote about them, the journalists, the chaplain, the officers, the regimental historians tended to describe what they did in terms that did not require softening.
There is one more thread that needs following before this account is complete and it concerns the men who came from communities in Britain who identified as Irish and who fought in units organized around that identity.
The London Irish rifles and the Liverpool Irish were territorial formations raised among the large Irish diaspora communities in the two cities.
The London Irish drew from the Irish Catholic community of South London.
The Liverpool Irish drew from the equally large Irish community in Murzyside.
Neither formation was composed entirely of men born in Ireland, and neither was part of the three specifically Irish divisions, but both went to France.
Both served on the Western Front, and both brought to their service the specific quality of identity that shaped how they understood what they were doing.
The London Irish rifles made their most famous gesture on the first day of the Battle of Loose in September 1915.
Their leading company went over the top, kicking a football ahead of them into no man’s land.
The gesture was attributed to a soldier named Frank Edwards who had been a school boy football player.
It was the kind of performance of Irish identity under fire that the Irish regiments understood as natural.
You did not stop being who you were because the war was trying to kill you.
You took who you were into the war and it came with you through the wire and into the German positions.
The Tinesside Irish, four battalions of the North umberland fuseliers raised from the Irish community of northeast England and designated the 103rd Brigade of the 34th Division, went over the top at Laboisel on the SO on July 1st, 1916 and were cut down at a rate that the survivors described with the specific bluntness of men who had seen something that exceeded language.
Thomas Bryan and Ernest Sykes, both of the Tinside Irish, earned Victoria Crosses at the Battle of Ars in April 1917, for actions that repeated in miniature the pattern of individual Irish aggression that the whole of this account has been describing going forward when others could not, taking positions that were supposed to be beyond reach.
The Irish guards in the guards division represent the most socially distinct of the Irish formations.
Roger Kipling, whose son John was killed serving with the Irish guards at Loose in September 1915, spent years after the war writing the regimental history of the Irish Guards.
The book is one of the finest regimental histories in the English language.
John Kipling’s body was not positively identified until 1992 when the Commonwealth War Graves Commission reidentified a grave near Loose.
Roger Kipling never found him.
He had used his influence to help Jon obtain a commission in the Irish Guards when the boy’s poor eyesight had initially caused his application to be rejected and he spent the rest of his life writing about the guards and processing what his son’s death had cost him.
This is not presented here as accusation.
It is presented as the specific human weight of one father’s decision made in the context of a war that consumed whatever it was offered.
Lance Corporal Michael Olirri, who killed eight men at Quincy on February 1st, 1915, whose Victoria Cross was the first the Irish guards earned in the war, was 32 years old in 1920.
He had been a cork farmer’s son who became a mounted policeman in Canada, who became a Lance corporal who became a sergeant, who became a propaganda icon, who became a major.
He lived another 40 years after the war.
He died in London in 1961.
He had come a very long way from Inigila, the men of the second Royal Dublin fuseliers who were alive on the morning of secondra in May 1915 and the 21 who were alive after the gas.
And whatever number of those 21 survived the war and went home to Dublin.
They came home to a city that was within a year going to execute 15 of its own citizens for the Easter Rising, including James Connelly, who was so badly wounded they shot him in a chair because he could not stand.
The Irish soldiers who came back from the Western Front came home to a country that was simultaneously mourning the executed rebels and mourning its own war dead and could not hold both things at once.
And so for decades it held neither.
The Irish National War Memorial Gardens Island Bridge in Dublin were commissioned in 1929 and completed in 1939.
They were then effectively abandoned by successive Irish governments for decades allowed to fall into disrepair.
The memorial was not formally inaugurated until 1988, 70 years after the armistice.
The political difficulty of commemorating men who had fought in the British army, while the Irish state was defining its identity in opposition to Britain produced a silence that lasted most of a century.
The names are on the wall at the men in gate.
The names are on the wall at Thipval.
The names are in the ground at Tine Cot.
The colors are at Windsor.
The records of what the Irish regiments did in the German trenches, in the dark, with clubs and grenades and knives are in the regimental histories and in the contemporary newspaper accounts and in the war diaries in the national archives at Q.
They say what they say.
No quarter was asked for or given.
The 16th Irish division and the 36th Olter division fought side by side at Messenas in June 1917.
Catholic nationalist and Protestant Unionist, Southern Irish and Olter Irish men who before the war had been organizing on opposite sides of a potential civil war.
They captured the ridge together.
They were both decimated at Passanddale later that year.
The Island of Ireland peace park at Messen built at the initiative of both communities and opened in 1998 stands on the ground they took together.
It took 81 years after the battle to build the monument that marks it.
The monument is there now and the ground is still there.
The ridge does not know or care what happened on it.
The men who took it are in the ground nearby, some of them identified, some of them not, mixed into the soil of Belgian Fllanders, at a depth that agricultural machinery still regularly disturbs.
Far Abala, clear the way.
No quarter was asked for or given.
That is the record.
