Men
of the North Part 3: Operation Harvest
"What
gifts hath fate for all his chivalry?
Even such as hearts heroic oftenest win
Honor, a friend, anguish, untimely
death."
-Homer, "The Iliad"
THE
HANDBOOK
After
the Savoy attack, an op-ed writer theorized:
"In the North...there are signs of a
breeze that may trouble the waters. There is no reason to believe that the IRA
is in a position to carry out any grand strategy. The odds, in the Republic and
the Six Counties alike, are balanced too heavily against it. No sane Irishman
wants any more of that hopeless nonsense. At the same time," he continued,
"the fanaticism of such members as it may have has not diminished; and a
man with only one idea in his head is always dangerous..."
By evidence and logic, the IRA certainly did
seem to have disappeared. But rarely in Irish history have events progressed
according to those two. In reality the IRA did have a grand strategy, thanks to
a former Irish Army officer, Sean Cronin, and his idea was called "Operation
Harvest." By his plan, the IRA would strike across the border from the
south using mobile, well-armed columns of 12-15 men. Their attacks on the
British Army and government infrastructure would make the country ungovernable
and inspire the nationalists to rise up. They would be assisted by smaller
Active Service Units of northerners and southerners fighting full time, and the
local units that existed around the north.
The few dozen men under Jim Rowntree that
comprised the Newry unit were of the latter category. They were "local
men," whose role was to "work during the day, go about their normal
routine, and then strike at night. Their job is to stay constantly on the
offensive, keep the enemy off balance and keep him guessing." Although far
removed from the (skin deep) romance of flying columns dashing across the
hills, they did the crucial grunt work of the army: gathering intelligence,
sheltering men and hiding arms, providing guides and for the ASUs and columns,
carrying out support operations and sabotage, and making sure the army
maintained a presence overall. They had the camraderie that comes from small
numbers, common sacrifices, and shared secrets.
In 1956 Cronin wrote a "Handbook for
volunteers of the IRA" to prepare them for the job they were about to
undertake. Cronin was a journalist by trade, and typical of his writing it is
precise, well-detailed, and owing to his army background, a cut above the
average guerrilla cookbook.
"The Guerilla must always remember
that his main job is the destruction and breakdown of enemy communications,
administration, and supplies," Cronin writes. This would primarily be done
by local units, and their tools to this end would be explosives. The handbook
describes the appearances, uses, and storing methods for gelignite, 808, TNT,
ammonal, wet gun cotton, plastic, and 822, in addition to several paragraphs on
bangalore torpedos (useful against "enemy tanks and barbed wire") and
the three primary detonators.
Gelignite, ("brown, used for cutting.
Initiate with primer. Can be initiated with bullet. Keep in cool place."),
was the only one the IRA made a habit of using. It was the most readily
available, having a legitimate use in quarries and mines, and could be obtained
from them legally under the disguise of "stuff exports." It was the
most stable, and can be knocked around without setting off the charge. And it
was the most familiar, having been used for several generations going back to
the Fenians. "Wee Joe," Seamus Trainor, and their generation were
versed in its use. Many Old IRA men who bedecked the Easter Parades had used it
in their day, and an early form was used by their predecessors in the IRB.
The primers and fuses which make the stuff
go off were another story. One had the option of electric fuse or copper wire,
and they were more volatile than the explosive itself, particularly when
exposed to moisture. It was not unusual they failed to work but many
volunteers, happy to get away from the scene after working in the dark with one
eye watching for police, did not usually risk their lives and freedom to go
back and fix it.
THE
CAMPAIGN
On
December 12, the campaign opened along the border with a salvo of raids and
attacks; watching and listening for the explosions across the border one
volunteer thought it looked "like the western front."
The original plans for South Down were:
"Destroy Territorial Army station at Newry and burn down courthouse.
Destroy Banbridge Territorial army Station. Seize short-wave Radio transmitter
in Newry shipping office. Hit Warrenpoint R.U.C. Barracks. Raid Bishopscourt
Radar Station."A variety of factors worked against all these being carried
out. The party assigned to raid Bishopscourt set out but was forced to turn
back and in the end only a hut in which B-Specials drilled in Newry was
attacked and mostly burned down. The columns that marked activity in the
western counties were absent from Co. Down, and the area was quiet over
Christmas.
A column of volunteers from the southern
side of the border moved into the area around New Years. They set up a staging
point for operations at a lonesome farmhouse a full mile off road in
Clontifleece- a "wild and sparsely populated" area at the base of the
Mourne mountains. They were joined by three locals to help and guide them,
Christopher and Bernard Loy, and Thomas Kearns. These latter three, along with
Seamus Hand, Peter Duffy, and Pat Shaw of Dundalk, and Pat Considine of Dublin
from the column torched a B-Special barracks the night of January 2nd-3rd.
Unknown to them as they hiked cross-country back to the farm, the authorities
were on to them and a landrover of six policemen armed with sten guns and
revolvers was approaching from the other side. As they jostled up the long
rocky lane they passed the farmer walking away the house. They stopped the car
and split up, approaching from different directions.
The
ASU had apparently sensed the presence of the police, and was crouching along
the wall of a pen while one man leaned over to dump their materials in it. A
policeman, armed with a sten, came up behind. The others were soon on the scene
and the ASU, in no position to shoot it out or escape, was captured. They
calmly stood up and assembled along the farmhouse wall. The police, outnumbered
and in dark, unfamiliar surroundings pressed the volunteers with shouting,
threats, and prodding with their stens to disclose where their explosives were.
None gave an answer and no explosives were found in the area, although in
various places around the pen and in the haversacks each was carrying were
tell-tale detonators, small arms, knives, copies of Cronin's manual, and
ordnance survey maps. A lorry arrived on the scene shortly and took them away.
This
means 12 years for us, one remarked grimly. Although that imminent sentence
hung over them, they played it cool at their trial, chuckling at inside jokes
as evidence was brought forth and waving to some women in the gallery. It
wasn't as bad as predicted: they got 8 years each.
The following day over 500 police and
members of the British Army carried out one of the largest sweeps seen in South
Down for some years. They combed the Mourne mountains and arrested two hapless
volunteers who were caught in daylight on the barren landscape with nowhere to
hide, and uncovered a dump of the usual items near Rostrevor. House to house
searches followed.
On the 9th a false alarm provided some
comic relief when a parachute with a "small object" descended out of
a clear blue sky and came down in the middle of the road. Those watching
assumed that this was an innovative new weapon of the IRA, and took cover.
Before the bomb squad got there a taxi man ventured to pick it up. It did not
explode: it was a meteorological instrument that had run its course. There were
similar scares throughout the spring as ordinance and ammunition were found
around disused installations that housed the US Army during WW2.
On February 22nd, about 40 Territorial
Army members were drilling in one of their huts on Downshire road. They left
for the much-awaited canteen. Half an hour later an explosion from under the
hut gutted it, leaving only the frame and blowing out the roof, windows, and
sections of the floor. A comedy of coincidences prevented casualties. Two men
on their way to relieve the sentries, and a caretaker who just happened to be
outside were all shielded from injury by a landrover, and the sentries were
protected by the sandbags around their post. The men in the canteen were thrown
to the floor like ninepins but, aside from scrapes, bruises, and a bump on the
head for one who was struck by a wireless transmitter, all were fine. This
attack, like the previous two barracks bombings in Down, was timed specifically
for when they were empty so as to avoid casualties: the objective was to
deprive the police and TA of their safe places, rather than to rack up a
bodycount. This attack prompted more searches through the mountains.
Through late February and mid March targets
in South Down focused on telephone transformers, wires, and kiosks to isolate
communications, and some bridges were damaged in attacks to isolate troop
movements. The Fianna were tasked with the former job of cutting wires, done by
hurling over a rope with a stone attached and pulling them to the ground.
Flickering lights and momentary power loss to the sound of not-so-distant
explosions were common. "Once (indeed more than once) it was the local
(transformer) on the site of the present Southern Regional College,"
writes one local. "For minutes at a time (or so it seemed) the sky was
filled with multi-coloured flashes, then all went dark."
The British for their part took to felling
bridges to isolate IRA movements and it was not always clear to observers who
was responsible for what. To control traffic they made roads some impassable by
alternately blowing very large craters in them, or placing iron spikes, or
concrete blocks in the way (or a mix of all 3). By 1958 only a handful of the
180-odd roads across the border in the north were open, and travelers on these
ran a gauntlet of searches and roadblocks by the RUC, and B-Specials, and less
commonly the British Army.
There was an old abandoned house on Chapel
Hill the police frequently raided, believing it to be a hideout. Their searches
brought nothing by way of volunteers, but on
March 1st they found a bomb waiting for them with 28 pounds of gelignite
primed to go off. The police deferred to an army bomb disposal expert, who
claimed it was the most complicated device he had encountered.
On March 6th, in a fairly straightforward
operation, an explosion leveled an army recruiting office which had just opened
in November. The issue of army recruitment was one that would surface later
with more drama than a simple explosion.
Just after this, two volunteers
"borrowed" a taxi cab for an operation, long enough beforehand that
the owner reported it stolen. Around 8:15 in the evening, residents heard them
racing up Frances street, accompanied by the sound of the Electricity Board's
windows shattering as a bomb was hurled through. The volunteers ditched the
taxi a hundred yards way at Merchants Quay, unharmed and ready to resume its
legal use. But there was no explosion. The street was closed and the police and
fire brigade watched as military disposal experts were called in. They found a
2 foot long iron water pipe with 75 sticks of gelignite stuffed inside, along
with a 12 foot fuse that had burned out only an inch and a half away from
detonation. Speculators pointed out a garage with underground petrol tanks was
next door, although whether they intended to cause an explosion with that, or
if the gelignite was capable of doing so, is debatable. The street was then
reopened.
On March 11th William and Sheila McCormick
resumed life at their respective places of work after a five-day honeymoon.
Around midday, word went around Sheila's workplace that police raids were going
on- an unusual occurrence as their usually came around in the early morning. On
her lunch break she asked a neighbor what the "sceal" was and the
reply was that William had been taken away. The police had arrested a total of
seven volunteers in precise daytime raids: Oliver Rowntree, Vincent and William
McCormick, Bernard Larkin, John Duffy, and Lennie and Edward Campbell. Sheila
appealed to Joe Connellan for help, who called for William's release without
result.
The Easter commemoration that year was
one of the largest in recent memory. The streets were flooded by a sea of over
5,000 people, who left just enough room for the Old IRA veterans' color party
to lead the procession through. Their route passed through a police cordon and
there was no chance of the tricolor passing it; the flag was kept hidden until
they had gone through, whereupon it was pulled out and triumphantly borne aloft
to St. Mary's Cemetery by Bob Savage. Dr Padraig O Cuinn read the proclamation
and led a decade of the rosary, after which four buglers sounded the last post.
The police arrived at Bob's home in the
early hours next morning and arrested him for the tricolor stunt. A few days
later in court, the judge ordered him to pay 10 pounds. Bob was released but
promptly ignored the fine out of principle; he ignored the reminders and
finally in September he was arrested and given a month in jail for non-payment.
Bob was not the only Tan War veteran to be
arrested. After the attack on February 22, among the homes searched was that of
66 year old Christie Loy. Christie was one of the Sinn Fein stalwarts of Newry,
and sold record amount of issues of "The United Irishman." Rummaging
through his bedroom they found, in a cabinet, copies of "The United
Irishman," "Ghlor Uladh," and "The Writings of Philip
Clarke" (a 30-page pamphlet promoting one of the IRA candidates who won
his seat during the 1955 elections)- all banned. Loy arrived home late that
night from his job at the Gas Works and was promptly taken away. The
prosecution tacked membership of Sinn Fein on to his list of offenses. His
hearings lasted a matter of minutes, during which he took full responsibility
for the documents and gave a defiant statement:
"
I am proud to claim I have been a member of the republican movement for a long
number of years. And if I may be allowed to say so, I am proud to be the first
member of the civil arm of the republican movement to be charged with this
offence, if it is an offence...I
have been a member of the Republican movement since I was a youth of 11 years,
and I have continued my association with the movement from that time to the
present time and I have no regrets in that connection.
"I
hereby state and proclaim the fact that I am a soldier of the Irish Republican
Army, and I am proud of my connection with that organization. That about sums
up all I have to say. (Then, in Gaelic:)Long live the Republic.
"Thank
you sassenachs."
The "sassenachs" sentenced him to
nine months in the Crum. A crowd showed up to cheer him on and as he was led
away to the police van a lady broke through to give him a cigarette. He joined
the growing list of incarcerated Loy's.
Such arrests were doubly significant as the
men of Bob Savage and Christie Loy's generation were an inspiration for the
movement. The Tan War Flying Columns were the basis for Sean Cronin's campaign.
The young volunteers grew up in the shadow of their exploits and looked back a
little longingly for the days when a republican soldier could fight such a war.
That some of them remained involved over thirty years later gave both impulse
and a sense of legitimacy in the movement's undertakings.
NEWRY'S
BORSTAL BOY
After
Bob Savage raised the tricolor, someone had the presence of mind to take a
picture showing the color party and their flags marching towards the camera
head on in all their determined glory. Under the tricolor, a few steps behind
Bob, one can make out a young teenager, much smaller than those around him but
well dressed and with accomplished air of an older volunteer. This choir-boy
face was actually the brains behind some of the explosions that rocked Newry.
The
rebel of his family, Dessie Mathers joined the Fianna in 1955 at the age of 12
and loved the republican lifestyle. The Newry Fianna was the first in the north
to show itself publicly since the organization disintegrated in the 40's,
marching in uniform at Easter in 1952. They had around half a dozen boys,
including Oliver Craven, whose fate was then quite unknown as they marched in
their green uniforms and slouch hats looking very much like the first Fianna
boys of 1909. Selection was rigorous, and took into account their moral
background rather than purely physical abilities. Theywere expected to parade
twice a week, drill, and attend classes on Irish language, history, and
politics. There was scout-style training consisting of camping out in the country
over a weekend. Weapons training was forbidden, but smuggling them, and the
construction and transportation of bombs was not- it was a time honored Fianna
service to the active volunteers dating back to the days of the Howth Gun
Running. In this field Dessie discovered a talent.
However, his mother was unaware that there
was more to the Fianna life than parades and dress uniforms. This had
complications for the boy, who was barely out of primary school. One time he
missed his brother's wedding so he could attend a training camp in Omeath, for
which his Ma "battered him." Later, when working with bombs, he would
arrive home reeking of unknown odors (gelignite), for which he was further
battered. Facing his mother was only slightly less frightening than cutting
live telephone wires; or the bomb he set which failed to explode, and Dessie
undertook the job which earned British sappers respect from their IRA
opponents, that of disconnecting a live and volatile explosive.
Anecdotes of his hijinks abound. One day
while his brother was playing in the street there was a "heavy"
explosion, the sort whose concussion left both houses and people trembling far
away from the epicenter. "Its the end of the world," an old matron
shrieked. Reality was more mundane- it was his younger brother at work. Another
night a girl was in the process of "getting it on" with a boy whom
she had been eying for some time without success. They went into the backyard
and just as she was about to kiss him the mood was interrupted by an explosion.
The lights went out, and in the darkness she watched a small figure hop the
fence behind her and ran away. It was some time later when she met her cousin's
boyfriend and instantly recognized him as the shadow than ran through the yard
that night. Dessie was known to her as "Blackout."
In the midst of this he was still attending
school, and played on the local soccer team. He was a messer by nature and was
not about to let a little thing like age get in the way of something he liked
doing, although he earned the unsurprising sobriquet "The Child" from
the other volunteers. He would leave his mark on the town before the campaign was over.
MORAL FORCE AND OTHER THINGS
On the night of May 12, two lorries of
"masked men with blackened faces" approached the Victoria locks,
which guards the opening of the Newry canal, built as an artificial link for
shipping between the industrial city and the sea. Three approached the small
wooden house on site where the lockmaster lived, relieved him of the keys, and
told him and the family to get away quickly. They then accessed the locks on
which two gelignite bombs were planted. They watched them detonate from the
shore before driving across the border. The operation was carried out swiftly,
for the gatekeeper and his family had only gone a hundred yards up the road
when they felt the explosion.
Locals woke up to see water gushing through the mutilated lock into the
river. Newry port was closed, shipping was blocked, and incoming goods rerouted
to Belfast. Repairs initially cost £50,000, but by the time it was finished the
following January the cost grew to £350,000. A small vessel was trapped and it
cost further expense to extract that. The closing of the port left over a
hundred dock workers idle- in a town in which one in six people was unemployed.
(Nationalists for years accused the British of depriving Newry of jobs.)
No
one was perhaps more surprised with this than the local IRA men. Reports of
sabotage by masked men with guns were taken to refer to them without further
inquiry. In this case it was not so: Jim Rowntree had not cleared any such
operation, and the army foresaw with horror the political fallout this could
produce. They called the Urban Council Chairman, "on behalf of the
Adjutant General (Charlie Murphy)" of the IRA and denied responsibility.
They then distributed a statement around Newry declaring they had no hand in
the explosion and decrying it as the work of "pro-British saboteurs."
"The object of the Storemont saboteurs
was two-fold:
"First, to strike what was hoped would
be a crippling blow to the economy of the Newry area- a nationalist stronghold-
by stopping all work at the port.
"Second, by putting blame on the resistance and so give it a bad
name among the Nationalist people of Newry.
"Storemont has been unsuccessful in
the second of these aims and only partially successful in the first."
And in conclusion they reiterated:
"It is not part of (our) campaign to
engage in operations designed to damage the material interests and welfare of
any section of the Irish people."
The statement, which was reproduced in the next issue of the United
Irishman, went on to try and find gaps in the evidence as reported in the
papers. They even posted photos of government leaders repeating the accusation
beneath as if they set the fuses themselves.
The
explosion was actually the work of Saor Uladh, backed up by the Dublin-based
Christle Group. The latter had stolen the gelignite explosives from stores in
the south, and thanks to a masterful explosives expert they destroyed the
target rather than simply causing some damage, or worse, a burned out fuse as
was the result of so many operations. In J. Bowyer Bell's words, it was
"immense damage at a minimal cost." And their volunteers were not a
little put out at the IRA's denial. They considered it to be akin to
"felon-setting" and "aiding the (authorities') process of
elimination" against the interests of a group fighting against a common
enemy, and whose help the IRA availed themselves of when it suited the
leadership. In any event, the Victoria Locks bombing is often to this day
mistakenly blamed on the IRA.
Two
years prior when Joe Christle was the rising star in Sinn Fein, he delivered
the Easter oration in St. Mary's cemetery. With Dan Sheridan next to him, he
applauded the Old IRA men and proclaimed with Pearsaic oratorical flair:
"A new generation has come of age since
these men fought- a generation which has inherited the ideals for which they
died.
...Here
today, in this spot and during this peaceful feast of Easter we promise: never
to yield; never to cease our efforts against the enemy; never to cooperate with
the government; but to train ourselves in the use of arms, and having made
ourselves proficient with the weapons of war we shall take up the fight where
Newry's patriots fell."
On
the subject of the army's activities as opposed to those of the Nationalist
Party, he added:
"Is it for using moral force that Joe
Campbell and our fellow republicans are this day confined in the penal cells of
English prisons? The answer is 'no' and the reason is obvious. England has no
cause to intern anyone advocating moral force, because such a weapon can never
harm her. . ."
Christle had a more drastic maneuver in mind
than the bombing: a takeover of the city, which he hoped would set off a chain
of events to involve the British Army and Free State Army in open conflict.
However, Liam Kelly, ultimately in charge of Saor Uladh, and his aides would
have none of it. (The idea of the Free State invading Newry came back a decade
later in the form of a rumor that circulated during the "events of
'69" )
(To be continued....)
