Arming the Irish Revolution

Gunrunning and Arms Smuggling, 1911– 1922

W. H. Kautt

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780700632282
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

Arming the Irish Revolution is an in-depth investigation of the successes and failures of the militant Irish republican efforts to arm themselves. W. H. Kautt's comprehensive account of Irish Republican Army (IRA) arms acquisition begins with its predecessors—the Irish Volunteers and the National Volunteers—and, counterintuitively, with their rivals, the pro-union Ulster Volunteer Force. After the 1916 Rising, Kautt details the functioning of the Quartermaster General Department of the Irish Volunteer General Headquarters in Dublin and basic arms acquisition in the early days of 1918 to 1919. He then closely examines rebel efforts at weapons and ammunition manufacturing and bombmaking and reveals that the ingenuity and resources poured into manufacturing were never able to become a primary source of weapons and ammunition. As the conflict grew in intensity and expanded, the rebels encountered increasing difficulty in obtaining and maintaining supplies of weapons and ammunition since modern weapons in a protracted conflict used more ammunition than previous generations of weapons and their complexity meant that the weapons could not be clandestinely produced within Ireland. Thus, as the rebels conducted campaigns that became difficult to combat, their greatest limiting factor was that most of their weapons and ammunition had to be imported. Arming the Irish Revolution is the first work of research and analysis to explore in detail the Irish work inside Britain to establish arms centers and to conduct arms operations and trafficking. It also examines the full extent of the overseas or foreign arms trade and the arms operations of the War of Independence, including the continuance into the truce and treaty eras and up to the outbreak of the Civil War (1922â€"1923)—all of which reveals how the rebel leaders ran complex, maturing, and capable smuggling and manufacturing enterprises worldwide under the noses of the police, customs, intelligence, and the military for years without getting caught. Quite apart from the battlefield these groups and their activities led to political consequences, playing no small part in producing what were real concessions from Lloyd George's government. In the last chapter Kautt offers observations and conclusions about overall successes and failures that establishes Arming the Irish Revolution as a landmark study of insurgent or revolutionary arms acquisition in both Irish and military history.

1

Introduction

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.

The start of the Irish War of Independence came on a cold, wet January Tuesday in 1919, when the recently elected Irish republican members of parliament met at the Mansion House in Dublin and formed the first Assembly of Ireland, or Dáil Éireann. The Dáil formed an underground government that eventually attained independence from the United Kingdom. That same day, 118 miles southwest, in County Tipperary, a group of the republican Irish Volunteers¹ ambushed a horse-drawn cart carrying one hundred pounds of explosives to a quarry at Soloheadbeg, killing two policemen in the process.² The violence brought home the sobering reality that the coming struggle would not be quick or bloodless.

There was little about the ambush, beyond the needless killings, to make it remarkable;³ the significance given to the intersection of these two events normally obscures the primary purpose of the attack at Soloheadbeg—it was an attempt to obtain munitions. This was strangely apropos because one of the many obstacles the Irish Volunteers had to overcome was their pitiable lack of armaments. This was nothing unusual; rebellions throughout Ireland’s history had failed for many reasons, but foremost among them was always a lack of proper weapons, which, in a way, speaks to the rebels’ bravery. Desire does not make war; soldiers need weapons to fight.

With the ongoing Decade of Centenaries in Ireland, more studies of the Irish Revolution will likely continue to emerge on various aspects of the period, but this work focuses on one of the more unusual aspects, rebel arms procurement. While it will not examine the entirety of Irish Volunteers’ logistics, it is necessary to illuminate some closely related matters such as acquisition, smuggling activities, and transportation. Without sufficient arms in the hands of revolutionaries, there was no significant ability to make war, which makes any discussion of tactics or strategies used mostly irrelevant. Supply is so critical to warfighting that armies win and lose wars over it, while revolutionaries must secure their lines of supply or surely fail.

The obvious issue at this point is why, if logistics is so important, republican military logistics during the revolution has received so little attention. While there are studies that examine various elements of issues and topics surrounding arms acquisition during this period, none has done so comprehensively or as more than just a backdrop to another topic. As a result, there has been no assessment of these activities or their influences on the outcomes of the war. This lack of interest is somewhat surprising considering that, at least from 1917 to 1920, most Irish Volunteers operations were supply related. This was especially true at the unit level, where even offensive operations had significant logistical overtones. For example, attacks on police stations were usually little more than arms raids up to mid-1920. By focusing on the political significance of military actions in the war, historians have missed the basic military necessities of these attacks. More significantly, contemporaneous accounts of attacks from both sides tend to conclude not with casualties inflicted or sustained, but with numbers of weapons taken and amounts of ammunition captured. Clearly, the writers understood well the criticality of this topic, and thus these statistics became measures of effectiveness.

While a few studies cover various incidents of arms importation and similar topics before the war, none examines arms-smuggling acquisition during the war itself.⁴ Chronologically, there is F. X. Martin’s book on the Howth gunrunning in 1914, which provides some source material but is mostly a compilation of recollections and secondary sources.⁵ Ben Novick’s 2002 chapter looks at the Irish Volunteers’ arming activities during World War I,⁶ while Gerard Noonan includes a chapter that examines arms networks in Britain during the later revolution in his excellent book.⁷ J. Bowyer Bell and Patrick Jung had articles on the Thompson submachine gun in the Irish Sword, while the late Peter Hart included a chapter on it in his second book;⁸ however, these articles were restricted to just the Thompson and focused more on its effect than its acquisition. Andreas Roth had an excellent piece in the Irish Sword on arms smuggling from Germany, but, again, it is limited by looking at only one source of supply.⁹

From there, one must go to autobiographies and memoirs for information.¹⁰ Participants of the war were among the first to write accounts, and many of the authors mentioned various aspects of logistics, but none of these memoirs focused significant attention on supply, or when they did it was rightly focused on the individual rather than the system.¹¹ With the similar biographical genre, none appears to have higher value.¹²

At the other end of the political spectrum, for the pro-British Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), one must go to A. T. Q. Stewart’s masterful work on the situation in Ulster just before World War I, Frederick Crawford’s propagandistic account of his smuggling, or Keith Haines’s hagiographic biography of Fred Crawford.¹³ The first spends more time on the UVF’s smuggling than similar accounts of the Irish Volunteers, but it is one element among many, and one must approach both sources skeptically. The problem for these works is that none of them intended to examine gunrunning or related matters systematically.

Military historical examination of this conflict has been scant, and the void has been filled by political and social historians who have rightly shied from examining the more technical military aspects more deeply. Starting with the approach of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising, many authors have overemphasized Easter Week, partly for its drama as well as for its “safe” political appeal to both the pro- and antitreaty sides due to its seemingly more unified nature.¹⁴ The 1970s and 1980s brought more political examination, perhaps due to the ongoing “Troubles,” as John M. Regan has recently noted.¹⁵ These studies brought rich understanding of the political climate from the end of the Parnellite era to 1923 but left a considerable gap in the peculiarly insurrectionary aspects of the politics.¹⁶

An interesting, relevant, and welcome addition to Irish historiography is the relatively new focus of achieving a social understanding of the war. Starting with David Fitzpatrick in the late 1970s, historians began to explain who the Volunteers were, what they believed, and why they fought, the rhetoric of the past eighty years notwithstanding.¹⁷ These works examine, in addition to the above, the critical aspects of revolutionary-era volunteerism as a social movement.

By far one of the best military studies of the war, Charles Townshend’s The British Campaign in Ireland focused solely on the British, while in his Britain’s Civil Wars and Political Violence, he expanded his ideas on the war in Ireland. The late Keith Jeffery’s The British Army and the Crisis of Empire examined Ireland within the context of the wider empire, explaining that the British did not learn from their earlier experiences and suffered from a lack of a good example.¹⁸

One of the most unglamorous aspects of war is logistics; it and its attendant topics get short shrift in military writing. The rule of thumb is that there is a one-hundred-to-one ratio of strategy and tactics writings to those of logistics; this estimate does not seem far off the mark because they tend to be dry.¹⁹ One does not see, for instance, Napoleonic war reenactors reenacting supply units. Still, logistics is so critical to warfighting that it is integral in the curricula of professional military schools worldwide, albeit rarely popular. Logistics is significant in any military operation because it helps determine what is possible, but its aridity has caused academics to shy away from its study.²⁰

The supposed one-hundred-to-one ratio of strategy to logistics literature appears correct for the ratio of conventional logistics to guerrilla supply writings too. Indeed, few books deal solely with it for any conflict. Among these are S. Boyne’s, Gunrunners: The Covert Arms Trail to Ireland, A. R. Oppenheimer’s IRA: The Bomb and the Bullets: A History of Deadly Ingenuity, and J. M. Hazen’s What Rebel’s Want: Resources and Supply Networks in Wartime. It is interesting that two of these deal with Ireland from 1969 onward.

As for the remainder of the writings on the subject, these come in two groups: official field manuals and the writings of guerrilla theorists—de facto manuals for guerrillas. The writings of three of the “great” guerrilla theorists have few references to logistics but are unusually vague in the “how to” aspects of it.²¹ Even Che Guevara, the most prolific writer of the three regarding logistics, was more repetitive than informative. For instance, he mentioned the scarcity of ammunition frequently, often more than once per page and in several chapters. While Guevara’s mentor, Alberto Bayo, was more informative about logistics and less repetitive in his 150 Questions, the work was little more than lists of supplies...