The real history of Churchill and Dev was well hidden in TV series
The programme was superficial to the point of absurdity, as it repeatedly failed to put events in context. It might as well have been made from the propaganda of 60 years ago because there was little or nothing in it that was not known then.
Viewers were told that Churchill was Minister for War during the Irish War of Independence and that he eventually favoured a negotiated settlement. But they were not told he backed Chief of Imperial General Staff Henry Wilson who called for British forces to put lists on the doors of Catholic churches of local people who would be shot as authorised reprisals if any members of the security forces were killed.
Desecrating churches in such a way was guaranteed to alienate the people.
Churchill clamoured for “summary justice”. He actually proposed emulating the Bolsheviks in Russia with prompt executions. “After a person is caught, he could pay the penalty within a week”, he said.
He got his way, as the British behaved with wooden stupidity in executing teenager Kevin Barry on November 1, 1920 — All-Saints’ Day. Barry promptly became “another martyr for old Ireland”.
The Auxiliaries, the brainchild of Churchill, were responsible for the most infamous incident of the conflict at a football game in Croke Park on Bloody Sunday later that month. They fired indiscriminately, killing 14 spectators and one player.
Hidden History ignored those events and the firm stands against international aggression taken by de Valera at the League of Nations. In 1935, as the Italians prepared to invade Ethiopia, de Valera warned that the League was being given a last chance. If it did not stand up to Italy’s aggression,
Ireland would go its own way and stay out of the war that would eventually ensue.
But Churchill was then more intent on appeasing Mussolini.
After the sinking of the battleship Royal Oak at anchor in Scapa Flow in October 1939, Churchill actually called on the British war cabinet to seize Irish ports. This was obviously a diversion, as there was no way the denial of Irish bases had anything to do with the events at Scapa Flow.
Even Anthony Eden, one of Churchill’s strongest backers, denounced the proposed attack on Ireland as madness because of the damage it would do to Britain’s standing in the USA. Fearing that Churchill would attack Ireland after he became prime minister, the Americans warned that this would greatly hamper Franklin Roosevelt’s efforts to help Britain, especially in that election year in which he was running for an unprecedented third term.
One contributor mentioned the necessity of putting in context Churchill’s famous speech denouncing the denial of Irish ports on November 5, 1940, but then the programme missed the real context. It was election day in the USA, so Churchill was taking the first opportunity to lash out, but it was also another bid to divert attention.
The British learned that day that the German battleship Admiral Scheer was attacking a lightly defended convoy of some 40 ships in mid-Atlantic.
There were fears for the whole convoy, with the result that all other convoys were suspended for what became the longest delay of the war.
The programme also failed dismally to put the Northern Ireland conscription crisis of May 1941 in context. There was no mention of the bombing of Belfast on April 15, 1941, when 745 people were killed. This was considerably more than the 554 who perished in the bombing of Coventry the previous November.
The English always seemed ready to fight their wars to the last colonial.
The defences of Belfast were grossly inadequate. There were only two balloon barrages, which were well below the 7,000 feet at which the 180 German bombers flew, and the anti-aircraft shells were exploding much too high, at 12,000 feet. In real terms, the defences amounted merely to making noise.
The Belfast bombing was followed in the Atlantic by the sinking of the pride of the Royal Navy, HMS Hood, by the German battleship Bismarck. Churchill used the conscription crisis to detract attention from these disasters, but he ran into intense opposition from his most powerful allies.
Roosevelt warned against conscription in the North, and Prime Minister Mackenzie King of Canada complained that it would cause serious problems for him at home, while Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies, who had just returned from visiting Britain and Ireland, denounced the idea as lunacy.
“They are mad in Dublin, madder still in Belfast, and on this question perhaps maddest of all at Downing Street”, Menzies noted. “Blind prejudice, based on historical events, is the most intractable and almost the most dangerous thing in the world”.
Churchill tried to push ahead because backing off would look like appeasement, but his own cabinet compelled him to drop the idea.
The Hidden History programme also overlooked another sensational aspect of the Belfast bombing. In response to a request for help from John MacDermott, the Stormont Minister for Public Security, de Valera sent fire brigades from Dublin, Dun Laoghaire, Dundalk and Drogheda to fight the fires in Belfast.
It was a patently non-neutral act, but Hidden History was more interested in depicting the Churchill/de Valera face-off as a confrontation between the man with the bulldog spirit and the detached neutral. Many people saw it that way 60 years ago, but it was a gross distortion.
BEHIND the scenes de Valera never pretended to be neutral in his relations with the Allies. He was a determined non-belligerent ally prepared to give all help short of war.
There was extensive Irish security co-operation. The Irish passed on intelligence from their diplomats on the continent, as well as German naval codes found off the south coast following the sinking of a submarine.
German airmen and sailors who landed in Ireland were interned for the duration of the war. Some Allied airmen were interned for a time, but most were let go immediately, and all were secretly released long before the end of the war.
Irish coastwatching services reported directly to the British, who were allowed to station two armed naval vessels in Killybegs and Cobh for air-sea rescue purposes. The guns were covered and the British sailors’ worse civilian clothes only in port.
Wireless direction equipment was operated at Malin Head and Valentia for Allied planes to get their bearings. The British were also allowed to establish a radar station near the south coast. The reality of Irish ‘neutrality’ was the hidden history that the programme ignored. Churchill wrote his own distorted history in relation to Ireland. The “blind prejudice,” referred to by
Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies, thrived at our expense. Northern nationalists were treated contemptibly, and this culminated in a second Bloody Sunday — this time on the streets of Derry in 1972. Many people paid dearly in the ensuing years of the madness that it spawned, especially when Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher behaved like Churchill.
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