A Bloody Victory. Dan Harvey
A BLOODY
VICTORY
Lieutenant Colonel Dan Harvey, now retired, served on operations at home and abroad for forty years, including tours of duty in the Middle East, Africa, the Balkans and South Caucasus, with the UN, EU, NATO PfP and OSCE. He is the author of Soldiering against Subversion: The Irish Defence Forces and Internal Security During the Troubles, 1969–1998 (2018); Into Action: Irish Peacekeepers Under Fire, 1960–2014 (2017); and Soldiers of the Short Grass: A History of the Curragh Camp (2016).
ALSO IN THIS SERIES
A Bloody Day: The Irish at Waterloo (2017)
A Bloody Night: The Irish at Rorke’s Drift (2017)
A Bloody Dawn: The Irish at D-Day (2019)
A Bloody Week: The Irish at Arnhem (2019)
A BLOODY
VICTORY
THE IRISH AT WAR’S END: EUROPE 1945
DAN HARVEY
First published in 2020 by
10 George’s Street
Newbridge
Co. Kildare
Ireland
© Dan Harvey, 2020
9781785373336 (Paper)
9781785373343 (Kindle)
9781785373350 (Epub)
9781785373367 (PDF)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
An entry can be found on request
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
An entry can be found on request
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved alone, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Typeset in Bembo MT Std 11/15 pt
Front cover: John O’Neill, Bere Island, Co. Cork (back right) with the Northumberland Fusiliers in Holland, September 1944.
Image courtesy of Sarah Bermingham.
Back cover: Major the Lord Rathdonnell receiving the Military Cross from Field Marshal Montgomery, 12 August 1945. © Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums/Bridgeman Images.
CONTENTS
3. Thunderclap and Bombing the Big B
10. Telling the End of War Story
A Chronology of the End of the Second World War
Timeline: Operation Varsity and Plunder
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Second World War was won with the help of the brave men and women who fought for the Allies in their hour of need. Those that took a principled stand against tyranny, for whatever motivation, ought to be respected rather than ignored. It is all too profound that it was an Irishman, Edmund Burke, who is attributed with the words, ‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.’
When it mattered, the Irish did far from nothing. It is now an established fact that large numbers of Irish men and women fought with the Allies to save Europe from the evils of Nazi fascism. This is something that the Irish have become increasingly aware of over more recent decades. Because this involvement was more comprehensive than previously thought, it is now necessary to recalibrate our understanding of this heretofore underrated participation.
Ireland’s double-edged ambiguity, arising from the State’s pragmatic ‘neutral’ stance during the war, has created many misunderstandings and misperceptions, giving rise to much misinformation, whereas for many of the Irish there was a clear-cut course of action to be taken. The Irish were among the rangers, the commandos and the commanders; the airmen in the skies above and the sailors on the ships at sea. They all accepted the risks and exposed themselves to harm; they put themselves into the line of fire by entering deadly battle spaces, from the war’s very beginning to its very end.
I wrote this book to make people aware that those Irish men and women who participated in the war were part of a broad, outward-looking nationalistic narrative, acting for Ireland and standing shoulder to shoulder with the Allies. On Remembrance Sunday 2019, at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, Canon David Oxley, the prebendary of St Audoen’s, reported in The Irish Times that Irish neutrality in the Second World War was understandable from a political point of view. However, he added that, from a moral point of view,
it was hardly possible to remain neutral in the face of the kind of evil represented by fascism. Many individual Irishmen and women did in fact take sides and volunteered to oppose Nazism in arms, and we commemorate their sacrifice this afternoon. And I suppose what I want to say to you is just this: in the conflict between right and wrong, truth and falsehood, neutrality is not an