Post by Waverley on Dec 28, 2008 1:34:46 GMT 1
Robert Stradling uncovers the tale of the Irishmen who went off to fight for the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War and the reaction they provoked, then and now.
Fifty years ago last December, a state funeral was held in Dublin to honour one of the great heroes of the Irish struggle for national independence. The deceased had been a gallant soldier and failed politician, whose name has now all but disappeared from the historical record; it was Eoin O’Duffy. The formal commemoration of General O'Duffy's death, by what was soon to become the Irish Republic, was ordered by his most determined domestic opponent, Eamon de Valera, leader of the ruling party, Fianna Fail.
Apart from the Taoiseach and most of the cabinet, the ceremonies were attended by the Spanish Ambassador, Senor Ontiveros, and a senior representative of the Spanish army, on behalf of General Franco. On the whole, however, partly no doubt because it took place during the most intense phase of the battle against Germany on the European mainland, the occasion passed by relatively quietly. Indeed, it was greeted largely with indifference even in Ireland, except amongst a few dozen of the departed hero's devoted followers.
These diminished ranks were the diehard residue of what had once been a thriving and powerful political movement, the Irish version of fascism, a band of men and women who called themselves 'The Blueshirts'. In this last sentence I nearly wrote 'the bizarre Irish version of fascism': for to resort to the vocabulary of sixty years of unsympathetic public comment upon O'Duffy and his supporters is all too easy. The general’s reputation had become seriously tarnished in his last years. His person, his Blueshirts, and above all the Volunteer Brigade which he led to fight for the 'fascist' side during the Spanish Civil War, were causes of embarrassment in official circles and of tap-room ridicule everywhere. In the unanimous verdict of Irish and non-Irish historians alike, O'Duffy was not only a fascist, but an incompetent, and a drunkard. Others argue that he was a coward others still discern a covert homosexual. The familiar – and allegedly native - injunction that 'if I were you, I shouldn't start from here', would seem to be good advice to any writer seeking for sources to rehabilitate Eoin Duffy.
In any case, the official Requiem Mass in Dublin's pro-Cathedral, the solemn cortege, the military salute at the Glasnevin graveside, were offerings which de Valera could well afford. His one-time political rival had ceased to be a threat long before his death. The obsequies provided another demonstration that the Taoiseach was now above mere party, having become the lofty personification of the Irish State, ascetic apostle of re- conciliation at home and neutrality abroad. Not many years earlier, however, the prospect of a mass demonstration in O'Duffy’s favour in the streets of Dublin had frightened de Valera into the largest show of military force the Irish government had mounted since the Civil War of 1922.
In August 1933, O'Duffy announced that on the approaching day dedicated to the memory of national heroes killed in the struggle for independence, his Blueshirts – reputedly 30,000 strong – would march through the capital to the Parnell monument in Phoenix Park. It was intended as the culmination of a well-orchestrated campaign of speeches, meetings and marches all over Ireland, which had often been punctuated by-violence as leftist elements attempted to disrupt Blueshirt rallies. The toll of injured and dead from these encounters mounted steadily. It was believed that many O'Duffy supporters had stashed away firearms used on the government side during the Civil War. Given the circumstances of 1933, it is hardly surprising that de Valera and his cabinet suspected they were facing the prospect of a facist-style putsch, a 'march on Dublin' which would sweep O'Duffy to power as military dictator.
The situation was dangerously complicated by the fact that until only a few months before, shortly after the election result which made de Valera head of a precarious minority government, General O'Duffy: had been the popular chief commissioner of the Garda Siochana, the civilian police force. Furthermore, for a period in the 1920s he had held in plurality – and surely in unique fashion for a democracy – the post of General Officer in Command of the Irish Army itself. In 1935, many of the men who occupied key commands in both organisations were O'Duffy's ex-subordinates and even his appointees. Ex-comrades, friends and even family of members of the forces of law and order were bound to be prominent in the ranks of the marching Blueshirts.
De Valera boldly banned the march, nevertheless, and ordered army and police to stand by, and threatened O'Duffy with responsibility for the consequences of going ahead. For reasons which can only be surmised, the general declined the challenge and called off his demonstration. We can never know what might have happened had the loyalty of the state forces actually been put to the test. What is certain is that the debacle signalled the beginning of the end for the Blueshirt movement and for O'Duffy's political career.
As the reader will have gathered, O'Duffy and de Valera had been on opposing sides during the struggle which even today (if in attenuated form) continues to delineate the elemental split of Irish politics – the short but bloody internecine conflict over the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. The former was a protege of Michael Collins, and one of his most trusted colleagues at the time of the famous leader's death. De Valera organised republican resistance to the Treaty, suffering imprisonment and risking excommunication by the Catholic hierarchy, whilst in contrast, O'Duffy enjoyed the material and moral fruits of victory.
By the 1930s, however, the general had become completely divorced from the grounds of domestic disagreement, rehearsed above, which continued to preoccupy most of his compatriots. O'Duffy's mentality was of the type which English observers and commentators too often mistakenly assume to be predominant in the make-up of modern Irish nationalism. He was a zealous Catholic, whose political identity was formed entirely by perception of the historic persecution of his Irish co-religionists. In 1916-21, O'Duffy's enemy was the traditional English Protestant oppressor; then, for a brief moment, it had been his misguided compatriots who tried to deny Ireland (to use Collins' celebrated words) 'the freedom to achieve freedom'. Once these adversaries had been overcome, another loomed before him which seemed far more evil and deadly than either – the threat of atheistic Communism and the Third International.
O'Duffy was an out-and-out Catholic clericalist who dutifully accepted the lead of the pulpit and the guidance of Rome. This simplistic but powerful political faith seemed justified almost providentially by the victory of the puny Irish nationalist movement over the most powerful military-colonial state in. the world, a state (moreover) which had just over- come its greatest competitor in the epic struggle of the First World War. it was no accident that in 1932 the Irish Catholic hierarchy called upon General O'Duffy to organise the huge Eucharistic Congress which Pope Pius XI awarded to Dublin, an event which proved to be a thinly-disguised expression of triumphalism by the Universal Church over its enemies.
It is not necessary to place in question O'Duffy's sincere adherence to, and profound inspiration by, Catholicism in order to acknowledge that anti-Communism now became a high- h convenient vehicle for his political career. The party to which he belonged, (Cumann na nGaedhael, led by W.T. Cosgrave) which had created the Free State and governed its first decade, was narrowly defeated in the election of 1932. This exposed its leaders to the revenge of their enemies, whom de Valera had brilliantly re-shaped into the constitutionally conformist Fianna Fail. O'Duffy himself was summarily sacked by de Valera as chief of police, and most of his political associates were likewise faced with loss of office and influence. Not surprisingly, several began to flirt with fascist ideas, some actually abandoning the parliamentary path to join the Blueshirts and/or one of its competitor or successor movements on the extreme Right. Even for many who remained loyal to Cosgrave, what they called 'corporatism’ was an interest which continued well after the opposition party was reorganised as Fine Gael.
The new coalition government's policy had worsened the medium-term economic situation, and, in addition, de Valera seemed vulnerable to the smouldering resentment of Fianna Fail's own die-hard 'refuseniks', the Irish Republican Army. The larger faction of what was left of the IRA now re-formed itself into a Republican Congress and began to make fashionably extreme left-wing noises. The early 1930s were marked by various 'Red scares' as the oratory of rightist agitators and the pastoral letters of bishops raised the spectre of the slimy tentacles of international Communism reaching towards the shores of the Emerald Isle.
It must be emphasised at this point that the basic polarities of 1930s politics, so familiar from the history of Great Britain and Continental Europe in the 1930s, did not hold for the Irish Free State. With hindsight we can see that 'southern' Ireland was already on the way to overcoming its own history, and achieving a stable underlying political consensus. It was an agrarian peasant democracy in which the sanctions of wealth and poverty, though (of course) present, were less hard-edged and divisive than anywhere else in non-Communist Europe. Not only was the nation well over 90 per cent Catholic, but within that majority, 99 per cent actually practised their religion.
Ireland was the only Catholic country in the world where adult males attended church and took the sacraments as punctiliously as did females and minors. The social and moral influence of the clergy was enormous, and went largely unquestioned by any political group which wished to retain a following. If, on the one hand, this influence normally failed to extend to the realm of an individual's electoral preferences, on the other, the number of Irish Communists could be counted on the beads of one rosary.
Many were aware, however, that matters were much less happy in another strongly Catholic country. Events in Spain had begun to disturb Irish Catholic leaders well before the general outbreak of armed violence in 1936. The proclamation of the Second Republic in 1931 sounded a considerable echo of sympathy in many Irish hearts, but the spate of church-burnings which quickly followed was a warning which adumbrated the dilemma its supporters were later to face. The campaign of quasi-persecution which marked the first two years of the Spanish republic confirmed many of these fears. When the military uprising of July 1936 precipitated a revolution led by workers' organisations in many parts of Spain, the clergy quickly became a prime target. The months of July, August and September witnessed the wholesale murder of clerics, especially in areas (such as Extremudura, Andalusia, Aragon and Catalonia) where Anarchist doctrine had anathematised the cloth. During this limited but horrific period, it is a matter of record that dreadful atrocities took place against thousands of priests and nuns who were entirely innocent of any complicity in class oppression. The world's press quickly seized on sensational stories, often emanating from refugees from the loyalist zone, and Irish newspapers naturally gave the results maximum coverage. The most exaggerated and degenerate episodes, in large part either the lurid elaborations of fear or the carefully-crafted products of propaganda, were widely credited. In a letter to the pro-opposition daily, The Irish Independent, General O'Duffy asserted
In Madrid priests are battered to death on the altars, and their heads stuck on the railings outside the churches by howling mobs of women and youths armed by the Government. In Barcelona convents are sacked, the nuns stripped of their clothing and forced to walk naked before the mob. Men, women and children are being hung up alive on trees in the streets and fires lit under them.
In the same letter, dated August 10th, barely three weeks after the start of the conflict, the general suggested publicly for the first time that a volunteer unit of Irish fighters should be raised in support of the Spanish Nationalist forces. Soon afterwards, O'Duffy offered to organise this 'Brigade' with the co-operation of his own political group, the National Corporate Party, and to lead it to Spain in person. The idea was not originally his, having reached his desk from a Spanish monarchist agent in London, via Cardinal MacRory, Archbishop of Armagh. But it seems clear that O'Duffy's immediate purpose was twofold: to help protect fellow-Catholics, both clerical and lay, from murderous persecution; and to play a part in stemming the 'Red Tide' threatening to inundate Christian civilisation – of which persecution was an obvious symptom.
It is important to understand the conviction held by Eoin O'Duffy and his associates that Europe was suffering an all-out ideological offensive directed by the Soviet Union. They had little knowledge of the history or theory of Marxism-Leninism, and no insight into the tergiversations of Stalinist foreign policy. They were wholly unaware that in Spain it vas the Anarchists who led the assault on the church, and the Communist Party which – on the contrary – strained every nerve to prevent this and every other manifestation of social revolution. For O'Duffy, Irish Catholicism. was inevitably implicated in the fate of Spain; he saw his mission as, purely and simply, a crusade against Communism. Most of us will be able to recall that this was a. species of paranoia which, in 193Ci, nr 1956, or even 1986, one did not need to he either Irish or Catholic in order to contract.
Within a week of the general's proposal the Irish Independent reported between five and 6,000 offers to join a volunteer brigade. Meanwhile, O'Duffy needed to satisfy himself over the status and terms of the invitation. In September, he visited General Mola, co-ordinator of the army conspiracy, who now commanded the northern division of the insurgent army in Valladnlid. The two men got on well, and their agreement was sealed in the most auspicious manner. As they were shaking hands, news arrived of Franco's relief of the Alcazar of Toledo. Though O'Duffy did not neglect the occasion to celebrate, his task now seemed more urgent than ever. With the nationalist forces approaching Madrid, the war would soon be over; naturally, the crusader wanted his men to make a more substantial contribution to the defeat of the Reds than an appearance in the victory parade. During this visit, moreover, O'Duffy began to learn some of the baroque secrets of Spanish politics. He realised, for example, that the anti-insurgent forces of the Basque Country were no part of the 'Red Tide', but rather fervent Catholics who struggled only for regional autonomy. His brigade would therefore have to fight, not with Mola but with Franco, a man whom various interventionist powers, of greater significance and influence than Eoin O'Duffy, had already found a somewhat difficult ally.
By the time the general returned to Ireland, plans had matured. The political context had been carefully manipulated by the bishops and the opposition press so as to reduce the effect of government disapproval. De Valera had stoutly resisted opposition demands for a break in diplomatic and commercial relations with the Republic, and in September the free State adhered to the Treaty of Non- Intervention. In Ireland, however, this stance had quite a different gloss to that normally seen from the United Kingdom angle. By now, there was a popular and vocal current of opinion in favour of the nationalists, in comparison with which support for the Republic was muted. Sunday sermons all over the country contained admiring references to General Franco. With minimal opposition, dozens of local councils voted through the so called 'Clonmel Resolution' calling for official Irish recognition of the Burgos government. Indeed, similar motions were passed by various Trade Union committees. In this atmosphere, O'Duffy's aides were able to construct a communication network, preparatory to the actual mobilisation and transport of the brigade. Yet, in the light of his salutary experience over the 1933 march, O'Duffy would have been rash to assume that de Valera would never call his bluff. He had to avoid any violent confrontation with the authorities, and (above all) to give no excuse for .his own arrest. Thus the whole operation had perforce to be semi clandestine, and was correspondingly slowed down.
Even more pressing is the provision of transport. In October, it was still hoped to take 5,000 men to Spain: funds were not yet available and chartering of Irish or British vessels was in any case out of the question. The launching of the crusade thus depended entirely upon troop ships being provided by the insurgents themselves. In an attempt to tackle these problems a hand-picked advance party of twenty left Dublin in two groups and travelled to Spain by normal commercial services, reaching Franco's HQ in Salamanca early in November.
At this point the operation ran into the problems of caudillismo – the negative side of the decision, lately taken for positive military reasons, to make Franco the supreme warlord. The generalisimio was far too preoccupied with planning his assault on Madrid to devote attention to the trivial needs of the Irish. His frustrated attempts at liaison saw O'Duffy's relations with Franco get off to a poor start.
As frantic efforts were made to assemble a reliable programme, November arrived with the imminent prospect of the fall of Madrid. Correspondence between the Irish organisers assumed that the brigade would hardly be in time to help with more than the mopping-up operations which would follow government surrender. The first plans for embarkation were aborted when Franco, uni-laterally and without warning, cancelled the voyage of a Spanish merchantman to Irish waters. Meanwhile, however, several small groups of volunteers caught the routine Dublin ferry to Liverpool and made their way to Salamanca, and in early December the Nationalists were at last able to charter a German troopship. Hundreds of recruits, from as far distant as Dublin, were ordered to make for Galway, where officials were evidently regarded as sympathetic.
On Saturday night, December 5th, around 600 men gathered in Eyre Square, under the eyes of apprehensive local Gardai and delighted publicans. In the small hours of the following morning they marched round to the harbour to board the ferryboat Dun Aengus which was normally occupied in carrying livestock from the Aran Islands. A hand played 'Faith of Our Fathers', friends and relatives waved handkerchiefs from the quayside. After a long stomach-churning wait in the freezing black swell of Galway Bay, contact was established with the German steamer the men were somehow transferred without mishap, and the party reached El Ferrol two days later. This seemed a good omen as this port was the birth-place of the new nationalist generalisimo. But apart from one reinforcement of less than 100 men, which came into Lisbon late in the year, no further shipment proved feasible.
It would be futile to pretend that the German service rendered in delivering the Brigade was to prove as important to the Spanish Nationalist war effort as their transport of the army of Africa across the straits of Gibraltar. Nonetheless the battle record and reputation gained by the O'Duffy Brigade do not justify the wholly negative (indeed, contemptible) impression conveyed by malicious reports and a national tendency to self-denigration. For one thing, it was ordained by Franco that the Irishmen should actually form part of the army of Africa; indeed, that they should be constituted as a bandera (battalion) of El Tercio – the elite Foreign Legion founded by Franco's mentor, Millan Astray, and commanded by the caudillo himself. This signal advance honour recognised (inter alia) that a majority of the volunteers had already seen active service with or against the British army (in some cases, both), and that a large proportion had at some time been commissioned officers or NCOs.
The Brigade underwent eight weeks of intensive training in the methods and discipline of El Tercio in Caceres (Extremadura), where the citizens were astonished by their equal devotion to the Blessed Virgin and to Bacchus. In mid-February (1937), they were assigned to a sector of the line south of Madrid. On their way, they experienced their first battle – a tragic blunder which was entirely the fault of Spanish officers on both sides. Apparently overhearing a foreign tongue during a parley of deputations, a bandera from the Canary Islands jumped to the conclusion that they had confronted an infiltrating unit of the International Brigades, and suddenly opened fire. In the sharp exchange which followed two Irishmen, including a popular officer, were killed.
The next day, the Brigade occupied its billets in the small town of Ciempozuelos, today little more than an anonymous dormitory suburb of the sprawling Spanish capital. The streets bore signs of recent heavy fighting. Coincidentally, the place had been held by the Fifteenth International Brigade – which probably included some Irishmen but was taken by a Moorish unit of El Tercio in their advance towards the river Jarama. However, this offensive ground to a halt not long after the Irishmen arrived, and was never renewed. Instead, the Nationalists began to plan a major switch of their strategy to the north, the attack on the Basques, a campaign in which the Brigade could have no part. For the rest of its sojourn in Spain – indeed, for the rest of the war – the Madrid front was largely dormant. The men suffered the familiar strains of inactive trench life, aggravated by an exceptionally wet spring. Indeed, if anyone ever translated 'Ciempozuelos', it may have caused ironic amusement – it means 'a hundred little wells'. Other casualties, including four killed, were incurred in further minor actions, but the longest list was of those who ended up in hospital with a variety of ailments.
O'Duffy's agreement with Franco, made in November 1936, stipulated that his unit was to serve until the end of the war, or the end of six months, whichever arrived first. He was anxious to renew this commitment, so as to share in a more rewarding and glorious phase of operations; but his men were by now in a mood of sullen discontent. The officer corps persuaded their leader to put the matter to the vote, and as the result of an overwhelming democratic decision the Brigade returned to Ireland in mid-June, 1937. In Dublin and some other places, the volunteers received warm and appreciative public receptions, though some were disappointed not to be greeted with acclamation as heroes and martyrs of a sacrosanct crusade.
Of course, it would be absurd now, as then, to beatify these men. But on the other hand it seems unjust to deny the rank-and-file of the Irish Bandera similar recognition to that which has traditionally been given to the International Brigades. Like the latter, they risked life and limb in a cause which they felt was worthy to the point of being morally imperative. Pro rata, the ranks of the O'Duffy Brigade contained fewer convinced fascists than those of the Internationals contained convinced Communists. The Irish Brigade has often been traduced for incurring few battle casualties – surely a strange species of argument to employ in a military context. Indeed, it might with equal validity be argued that the contrary tendency among the Internationals illustrates chronic military incompetence. Although one of the Brigade's two serious engagements was a ghastly error, they nonetheless accounted for some twenty of their adversaries for the loss of tour dead (including two Spanish aides) and one wounded. The reported admiration of some German officers in Spain for the Irish Brigade may not have been entirely undeserved. In the course of 1937, all the top brass of El Tercio – Varela, Yague, and Franco himself – included the Bandera Irlandesa in their tours of inspection. Though drunkenness was a recurrent problem in billets, hardy perennials about the feudin' and fightin' Irish were mostly invented by agents-provocateurs planted in the ranks by the Republican Congress. Dozens of other committed 1RA members (men from the opposite end of the Irish political spectrum to the Blueshirts) joined the Brigade – some later rejoining the republican movement. Notably enough, a representative handful of Protestants, from both sides of the border, also joined O'Duffy's Catholic crusade. For them, confessional differences between Christians were rendered insignificant by the Communist threat.
The Irish Brigade's stay in Spain was exactly contemporaneous with that of the most famous individual among all the volunteers of the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell. Like Orwell, they suffered privation and wounds for their cause; like him, they were isolated, through no choice of their own, on an obscure section of the front, and involved through official blunders in episodes of farce; like him, they feared and hated the influence of Soviet Communism. In contrast to the case of Orwell, however, when their memory is revived today, it is often for the purpose of derision.
As for Eoin O'Duffy himself, few modern leaders can have had such a collective mauling from commentators of almost every shade of political opinion. His memory is not revived, merely reviled. His staff returned from Spain in a mood of mutinous complaint and mutual recrimination, and some of them never again spoke to the leader, nor to each other, as long as they lived. Others, like O'Duffy's one-time secretary and disciple, Tom Gunning, stayed behind in Spain, and blackened the chief s reputation with visiting journalists. Clearly, Franco himself disliked O'Duffy and was glad to see the back of him in 1937. He was disgusted by the Irishman's drinking habits, and perplexed by his reluctance to fight against the Basques. The Caudillo may also have been apprehensive about the political character of O'Duffy and his movement. After all, Franco was currently having enough trouble with the home-brewed Blueshirts – the camisas azules of the radical anti-establishment Falange – to feel easy about importing foreign ones.
But perhaps there was another, more personal reason for Franco's unfavourable opinion of O'Duffy. The former's competitive instinct was a striking feature of his character; it brought him to supreme power and kept him secure in it for nearly forty years. The assertion that he was the youngest general in Europe was frequently repeated in contemporary propaganda and has since become commonplace. The statement is correct – but only technically so. When Franco became brigadier-general in February, 1926 – at thirty-three – he indeed became the youngest serving general at that juncture, but only by virtue of being a few weeks younger than Eoin O'Duffy, whom he succeed- ed in that honour. (Both were born in late 1892). But the latter's career had been even more precocious than Franco's. In February, 1921 – aged twenty-eight – O'Duffy was a lieutenant-general in the Irish National Army fighting the British. A year later, under the Free State (thus recognised by the British Empire and Commonwealth) he was promoted Chief of Staff during the war against the republican 'rebels'. As we have seen, before long he was appointed GOC. Since we know that O'Duffy once boasted to Franco of having commanded a million men (during the Eucharistic Congress), he seems unlikely to have allowed diplomatic tact to inhibit him from drawing these achievements to his reluctant host's attention.
O'Duffy's last intervention in international politics was in 1941, when he wrote to Adolf Hitler, offering to send an Irish Brigade to assist him in the destruction of Bolshevism. Hitler's response is not recorded: doubtless he discouraged the Irish Napoleon, having enough trouble on his hands with the Spanish Napoleon's volunteer Division Azul. This last sentence contains a joke or two. Humour is the normal discourse in treatment of the history of the Blueshirts; and often (until recently) of other minor 'fascist' phenomena in Britain and Europe. It is infallibly subversive and dismissive of its subject, tending to deprive it of any meaning worthy of serious attention. This is not only an implicitly censorious attitude, but also one which impedes full understanding of the attractions and purposes of political extremism.
Fifty years ago last December, a state funeral was held in Dublin to honour one of the great heroes of the Irish struggle for national independence. The deceased had been a gallant soldier and failed politician, whose name has now all but disappeared from the historical record; it was Eoin O’Duffy. The formal commemoration of General O'Duffy's death, by what was soon to become the Irish Republic, was ordered by his most determined domestic opponent, Eamon de Valera, leader of the ruling party, Fianna Fail.
Apart from the Taoiseach and most of the cabinet, the ceremonies were attended by the Spanish Ambassador, Senor Ontiveros, and a senior representative of the Spanish army, on behalf of General Franco. On the whole, however, partly no doubt because it took place during the most intense phase of the battle against Germany on the European mainland, the occasion passed by relatively quietly. Indeed, it was greeted largely with indifference even in Ireland, except amongst a few dozen of the departed hero's devoted followers.
These diminished ranks were the diehard residue of what had once been a thriving and powerful political movement, the Irish version of fascism, a band of men and women who called themselves 'The Blueshirts'. In this last sentence I nearly wrote 'the bizarre Irish version of fascism': for to resort to the vocabulary of sixty years of unsympathetic public comment upon O'Duffy and his supporters is all too easy. The general’s reputation had become seriously tarnished in his last years. His person, his Blueshirts, and above all the Volunteer Brigade which he led to fight for the 'fascist' side during the Spanish Civil War, were causes of embarrassment in official circles and of tap-room ridicule everywhere. In the unanimous verdict of Irish and non-Irish historians alike, O'Duffy was not only a fascist, but an incompetent, and a drunkard. Others argue that he was a coward others still discern a covert homosexual. The familiar – and allegedly native - injunction that 'if I were you, I shouldn't start from here', would seem to be good advice to any writer seeking for sources to rehabilitate Eoin Duffy.
In any case, the official Requiem Mass in Dublin's pro-Cathedral, the solemn cortege, the military salute at the Glasnevin graveside, were offerings which de Valera could well afford. His one-time political rival had ceased to be a threat long before his death. The obsequies provided another demonstration that the Taoiseach was now above mere party, having become the lofty personification of the Irish State, ascetic apostle of re- conciliation at home and neutrality abroad. Not many years earlier, however, the prospect of a mass demonstration in O'Duffy’s favour in the streets of Dublin had frightened de Valera into the largest show of military force the Irish government had mounted since the Civil War of 1922.
In August 1933, O'Duffy announced that on the approaching day dedicated to the memory of national heroes killed in the struggle for independence, his Blueshirts – reputedly 30,000 strong – would march through the capital to the Parnell monument in Phoenix Park. It was intended as the culmination of a well-orchestrated campaign of speeches, meetings and marches all over Ireland, which had often been punctuated by-violence as leftist elements attempted to disrupt Blueshirt rallies. The toll of injured and dead from these encounters mounted steadily. It was believed that many O'Duffy supporters had stashed away firearms used on the government side during the Civil War. Given the circumstances of 1933, it is hardly surprising that de Valera and his cabinet suspected they were facing the prospect of a facist-style putsch, a 'march on Dublin' which would sweep O'Duffy to power as military dictator.
The situation was dangerously complicated by the fact that until only a few months before, shortly after the election result which made de Valera head of a precarious minority government, General O'Duffy: had been the popular chief commissioner of the Garda Siochana, the civilian police force. Furthermore, for a period in the 1920s he had held in plurality – and surely in unique fashion for a democracy – the post of General Officer in Command of the Irish Army itself. In 1935, many of the men who occupied key commands in both organisations were O'Duffy's ex-subordinates and even his appointees. Ex-comrades, friends and even family of members of the forces of law and order were bound to be prominent in the ranks of the marching Blueshirts.
De Valera boldly banned the march, nevertheless, and ordered army and police to stand by, and threatened O'Duffy with responsibility for the consequences of going ahead. For reasons which can only be surmised, the general declined the challenge and called off his demonstration. We can never know what might have happened had the loyalty of the state forces actually been put to the test. What is certain is that the debacle signalled the beginning of the end for the Blueshirt movement and for O'Duffy's political career.
As the reader will have gathered, O'Duffy and de Valera had been on opposing sides during the struggle which even today (if in attenuated form) continues to delineate the elemental split of Irish politics – the short but bloody internecine conflict over the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. The former was a protege of Michael Collins, and one of his most trusted colleagues at the time of the famous leader's death. De Valera organised republican resistance to the Treaty, suffering imprisonment and risking excommunication by the Catholic hierarchy, whilst in contrast, O'Duffy enjoyed the material and moral fruits of victory.
By the 1930s, however, the general had become completely divorced from the grounds of domestic disagreement, rehearsed above, which continued to preoccupy most of his compatriots. O'Duffy's mentality was of the type which English observers and commentators too often mistakenly assume to be predominant in the make-up of modern Irish nationalism. He was a zealous Catholic, whose political identity was formed entirely by perception of the historic persecution of his Irish co-religionists. In 1916-21, O'Duffy's enemy was the traditional English Protestant oppressor; then, for a brief moment, it had been his misguided compatriots who tried to deny Ireland (to use Collins' celebrated words) 'the freedom to achieve freedom'. Once these adversaries had been overcome, another loomed before him which seemed far more evil and deadly than either – the threat of atheistic Communism and the Third International.
O'Duffy was an out-and-out Catholic clericalist who dutifully accepted the lead of the pulpit and the guidance of Rome. This simplistic but powerful political faith seemed justified almost providentially by the victory of the puny Irish nationalist movement over the most powerful military-colonial state in. the world, a state (moreover) which had just over- come its greatest competitor in the epic struggle of the First World War. it was no accident that in 1932 the Irish Catholic hierarchy called upon General O'Duffy to organise the huge Eucharistic Congress which Pope Pius XI awarded to Dublin, an event which proved to be a thinly-disguised expression of triumphalism by the Universal Church over its enemies.
It is not necessary to place in question O'Duffy's sincere adherence to, and profound inspiration by, Catholicism in order to acknowledge that anti-Communism now became a high- h convenient vehicle for his political career. The party to which he belonged, (Cumann na nGaedhael, led by W.T. Cosgrave) which had created the Free State and governed its first decade, was narrowly defeated in the election of 1932. This exposed its leaders to the revenge of their enemies, whom de Valera had brilliantly re-shaped into the constitutionally conformist Fianna Fail. O'Duffy himself was summarily sacked by de Valera as chief of police, and most of his political associates were likewise faced with loss of office and influence. Not surprisingly, several began to flirt with fascist ideas, some actually abandoning the parliamentary path to join the Blueshirts and/or one of its competitor or successor movements on the extreme Right. Even for many who remained loyal to Cosgrave, what they called 'corporatism’ was an interest which continued well after the opposition party was reorganised as Fine Gael.
The new coalition government's policy had worsened the medium-term economic situation, and, in addition, de Valera seemed vulnerable to the smouldering resentment of Fianna Fail's own die-hard 'refuseniks', the Irish Republican Army. The larger faction of what was left of the IRA now re-formed itself into a Republican Congress and began to make fashionably extreme left-wing noises. The early 1930s were marked by various 'Red scares' as the oratory of rightist agitators and the pastoral letters of bishops raised the spectre of the slimy tentacles of international Communism reaching towards the shores of the Emerald Isle.
It must be emphasised at this point that the basic polarities of 1930s politics, so familiar from the history of Great Britain and Continental Europe in the 1930s, did not hold for the Irish Free State. With hindsight we can see that 'southern' Ireland was already on the way to overcoming its own history, and achieving a stable underlying political consensus. It was an agrarian peasant democracy in which the sanctions of wealth and poverty, though (of course) present, were less hard-edged and divisive than anywhere else in non-Communist Europe. Not only was the nation well over 90 per cent Catholic, but within that majority, 99 per cent actually practised their religion.
Ireland was the only Catholic country in the world where adult males attended church and took the sacraments as punctiliously as did females and minors. The social and moral influence of the clergy was enormous, and went largely unquestioned by any political group which wished to retain a following. If, on the one hand, this influence normally failed to extend to the realm of an individual's electoral preferences, on the other, the number of Irish Communists could be counted on the beads of one rosary.
Many were aware, however, that matters were much less happy in another strongly Catholic country. Events in Spain had begun to disturb Irish Catholic leaders well before the general outbreak of armed violence in 1936. The proclamation of the Second Republic in 1931 sounded a considerable echo of sympathy in many Irish hearts, but the spate of church-burnings which quickly followed was a warning which adumbrated the dilemma its supporters were later to face. The campaign of quasi-persecution which marked the first two years of the Spanish republic confirmed many of these fears. When the military uprising of July 1936 precipitated a revolution led by workers' organisations in many parts of Spain, the clergy quickly became a prime target. The months of July, August and September witnessed the wholesale murder of clerics, especially in areas (such as Extremudura, Andalusia, Aragon and Catalonia) where Anarchist doctrine had anathematised the cloth. During this limited but horrific period, it is a matter of record that dreadful atrocities took place against thousands of priests and nuns who were entirely innocent of any complicity in class oppression. The world's press quickly seized on sensational stories, often emanating from refugees from the loyalist zone, and Irish newspapers naturally gave the results maximum coverage. The most exaggerated and degenerate episodes, in large part either the lurid elaborations of fear or the carefully-crafted products of propaganda, were widely credited. In a letter to the pro-opposition daily, The Irish Independent, General O'Duffy asserted
In Madrid priests are battered to death on the altars, and their heads stuck on the railings outside the churches by howling mobs of women and youths armed by the Government. In Barcelona convents are sacked, the nuns stripped of their clothing and forced to walk naked before the mob. Men, women and children are being hung up alive on trees in the streets and fires lit under them.
In the same letter, dated August 10th, barely three weeks after the start of the conflict, the general suggested publicly for the first time that a volunteer unit of Irish fighters should be raised in support of the Spanish Nationalist forces. Soon afterwards, O'Duffy offered to organise this 'Brigade' with the co-operation of his own political group, the National Corporate Party, and to lead it to Spain in person. The idea was not originally his, having reached his desk from a Spanish monarchist agent in London, via Cardinal MacRory, Archbishop of Armagh. But it seems clear that O'Duffy's immediate purpose was twofold: to help protect fellow-Catholics, both clerical and lay, from murderous persecution; and to play a part in stemming the 'Red Tide' threatening to inundate Christian civilisation – of which persecution was an obvious symptom.
It is important to understand the conviction held by Eoin O'Duffy and his associates that Europe was suffering an all-out ideological offensive directed by the Soviet Union. They had little knowledge of the history or theory of Marxism-Leninism, and no insight into the tergiversations of Stalinist foreign policy. They were wholly unaware that in Spain it vas the Anarchists who led the assault on the church, and the Communist Party which – on the contrary – strained every nerve to prevent this and every other manifestation of social revolution. For O'Duffy, Irish Catholicism. was inevitably implicated in the fate of Spain; he saw his mission as, purely and simply, a crusade against Communism. Most of us will be able to recall that this was a. species of paranoia which, in 193Ci, nr 1956, or even 1986, one did not need to he either Irish or Catholic in order to contract.
Within a week of the general's proposal the Irish Independent reported between five and 6,000 offers to join a volunteer brigade. Meanwhile, O'Duffy needed to satisfy himself over the status and terms of the invitation. In September, he visited General Mola, co-ordinator of the army conspiracy, who now commanded the northern division of the insurgent army in Valladnlid. The two men got on well, and their agreement was sealed in the most auspicious manner. As they were shaking hands, news arrived of Franco's relief of the Alcazar of Toledo. Though O'Duffy did not neglect the occasion to celebrate, his task now seemed more urgent than ever. With the nationalist forces approaching Madrid, the war would soon be over; naturally, the crusader wanted his men to make a more substantial contribution to the defeat of the Reds than an appearance in the victory parade. During this visit, moreover, O'Duffy began to learn some of the baroque secrets of Spanish politics. He realised, for example, that the anti-insurgent forces of the Basque Country were no part of the 'Red Tide', but rather fervent Catholics who struggled only for regional autonomy. His brigade would therefore have to fight, not with Mola but with Franco, a man whom various interventionist powers, of greater significance and influence than Eoin O'Duffy, had already found a somewhat difficult ally.
By the time the general returned to Ireland, plans had matured. The political context had been carefully manipulated by the bishops and the opposition press so as to reduce the effect of government disapproval. De Valera had stoutly resisted opposition demands for a break in diplomatic and commercial relations with the Republic, and in September the free State adhered to the Treaty of Non- Intervention. In Ireland, however, this stance had quite a different gloss to that normally seen from the United Kingdom angle. By now, there was a popular and vocal current of opinion in favour of the nationalists, in comparison with which support for the Republic was muted. Sunday sermons all over the country contained admiring references to General Franco. With minimal opposition, dozens of local councils voted through the so called 'Clonmel Resolution' calling for official Irish recognition of the Burgos government. Indeed, similar motions were passed by various Trade Union committees. In this atmosphere, O'Duffy's aides were able to construct a communication network, preparatory to the actual mobilisation and transport of the brigade. Yet, in the light of his salutary experience over the 1933 march, O'Duffy would have been rash to assume that de Valera would never call his bluff. He had to avoid any violent confrontation with the authorities, and (above all) to give no excuse for .his own arrest. Thus the whole operation had perforce to be semi clandestine, and was correspondingly slowed down.
Even more pressing is the provision of transport. In October, it was still hoped to take 5,000 men to Spain: funds were not yet available and chartering of Irish or British vessels was in any case out of the question. The launching of the crusade thus depended entirely upon troop ships being provided by the insurgents themselves. In an attempt to tackle these problems a hand-picked advance party of twenty left Dublin in two groups and travelled to Spain by normal commercial services, reaching Franco's HQ in Salamanca early in November.
At this point the operation ran into the problems of caudillismo – the negative side of the decision, lately taken for positive military reasons, to make Franco the supreme warlord. The generalisimio was far too preoccupied with planning his assault on Madrid to devote attention to the trivial needs of the Irish. His frustrated attempts at liaison saw O'Duffy's relations with Franco get off to a poor start.
As frantic efforts were made to assemble a reliable programme, November arrived with the imminent prospect of the fall of Madrid. Correspondence between the Irish organisers assumed that the brigade would hardly be in time to help with more than the mopping-up operations which would follow government surrender. The first plans for embarkation were aborted when Franco, uni-laterally and without warning, cancelled the voyage of a Spanish merchantman to Irish waters. Meanwhile, however, several small groups of volunteers caught the routine Dublin ferry to Liverpool and made their way to Salamanca, and in early December the Nationalists were at last able to charter a German troopship. Hundreds of recruits, from as far distant as Dublin, were ordered to make for Galway, where officials were evidently regarded as sympathetic.
On Saturday night, December 5th, around 600 men gathered in Eyre Square, under the eyes of apprehensive local Gardai and delighted publicans. In the small hours of the following morning they marched round to the harbour to board the ferryboat Dun Aengus which was normally occupied in carrying livestock from the Aran Islands. A hand played 'Faith of Our Fathers', friends and relatives waved handkerchiefs from the quayside. After a long stomach-churning wait in the freezing black swell of Galway Bay, contact was established with the German steamer the men were somehow transferred without mishap, and the party reached El Ferrol two days later. This seemed a good omen as this port was the birth-place of the new nationalist generalisimo. But apart from one reinforcement of less than 100 men, which came into Lisbon late in the year, no further shipment proved feasible.
It would be futile to pretend that the German service rendered in delivering the Brigade was to prove as important to the Spanish Nationalist war effort as their transport of the army of Africa across the straits of Gibraltar. Nonetheless the battle record and reputation gained by the O'Duffy Brigade do not justify the wholly negative (indeed, contemptible) impression conveyed by malicious reports and a national tendency to self-denigration. For one thing, it was ordained by Franco that the Irishmen should actually form part of the army of Africa; indeed, that they should be constituted as a bandera (battalion) of El Tercio – the elite Foreign Legion founded by Franco's mentor, Millan Astray, and commanded by the caudillo himself. This signal advance honour recognised (inter alia) that a majority of the volunteers had already seen active service with or against the British army (in some cases, both), and that a large proportion had at some time been commissioned officers or NCOs.
The Brigade underwent eight weeks of intensive training in the methods and discipline of El Tercio in Caceres (Extremadura), where the citizens were astonished by their equal devotion to the Blessed Virgin and to Bacchus. In mid-February (1937), they were assigned to a sector of the line south of Madrid. On their way, they experienced their first battle – a tragic blunder which was entirely the fault of Spanish officers on both sides. Apparently overhearing a foreign tongue during a parley of deputations, a bandera from the Canary Islands jumped to the conclusion that they had confronted an infiltrating unit of the International Brigades, and suddenly opened fire. In the sharp exchange which followed two Irishmen, including a popular officer, were killed.
The next day, the Brigade occupied its billets in the small town of Ciempozuelos, today little more than an anonymous dormitory suburb of the sprawling Spanish capital. The streets bore signs of recent heavy fighting. Coincidentally, the place had been held by the Fifteenth International Brigade – which probably included some Irishmen but was taken by a Moorish unit of El Tercio in their advance towards the river Jarama. However, this offensive ground to a halt not long after the Irishmen arrived, and was never renewed. Instead, the Nationalists began to plan a major switch of their strategy to the north, the attack on the Basques, a campaign in which the Brigade could have no part. For the rest of its sojourn in Spain – indeed, for the rest of the war – the Madrid front was largely dormant. The men suffered the familiar strains of inactive trench life, aggravated by an exceptionally wet spring. Indeed, if anyone ever translated 'Ciempozuelos', it may have caused ironic amusement – it means 'a hundred little wells'. Other casualties, including four killed, were incurred in further minor actions, but the longest list was of those who ended up in hospital with a variety of ailments.
O'Duffy's agreement with Franco, made in November 1936, stipulated that his unit was to serve until the end of the war, or the end of six months, whichever arrived first. He was anxious to renew this commitment, so as to share in a more rewarding and glorious phase of operations; but his men were by now in a mood of sullen discontent. The officer corps persuaded their leader to put the matter to the vote, and as the result of an overwhelming democratic decision the Brigade returned to Ireland in mid-June, 1937. In Dublin and some other places, the volunteers received warm and appreciative public receptions, though some were disappointed not to be greeted with acclamation as heroes and martyrs of a sacrosanct crusade.
Of course, it would be absurd now, as then, to beatify these men. But on the other hand it seems unjust to deny the rank-and-file of the Irish Bandera similar recognition to that which has traditionally been given to the International Brigades. Like the latter, they risked life and limb in a cause which they felt was worthy to the point of being morally imperative. Pro rata, the ranks of the O'Duffy Brigade contained fewer convinced fascists than those of the Internationals contained convinced Communists. The Irish Brigade has often been traduced for incurring few battle casualties – surely a strange species of argument to employ in a military context. Indeed, it might with equal validity be argued that the contrary tendency among the Internationals illustrates chronic military incompetence. Although one of the Brigade's two serious engagements was a ghastly error, they nonetheless accounted for some twenty of their adversaries for the loss of tour dead (including two Spanish aides) and one wounded. The reported admiration of some German officers in Spain for the Irish Brigade may not have been entirely undeserved. In the course of 1937, all the top brass of El Tercio – Varela, Yague, and Franco himself – included the Bandera Irlandesa in their tours of inspection. Though drunkenness was a recurrent problem in billets, hardy perennials about the feudin' and fightin' Irish were mostly invented by agents-provocateurs planted in the ranks by the Republican Congress. Dozens of other committed 1RA members (men from the opposite end of the Irish political spectrum to the Blueshirts) joined the Brigade – some later rejoining the republican movement. Notably enough, a representative handful of Protestants, from both sides of the border, also joined O'Duffy's Catholic crusade. For them, confessional differences between Christians were rendered insignificant by the Communist threat.
The Irish Brigade's stay in Spain was exactly contemporaneous with that of the most famous individual among all the volunteers of the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell. Like Orwell, they suffered privation and wounds for their cause; like him, they were isolated, through no choice of their own, on an obscure section of the front, and involved through official blunders in episodes of farce; like him, they feared and hated the influence of Soviet Communism. In contrast to the case of Orwell, however, when their memory is revived today, it is often for the purpose of derision.
As for Eoin O'Duffy himself, few modern leaders can have had such a collective mauling from commentators of almost every shade of political opinion. His memory is not revived, merely reviled. His staff returned from Spain in a mood of mutinous complaint and mutual recrimination, and some of them never again spoke to the leader, nor to each other, as long as they lived. Others, like O'Duffy's one-time secretary and disciple, Tom Gunning, stayed behind in Spain, and blackened the chief s reputation with visiting journalists. Clearly, Franco himself disliked O'Duffy and was glad to see the back of him in 1937. He was disgusted by the Irishman's drinking habits, and perplexed by his reluctance to fight against the Basques. The Caudillo may also have been apprehensive about the political character of O'Duffy and his movement. After all, Franco was currently having enough trouble with the home-brewed Blueshirts – the camisas azules of the radical anti-establishment Falange – to feel easy about importing foreign ones.
But perhaps there was another, more personal reason for Franco's unfavourable opinion of O'Duffy. The former's competitive instinct was a striking feature of his character; it brought him to supreme power and kept him secure in it for nearly forty years. The assertion that he was the youngest general in Europe was frequently repeated in contemporary propaganda and has since become commonplace. The statement is correct – but only technically so. When Franco became brigadier-general in February, 1926 – at thirty-three – he indeed became the youngest serving general at that juncture, but only by virtue of being a few weeks younger than Eoin O'Duffy, whom he succeed- ed in that honour. (Both were born in late 1892). But the latter's career had been even more precocious than Franco's. In February, 1921 – aged twenty-eight – O'Duffy was a lieutenant-general in the Irish National Army fighting the British. A year later, under the Free State (thus recognised by the British Empire and Commonwealth) he was promoted Chief of Staff during the war against the republican 'rebels'. As we have seen, before long he was appointed GOC. Since we know that O'Duffy once boasted to Franco of having commanded a million men (during the Eucharistic Congress), he seems unlikely to have allowed diplomatic tact to inhibit him from drawing these achievements to his reluctant host's attention.
O'Duffy's last intervention in international politics was in 1941, when he wrote to Adolf Hitler, offering to send an Irish Brigade to assist him in the destruction of Bolshevism. Hitler's response is not recorded: doubtless he discouraged the Irish Napoleon, having enough trouble on his hands with the Spanish Napoleon's volunteer Division Azul. This last sentence contains a joke or two. Humour is the normal discourse in treatment of the history of the Blueshirts; and often (until recently) of other minor 'fascist' phenomena in Britain and Europe. It is infallibly subversive and dismissive of its subject, tending to deprive it of any meaning worthy of serious attention. This is not only an implicitly censorious attitude, but also one which impedes full understanding of the attractions and purposes of political extremism.