Abstract
William H. Kautt, a veteran of the US Air Force who teaches military history at the Fort Leavenworth staff college, adopted a training-ground approach to editing the first volume of The Record of the Rebellion in Ireland in 1920–21, and the Part Played by the Army in Dealing with It. This apologia for counter-insurgency was drafted by the Irish command following the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and printed for circulation within the army in about May 1922. In addition to its undeclared aim of exonerating the army from blame for the widely perceived failure of the campaign, it was ‘hoped that this record may be of use in the event of similar situations arising in any part of the Empire’ and of some ‘value to any government which may have to deal with a somewhat similar situation in future years’. This entailed a very broad remit, incorporating not only soldiering but policing and politics, since ‘political and military activities were so closely interwoven that it is impossible to disentangle them’ (p. 16). The Record consists of four volumes concerning operations, intelligence, law, and three of the four Irish military areas (the Dublin district, the southern counties covered by the 6th division, and those of the midlands and north-west covered by the 5th division). Edited versions of the later volumes have already been published or promised, leaving Kautt to tackle the general analysis of operations. Though widely and productively mined by scholars over the past four decades, publication of the full text of the first volume will be welcomed by students and readers of Irish revolutionary history.
The text is supported by various official documents, some not appended to the original volume, and extensive annotations for specific incidents (often contradicting excessive estimates of the strength of ‘rebel’ forces or the casualties they sustained). Not content with conventional annotation, Kautt tirelessly interrupts the text with boxed comments on the plausibility or disingenuousness of passages in the Record, emphasizing the aimlessness of the Irish counter-insurgency, its lack of achievable ‘military objectives’, and its inadequacy when tested against modern standards of practice (equally inadequate though such standards may appear as tested in Iraq or Afghanistan). Kautt’s anachronistic and sometimes quirky judgements of the army’s analysis of its own performance, though of some interest, tend to distract the reader from the Record as a contemporary document illuminating the debates and quandaries facing those charged with solving the post-war reincarnation of ‘the Irish problem’.
Whereas the Record’s factual coverage of counter-insurgency is patchy and unreliable, its presentation of lessons for future operations is an incisive illumination of the thinking of Macready and his associates in the army command. It accords closely with Macready’s less precise and more indiscreet analysis in Annals of an Active Life (1924, not 1925 as stated by Kautt). The Record concluded that: the solution of the Irish problem and the pacification of Irishmen was not, and never could be, the task of soldiers. . . . All that the military authorities ever claimed that the troops could do was reduce the armed rebels to a state of sufficient impotence, to create a situation in which a political solution would have a reasonable chance of acceptance. (p. 185)
Though overt criticism of Lloyd George’s government was largely eliminated in the course of drafting, the text was riddled with implications that political indecisiveness, inconsistency, and failure to define military objectives were primarily to blame for the prolonged resistance, high morale, and enduring popularity of the ‘rebels’. In pointing towards a preferable alternative approach, the Record endorsed the draconian measures proposed by Macready in the event of the collapse of the truce and imposition of a Crown Colony (proposals never endorsed by the government despite his protestations). These involved a vast expansion of the forces available for ‘offensive’ actions, martial law except in Northern Ireland, drumhead courts empowered to execute suspects for an impressive range of offences, internment of all members as well as officers of the IRA, and other measures hitherto deemed either impracticable or counterproductive.
In addition, the Record set out fourteen ‘points in strategy, political and military, which were revealed, chiefly by their omission, but which would appear to be common to all forms of rebellion’. In future, governments should ‘strike, and strike hard, . . . at the very beginning’, never give up ‘a policy once started’, enlist ‘loyalists and moderate people’ as ‘civic guards’, forcibly concentrate loyalists in defensible towns, impose universal martial law ‘without any executive civil authority’, keep all auxiliary forces ‘under one supreme control’, impose severe censorship, enunciate government policy unequivocally in order to maintain public confidence ‘at home and abroad’, and enforce various ferocious measures of coercion (pp. 187–92). Since the government had not met any of these necessary conditions for efficient counter-insurgency, so often urged by the Irish command, it was the government rather than the army which should be held responsible for the implied capitulation in 1921. Meanwhile, the forces had already set aside their ‘sense of humiliation and disappointment’ in favour of ‘intense pleasure at the thought of a speedy and permanent departure from Ireland’ (p. 187).
Though his annotations are wide-ranging and based on wide reading, Kautt is often unreliable in detail, especially when setting the scene. It is not true that ‘the Civil War had broken out’ before completion of the Record in May 1922; that the secretary of state for war in 1922 (in fact, Churchill) was Sir Herbert Creedy (in fact, secretary to the War Office); that the Irish Republican Brotherhood was founded in 1853 (in fact, 1858); that the chief secretary was ‘the day-to-day governmental administrator of Ireland’; that Birrell, who resigned that office in 1916, disbanded the Irish secret service in 1917 (in fact, 1910); or that MacNeill’s Irish Volunteers ‘conducted the Easter Rising’ (pp. 3, 9, 20, 21, 22 and 35, 22). The commandant of Ballykinlar camp, Colonel Dick Hely-Hutchinson, served in the Royal Fusiliers, not the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, and died in England in 1953 (p. 107). There are signs of careless analysis as well as poor copy-editing. Though challenging the Record about the frequency of attacks on police barracks after August 1920 and the number of policemen killed in 1919–20, Kautt himself gives inconsistent figures (pp. 72–3, 88; 22, 91). No fewer than five of the fourteen men killed by the IRA on Bloody Sunday morning (21 November 1920) are incorrectly named (pp. 98–9). The value of the annotations is diminished by reliance on heroic narratives such as Tom Barry’s Guerilla Days in Ireland (1949) and the Kerryman’s various Fighting Stories, with no use of statements for the Bureau of Military History except on the issue of hostages (p. 116).
Despite these technical defects, Kautt should be applauded for publishing a fascinating document which, though uninformative about what actually happened in the Irish revolution, reveals a great deal about the mentality of counter-insurgency. Complementing Peter Hart’s edition of the second volume in British Intelligence in Ireland, 1920–21: The Final Reports (2002), it shows how little the army command knew about their opponents or indeed about Ireland. Shielded from despair (as in so many counter-insurgencies) by ignorance, prejudice, incuriosity, and contempt for politicians, the forces of the Crown hastened out of Ireland, Record in hand, primed to apply the same misguided attitudes when facing future rebellions elsewhere in the empire.