The ‘desertions crisis’ in the Irish defence forces during the Second World War,1939–1945

I. Introduction

In 2013, the government of the Republic of Ireland took the extraordinary and unprecedented step of enacting legislation that granted a formal amnesty to all former personnel of the Irish defence forces who deserted to join the British forces in order to fight in the Second World War. ¹ This occurred in response to a highly controversial, but very effective campaign which aimed to procure an official state pardon for condemned ex-servicemen of the defence forces, both living and deceased. ² These men suffered condemnation pursuant to Emergency Powers (No. 362) Order, 1945, a provision enshrined within the Irish Statute Book under the Defence Forces (Temporary Provisions) Act, 1946. ³ The effect of the pardons campaign raised sincere questions about the integrity of Irish neutrality over the course of the Second World War, a period that is traditionally referred to in southern Ireland as ‘the Emergency’. Indeed, there soon emerged a sharp division of opinion in Irish society concerning the moral soundness of the policy of neutrality itself. This eventually resulted in an occasionally intemperate public debate in the months that followed an announcement of the introduction of an amnesty bill by the Irish government, in February 2012, in order to provide redress to the last of the ‘deserter’ veterans. ⁴ This debate would involve the deployment of elements of both the ‘revisionist’ and ‘traditionalist’ factions of the Irish historical profession. Vitriolic attacks would be articulated by revisionists against the neutral policy adopted by Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Éamon de Valera and his Fianna Fáil government; from the traditionalist side came bitter accusations of cowardice and treachery levelled against Irish soldiers who, it was argued, having disposed of their uniforms, effectively betrayed and abandoned a country they had sworn to defend. ⁵

Several issues arose in the heat of this debate, among them, the honour of the policy of Irish neutrality, the effectiveness of the defence forces in handling desertion and wastage problems, to say nothing of their ability and readiness to defend national territory, but, above all, the maltreatment of Irish soldiers through the agency of their own state. Despite extensive media coverage, both nationally and globally, along with a very comprehensive debate on the issue of neutrality, there emerged glaring problems with the narrative on wartime desertion in Ireland. First, it appeared that desertion was largely perceived through the prism of wider debates around neutrality. Second, there was a general scarcity of objective scholarship on the subject, primarily owing to the relatively small amount of work thus far accomplished on desertion from the Irish defence forces, with scant analysis of available sources that address questions which may help us better understand why desertion occurred. These questions are as follows: (1) what was the condition of the defence forces of neutral Éire prior to the Second World War? (2) what patterns and trends are evident from the rate of wartime desertion from the defence forces? (3) what were the motives of personnel who deserted and which factors contributed to desertion? (4) what was the response of the Irish government to the problem?

The main body of scholarly work so far published on this topic has been undertaken by Liam Canny and Bernard Kelly. Canny completed a Master’s thesis at Queen’s University Belfast in 1995, featuring a chapter on desertion from the Irish defence forces which was later published as a scholarly article. ⁶ This study was the first overview of the desertion problem, based on files from both the Department of the Taoiseach and Department of Justice, housed within the National Archives of Ireland (NAI), and Department of Defence files held by the Irish Military Archives (IMA). ⁷ Kelly’s contribution to scholarship on this subject supports a robust defence of the legislation enacted by de Valera, in 1945, to tie off the desertion issue. He utilizes NAI files from the Departments of Foreign Affairs, Justice and the Taoiseach, the ‘Emergency Defence Files’ from the Military Archives, the Dominions Office files from the National Archives, Kew, and the de Valera and Aiken Papers, held in the University College Dublin Archives, along with extracts of parliamentary debates in Dáil Éireann and excerpts from oral history interviews conducted by the author with some ex-servicemen of the defence forces and the British forces. ⁸ The main weakness of Kelly’s excellent scholarship, together with Canny’s pioneering study, is the general lack of commentary on, or analysis of, detailed summaries written key staff officers in the Irish military, especially senior army commanders. These can be located in a number of sources, particularly the Chief of Staff’s Annual Reports for the defence forces during the 1940s, an analysis of which forms the basis of a study of the trend of desertion presented in this article. ⁹ There is also a general absence of testimony from the deserters themselves, without which one cannot assess the motives behind desertion or, at any rate, the reasons these men later cited to justify their decisions to desert. ¹⁰

This study shall build on the existing literature by interrogating a series of previously unexplored sources. Through an analysis of the data provided in the Chief of Staff’s Annual Reports, together with statistics supplied within selected memoranda, drawn from the files of the Department of the Taoiseach, together with the Emergency Defence Files and the records of the Irish military intelligence branch, G2, this article advances new evidence that a morale crisis led to an epidemic of desertions within a year of the second largest mobilization phase in the history of the defence forces. It utilizes testimony from a small sample of interviewees, a sample which comprises the bulk of existing interview testimony from Irish deserters. From this analysis, fresh conclusions are produced that, while verifying certain generally accepted motives, radically reinterpret the factors which contributed to large-scale desertions from the Irish military. In particular, the study argues that economic factors do not sufficiently explain epidemic levels of desertion, particularly throughout the 1941–1942 period; that the widespread expression of economic motives as a justification for desertion is mitigated against by the fact that there was also clearly an overwhelming preference for military service among deserters. This study will address the ‘desertion crisis’ in the context of a far greater morale crisis in the ranks of the defence forces, one highlighted by the reports of staff officers who investigated the motives of deserters and examined the morale of the forces, generally. Since desertion in any other military organization is often framed in the context of the failures of that institution, especially those which affect the morale of service personnel, this article concentrates purely on conditions in the Irish military in order to discover why the crisis occurred.

II. The Irish defence forces during the inter-war years

During the inter-war period, the Irish state adopted an attitude towards the military which did not account for the proper maintenance of armed forces for the defence and the security of the country. By the time war broke out in September 1939, the defence forces were ravaged and depleted by the fiscal constraints of the inter-war years and faced these same barriers as they tried to increase their regular forces, particularly the army, to a War Establishment capacity. General Staff officers warned the government, a year prior to the outbreak of war, that owing to restrictions in ‘actual strength, organisation and equipment of the existing forces’, the army was only capable of suppressing ‘internal disorder’ rather than defending the state against any external aggressor. ¹¹ This resulted from the rejection of a four-brigade scheme by de Valera, then acting as Minister for Defence and Taoiseach, in favour of the two-brigade model which allowed for a Peace Establishment of 8,021 for the regular army (which was then only 6,000 strong), an Emergency Establishment of 20,425, which was also subject to review, and a War Establishment of 37,560 all ranks. ¹² A considerable amount of wrangling occurred between the departments of Defence and Finance, mortal enemies since the demobilization period that had followed from the Civil War. A reduction in the Emergency Establishment to 15,350 did not satisfy the Minister for Finance, Sean T. O’Ceallaigh. Replying in kind, the Minister of Defence, Oscar Traynor, warned that he would not settle for a War Establishment of less than 25,000. The argument presented by the Department of Finance, which saw the Irish military as a frivolous luxury rather than a necessary branch of state, was that ‘the increase in defence expenditure and the consequential increase in taxation presented a greater danger to the state than the threat of invasion’. ¹³ Indeed, O’Ceallaigh and his subordinates in Finance had ample reasons to be reticent about funding an expansion of the defence forces.

Throughout the period of the Irish Civil War (1922–1923) some 30 per cent of the overall national expenditure of the recently founded Irish Free State was dedicated to the operations of their newly formed National army, with a further 7 per cent allocated as compensation for property damage and injuries sustained over the course of the conflict. As late as 1927, these compensation payments absorbed £1.7 million of a total national expenditure of £28 million; only thereafter would expenditure on defence and compensation cease to be among the major levies on national finances. ¹⁴ Not only were the government severely burdened by the effects of the civil war on the economy of the new state, but they had only narrowly avoided being deposed by the military leadership of the cumbersome army that they had tried desperately to demobilize. The Army Mutiny of 1924 shocked the administration of the Executive Council President, W.T. Cosgrave, and the Army Enquiry which followed demonstrated how a clique of disgruntled army commanders could threaten the primacy of civilian government in the affairs of state. ¹⁵ In March 1923, during the final months of the Civil War, the National army stood at over 48,000 personnel of all ranks, but was reduced to a strength of 16,382 by 1924, a decrease of almost 32,000 in less than one fiscal year. By 1927, the army numbers fell again to 11,572, a reduction of almost 4000 from the previous year’s count. ¹⁶ In addition, savage cuts in military expenditure, from £11 million in 1924 to just £1 million in 1932, significantly diminished the standing capacity of the Irish army. ¹⁷

Commensurate with the policy of weakening the Irish military was a state-sponsored policy of enabling young Irishmen to join the British forces. Throughout the inter-war period, thousands of young migrant men from the Free State continued the military tradition of their forefathers and joined the British army, a fact that was well-known to the Irish authorities and the diverse political factions of Irish society. Irish ministers of state and their department staff showed very limited concern towards British recruiting activities in Ireland, or to the steady trend of young men and boys leaving the state to enlist. In view of the economic difficulties ongoing in the Free State at this time, even Department of Defence officials had argued ‘that these boys would be better off every way in the British army, than hanging around corners here’. ¹⁸ This opinion was shared by the departments of External Affairs and Justice, and was the conclusion of the Executive Council in December 1930. As one cabinet member argued,

if young men, otherwise unemployed, or unemployable, find an outlet for their energies in the British army, I do not feel that we should, in the present economic conditions, endeavour to prevent them. They are better in the British army than in our gaols. ¹⁹

Canny notes that the Cosgrave government set a precedent in the 1930s by viewing British recruiting in southern Ireland as an aperture for the ‘unemployed and unemployable’, and maintained a permissive attitude towards such activities, even to the detriment of the Irish defence forces. ²⁰ According to Steven O’Connor, evidence of the government’s support for British recruitment activities exists in the form of active cooperation between Irish police, An Garda Síochána, and British recruiting officials in London. The Gardaí carried out background checks on prospective Irish recruits at the request of the War Office and the Admiralty throughout the interwar period, a practice that continued well into the Second World War, only being discontinued in 1941. ²¹

An additional consideration is that the development of the forces during the late 1920s and early 1930s was stunted due to continuous cuts in spending. The chronic shortage of finance hampered the army’s ability to ‘attract and retain skilled men for the various technical corps’ which, according to Eunan O’Halpin, in turn led to a ‘steady trickle out of experienced men drawn by the wider vistas for professional soldiering offered by the British army’. ²² Many ex-soldiers of the National army, thus, left the Free State to join the British forces in the 1930s. Ex-servicemen’s organizations, such as the British Legion, made concerted efforts to recruit Irishmen with military experience, and National army ex-servicemen were identified as high-value recruits to be secured by British ‘cross-channel’ recruiting officers. ²³ The deterioration of the defence forces would be furthered by the coming to power of Fianna Fáil under Éamon de Valera in 1932. This resurgent anti-Treatyite party held contempt for conventional military organization and viewed the National army as their old adversary; soon after taking power, de Valera argued that the army should be downgraded ‘to a small standing force and a volunteer territorial army’. ²⁴ Towards the end of the decade, the first reports of desertion from the Irish defence forces, as well as large-scale defections of Irish army deserters to the British forces, appeared in the British press. ²⁵ Irish officials energetically refuted these claims, arguing that there was no information to ‘show that deserters from the Irish Army join the British Army in large numbers’. ²⁶ Although there are no indications that desertion to the British forces was an established pattern during the inter-war period, it is clear that desertion was a factor in annual wastage problems in the National army which dated back to the Civil War.

III. Trends and patterns of desertion in the defence forces during the Emergency

At the outset of the Emergency, desertion was not a serious concern for senior Irish officers, as the Annual Reports of the Chief of Staff of the Irish defence forces, Lieutenant-General Daniel McKenna, bear out. The army expanded rapidly from the outbreak of war, but taking into account ‘the inclusion in its ranks of the most diverse types, and the shortness of service of the majority’, the level of discipline was considered high. ²⁷ In considering the motives for desertion, it is notable that in early 1940, the Irish government was applying spending cuts in the area of defence due to a lull in activity during the Phoney War. This policy resulted in a reduction in numbers in the Irish army, which fell from 20,000 in September 1939, to 16,000 in January 1940, with a further 2,000 being axed by April of that year. ²⁸ This was an alarming initiative, since the army was already ill-equipped to defend the country from attack, and their poor state of readiness soon became the subject of questions from Fine Gael party opposition members on army strength, which Minister for Defence, Oscar Traynor, refused to answer. ²⁹ During April 1940, even as the Nazi invasions of Denmark and Norway were underway, J.J. McElligott, Secretary to the Department of Finance, wrote to the Adjutant-General, Colonel James Flynn, rebuking the Department of Defence for permitting the army to recruit around 1,500 more troops than had been budgeted for by Finance; Flynn was forced to cut the same number of recruits in order to satisfy McElligott’s demands. ³⁰ In a political climate hostile to military expenditure, one would be forgiven for assuming that the Irish desertion crisis found its origins during the 1939–1940 period. However, despite the confusion generated in the purges orchestrated by Finance, desertion rates would remain stable and the percentage of desertions actually decreased, from 2.4 per cent in 1939, to 2.2 per cent in 1940. ³¹

After German forces invaded the neutral Low Countries in May 1940, the government reversed the policies of Finance and a draft of 40,000 troops was authorized, with 25,000 men flocking to the ranks of the Irish army within 5 weeks of the launch of a national recruiting drive. ³² Many of these recruits believed that Ireland was facing a genuine threat of invasion, but throughout 1941, the realization that this danger had passed was marked by an increase in desertions. In June 1941, the strength of the regular army had peaked at 40,174, but there was a considerable decline in numbers, by May 1945, to 31,415, a falloff of about 22.5 per cent. ³³ According to the Chief of Staff’s reports, desertion rates climbed considerably during the first months of 1941, but the most prevalent offence during this time was a short absence without leave, which accounted for 60 per cent of offences. ³⁴ In January 1942, Colonel Thomas McNally, the commanding officer of Curragh Camp, wrote to Department of Defence officials to report ‘a very large increase in desertions’ during the previous 12 months; he divided these into two classes: those who deserted to join a foreign army (the British army), and were arrested by the authorities, and those who had deserted to take up employment abroad. ³⁵ The statistics supplied by the army intelligence branch, G2, to the Department of Defence on the number of desertions from 1939 to 1941 reveal that desertions dramatically increased on an annual basis from the commencement of the June 1940 recruiting drive. ³⁶ The total number of desertions recorded by the army by the end of March 1942 had totalled 2,731 since the outbreak of the war, with over 2,000 of these occurring in the previous fiscal year alone. ³⁷ This means that 5 per cent of regular soldiers deserted less than a year after the army achieved peak strength.

According to G2 Branch, (whose reports record a higher number of deserters than the Chief of Staff’s reports, most likely due to the inclusion of Local Defence Force (LDF) volunteers alongside regular troops) throughout the period of September 1939 to September 1941, 3,694 personnel deserted from the defence forces, of which 541 had been arrested, with the number of desertions doubling in 1940 and more than quintupling from 1940 to 1941. They observed an almost 40 per cent increase of recorded desertions from March 1941 to September 1941; nearly a 1,000 men vanished from the ranks of the defence forces during a 6-month period. The numbers peaked at the end of 1941, with 450 desertions in August, 355 in September, 272 in October, 103 in November and 8 in December. ³⁸ Despite a sharp decline during the last 2 months of 1941, the total number of desertions for the period between August and December amounted to 1,188, a substantial figure given the relatively compact size of the 40,000-strong Irish army. One strong explanation put forward for this astonishing spike in desertions in the second half of that year is a public reaction at the German attack on the Soviet Union, which occurred in June 1941. ³⁹ Since Hitler had turned his attention eastwards, and with American entry into the war at the end of that year, it may have appeared to many would-be recruits that this was the time to join the Allied side. Such can be deduced from a study of the motivations of a sample of a hundred Irish veterans from across Ireland who joined the British forces over the course of the war, with 25 per cent of participants enlisting in 1941, primarily driven by a desire for adventure. ⁴⁰ In addition, a major spike in voluntary enrolments in the British forces occurred during 1941. According to the official statistics maintained by the British recruiting authorities in Northern Ireland, some 10,158 male recruits from neutral Éire were recorded as having enlisted in all three branches of the British forces from August 1940 to August 1941. ⁴¹ Given the epidemic levels of desertion recorded by Irish military authorities during the same period, it is possible that as many as 15 per cent of all southern Irish male recruits attested by British recruiting staff in this duration were deserters from Irish defence forces.

A Department of Defence memorandum of May 1941 acknowledged that among the chief difficulties in relation to the compilation of desertion figures was the inability to verify exactly how many absentees had actually joined the British forces without ‘special inquiries’ being made by the Intelligence Services. ⁴² In addition, the fact that an absent without leave (AWOL) soldier would be labelled a deserter after an absence of 3 weeks was a clerical technicality which could have led to a huge inaccuracy in the figures supplied to the government by the Department of Defence. ⁴³ However, one very notable point, confirmed by available research, is the fact that a large portion of the deserters were originally reservists. ⁴⁴ In September 1939, some 10,578 army reservists were called up to boost the strength of the Irish army, and together with the men who had regularly joined during the Emergency, these would comprise the main body of absentees by the end of the war. ⁴⁵ This suggests that these reservists, who were more likely to have received better standard of training than those troops raised in the Emergency battalions, were far more desirous of military service with the British forces than with their own forces. It also implies that those reservists who responded to the mobilization order in 1939 had been demoralized by the sudden cuts to army numbers in the early months of 1940; consequently, many of them decided to desert to the British army for a more secure military career. ⁴⁶ Aside from these considerations, the desertion of reservists also raises questions about conditions of service in the Emergency Establishment which they had been called upon to augment.

There has been much speculation about the actual number of desertions that occurred during the Emergency. Most historians who have engaged with these figures concur with an overall estimate of 7,000 desertions. ⁴⁷ An examination of the ‘General Report on the Defence Forces, 1939-1948’ confirms that 7,303 Irish troops in the regular army deserted or attempted desertion during 1940–1945. ⁴⁸ The estimate of 7,000 was supported by Defence Minister, Oscar Traynor, in 1946, but was subsequently revised due to more accurate information. ⁴⁹ There are three key sources which provide figures on desertions. The first is the Chief of Staff’s Annual Reports, which gives us precise figures for desertions and apprehensions from 1941 to 1945 (Table 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Annual Irish army desertion and apprehension rates, 1941–1945.

Annual report	Desertions	Apprehensions	Total unapprehended
1941/1942	2,731	1,062	1,669
1942/1943	1,210	669	541
1943/1944	1,775	539	1,236
1944/1945	886	535	351
Total	6,602	2,805	3,797 50

As the above figures indicate, a total of 6,602 desertions were recorded between March 1941 and March 1945, of which 2,805 were apprehended, leaving a figure of 3,797 absentees who escaped the jurisdiction, either to find employment or to join the British Forces. Adding the 402 desertions in the 1945/1946 period, one arrives at a total figure of 7,000 cited by historians. However, previous research does not account for the anomaly presented by troops who were discharged for the offence of desertion and joined the British forces, or for captured deserters who were ‘rehabilitated’ during their imprisonment and returned to active duty, but who then reoffended. There is a second source that gives an alternative figure for desertions based on a detailed list of personnel who deserted during the Emergency, providing names, ranks, serial numbers, addresses and dates of desertion, along with the branch of the forces abandoned by deserting troops. A total of 4,983 persons are listed in the publication ‘List of personnel of the Defence Forces dismissed for desertion in time of National Emergency’, which was compiled by the defence forces after the war and was referred to in recent times as ‘the Blacklist’. ⁵¹ A third source, a G2 intelligence report, provides an approximate estimate of the total number of troops recorded as having deserted by 1945; this source verifies a figure of ‘almost 5,000 non-commissioned officers and men of the Defence Forces in a state of desertion or absence without leave’. ⁵²

The Chief of Staff’s reports verify that 4,600 NCO and men were dismissed under Emergency Powers (No. 362) Order, issued on 8 August, 1945, and a further 150 with effect from various dates thereafter. ⁵³ Since the number of desertions in the 1945/1946 period totalled 402, one can conclude that the number reached 5,000 by the end of 1945. In the course of the Pardon’s Campaign, it was observed that the number of recorded desertions had applied to all personnel serving in the defence forces, including regular army soldiers, reservists and LDF volunteers. The regular army, numbering around 40,000 regular troops and reservists at peak capacity, and the LDF having approximately 98,000 volunteers, brings the total strength of Irish land forces throughout the Emergency to 138,000, of which a figure of ‘4,983 personnel recorded in the blacklist represents 3.61 per cent of the total’. ⁵⁴ However, there is no evidence to suggest that LDF volunteers, or any other auxiliary personnel who absented themselves during the Emergency, were counted consistently among the tallies of desertions. When one leaves aside other defence forces personnel, taking the accepted approximation of 5,000 deserters recorded in 1945 as a percentage of maximum army strength (approximately 40,000 by late 1940), one arrives at a desertion rate of 12.5 per cent in the Irish army over 5 years. If one takes a 7,000 approximation (including apprehensions), the rate is 17.5 per cent. On the basis of the numbers supplied to the Department of Defence by G2, it is reasonable to deduce that approximately 5,000 Irish army soldiers had deserted by the end of the war.

In evaluating the factors that contributed to high desertion rates during 1941–1945, it is important to consider the rapid expansion of the defence forces, particularly the army. In June 1940, the government authorized the largest draft of troops since the Civil War, and when the numbers of regular soldiers surpassed 40,000 in September of that year, the army arrived at a strength not seen since March 1923, when the National army had numbered almost 50,000. ⁵⁵ In 1940, the defence forces, comprising the Irish army, the Army Air Corps, the LDF and the Naval Service along with its volunteer branch, the Maritime Inscription, was critically under-resourced, lacking equipment, weapons and finance. Unlike the Civil War, when the National army benefitted from generous supplies of surplus equipment and munitions from the British in order to defeat its enemies, during the Second World War the British deliberately withheld arms as part of a campaign to pressurize Éire into abandoning neutrality. The defence forces were inevitably reliant on the Allies for arms supplies and ‘Britain and the United States were reluctant to sell weapons to a neutral country that was unlikely to make use of them against the enemy’. ⁵⁶ In addition, the army experienced problems in training new recruits, owing to ‘the inrush of recruits and the organization of new units’; in 1941, General McKenna reported that ‘only a few columns of little more than company strength could take the field as mobile units’. ⁵⁷ The army had clearly been overwhelmed by the recruiting drive of June 1940 and it is likely that the chaos that ensued from the rapid reorganization and expansion of the defence forces during the 1940–1941 period later contributed to the high rates of desertion, particularly during 1941–1942, when the Irish army appeared to be haemorrhaging men.

IV. Motives for desertion from the Irish defence forces, 1940–1945

The motives of Irish defence forces soldiers who deserted, particularly during the early years of the Emergency, were as pertinent to an Irish staff officer’s understanding of the problem of desertion during the 1940s as they are for historians today. The main sources on the motives, or reasons for desertion and absenteeism, are the reports of those senior and middle-ranking staff officers who monitored and investigated desertion throughout the period, as well as the testimonies of the deserters themselves. These sources, although identifying various motives for the occurrence of desertion, point to the same symptom: economics. In November 1941, two army intelligence officers in G2 produced a tabular report based on the interrogations of nine deserters who had returned to Éire on leave while serving with the British army and had been apprehended by the Irish military authorities. The report concluded that the main factor behind their decisions to desert had been economic; of the nine men interrogated, all but one had defected to the British army for economic or financially-related reasons. The co-authors of the report, Captain O’Brien and Captain Fitzpatrick, interpreted the motive for desertion as such; the report concluded that there seemed to be ‘little inducement for single men to desert to the British Army’, whereas for the married soldiers there was a ‘strong temptation’. British army soldiers with families were given a weekly allowance of 18/6d for their wives, 10/6d for their first child, and 7/6d for their second, which was normally paid out along with what the husband was allotted through the Post Office. The G2 officers conceded that the unfortunate spouses of Irish army soldiers ‘have to wait a fortnight for considerably less and are paid by cheque, which often goes astray’; they even suggested that the disparity between the levels of pay on offer in the defence forces and the British forces created ‘domestic pressure’, applied by disgruntled wives, to encourage their husbands to desert to the British army. ⁵⁸

An assessment of all available oral history testimony pertaining to desertion similarly reflects that economic motives are predominant among the potential influences on deserting personnel. Tommy Meehan, a British army veteran from Dublin, who had served alongside a number of Irishmen in First Battalion, Royal Ulster Rifles, a glider infantry battalion of British 6^th Airborne Division, recalled meeting many Irish army deserters during his years of service; Meehan stated that ‘many of them were family men who could earn a pound a week with the British army’. ⁵⁹ Given the tenuous economic situation in Ireland during this time, it is entirely plausible that this would have been the case, especially since the wage gap between Éire and the United Kingdom would rise considerably throughout the war years. ⁶⁰ The pay in the Irish army was not at all attractive, according to Dermot Keogh, who observes that an Irish army Private’s pay per week in 1942 was just 14 shillings, with a Private First Class receiving 2/6d per day which, after the usual compulsory deductions, such as a haircut, laundry and social welfare, left them with only 13 shillings. Eventually, soldiers were allotted a one-shilling-per-week increase in 1942, of which they were directly paid half, with the remaining sixpence being deferred from them until after the Emergency. ⁶¹ One soldier, who abandoned the Irish army with his pay of 18 shillings a week, joining the British army for a wage of 22 shillings a week, admitted that his decision to desert had ‘nothing to do with Hitler’; like many of his fellow deserters, his rationale for abandoning the Irish army amounted to simple economics. ⁶²

General Peadar MacMahon, the former Chief of Staff of the defence forces during the 1930s and Secretary to the Department of Defence during the Emergency, observed that most of the desertions from the army, and the enlistment of Irish citizens in the British forces, were ‘almost wholly governed by economic considerations’. In a memorandum to the Department of the Taoiseach in September 1941, MacMahon would also acknowledge that the wages paid to Irish soldiers were practically insufficient to sustain a wife and family by comparison with the wages on offer in the British forces. ⁶³ Nevertheless, poor recruiting for the defence forces after 1941, attributed primarily to economic motives by certain Irish staff officers, can also be paralleled with the army desertion crisis, according to Donal O’Carroll, who deduces that ‘the more exciting prospect of joining the British services, or taking up employment in England, particularly when it appeared that the main danger had passed at home, proved too tempting for many’. ⁶⁴ One Irish soldier who succumbed to this temptation was the Dublin-born Vintan Christopher Donohoe. He joined the Irish army in 1937, serving in an artillery unit stationed in Kildare town barracks, but in 1941 he decided to take a short period of leave during which he would permanently absent himself from duty for the following reasons:

We were all built up in our training to go to war and then, suddenly, there was no war to go to. There was nothing to do. There didn’t seem to be any leadership about what we did next. We were all trained men. We’d gone through all our training. I was trained on revolvers, rifles, the Bren machine gun, the Vickers machine gun, the 38 field gun. So what was I to do with all this knowledge that I have? ⁶⁵

Irishmen who volunteered to serve in the British armed forces, particularly deserters from the defence forces, had clear alternatives to a military path. O’Connor notes that if those Irish recruits who cited economic motives

wanted to improve their economic situation they could have earned higher wages by following other Irish migrants into the booming British war industries; what is more, this work involved less risk to life and limb than service in the British forces.

It is, thus, O’Connor’s contention that the veterans who mentioned economic motives in their interview testimonies also ‘had additional motives pushing them towards the British military’. ⁶⁶ In analysing the motives for desertion, it is useful to assess Irish motives for military service, generally, in both world wars. David Fitzpatrick presciently observes that ‘soldiering in peacetime might indeed be deemed preferable to civilian unemployment . . . but in wartime, the risks of death or incapacity would clearly outweigh the material benefits’. ⁶⁷ Irish deserters had many alternatives to the continuance of military service, especially those men who travelled to the major British industrial cities where an abundance of employment options awaited them. However, according to the available recorded testimony, it appears that the majority of Irish deserters held a strong preference for military service. Like their civilian counterparts, who departed neutral Ireland’s shores for the purposes of volunteering for the British forces, deserters were often desirous of a good military career, and many had simply deserted for the purposes of switching armies. This is hardly surprising; many of these men clearly joined the Irish army with the intention of forging a career, getting a taste of military life, or serving their country’s cause. Therefore, the trading of uniforms and allegiances under the admittedly potent justification of economic motives should be scrutinized against broader influences, including Fitzpatrick’s formula of ‘group affiliations and collective pressures’. ⁶⁸

Even the Chief of Staff, General McKenna, disagreed with the pronouncement of his predecessor regarding the predominance of economic factors in the desertion problem. In his 1944 report to the government, he conveyed an altogether different analysis of the problem:

The discipline of the N.C.O’s and men of the Forces could not be described as other than satisfactory, [sic] there has been a slight falling off from the high standard which was in evidence when my last report was submitted. The causes for this regrettable fact are not hard to find, and they present a problem for which there is no effective solution. All the factors which were responsible for the continually decreasing rate of recruiting also react on the serving troops. Public apathy, boredom and the comparatively low rate of remuneration are bound to affect soldiers with a sense that they are wasting their time in the Army. Coupled with this were the extremely unpleasant conditions under which the turf had to be cut last summer and the fact that the interest and excitement caused by the extensive field exercises were lacking during the past year. The granting of annual leave during the summer months was largely prevented by the demands of turf cutting and this was also a cause of grievance. ⁶⁹

O’Halpin argues that desertion was not

a function of low morale but, as in the case of recruitment (of ordinary Irish civilian candidates), of the fact that there was more money and excitement to be had in Britain, whether as a serviceman or as a civilian worker. ⁷⁰

However, the question of low morale in the defence forces has never been sufficiently evaluated as an overall factor for desertion in any previous study on the subject, and is far more deserving of much better inspection in light of General McKenna’s observations. Derek Overend, a Trinity College student who served as a Royal Artillery officer during the D-Day landings, began his military career in the LDF. His decision to desert, in 1941, was inspired by an instance where his volunteer unit took part in military manoeuvres in the Dundrum area of Dublin, but found themselves running around aimlessly in an area that was earmarked as a drop zone for enemy paratroopers, all the while armed with no weapons. ⁷¹ Phil Farrington was another Irish soldier who simply found life in the Irish army to be dull and boring: ‘as life in the Irish army wasn’t very exciting, to say the least, I deserted our army and joined the British army’. ⁷² Cork native Con Murphy, regarded one of his main duties as an Irish army Private, the cutting and saving of turf, to be a demeaning and irritating task. ⁷³ Bernard Kelly highlights evidence that labour duty given to soldiers during the summer months, often involving turf cutting and the saving of the harvest, was the cause of a morale crisis which was evidently linked to a major spike in desertions. Indeed, the government were aware of this morale problem as early as July 1942, as desertion levels began to peak in advance of the harvest season; Defence Minister Traynor even tried to pre-empt this by granting 2-months leave to soldiers in the summer of 1944. ⁷⁴

For some soldiers, conditions in the army were so appalling that they felt they had no option but desertion. John Stout, a teenage recruit to the Irish army from Cork city, who later deserted to the British army and served with the Irish Guards regiment, found life difficult in the Irish army; the pay was a meagre 12 shillings and he wasn’t being fed properly. His daily meal consisted of ‘half a loaf of bread, with some butter, and bits of stew’; on the whole, the quality and the quantity of food provided to him and his fellow soldiers was abysmally poor. John claimed that the quartermaster of the Kinsale garrison, where he was posted, was selling the food stocks of the garrison for his own profit, while the men in John’s unit were forced to spend part of their pay on bread. ⁷⁵ Fellow Corkman, Con Murphy, who had deserted in 1941 to join the Royal Air Force (RAF), also abandoned the Irish army for similar reasons. The food he received was of a poor quality and he, along with the other men in his unit, were ‘starving half the time’. ⁷⁶ Keith Jeffery underlines a significant disparity in the motives of soldiers from different socio-economic backgrounds, one that places Irish deserters into varying categories. Some soldiers deserted the army for entirely economic reasons, like Jimmy Tallon, from the urban working-class Whitehall area of north Dublin, who abandoned the Irish army, due to his poor wage of 13 shillings per week, to enlist in the British army for 22 shillings per week. Others, however, like William Shorten from the affluent middle-class village of Dundrum, in the south Dublin district, were motivated by ‘a desire for adventure which was not about to be satisfied in the army of neutral Ireland’. ⁷⁷ Jeffery’s observation is extremely helpful to our understanding of motives: certain recruits had the luxury of deserting for ideological reasons, or for adventure, but for others it was purely a matter of survival during a time of severe economic privation.

Some soldiers deserted the defence forces because their fathers and uncles had served in the British army during the Great War, and they felt comparably wasted and unfulfilled in the Irish army. ⁷⁸ Another point, made by Private Daniel Rooney, one of the nine apprehended deserters interrogated by Captains Fitzpatrick and O’Brien, was the ‘lack of appreciation for a soldier in this country [Ireland] – in England, on the other hand, there were free pictures, bus rides, dances and glamorous girls hero-worshipping the soldiers’. ⁷⁹ Evidence that desertion in groups was a commonplace occurrence is also apparent from some deserter testimonies. One well-known episode, the desertion of a whole football team from the Curragh garrison during an excursion to Dundalk, made a very strong impression on Vintan Donohue prior to his own departure. ⁸⁰ John Joseph Drumm deserted the Army Air Corps with a group of fellow airmen to join the RAF in 1943. Drumm also explained that a critical factor influencing his decision to desert were the close connections between his service and the RAF:

I was in the Irish Army Air Corps up to 1942-3 and there was a mass exodus into the RAF. By 1943 there was no risk of an invasion of Ireland by then and it seemed to be – our time in the Army – seemed to be a waste of time in many ways because there was nothing we could do. And I think it’s fair to say that most of, certainly, the Army Air Corps men would have been very sympathetic to the British cause because we had a very close relationship with the RAF. I mean, after all, we bought all our aircraft off them, they supplied our instructors and our chaps were often sent over there to their training schools and we also had a couple of liaison officers from the RAF stationed at Baldonnel. So we used their manuals, they were called AMO’s, Air Ministry Orders, and our life wasn’t that much different from an airman serving in the Royal Air Force. ⁸¹

Collectively, all the aforementioned factors that explain the propensity of personnel to desert the Irish military indicate a low level of morale among the rank and file of the defence forces. However, it is quite obvious that this low ebb in the morale of Irish military personnel was not merely predicated upon economic factors, as has been suggested overwhelmingly by the evidence, including the summaries of senior Irish officers. It was the ‘unsoldierly’ nature of their service in Irish uniform that appears to have repulsed many; it appears to have been a fundamental cause for absenteeism and an underlying reason for the mass defections of many absentees to the British forces, where both the pay and conditions of service were manifestly improved. The majority of Irish army deserters who testified about their motives for desertion cited economic motives, namely their poor wages, as the principle incentive for defecting to the British forces. However, almost all of them list various other motives, such as boredom, a desire for adventure, a sense that they were wasting their time or a feeling that their skills and training were not being properly utilized, as well as wider public apathy towards their service and a realization that any threat of invasion had passed. Other factors include disgruntlement about being ordered to undertake menial and unsoldierly tasks such as turf-cutting and burial of diseased corpses of dead cattle, a lack of proper nutrition because of small rations of poor-quality food, spartan training, excessive discipline and harsh treatment from their officers and NCOs, and little sense of direction within the army itself. ⁸² Furthermore, if one compares the Irish desertion crisis during the Emergency to what was experienced by other military forces throughout the Second World War, drawing comparisons with the desertion problems which afflicted both the Allied and Axis armies during this period, one can find striking similarities in terms of the common factors which provoked epidemics of desertion.

In the case of German military, according to Steven O’Connor and Martin Gutmann, ‘low morale and a propensity to desert was a significant problem in German units’, especially within foreign units of the Waffen SS. The problem seemingly stemmed from the hierarchical nature of German military and the stringent application of Nazi ideology, which deemed most non-Germans as inferior, and, in particular, the abusiveness of German officers commanding foreign units. ⁸³ In comparison with the Irish case, Germany’s desertion problems are clearly linked with cultural barriers inherent in the Nazi regime, but Irish army deserters sometimes cited harshness and abuse from their officers and NCOs as factor in their decisions to desert, a factor which closely matches the German case. The lack of effective military organization and poor conditions of service, shown to be a factor in the Irish case, was also a major factor in the mass desertions of ethnic Germans from the Romanian armed forces in 1941. Although the influence of Berlin and a radicalisation of ethnic Germans through Nazi propaganda was key, other factors, such as

‘the long enlistment period, discriminatory treatment of minority soldiers by officers and non-commissioned officers [NCOs] . . . poor organisation of the army postal service, poor supplies, the widespread practice of corporal punishment, and the complete lack of financial support for the families of mobilized soldiers’ are now regarded as far more potent influences upon minority deserters, particularly ethnic Germans. ⁸⁴

Leadership, in the case of the Allied forces, together with inadequate cycles of relief, was critical to the growth of desertion rates within the American, British and Commonwealth armies, especially in the latter years of the war. The American author, Charles Glass, argues that the majority of the tens of thousands of British and American soldiers serving in Europe who abandoned their posts or went AWOL from 1943 to 1945, would do so because of the ineffective system of relieving and replacing frontline troops. They also deserted due to poor, or non-existent leadership from undertrained officers who often avoided combat and did not properly attend to their men. ⁸⁵ Glass’ conclusions, which are drawn mainly from his analysis of the desertion problem within the American armies in Europe, are mostly anecdotal, but are reinforced by the recent scholarship of Jonathan Fennell, who links morale problems with the outbreak of desertion epidemics. Fennell identifies a figure of 14,000 soldiers who were lost to the British and Commonwealth forces in Northwest Europe and Italy due to convictions for desertion and AWOL. He also highlights evidence that many of the convicted had ‘previously been well-behaved soldiers’ and that most committed their offences ‘in anticipation of enemy action’. At this point, it is useful to note the significant difference with the Irish case; namely, the effect of the strain of combat on Allied troops who deserted, which is completely absent in the case of Irish deserters. However, Fennell observes that the lack of an effective option in deterring desertion frustrated leading British commanders, with some even lamenting the fact that the death penalty had been abolished as a martial punishment. ⁸⁶

This same lack of an effective deterrence to desertion is also present in the Irish case. The punishment applied by Irish courts-martial under the Emergency Powers (No. 362) Order concerning desertion was to award imprisonment to the former category and detention to the latter, with the terms for imprisonment lasting between 6 and 9 months, and for detention from 180 to 300 days. ⁸⁷ This punishment did leave a lasting impression upon the men caught in the act of desertion, but such penalties were ineffective in discouraging would-be deserters. The statistics on desertions supplied by G2 to the Department of Defence from 1939 to 1941 suggest that these had virtually no impact; desertions skyrocketed on an annual basis from the middle of 1940 until the middle of 1942. ⁸⁸ The proximity of the border with Northern Ireland also made it both easier for deserters to escape into British territory, and impossible for Irish military authorities to punish the majority of those who absconded. ⁸⁹ In addition, Dublin had ‘neither the will nor the capacity to restrict the movement of Irish people from the state into the United Kingdom’ and, as it was impractical for either government to seal the border with Northern Ireland, a ban on foreign enlistments, if introduced, would have been impossible to enforce. ⁹⁰ Aside from improvising methods of apprehending deserters before they reached the border, Irish military chiefs were powerless to stop desertions. Like their British counterparts, they lacked the means to instil discipline in their ranks; as a British divisional commander in Italy had very chillingly surmised, ‘shootings in the early days would have been an effective prophylactic’. ⁹¹ For obvious historical reasons, the firing squad was never an option for Irish military discipline – furthermore, Irish deserters understood this and, thus, a lack of impunity towards their actions probably served as an additional motive for desertion.

V. The response of the Irish government to the desertion crisis

Following the state visit of Queen Elizabeth II in June 2011, a leading journalist and advocate of war remembrance, Kevin Myers, recalled the story of Flight Sergeant Kehoe and Corporal Shannon. ⁹² The plight of thousands of absentees in post-war Ireland was symbolized by the court-martial of Shannon and Kehoe, both of whom had just been released from captivity in German prisoner of war (POW) camps in May 1945, but were arrested by the authorities upon their return to Ireland and were tried for desertion in June 1945. ⁹³ The trial attracted massive publicity, not just in the Irish state, but in United Kingdom, where it would be portrayed by elements of the British press as a vicious attack upon the Irish volunteers who fought for Britain in the war. ⁹⁴ Kehoe deserted from the Irish army’s 22nd Infantry Battalion after 3 years of service and, at only 18 years of age, joined the RAF, serving in Bomber Command until he was shot down in March 1945 after 22 operations. His co-defendant joined the 2nd Infantry Battalion in 1940, but had deserted the following year to join the British army. Shannon fought in both the North African and Sicilian campaigns, landed at the Anzio beachhead and later partook in the Allied breakout and in the advance northward to Florence where he was captured by German forces. Both were sentenced to 156 days military imprisonment, but due to the public scrutiny that the trial had attracted, Shannon and Kehoe were discharged from the Irish army and set free. ⁹⁵ Kelly notes that two deserters arrested in County Longford had been similarly awarded six-month sentences and were released immediately without further incident. ⁹⁶

It became apparent to Stephen Roche, Secretary to the Department of Justice, that to trace, apprehend, court-martial and imprison all 5,000 deserters would be an impossible task; Roche drafted a proposal recommending that all soldiers absent beyond 180 days be formally dismissed from the defence forces and barred from public employment. ⁹⁷ Kelly argues that de Valera had sought an appropriate means of punishing deserters without incurring a diplomatic backlash, especially after the controversy of the Shannon-Kehoe trial. In adopting emergency powers legislation in lieu of military law, de Valera had chosen ‘the path of least resistance, ensuring that the desertion crisis was tied up swiftly, cheaply and with the minimum amount of adverse international publicity’. ⁹⁸ The Emergency Powers (No. 362) Order, 1945, which became law on April Fool’s Day, 1946, was the government’s fait accompli to the deserters. Under this legislation, all troops in a state of absence after 180 days were dismissed from the defence forces, all pay and allowance rights were forfeited and they lost their entitlement to a pension or gratuity. In a further twist, the government decreed that their dismissal would not be regarded as a formal discharge, thereby preventing deserters from making any claim under the Unemployment Insurance Act, 1945. They were prohibited from obtaining employment in any state or public body and barred from all work remunerated from public expenditure for a duration of seven years. ⁹⁹ In addition, the ‘blacklist’ was sent to all public bodies and local government offices around the state to ensure that they were known to these organizations.

Until recently, a small group of elderly men, ex-servicemen of both the Irish defence forces and the British forces, were still living under the condemnation of Emergency Powers (No. 362) Order. In 2011, a furious debate erupted in the opinion columns of Irish and British newspapers, soon to be followed by extensive coverage from international news agencies. A lobby group, named the ‘Irish Soldiers Pardons Campaign’, demanded the rehabilitation of all former defence forces personnel who had been blacklisted by the government and condemned under ‘the starvation order’. ¹⁰⁰ In June 2012, the then Minister for Justice and Defence, Mr. Alan Shatter, announced to Dáil Éireann that his government were

committed to issuing an apology for the manner in which those members of the Defence Forces who left to join the Allied side during World War II . . . were treated by the State and to seek to provide a legal mechanism that would provide an amnesty to all those who absented themselves from our Defence Forces for that reason. ¹⁰¹

This was followed by the passage of a bill granting an amnesty to the deserters in May 2013; it acknowledged that these men had ‘contributed in no small part to the allied victory against tyranny and totalitarianism’ and that their treatment by the state after the war had been ‘unduly harsh’. ¹⁰² In light of this belated volte-face in policy towards the deserters, it has become more fashionable in Ireland for critics to speak out about this unsavoury episode and ask why these men were ever condemned at all.

One of the great myths about the act of desertion from any military force is the idea that it represents an act of cowardice. Glass asserts that ‘few deserters were cowards’, even in the turbulence of the Second World War. ¹⁰³ One confronts an altogether different situation when dealing with desertion from a defensive military establishment in a neutral country such as Éire. How does one define desertion if it takes place in a country whose stated position is a policy of strict neutrality, while almost every other country within the same region is at war? More importantly, is the term ‘deserter’ justifiable, or even applicable, in the case of soldiers and personnel of a neutral military force who abandoned their posts in order to join the forces of a warring belligerent? ¹⁰⁴ This question was answered brilliantly by Captain Peadar Cowan, a solicitor and a retired National army officer, who acted as defence counsel for Shannon and Kehoe during their courts-martial. In his summation, Cowan cited the definition of desertion under military law as ‘abandoning a post of danger for a post of safety’; this definition clearly was not applicable to Shannon or Kehoe, as they had done quite the opposite, leaving a post of safety in Irish uniform for a post of danger in British uniform. ¹⁰⁵ In arguing Kehoe’s case, Cowan forcefully asserted that ‘in many countries, the accused would . . . be considered a hero that deserves honour and deserved reward’. ¹⁰⁶ There was no reward for deserters in post-war Ireland, and the label of deserter, regardless of whether or not the application of the term was justified, or legally appropriate, was branded onto many Irishmen and their families, together with the social stigma that the label entailed, with devasting effects for generations to come.

VI. Conclusion

The origins of the desertions crisis that occurred in neutral Ireland throughout the course of the Second World War stemmed from the critically poor state of defence forces, materially, fiscally and strategically. ¹⁰⁷ As the founding institution of the state, it never really recovered from the demobilization of 1923–1924 and would be degraded by almost two decades of severe financial constraints. Commensurately, two successive governments sponsored the enlistment of Irish youth and National army ex-servicemen in the British forces. Although there is little evidence to suggest that desertion was a major problem during the inter-war period, following the recruiting drives of June 1940 desertion gradually became an epidemic, with the rate of absences reaching astonishing levels during the 1941–1942 periods. The defence forces, and the Irish army in particular, simply swelled to an unmanageable number; the Irish state lacked the necessary resources to train, equip, clothe, feed and remunerate such a large body of men. In addition, with the elapsing of the perceived threat to the state during 1940–1941, a feeling arose that many were wasting their time in the army. An accompanying lack of direction from the Irish officer corps owing to a shortage of resources, for which they, themselves, were largely blameless, seemingly provoked an existential crisis within the defence forces which, together with meagre allotments of food, intolerable conditions of service and poor pay, contributed to a morale crisis within the ranks. It was under these circumstances that Irish soldiers, whether regulars, reservists and members of the Emergency battalions, elected to abandon their army and left the jurisdiction, either to seek employment in the United Kingdom or enlist in the British forces. This study concludes that the majority deserted for the latter motive due to an overwhelming preference for military service rather than civilian employment in war industries.

In view of the, arguably, catastrophic state of the army during the Emergency, which lost almost a quarter of its total strength by 1945, mostly due to desertion, it can only be said that the formulation of de Valera’s solution to the desertions crisis was, at best, ad hoc. His government were reticent in providing solutions to severe institutional problems encountered for decades by the forces that they had so badly neglected and yet would ultimately rely upon as ‘the first line of defence’. ¹⁰⁸ The dilapidated condition of Éire’s defence forces during the 1930s consummated the desertions crisis; throughout the Emergency, the Irish government was merely reaping what had been sowed for two decades. This fact renders de Valera’s sanction against the deserters as unjustifiable and, in light of the suffering caused to countless families by this policy, utterly misplaced. The deserters issue remains one of the most tragic legacies that the Republic of Ireland has inherited from the Emergency period, unnecessarily casting a pall of shame on an otherwise honourable tradition of neutrality in a time of war.