amphibious invasion was unprecedented. It was a task of enormous complexity and great difficulty, an immense undertaking, both stark in its magnitude and in the realisation that if they failed, faltered or otherwise came up short in Normandy – and war is unpredictable – then the war itself might drag on for years. The story of D-Day is enormous, and the Irish have a rightful place among its many chapters. For the first time, this book facilitates the telling of this important Irish involvement and places Irish participation on the front page, by populating the undertaking through an Irish ‘lens’. It builds on the prior work of Richard Doherty, Neil Richardson, Steve O’Connor, David Truesdale, James Durney and others, especially Yvonne McEwen, Professor Geoff Roberts, Tina Neylan, Kevin Myers, Damien Shields and more, who have lately gone a good way to revealing the involvement of Irish men and women in the Second World War.
It is only a matter of time, circumstance and chance – an accident of birth, the hand of fate – that might otherwise have seen any of us placed among those on board the landing craft heading for ‘Utah’, ‘Omaha’, ‘Gold’, ‘Juno’ or ‘Sword’ beaches, or by equal happenstance to be in the pillboxes and other fortified concrete emplacements with weapons ready, awaiting their arrival. This is the fascination of history and it takes only a little leap of imagination to live it. Its happenings must be respected and its participants interrogated, their motives analysed and their actions assessed, and lessons learned. But first we must become aware and understand such events so that we can view the ‘Irish’ involvement with a dispassionate, informed and proper perspective which rightly and more fully does honour to that participation and sacrifice.
Operation Overlord, the codename for the Allied invasion of Normandy, is a day that would forever be known as D-Day. The story of D-Day is also the story of ‘D-Day minus’ and ‘D-Day plus’, and although there is no one single specific ‘Irish narrative’ throughout, there are sufficiently strong individual Irish involvements to justify a claim of substantive Irish participation. While in no way purporting to cast a comprehensive insight into the topic, I hope the book provides a context and clarity in the presentation of ‘the D-Day Irish’ that further generations can claim ownership of, and a justified, meaningful pride. By the book’s end, I hope to have emptied the reader’s mind of the assumption that there was no noteworthy Irish involvement in D-Day, and instead to have planted the seed that the ever-emerging evidence suggests the contrary. And I would pose the question: given the history of the Irish soldier abroad over the centuries, being as honest, objective and truthful a possible, ought we really be surprised?
Today, with the broken-down remnants of what Hitler proudly called his Atlantic Wall, the coastline of northern France still displays the disfigurement of the Normandy invasion of seventy-five years earlier. The once formidable reinforced pillboxes, gun emplacements, coastal defence batteries, mortar, machine-gun and observation bunkers are now just a ruined reminder to future generations of the bloody and terrifying battle that occurred there in 1944. The guns which once wreaked such havoc and caused so much death are now silent, and the ranks of dead soldiers, tens of thousand in number, both invader and defender, lie in graveyards close to the once blood-soaked sands where they fell.
Although there were many Allied casualties, most of those who fought there survived, continuing to participate throughout the Normandy campaign. Once the breakout from the bocage terrain was eventually achieved, they advanced rapidly through the rest of France into Germany. Seventy-five years later, the number of D-Day participants still alive has dwindled dramatically. Many veterans have passed from living memory, and with them their personal first-hand reminiscences have gone forever. Some were recorded by audio, visual or written means; many – most – were not.
There is an ‘Irish’ dimension to D-Day, but difficulties were encountered researching it. Like many soldiers who survived the Second World War, Irish veterans in particular rarely spoke about it. Many Irish served under assumed names in non-Irish regiments, among them many of the 5,000 (4,983) Irish Defence Force ‘deserters’, who left a neutral Ireland and joined the British Army to fight Hitler’s tyrannical regime. In all it is believed that some 120,000 Irish fought with the British throughout the Second World War. There are soldiers with Irish names who died during the war, but were their families in England, America or Canada only recently there or resident for a couple of hundred years? Unlike during the First World War, the local papers in Ireland did not report on Irish casualties so it was difficult to know who the ‘Irish’ dead were and precisely where they were from. Many D-Day participants were not born in 1911, and so we are unable to verify who or where many were from by referring to census records. Finally, there is a lack of military service records available for that time.
But despite these challenges, the ‘D-Day Irish’ are no longer to be ignored or forgotten, nor is the role they played to remain undocumented or unwritten. Irish men and women of all ranks and none were involved in D-Day, and in each of the phases, facets and events of this epic story there was an Irish participation.
1
FESTUNG EUROPA (FORTRESS EUROPE)
While offence is the most decisive type of military operation, defence is stronger and the Germans had prepared well. The Allied invasion of the northern shoreline of France was inevitable, imminent even, just not today. After months of overseeing the preparation of defences to meet head-on the impending Allied attack, German General Erwin Rommel (‘the Desert Fox’) of Army Group B decided to leave his headquarters in the castle of the Duc Francois de Rochefoucauld at La Roche-Guyon, roughly mid-way between Paris and Normandy.
It was early morning on 4 June 1944, and he hoped to make the eight-hour journey to his home in Herrlingen, Ulm, Germany, to celebrate his wife, Lucie-Maria’s, birthday with her on 6 June. A spell of unseasonal and continuing bad weather, the worst seen in June along the northern French coastline in over twenty years, had convinced Rommel that the Allied invasion was unlikely to occur over the coming days. And so, on that damp, gloomy Sunday morning after months of devising and driving defence improvements, he set out for his home via the headquarters of his superior, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, Oberbefehlshaber (OB, Commander-in-Chief) West, at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, outside Paris. Rommel knew that the Allied attack would be decisive, a turning point in the war, but what he did not realise was that the vast military machinery and apparatus of the greatest airborne and amphibious force ever assembled was in fact moving into position and about to unleash its massive might.
All too aware of the Allies intent and of what was coming, yet not knowing the details of their plans and design, proved a huge strain and an enormous, almost intolerable, burden on the German command. All their questions were about to be answered, and Rommel would be hundreds of miles away. Unexpectedly, but all too close at hand, was the moment he and his troops had been waiting months, even years for behind the vast array of concrete coastal fortifications, artillery batteries, gun emplacements, minefields, barbed wire entanglements and improvised shoreline obstacles. More than half a million men were under his command, manning coastline defences stretching 800 miles from Holland’s dykes to Brittany’s peninsula; even further north and south beyond that, from Norway to Spain respectively. The Fifteenth Army, his main defensive effort, was at the narrowest point of the Channel between France and England, the Pas-de-Calais. His Seventh Army, a less formidable one, was in Normandy. Whether the forthcoming battle was to be fought forward front, on the beaches, or back behind, inland of them, was hotly debated, with sharply divided views on the matter. So too were there distinct opinions as to where the invasion would occur, the Pas-de-Calais or Normandy? There was, however, a generally accepted belief that Calais was the most logical and so most likely choice. It was thought probable that the invasion would involve a support and a main attack, but where would this be?
Rommel positioned troops in improved defences, having used the time since his appointment in December 1943 well, but he desperately needed more men, more materials and more time. Most of all he needed Panzers, the feared German tanks that provided the striking power of Germany’s armoured divisions throughout the war. He wanted five Panzer divisions
