HISTORY: Guarding Neutral Ireland: The Coast Watching Service and Military Intelligence, 1939-1945 by Michael KennedyFour Courts Press, 338pp. €29.95
FOR THE FIRST few months of the second World War Ireland was defenceless when it came to aerial attack: at the start of 1939 its aerial defence consisted of four obsolete first World War anti-aircraft guns. With wrangling and ineptitude marking the relations between the departments of defence and finance, Ireland left it late to place weapons orders, which then got caught up in the actual outbreak of war.
The story of that unpreparedness, and of eventual recovery from it in terms of measures in defence of the neutral state, is well-told in Michael Kennedy's Guarding Neutral Ireland: the Coast Watching Service and Military Intelligence, 1939-1945.
At its full development, the CWS had recruited over 700 personnel manning 83 local observation posts (LOPs) strategically constructed along the 1,970 miles of neutral coast. Each manned 24 hours a day by a unit of NCO and seven men over the course of the conflict, these posts generated a remarkable one and a half million individual reports: minute-by-minute accounts revealing the ebb and flow of the conflict in its various manifestations of bodies washed ashore, mines floating or beached, convoys passing, submarines surfacing, flights of bombers and aerial dogfights.
More than 500 logbooks of these LOPs have survived, and through them Kennedy provides an unrivalled account of the war around coastal Ireland. Indeed, in a specific and valuable way, Kennedy shows how they provide an account of the North Strand bombings in a degree of detail that is unique. He is the first to piece together the tragic events of the night of May 30th to 31st, 1941, from Irish primary sources in which the log books provide the definitive information: their scrutiny leads him to conclude that "in a tragic accident, the bombs were dropped by aircraft running low on fuel, seeking to reduce their weight . . . Dublin was not the intended target nor was Dublin mistaken for Belfast".
Although the decision to set up a coast watching service was hesitant, in the event the process of constructing 83 LOPs and of training the 700-plus personnel was conducted with relative speed. Furthermore, while the CWS may initially have been belittled by elements in the British war establishment - notably in the Admiralty - other critical elements, in particular MI5, in liaison with G2 (Military Intelligence) in Dublin, came to appreciate the very significant role the CWS played in information gathering. More than this, Kennedy's book shows the highly elastic extent to which Irish neutrality could be stretched to accommodate the Allies: from reporting the movements of enemy ships and aircraft, and vital weather information, especially coming up to D-Day, and, most remarkably by providing from the summer of 1943 large white signs bearing the word Éire and the number of the particular LOP. These signs guided Allied aircraft on their approach to or overflying the state - the aerial markers became navigational aids and tellingly, while the Allies were informed of them and their locations, the Germans were not. In effect, the CWS was actively assisting the Allied conduct of the war over the north west Atlantic.
In an elegiac ending, Kennedy records that today most of the 83 LOPs are in ruins or overgrown. His final conclusion is a vital one: through CWS reports, Irish Military Intelligence was able to provide the information that rendered British or Churchillian temptations to invade unnecessary: such key information soothed British-Irish tensions at critical moments of crisis and the CWS proved a key weapon in the battle of information and propaganda.
In marking the end of the CWS, Dan Bryan concluded that it "had served the Defence Forces and the State well": one might add that for the history and historiography of Ireland and the second World War, Kennedy's masterful and original study has done likewise.
Prof Fergus D'Arcy, Dean of Arts, UCD 1992-2004, is the author of the recently published Remembering the War Dead: British Commonwealth and International War Graves in Ireland since 1914