Post by Louis Parminter on Jul 9, 2011 6:22:09 GMT
Daily Express Thursday June 30 2011
In the early Forties two Canadian RAF airmen crashlanded in Ireland, about 30 miles inland from Dublin. Disorientated as they emerged from their wreck, they thought they were close to their Scottish base. Spotting a pub, they decided to celebrate their survival but when they entered the saloon bar they found it full of Germans in Nazi uniforms who shouted at them to “go to their own barâ€. The Nazis pointed at the public bar which turned out to be full of Allied men.
To the Canadians it seemed as if they had fallen down a rabbit hole and emerged in some kind of Wonderland where the Second Worlsd War had been reduced to a minor rivalry about which side of the pub to sit in. What they had actually discovered were the inmates of the Curragh, a prisoner of war camp that has been described as “Colditz meets Father Tedâ€
Here guards had blank rounds in their rifles, inmates were allowed to come and go, one officer had his horse shipped from England so he could fox hunt and – crucially for a country that stuck rigidly to the principle of wartime neutrality – Allied and Nazi prisoners co-existed peacefully on either side of a 4’ corrugated iron fence.
One of the Allied men was Bud Wolfe, a young American volunteer for the RAF whose spitfire came down in a peat bog in County Donegal in 1941. This week a team of archaeolgists began to recover his wrecked plane for a series to be shown on the BBC next year.
But presenter Dan Snow acknowledged that the truly unique element of the story is the camp in County Kildare to which Wolfe was taken by the Irish authorities.
“It was not just the british and their allies who got lost above and around Ireland†he says “German sailors from destroyed U-boats and Luftwaffe aircrew also found themselves interned. The juxtaposition of the two sides made for surreal dramaâ€
The Curragh, a wide plain west of Dublin, had been used as a military muster area and training ground for centuries. The camps first permanent structures were built for British soldiers preparing for the Crimean War in the 1850s but by the time the Second world War broke out, Ireland was an independent state and determined to stay neutral.
Accordingly, Eamon de Valera’s government made a deal with Britain and Germany under which any soldier, sailor or airman from either side would be interred for the duration of the war.
“De Valera was determined that nobody could look at Ireland from the outside and say it wasn’t being completely neutral†says Professor Clair Wills of Queen Mary University of London and author of ‘That Neutral Island’. “They had no defences – no anti-aircraft guns, no navy. If they had been bombed it would have been catastrophic. And while Churchill felt personally betrayed by Irish neutrality, everyone else in the British government could see that neutrality was a good deal for Britainâ€.
She says there was a high level of covert intellegence co-operation that the British public were not aware of. Furthermore, keeping ireland neutral was definitely a better option than seeing it fall to Hitler.
The interred servicemen were sent to the Curragh and it turned out to be a very cushy deal indeed. Some 40 British, Canadian, New Zealand, French and Polish airmen received full service pay, dined well in a country where meat and dairy products were unrestricted, had full access to duty free alcohol, had their laundry done for them, were provided with a radio and newspapers from home and could borrow bicycles to leave the camp. Some of them even brought their families to live nearby.
Meanwhile more than 200 men from the German Navy and the Luftwaffe were treated almost as well. They spent their time planting gardens, making tennis courts, organising exercise classes and occasionally singing Nazi songs to taunt the Allies.
All the internees were allowed to attend dances on Saturday nights, signed themselves out for weekend rounds of golf, fishing expeditions and played each other at boxing, table-tennis and football. In one match that might be better forgotten the Germans beat the British 8 – 3. On the Allies side of the camp, a Spitfire pilot called Aubrey Covington organised a bar where drinks cost 10 US cents a shot and internees poured their own drinks. They wrote down what they owed in an honesty book.
Some of the men felt guilty about the comfort of their situation while the war raged elsewhere. Pilot Officer Wolfe yearned to join the action and broke his parole, escaping into Northern Ireland. To his astonishment he was sent back to the camp by the British authorities – the principle of neutrality was too important to risk. Another time he was caught by the Irish and sent back
Aside from men such as Wolfe, the only truly disenchanted members of the camp were a much larger group of up to 2,000 Irish internees.
“The government rounded up anyone they thought might endanger neutrality – people suspected of IRA sympathies or of being Right-wing Quisling typesâ€. Says professor Wills. “They were uprooted from their families and jobs and were often very angry at the loss of their liberty. But from the point of view of the Allied and Germen men interred there it was jolly nice for them to have been sent to the Curraghâ€.
While the detention of Irish internees has remained central to the story of that nation’s neutrality, the PoW element of the Curragh camp became largely forgotten – helped by De Valera’s strict wartime censorship of the media. Knowledge of it was only revived when an English novelist called John Clive stumbled across the facts in the early Eighties. Having moved to Ireland he heard the story from a taxi driver who had been a guard at the camp. When he could find only passing references to it in official sources he started his own research and interviewed 100 people who had been connected to the Curragh. He turned his findings into a thriller called Broken Wings.
In 1989 the story of the camp was turned into a film, The Brylcreen boys, with the Usual Suspects star Gabriel Byrne as the camp commander. Riverdance performer Jean butler played a local girl caught in a love triangle with a Canadian and a German pilot.
The biggest hurdle for the producers was convincing financiers that this was not some far-fetched nonsense on a par with Hollywood’s much-ridiculed tartan fantasy Brigadoon. They raised the money but the objection remained valid, the finished product was panned by critics who refused to believe that this mix of Dad’s Army, the Great Escate and MASH could ever have happened.
“one wonders if the Brylcreem Boys bears any resemblance to the historical roots whatsoever†sneered one reviewer.
Allied internees were released in 1943 when the Irish realised that the Germans were losing the war and it was no longer necessary to be so strictly neutral.
The 266 German detainees remained until the end of the war. They liked it so much that only 138 of them asked to go home, with many staying to marry locals.
One inmate, Austrian born film-maker Georg Fleischmann had been helping the Irish authorities to make information films and he became a significant figure in the country’s film industry.
Towards the end of his time in the camp even Wolfe had given up trying to escape. He had reconciled himself to the delights of life in rural Ireland, dressing up as a cowboy and riding with the local hunt. It was almost certainly not what he had foreseen when he volunteered for service with the RAF.
Fortunately he was released in time to see active service once more as a pilot.
However, he could console himself that he had been part of one of the most bizarre episodes of the war even if it had not been the most strategically vital or thrilling.
In the early Forties two Canadian RAF airmen crashlanded in Ireland, about 30 miles inland from Dublin. Disorientated as they emerged from their wreck, they thought they were close to their Scottish base. Spotting a pub, they decided to celebrate their survival but when they entered the saloon bar they found it full of Germans in Nazi uniforms who shouted at them to “go to their own barâ€. The Nazis pointed at the public bar which turned out to be full of Allied men.
To the Canadians it seemed as if they had fallen down a rabbit hole and emerged in some kind of Wonderland where the Second Worlsd War had been reduced to a minor rivalry about which side of the pub to sit in. What they had actually discovered were the inmates of the Curragh, a prisoner of war camp that has been described as “Colditz meets Father Tedâ€
Here guards had blank rounds in their rifles, inmates were allowed to come and go, one officer had his horse shipped from England so he could fox hunt and – crucially for a country that stuck rigidly to the principle of wartime neutrality – Allied and Nazi prisoners co-existed peacefully on either side of a 4’ corrugated iron fence.
One of the Allied men was Bud Wolfe, a young American volunteer for the RAF whose spitfire came down in a peat bog in County Donegal in 1941. This week a team of archaeolgists began to recover his wrecked plane for a series to be shown on the BBC next year.
But presenter Dan Snow acknowledged that the truly unique element of the story is the camp in County Kildare to which Wolfe was taken by the Irish authorities.
“It was not just the british and their allies who got lost above and around Ireland†he says “German sailors from destroyed U-boats and Luftwaffe aircrew also found themselves interned. The juxtaposition of the two sides made for surreal dramaâ€
The Curragh, a wide plain west of Dublin, had been used as a military muster area and training ground for centuries. The camps first permanent structures were built for British soldiers preparing for the Crimean War in the 1850s but by the time the Second world War broke out, Ireland was an independent state and determined to stay neutral.
Accordingly, Eamon de Valera’s government made a deal with Britain and Germany under which any soldier, sailor or airman from either side would be interred for the duration of the war.
“De Valera was determined that nobody could look at Ireland from the outside and say it wasn’t being completely neutral†says Professor Clair Wills of Queen Mary University of London and author of ‘That Neutral Island’. “They had no defences – no anti-aircraft guns, no navy. If they had been bombed it would have been catastrophic. And while Churchill felt personally betrayed by Irish neutrality, everyone else in the British government could see that neutrality was a good deal for Britainâ€.
She says there was a high level of covert intellegence co-operation that the British public were not aware of. Furthermore, keeping ireland neutral was definitely a better option than seeing it fall to Hitler.
The interred servicemen were sent to the Curragh and it turned out to be a very cushy deal indeed. Some 40 British, Canadian, New Zealand, French and Polish airmen received full service pay, dined well in a country where meat and dairy products were unrestricted, had full access to duty free alcohol, had their laundry done for them, were provided with a radio and newspapers from home and could borrow bicycles to leave the camp. Some of them even brought their families to live nearby.
Meanwhile more than 200 men from the German Navy and the Luftwaffe were treated almost as well. They spent their time planting gardens, making tennis courts, organising exercise classes and occasionally singing Nazi songs to taunt the Allies.
All the internees were allowed to attend dances on Saturday nights, signed themselves out for weekend rounds of golf, fishing expeditions and played each other at boxing, table-tennis and football. In one match that might be better forgotten the Germans beat the British 8 – 3. On the Allies side of the camp, a Spitfire pilot called Aubrey Covington organised a bar where drinks cost 10 US cents a shot and internees poured their own drinks. They wrote down what they owed in an honesty book.
Some of the men felt guilty about the comfort of their situation while the war raged elsewhere. Pilot Officer Wolfe yearned to join the action and broke his parole, escaping into Northern Ireland. To his astonishment he was sent back to the camp by the British authorities – the principle of neutrality was too important to risk. Another time he was caught by the Irish and sent back
Aside from men such as Wolfe, the only truly disenchanted members of the camp were a much larger group of up to 2,000 Irish internees.
“The government rounded up anyone they thought might endanger neutrality – people suspected of IRA sympathies or of being Right-wing Quisling typesâ€. Says professor Wills. “They were uprooted from their families and jobs and were often very angry at the loss of their liberty. But from the point of view of the Allied and Germen men interred there it was jolly nice for them to have been sent to the Curraghâ€.
While the detention of Irish internees has remained central to the story of that nation’s neutrality, the PoW element of the Curragh camp became largely forgotten – helped by De Valera’s strict wartime censorship of the media. Knowledge of it was only revived when an English novelist called John Clive stumbled across the facts in the early Eighties. Having moved to Ireland he heard the story from a taxi driver who had been a guard at the camp. When he could find only passing references to it in official sources he started his own research and interviewed 100 people who had been connected to the Curragh. He turned his findings into a thriller called Broken Wings.
In 1989 the story of the camp was turned into a film, The Brylcreen boys, with the Usual Suspects star Gabriel Byrne as the camp commander. Riverdance performer Jean butler played a local girl caught in a love triangle with a Canadian and a German pilot.
The biggest hurdle for the producers was convincing financiers that this was not some far-fetched nonsense on a par with Hollywood’s much-ridiculed tartan fantasy Brigadoon. They raised the money but the objection remained valid, the finished product was panned by critics who refused to believe that this mix of Dad’s Army, the Great Escate and MASH could ever have happened.
“one wonders if the Brylcreem Boys bears any resemblance to the historical roots whatsoever†sneered one reviewer.
Allied internees were released in 1943 when the Irish realised that the Germans were losing the war and it was no longer necessary to be so strictly neutral.
The 266 German detainees remained until the end of the war. They liked it so much that only 138 of them asked to go home, with many staying to marry locals.
One inmate, Austrian born film-maker Georg Fleischmann had been helping the Irish authorities to make information films and he became a significant figure in the country’s film industry.
Towards the end of his time in the camp even Wolfe had given up trying to escape. He had reconciled himself to the delights of life in rural Ireland, dressing up as a cowboy and riding with the local hunt. It was almost certainly not what he had foreseen when he volunteered for service with the RAF.
Fortunately he was released in time to see active service once more as a pilot.
However, he could console himself that he had been part of one of the most bizarre episodes of the war even if it had not been the most strategically vital or thrilling.