Military Internees, Prisoners of War and the Irish State during the Second World War

B. Kelly

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137446039
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Between 1939 and 1945, over two hundred German and forty-five Allied servicemen were interned in neutral Ireland. They presented a series of extremely complex issues for the de Valera government, which strove to balance Ireland's international relationships with its obligations as a neutral.

1

Locking Them Up: Internment, Prisoners of War and International Law

Abstract: One of the fundamental problems faced by the de Valera government when dealing with military internment during the Second World War was how to apply international law, such as the 1907 Hague and 1929 Geneva conventions, to the Irish situation. Having had no previous experience of detaining belligerent personnel, neutral Ireland was initially content to apply international law to the internees, but moved away from this from 1942 onwards, when military internment was rooted in Irish emergency law, before circling back to international agreement in 1949. This chapter charts the evolution of Irish thinking on the legal basis of belligerent internment, as well as focusing on the way in which the internees were classified as prisoners, but not treated as such.

Keywords: emergency law; 1929 Geneva Convention; 1907 Hague Convention; international law; internment; prisoners of war

Kelly, Bernard. Military Internees, Prisoners of War and the Irish State during the Second World War. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137446039.0004.

In a note to the Defence Forces Adjutant-General in August 1940, Colonel Liam Archer of G2 (Irish military intelligence) made a telling mistake. His letter concerned the conditions in which the first few German belligerent personnel were living in after being transferred to K-Lines and, when referring to them, Archer wrote ‘German P.O.W.’, which he then crossed out and replaced with ‘internees’.¹ His confusion was understandable. The Irish government and military had no previous experience of detaining military personnel from other countries, and they had little idea how to classify them or how they were to be treated according to international law. Prior to the Second World War, the duties and obligations of neutral countries as regards the internment of belligerent personnel during wartime were set out in the 1907 Hague Convention. This stated that ‘A neutral Power which receives on its territory troops belonging to the belligerent armies shall intern them, as far as possible, at a distance from the theatre of war’, defining places of internment as camps, ‘fortresses or in places set apart for this purpose’.² The experience of the First World War showed that this simple formulation was inadequate to deal with the complex question of over-flights and landings by belligerent aircraft in neutral countries. Dwight S. Meares has observed that between 1914 and 1918, some neutrals released belligerent aircrew if they had become lost during flight, as Norway did with a German airship crew in 1915, while others, such as Switzerland, often refused to do so.³ In 1923, some clarity was brought to this issue when the General Report of the Hague Commission of Jurists upon the Revision of the Rules of Warfare categorically stated that a ‘neutral government shall use the means at its disposal to intern any belligerent military aircraft which is within its jurisdiction after having alighted for any reason whatsoever, together with its crew and the passengers, if any’; however, it also suggested that neutral countries could make exceptions when belligerent aircraft were in distress, lost, experiencing engine difficulties or running out of fuel.⁴

Further regulations regarding the treatment of prisoners of war were laid out in the 1929 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. Although Ireland signed the convention in July 1929, it did not ratify it, along with eight other countries such as Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Finland, Iran, Japan, Luxemburg, Nicaragua and Uruguay.⁵ During the Second World War, the Japanese government announced that it would apply the 1929 convention to prisoners in its custody, but reserved the right to make exceptions for certain nationalities and races.⁶ The duty of a neutral to detain belligerent personnel was reaffirmed in the 1939 Draft Convention on Rights and Duties of Neutral States in Naval and Aerial War’.⁷ Thus, when the Second World War broke out in September 1939, there was a relatively firm legal framework instructing neutral states that they were under an obligation to intern members of belligerent forces but, crucially, there was little guidance on how to actually implement this policy, or how military internees were to be treated once detained.

Perhaps because of this, in the early part of the war, Dublin to all intents and purposes did not have an internment policy and was unprepared for the issue. No decision had been made on where or how belligerent personnel would be detained, or even if they would be. With British forces stationed in Northern Ireland, Irish members of the forces constantly circulating around Ireland on leave, thousands of reservists in the country and constant British air and naval activity around Ireland, it was clear that a firm internment policy would create significant difficulty for Dublin. If international rules were strictly enforced, Irish camps would rapidly fill up with personnel from the British and Commonwealth militaries, some of which would undoubtedly have been Irish themselves. During September 1939, several British seaplanes touched down in Irish waters and had extensive interactions with the local population and Gardaí; in one case, the pilot used the telephone in a Garda station⁸ and in another a local mechanic helped repair the aircraft.⁹ The government’s lack of urgency reflected its attitude towards the war in general in this period. Despite declaring neutrality, preparations for the conflict were leisurely to say the least. For instance, the Defence Forces continued to recruit along peacetime lines: between 1 September 1939 and 31 May 1940, the army increased by 191 men and the reserve Volunteer Force only by 552.¹⁰

The one area in which the government acted relatively speedily was to move against the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which was known to have contacts with the German secret services. During the war, Berlin sent funds and 12 agents to Ireland to make contact with the IRA;¹¹ the majority of them were so hopelessly inept that they were captured within a few days or even hours. The most successful, Herman Goertz, spent 18 months on the run before being arrested in November 1941. The IRA had, somewhat farcically, declared war on Britain in January 1939; the subsequent bombing campaign on the British mainland was much more serious, killing seven and wounding 200.¹² This led to mounting pressure on the de Valera government to crack down on militant Irish republicans. Once war was declared, the Emergency Powers Act was passed by the Dáil and gave the de Valera government an extensive array of special powers. In December 1939 the IRA raided the Magazine Fort in the Phoenix Park, the Irish army’s main munitions reserve, and escaped with around one million rounds of ammunition. As Colonel Dan Bryan of G2 noted after the war, the Magazine Fort raid was the ‘Irish Pearl Harbour’¹³ and afterwards the government moved decisively to suppress the IRA. After an early attempt to use the Special Criminal Court to detain republicans was struck down by the High Court, internment of republicans and IRA members under emergency law was introduced on 4 January 1940.¹⁴ Internment under emergency legislation had the advantage, from the perspective of the government, of being exempt from judicial scrutiny¹⁵ and No.1 internment camp at the Curragh was opened shortly afterwards, in May 1940. Republicans were also held at other locations such as Arbour Hill, Mountjoy and Portlaoise prisons. Over 1500 republican internees passed through the gates of Tintown, but the high level of transfers and releases meant that its highest monthly occupation was 547 in March 1943. Early in the war, the subject of the IRA and possible belligerent internments were connected by the Department of Defence; it noted that according to international guidelines shipwrecked sailors washing ashore in a neutral country would not necessarily have to be interned and it was feared that German agents would pose as distressed sailors to land in Eire, and subsequently attempt to join forces with the IRA. Defence urged the government to make a swift decision on belligerent service personnel, arguing that ‘any course other than internment, possibly with the privilege of leaving the country within a stipulated period to avoid internment, may prove disastrous.’¹⁶ In spite of this, little was done to prepare for the arrival of any potential belligerent internees.

The German attack on Western Europe in May 1940 and the unexpectedly swift fall of France in June forced a reappraisal of the belligerent internment policy. Writing on 24 June 1940, Michael Rynne, the legal advisor at the Department of External Affairs, suggested a radical new direction in Irish policy. He recommended that the porous border with Northern Ireland should be sealed off to prevent refugees from crossing, while members of the belligerent forces should also be apprehended:

Whether thes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Locking Them Up: Internment, Prisoners of War and International Law
• 2  Keeping One Eye Abroad: Belligerent Internment and Diplomacy
• 3  Settling in and Earning Their Keep: Life in K-Lines
• 4  Breaking Out and Breaking In: Escape
• Conclusion: Not Breaking but Making International Law?
• References
• Index