The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [67]
Eire’s neutrality aroused great resentment in the rest of the British Isles, and it was not just Churchill who considered the country to be ‘legally at war, but skulking’. In 1938, the Chamberlain Government had turned over to Irish sovereignty the three strategically valuable Atlantic ports that Britain had retained under the terms of the 1922 Anglo-Irish Treaty, and Dublin’s denial of their use to the Royal Navy on the outbreak of war the next year exposed this as having been a disastrous error by the British. As Churchill put it to the War Cabinet: ‘Eire was strangling England quite pleasantly.’62 For him the Irish joke of the day – ‘So who are we neutral against?’ – was not funny. The only explanation for Eire’s neutrality was a lingering hostility to Britain after centuries of mutual antagonism, which blinded the de Valera Government to the greater issues that were at stake by 1939.
The loss through diplomacy of the Atlantic naval bases in southern and western Ireland meant that escorts could not sail as far out into the Atlantic as in the Great War; destroyers and corvettes took longer to be refuelled; tugs could not be sent out to ships in distress, but instead escorts had to go ‘the long way round’ from Scottish ports. ‘To compute how many men and how many ships this denial was costing, month after month’, wrote Nicholas Monsarrat, the novelist who commanded a frigate during the battle of the Atlantic, ‘was hardly possible; but the total was substantial and tragic.’ Although Monsarrat’s classic tale The Cruel Sea was of course fictional, its hero, who also commanded a frigate on the transatlantic convoys during the battle, states:
it was difficult to withhold one’s contempt for a country such as Ireland, whose battle this was and whose chances of freedom and independence in the event of a German victory were nil. The fact that Ireland was standing aside from the conflict… posed, from the naval angle, special problems which affected, sometimes mortally, all sailors engaged in the Atlantic, and earned their particular loathing… In the list of people you were prepared to like when the war was over, the man who stood by and watched while you were getting your throat cut could not figure very high.63
If the neutrals could not be prevailed upon to help, it was necessary to stir up those former Continental allies that had been subdued by the Germans, and on 19 July 1940 Churchill set up the Special Operations Executive (SOE), ‘to co-ordinate all action by way of subversion and sabotage against the enemy overseas’.64 This was to be the romantic world of moonlit parachutists, arms caches, cyanide pills, forged papers, weapons-drops, gold sovereigns and guerrilla units that occupied so much literature and film, a concentration of attention out of all proportion to SOE’s actual operational importance.
‘Regular soldiers are not the men to stir up revolution,’ wrote the Labour politician Hugh Dalton of his new role in control of the newly founded SOE, ‘to create social chaos, or to use all those ungentlemanly means of winning the war which come so easily to the Nazis.’ Churchill had always been interested in irregular warfare, and SOE was his brainchild; on 16 July 1940 he appointed Dalton to the post with the inspiring invocation: ‘And now set Europe ablaze.’65 The intention was later to use resistance movements to hold down a large number of German divisions far away from the Eastern, and later the Italian and Western Fronts, but there was an horrific price