Actually, the evidence presented has been that one Prime Minister purportedly made an offer without consulting the rest of Parliament (who would have had to approve any such offer) and without consulting the people of Northern Ireland (who also would have wanted a say in the matter and who had their own members in Parliament).
It would be rather like a U.S. President agreeing to return Southern California to Mexico without having the prior approval of Congress or the residents of California.
Or, given the history of British-Irish relations, it would be like a U.S. president offering to “give back” Southern Florida, Oklahoma, and the Dakotas to the Indians (with the above-mentioned lack of congressional support) added to a natural distrust for any statement emanating from D.C.
From what I can remember from studying it in school.
Ireland had no airforce, no real navy and a tiny army.
Thus, by declaring neutrality they could prevent themselves from being attacked by Germany (for anyone who doesn’t know, Belfast, in the Britishl north was blitzed) and possibly invaded. They could also stop their lands from being used as a staging base by the allies…effectively being invaded by the Brits and Yanks for the duration. Not something that the newly independent Ireland was willing to risk.
Irish Neutality was also strangely non neutral towards the Allies. Thousands of Irishmen joined the British army and fought in the war, and US and Canadian planes flew over Irish airspace without hindrance. As well as this, Allied soldiers who ended up in Ireland were repatriated and German soldiers were interned.
For many Irish people, being under Allied control during the war would have been perceived as being as bad as being under Nazi control.
Dev chose a course of action that saved Irish lives and sovereignty, and as President of Ireland, he acted in the best interests of his people and his country. You can’t really blame him.
In terms of the overall ‘war effort’, I’ve always understood the main contribution Ireland could have made was not in manpower but in strategic matters. Main example being (as mentioned) the ports; after the ‘Battle of Britain’ the single most important event in keeping any opposition whatsoever to Germany functioning (at all, and then ‘in the West’ after Barborossa) was the ‘Battle of the Atlantic’. On some estimations – although there’s no way of calculating this, not being able to provide more efficient air and sea cover for the convoys cost 30,000 lives, mainly Canadian and British. But who knows . . . but that’s, as I say, the most significant factor, not manpower.
No idea how you quantify the loss of materials on those convoy ships.
WRT the Irish ports that DeValera denied the use of, we should be specific. The southern Irish bases that the Royal Navy used in WWI were Cobh (Queenstown) near Cork and Bere Island (Berehaven) in Bantry Bay. These were mainly used for refueling convoys and escorts before setting out across the Atlantic.
The loss of these ports reduced the unrefueled range of convoys, but this had nothing to do with the “Dead Zone” in the middle Atlantic. That was a gap in coverage not by escort vessels, but by air cover (The Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Warfare, Frankland, Noble ed., 1989. p.41) The existence of the gap had as much to do with internecine fighting between RAF Coastal Command and Bomber Command as it did the unavailability of Irish bases (ibid). In any event, Belfast and Lough Foyle were available and used to support the Atlantic convoys.
To put the distances in perspective, the most numerous class of convoy escort in the RN was the Flower class. The Flowers had a range of 3,500 nautical miles. The distance from Halifax to Plymouth is 2,375 NM. The distance from Bantry Bay to Plymouth is 226nm.
The loss of the southern Irish ports, therefore, was not that strategically significant.
Just a word about Sweden. If my understanding is correct, they did help to save the lives of many Jews that had been in hiding in Denmark and Norway. Please correct me if I am mistaken.
As for the US, I doubt that we ever apologized for not allowing the passengers of the St. Louis to disembark. Did we apologize for destroying Dresden?
That would be the Brits’ responsibility. (We targeted the rail yards and were not directly involved with the destruction of the city. Of course, if we wander over to Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Nagoya, etc., then the U.S. has direct responsibility for the destruction of those cities.)
This claim is just a tad disingenuous. The methods and means for conducting the aerial campaign against Germany were jointly decided by the US and Britain beginning at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943.
As stated in Britannica “The work of the conference was primarily military … agreeing on the concentrated bombing of Germany. …”
At that conference the US and Britain agreed that the RAF would area bomb cities at night in order to destroy the housing and logistic support for factory workers and the US would bomb in daylight to destroy factories, communications and transport.
So to assign full resposibility to the British for night, area bombing is to avoid US responsibility in planning the conduct of the air war.
By the way, I’m not saying that Dresden was an unjustified and unecessary. As the cite below shows, Dresden suffered far less bombing that other German cities, particularly Hamburg where the first known firestorm as a result of bombing occurred. It was also an important transportation center in that part of Germany. The modern criticism is a case of real hindsight. I analogize our conduct of the air war in WWII to old-time physcians blood-letting and leeches. It was all we had and we knew of no other means of trying to destroy the enemy’s war making ability from long ranges.
The US attacks also became area bombing because daylight bombing wasn’t nearly as precise as it was thought to be at the time of the Casablance Converence. This cite shows, among other data, that 572 8Th AF planes were in the raid of 17 February. That is about 16 heavy bomber groups. I will guarantee that by the time the 10th group, or so, arrived the city was so obscured by smoke and dust that the idea of identification of any particular target for attack was a pipe dream and by the time of the Dresden raid this was well known to US military planners.
The joke in Norway is that Sweden was “neutral on the side of whoever was winning”, but one thing no one has ever denied is that the Swedish government was very willing to accept refugees, particularly but not exclusively from their neighbors. (Google on “Raoul Wallenberg” if you’ve never heard the name to learn about one of the most interesting parts of this story.) Nearly all of the Jewish population of Denmark escaped to safety in Sweden in one incredible night. Though there wasn’t a single organized action to evacuate Jews in Norway, about 60% escaped overland to Sweden. However, few if any of these people had been “in hiding”, as the deportation orders had not yet been given. Many Danes and Norwegians who were in danger of execution or imprisonment for political reasons also found refuge in Sweden.
And private organizations, most particularly the Swedish Red Cross, gave much-needed food and other aid to Norway. Many Norwegians who were school children at the time remember being told to bring a cup to school so they could be served “Swedish soup”, a nourishing meal made almost entirely from the Red Cross aid.
But the story is more complicated than that; I don’t want to get into all the details here, but the Swedish government also made some decisions that caused resentment and suspicion among their neighbors. So if you want to put Sweden’s wartime policy in a pigeonhole marked “Good” or “Bad”, you’re going to have a hard time of it…
Nueutrality did wonders for Belgium, Holland, Luxemburg, Denmark…
Those Irishmen who thought that Allied control would have been as bad as Nazi control were not too bright, were they? All the woes of Ireland under British rule would have been a happy day in the park if the SS-Totenkopfverbände set up shop in Dublin.
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A rather short-sighted approach. DeValera could not have known that Britian would have stood; The war was certainly in the balance for a while, and if GB fell, any childish notion of ‘neutrality’ would have been worth nicht, when and if Germany decided it wanted Ireland.
Some Swede said, during the war, “If the Nazis win, we are Aryans. If the Allies win, we are a democracy.” Sums up the ethics of neutrality nicely.
By the time Germany declared war on America, we were a defacto combatant. Escorting convoys, extending virtually unlimited credit to purchase war materials, etc, are not the actions of a properly docile neutral nation.
Not hardly. Neutrality by any nation during WW2 was amazingly stupid, American included. I certainly would take America to task for thinking they could sit this one out. But at least the humorously named ‘Neutrality Act’ allowed America to provide arms and supplies to France and Britain.
The Battle of the Atlantic was a damned close affair, and every little bit would have helped. Merely allowing GB to base convoy-protection assests in western Ireland would have been a great aid, if only the Irish had dropped their petulant notions of neutrality.
Well sort of. The Neutrality Act was altered to allow arms on a “cash and carry” basis. That is, they had to be paid for up front in cash and carried in other than US ships. And this was only after we got badly frightened at the rapid collapse of France. I will agree that FDR at least, and enough members of Congress to make a difference, finally got off the dime and started seeing the handwriting on the wall.
However, the America First committee’s were still powerful and strict neutrality was still pushed by such senators as Vandenberg of Ohio, Nye of North Dakota, Borah of Idaho and supported by a majority of the people.
At best our help against Hitler was half-hearted until after the Pearl Harbor attack.
I do think we are one the same page as to the US inability to see the danger until awfully late in the game.
I’ll let the Irish justify their own actions. I really can’t justify ours and didn’t at the time either, but then I was only 19 years old and didn’t count.
:- We had just got control of our country from the UK.
:- We had being killing them and them us 15 years before and for a looooooonnnnng time before that.
:- A lot of the population would not of accepted a Irish/UK pact. It would have been political suicide. Remember after we got a Free State we had a very vicious(aren’t they all) civil war(1922-1923) over how we were still linked to the UK by oath and the North It would have been almost impossible to keep the support of the public and go to war on the side of the UK.
:- For a lot of the war it wasn’t widely known how bad the Nazis actually were.
:- We had been given guns by the Germans for a fight against the British.
:- We favoured the British at almost every level politically during the war.
The leaders of the country decided what they wanted to do in the best interests of Ireland at the time. Hindsight is 20/20 but at the time it made perfect sense. I really don’t see why this is such a problem for you to get your head around.
I see yojimbo has ably handled the accusation of “petulance” but can I suggest you read my earlier comments about actual strategic significance of the Irish ports? The cites are above, but to sum up: The Royal Navy’s most common escort had enough unrefueled range to go from Canada to England, and the Northern Irish ports were available and in use. The RN was able to find other places for convoy assembly points, which also limited the significance.
Would it have been nicer for the RN if Queenstown hadn’t become Cobh? Yeah, probably. But did it affect the course of the Battle of the Atlantic? Not really.
