From time to time my dad grumbles about the fact that Ireland and Switzerland did their damndest to stay out of the hostilities in World War 2. He’s quite certain (and probably right) that had Hitler prevailed in the rest of Europe, he eventually would have invaded those two countries as well - which is to say that they had a stake along with everyone else in thwarting Hitler’s plans, but refused to pull their weight.
I’m curious to know if, in the aftermath of WW2, there was widespread resentment among Allied forces toward these two countries for not getting involved.
First, Hitler never even TRIED to invade England, and knew perfectly well that he COULDN’T have launched such an invasion successfully.
So, it was FAR from inevitable that Ireland would have been conquered by Hitler. Napoleon never tried to conquer Ireland, so why would Hitler? What did Ireland have that Hitler wanted or needed?
In any case, while the Republic of Ireland was officially neutral, there were a LOT of Irish citizens serving in the British armed forces during World War 2.
I’m from Switzerland, and I’ve never heard anyone in Europe criticize the country for remaining neutral. (Criticizing them for appeasing the Axis powers in various ways, sure.) I don’t think anyone imagines that the small Swiss Army could have done anything useful against Germany.
It was also useful to have Switzerland neutral as a way to contact the German government. Your embassy could contact people in the German embassy if there were a matter pertaining to your noncombattant nationals in Germany. It could also be a way to discuss surrender, if it ever came to that.
Also worth noting: Ireland was and is a very small country. World War 2 was decades before the rise of the Celtic Tiger, and the Irish simply didn’t have the money or the population to put together much of an Army or navy.
So, it’s safe to say that, in early 1941, when Hitler controlled the Continent of Europe and Britain was facing the Wehrmacht alone, NOBODY in London was thinking, “Damn it, if onlly the IRISH would declare war on Germany, we’d have a chance!”
As a practical matter, there was nothing Ireland could do.
I would guess there was more jealousy more than resentment. There were a lot of countries that officially declared neutrality during the war. Unfortunately most of them didn’t have the advantage of the Swiss and Irish, too much work to conquer for too little reward. It isn’t like the Belgians, Danes, Dutch, Luxembourgers, Norwegians, Yugoslavs, and a dozen other nations wouldn’t have liked to sit the war out. They tried to do everything they could to make nice. But for them there was a worse effort/reward ratio in Hitler’s mind. So their preferences were ignored.
I’m also unclear what your dad thinks they could have done. Had the Swiss declared war they would have gotten their butts kicked… at least until mid '44 when they could have started getting support through their French border. And the Irish never could have done much more than offer the British a few extra divisions, which they pretty much did via volunteers.
My Grandad used to moan about the French for being a nation of collaborators who pretended to all be in the Resistance after they were liberated, and about the Italians for changing sides a couple of times, but never mentioned ther Swiss (apart from their apparent willingness to bank Nazi looted gold).
He also looked at the Irish as a nation who would have been quite happy to jump in bed with Hitler had he launched Operation Sealion and made some headway. It was his view that the IRA weren’t the only ones who were in touch with the Abwehr, that they considered “my enemy’s enemy (Germany) is my friend”.
I’ve no idea who else was of similar mind, but I do know that Eire wasn’t allowed to join the UN until 1955, and this was considered to be due to Stalin and Churchill’s 1945 Yalta agreement. There was apparently also controversy over the Irish PM’s signing of a book of condolence for Hitler’s death involving visiting the German embassy, yet not having done the same for Roosevelt’s death a month previously.
There was resentment at Ireland’s neutrality - most memorably in Churchill’s notorious swipe in his VE Day speech, followed by De Valera’s famous reply. The canard that German U-boats were refuelled in Irish ports comes up still - although Ireland barely had enough fuel to keep itself ticking over during the Emergency years, let alone spare any for other people.
A few in the government, like Frank Aitken and Joseph Walsh, actively hoped for a German victory, or at the least a negotiated peace that would leave Britain substantially weakened and give them a lever on Partition (which was the only thing they cared about). De Valera’s attitude is more difficult to assess; he bent with the wind and later on allowed a number of Allied airmen who should have been interned to ‘disappear’. DeV and the rest of the government seem to have convinced themselves that the rest of the world would respect Ireland for principled neutrality. There’s little evidence that the world did, and when Stalin vetoed Ireland’s application to join the UN after the war, neither Britain or America expended any political capital to support it.
The main thing the allies wanted from Ireland was basing rights. The ability to base naval and air patrols out of western Ireland would have been a major benefit in the Battle of the Atlantic.
Norwegian resentment against the Swedes is mostly about them allowing the transportation of German troops to and from Norway during the occupation, and other concessions and neutrality breaches benefiting the axis, but this is mostly outweighed by the support for refugees and concessions and neutrality breaches benefiting the allies closer to the end of the war.
We can’t really resent their policy of neutrality as that would have been Norwegian policy had we not been invaded.
Major? Sure it would have helped. But there wasn’t a better naval base than Belfast on the island, and allies already had that. And Cork was significantly less useful than Plymouth as a base for the southern western approaches. I guess there would have been some marginal utility from Cork and Galway. But there wasn’t a huge benefit to be gained from naval leases.
Likewise, the best place for planes was in Cornwall where they might catch the subs coming and going from Brest. A squadron on the NW coast would have extend plane ranges by 50 miles or so… but it still wouldn’t close the mid-Atlantic gap until the baby-carriers started becoming available in quantity. Better than not having them, but again not something I would call a major benefit.
Against that you have to weigh the possibility/probability of a significant uprising. Allowing British soldiers back on Irish soil would have gotten De Valera lynched. I can certainly pretty easily visualize a situation where the allies spend more men and material securing the island against the IRA etc, than they save with some marginal basing rights.
Actually one country that got quite a bit of resentment from Churchill during the war was France (Vichy France). It is mostly forgotten that the British fought the French in places like Madagascar and Syria “to prevent the Japanese and Germans from taking over”. The French fought well enough for Churchill to grumble that if France had fought as well in 1940, they wouldn’t have surrendered. Huge numbers of French troops rescued from Dunkirk demanded to be repatriated after France surrendered. To their surprise, a lot ended up in “labor camps”. There were far fewer Free French fighting than Free Poles, despite the distance needed to reach England. French navy ships were unwilling to join the English or sail to neutral ports and were attacked at Mers-el-Kebir in July 1940. The french underground was virtually non existent until 1943 when it looked like the Allies would win. See Max Hastings “Inferno”
There was a lot of political maneuvering to get Swiss banks to return property confiscated from Jews by the Nazis about 20 years ago, with people feeling the vaunted Swiss neutrality and strong defense actually involved a lot of going along with Hitler than was admitted to. There were people at the time who felt that Sweden was just as bad but they seemed to escape as much of the blame.
Sweden did sell raw materials to Germany and allowed German troops to transit from Norway to Finland via Swedish territory, but it also served as a haven to thousands of Jewish refugees (includes almost all of Denmark’s Jews).
No, that’s how we could have helped the French. For the Germans we would have opened their beer bottles. Luckily, a Swiss soldier is always well equipped for either task.
They weren’t hypothetical concerns. Germany and Japan had discussed the possibility of a Japanese move on Madagascar, and the Vichy government in Syria/Lebanon had allowed Luftwaffe aircraft to use their bases during the Iraqi revolt against the British in May 1941.
Switzerland - they might as well have been on the German side. Putting aside the safe haven for escaping Allied pilots, the Swiss gave a welcoming home for Nazi financing. The issue of stolen gold (from Jewish and other concentration camp victims) is well known. Not so well known (and no, no ‘cite’ - any1 can do their own research) is the close collaboration between German state companies (like subsidiaries of I.G. Farben), the Reichbank, and Swiss banks. Mass official confiscation of cash, jewelry or precious gems (as opposed to unsanctioned looting) was set up to be funneled into Swiss banks. Much has never been recovered. One Nazi minister, possibly Julius Rosenberg, was heard to have said, ‘without the Swiss the * heilege kreig* [holy war, the Nazi expression for ‘war’ against Jewry] wouldn’t be possible’. Toward the end of the war, S.S. officers routinely would send shipments of booty to their Swiss accounts. Post-war, Swiss life insurance companies would refuse to honor claims from Holocaust victims’ surviving heirs, telling them to get death certificates from the camps!
Other countries that declared their neutrality were invaded - why not Switzerland? Because the Nazis decided they were more valuable as a partner than another territory to occupy.
Ireland was a schizophrenic case. On the 1 hand, there were the Irish Guards, who served heroically on the Allied side (notably in Operation Market-Garden, the ‘A Bridge Too Far’ story). They were unequivocally fighting the Nazis, Ireland’s official neutrality notwithstanding.
On the other hand, the IRA threw in with the Nazis, not out of anti-Semitism or support of Fascism, but to seize the opportunity to get the British out. IRA members were accepted to have taken part in sabotage operations in Allied ports, including New York. Companies of foreign volunteers to the German Army included Irish. I wouldn’t go as far as to say Ireland was a haven for German spies, or that their government was actively plotting an invasion of England, but they couldn’t be counted on as truly ‘neutral’. The Nazis absolutely did plan to invade England, and had they done so (as someone alluded to Operation SeaLion), there’s little doubt Ireland would’ve seized the moment to declare its independence. A provision of the plan was to send arms to the IRA, and administer Northern England with Irish collaborators, much like the Vichy in France.
So between the 2, it’s not that the Irish were truly ‘neutral’. However, they were certainly less obviously allied with the Nazis than the Swiss.
While this is factually correct, the way you’ve presented it makes it look like they completely snubbed the Americans. Ireland, like other neutral nations of the time, had a general policy of expressing condolences on the death of any head of state/government with whom they had diplomatic relations, and did indeed do so upon Roosevelt’s death, even if it didn’t take the form of some official signing a book at the American embassy. The fact that the prime minister addressed a eulogy to the Irish parliament in one case and signed a book of condolences in the other was simply seized upon by certain factions intent on manufacturing a controversy.
I do recall from a history course a friend took, the point that maybe bout 5% of the French took any part in the resistance. The vast majority simply sat back and watched the show; it’s not like they had any affection for the Germans, but there was always their antipathy towards the communists too; the Germans were happy to fight that political battle. Also as many probably approved of oppressing the local Jews as there were who disliked it; although no indication they knew exactly what that implied.
Of course, once the liberation rolled through, everyone had been part of the great resistance all through the war.
I’m curious why Sweden got a free ride. The common wisdom is that mountainous Switzerland would be difficult to take, but if the Germans could take Norway, why was less challenging Sweden left alone? Or was that simply for later, when other things had been settled? Besides, Norway was IIRC a former province or dependency of Sweden, wasn’t there some resentment that Germany was encroaching on Swedish homeground with their takeover?
