On the morning of 28 July 1940 whilst bathing at Portnablagh near Dunfanaghy in Donegal John Gamble discovered the corpse of an Arab sailor washed ashore by the tide. It was of a British colonial seaman, fifty-nine year old Messen Mohamed, a native of Aden. He had been wearing a lifebelt but it had not served him well. He was identified by Gardaí from the photograph on his certificate of British Nationality. An inquest concluded death by drowning.
The Coroner directed that the cost of Messen Mohamed’s burial be taken out of the four one pound notes found in his wallet. The Donegal local authorities cut five shillings off the bill to ensure the cost met the funds available. The question of where to bury an Arab seaman led to some debate. Messen Mohammed was laid to rest ‘in a little burial place’ seven miles from Dunfanaghy ‘where other bodies which had been washed ashore some years ago, were interred’.[i]
We know nothing of the vessel on which Messen Mohamed served or when or how it went down. We do not know if he left a family, though Gardaí made contact with a cousin in Hull. But we do know that he was buried with those who met their deaths in a similar manner. The sea does not differentiate. Those who live by the sea and make their living from it do not differentiate either when it comes to those who are taken by it.
And so it was that Messen Mohammed had the dubious honour of being the first of the 348 dead to be washed ashore along the Irish coast during the Second World War. That is the known recorded figure. Newspaper reports suggest that hundreds more bodies went unrecovered as part of the bleak harvest of corpses that began during the summer of 1940 as the Battle of the Atlantic intensified off Ireland’s western shores. To German U-boat crews these months were known as the ‘Happy Time’ as they sank vessels with impunity in the hundreds of miles of ocean off the west coast.
One might be tempted to conclude that counting corpses washed ashore is merely ghoulish antiquarianism or that it is the history of ‘now there’s a thing’. I think it is a more important and complex matter that allows different perspectives and alternative views on Ireland’s Second World War.
What I want to talk about today is a connection between neutral Ireland and the Second World War and between the sea and the communities that live alongside it. The sea does not respect neutrality and in wartime Ireland’s Atlantic coastline was an interface between war and peace. Ireland could not by declaring its neutrality cut itself off other than notionally from the Second World War. The Battle of the Atlantic, the longest campaign in the Second World War, took place off Ireland’s coasts and in Ireland’s coastal seas and skies. The rising number of bodies washed ashore through the second half of 1940 is the blunt reality of the war off our neutral coast. To many of you Louis MacNeice’s lines from his poem ‘Neutrality’ will already have come to mind: ‘While to the west off your own shores the mackerel are fat – on the flesh of your kin.’ The location, rate and date of discovery of bodies all correlate to the intensification of the Battle of the Atlantic off Ireland’s western coast during the second half of 1940. Through the summer of 1940 there were many U-Boat attacks on shipping off the north-west coast of Ireland. The 250 square miles of sea off Bloody Foreland became a cemetery for shipping. Among the vessels sunk were Arandora Star, Transylvania, Dunvegan Castle, Manchester Brigade, and Mohamed Ali el-Kebir.One can argue until hell freezes over as to whether the availability of Irish bases to the Royal Navy would have prevented the loss of these vessels and you will find that even Royal Navy sources differ on the value of the bases.
The number of bodies washed ashore tapered off to generally less than ten a month after the summer of 1941 and to less than half that by 1942. Historians are unemotional creatures, trained to be so. But I have no difficulty in telling you that the files in the National Archives that this paper was written from were amongst the most graphic, moving and saddening I have ever encountered. So this paper is not a macabre body count, it is a way of looking at neutral Ireland and its experience of war through a paradigm – the discovery of bodies of the combatants, of belligerent soldiers, sailors or airmen, and of the civilian casualties of war who, because of their nationality and background, were caught up in the conflict. The discovery of each body was a unique and terrifying encounter with death, and each case reveals a little more about how Irish society experienced the second world war and how such a shocking act as the discovery of a corpse, often of a badly decomposed adult male, became part of the everyday experience of life along Ireland’s coast during the summer of 1940. The less-censored local press carried regular reports of the discovery of many of the bodies. These dead were not secretly buried or covertly dealt with; they were events that moved communities in the remotest parts of north-west Ireland and by September 1940 the epidemic of corpses represented something of a crisis to the local authorities in Donegal, Sligo and Mayo who had scarce resources to cover to recovery and interment operation.
When I spoke on an aspect of this paper some years ago an old man came to me after the paper to tell me a wartime childhood story of visiting Achill Island on holiday and how he and his young brothers used innocently to collect the flotsam from the shoreline. He remembered timber, oil and even wrecked lifeboats and he ended the story on how whenever he saw a flock seagulls circling down to a floating object on the surface of the water his father would tell him to look away. To a country with a censored perspective on the war bodies found off and along the shoreline were part of the experience of wartime that included beachcombing for oil and rubber, tampering with mines washed ashore, regular low-level overflights of Allied and Axis aircraft, crashes of aircraft on Irish territory, and the occasional welcoming ashore and caring for lifeboats of ailing survivors from sunken allied vessels or downed aircraft, Allied and Axis alike. These events connect Ireland to the war at sea in a manner that counters the traditional historiography of Ireland and the Second World War which distances Ireland from the conflict. Though neutral Ireland still had a Second World War and neutrality does not remove a neutral from the conflict, rather it makes it neutral in the conflict until either invaded or the conflict ends. It was a reminder of what was happening over the horizon and it underscored that Ireland’s neutrality could not keep it sheltered from the harsh reality of the war at sea even if it did not experience it first-hand.
The cost of the war at sea became evident along the Irish coast in the second half of 1940. Life rafts, lifeboats, bales of cork, rubber and other items washed ashore showing the economic and strategic impact on the Allied war effort of German submarine attacks. The human cost was also apparent. Now aged in his nineties former member of the Marine and Coast Watching Service Volunteer John Joe Haugh emigrated to Australia in after the war. When I spoke to him in 2011 about his time at Loop Head Look Out Post in Clare his memories were sharp. One evening in November 1940 Thomas Griffin was walking the cliff tops near Loop Head when he saw a naked body washed onto the rocks two hundred feet below. It was headless and badly decomposed after weeks in the water. The local Gardaí were informed and John Joe was sent to keep the body under observation. Griffin told Gardaí that ‘it would be impossible to recover the body as in the memory of the oldest resident of the locality no one had ever been known to scale down these cliffs’.[ii]
The following morning Coastwatchers Crotty and Austin volunteered to scale the cliffs and the two were lowered down the cliff face to the body on the rocks below. The action was courageous and the Garda report on the recovery of the body was sent to top level Garda officers and to senior military officers at Southern Command Headquarters in Cork.
The remains were secured onto a stretcher and it was hauled up the cliff, the rope was lowered again and the two coastwatchers were raised back up to the top. Sergeant Byrne began the grim task of attempting to identify the remains. John Joe remembered it was in a very poor condition and was ‘like jelly’. Sergeant Byrne considered that ‘it appeared to have been in the water for some considerable time.’[iii] There were no identifying papers, but there were many tattoos – the head of a girl with the name Barbara on the left wrist, the figure of Christ crucified on the left bicep and on the right shoulder the tattoo of a girl with the words ‘Forget me not’ over the head. The unknown man was a British merchant seaman; John Joe thought he was a fireman.
County Coroner M. J. Hillery concluded death by drowning. Like almost half the bodies washed ashore along the Irish coast during the Second World War, the man was never identified. He was buried in Kilballyowen cemetery, where, to this day, he rests in an unmarked grave. When I asked John Joe about the burial he identified the location immediately; it was a little bit in from the steps, on the left hand side, perhaps one or two body lengths. John Joe had not been in Ireland since the 1950s, but there is an empty plot at this location. In a strange postscript he added that shortly after the war, having read in the British press about the discovery of the body of a man with a woman’s name tattooed on his left wrist, a woman named Barbara arrived in Kilbaha searching for the grave.
Make of that what you will. Such discoveries and such an aftermath were common occurrences on Ireland's Atlantic coast during summer 1940. There are many unmarked graves of the unidentified casualties of the Battle of the Atlantic along Ireland’s western seaboard. Little, for example, could be done to identify the body of a ‘European Male’ in a blue pin-striped suit sighted in the sea beneath the cliffs at Glenlara. Recovered by Gardaí who borrowed a local currach, hooked the corpse with a grappling iron and brought it to shore, they found on the badly decomposed body thruppence ha’penny and a small crucifix. He is buried in an unmarked grave in Termoncarragh Cemetery near Belmullet.
Common too were letters to the Irish authorities from relatives looking for traces of their loved ones. Nancy Cotton discovered through press reports that her fiancée Edgar Mayes had died in the sinking of Upwey Grange and had come ashore near Erris Head. She wrote to the Gardaí at Belmullet to see if a blue and gold enamel badge was sewn behind the lapel of his uniform jacket. It was her badge from Notre Dame High School Northampton. The keepsake having been found where it was said to be had been removed by Gardaí and was amongst Mayes’ effects at Belmullet station. It was forwarded to Ms Cotton.
The story of the bodies washed ashore is also important because it allows us to create a bottom up narrative of the Second World War. This is not the de Valeras and the Churchills; it is the war as experienced by the ordinary people who get left out of the grand narratives. It is the war as experienced by those who saw the war take place around them.
In the week after Messen Mohammed’s body was discovered Sheila Murphy at the Department of External Affairs began to receive daily, sometimes hourly, reports from Defence Forces GHQ of more and more bodies being found by civilians, military and Gardaí along the west coast. On 10 August there were fifteen bodies found; twelve on 11 August. There was no co-ordinated way of dealing with these discoveries and often very little tact was shown in dealing with cases.
Following normal procedures local Gardaí often simply contacted the next of kin of the deceased if they could identify them and delivered the grim news without warning. In this manner Cesare Camozzi’s wife Minnie, the propriotress of the Monogram Café in Manchester, learned of her husband’s death after the discovery of his body at Malin Head on 8 August. She knew he had been interned – as were all Italian men between certain ages in Britain in the summer of 1940 - and she thought he was in a camp in Scotland. The phone call, out of the blue from the Gardaí at Buncrana, left her ‘so distressed that it was not possible to get from her any instructions as to the funeral arrangements she desired to have made, but before she left the phone, it was learned from her that her husband was a Catholic’. This last bought Cesare Camozzi some final dignity. A requiem mass was celebrated in his memory at the Catholic Church in Carndonagh and the Deputy Coroner ‘himself took the responsibility of ordering a good class of coffin’ for Camozzi’s internment in the cemetery adjoining the Church. A second body had been found alongside Camozzi’s. As identification of the deceased’s faith was not possible he was buried without ceremony in the district hospital cemetery.
In other cases next of kin were simply informed by telegram, as was the case with Mr H.R. Darrell who learned in this manner of the death of his son Clive, a Private in the York and Lancaster Territorial Regiment, whose decomposed body was discovered at Culdaff, Donegal on 11 August 1940. With slightly more compassion Captain O’Byrne of Defence Forces GHQ thought that the ‘Protestant Clergyman’ in Belmullet ‘might communicate with [the] relatives’ of nineteen-year-old Private Fred Chick whose body had been discovered by Coastwatchers at Annagh Head in Mayo. In Darrell’s case, the Gardaí at Buncrana asked for permission to hand in Darrell’s few personal effects at Ebrington Barracks in Derry. It is a sign of the unofficial cross-border networks operating in the area.
Observing what was happening the Department External Affairs took the initiative over the Department of Justice and the Gardaí and began to put proper channels in place for dealing with the deceased, their property and their next of kin. In future all notifications subsequent to the discovery of bodies of individuals not resident in Ireland were to be transmitted to External Affairs for communication to the relevant diplomatic representative of the deceased’s country who could further convey the bad news. This, as we will see, led to some bizarre, if correct, decisions being taken. Nonetheless it was in accordance with international practice. It also had the impact of prolonging the uncertainty facing the family of the deceased.
Often reports of the recovery of a named body along the Irish coast would appear in the British press. Via the Red Cross or British Legion contact would be made with the Gardaí by the family of the dead. The Gardaí, although knowing the correct identity of the person in question would send the letter on to Justice, who would send it to External Affairs who would contact the original sender and tell them to make contact with the British representative in Dublin and so the process would begin again, nothing having been done to assuage the uncertainty or grief of the deceased’s family.
By mid-August 1940 the British, German and Italian diplomatic representatives in Dublin were contacting External Affairs for information to allow identification by next-of-kin and for graves to be marked so as to allow identification after the war. Representatives from the Italian legation in Dublin travelled to Donegal, Sligo and Mayo to gather information on the dead. The Department of Local Government was ensuring that steps were taken to have the graves of all bodies washed ashore marked and records kept. So within about three weeks of the first bodies being discovered a simple national level system being put in place to deal with this consequence of Ireland’s geographical position in relation to the war at sea – inquests were being held, bodies interred at local authority expense, graves were being marked and next of kin were now being informed through the relevant diplomatic representative. Later developments included returning only personal effects and keeping matter of a military nature. It also became normal in the case of German casualties for a representative of the German legation to lay a wreath on the grave of the deceased. In one case Minister Edouard Hempel’s practice ‘raising his right hand in a Nazi salute’ and speaking in German for a short time was particularly noted by Gardaí. On other occasions Hempel visited graves on his own he was not reported as giving a salute. One wonders if it was for the benefit of the deceased or to be seen by German Legation Press Secretary Carl Peterson who had accompanied Hempel to the graveyard.
Before moving on I’d like to give an overview. Chart one shows the period from July 1940 to May 1945. There are 348 bodies on this chart. Of these over 95% are from ships (rather than aircraft), they are of Allied rather than Axis personnel, and of the known military casualties the majority are British naval personnel. The chart indicates that the period to focus on is from July 1940 to February 1942. Within that period, shown on chart two, 320 bodies were found. But it is the six months from July to December 1940, when 220 bodies were discovered that need to be explained. This is shown on chart three.
The location the bodies were discovered in, the beach, the cliff-base or the harbour, are also significant. One with more expertise than I in current flow could morph the data back to the points of sinking. But let’s look at counties and it is clear that the majority of bodies were discovered along the stretch from Erris Head to Malin Head. The first pie chart shows the proportions for the July 1940 to May 1945. The second, for the period from July 1940 to January 1941, leaves no doubt. If I attempt to plot these bodies by geographic location the true extent of occurred is apparent. [three maps]
One report to External Affairs in August 1940 noted that ‘the other body washed up yesterday at Malin Head has not been identified, but it looks like an Italian’. The picture building up through the month was of British, German and Italian dead being found along the north-west coast. British soldiers and German and Italian civilians. One ship’s name kept appearing in intelligence and Garda Reports and it connected them all: Arandora Star.
From Annagh Head in Mayo north to Tory Island in Donegal Gardaí and the Defence Forces recovered twenty-one bodies from along the coastline in early August 1940. Coastwatchers, Gardaí and members of the public from Blacksod Bay to Malin Head reported the silent arrival of these ‘men that came in with the sea’. Carried on the sea during a north-westerly gale the dead all came from - Arandora Star - torpedoed off Bloody Foreland four weeks earlier on the morning of 2 July. James O'Donnell of the Shipwrecked Mariners' Society, Burtonport, Donegal anticipated that 'if the wind hold to the west and the northwest many of these poor men's remains will be cast in on this coast.' Corporal Ted Sweeney from Blacksod LOP recalled that 'eventually we started to have rafts washed ashore and there were some dead bodies, there were rafts and old lifeboats coming, and, not many came ashore here, but there were quite a lot of bodies.'
Communities along the west coast of Ireland were taking part in the final chapter of a story that began on 1 July when Arandora Star left Liverpool for St John’s, Newfoundland. Designed to carry 500 passengers, the luxury liner was crammed with 1,300 German and Italian internees and their military guards. The internees were portrayed as a security threat because of their ethnic backgrounds and British fear of a ‘Fifth Column’. They were among the 8,000 men rounded up across Britain after war broke out and herded into internment camps such as the ‘Warner’s’, a former holiday camp at Seaton on the Devon coast near Lyme Regis. ‘Collar the lot’, Churchill had ordered.
They were men like the tall dapper 28-year-old Hans Moeller, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, Frantz Kirste, another young exile from Nazism, and 60-year-old Italian Ernesto Moruzzi, a chip shop owner from Neath, Glamorgan. Standing on the dockside at Liverpool they expected a short trip to the Isle of Man. They were instead bound for Canada. Within forty-eight hours they would be dead, along with over 800 of their fellow internees and almost 100 of their British army guards.
Sailing at cruise speed of 15 knots without escort, painted battleship grey and with her upper decks festooned with barbed-wire Arandora Star zig-zagged to avoid U-boats. The internees were kept below decks and guarded by soldiers issued with live ammunition. Captain Edward Moulton knew his ship was a death trap. If it were to sink ‘we shall be drowned like rats’ he protested before setting sail.
At 6.15am on 2 July 1940, 75 miles northwest of Bloody Foreland, Donegal a torpedo from Gunther Prien’s U-47 hit Arandora Star’s engine room. She sank within an hour. 470 Italians and 243 Germans drowned, as did 94 guards. Adding crewmembers killed, it was a combined death toll of 807 out of the 1673 carried. Almost half of those on board perished, the majority being Italian internees. There had been no instruction in emergency drill.
When Moeller’s badly decomposed body was found on 29 July at Maghery, Dungloe, Donegal, Gardaí found in his wallet a slip of headed notepaper from Jermyn Street shirtmakers ‘Turnbull & Asser’ and a songbook, ironically titled ‘Holiday Songs’ and inscribed ‘In memory of many a sing-song whilst making nets in hut D21, Warner’s Camp, Seaton Doon, 7.4.1940.’
Through the London Metropolitan Police Gardaí discovered that Moeller’s fiancée Dora Lucas worked at the Jermyn Street shop. Lucas explained that she and Moeller had lived together in Hammersmith before Moeller was interned in November 1939. Lucas’ statement to the London police suggested that Moeller had fled Germany to escape the Nazis: he had no next of kin in Britain and she asked for his effects to be returned to her. It was only on Lucas’s statement that Moeller’s body was firmly identified. He was buried in the remote graveyard at Termon, Maghery, Donegal. The Department of External Affairs did not honour Lucas’ request, they instead sent Moeller’s few possessions to the German Minister to Ireland, Edouard Hempel. Moeller was, after all, a German national and External Affairs cared little about his personal life. In a strange twist (2 slides) of fate his body was removed to the German War Cemetery at Glencree near Enniskerry in the 1950s and he lies buried alongside his fellow countrymen, supporters of the regime he fled Germany from.
Certain officials in External Affairs often showed little subtlety or indeed common sense when dealing with the papers and possessions of internees. Franz Kirste, who had fled Germany in 1933 to Prague and then to London in 1938, also died in the sinking of Arandora Star and was found washed ashore at Cloonagh, Lissadell, Sligo on 11 August 1940. Papers found on his body, described as ‘a disorderly mass of scribblings’ showed his anti-Nazi beliefs, his communications with his wife Jane in London, as well as highlighting his involvement with the British government funded Czechoslovakian Refugee Committee in London. The minute prepared on the case by External Affairs makes it clear that Kirste had been also interrogated by the British security services on his knowledge of Nazi agents in Britain, and that he appeared to be under great mental pressure in the months leading up to this death. The punctilious Nicholas Nolan, later Cabinet Secretary, who during the Second World War was a mid-ranking official at External Affairs, with his usual single-minded determination to follow exact procedures proposed sending Kirste’s personal papers, minus some of the anti-Nazi references, to Hempel, thus identifying to the German authorities Kirste’s wife and that he was involved with Czech refugees in London and in Czechoslovakia. The final decision taken was to send all Kirste’s papers to the British Representative’s office. It was authorised by the more worldly-wise and Anglophile Fred Boland, Assistant Secretary at External Affairs who was also in part associated with the Department’s contacts with G2 and with intelligence matters.
Moruzzi’s body was found on 30 July 1940 at Cloughglass, Burtonport, Donegal. A small stout man with thinning grey hair and a dark moustache, he was identified by his political leanings - the receipt for his yearly subscription to the Neath Constitutional Club. It was the only item in his wallet, save five religious medals and a small crucifix. Survivors recalled how many older men like Moruzzi simply stood waiting on the decks for the sea to take them as Arandora Star sank. He was buried with others from Arandora Star in the graveyard on Cruit Island, Donegal.
Moeller, Kirste and Moruzzi were symbolic of the internees on the ship. Italians like Moruzzi had come to Britain in the early 1900s as economic migrants seeking to make a new life had integrated into British society. Moruzzi was interned on 11 June 1940, the day after Italy declared war on Britain. German refugees like Moeller and Kirste sought haven in democratic Britain after fleeing Nazi Germany and Kirste took active steps to support his former homeland. They had no rights in wartime Britain.
One of the guards on Arandora Star was Private William Frederick Chick of the Dorsetshire Regiment. Nineteen year old Fred Chick, as he was known to his family, was a butcher in civilian life and was from the village of Martinstown in Dorsetshire. He had enlisted in the Territorial Army in April 1939 and later saw service in France with the British Expeditionary Force. The Mayo press covered the discovery of Chick’s body at Annagh Head on the morning of 9 August 1940. They carried a story about how three local men had waded into rough seas to tie a rope to his body and bring him ashore and how on finding a photograph of Chick’s girlfriend in his wallet they were reduced to tears.
It took almost a month for bodies of the dead from Arandora Star to reach land. Moeller and Moruzzi were amongst the first. The last body known to be from Arandora Star was of 21-year-old Private Edward Lane of the 7th Battalion, the Devon Regiment, recovered from the sea at Ballycastle, Mayo on 21 August. His watch had stopped at two minutes past eight, forty-seven minutes after Arandora Star rolled over and sank.
British official opinion blamed the high loss of life in the sinking on fighting onboard and panic and cowardice amongst the internees as Arandora Star began to sink. Parliamentary questions brought to light the real story. The conditions the internees were kept in had contributed to the high death toll. Italians, mostly older men, on the lower decks were unable to make their way to the deck of the listing liner. The Germans and Austrians on the upper decks had a much higher survival rate; Moeller’s body, for example, had been found with a lifebelt on (2 slides).
The sinking of Arandora Star was the fourth worst British merchant shipping disaster of the Second World War and was the subject of an inquiry by Lord Snell. As a result of his findings British internment policy was relaxed and deportation overseas was abandoned. However Snell’s report was a white-wash which hid the ineptitude of Britain’s internment policy in 1940. In the rush to intern dangerous characters many harmless individuals were picked up. Arandora Star was supposed to carry only known fascists and Nazis, but selection was at best random. Many of those who died should not have been onboard. Snell’s report was never published. This is a much more complex story than MacNeice’s one dimensional quote indicates, unless one chooses to interpret ‘your kin’ as your fellow human beings.
By late August 1940 there were so many bodies being found that Local Relieving Officers in Mayo and Donegl had to instruct Councils re-open old graveyards, some of which had not been used since the Famine almost 100 years before. There was mounting concern about the cost of dealing with so many casualties. The Donegal Board of Health was told that 33 bodies had been washed ashore during the previous week, and that funeral expenses had been paid by Board officers out of their own pockets. The Derry People of 7 September 1940 reported that
‘Every island off the coast of Donegal has had bodies washed ashore or some kind of wreck from torpedoed vessels such as lifeboats, ships stores, timber, etc.’… a lifeboat belonging to the Vinedoor, of London has been brought ashore at Tory Island. It is simply riddled with machine-gun bullets, another lifeboat has come ashore at Downings.’
In County Mayo there was one body for every kilometre along the Erris coastline, and the Board of Health became very concerned at the cost of so many funerals with coffins costing £2.10 shillings each. Ordinary coffins could not be used as bodies wearing the large bulky life vests of the time would not fit in them and larger coffins had to be procured. There is a tone of desperation and of a real human disaster in local newspaper reports. ‘There were hundreds of bodies in the sea, around Belmullet and they had only got a taste of what was coming’ a meeting of the Mayo Board of Health heard on 17 August. They had already spent well over €1,000 in today’s money on coffins and were on the verge of sending outstanding bills for coffins, which were being met by ratepayers, to the War Office in London. The Derry People of 24 August 1940 reported the cost to the Donegal Board of Health of burying bodies washed ashore. Burial coast £4 per body and an inquest £5.33. The total cost was £140 – well over €4,000 in today's money. Shortly afterwards the authorities agreed to discontinue holding coroners’ inquests, and bodies were interred on the authority of a local doctor rather than the County Coroner.
As the last casualties from Arandora Star were buried a second wave of bodies began to come ashore. They were from number of ships including the British-registered transport SS Mohamed Ali el-Kebir, a converted liner, which was torpedoed 250 miles west of Malin Head at dusk on 7 August 1940 by Lt Heinrich Liebe’s U-38. Along with her crew Mohammed Ali el Kebir was carrying 732 naval and military personnel, supplies and equipment. Her sole escort, the destroyer Griffin saved about 740 including 2 naval officers and 59 ratings, 20 army officers and 505 other ranks, leaving 120 presumed lost. John Colville, Churchill’s private secretary, noted in his diary that the relatively rare loss of a troopship ‘depressed Winston greatly; however he recovered when he heard that nearly all the men had been saved, and that there were no valuable stores on board, merely remarking that the navy was not being as successful against U-boats as in the past. We have lost much shipping lately.’
On 6 August 1940 the body of Sapper William Fullerton, who had been on the Mohamed Ali el Kebir washed up by heavy seas during a storm on the shore of Tory Island. Islander Phillip Dougan was 16 at the time and recalled seeing Fullerton’s corpse: ‘He was a big fellow, stout and blond. The whole island turned out for his funeral. Although he had no identification papers on him I recall he had seven pennies in his pocket.’ Asked what happened to the pennies Dougan smiled and said: ‘In those days pennies were very scarce. I think someone kept them.’ This story was recounted to journalist Henry MacDonald some year ago. It shows the danger of relying on oral accounts given at such a distance. Garda documents show that Fullerton had two pounds ten shillings in his pockets and his corpse was in an advanced state of decomposition. But he was indeed buried on Tory on 7 September 1940 in the Seamen’s Graveyard on the north west of the island.
But Fullerton's story hints at something else. Not all this story is one of caring coastal communities seeking to respectfully honour the dead. In one case Gunner Joseph Mulvihill of the Defence Forces attempted to defraud households in Buncrana by going from door to door claiming he was collecting for a Red Cross fund set up to defray the cost of burying bodies washed ashore – he was let off with a warning at Buncrana Court.
Perhaps more repulsive was the behaviour of Michael McGinley when on 17 September 1940 at Ballyness Strand near Falcarragh in Donegal he discovered the remains of 37 year old Roubert Courley Anderson, 2nd Officer on the Dunvegan Castle. McGinley said he looked after the corpse and told the police, as he put it he ‘kept guard’, adding ‘there was nothing of note on his person, but anything there was, was removed by the police authorities’. McGinley continued that he ‘had the body conveyed at midnight from the strand to a main road where his body was coffined.’ Anderson was buried the next day at Killult after a service conducted but the Rev Anderson. Perhaps he had civic virtue close to his motives, but this did not stop McGinley writing to Anderson’s parents that while he ‘sympathise[d] with you in your great affliction, and if your means enable you in your distress to send me some monetary assistance, as I had to procure some other men to help me at the work, I shall deeply appreciate anything you may have to give’. He signed off conveying his ‘sincerest condolence’. The Anderson family were not best pleased about learning of the death of their son in this manner and wrote via the Chief Constable of Kincardineshire to the Garda Chief Superintendent in Letterkenny about what he referred to as McGinley’s ‘usual begging epistle’. Chief Constable Mitchell looked forward hearing what had actually happened in order to acquaint the family of the true details of the Anderson’s death.
Dunvegan Castle had been lost off Donegal on 28 August 1940. Anderson’s body was found close to that of Able Seaman Walter Redford, also of Dunvegan Castle, after almost two weeks in the water. McGinley, it transpired after Garda investigation, had also written to Refdord’s next of kin, as Gardaí put it ‘in the hope of seeking some monetary reward’. What also transpired was that he had searched the bodies before the Gardaí arrived as he feared they would be washed back in to the water and ‘he handed over to the Garda certain articles which he had taken from the bodies and left the Garda under the impression that he had handed over everything found by him in the search of the bodies’.
McGinley had only assisted in moving the two bodies from the beach to a hearse and he had already been paid tens shillings by the Donegal County Board of Health for his assistance. He had kept some personal papers and two 5/- postal orders from Redford’s body and later sent the postal orders to Redford’s parents as proof of their son’s death. McGinley was warned by the Gardaí against ‘in the future interfering with any body before the arrival of the police’ and Chief Superintendent McManus considered his letters to the next of kin of the deceased as ‘particularly mean productions, containing as they do some false statements’. Redford’s father wrote to McManus giving a list of the items likely to have been on his son’s body at the time of its discovery by McGinley. These included his gold signet ring, a wristlet watch, a cigarette case and cigarette lighter. None of these items were recovered by Gardaí. McGinley’s actions were unusual, but not unique and there are a number of reports on External Affairs files where it appears that a local person examined the body before calling the Gardaí in, removing documents and valuables and communicating directly with the relatives of the deceased.
Often the information gained from non-personal possessions found on the bodies was very important. Because historians work in retrospect and hindsight and perhaps with a reasonably full picture of subsequent events we perhaps are not fully attuned seeing what was the once an even more partial picture the evidence building up day by day in the source material we use. From the summer of 1940 G2 officers attempted to build up a picture of the war as it developed off Ireland’s coast. Isolated as Ireland was and relying on censored newspaper reports they had a very limited picture of the Battle of the Atlantic from mainstream media. One must imagine the picture being built up as Coastwatchers sightings of shipping and aircraft come in, as intercepts of radio traffic from Malin Head and Valentia stations, still under Admiralty control, rise and more and more bodies are washed ashore. Each piece builds one upon the other to reveal something of the belligerents’ plans.
An example is the body of Private Peter Clarke of the 4th Devonshires, recovered near Burtonport on 8 August 1940. He had French money, as had many of the other servicemen’s bodies found at this point, perhaps an indication that his unit had seen action with the BEF in France. More significantly, he was carrying 40 rounds of .303 ammunition and a bayonet. He was perhaps guarding something – or someone? Many of the identified military bodies were carrying equipment that indicated they were armed at the time of their death. Clarke was only seventeen years old, the youngest of the 91 members of the 253 strong military guard lost in the sinking of Arandora Star. His carrying ammunition and a bayonet shows the manner in which the internees were indeed kept under guard and how they were, because of their numbers, judged to be a threat to the ship.
Any items of military significance on bodies was handed over to G2 for inspection and report. Generally this concerned German airmen as they often had items such as documents, parachutes, breathing apparatus, ammunition and sundry items of personal survival kit on their bodies. My guess, based on what happened to larger sections of German war materiel is that it was handed over the British authorities.
On a few occasions important pieces of intelligence were recovered from bodies. Jack Johnson’s body was found on Inniskea Island on 29 June 1941. He was one of the crew lost in the sinking of the destroyer Mashona off Loop Head as she escorted vessels returning from the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck. A telegram found on his body gave an insight into the sinking of Bismarck otherwise unavailable at the time to G2: ‘To C-in-C, Home Fleet from Dorsetshire. I torpedoed Bismarck both sides before she sank. She had ceased firing but her colours were still flying. Signed 1107. 27/5/41’.
There are many other individual cases and episodes one could talk about. But other than the drama and the human tragedy why should this story be of importance to historians? The sinking of ships off the Irish coast and the grim aftermath of bodies washed ashore make a very important point that has been ignored by many Irish historians when dealing with the Second World War. Proclaiming its neutrality in the Second World War, Ireland sought to stay out of the conflict between Axis and Allies, but it could not stay out of the war. The almost 350 graves of the dead from that battle, dotted along Ireland’s Atlantic seaboard, military and civilian alike are a continuing reminder of neutral Ireland’s inability to remove itself completely from the Second World War and also of the intensity of that conflict off Ireland’s shores almost a generation ago.
Consider too the contrast between how Churchill’s concern over the Mohammed Ali el Kebir was abated when he realised that only 120 men had been lost and how the reality of the loss becomes apparent when the deaths are analysed through even a handful of cases. Diplomatic and political historians too often focus only on the big geopolitical pictures of power politics, forgetting the local drama and family concerns. Even though his body had been found on the Mayo coast, a letter from Mary Weir, widow of Wing Commander A.G. Weir, who was lost in the sinking of the troopship Nerissa on 30 April 1941 captured the particularly unending sense of loss causes by her husband’s death at sea: ‘I wondered if his signet ring was still there, which is of great sentimental value to us … it is so tragic to know so little. He just vanished “into the blue”, somewhere overseas earlier in the year, and was almost home again when the disaster happened, and I know nothing at all about his end and very little of his voyagings. Just a few details pieced together from survivors’ stories.’[iv] Sadly Weir’s body was recovered in a very advanced state of decomposition and there is no mention of a signet ring having been recovered from his body.
Focussing on the dead recovers not only their personal histories, but the way the war impinged on the life of those living on Ireland’s coast. We have seen the military, civilian and religious authorities, local personalities and infrastructure at work, the unsung local heroes like Corporal Crotty and Volunteer Austin and also the mean petty crooks like Michael McGinley. We have encountered the grieving widows and fiancées and the inconsolable parents. Perhaps too in their descriptions of their lost sons and loved ones we have seen the fragility of human existence in wartime where the transient nature of what a man may hold in his pockets at any given time can dictate whether he will be remembered on his death. In December 1940 Fred Boland minuted that in so many cases ‘there would appear to be very little hope of ever establishing the identity or nationality of the deceased’. So many of the bodies remain unidentified to this day.
But there is a further and final point to make. Historians such as Fergus D’Arcy, Clair Wills and myself have written about the sinking of Arandora Star and other vessels as extraordinary events in Emergency Ireland. But a conversation I had with Garda Sergeant Terry Reilly, the son of Corporal Pat Reilly, who headed the Coastwatchers on Erris Head made me think about the sinkings differently and in a longer term perspective. Sergeant Reilly mentioned that his father was the last survivor of the Inniskea tragedy, the October 1927 drowning of twelve young men from the island when their currachs were caught in a hurricane as a deep depression moved north east over the west coast of Ireland. Forty-five men were drowned along the west coast. The deaths from Inniskea broke the spirit of the island and it was evacuated shortly afterwards. The arrival of the bodies from Arandora Star and other casualties of war was only the current chapter in the ongoing ages-old struggle between the communities of the West of Ireland and the Atlantic Ocean. Most worked to ensure the dead were buried in accordance with accepted practice and ritual, whereas a few did object to drowned strangers of uncertain religion being buried by their own loved ones. But by and large those who discovered the men that came in with the sea did their best to show them dignity to the last.
For the national authorities, the police and the military, the civil servants, the ongoing local resonance and emotion of being taken by the sea was lost. Identification had to be carried out, next of kin informed and relevant procedures undertaken. The local Garda reports, particularly those written in Irish, contain an implicit emotion absent from national level correspondence. It is as if those based along the seashore, from their closeness to the sea understood the impact of death by drowning, the power of the sea and man’s struggle with the ocean.
That struggle is as old as the communities themselves and is immortalised in Synge’s play Riders to the Sea. I was reminded of the sinking of Arandora Star and the Mohammed Ali el Kebir when reading Synge’s character Maurya, whose sons Michael and Bartley have recently drowned, just like her other sons and husband. Men from each generation lost at sea: Maurya tells how ‘I’ve had a husband, and a husband’s father, and six sons in this house … and some of them were found and some of them were not found.’ Just like the dead I’ve spoken about today – regardless of faith, background or nationality. Michael’s body has been found in the sea off the Donegal coast, but Maurya doubts it is he, saying ‘There does be a power of young men floating round in the sea, and what way would they know if it was Michael they had, or another man like him, for when a man is nine days in the sea, and the wind blowing, it’s hard set his own mother would be to say what man was in it.’
The men who found the broken and decomposing bodies of Messen Mohammed, Hans Moeller and Ernesto Moruzzi and others along the western coast of Ireland during August 1940 knew how these men had perished in the sea during the Battle of the Atlantic as had their own kith and kin in years gone by. Neutrality and censorship could not erode bonds of human tragedy and shared loss. Like Maurya’s daughter Cathleen, they knew from personal experience it was ‘a bitter thing to think of [them] floating that way to the far north, and no one to keen [them] but the black hags that do be flying on the sea.’ [i]
[ii] NAI DFA 241/187, Garda Sergeant Dawson to Commissioner, C Division, Garda Headquarters, 12 Nov. 1940.
[iii] NAI DFA 241/187, Garda Sergeant Dawson to Commissioner, C Division, Garda Headquarters, 12 Nov. 1940.
[iv] NAI DFA 241/184A, Weir to Craig, 26 Sept. 1941.