The death of John Hemingway, the last of The Few who fought in the Battle of Britain, has brought a reminder of the southern Irish who fought in the second World War, but especially those from the Protestant tradition who signed up to fight fascism.
Why did they join the British military forces? What were their motivations?
There is still considerable debate as to the number of citizens of what was then the Free State who served in the British military, with numbers varying from as high as 165,000 to as low as 38,000.
One scholar reckons it was probably about 70,000. Of these, possibly about 20 per cent were non-Roman Catholics, which would put the number of southern Protestants at about 14,000.
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Excitement, boredom and duty - the reasons southern Protestants fought in second World War
My uncle and godfather, Michael d’Alton, of Sandycove, Co Dublin, was one, second-in-command of a landing craft on D-Day. His sister and brother – my aunt and father – also fought in the war.
More than half of the Irish officers who served in the British forces were from a southern Protestant background, including generals O’Moore Creagh, Cunningham, Somerville, Montgomery, Pile, Loftus-Tottenham and Dawnay.
The numbers support the argument that a higher proportion of southern Protestants fought in the second World War than did in the preceding conflict between 1914 and 1918.
However, their story is less visible, partly, perhaps, because of the much lower death rate – 4.5 per cent of those in uniform dying in the Second World War, compared with 14 per cent in the first.
Between 200 to 650 southern Protestants were killed in the second World War. Even at the top end, however, the toll is a third of the Great War losses, as illustrated by the rolls of honour to be found in Protestant churches, and elsewhere.
Michael d’Alton was 23 years old in June 1944. Like most southern recruits, he had travelled to Belfast, without hindrance (unlike those in other neutral states), to join the Royal Navy.
Giving testimony to US military historians in 2004, he said he had been the second-in-command of a landing craft that hit the beaches, LCT796, serving under “a rather pugnacious Englishman”.
So, why did d’Alton, and so many other citizens of a nominally neutral state, serve? The Volunteer Oral Archive at UCC throws up a welter of fascinating information about why they say they did.
For southern Protestants, they decided that fighting on the same side of the British was an acceptable reflection of their sense of Irishness at the time, since the Free State was still a part of the Commonwealth, formed in 1931.
D’Alton was of suburban stock. While describing himself as “coming from what you might call ... a West British background” he was not of the country-house set. He preferred to describe himself as “pro-British”.
The crucial point here was that being pro-British did not entail being anti-Irish. After more than two decades of Irish self-government, southern Protestants had become more comfortable with their identity in the new State.
Within a stockade of economic and social exclusivity, they had invented for themselves after 1922 what we might call the “Protestant Free State”, which emphasised Ireland as a constitutional monarchy and its dominion status.
That allowed loyalty, or at least tolerance, to function on two levels without much conflict. Elizabeth Dobbs, who joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service, the Wrens, suggested that her religion and background played an important part
Capturing the relatively unstructured, instinctive reasons behind their actions, she said: “Most Protestants felt a kinship, sort of something to do with England”. People such as her still saw the Commonwealth offering a greater whole of which they could be part.
That Commonwealth came with values, they believed – liberty, tolerance, loyalty, respect for law and order, good humour and, less attractively, ethnic superiority allied to a sense of somewhat smug righteousness.
Once that generic permissive bar for joining up had been crossed, the second stage was down to individual reasoning, but it had nothing to do with the “logic of collective sacrifice” shown during the first World War.
It was the right thing to do, you were fighting evil, I was fancy free, I was young, I had a bit of education. Mostly it was because everyone else was
— Maureen Deighton from Limerick
D’Alton felt no pressure to enlist, but moving within a south county Dublin Protestant middle-class community, his mind was surely formed by the informal camaraderie of shared interests that existed.
What held sway in the second World War were, broadly, the same reasons that had been there in the first, including a family tradition of military service. But there was never just one reason.
Desmond Leslie of Castle Leslie, Co Monaghan, coming from a line of soldiers, enlisted, joining the RAF, while Basil Baker’s grandfather had been a general in the Connaught Rangers.
John Jermyn from Cork joined because his uncle had been killed at Gallipoli in the disastrous landings in 1915: “In some foolish way I thought that perhaps I should take his place,” he said years later.
Excitement was another, with so many young men believing they were immortal. For Corkman Brian Bolingbroke, that was the principal reason to join the Royal Navy since serving with the Irish military then held no purpose, in his view.
Living in a constricted Ireland, John Rowlands from Dalkey wanted to see the world. RJ Good from Kinsale was bored, looking for excitement. Interestingly, he “had nothing against Germans, had never even met one – and didn’t really care about England".
For people from poorer backgrounds, a British military pay packet played a role, too. They did not pay well compared with the Americans, but given the dire economic situation at home, it was steady.
One such was RE Jones from Cork, who had been a salesman: “Always on for a bit of fun and excitement, and I wanted to advance myself, so took that chance. With the economic situation here, I was earning a pittance.”
John Jacob, of Quaker extraction, claimed that he was the first of his family to go to war in 300 years: “I was 24, the business I was in – feedings stuff – was slowly closing down as it wasn’t able to import things."
It is tempting to look for some sort of high-minded moral purpose in the southern Protestant motivation to fight. It can be found.
Journalist Brian Inglis, from Malahide, felt a sense of “duty”. For Arthur Jones, a Dublin electrician, Germany in the first World War had been stumbling for her place in the sun, but the later conflict was “perniciously evil”.
For others, that crusade was shot through with a healthy dose of practical patriotism. In d’Alton’s words, “that bloody little monster from Germany had to be stopped” because Ireland would inevitably be next on his list.
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Jermyn agreed, Hitler only had to send “a platoon of girl guides to take Ireland”, he said. acob “was certain that if the Germans did conquer Britain, they would not stop at Holyhead or Fishguard”.
Maureen Deighton from Limerick brought all these threads together: “It was the right thing to do, you were fighting evil, I was fancy free, I was young, I had a bit of education. Mostly it was because everyone else was.”
Even though they joined up, they supported Irish neutrality: “I had no objection to Ireland being neutral and thought it was the right thing to do ...[It] was a good thing. It saved this country the appalling devastation I saw in Britain,” said Brian Bolingbroke.
Frank McLoughlin thought that “we were better off out of it”. Jacob’s view was that “neutrality was the only possible thing – we were a young state.’ D’Alton’s take on neutrality was similar: “I thoroughly agreed with it.”
Given the Free State’s military and economic weakness at the time, he believed: “We’d be more of a liability than an asset. Far more forces would have had to be devoted to our protection that were needed elsewhere.”
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However, southern Protestants joined the Irish Defence Forces, too, with several Protestant schools that had a strong British military tradition recording past pupils joining the Irish forces.
John Richards-Orpen spoke for many southern Protestants when he decided that “as their homes and families were in Ireland, they should offer their services to their own country’s defence”.
But these numbers should not be exaggerated. Some southern Protestants, like my maternal grandfather, joined Na Caomhnóiri Áituila, the Local Security Force. But they were a minority.
Trinity’s reconstituted Officer Training Corps, formed in 1908 and disbanded in 1933, was reformed as part of the Irish Defence Forces’ reserve, but it went out of existence after the second World War.
For many, the British forces were still “our Army’ and ”our Navy". As late as 1954, novelist Elizabeth Bowen, in A World of Love, was articulating a perceived southern Protestant mild bemusement that Ireland even had an army.
In 1939, however, the Church of Ireland Gazette illustrated the distance that had formed amongst southern Protestants from Britain. Its letters page had a few letters hostile to Irish neutrality, but many more on pacifism, with opinion divided.
The Trinity College academic AA Luce was against it and the rector of Howth supporting. On October 6th, 1939, it wrote approvingly of De Valera’s call that neutrality “is being surveyed with courage and energy”.
Despite what might now be accepted as the morality and necessity of the war against Nazi Germany, a more conditional attitude was shown by southern Protestants in 1939, and after than had been shown in 1914.
There was relatively little soul-searching among them. Instead, they got on with things. In reality, they had little choice. Both world wars were important markers in defining southern Protestants' identity.
Four years after the first World War ended, Ireland departed from the United Kingdom. Four years after the second, Ireland finally left the Commonwealth. In neither case could southern Protestants have prevented what happened.
They had done their bit, but they were already bit-players by 1922, and virtually unnoticed in 1949. Perhaps that was all to the good. The lifespan of visible and aggressive minorities in most countries tends to be quite short.
This is an abridged and amended version of an essay by Ian d’Alton in B Hughes and C Morrissey (eds), Southern Irish Loyalism 1912-1949 (Liverpool UP, 2020). He is the author of Southern Irish Protestants – Histories, Lives & Literatures, published by Eastwood Books in September 2024.
