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Today in 1920, a flying column of 36 IRA volunteers under the command of Tom Barry changed the course of the War of Independence. Barry himself was an unlikely figure to lead a guerrilla action against the occupation forces. He had been a British soldier in the First World War, schooled in the grim discipline of trench warfare. Yet that same experience, the mud and the shellfire and the military training drilled into him, became the foundation for one of the most audacious actions of the entire war. He returned to Ireland with an understanding of how to use terrain, timing, and deception, and at Kilmichael he used all three. The Auxiliaries, ex-officers recruited for counterinsurgency and feared across the countryside, travelled a routine route between Macroom and Bandon in two Crossley Tender trucks. Barry knew their habits.
About a mile and a half south of Kilmichael, on a bend where the road dipped, he positioned his column. Hidden riflemen lay on their bellies on the banks and in ditches, while Barry himself stood openly on the road wearing a tunic and Sam Browne belt to pass as one of the enemy. When the first lorry appeared around 4:20p.m , he stepped forward and flagged it down. The Auxiliaries barely had time to register the ruse. A grenade arced through the cold air and exploded inside the first truck, killing its commander, Francis Crake, and the driver. Barry blew his whistle, the prearranged signal, and the hillside erupted with rifle fire.
What happened next, involving the second Crossley Tender, has been argued about ever since. According to Barry and the IRA survivors, the Auxiliaries shouted that they were surrendering. When the IRA men stood up from cover to take the surrender, the Auxiliaries opened fire, killing Michael McCarthy, Jim O’Sullivan and Pat Deasy. Others have suggested that the Auxiliaries may have believed they were about to be shot and fired in desperation. What is certain is the scale of the result. By the end of the ambush, sixteen Auxiliaries lay dead. Only one, Cecil Guthrie, survived the initial assault. Badly wounded, he made his way to a nearby house seeking help. There he encountered three IRA men, and they executed him.
The Kilmichael ambush sent a shockwave through the British government. David Lloyd George, no stranger to sweeping statements, nevertheless understood its significance. He called it “a different character from the preceding operations. The others were assassinations. This last was a military operation.” What had been, in British eyes, the isolated killings of policemen and informers had now become open, organised warfare. The response was swift. Martial law was imposed in Cork, Tipperary, Limerick and Kerry on the 10th of December 1920, and extended to Clare, Waterford, Kilkenny and Wexford early in the new year. The countryside braced itself for reprisals, burnings, curfews, and raids. In many ways Kilmichael marked the threshold point of the conflict, the moment when the War of Independence shed its earlier ambiguity and stepped into full-blown insurgency.
from Dublin City, Ireland
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