The Kilmichael ambush (Irish: Luíochán Chill Mhichíl) was an attack carried out on 28 November 1920 by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) near the village of Kilmichael, County Cork, during the Irish War of Independence. Thirty-six local IRA volunteers commanded by Tom Barry killed sixteen members of the Royal Irish Constabulary's Auxiliary Division. The Kilmichael ambush was politically as well as militarily significant. It occurred one week after Bloody Sunday and marked an escalation in the IRA's campaign.
Background
The Auxiliaries were recruited from former commissioned officers in the British Army. The force was raised in July 1920 and were promoted as a highly trained elite force by the British media. In common with most of their colleagues, the Auxiliaries engaged at Kilmichael were World War I veterans.
The Auxiliaries and the previously introduced Black and Tans rapidly became highly unpopular in Ireland due to intimidation of the civilian population and arbitrary reprisals after IRA actions – including burnings of businesses and homes, beatings and killings. A week before the Kilmichael ambush, after IRA assassinations of British intelligence operatives in Dublin on Bloody Sunday, Auxiliaries fired on players and spectators at a Gaelic football match in Croke Park Dublin, killing fourteen civilians (thirteen spectators and one player).
The Auxiliaries in Cork were based in the town of Macroom, and in November 1920 they carried out a number of raids on the villages in the surrounding area, including Dunmanway, Coppeen and Castletown-Kinneigh, to intimidate the local population away from supporting the IRA. They shot dead one civilian James Lehane (Séamus Ó Liatháin) at Ballymakeera on 17 October 1920. In his memoir, Guerilla Days in Ireland, Tom Barry noted that before Kilmichael the IRA hardly fired a shot at the Auxiliaries, which "had a very serious effect on the morale of the whole people as well as on the IRA". Barry's assessment was that the West Cork IRA needed a successful action against the Auxiliaries in order to be effective.
On October 31st, Barry assembled a flying column of 36 riflemen with them regrouping on November 21st in preparation of the ambush. The column had 35 rounds for each rifle as well as a handful of revolvers and two Mills bombs (hand grenades). Barry scouted possible ambush sites with Captain Michael McCarthy on horseback and selected one on the Macroom–Dunmanway road, on the section between Kilmichael and Gleann, which the Auxiliaries coming out of Macroom used every day. The flying column marched there on foot and reached the ambush site on the night of 27 November. The IRA volunteers took up positions in the low rocky hills on either side of the road. Unlike most IRA ambush positions, there was no obvious escape route for the guerrillas should the fighting go against them.
The ambush
As dusk fell between 4:05 and 4:20 pm on 28 November, the ambush took place on a road at Dus a' Bharraigh in the townland of Shanacashel, Kilmichael Parish, near Macroom.
Just before the Auxiliaries in two lorries came into view, two armed IRA volunteers, responding late to Barry's mobilisation order, drove unwittingly into the ambush position in a horse and side-car, almost shielding the British forces behind them. Barry managed to avert their detection by directing the car up a side road and out of the way.
The first Auxiliary lorry was persuaded to slow down by Barry standing on the road in plain sight in front of a concealed Command Post (with three riflemen). He was wearing an IRA officer's tunic given to him by IRA Volunteer and ambush participant Paddy O'Brien. The British later claimed Barry was wearing a British uniform. This confusion was part of a ruse by Barry to ensure that his adversaries in both lorries halted beside two separated IRA ambush positions on the north side of the road, where Sections One (10 riflemen) and Two (10 riflemen) lay concealed. Hidden on the opposite (south) side of the road was half of Section Three (six riflemen), whose instructions were to prevent the enemy from taking up positions on that side. The other half of Section Three (six riflemen) was positioned before the ambush position as an insurance group, should a third Auxiliary lorry appear. The British later alleged that over 100 IRA fighters were present wearing British uniforms and steel trench helmets. Barry, however, insisted that, excepting himself, the ambush party were in civilian attire, though they used captured British weapons and equipment.
The first lorry, containing nine Auxiliaries, slowed almost to a halt close to the intended ambush position. At that point Barry blew a whistle and threw a Mills bomb that exploded in the open cab of the first lorry. Both occupants, the driver and Macroom Auxiliary commander District Inspector Francis Crake, were killed. The whistle was the signal to open fire. A savage close-quarters fight ensued, between surviving Auxiliaries and a combination of IRA Section One and Barry's three person Command Post group. According to Barry's account, some of the British were killed using rifle butts and bayonets in a brutal and bloody encounter. This close-quarters part of the engagement was over relatively quickly, with all nine Auxiliaries dead or dying. The British claimed that the bodies of the dead "suffered terrible mutilation as though hacked with hatchets", although Barry dismissed this report as atrocity propaganda.
Fire was opened simultaneously at nine Auxiliaries in the second Auxiliary lorry, in the ambush position close to IRA Section Two. This lorry's occupants were in a more advantageous position than Auxiliaries in the first lorry, being further away from the ambushing group. Reportedly, they dismounted to the road and exchanged fire with the IRA, killing Michael McCarthy. Barry then brought the Command Post soldiers who had completed the attack on the first lorry to bear on this group. Barry reported that surviving Auxiliaries called out a surrender and that some dropped their rifles. They then reportedly opened fire again with revolvers when three IRA men emerged from cover, killing one volunteer instantly, Jim O'Sullivan, and mortally wounding Pat Deasy. Barry then said he ordered, "Rapid fire and do not stop until I tell you!". Barry stated that he ignored a subsequent attempt by remaining Auxiliaries to surrender, ordering his men to keep firing at a range of ten yards (9.1 m) or less, until he believed all of the Auxiliaries were dead. Barry said of the Auxiliaries who tried to surrender a second time, "soldiers who had cheated in war deserved to die." Barry referred to this episode as the Auxiliaries' "false surrender".
Barry's account in 1949 can be compared with other IRA veteran testimony. In 1937 Section Three commander Stephen O'Neill published a first participant account of an Auxiliary false surrender, though without using that actual term. O'Neil wrote:
"The O/C Tom Barry, with three of the section responsible for the destruction of the first [Auxiliary] lorry, came to our assistance, with the result that the attack was intensified. On being called on to surrender, they signified their intention of doing so, but when we ceased at the O/C's command, fire was again opened by the Auxiliaries, with fatal results to two of our comrades who exposed themselves believing the surrender was genuine. We renewed the attack vigorously and never desisted until the enemy was annihilated."
Some Bureau of Military History (BMH) accounts do not mention a false surrender, for example Section Three volunteer Ned Young's 1955 Witness Statement, published in 2003 (WS 1,402). However, Young stated he had left his position to individually pursue an escaping Auxiliary when the false surrender incident took place. Nevertheless, in a 1970 audio interview Young reported that other veterans told him afterwards of an Auxiliary false surrender. Tim Keohane, who claimed controversially in his BMH statement (WS 1,295) to have participated in the ambush, described a false surrender event. He recalled that when Section Two and the Command Post group engaged the second lorry that:
"Tom Barry called on the enemy to surrender and some of them put up their hands, but when our party were moving onto the road, the Auxiliaries again opened fire. Two of our men were wounded".
Barry stated that two of the IRA dead, Pat Deasy and Jim O'Sullivan, were shot during the false surrender episode, but Keohane reported that O'Sullivan had been hit earlier, and that Jack Hennessy and John Lordan were wounded after they stood to take the surrender. Ambush veteran Ned Young reported (see above) being told afterwards that Lordon bayoneted an Auxiliary he believed had surrendered falsely. Hennessy described in his BMH statement (WS 1,234) an incident in which, after Michael McCarthy was shot dead, he stood and shouted "hands up" to an auxiliary who had "thrown down his rifle". Hennessy reported the auxiliary then "drew his revolver", causing Hennessy to "shoot him dead".
IRA veterans reported variously that wounded Auxiliaries, finished off after the firefight, were killed with close range shots, blows from rifle butts and bayonet thrusts. Ambush participant Jack O'Sullivan told historian Meda Ryan that, after he disarmed an Auxiliary, "He was walking him up the road as a prisoner when a shot dropped him at his feet". Barry did not engage in this level of detail in his account of the first lorry confrontation, or after the false surrender event. They are consistent with his order to continue fighting to the finish after the false surrender attempt, refusing further surrender attempts.
After fighting ceased it was observed that two IRA volunteers – Michael McCarthy and Jim O'Sullivan – were dead and that Pat Deasy (brother of Liam Deasy) was mortally wounded. The IRA fighters thought they had killed all of the Auxiliaries. In fact two survived, one very badly injured, while another who escaped was later captured and shot dead. Among the 16 British dead on the road at Kilmichael was Francis Crake, commander of the Auxiliaries in Macroom, probably killed at the start of the action by Barry's Mills bomb.
The severity of his injuries probably saved Frederick Henry Forde (also referred to as H.F. Forde). He was left for dead at the ambush site with, amongst other injuries, a bullet wound to his head. Forde was picked up by British forces the following day and taken to hospital in Cork. He was later awarded £10,000 in compensation. The other surviving Auxiliary, Cecil Guthrie (ex Royal Air Force), was badly wounded but escaped from the ambush site. He asked for help at a nearby house. However, unknown to him, two IRA men were staying there. They killed him with his own gun and dumped his body in Annahala bog. In 1926, on behalf of the Guthrie family, Kevin O'Higgins, Irish Free State Minister for Home Affairs, interceded with the local IRA, after which Guthrie's remains were disinterred and buried in the Church of Ireland graveyard at Macroom.
Many IRA volunteers were deeply shaken by the severity of the action, referred to by Barry as "the bloodiest in Ireland", and some were physically sick. Barry attempted to restore discipline by making them form up and perform drill before marching away. Barry himself collapsed with severe chest pains on 3 December and was secretly hospitalised in Cork City. It is possible that the ongoing stress of being on the run and commander of the flying column, along with a poor diet as well as the intense combat at Kilmichael, contributed to his illness, diagnosed as heart displacement.
Aftermath
Soon after the ambush, The Times of London described the engagement as a "brutal massacre" of the Auxiliary Division. This, along with other reports in the British media, "had a chilling effect on all members of the crown forces"; British claims of killing disarmed or surrendered Auxiliaries portrayed the IRA as having "descended to a new level of brutality." One day after the ambush, IRA volunteers from the Cork No. 1 Brigade abducted and killed civilians James and Frederick Blemens, believing them to be British spies. Four days later on 2 December, 3 volunteers were ambushed and killed by soldiers from the Essex Regiment after contacting a British deserter.