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Special Article: EX Bantry Bay, August 1943[/SIZE]
by Jean-Christophe Houdon
Article from
Le Spectateur militaire.
"Away assault boats!" announces the ship's intercom, and I raise my binoculars to watch them go. Five rubber craft, each propelled by a small outboard motor, dash away from the side of the Irish warship LÉ
Meath, heading towards the shore of the port of Castletown-Berehaven, a small town on Ireland's Beara peninsula. My Irish local guide, an Irish Naval Service officer-trainee by the name of Colin Masterson, notes my interest. "American-built rubber landing boats," he explains. "They seat seven. That will be the first platoon of A company that's going ashore in them."
I nod, and hold onto my cap as the wind tries to blow it off. I've been allowed to observe this joint exercise between the Irish Naval Service and the Irish Army, but the
Meath's captain has emphasized that he doesn't want me getting in the way of his crew. The
Meath, which is normally used as a destroyer and torpedo-boat support ship, is packed deep with infantry. As the ship creeps slowly into the bay of Castletown-Berehaven, I stay out of the way by perching in a gun tub for the ship's 20mm cannon.
Meath barely fits at the pier, which has been vacated for the morning by the local fishing boats. Despite the ongoing military exercise, the
Meath will need to back off and anchor near Dinish Island for the night. With no time to waste, the ship's master immediately moors the ship and begins unloading. The first to disembark are the rest of 9th Battalion's A for Ailill Company, toting their Enfield rifles, Breire machine guns, and big Boys antitank rifles. The Irish troops look like an odd cross between the British and German armies: they tote Enfields and wear British-manufactured uniforms, but wear Germanic stahlhelm helmets, ironically manufactured by Vickers.
This is amphibious assault on the cheap: two ships with a company of infantry and another of combat engineers. The exercise is intended to represent an intervention by Irish troops in support of the League of Nations. Whimsically, the locals are named 'Rockistanis' while the ethnic rebels are named 'Badistanis'. I'm told that there may be Badistani guerrillas in the hills above town, but they don't seem interested in attacking the troops as they come ashore. Masterson grins as he points out the obvious. "We might be just setting infantry ashore, but the
Meath has three-point-seven guns and forty-millimeter Bofors. That beats rifles!"
Once the ship is mostly unloaded, I make my way down to the pier with my bag in hand. An Irish military policeman shoos me off the pier, frowning at my press credentials and exhorting me not to get in the way. I take his advice and walk to where A Company's soldiers, and the 2nd Engineer Field Squadron, are cleaning out the old British barracks for use as their casern. Abandoned for fifteen years, it requires some repair.
The local population plays the part of the Rockistani civilians, who the Irish troops are ostensibly protecting from the depredations of Badistani guerrillas. I encounter Sublieutenant Andrew Keen, a member of the 9th Infantry Battalion's headquarters company 'interrogating' some of the locals for information. His most productive agents are teenaged boys, whose loyalty can be bought with chocolate bars and hard candies. Keen's playbook for intelligence gathering is right out of the Irish experience in Afghanistan - cultivating the trust of the locals with free medical help, food, and general help. As I watch curiously, Keen chats with a local farmer who's in town for the afternoon. The farmer is irritated by the exercising troops, but Keen knows just how to sooth the man's concerns. Achieving a sort of studied neutrality, Keen goes on the offensive. It seems the man's horse has gone lame, and the farmer was hoping to borrow his brother-in-law's in order to remove some tree stumps. Instead, Keen grabs three of the combat engineers and directs them onward with one of the two heavy tractors the troops brought along. The farmer leaves with the engineers, a very happy man. "It doesn't matter if he didn't give me any solid leads," Keen says to me. "This sort of operation is less about military might and more about capturing influence with the locals. At the start of insurgencies, a good commander must give as much thought to cultivating influence as he gives to seeking proper terrain. Perhaps our farmer friend will see the guerrillas tomorrow, and will report them to us then."
Leaving Keen behind to trade chocolates for influence, I spoke with one of the military engineers responsible for setting up the casern. The Irish attribute much of their successes as part of the Afghanistan Field Force to the capabilities of their engineers and supply troops. Corporal Devin White, who served five months in Afghanistan, explained the reason to me. "We won battles because we were able to keep up a faster tempo of operations. That was only possible with regular deliveries of food, fuel, and ammunition. In order to get those things to the troops, we had to build roads, bridges, and infrastructure where there was none. The route of the League Field Force became Afghanistan's largest highway."
In the exercise, the engineers were responsible for setting up a series of fortified caserns for the use of the infantry. White took the time to show me around. "The casern serves as a defensible barracks," he explained. "A fully-developed casern, as we used in Afghanistan, would have mortar pits, barbed wire fences to restrict approaches, and defensive minefields."
The next day, I watched an infantry platoon march out of town toward the hills. According to the rumors, Keen's intelligence-gathering efforts had borne fruit, and a platoon was dispatched to hunt down a small band of guerrillas in the hills overlooking the peninsula. The 'Badistani' guerrillas were portrayed by Irish Army Rangers, who were influenced by the Yugoslavian Pandurs as combat and terrain specialists. At dusk, the platoon returned, having taken seven prisoners and one 'casualty' - a cheerful private from County Mayo who'd been declared injured by the exercise umpires.
That evening, as I halted for dinner at a local Irish pub, I encountered Naval Service Lieutenant Nicolas Porterfield, and discovered the bright young twenty-six year old was the commander of the Irish motor gunboat
M-3. Upon learning I was observing the exercise for
Le Spectateur Militaire, Porterfield invited me to join him on the
M-3 the next day to show me the naval side of the exercise. Porterfield's command, a seventy-five ton motor torpedo boat, was one of the vessels participating in the naval patrol phase.
Departing Castletown-Berehaven at the crack of dawn,
M-3 made her way to her assigned patrol zone. Porterfield told me that a group of civilian motor-boats, trawlers, and sailing craft had been chartered to ferry 'arms and guerrillas' across Bantry Bay into the exercise zone. Although none of the
M-3's crew knew what the ships would look like, each of the chartered ships flew a special pennant identifying them as a permissible target to stop, board, and search.
M-3's lookout spotted our only such boat of the day just before noon, and Porterfield signaled the boat to halt. Initially reluctant to comply, the fisherman eventually was exhorted to stop her engines, whereupon Porterfield's second-in-command inspected the craft. Half the size of
M-3, she nevertheless offered many hiding spots, and it didn't take long for the Irish sailors to find a dozen (empty) ammunition cases being transported to the guerrillas.
On the fourth day of the exercise, I hitched a ride with a local salesman in order to travel to nearby Adrigole, a quaint little seaside village of three hundred where the 9th Battalion had established another temporary casern. The trip through the Irish countryside was uneventful. It is not without cause that the country is dubbed 'The Emerald Isle', and my traveling companion pointed out to me the region's tallest mountain, named Hungry Hill. I knew from my previous evening in Castletown-Berehaven that most of the 'Badistani Guerrillas' had slowly migrated there, making it their temporary base. Indeed, arriving at the Adigole casern, I discovered only a single platoon defending the impromptu fortifications: the rest of C for Cian Company was combing Hungry Hill for the guerrillas. One platoon straggled back into the casern just before dusk, tired and frustrated: the Irish Rangers had apparently led most of the company on a fruitless chase up and down Hungry Hill.
Despite the difficulties, the Irish troops have benefitted immensely from their hard-won experience in Afghanistan. Though the troops of C for Cian Company had been demoralized by their apparently fruitless chase, it turned out that it had not been for naught: B for Brighid Company's soldiers had come down from the north and swept up a band of thirty guerrillas, completing the terms of the exercise.
I took the bus back to Cork, where I'd get on the ferry to return home. My seatmate, as it turned out, was Karel Syrovy, a Czech veteran of the Afghanistan Field Force who'd been invited to observe the exercises, as I had done. When we finally parted ways in Cherbourg, Karel helped me gain a new understanding into the Irish Army. "For the Irish nation and their army, Afghanistan is very important," he said. "For decades they fought against British occupation. Now they are almost completely independent, with only a few threads left to tie them to Britain. In four hundred years they have either fought for their freedom, or at Britain's command: but in Afghanistan they fought beneath their own tricolor to bring a lasting peace to another land. They still quietly worry a bit about British invasion, but now they are heavily-committed to the League of Nations. It's a strange sort of half-war they're preparing to fight - idealistic, gritty, and quixotic. I think that suits the Irish well."
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Wednesday, April 17th 2024, 1:26am
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