During the latter part of 2018 I spent an extended period of time back in County Down in Northern Ireland. Just before Christmas I visited Movilla Abbey in Newtownards to see the grave of the Special Air Services legend Colonel Robert Blair Mayne. He had died in a drink-driving car accident in his hometown on 14th December 1955 at the age of only 40 after military service in both the North African Desert War and the liberation of Nazi-occupied Western Europe.
Little remains of the famous abbey itself which was founded by St Finnian in 540 upon a site of pagan worship and was one of Ireland's most famous monasteries along with that located five miles away on the coast at Bangor. St Columba studied at this Movilla centre of learning and craftsmanship which was sacked by Danish Vikings in 823 and dissolved by Henry VIII in 1542.
While there I noticed a small mossy memorial on the ground in front of Mayne's gravestone underscoring that In heaven is rest and endless peace. Such a blessed landscape of celestial calm of course tends to sit in somewhat stark juxtaposition to the wild life of high adventure the great Irish warrior lived professionally and personally over his four explosive decades on earth. Yet the seven redemptive words remain thought-provoking, poetic and elegiac in their own beautifully understated spiritual right.
The 1987 Rogue Warrior of the SAS biography of Blair Mayne by Martin Dillon and the former Unionist Party politician Roy Bradford includes details of his presence at Lower Saxony's Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945 when British and Canadian forces arrived. The Seventies and Eighties Ulster Unionist leader James Molyneaux from Crumlin in County Antrim was also in attendance as a Royal Air Force officer and returned to the site in later years for a BBC feature - he remembered a priest conducting a Catholic mass in the corner of the camp with a fellow clergyman dead at his feet. In turn an old North Belfast schoolfriend who lives in Australia told me how his father was also involved in the early days of the KZ liberation because of his knowledge of German and was so deeply traumatised upon what he witnessed that he cried for several days.
The three infantry regiments of Ulster in the British Army (the Royal Irish Fusiliers, Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers and Royal Ulster Rifles) were engaged in the conflict between 1939-45 along with the Irish Guards. The six great regiments of Southern Ireland had been dissolved upon the partition of the island in 1921 and the constitution of the Irish Free State the following year - the Royal Irish Regiment, Royal Dublin Fusiliers, Leinster Regiment, Connaught Rangers, Royal Munster Fusiliers and the South Irish Horse. However a great many Irishmen from Eire served in the war against the Axis powers - over 70,000 across several estimates. In turn approximately 52,000 servicemen originated from Northern Ireland and the total Irish dead in the conflict may have reached over 9,000.
The Royal Irish Fusiliers historically had recruited across Counties Armagh, Cavan and Monaghan; the Royal Inniskillings in Fermanagh, Tyrone and Donegal and the Royal Irish Rifles throughout Antrim, Down and Louth - thus including four counties that would fall within the Southern jurisdiction after the island's divison. As noted in an earlier post, two of the most globally famous photographs from the Great War are of 36th Ulster Division soldiers - some men from the Royal Irish Rifles tensely reposed together within their trench confines and then a literally electrifying image of a grouping of Royal Irish Fusiliers going over the top on a raid. The RIR were renamed as the Royal Ulster Rifles on 1st January 1921.
During the Second World War itself, the First Battalion of the Royal Irish Fusiliers and the Second Battalion of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers were part of the initial British Expeditionary Force of 1940 and evacuated from Dunkirk. Both battalions - along with the Sixth Inniskillings and the Second Battalion London Irish Rifles - were to fight as part of the 38th (Irish) Brigade of the Sixth Armoured Division and later 78th Battleaxe Division. Battle was engaged by these divisions in Tunisia, Sicily and then on the Italian mainland including at Monte Cassino. The Second Battalion of the Fusiliers served on Malta between 1940 and 1943 while the First Battalion of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers fought in Burma throughout World War Two.
75 years ago today the Royal Ulster Rifles were the only British Army regiment on D-Day 6th June 1944 to have forces in the airspace over Normandy - First Battalion glider infantry units within the 6th Airborne Division - and on the landing beaches too during Overlord. The Second Battalion had been evacuated from Dunkirk four years previously and both the First and the Second fought through the Battle of Normandy - the latter amongst the first Allied troops to enter Caen. The First Battalion were later to play a small role in combating the Winter 1944 German offensive in the Ardennes before final airborne missions crossing the Rhine in March 1945. Second Battalion fought during Operation Bremen which opened on April 13th and was accomplished with the fall of that great Hanseatic city on the 27th April. An Eighth Battalion of the Royal Ulster Rifles would also see action in North Africa and Italy.
The Irish Guards meanwhile fought in the Norway campaign and through the fall of France in 1940, the end of the Desert War in Tunisia and then in Italy including the Anzio landings. Following D-Day the Second and Third Battalions were engaged as part of the Guards Armoured Division in France, Belgium, Holland and Germany - thus incorporating Operations Goodwood and Market Garden at Arnhem. The division liberated Brussels on 4th September 1944 alongside Free Belgian forces. The Siegfried Line was breached in early 1945 and the division then pushed on to Bremen on the River Weser too. During the Second World War the fourth Northern Ireland Prime Minister Terence O'Neill, Grand Duke Jean of Luxembourg, writer Patrick Leigh-Fermor and early James Bond film director Terence Young served in Ireland's Foot Guards regiment.
The outstanding and comprehensive Wartime NI website recently located the three Northern Ireland infantry regiments across both theatres of war on VE Day 1945. The First Battalion of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers were at Dehra Dun in India. The Second Battalion was at Udine in Italy while the First Battalion Royal Irish Fusiliers were also in that country at Cividale. Within Germany, the First Battalion Royal Ulster Rifles were positioned at Niendorf near Hamburg and the Second at Bremen and Delmenshorst in Lower Saxony.
As for the fighting men of Ulster - Protestant and Catholic alike - who helped liberate the future capital of the European Union and one of the two Nazi "Capitals of German Shipping", there would be no rest and endless peace in the long run. As unkind, unsympathetic and unfair a future lay ahead as had done so for all the Irish soldiers of the Great War who returned beforehand.
The blood-soaked quarter-century provincewide conflict which erupted in the summer of 1969 in Northern Ireland would not just bring down the Stormont polity - and indeed terminate the gathering dilution of religious animosities in a riptide of desperate historical payback - but also sow toxic seeds into the very bedrock of Irish society through the outplay of that terror war into self-perpetuating legacy conflicts.
Today of course the Protestant Unionists are regularly vilified and ridiculed across swathes of modern cosmopolitan British and Irish society for the electoral underpinnings one particular Northern Ireland party provided for the sustenance of Conservative rule in the United Kingdom as the European project radically deconstructed in 2016. Conversely there is little public discourse on the raging bull elephant of historical revisionism which dynamised that same Ulster party's electoral reach in the first place. Indeed subtle complexities of Irish history are rarely diffused with accuracy through modern multimedia platforms gauged to momentary 21st Century hand-held attention spans. Starting with the galling comparison between the Fifties and Sixties NILP vote (garnered in the main from the Protestant worker) with the criminal failure of British Labour to organise in Ulster, they all spin dizzily into time and space as day follows idiot day.
As the United Kingdom's natural party of government now faces up to a similar electoral collapse as affected Northern Ireland's default party of government during its fifty year existence as a separate state, let us hope that the local and European election results of May 2019 will cast new morning light over Ulster's landscape of beauty and soulfulness, ghosts and curses. Anything now to move on from the soul-destroying political morass and economic stagnation engendered by the shotgun marriage of two fundamentally myopic, painfully parochial and clearly played-out sectarian agendas.
Regimental museums for the Royal Ulster Rifles, Royal Irish Fusiliers and the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers can be visited in central Belfast, The Mall in Armagh and Enniskillen Castle respectively. In London there is a Guards museum in Wellington Barracks near St James Park and one commemorating the London Irish Rifles at Connaught House in Camberwell south of the Thames. Located geographically between the two in Victoria Street there is also a chapel in the Catholic Westminster Cathedral dedicated to the regimental soldiers of Leinster, Connaught and Munster.
