Letter from Frederick H. Boland to Seán Nunan (Dublin)
(Secret)

So far as my recollection goes, there is so far not much in the way of actual mis-statement in Professor Williams’ articles in the ‘Irish Press’ about our neutrality in the last war. The interpretations he puts on events are, of course, another kettle of fish; they are matters not of fact but of opinion. Williams’ account is very generalised and seems to be based mainly on American and German documentary sources. Of course, a great many things happened in the period which never found their way into documents at all. Where Professor Williams goes wrong, it is usually a question of false emphasis rather than of actual mis-statement, the reason being his 100 per cent reliance on the documentary sources available to him to the exclusion of everything else.

Subject to the foregoing, the following comments occur to me:-

1. Williams fails to give adequate weight to the extremely virulent press campaign waged against us in Britain and in the United States from early in 1940 onwards. Much of this was an attempt to appeal to Irish public opinion over the head of the Government, and this enhanced enormously the importance of our press censorship as one of the main defences of our neutrality. It also greatly increased our suspicions of British intentions. People nowadays have forgotten that even normally moderate papers like the ‘Economist’ called on the British Government to invade Ireland and seize the ports by force! The censorship was one of the principal bones of contention with the Allies all through the war.
2. In my view, also, he is wrong to ignore so completely the evolution which our own public opinion underwent as the war progressed. Up to May, 1940, a lot of people – even official people – were sceptical about the neutrality policy and thought we would be eventually in the war. After the fall of France and Italy’s entry, people came round much more to the view that our neutrality was the right policy and should be defended at all costs. Many people who were anti-German were not anti-Italian.
3. In my view, Williams understates the extent of the economic ‘squeeze’ put on us by the British after the US presidential election in November, 1940 and the subsequent public exchanges between the Taoiseach and Mr. Churchill. If I remember correctly, the tea ration had to be cut from 2 oz. to 1/4 oz., or even 1/8 oz., overnight. Our coal supplies were cut to something like 12,000 or 15,000 tons of bad coal a week. Williams suggests that the economic pressure was ‘neither sustained nor severe’. In my view, the British pushed it as far as they thought safe to do so without disrupting our economy. It is worth recalling here that when the Taoiseach stated in his broadcast at the end of 1940 that we were ‘blockaded by both sides’, he was strongly attacked for making a statement unfair and uncomplimentary to Britain. The fact is that he was stating the exact truth and warning the country of a very real danger. The point is worth emphasising because, in my opinion, one of the mistakes which we were lucky to be able to correct in time, was the assumption which I think we were inclined to make at the beginning of the war, that we could operate a policy of neutrality and at the same time rely on arrangements with British government departments for essential supplies. Incidentally, Williams says that Irish Shipping Ltd. was set up in 1942. I thought it was set up earlier than that.²
4. The account in the ‘Irish Press’ of the 8th July of Germany’s offer of arms in 1940 does not quite correspond to my recollection. My recollection is that Hempel came in and made a definite offer to run in a boatload of arms from Spain, the arms being British equipment and ammunition captured in France prior to the Dunkirk evacuation. If my memory is not at fault, the offer was turned down in much more emphatic terms than Williams suggests in his article. No doubt, Hempel toned down the reply somewhat in his telegram to Berlin. Incidentally, just about the time Hempel made this offer, the British Office told us very confidentially that they had an intelligence report from their Military Attaché at Helsinki to the effect that the Germans were considering sending a large shipload of arms from Spain to Ireland. The British said they were telling us of this report because they assumed that the arms were intended for the IRA. Remembering the contacts between Admiral Canaris³ and the Allies, it is an interesting speculation where the British Military Attaché in Helsinki got his information!
5. Williams is undoubtedly right when he suggests that the British deliberately kept the Americans in the dark as regards the relations between the Irish and British security services and the information available to the British in consequence of them. Not only that, but we had plenty of evidence at the time that the British deliberately took advantage of the Americans’ ignorance to ginger them up into putting pressure on us about things which for one reason or another, the British didn’t want to push themselves. Even Maffey lent himself to this game, encouraging David Gray to go for us in connection with matters about which – as Maffey well knew – David Gray was completely wrong.
6. In his article on the 30th June, Williams suggests that we made some concession to the British in respect of operational flights from Lough Swilly.⁴ If I am not mistaken, he is wrong about this. The concession we made was given in respect of flying boats operating from Lough Erne. We allowed them to use a channel out over Donegal Bay to save them the trouble of making the flight north-about to avoid our territory. The Germans soon found out about the arrangement but didn’t make any great issue of it. The concession would not have been of much value in respect of Lough Swilly and for obvious reasons any concession to the British in respect of one of the Treaty ports would have been very ticklish!
7. In his article of the 30th June, Williams suggests that when he found the IRA pretty useless, Goertz⁵ tried to move from contacts of an unofficial and illegal nature to contacts on the official level. This ignores an important and interesting intermediate step. Goertz’s first reaction when he found out what the IRA was like was to try to get back to Germany by boat. We had concrete evidence that he was trying to buy a seaworthy craft first in Wicklow and later in Kerry, and he subsequently confirmed this himself.
8. I don’t remember Hempel advising us to try to make closer contacts with pro-German elements in the United States as Williams suggests in his article of the 2nd July. It is not the sort of advice Hempel was apt to give, because he knew that the Taoiseach had an intimate knowledge of American affairs and, as he often stated, he himself had none. In the same article – although this is something you know far more about than I do – I wonder whether Williams doesn’t exaggerate when he says the Taoiseach came to rely more and more upon elements in America which were opposed to Roosevelt.⁶ Up to the time of Pearl Harbour our efforts in the United States were mainly concentrated on the American League for the Defence of Irish Neutrality – which Williams does not even mention – and as you know yourself, good Democrats like Jim Meade,⁷ John McCormack,⁸ Joe Mahoney⁹ and Murray of Montana¹⁰ were our main stand-byes all through the period.
9. In his article of the 8th July, Williams says that Russell¹¹ was drowned by accident on his way to Ireland and that ‘as the Germans preferred Russell to Ryan’,¹² the proposed landing was deferred. Mrs. Clissmann told me that Frank Ryan had personally assured her that Russell had died on the journey as the result of perforating an ulcer, and that the reason why he (Ryan) had not landed was that Sean Russell was ‘secretive’ and had not given him the names of the contacts.
10. Curiously enough, Williams doesn’t mention one of the sharpest crises we had with the Germans during the whole course of the war. This was about the 18th December, 1940, when Hempel told us that four additional members had been added to his staff and they proposed to arrive at Rineanna Airport by plane from Germany on the night of the 22nd.¹³ He was instructed to demand with the utmost insistence that facilities for the landing of the plane at Rineanna should be given and he was to indicate that the German Government would regard a refusal in a most serious light. The request was refused by the Taoiseach in an interview with Hempel and as we suspected, the German threat turned out to be a bluff. Hempel told me long afterwards that a few days later, he received a personal message from Weizsaecker,¹⁴ the Head of the German Foreign Office, which indicated that Weizsaecker was personally not sorry that the request had been turned down. It was apparently an instance of the Abwehr trying to push a scheme against the opposition of the German Foreign Office.

I will read the remaining articles in the series and send you any further comments which may occur to me.