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Lots to Love About the Irish Barry Farber It doesn't have to be St. Patrick's Day to love the Irish. One line spoken during World War II made me an Irish fan for all time. It may have been the best line of World War II, in English, German, French, Italian, Japanese, or any other language involved. First of all, remember Hitler's grand plan for a necklace of allies he wanted in place before he launched his conquest of Europe and beyond. I recall with some shame America's pitiful attempts to portray Nazi Germany's annexation of Austria in 1938 as Hitler's rape of a helpless neighbor. We now know the overwhelming majority of the Austrian population was ecstatic about being welcomed into the Thousand-Year Reich! They were enthusiastic Nazis. To Austria's east was Hungary, still smarting from defeat in World War I and the shrinkage of its territory from empire dimension to a little middle-European jelly bean. Hungary fell in line with Nazi Germany as did Romania and Bulgaria stretching Hitler's eastern allies all the way to the Black Sea. (Yugoslavia was supposed to be part of that Nazi team, a taken-for-granted Berlin success that was amazingly dashed after one day when the 9-year-old children walked out of their Belgrade classrooms denouncing the pact with Germany and were promptly joined by the rest of the population! A previous column dealt with that incredible "Diaper Rebellion.") Hitler had his "east" where he wanted it.
The possibility of a German alliance with Ireland in the west is what set Hitler's fantasies aflame. Ireland is to the west of England, an unsinkable aircraft carrier and submarine base whose traditional enemy had been Great Britain and none other from the beginning of Irish history and Irish memory.
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Consider the catastrophic damage German submarines inflicted on ships carrying vital supplies from America across the Atlantic Ocean to England without Ireland as a Nazi base between England and America. How long could that lifeline from America to Britain have remained viable if Ireland had joined Germany?
Hitler was in position to promise Ireland great rewards if only it would join the Axis alliance. There was great optimism in Berlin that Ireland would be as excited by the possibilities of allance with Hitler as Germany was. These things don't always go according to aspirations, ambitions, plans or plots, however. The Irish attitude was, remarkably, "Look here, Mr. Hitler. We may have our quarrel with England but we don't like you! We don't like bullies. We don't like Nazis. And we're having no part of your wretched offer to make our dreams come true if only we agree to stab England literally in the back." And remember, this was Ireland's feeling long, long before the concentration camps and the Holocaust were ever imagined.
Ireland remained neutral. Ireland made no deal with Hitler. Instead, Irish boys by the tens of thousands hauled off and joined the British Army and the Royal Air Force. Got that picture? Instead of leaving their own country to avoid fighting in a war, those Irishmen went to another country to get into one.
It didn't happen very often but neither was it a rarity; on one particular night raid over Hamburg every single member of the crew of a British Lancaster bomber was Irish; nary a Brit aboard.
Ground fire and German fighter planes took a frightful toll that night. On this particular plane an outboard engine was knocked out and one on the other side was smoking. Part of the tail section was shot away by a burst of machinegun fire from attacking Messerschmidts, the fusilage was pierced by multiple bullets, gas fumes permeated the airplane and a wobble set in suggesting the plane's continuing airworthiness was measurable in minutes. None of that, however, prevented the Irish crew from debating Irish politics over the plane's intercom as they limped fitfully back toward base in England. The tail gunner was no fan of Irish President Eamon deValera. "He ain't got no business being president or anything else in Ireland," said the gunner. "He ain't ever Irish. His mother's an American and his father's a bloody Spaniard." "So what," answered the pilot. "He kept us out of the war, didn't he?"
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