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#OnThisDay 1921 The IRA attacked a four truck convoy of Auxiliaries in the Rathcoole Ambush, Cork. Captain Dan Vaughan placed six mines on the road and covered in dust. He spaced them out at roughly the same distance the Crossley Tender trucks would travel in. The IRA had been waiting for the convoy all day, allowing it to pass through the ambush site only to attack them on their return journey. The Auxiliaries had been using the same road for several days to collect supplies in Milltown and not changing their routes as they should have been.

When the Auxies returned at 19:30, only three of the mines detonated but disabled three of the four trucks. A firefight ensued between the IRA and the 29 occupants of the vehicles. The Cork men managed to kill two Auxies & injure many more. This can be seen in the compensation claims made. Over £10,000 was paid out. £4,500 to the two families of the deceased and over £6,000 more in other claims to those wounded in the fight.

Despite inflicting this damage, the IRA soon had to withdraw due to a dwindling supply of ammunition.

#OnThisDay 1921 The Thompson submachine gun (Tommy Gun) was first used in combat by the IRA. Dublin ASU led by Oscar Traynor fired on a train carrying soldiers of the Royal West Kent Regiment. One report says that one of the guns jammed and the shooter had only been trained on it that morning couldn’t get it operational again. Only 63 rounds were fired from a 100 round drum magazine. However, the rest of the ASU had other weapons such as pistols and some grenades were also thrown.
Three British soldiers were reported to have been injured but no deaths recorded.

The Tommy Gun was famous, being used by everyone from the American Postal Service (Marines guarded mail trains), Gangsters like Al Capone, they were used in the Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago in the 1920s to the US Army in the Second World War.

#OnThisDay 1917 Éamon de Valera, prisoner #95 was released from Pentonville Prison, London. De Valera, the senior surviving leader of the Easter Rising avoided execution & had his sentence commuted to life. Dev liked to tell the story that his life was spared because of his American birth (this story he told to the visiting US president JFK at a State reception in 1963), but it was most likely that his court martial was scheduled too late after the public and popular pressure became too much on the British Gov who called a stop to the executions.

De Valera was handed a telegram saying that he was going to stand as the Sinn Fein candidate in the East Clare by-election. This was the start of a political career that would extend over fifty years.

Most of the notable leaders (Dr Kathleen Lynn, Thomas Ashe and others) of the Rising had been released from various British prisons, congregating in Pentonville before returning back to Ireland. Before they left the prison, the Irish prayed over Roger Casement’s grave. Casement’s final wish was that he be buried back home in Antrim. He would be reinterred into Glasnevin Cemetery in 1965.

#OnThisDay 1864 Colonel Patrick Kelly, from Galway, the commander of the Irish Brigade was shot dead as he led his men at the Battle of Petersburg. ‘Raising his unsheathed sword in front of the brigade he urged the men forward. A Confederate bullet struck him in the forehead killing him instantly.’ His men revered him and it was said that upon his death;

“strong old veteran soldiers wept like children & wrung their hands in frenzy”.

Kelly had previously led the Irish Brigade in other battles, most famously at the Battle of Gettysburg. It was recommended by General Meade and by President Lincoln that he receive his Brigadier General star but it never happened. By 1864, the Irish Brigade was a shadow of its former self. Captain Wall wrote

“But I grieve to tell you, that it is a Brigade no longer, and, as was said to me, yesterday, by one of our trustiest ‘Faugh-a-Ballaugh’s’ – a gallant little officer who first served under and fought by the side of the heroic Captain Clooney – ‘without the protection of Providence, the remnant of our heroic little Brigade will lose what it has won; for all that now remains of it is the recollection of its services and suffering.”

#OnThisDay 1921 A FBI & police raid on a ship called the “East Side”, with an all Irish crew, in Hoboken, New Jersey discovered 495 Thompson submachine-guns destined for the IRA. This raid was authorised by future Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover.
“Nearly all of the 500 guns were smuggled aboard a collier ship, the East Side as ‘engine room supplies’, their serial numbers obliterated to prevent trace. The ship, stuck in Hoboken, New Jersey as part of a worker’s strike, was supplied with a fresh Irish crew to get it underway. However, on June 15 1921, it was raided and the guns seized. There had been no tip-off from British authorities, no elaborate Bureau investigation; the ship’s captain had simply become suspicious of the activity on the collier.”  “More importantly however, the export of arms to Ireland from the US wasn’t actually illegal!”

The guns were impounded and most but not all found their way to Ireland in 1925, much too late to be used in the War of Independence and indeed the Civil War. Some of them found their way, through nefarious means, to the mafias of Chicago where the Thompson got the nickname, “The Chicago Typewriter’.