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INTRODUCTION

The sound that delights the treasure hunter – the sudden bleeping of the metal detector, an audible indicator of having located a ‘hard’ object underground – was heard by a hopeful relic hunter seeking ‘bounty’ in a quarry in Haut-Mesnil, Normandy, in the early summer of 2005. Stirred into expectancy, the excitement that his quest might bear fruit was transformed and dissolved into something else completely as digging into the French soil he revealed the complete remains of a Canadian soldier. Three years later, in May 2008, after much work by the Department of Veteran Affairs, the body was identified as Ralph Tupper Ferns, who was born in Cahir, County Tipperary, on 18 June 1919.

Having grown up in Toronto, Ferns enlisted as a private in the Royal Regiment of Canada in 1941. In August 1944, he was among those having moved inland from the beaches, battling through the bocage countryside, the mixed woodland and pasture characteristic of parts of France, and then into the ‘Falaise Pocket’, where the German Army was being encircled by the Allies. He was reported missing in action on 14 August 1944 and his body never recovered, that was until sixty-one years later. It transpired that Ferns had perished during a ‘blue-on-blue’ friendly fire incident when RAF bombers mistakenly targeted the regiment’s positions during the Allied advance. Ralph Tupper Ferns was buried with full military honours at Bretteville-Sur-Laize Canadian War Cemetery on 14 November 2008.

Thousands of Irish soldiers, both Irish-born and members of the Irish diaspora, were among the British, US and Canadian units landing in France on D-Day and beyond to Berlin, until VE Day. They played a small but significant role in driving the German Army, first from France and then back across Europe to the German capital itself. The unearthing of the remains of Ralph Tupper Ferns, like the uncovering of other such individual Irish involvements, has taken decades to emerge. Their sacrifice, contribution and effort have had to be exhumed, as it were, from the corners of Irish history. Theirs was often a narrative not related, an involvement not cherished, a recognition neither commemorated nor celebrated. Yet their sacrifice, suffering and sorrow, the fear they felt and their exposure to danger and uncertainty, was all very real.

The role of the historian is to interpret the past and be as honest, objective and truthful as possible about it. To do so you must first empty your mind of assumptions and then brutally ask yourself: is your interpretation strictly valid or is it simply how you would like it to be? To counter the latter, it is useful to first think of the strongest possible case against your interpretation and then see how your argument stands up. And if it does, then go ahead.

The Second World War continues to cast its shadow over Europe and the world. Alert since boyhood to the scope of the Irish on D-Day 6 June 1944, but knowing anecdotally that involvement to be cumulatively greater than generally acknowledged, the presentation of such participation is long overdue. Irishmen were among the British and American airborne paratroopers and glider-borne infantry landings prior to H-Hour on D-Day; they were on the beaches from dawn among the first and subsequent day-long troop invasion waves; they were in the skies above in bombers and fighter aircraft; and standing off at sea on naval ships all along the Normandy coastline. They were also prominent among the planners and commanders of the greatest military operation in history, a combined operation of greater magnitude than had ever been attempted in the history of warfare.

The scale of the amphibious invasion was unprecedented. It was a task of enormous complexity and great difficulty, an immense undertaking, both stark in its magnitude and in the realisation that if they failed, faltered or otherwise came up short in Normandy – and war is unpredictable – then the war itself might drag on for years. The story of D-Day is enormous, and the Irish have a rightful place among its many chapters. For the first time, this book facilitates the telling of this important Irish involvement and places Irish participation on the front page, by populating the undertaking through an Irish ‘lens’. It builds on the prior work of Richard Doherty, Neil Richardson, Steve O’Connor, David Truesdale, James Durney and others, especially Yvonne McEwen, Professor Geoff Roberts, Tina Neylan, Kevin Myers, Damien Shields and more, who have lately gone a good way to revealing the involvement of Irish men and women in the Second World War.

It is only a matter of time, circumstance and chance – an accident of birth, the hand of fate – that might otherwise have seen any of us placed among those on board the landing craft heading for ‘Utah’, ‘Omaha’, ‘Gold’, ‘Juno’ or ‘Sword’ beaches, or by equal happenstance to be in the pillboxes and other fortified concrete emplacements with weapons ready, awaiting their arrival. This is the fascination of history and it takes only a little leap of imagination to live it. Its happenings must be respected and its participants interrogated, their motives analysed and their actions assessed, and lessons learned. But first we must become aware and understand such events so that we can view the ‘Irish’ involvement with a dispassionate, informed and proper perspective which rightly and more fully does honour to that participation and sacrifice.

Operation Overlord, the codename for the Allied invasion of Normandy, is a day that would forever be known as D-Day. The story of D-Day is also the story of ‘D-Day minus’ and ‘D-Day plus’, and although there is no one single specific ‘Irish narrative’ throughout, there are sufficiently strong individual Irish involvements to justify a claim of substantive Irish participation. While in no way purporting to cast a comprehensive insight into the topic, I hope the book provides a context and clarity in the presentation of ‘the D-Day Irish’ that further generations can claim ownership of, and a justified, meaningful pride. By the book’s end, I hope to have emptied the reader’s mind of the assumption that there was no noteworthy Irish involvement in D-Day, and instead to have planted the seed that the ever-emerging evidence suggests the contrary. And I would pose the question: given the history of the Irish soldier abroad over the centuries, being as honest, objective and truthful a possible, ought we really be surprised?

Today, with the broken-down remnants of what Hitler proudly called his Atlantic Wall, the coastline of northern France still displays the disfigurement of the Normandy invasion of seventy-five years earlier. The once formidable reinforced pillboxes, gun emplacements, coastal defence batteries, mortar, machine-gun and observation bunkers are now just a ruined reminder to future generations of the bloody and terrifying battle that occurred there in 1944. The guns which once wreaked such havoc and caused so much death are now silent, and the ranks of dead soldiers, tens of thousand in number, both invader and defender, lie in graveyards close to the once blood-soaked sands where they fell.

Although there were many Allied casualties, most of those who fought there survived, continuing to participate throughout the Normandy campaign. Once the breakout from the bocage terrain was eventually achieved, they advanced rapidly through the rest of France into Germany. Seventy-five years later, the number of D-Day participants still alive has dwindled dramatically. Many veterans have passed from living memory, and with them their personal first-hand reminiscences have gone forever. Some were recorded by audio, visual or written means; many – most – were not.

There is an ‘Irish’ dimension to D-Day, but difficulties were encountered researching it. Like many soldiers who survived the Second World War, Irish veterans in particular rarely spoke about it. Many Irish served under assumed names in non-Irish regiments, among them many of the 5,000 (4,983) Irish Defence Force ‘deserters’, who left a neutral Ireland and joined the British Army to fight Hitler’s tyrannical regime. In all it is believed that some 120,000 Irish fought with the British throughout the Second World War. There are soldiers with Irish names who died during the war, but were their families in England, America or Canada only recently there or resident for a couple of hundred years? Unlike during the First World War, the local papers in Ireland did not report on Irish casualties so it was difficult to know who the ‘Irish’ dead were and precisely where they were from. Many D-Day participants were not born in 1911, and so we are unable to verify who or where many were from by referring to census records. Finally, there is a lack of military service records available for that time.

But despite these challenges, the ‘D-Day Irish’ are no longer to be ignored or forgotten, nor is the role they played to remain undocumented or unwritten. Irish men and women of all ranks and none were involved in D-Day, and in each of the phases, facets and events of this epic story there was an Irish participation.