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“In all my life and in all the fictional tales I have read, I have never experienced such orgies of murder, arson and looting as I have witnessed for the past 16 days with RIC auxiliaries. It is a puzzling description and is supposed that we must be officers and gentlemen. There are quite a few decent guys and also several ruffians. “
This excerpt from an intercepted letter written by Charles Schultze, one of the roughly 1,500 former British Army officers who joined the RIC Auxiliary Division, gives a remarkable insight into the makeup of what was effectively an introduced paramilitary strike force. when the RIC could not cope with the scale of the guerrilla war raging in Ireland and Munster in particular.
The Auxiliary Division had been created to meet fire with fire. Many of its members had served in World War I and returned to a Britain that had a very depleted army and offered a bleak future for career soldiers. Some of them, despite decorations and medals, were destitute.
The Auxiliary Division offered the recruits a pay of 1 pound per day. RIC men were paid half that rate. It was an attractive option, for some the only one they had. The problem, however, was that they were soldiers and not policemen. In the case of the Helpers, the roles were merged, with disastrous results. His role had little to do with conventional police.
Poor discipline and the ethics of treating nearly everyone they encountered as enemies became his hallmark.
An RIC divisional assistant commander, Lt. Col. Gerald Smyth, made the following chilling remarks to his men in Kerry:
“You can make mistakes and they can shoot innocent people, but that cannot be avoided and you will surely have the right parties at some point. The more you shoot, the more I will like you, and I assure you that no police officer will get in trouble for shooting anybody. man ‘”.
A month later, Smyth was relaxing at the Cork Conservative Club when an IRA squad shot him dead in his chair.
By the late 1920s, the RIC had lost its police capacity. After the sustained campaign of IRA attacks, it had withdrawn from the countryside to larger towns and cities and to more fortified barracks. But the attacks continued at a predictable pace.
The IRA’s attacks on the RIC, the Black and Tans (the first group sent from Britain to supplement the RIC) and the Auxiliary Division were followed by retaliatory attacks. Balbriggan in Co Dublin and Fermoy in Cork, for example, had been fired. In Balbriggan, houses, factories and bars were destroyed after the death of two policemen.
By winter, raids and shootings were almost a nightly occurrence in many parts of the country, but especially in Cork, where the IRA had a formidably organized and efficient structure.
After the death of Terence MacSwiney, the second Republican mayor of Cork, on a hunger strike, the IRA assassinated 14 RIC agents.
Their attacks on the police and the army did not go unanswered, and the tit-for-tat killings continued.
Perhaps not surprisingly, another ambush, this time on an auxiliary patrol at Dillon’s Cross in Cork City on the night of December 11, 1920, was a turning point that would lead to the destruction of the commercial heart of the city. Homes caught fire for the first time in the Dillon’s Cross area, but that wasn’t the end of the arson that night.
“The burning and sacking of Cork immediately followed the ambush of our men. It is quite natural for the rest of the company to become enraged. The houses near the ambush were burned down and from there the various parties set out on their mission of destruction. “Many who witnessed similar scenes in France and Flanders say that nothing they experienced was comparable to the punishment meted out in Cork,” Schulze also wrote.
The auxiliaries descended on the city, looted shops and then set them on fire. Wine and spirits, jewelry, and clothing were brought by cart, often from stores traditionally considered Unionist and from those that came out of Union Jacks.
As the night progressed, there was more looting of wine and liquor stores and drunkenness was common.
Any semblance of discipline that might have previously existed in the ranks of Auxiliary K Company evaporated well and truly that night.
When the originally equipped fire brigade arrived, with their horse-drawn butchers, they cut off their hoses and fired at them. Three firefighters were injured. As the night wore on, there was more looting of wine and Alfred Hutson, then 70, and his men from the Cork fire brigade had little hope of trying to contain the fires with their horse-drawn carts.
Whether looting or arson was the primary target remains questionable, but by the next day five acres of Cork City’s commercial center had been destroyed. So had Republican-owned City Hall on the other side of Lee and the city’s only free library, paid for by Scottish philanthropist Andrew Carnegie.
Thousands of jobs were instantly lost and damage estimated at around € 60 million in current value. Surprisingly, no one died directly in the fires, despite the fact that many apprentices and store personnel lived above the burned premises.
The city was devastated and its population disconcerted. A new kind of war had come to their streets.
Initially, the Cork Corporation took responsibility for the compensation of home and business owners, although the British government later agreed to pay.
Some businesses reopened shortly after the fires, establishing temporary shacks to preserve the boundaries of their properties. Roche’s Stores’s William Roche held an immediate auction before acquiring an adjoining property to realize his dream of a bigger and grander store than the one he lost.
A subsequent military investigation into the fire was suppressed. However, an investigation by the Labor Party and the unions blamed the RIC and others.
Company K of the Auxiliary Division was disbanded and the members were redeployed. Within weeks of the Cork burning, some members of that company were active again in West Cork, where the chaos continued.
In the late 1920s, after the Law of Restoration of Order and martial law went into effect, the violence increased even further and so did the brutality on both sides.
In the period from 1917 to 1921, the War of Independence claimed more than 2,000 lives. Half of the dead were in Munster.
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