The recent auctioning of a copy of part of the German invasion plan of Ireland has caused me to think about how such an invasion may have panned out. I do not claim any great strategic understanding and my tactical work ended at platoon level. Seemingly the Germans decided not to land in the area marked “a” on this map so they would not have to deal with the 21 Bn and decided instead to land between Wexford and Dungarvan, not realising that 21 Bn might be on annual camp in the region. The major difficulty facing 21 Bn would have been how to cope with all the prisoners!
The Daily Mail published a piece on the plan which has led to every regional newspaper that has a local picture postcard included in the documents to run an article on how Hitler planned to invade Kerry, Donegal, Limerick, The Arann Islands etc. I have taken some information from a very good Wikipedia article on “Operation Green” as well as a commentary by Diarmuid Ferriter I found on independent.ie. There is also an excellent document available under creative commons licence from Tom Clonan of DIT. I will discus these documents and supply links to them after the break.
Implementation and objectives of the plan
The jumping off point for Green was to be the French ports of Lorient, Saint-Nazaire, and Nantes with an initial force of 3,900 troops. The objective was to be an eighty-five mile stretch of the southern coast of Ireland between Wexford and Dungarvan. Having captured the ports there, German units were expected to fight their way up to thirty miles inland to establish a beach-head running from Gorey on the Wexford-Dublin road across the 2,610 feet height of Mount Leinster above Borris, County Carlow, through Thomastown in County Kilkenny, to Clonmel in County Tipperary. This beachhead was to be achieved in 24 hours.
My drawing on Google Maps. Thin red line is beachead objective, thicker red lines – phase 2 advance.
Phase 2 was to push northwards through Laois-Offaly (good tank country?) to the Curragh. Probing attacks from Clonmel towards Cork would engage Southern Command. It was expected that German troops would be in the outskirts of Dublin within 48 hours of the initial landing.
The first landings were to include Artillery and commando squadrons and a motorized infantry battalion. A bridge building battalion was also to be landed along with three anti-aircraft companies and several ‘raiding patrols’- to probe Irish Army defenses. Reserves from the German 61st, 72nd, and 290th Divisions were to take up occupation duties in the Gorey-Dungarven bridgehead once it had been established. Tom Clonan’s article goes into the background of the 4th and 7th Army Corps who were earmarked for “Green” and it seems they were pretty aggressive proponents of Bltizkrieg.
The overall details for the plan appear to be sketchy from this point onwards, and mostly would have depended on the success or failure of Operation Sea Lion in Britain.
Operation Sea Lion, the Invasion of Britain was war-gamed in 1974 and failed, but this assumed, as was the real case, that the Luftwaffe had NOT attained air superiority. It would be interesting to war-game Operation Green. For instance would the Germans have pushed up the N11 from Gorey to Dublin? Maybe pincer movement on Dublin with a left flank also driving towards the Curragh to destroy Irish forces based there? Or westwards to Limerick and it’s Atlantic port for the U-boats?
Defence
It would seem that secret co-operative plans for the defence of Ireland from German aggression had been taking place since May 1940 (Plan “W”). The main thrust was that the Irish Army would try to delay the Germans long enough to allow British forces to cross from Northern Ireland into Donegal to secure Lough Swilly and other anchorages for the Royal Navy and for a further expeditionary force to land at Dublin. Poet Patrick Kavanagh rather harshly put it, Ireland would be hard-pressed “to protect a field of potatoes from an invasion of crows”.
What If: Hitler’s Invasion of Ireland
Tom Clonan, Dublin Institute of Technology
Operation Green
Seventy years ago this summer, Hitler’s general staff drew up detailed plans to invade Ireland. In June of 1940, Germany’s 1st Panzer Division had just driven the British Expeditionary Force into the sea at Dunkirk. Churchill labeled Britain’s rout and the evacuation of approximately 330,000 British and allied troops a ‘miracle of deliverance’. The Nazis intoxicated with their victory in France considered themselves unstoppable and were determined to press their advance into Britain and Ireland. Germany’s invasion plans for Britain were codenamed ‘Operation Sealion’. Their invasion plans for Ireland were codenamed ‘Unternehmen Grun’ or ‘Operation Green’.
Like Operation Sealion, Operation Green was never executed. The Nazis failed to achieve air superiority over the English Channel that summer. By the autumn of 1940 the ‘Battle of Britain’ had been won by the RAF and Hitler postponed his British and Irish invasion plans. Some military historians also believe that the plans for Operation Green, drawn up in minute detail, may have been a feint – part of a wider Wermacht deception plan to divert British resources away from Germany’s invasion of southern England. However, had the RAF been overwhelmed by the Luftwaffe that summer – Operation Green gives a sobering insight into what fate neutral Ireland would have suffered at the hands of the Nazis.
Operation Green was conceived under the scrutiny of Field Marshal Fedor von Bock. Bock had a fearsome reputation as an aggressive campaign officer – well versed in the concept of Blitzkrieg. Bock had been commander of Germany’s Army Group North during the invasion of Poland in 1939 and Army Group B during the invasion of France in May of 1940. Nicknamed ‘Der Sterber’ or ‘Death-Wish’ by his fellow officers, von Bock was ultimately given responsibility for Germany’s planned assault on Moscow – ‘Operation Typhoon’ – during Germany’s subsequent invasion of Russia.
In the summer of 1940 – before Hitler had turned his attentions towards Russia – Von Bock was preoccupied with invasion plans for neutral Ireland and assigned responsibility for it to the German 4th and 7th Army Corps, Army Group B under the command of Gerneral leutnant Leonhard Kaupitsch. If these German Army units in particular had reached Ireland’s shores in 1940, the consequences for Ireland would have been tragic and would have profoundly altered the course of history for the Irish Republic and its citizens.
The German 4th Army Corps in particular had a brutal reputation in battle and inflicted many civilian casualties as they secured the ‘Polish Corridor’ to Warsaw during the invasion of Poland in 1939. Later in 1941, the 4th Army Corps – equipped with its own motorized infantry and Panzer Divisions – would play a crucial role during ‘Operation Barbarossa’, Hitler’s invasion of Russia. The 4th Army Corps – earmarked for service in Ireland in the summer of 1940 – conducted brutal operations the following summer as they took Minsk and Smolensk on their advance to Moscow in June and July 1941. Significantly – as amply demonstrated in the invasions of Poland, France and Russia – the 4th and 7th Army Corps were noted for their aggressive, offensive ethos and for their rapid rate of advance as armoured formations engaged in Blitzkrieg tactics. Had the 4th and 7th been deployed to Ireland in 1940, their tactics would have been brutal, their advance rapid – up to 100km per day.
The Nazis allocated 50,000 German troops for the invasion of Ireland. An initial force of around 4000 crack troops – including engineers, motorized infantry, commando and Panzer units – was to depart France from the ports of Lorient, Saint-Nazaire and Nantes in the initial phase of the invasion. According to Operation Green, their destination was the Waterford and Wexford coastline where beach-heads were to be established between Dungarvan and Wexford town. Once beachheads and air-strips had been established – negligible armed resistance was expected – waves of Dornier and Stuka bomber aircraft would have commenced assaults on military and communications targets throughout the Republic and Northern Ireland.
In the second phase of the invasion – to commence within 24 hours of the initial landings – ground troops of the 4th and 7th Army Corps would have commenced rapid probing attacks on the Irish Army based in Cork and Clonmel initially, followed by a thrust through Laois-Offaly towards the Curragh Camp area. Their rate of advance would have been rapid, with some units reaching the outskirts of Dublin within 48 hours of the German landings. Dublin was identified by the Nazis as one of six regional administrative centres for the ‘British Isles’ (sic) – had the occupation taken place. Dublin’s Gauleiter was to have sweeping executive powers and would have had instructions to dismantle – and if necessary, liquidate – any of Ireland’s remaining indigenous political apparatus, her intellectual leadership and any non-Aryan social institutions such as the trade union movement or the GAA for example. Irish Jews would also have been murdered en masse.
Hitler’s generals were aware that their operations in Ireland would have to be ‘self-sustaining’ given that their troops would be operating far from the continental mainland in Europe’s most western region. Admiral Raeder described the German force in Ireland as one which of necessity ‘would be left to its own devices’ in order to execute its mission of conquest. Therefore, Operation Green envisaged that German troops here would administer martial law and curfews – commandeering shelter, food, fuel and water from the civilian population. The plans even contained an annex with the names and addresses of all garage and petrol station owners throughout Munster and the Midlands. This policy of predation on the civilian population would have inevitably led the Germans into direct conflict with the civilian population as they confiscated livestock, horses, food, fuel and forced labour to support their advance northwards. As was the case in continental Europe, Irish civilians would have borne the brunt of the casualties in an invasion of Ireland, either in punitive actions by the Germans, or as ‘collateral damage’ to German military operations and Britain’s inevitable counterattack.
In strictly military terms the Irish Army would have been spectacularly ill-equipped to challenge a German invasion in the summer of 1940. In 1939, there were approximately 7,600 regulars in the Irish Army with a further 11,000 volunteers and reserves. By May 1940, this number had actually dropped by 6,000 due to financial constraints. The Irish government’s recruitment campaign only began to bear fruit by the autumn of 1940. Had the Germans come ashore in the summer of 1940, they would have been met with an army with no experience of combined arms combat and capable only of company sized manoeuvres, involving a maximum of around 100 men. In addition, the Irish army was very poorly equipped at the time, possessing only a dozen or so serviceable armoured cars and tanks. In terms of small-arms, the Irish Army at the time did have plenty of Lee Enfield rifles – of World War 1 vintage – but had only 82 machine guns in total for the defence of the entire country. Many of the Irish units also moved on bicycles – referred to at the time as ‘peddling’ or ‘piddling Panzers’. Had they been engaged by the Wermacht, the Irish would have been slaughtered.
Ironically, the Germans were not the only foreign power making plans for the invasion of Ireland in the summer of 1940. In June of that year, General Montgomery drew up plans for the seizure of Cork and Cobh along with the remainder of the Treaty Ports. When Churchill became aware of Operation Green, the British military set out detailed military plans to counter-attack the Germans from Northern Ireland. This plan, codenamed ‘Plan W’ envisaged Irish Army units re-grouping in the border areas of Cavan-Monaghan and being reinforced by British troops moving south from the six counties. In the scenario envisaged within Plan W, the Irish and British Armies would have fought alongside one another to repel the German invasion. Had this happened, hundreds of thousands of Irish men, women and children would have died in the ensuing conflict?
Operation Green never took place and neutral Ireland survived the war almost entirely untouched by the Second World War. Our neutrality certainly played a role in protecting us from the horrors of the war. Most Irish people are willing to accept this. Far fewer are willing to accept the crucial role that the British, Polish and French pilots of the RAF played in protecting us from invasion during the summer of 1940. Were it not for their sacrifices, who knows what flag would now fly over Leinster House.
Dr. Tom Clonan is the Irish Times Security Analyst. He lectures in the School of Media, DIT.
Diarmaid Ferriter: Invade Eire … are you kidding, Mr Hitler?
THE revelation of a secret plan for a Nazi invasion of Ireland during the Second World War, which was up for auction in England yesterday, should come as no surprise.
The declaration of Irish neutrality at the outset of the war was a determined assertion of Irish sovereignty and the culmination of de Valera’s successful mission during the 1930s to win back the Irish ports of Lough Swilly, Bearehaven and Cobh, which Britain held under the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. But neutrality also involved walking various diplomatic tightropes, and possibilities abounded about the violation of neutrality from both Germany and Britain, especially in 1940.
The trade-off for the return of the ports, and thus denial of Britain’s access to naval facilities, was that Ireland was supposed to make sure it was not a threat to British security, which meant preventing third parties using Ireland as a means to attack Britain. This became a serious military and security preoccupation, for the simple reason that Ireland did not have the means to defend itself, despite the stirring rhetoric that the Irish would resist any invasion.
By June 1940 the situation in Europe had altered dramatically, once Hitler had decided to go on the rampage and Churchill had become British prime minister. The British dominions secretary, Malcolm Mac Donald, arrived in Dublin on June 17, 1940 talking up the possibility of a German invasion and offering Irish unity in return for the abandonment of neutrality, an offer rejected by de Valera.
Despite the plans for a German invasion, in some ways a British invasion was more likely, particularly in view of Churchill’s refusal to accept the legitimacy of Irish neutrality; he referred dismissively to the “so-called neutrality of so-called Eire”. It was certainly deemed a live possibility at the time.
And what of the Nazi plans in relation to Ireland?
After the fall of France in June 1940 southern Irish ports were vulnerable to German aerial attack; Hitler’s forces could have pushed through Ireland with ease, in a country with no modern defensive aircraft or naval service. As the poet Patrick Kavanagh rather harshly put it, Ireland would be hard-pressed “to protect a field of potatoes from an invasion of crows”, never mind the military might of the Nazis. The consequences would have been catastrophic.
Thankfully, none of this came to pass. Britain and Ireland became close in terms of security and military intelligence, with arrangements put in place so that in the case of a German attack there would be an agreed Anglo-Irish response which would involve an Irish attempt to hold the Nazis at bay for a few days before the British arrived to back them up. But another issue was whether Britain would have intervened first and therefore become the violators of neutrality.
BUT the bottom line in 1940, and up to the end of the war, was the Irish need to prevent invasion and preserve neutrality, and Irish diplomats went to considerable lengths to do that, often by conveying to London in the words of Joseph Walshe, secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Ireland’s “position of benevolent neutrality”. Pragmatism was necessary given the, at times, very real threat of a German invasion, as underlined in the documents under the hammer yesterday, and as de Valera had recognised himself, absolute neutrality was a luxury Ireland could not afford, but there was to be continuing tension in the Anglo-Irish relationship throughout the war.
Dublin believed the immediate threat of a German invasion had declined by July 1940. Although no invasion occurred, it was not to be totally spared Nazi aggression. Two German aircraft dropped bombs in Wexford in August 1940, and there were sporadic attacks for the next nine months, culminating in the bombing of North Strand in Dublin in May 1941 that left 34 people dead.
Original article here http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/diarmaid-ferriter-invade-eire-are-you-kidding-mr-hitler-3242759.html
Diarmaid Ferriter is Professor of Modern Irish History in UCD
Wikipedia on Operation Green (Ireland)
A fuller version of this Wikipedia article is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Green_(Ireland)
Implementation of Green was the responsibility of General der Flieger Leonhard Kaupisch, commander of the German Fourth and Seventh Army Corps, Army Group B. The originator of the idea for Green is thought to be newly promoted Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, Army Group B. Bock had operational command for the western flank under Operation Sea Lion. Once collated, thirty-two copies of Green were distributed as “Top Secret” on 8 August 1940 to the German High Command; a number of copies survived World War II.
Hitler’s views
Despite the propaganda, Green was an actual military plan that was given real consideration. Although Hitler had postponed Sea Lion on 17 September 1940, he took up a personal interest again on 3 December 1940 after hearing of radio reports alluding to a British invasion of Ireland. Hitler then ordered Raeder’s naval staff to investigate the feasibility of occupying Ireland to pre-empt any British attempt. However, at the time Hitler seemed already convinced that any landing should be by invitation only:
“..a landing in Ireland can be attempted only if Ireland requests help. For the present our envoy [assumed to be Dr. Eduard Hempel of the German Legation] must ascertain whether De Valera desires support and whether he wishes to have his military equipment supplemented by captured British war material (guns and ammunition), which could be sent to him in independent ships. Ireland is important to the Commander in Chief, Air, [Göring] as his base for attacks on the north-west ports of Britain, although weather conditions must be investigated. The occupation of Ireland might lead to the end of the war.”
Military details of Plan Green
Green is often confused with a plan authored by the Irish Republican Army and sent to German Intelligence (Abwehr) in August 1940.[14] The IRA authored plan was later titled “Plan Kathleen” by the Abwehr and “Operation Artus” by the German Foreign Ministry.[15] Green and Plan Kathleen should not be confused. There are no details in Green on the politics of Ireland, only military capacity estimates. Green makes no mention of the IRA in these estimates, and it is fair to say that even if the planners had wanted to include detail and estimates of the IRA they would not have gained much accurate information from the Abwehr.
Green within Sea Lion framework
Leaving aside the possible propaganda and tactical aims of Green, the military planning aspects of Green are best considered as complementing the aims of Sea Lion. In pursuit of Sea Lion, Plan Green was thought to meet a number of military objectives:
- to draw off British Army troops stationed in Northern Ireland who might otherwise be sent to aid the defence of Britain,
- deny Ireland as a staging point/refuge to British troops,
- provide a staging post to Luftwaffe forces in subduing northern Britain.
In the event of Sea Lion’s success, fulfillment of Green was expected to be the next step, (insofar as operational plans stay static during wartime). No plans for the imposition of government in Ireland, or ’rounding up of dissidents’ were included as part of Green however. Dublin was mentioned as one of six German administrative headquarters between the two islands that were to be established on the successful completion of Sea Lion.
Implementation and objectives of the plan
The jumping off point for Green was to be the French ports of Lorient, Saint-Nazaire, and Nantes with an initial force of 3,900 troops. The objective was to be an eighty-five mile stretch of the southern coast of Ireland between Wexford and Dungarvan. Having captured the ports there, German units were expected to fight their way up to thirty miles inland to establish a beach-head running from Gorey on the Wexford-Dublin road across the 2,610 feet height of Mount Leinster above Borris, County Carlow, through Thomastown in County Kilkenny, to Clonmel in County Tipperary.
The first landings were to include Artillery and commando squadrons and a motorized infantry battalion. A bridge building battalion was also to be landed along with three anti-aircraft companies and several ‘raiding patrols’- to probe Irish Army defenses. Reserves from the German 61st, 72nd, and 290th Divisions were to take up occupation duties in the Gorey-Dungarven bridgehead once it had been established. The overall details for the plan appear to be sketchy from this point onwards, and mostly would have depended on the success or failure of Operation Sea Lion in Britain.
Plan “W”
More details here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_W
Daily Mail Article with more pictures
Warning! May contain very right wing opinions!