Faber & Faber

That Neutral Island: Clair Wills

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Synopsis:

When the world descended into war in 1939, a few European countries were able to remain neutral. Of the neutral states, none was more controversial than Ireland.

The Irish premier Eamon de Valera stuck determinedly to Ireland’s right to remain outside a conflict in which it had no enemies, despite the arm-twisting of his British counterpart, Winston Churchill. Less than twenty years earlier, the two leaders had been on opposite sides in the bitter fight between the IRA and the British, and de Valera was convinced that it would tear his young country apart to join battle beside the old enemy. The British, for their part, blamed their mounting casualties in the Battle of the Atlantic on Ireland’s refusal to lend back its deep water ports for use against the U-Boat menace. Accusations of betrayal and hypocrisy poisoned the airwaves and the printed media; tales in the British press of German submarines refuelling on the western coast made Ireland seem a haven for Hitler’s friends.

This is the backdrop to Clair Wills’s ground-breaking book. Previous histories of Ireland in the war years have focused on high politics and diplomacy, but That Neutral Island mines deeper layers of experience. This was a time when the Irish press was so heavily censored that it could not properly report Allied victory at El Alamein or Stalingrad, least it violate neutral etiquette. Nazi spies landed, and were usually promptly arrested, but one roamed free for over a year. The world of Irish letters split along political lines: some writers went off to work for MI6, or for the BBC; others were interned for years for being members of an IRA committed to the defeat of Britain. One of them broadcast pro-fascist bulletins from Berlin. The country ground to a halt as oil, rubber, coal and wheat stopped being imported. And de Valera offered condolences on the death of Hitler, so strict was his sense of neutral decorum.

This is a book about being on the edge of total war. It does not neglect the political debate, but it is also about life in the small towns and the countryside, about patriotic pageants, radio shows, and local amateur dramatic societies. It is about what people read or watched at the cinema, about what they ate and drank. And it asks how ordinary people made moral sense of a struggle that was distant from them, and yet touched all their lives. Wills vividly evokes the strange state of detachment from the real world of the war in which most Irish citizens lived, but she also shows how thousands of Irish men and women left the country to fight in the British forces. She has made use of evidence neglected by previous historians – trade journals, advertisements, letters, small town papers and other sources. There is, for example, a moving chapter on the recovery of the bodies of sailors and airmen from around the Irish coast.

Wills also makes good use of the work of creative writers. Sean O’Faolain, Kate O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, Patrick Kavanagh, Flann O’Brien and Louis MacNeice are a few of the writers whose stories, letters and diaries reflect their inner struggle to understand what neutrality meant, and often their feelings of compromised entrapment about the situation they were in.

This is a history for a new generation of the strangest episode in post-independence Irish history.

Tags:

Categorised as:

Non-fiction

Sub-categories:

History

Places:

Ireland; Northern Ireland

Genres & Themes:

Conflict; Independence; Military; WWII

Awards & Prizes:

Hessell Tiltman Prize - Winner