PKeating

Thanks to our Belgian comrade Roel, I was able to add this to my Resistance collection: an attributed WW2 CdG with Palm, in this case the single "L" pattern, awarded to a member of the Service de renseignement et d'action (SRA). The Order of Leopold also bears a single "L" Palm. The designation SRA covered a range of Belgian Resistance units and sub-units involved in intelligence-gathering, whose members were either inserted into Belgium by British organisations like the SOE or recruited in Belgium itself. The 1939-1945 War Medal bears the “Service of Information” device on its riband. The recipient was from Kontich, just south of Antwerp. He also spent time in a concentration camp after deportation, as well as receiving the French Resistance Medal. He survived the war, as the bronze non-portable medal shows.

Triple post. What's with the forum software?

It is important to note that even if a foreign award does not appear in the London Gazette, it does not mean that the award was not made to a soldier. The posting in the LG of a foreign award to to an officer just means that he has been officially accorded the right by HM King or Queen to wear said award on his medal bar when parading in N° 1s and N° 2s. The French Army may well have sent or tried to sent Nick's father a Citation document, recording the award of the CdG and its grade. A relative of mine, who was commissioned in the 1914-1918 War, received a regimental citation entitling him to the CdG with Bronze Star at his address in Dublin in 1920, after leaving the British Army, and this award never appeared in the London Gazette. But he put the CdG on his medal bar with his Pip, Squeak and Wilfred. A Croix de Guerre was eventually presented to him at the French Embassy in Dublin in 1948. He wasn't asked to pay for it, which is more than can be said for the occasion of the nomination of WW1 survivors to the Légion d'Honneur during President Chirac's reign in the 1990s. All of the old boys received bills for their medals, which were cancelled when the French media made a stink about it. Foreigners did not have to be serving with French forces to earn a French award. The Allies often made awards to the fighting men of other armies as part of their general policy of cooperation and comradeship, as the awards by the Russians to men of other armies fighting the Huns who never even saw Russian soil remind us. I think Chris Boonzaier, who knows a lot about the Battle of Verdun - and who showed me around some of the battlefield a couple of years back - makes a good point. I don't think Albert Charman fought with the French Army at Verdun. I would be interested in seeing the newspaper clippings to which Nick referred earlier, if they mention the Croix de Guerre to his father. Perhaps Nick can ask someone to scan them and turn them into JPEG files of 100K of less so that he can post them here. Here's a translation and edit of your e-mail, Nick. You can send this to any French archival organisation. Prosper Keating

Double Post

Hallo Nick! "PM me" means "send me a private message through the website's Private Message system". If you click on my name next to my post, you should end up on my profile page, where you will see a button enabling you to send me a message. This way, you can send me your e-mail address, if you wish. Here's an extract from a screenshot of the London Gazette page from 1941, mentioning your father. I see that I misread the entry. The RQMS reference concerns the man below your father. I also misread the sub-heading. Your father seems to have been listed under Pioneer Corps. Sorry about that! Copy and paste this link into your internet browser and it should take you to the LG page in question: http://www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/35278/supplements/5408 You'll probably be able to find entries for his decorations, using the Advanced Search facility: http://www.london-gazette.co.uk/search Regarding your letter to France, unfortunately, very few people in France speak foreign languages, especially in the civil service. So your letter was probably incomprehensible to them. I will translate it into French for you when I have a moment today. I will also see about finding a phone number as, in my experience, the French tend to be very kind and helpful regarding requests like this, especially when one gives them a ring, which I will happily do on your behalf. PK

He wasn't 202297 Arthur Ernest Charman, was he? The London Gazette supplement of 19.9.1941 has CSM A E Charman MC DCM MM, acting RQMS, from The Middlesex Regiment serving with The Royal Army Pay Corps, commissioned 2nd Lt as of 25.8.1941. I am afraid you might spend a lot of time trying to find his CdG in French archives but if you have supporting newspaper clippings from the time, they may help. I would be happy to give your contact a call here in France to see what can be done. PM me if you like. The Verdun connection is interesting. Did he ever tell you what he was doing on secondment to the French Army? PK

It seems OK to me. The date of Schmidt's EK2 document would suggest Warsaw to some people but it was probably awarded for earlier combat action around the time he earned the Wound Badge in Black, when SS-Jäger-Btl 500 was under the administrative command of 292. Infanterie-Division, which was part of Armee Gruppe Mitte from June 1941 to January 1945. A quick bit of research shows the divisional commander from 30.6.1944 to 1.9.1944 to have been Generalmajor Johannes Gittner. I am not familiar with Gittner's signature but the signature on the document must be his. Gittner was awarded the DKiG in September 1944. SS-Jäger-Btl 500 was engaged in security and anti-partisan operations behind the German lines during its time with 292. ID. The first Wound Badge in Black bears the Feldpost Nr stamp of the SS-Truppenübungsplatze Moorlager, which was the unit depot of SS-Jäger-Btl 500, and is signed by SS-Oberführer Viktor Knapp, who was in command there at the time. Schmidt's second Wound Badge in Black is an interesting anomaly. It is not the first time I have seen double awards in German document groups. I would say that this award was certainly for Warsaw, where SS-Jäger-Btl 500 also fought. The hospital to which he was evacuated was in the East Prussian town of Braunsberg, now known in Polish as Braniewo. SS-Jäger-Btl 500 was disbanded in October 1944, the survivors being sent to SS-Panzergrenadier-Ausbildungs und Ersatz Btl 35, which was the depot of the SS-Jagdverbände and SS-Fallschirmjäger-Btl 500 and 600. As I said, at first glance, it all looks OK and Schmidt seems to have survived the war as the little holes in the documents suggest. PK

Not an error on my part. The Free State and the Republic comprised thirty-two counties. Northern Ireland, popularly called Ulster, comprises six counties if one thinks just of the British province. One could therefore say that a quarter of Ulster is free while two thirds remain under the British flag. However, it is hard to find people in the Irish Republic these days who would support reunification and this is probably more acute now that the Celtic Tiger has proved to be a paper tiger. Most people, particularly Irish Conservatives, just don't want the social baggage and the social security bill. A cousin of mine close to high places in Dublin told me that this was one of the viewpoints that informed the revision of the Irish Constitution in order to drop the claim on Ulster or, at least, the two thirds of it remaining under British control. It all boils down to money in the end. London wanted to keep Ulster because of the money generated there. Now that Britain would like to offload Ulster, having run down its industrial base as in the rest of the UK, Dublin doesn't want it anymore because of the money it would cost. Everyone remembers what happened to the German economy when after reunification. Regarding Gerard Kenny's posts, I would agree that we agree on many points and am pleased that we have done so in a civil manner because when Irishmen disagree, it can get nasty. I regret any standoffishness in tone and look forward to continuing discourse. Very interesting comments from Kenny there. Food for thought. As Mervyn and others have remarked, this has become one of the better threads I recall seeing on GMIC in a long time. Because - say it quietly! - we can discuss things 'political' after all, without all of us getting bent out of shape. Jeff makes some good points about decent Specials and Tans. There were plenty of decent men in their ranks. There were also plenty of decent men in the ranks of the IRA. I wouldn't dismiss them out of hand as "scoot and shoot" guerillas. If they sometimes employed hit-and-run tactics, it was because some of the commanders had studied Apache Indian tactics. But they were brave, nonetheless. They were up against trained soldiers from the best army in the World, many of whom were hardened combat veterans. When you command a flying column of thirty-five or forty men, are you going to commit them to a pitched battle or are you going to hit the enemy as hard as you can and leg it? To suggest that these tactics indicate cowardice is surely akin to suggesting that the LRDG or the SAS were cowards for not standing still to be shot. Pax vobiscum. PK

I was couching my statements in the context of the period of truce from July through the autumn of 1921 to December, when the Irish delegation went to London to sign the treaty. That's pretty much what I said. Very arguable. The film starring Liam Neeson should be taken with large doses of salt. Dev was quite the consummate politician. He was also a survivor. Dev famously said in 1966 that "It is my considered opinion that in the fullness of time, history will record the greatness of Michael Collins, and it shall be forever recorded at my expense". However, it was already recorded very much at Dev's expense, for many people thought Dev had gone as far as setting Collins up for the ambush at Beal na Blath in which he was killed. Many people view it as an assassination rather than an ambush. For his own part, Collins knew who and what he was dealing with. After Dev's attempt to send Collins to the United States in 1921 to rally support for Ireland's entry into The League of Nations, Collins remarked: 'That long whore won't get rid of me as easy as that." I think you might find that he was known to the British Establishment. It is true that the British security and intelligence forces did not know what he looked like or, to be more precise, did not have any photographs of him and could not get anyone to describe him accurately but they did get close to him in 1920, hence "Bloody Sunday", when Collins' Dublin Brigade hit squads took out The Cairo Gang, as the intelligence unit of British Army and Royal Irish Constabulary officers was known. Collins himself believed in hiding in full view, reasoning that if a man did not seem to be hiding, then nobody would look for him. However, Michael Collins was not, as far as I know, wanted by any Continental police forces. I think this is hyperbole based on the fact that he achieved "Most Wanted" status in Great Britain and Ireland and, hence, throughout the British Empire. You presumably found this on http://generalmichaelcollins.com/The_Path_to_Freedom/Foreword.html. I applaud their aims, as something of a Collins partisan myself, but passages like "The most wanted man in Europe, he smiled his way through a hundred hold-ups never wearing a disguise, never missing an appointment, never certain where he would spend the night" are rather fanciful and rather unfortunately worded, making Collins seem more like Jesse James than an Irish freedom fighter. They need an editor. Collins certainly wrote as much in a letter that survives to this day. He was certainly unhappy about being photographed by photo-reporters when he went to London, given that there was only a truce in force and that the war could certainly resume, a prospect that did not unduly worry him because he was familiar with the British people and their mindset and felt that there was no popular will for further war in Ireland. Collins did not even take Lloyd George's threats on 5.12.1921 very seriously. But other delegates did. He also knew that he had been set up by Dev to take the fall for the compromise. Dev would have known that the British weren't going to roll over and let Ireland have complete independence, along with British industrial assets in the North. However, his principal motivation for the lack of desire to go to London was more rooted in a feeling that he was not a politician. He felt that he would be more effective as a kind of implicit threat in the background, a bogeyman to be unleashed again upon the British should they prove intransigent in negotiations. And yet, he could have been a politician, despite the general view of him as a warrior who would have been ill-suited to peacetime leadership. He had passed the British Civil Service exams, after all, and his brief tenure as Finance Minister was successful. In addition, to bring it back to Ulster and closer to the topic, Collins actually persuaded opposing factions of the IRA to work together in a campaign in Ulster after the schism over the ratification of the treaty in April 1921. The campaign was not successful as the RUC and Ulster Special Constabulary managed to round up several dozen IRA men, thus weakening the insurgents but it was a testament to Collins' persuasiveness. Sadly, after the campaign fizzled out in June, the Civil War began in earnest, with Dev playing both ends against the middle like the skilled politician he was. Collins was eliminated, leaving the road clear for Dev to assume control of the Irish Free State and, later on, the Irish Republic. PK

History is indeed full of examples of 'the people' getting fed up with their rulers, whether home-grown or imported, and once that happens, it is only a matter of time. In the case of The Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, many Irish people feel that Eamonn de Valera set Michael Collins up to take the heat for signing a compromise agreement that failed to accord full independence to Ireland. Lloyd George's threat was superfluous. However, any thoughts the Irish delegation may have been entertaining of rebelling against de Valera and refusing to sign the treaty were probably banished by the threat of a resumption of the war, this time against massively superior occupation forces. This would have been very unpopular in Ireland. Moreover, veterans of the 1916 Uprising remembered the hostility of the people of Dublin, many of whom had menfolk fighting on various fronts in the British armed forces. In fact, the British soldiers - many of whom were New Zealanders, I believe - guarding and escorting the prisoners to captivity found themselves protecting the rebels from the Dublin mob rather than preventing anyone from escaping. So the Irish rebels understood that the support of the people was tenuous at best and having a million British soldiers or hundreds of thousands of British soldiers all over Ireland like a rash was unlikely to endear the Republicans to the people they were liberating. The treaty was also very unpopular. The ratification barely made it through the Dáil (Irish Parliament) after the signing, as it was. So Collins was really between a rock and a hard place: damned if he did and damned if he didn't. My grandmother's papers included some postcards and a couple of letters from Big Mick, one of which made it clear that he knew he had been stitched up. PK

Just to clarify, my parents knew Fitzgibbon, not Hezlet. I imagine that he was Unionist to the core but his book was indeed fair. I must read it again. Did you grow up in Londonderry or did you meet Hezlet through his daughter? He must have been interesting. What a life! Coming back to Twomey, it would be interesting to know which of the Ard Fheis - pronounced 'Ard Esh', like the French region - or, rather, Ardfheiseanna (Plural) he attended, given the schism. Was it the regular Sinn Féin conference or the dissident Republican Sinn Féin conference? When you mention that the Cambridge connection helped in terms of access, were you representing Varsity. I know that the Republicans were prepared to talk to journalists if they felt it might be to their advantage but it's interesting that someone like Twomey gave you enough of an interview that you were later able to sell it to Simon Winchester. Winchester doesn't seem to have written a book on Northern Ireland. If you have a transcript of the interview, I'd be interested in reading it. I might even be able to place it for you, given that this is the twentieth anniversary of his death. PK

Vice-Admiral Sir Arthur Richard "Baldy" Hezlet, KBE, CB, DSO and Bar, DSC, Legion of Merit (United States) hailed from your neck of the woods, born in 1914 in Pretoria, although the family were from County Derry, where he went after retiring from the Royal Navy in 1964. I don't think he had anything to do with the B Specials as such. He was, amongst other things, head of The British Legion in Ulster. He died in 2007. He was a very interesting character. His 1972 book The B Specials: A History of the Ulster Special Constabulary was reprinted by The Mourne River Press (Belfast) in 1997. I read it many years ago and it is a must-have for anyone studying the subject. Secondhand copies sometimes appear on the market. There's nothing on Bookfinders right now but there are seven original hard cover editions from 1972 on Amazon from just under $15.00 and three of the 1997 paperback re-editions from just under $10.00. There is a more expensive alternative for over $30.00 here: http://imprimaturbooks.com.au/index.php/Irish/7938-The-B-Specials-A-History-of-the-Ulster-Special-Constabulary.html While Hezlet's history is honest, another historian worth reading for an alternative view and an insight into how many people, including well-educated "West Brits", is Constantine Fitzgibbon, an American of Irish-American extraction who served with the British Army and US Army intelligence in WW2. Some members with an interest in German history of the Third Reich era would doubtless know his work. He moved to Ireland in 1965 and was a friend of my parents. He published Red Hand: The Ulster Colony (Michael Joseph - ISBN 7181 0881 7) in 1971. His paragraphs about the B Specials, on pages 328 and 329, border on polemic but are valid, nonetheless, coming from such a distinguished historian and man of letters. The Ulster Special Constabulary was disbanded in 1970, following the Hunt Report. In the early stages of the recent Ulster Troubles, after the deployment of the British Army to protect Catholics from Protestant mobs, the B Specials were confined to patrolling Protestant districts and soon upset the locals when they tried to prevent them from attacking Catholics. Republican literature of the period fails, of course, to note this. Those former "Spahshuls" who failed to hand over their weapons to the new Ulster Defence Regiment were not pursued and where those who complied with the order are concerned, several historians point out that an unusually high number of firearms licences were issued by the RUC in the months following USC disbandment. The Orange Order also assented to the formation of a lodge called the Ulster Special Constabulary LOL N° 1970. LOL N° 1970's banner was flown in London as recently as 2007. Anyway, it is an interesting subject albeit an emotive one and it is very gratifying to see that it can be discussed here in an orderly manner without histrionics and bitterness, even though I am sure there are people with differing views involved. PK

PM sent.

For the benefit of readers unfamiliar with Irish history, Seamus Twomey was an IRA hardliner who served twice as Chief of Staff, his second term ending when he was arrested by Irish security forces in 1977 and given five years in gaol. Twomey was one of the founding members of the Provisional IRA following the schism in 1969. He remained on the GHQ roll until his death from heart trouble in 1989 and visited the United States for fund-raising and publicity purposes. He was fervently against the Peace Process and was a believer in sectarian violence, believing, pretty much, that the only good Protestant Unionist was a dead one. I am impressed that you managed to interview Seamus Twomey. Normally, a man of his status and stature and his minders would have insisted upon journalists of the calibre of, say, David McKittrick but I suppose the criteria were relaxed if they were on a publicity and fund-raising trip to the US. All the same, the fact that you later sold extracts from the interview to Simon Winchester and that both the CIA and MI5 were interested in the interview suggests something more substantial than a couple of hurried questions while the man was leaving the building after a speech. You obviously managed to get a 'sit-down' with him. Did you ever publish it in its entirety? The IRA were always short of men and materials. The Border Campaign of 1956-1962 was a case of tilting at windmills for a number of reasons, not least of which was the fact that they were also hampered by their memories of the ferocity with which the Dublin government had suppressed previous campaigns. By the late 1940s, the Irish Army's intelligence service reckoned there to be no more than a couple of hundred operational IRA members. When the so-called Third Border Campaign was launched in 1956, the Dublin government - with which the IRA had considered itself to be at war since the signing of the Treaty in 1921 - reintroduced internment and just to be seen talking to a a suspected IRA man was to risk years of imprisonment without trial. When you report old IRA men as saying or implying that "they called off the 1950s campaign because the IRA was afraid the Bs were going to be 'unleashed'", you are of course right but only to a point and it is important to view such statements in their proper context. Practical popular support for the IRA was much stronger in the Catholic areas of The Six Counties of "Ulster" than it was in the thirty-two counties comprising the Irish Republic. Many outsiders have fallen into the trap of mistaking drunken singing by maudlin Irishmen in pubs of "rebel songs" for support of the IRA but the IRA did not enjoy the kind of widespread popular support in the Irish Republic that is essential for any guerilla army or movement. One of the reasons for this was the risk of being marked down as an IRA sympathiser and thrown into prison. So when the threat arose of a deployment of the B Specials, a deployment that would have involved a lot of aggression against the general Catholic population of Ulster, the Army Council realised that they would very quickly lose the popular goodwill essential to operations in the North and, sensibly, they ended the Third Border Campaign in 1962. However, they remained "at war" with Dublin - regardless of the political hue of governing parties - until the fairly recent ceasefires. But we don't need to go into all of that here as we are confining ourselves to a discussion of the B Specials, whose fabulous truncheons Mervyn has shown us. The threat to turn the B Specials loose with a free hand in Ulster recalls Lloyd-George's threat to the Collins delegation in 1921, about sending a million men-under-arms into Ireland, the likely consequences being a massive reduction in popular support for the war of liberation against Britain. So, whatever anyone thinks of the B Specials, they were nothing if not an effective weapon against Republicanism. However, they also demonstrated the two-edged nature of turning forces like that loose on civil populations because they became a public relations liability once people around the world saw them at work on television. PK

These truncheons are beautiful. Broadly true, but I think it's truer to say that the IRA were kept more or less in line by the Dublin authorities and security forces in the 1950s. The B Specials were effective to a point but certainly became a liability as television made a wider audience more aware of their general conduct. It is worth pointing out or, at least, reminding people that the British public in general had a proud tradition of disapproval of the way in which Irish Catholic subjects of the Crown were sometimes treated, from the Great Famine to Lloyd-George's unleashing of the Black and Tans. And yet, for all that, not every Black and Tan nor every B Special behaved like a mindless thug. There were plenty who behaved very correctly indeed, no matter what Republican propaganda claimed. The truth is always somewhere between the poles. It is probably also worth clarifying the difference between the UVF as referred to in the news since 1969 and the original UVF. The former was - and still is - a terrorist organisation with links to all sorts of extreme rightwing groups around the world whereas the original UVF of which many older B Specials had been members was in fact the Ulster Volunteers, a Unionist militia established in 1912 to resist Home Rule for Ireland, a process interrupted by the outbreak of war in 1914. There were almost a quarter of a million male members and the UVF was armed in April 1914 by the Germans, who shipped 20,000 rifles and 3,000,000 rounds of ammunition over to the UVF, which was preparing to fight the British Army on the issue of Home Rule. The Irish Volunteers and, shortly afterwards, the Citizens' Army were formed in response to Protestant Loyalist and Unionist aggression. In any event, most of the UVF militiamen enlisted in the British Army, as did many Irishmen who wanted Home Rule. The 1916 Uprising is history, as is the Anglo-Irish War and the Irish Civil War that followed the political compromise that saw the industrial north retained by London, with the dirt-poor south becoming a Free State. Some of the former UVF men who came home from the Great War formed the cadre of the Ulster Special Constabulary, known as the B Specials. They saw action in the final stages of the Anglo-Irish War and were also deployed during the Irish Civil War. Some of them behaved very badly. Others behaved correctly. They were very hard times. PK

We crossed in the ether, Gordon! Thank you so much! Paddy

Thanks Rick. It is a tough call. The officer on the right is British, the father of a friend of mine, who spent some time in Bulgaria. It looks a bit like the mid-1960s, as the Brit was a young Indian Army Para officer in WW2, so maybe these are Russian officers, perhaps from the embassy, and maybe that's a 20th Anniversary Medal the man in the middle is wearing. I have asked for a mega-scan. P

Are the two officers Russian or Bulgarian?

Reverse view. It seems to be trying to be a Type 3 badge.

Another fake.

Seven years later, people are still referring to this book and making expensive mistakes in buying the "ghostbuster" fake of the Fallschirmschützenabzeichen (Heer) because they think it must be genuine, because it's in a very expensive reference guide. So, apart from the need to study your chosen subject or topic as closely as if you were trying to achieve a doctorate in it, you need to bear in mind that not everything you see in print is true, especially in the case of some of these reference guides. In the past, before the internet facilitated easier exchange of information between collectors, some dealers and fakers notoriously used reference guides to pass fakes and fantasy pieces into circulation, particularly in the world of Third Reich edged weapons. Post-internet, they still use print media but have subtly shifted their emphasis, aiming for the 'rehabilitation' of older high end fakes like the "ghostbuster" APB, the Army Balloon Badge, the so-called Otto Schickle Condor Legion Tank Badge and so on, as well as the old trick of passing fakes into circulation, like the infamous "Rounder" Knight's Cross, which was the topic of much debate following articles various websites declaring it to be a Meybauer product and offering various kinds of provenance, later discredited or unsubstantiated but not before a number of people had bought these crosses. However, as far as a certain kind of collector is concerned, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. Apart from the whole painful issue of bent dealers and Honest John dealers who, ahem, make the occasional mistake, many 'important' collectors have a lot of money invested in top end, expensive fakes like Army Balloon Observer Badges, Luftwaffe Panzer Badges, LW Sea Battle Badges, LW Close Combat Clasps, LW numbered Ground Combat Badges and, yes, Army Parachutist Badges. This is why they squeal like pigs in an abbatoir if anyone dares to "upset the apple cart" - thereby rendering significant parts of their important collections effectively valueless - by trying to get at the truth behind the myth. So many 'collectors' at all levels buy into myth rather than history.

Several dealers went to remarkable lengths to defend the "ghostbuster" fake, including magazine articles, articles on their websites, attempts to have the article by Eric Queen and myself deleted or edited and inclusion of the "ghostbuster" badge in expensive reference books, from which the attached extract is taken.

Just to recap: the "ghostbuster" fake side-by-side with an original. The ghostbuster was the most dangerous fake out there for a long time and remains dangerous. I still get several e-mails a year from prospective buyers asking if it is worth buying.

Gosh! That is a spectacular example. Were do you find these all these minters? P