For many years The Kerryman Ltd.,
through its newspapers
and
in book form, has been telling the story of the struggle, made by
men and women of our time, which brought into
being our modern
The book we now present to the public continues
this policy of our
House. We had,
however, an additional object in view when publishing it at this time.
Since the end of the last war there has been a
spate of books upon
various aspects
of the fighting and about the exploits of those who -
individually or in combative units
- distinguished
themselves in the
course of it. In
particular, much has been written about the actions
of those partisan or resistance groups who waged a
ceaseless fight
against enemy
occupying forces. It seemed to us that in the face of
this publicity for the actions of patriot forces
attempting to re-establish
the
independence of their country it was timely to give - in a cheap and handy form
- a record of the fight put up by men and women of
our own race against greater odds than any of those
groups had to face.
Those resistance
groups were lavishly supplied by powerful allies
with adequate quantities of the most modern arms and
equipment;
their attacks on the
enemy were supported and helped forward by
strategic bombing and diversionary actions; their
morale was sustained
by a
propaganda campaign which was almost world-wide in extent;
and, finally, they were fighting an enemy who was
new and strange to
their country
and who had to operate very much in the dark.
How very different was the task set before our
own fighters for
freedom! They
had to fight an enemy who had been entrenched in
the country for centuries, whose administration
covered the land, who
had
friends in high places and in low places. They had to face him
without the help of powerful allies, in the
teeth of a campaign of misrepresentation,
with arms which, for the most part, had to be taken
from him in hard fighting. And the enemy they fought
was the first
imperial power in the
world at the time. Only idealism and courage
on the part of the fighters and the steadfast support of
the people could
have carried
such an unequal struggle through to the end.
Let us not forget that struggle. That is the
message of this book.
In
its pages we have tried to present a representative picture of the
fight put up by the Army of the Republic and of
the campaign of terror so unflinchingly endured by the civilian, population.
Within the compass we had to prescribe for ourselves we could not, of course,
give
anything like an exhaustive account of the
fight for independence. Some
actions have
been omitted because they have already been well publicised, and we felt that others, less well known,
should take their place;
some other
actions, which we would like to have included we have had
to leave out because, for one reason or another, we
found ourselves unable to gather the necessary information. In all instances
the scene
of a fight was visited and
inspected and every effort was made to check and verify information - wherever
possible we endeavoured to get the
officer
in charge or a participant to tell the story of an engagement -
and we are confident that the matter appearing in
the book is as accurate as research
and hard work could make it.
This book does not purport to be a history of the
War of Independence, but it is
a portion of that history. We offer it to the public in
that light in the hope that, in its own small
way, it may help to keep
alive
in the breasts of our people a remembrance of one of the most
glorious periods in our history.