Britain's Irish American Front in the Second World War
An AIDA letterhead from the files of the Special Operations Executive
The complexity of the Irish-American response to World War Two can be demonstrated with two names, Joe Kennedy and Bill Donovan.
As US ambassador to London in 1940, Joseph Kennedy Sr. was sceptical of Britain's ability to defeat Germany. His isolationism is recalled particularly perhaps among those suspicious of American influence on the Northern Ireland peace process.
Yet it should not be forgotten that in the crucial months before Pearl Harbour, Britain's closest ally in the US, with the possible exception of President Roosevelt himself, was another Irish-American, Bill Donovan. The UK's North American intelligence arm, British Security Co-ordination (BSC), enthusiastically supported Donovan's appointment as head of the Office of Strategic Services for this reason.
BSC did have concerns about wider Irish-American opinion, however, which became one of the targets for its extensive network of front operations.
After Churchill asked for American help in obtaining access to Irish naval bases in late 1940, a petition in support of the idea was circulated among Irish-Americans. Prominent signatories included William Agar, James Byrne and Christopher Emmet (ref 1, p.148).
Emmet was a descendant of the United Irishman Robert Addis Emmet, brother of Robert Emmet. He was also a close contact of BSC official Sandy Griffith, and was a founder of the Gaullist group France Forever, which BSC regarded as one of its controlled fronts (ref 2, p.90). Byrne was the chancellor of New York University and the uncle of another BSC officer, Ivar Bryce (ref 2, p.40). Agar was an employee of Fight For Freedom, an interventionist group which worked closely with the British (ref 2, p.28).
After the failure of the petition drive, a new front organisation was formed, the American Irish Defence Association (AIDA), in which Emmet, Byrne and Agar would all be prominent (ref 2, pp.38-39). Its headquarters were on West 40th St, New York, the address of Sandy Griffith’s company, Market Analysts Inc.
Griffith told his BSC superiors that 'we are subsidizing the movement at the rate of $1,500 per month,' and that 'I have reserved effective control of the organisation' (ref 2, p.39).
Mahl describes the AIDA as BSC's 'smallest and least successful front' (ref 2, p.38). Yet, as he also observes, the volume of its reports in the archives of the Special Operations Executive suggest a substantial operation.
At the National Archives last week, I picked up one of these files, HS 8/57, listed with the description ‘American Irish Defence Association: Second report. With 15 newspaper cuttings and 2 publications 'Neutrality News' and 'Case for American-Irish Unity.’
The cuttings certainly underline the difficulty of the AIDA’s task. Hostile reports from papers like the Irish World and the Gaelic-American demonstrate that the British hand in the organisation was not as well hidden as BSC might have liked.
The AIDA’s second report, compiled a month before Pearl Harbour in November 1941, identifies its chief antagonist as the American Friends of Irish Neutrality, headed by Michael McGlynn. The report states that ‘we believe him to be an agent of the Irish legation, through whom they carry on propaganda in this country,’ adding somewhat ironically ‘we are checking to find if McGlynn and his organisation are registered as foreign agents’ (ref 3, p.49).
These external problems were compounded by tactical differences in AIDA itself. The organisation originally had two principal aims: ‘(1) to enable Irish-Americans to prove their loyalty as American citizens; (2) to secure tangible aid - food, arms, commerce, etc, - for Eire in return for which the U.S. would be granted the right to establish air and naval bases’ (ref 3, p.71). If the first of these was straightforward, the second was to prove contentious even internally.
Most of the persons who originally organised the New York Committee were strongly in favour of this full program. This was and is true of the Chicago group as well. The problem over bases developed after some of our charter members - and our Administration friends - discovered Rossa F. Downing and promoted him for the National Chairmanship (ref 3, p.71).
Downing took the chair on the condition that the bases demand was dropped, at least until American entry into the war. To that extent, Britain’s Irish-American front itself came under the influence of mainstream Irish-American opinion.
One area where AIDA found views among Irish-Americans more promising was in the labour movement, itself the target of several other BSC fronts.
Michael McGlynn has told one of our interviewers that his organisation, advocating Irish neutrality, has found its work with labor (Irish-American) much more difficult since the attack on Russia because the I.R.A. members in such unions as the NMU and TWU proved to be more Communist than Irish (ref 3, p.47).
The Irish War of Independence was less than two decades in the past and many of its veterans would have emigrated to the United States in the meantime. An AIDA report on the New York America First Committee accuses ‘an old I.R.A. man Charlie O’Hara’ of organising its ‘goon squads’ (ref 3, p.23).
However, as McGlynn’s comment indicates, Irish republicans in the US were not uniformly anti-interventionist, though the terms of their potential support for intervention raised their own issues for the British.
In a letter to the Washington chapter of the AIDA, the Irish-American communist Shaemus O’Sheel wrote:
I’d like to help Ireland get into the anti-fascist front, not by way of Britain but via USA; but I could never participate in any movement which did not include offering the Irish people some betterment of their partitioned and far from independent status. We offer restoration and independence to Czechs, French, Norse, Danes, Dutch etc. - in heaven’s name, what is the basis for offering the Irish alone nothing? (ref 3, pp.34-35).
While O’Sheel was a fairly singular figure, any movement for Irish intervention that gained traction would likely have sparked similar calls to address the partition issue. In the event, the AIDA failed to influence Irish policy. It’s impact on Irish-American support for US policy is more open to question, although even here it may have functioned more as a counterweight to the America First Committee than an effective force in its own right.
Along with the other BSC fronts however, it provided a precedent for later exercises in covert propaganda, as exemplified by Christopher Emmet’s participation in several organisations linked to the CIA state-private networks of the Cold War, such as the American Friends of Vietnam (ref 2, p.91).
References
Ref 1: Mark Lincoln Chadwin, The Hawks of World War II, University of North Caroline Press, 1968.
Ref 2: Thomas E. Mahl, Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States 1939-44, Brassey's,1999.
Ref 3: UK National Archives, HS 8/57, American Irish Defence Association: Second report. With 15 newspaper cuttings and 2 publications 'Neutrality News' and 'Case for American-Irish Unity'.