Tom Barry (1) (1897–1980)

Commandant General Tom Barry was the commander of the West Cork Flying Column of the I.R.A. during the days of the Irish guerilla war aimed at expelling the British from Ireland. Guerilla Days in Ireland is Barry's memoir of that campaign and his role in it, written and published 25 years after the events described. Barry describes in interesting detail the ways that the decidedly outgunned (even when they had enough guns to go around, they rarely had enough bullets) and outmanned IRA forces show more carried on an effective enough campaign to eventually force the British government to offer truce terms in 1921. Minute by minute accounts of individual ambushes and attempted ambushes (night-long vigils frequently went for naught when British patrols did not turn up where they were expected) of British forces. While particularly critical of the brutal tactics employed by the various British forces the I.R.A. was up against, Barry is frank about the counter-measures, often equally harsh, that his own soldiers resorted to. "They said I was ruthless, daring, savage, blood thirsty, even heartless," Barry writes. "The clergy called me and my comrades murderers; but the British were met with their own weapons. They had gone in the mire to destroy us and our nation and down after them we had to go."

Obviously, this is a one-sided account. However, as an on-the-spot telling of tragic and bloody times, I found this memoir fascinating. I read it, in fact, on the recommendation of a bookseller in Cork City. My wife and I were on vacation there last year. While in one of the many fine bookstores in that town, I asked a salesman which histories of the years from the Easter Rebellion of 1916 through the Irish Civil War I should read. He recommended I start with Guerilla Days in Ireland, as I now finally have, and follow that up with Charles Townshend's two volumes, Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion and The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence. show less