Britain, Ireland and the Second World War
Ian S. Wood
Abstract
For Britain, the Second World War exists in popular memory as a time of heroic sacrifice, survival, and ultimate victory over Fascism. In the Irish state, the years 1939–1945 are still remembered simply as ‘the Emergency’. Éire was one of many small states that in 1939 chose not to stay out of the war, but one of the few able to maintain its non-belligerency as a policy. How much this owed to Britain's military resolve or to the political skills of Éamon de Valera is a key question that this book explores. It also examines the tensions Éire's policy created in its relations with Winston Church ... More
For Britain, the Second World War exists in popular memory as a time of heroic sacrifice, survival, and ultimate victory over Fascism. In the Irish state, the years 1939–1945 are still remembered simply as ‘the Emergency’. Éire was one of many small states that in 1939 chose not to stay out of the war, but one of the few able to maintain its non-belligerency as a policy. How much this owed to Britain's military resolve or to the political skills of Éamon de Valera is a key question that this book explores. It also examines the tensions Éire's policy created in its relations with Winston Churchill and with the United States, and furthermore explores propaganda, censorship, and Irish state security, and the degree to which it involves secret co-operation with Britain. Issues such as the IRA's relationship to Nazi Germany and ambivalent Irish attitudes to the Holocaust are also raised. Drawing upon both published and unpublished sources, the book illustrates the war's impact on people on both sides of the border, and shows how it failed to resolve sectarian problems in Northern Ireland while raising higher the barriers of misunderstanding between it and the Irish state.
Keywords:
Second World War,
non-belligerency,
Éamon de Valera,
propaganda,
censorship,
Irish state security,
secret co-operation,
IRA,
Nazi Germany,
Holocaust
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2010 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780748623273 |
| Published to Edinburgh Scholarship Online: March 2012 |
DOI:10.3366/edinburgh/9780748623273.001.0001 |
