tric man. I told him that I thought it would be better for all mankind if we won the war first.
“Then just before the battle of Le Havre he refused to fight because he believed that an awful lot of French people were liable to get shot."
Somehow the story got out. Some days later the Daily Mirror published the story under the lurid headline: Earl’s Son Refuses to Fight.
William was sent to jail in England and there he wrote his first play. "He was enormously sympathetic to his fellow IRA prisoners!"
Monty in trouble
Lord Killanin assured me that the following story was true, although my mouth dropped to hear how he misdirected Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, etc, etc, one of the key planners of the whole D-Day invasion.
“I was swanning around on my new BSA motorbike when I heard a siren and looked behind and saw two jeeps approach trying to make their way through the streams of soldiers, trucks, and transport vechicles. Montgomery was sitting grim-faced in the back seat of one of them.
“The jeeps stopped beside me. Monty’s ADC leaned out and asked the way to the 2nd Army HQ.
“Well, of course, I hadn’t a clue. But I had to let on that I knew my way around….
I looked behind me, I looked to the left, I looked to the right, and seeing an area with a lot of activity in the distance, I pointed in that direction and said confidently: ‘There. Over there Sir!’
The jeeps sped off. It was only later when I looked at my maps that I realised that I had sent Monty straight into the German lines.
“I laid low for a few days.”
Lord Michael Killanin MBE, Joined the British army at the beginning of the war. He was a journalist with the Sunday Dispatch and the Daily Mail. He was in Downing Street when prime minister Chamberlain returned from Germany, September 30 1938, waving an agreement over his head which he had negotiated with Hitler granting ‘peace in our time.’
“I didn’t believe it”, he said. “I was a liberal sort of man. I detested the Nazis and joined up for purely political reasons.”
Lord Killanin rose to the rank of major, and after the war continued his life as an author, film producer and journalist. He served as president of the International Olympic Committee 1972 – 1980.
We were like tourists – Fascinated by what we saw…
Paddy Devlin’s sensation as his glider swept down towards French soil just after dawn on D-Day, was one of total silence.
“ Paratroopers called us the ‘Suicide Transport’ but I never had any sense of danger in a glider. There was just silence. We heard no battle sounds as we approached our target near the Caen area."
A total of 6,000 men was landed by glider that day. Paddy’s glider was one of 190 landing inland from the beaches to secure bridges and road junctions against a German advance.
As Paddy’s platoon (28 men ) left their glider, instead of taking up defensive positions they just stared at the amazing spectacle of gliders falling from the sky, groups of infantry marching off, the sound of battle in the distance.
“Unlike the poor infantry scrambling ashore on the beaches we were all dry, and smartly dressed. We were like tourists, fascinated by all we saw.”
They did, however, soon march away towards Ranville. They passed one paratrooper who remarked, "You don’t know how lucky you were to survive that landing...if you saw all the shit the Germans fired at you."
No one on Paddy’s glider was aware they were under attack.
After the paratrooper, the next man they met was a very drunk Frenchman. He was waving a bottle of wine over his head shouting, ‘DeValera Irlandaise!’
Their target was a small town, St Honorine about 10 kilometres from Ouistreham.
They dug in and waited events. Suddenly overhead they saw a German bomber being chased by two Spitfires. The bomber crashed and burst into a ball of flame. “We all cheered,” said Paddy, “We had no idea how the invasion was going, but when I saw that plane crash I knew we were winning.”
A Galway visitor
That is how Paddy Devlin spent his first day in France. The next day everything went wrong. Paddy’s platoon got separate