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Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA


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Roger Casement’s Efforts to Gain German Military Aid Ends

During World War I, Roger Casement makes efforts to gain German military aid for the 1916 Easter Rising. His journey on the German submarine SM U-19 comes to an end on April 21, 1916.

In April 1916, Germany offers the Irish 20,000 Mosin–Nagant 1891 rifles, ten machine guns and accompanying ammunition, but no German officers. It is a fraction of the quantity of the arms Casement had hoped for, with no military expertise on offer. The weapons leave Germany bound for Ireland on a German cargo vessel named the SS Libau, disguised as a Norwegian vessel, Aud-Norge.

Casement confides his personal papers to Dr. Charles Curry, with whom he has stayed at Riederau on the Ammersee, before leaving Germany. He departs with Robert Monteith and Sergeant Daniel Beverley (Bailey) of the Irish Brigade in a submarine, initially the SM U-20, which develops engine trouble, and then the SM U-19, shortly after the Aud sails. According to Monteith, Casement believes the Germans are toying with him from the start and providing inadequate aid that will doom a rising to failure. He wants to reach Ireland before the shipment of arms and to convince Eoin MacNeill, who he believes is still in control, to cancel the rising.

Casement sends John McGoey, a recently arrived Irish American, through Denmark to Dublin, ostensibly to advise what military aid is coming from Germany and when, but with Casement’s orders “to get the Heads in Ireland to call off the rising and merely try to land the arms and distribute them.” McGoey does not reach Dublin, nor does his message. His fate is unknown until recently. Evidently abandoning the Irish Nationalist cause, he joins the Royal Navy in 1916, survives the war, and later returns to the United States, where he dies in an accident on a building site in 1925.

About 2:00 a.m. on the morning of April 21, 1916, three days before the rising begins, Robert Monteith, Daniel Bailey (calling himself Beverly), and Casement climb into a small boat for the trip to shore at Banna Strand in Tralee Bay, County Kerry. Their boat, now in the Imperial War Museum in London, capsizes before they reach shore.

Monteith helps an exhausted Casement to safety on shore. Casement is convinced that the Rising cannot be successful without a large number of German troops, and the best he has been able to obtain is one boatload of arms. Suffering from a recurrence of the malaria that had plagued him since his days in the Congo, and too weak to travel, Monteith and Bailey leave Casement at the ruins of McKenna’s Fort, an ancient ring fort in Rahoneen, Ardfert, now renamed Casement’s Fort, and head for Tralee.

About 1:30 p.m., Casement is discovered by two Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) officers. He nearly talks his way out of being arrested, but a 12-year-old boy at the scene points out a piece of paper Casement had tossed away as the police approach. On that paper is a German code list. He is arrested on charges of high treason, sabotage and espionage against the Crown. He manages to send word to Dublin about the inadequate German assistance.

The Kerry Brigade of the Irish Volunteers might have tried to rescue Casement over the next three days, but its leadership in Dublin holds that not a shot is to be fired in Ireland before the Easter Rising is in train and therefore orders the Brigade to “do nothing.” A subsequent internal inquiry attaches “no blame whatsoever” to the local Volunteers for failing to attempt a rescue. Casement is taken to Brixton Prison and placed under special observation for fear of an attempt of suicide as there is no staff at the Tower of London to guard suicidal cases.

Casement’s trial at bar opens at the Royal Courts of Justice on June 26, 1916, before the Lord Chief Justice (Viscount Reading), Justice Horace Avory, and Justice Thomas Horridge. Refusing to agree to a “guilty but insane” plea, he is subsequently found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. He unsuccessfully appeals against his conviction and death sentence.

On the day of his execution by hanging at Pentonville Prison, August 3, 1916, Casement is received into the Catholic Church at his request. He is attended by two Catholic priests, Dean Timothy Ring and Father James Carey, from the East London parish of SS Mary and Michael. The latter, also known as James McCarroll, says of Casement that he was “a saint … we should be praying to him [Casement] instead of for him.” At the time of his death he is 51 years old.

Casement’s body is buried in quicklime in the prison cemetery at the rear of Pentonville Prison, though his last wish was to be buried at Murlough Bay on the north coast of County Antrim, in present-day Northern Ireland. Finally, in 1965, his remains are repatriated to Ireland. His remains lay in state at the Garrison Church, Arbour Hill (now Arbour Hill Prison) in Dublin for five days, close to the graves of other leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising, although he would not be buried beside them. After a state funeral, the remains are buried with full military honours in the republican plot in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, alongside other Irish republicans and nationalists. The President of Ireland, Éamon de Valera, who is then in his mid-eighties and the last surviving leader of the Easter Rising, attends the ceremony, along with an estimated 30,000 others.


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Birth of Sir John Greer Dill, Irish-born British Army Officer

Sir John Greer Dill, senior British Army officer with service in both World War I and World War II, is born on December 25, 1881, at Lurgan, County Armagh. From May 1940 to December 1941, he is the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), the professional head of the British Army, and subsequently serves in Washington, D.C., as Chief of the British Joint Staff Mission and then Senior British Representative on the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS).

Dill is the only son of John Dill, bank manager, and Jane Dill (née Greer). He is educated at Cheltenham College in England before entering the Royal Military College (RMC), Sandhurst. Commissioned as a second lieutenant, he joins the Prince of Wales’s Leinster Regiment (Royal Canadians) in May 1901 and serves in South Africa for the remainder of the Second Boer War. Promoted to captain in 1911, he is a student at the Staff College, Camberley, at the outbreak of World War I. He holds several important staff appointments during the war, including brigade major of 25th Brigade (8th Division) and General Staff Officer (Grade 2) to the Canadian Corps. Present at the battles of Neuve Chapelle, Aubers Ridge, Arras, and Third Ypres, at the end of the war he is serving as chief of operations branch at GHQ with the temporary rank of brigadier general. He is awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) (1915), the Order of St. Michael and St. George (CMG) (1918), the French Legion of Honour and the Belgian Order of the Crown.

Remaining active during the interwar years, Dill serves as chief assistant to the commandant of the Staff College (1919–22) before commanding the Welsh Border Brigade, TA (1922–23), and 2nd Infantry Brigade at Aldershot (1923–26). In late 1926, he is appointed army instructor at the newly established Imperial Defence College. A period in India follows as general staff officer of the Western Command (1929–31), based at Quetta. On return to England, he is promoted to major general and made commandant of the Staff College. Appointments as commander of the British forces in Palestine and Transjordan (1936–37) and the Aldershot Command (1937–39) follow. During this period, he shows a remarkable ability to both train and inspire those under his command. Most of his colleagues expect him to become the new chief of the Imperial General Staff and are surprised when Major General Lord Gort, junior to Dill in both rank and seniority, is appointed to the post.

At the outbreak of World War II Dill commands I Corps British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in France and is made a full general. In April 1940, he is made vice-CIGS and in May takes over as CIGS. His initial period in office is not a happy one, and he has to inform the public of setbacks in both Norway and France. His workload is enormous, and after the evacuation at Dunkirk in late May he devotes himself to preparing the defences of Britain against invasion. He clashes with Winston Churchill throughout 1941, advocating a more cautious and realistic approach to the situations in North Africa, Greece, and Crete.

The workload begins to affect his health adversely, and in November 1941 it is announced that he will resign as CIGS on reaching the age of 60 and serve as governor-designate of Bombay with the rank of field marshal. He seeks to be more actively involved in the war effort, however, and in December 1941 he visits the United States with Churchill, remaining there as head of the British joint staff mission in Washington, D.C. He plays a significant role in promoting Anglo–American military cooperation and attends the Casablanca, Quebec, and Tehran conferences.

In late 1944 his health again breaks down and he dies from aplastic anemia on November 4, 1944, at the Walter Reed General Hospital, Washington, D.C. After a memorial service at Washington National Cathedral, he is buried with full military honours at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington County, Virginia. President Franklin D. Roosevelt later pays tribute to him as a great soldier and friend, “the most important figure in the remarkable accord which has been developed in the combined operations of our two countries.”

Dill first marries (1907) Ada Maud Le Mottée, daughter of Col. William Le Mottée of the 18th Regiment. Their son, Major John de Guerin Dill, serves as an artillery officer throughout World War II. In October 1941, Dill marries Nancy Isabelle Charrington, widow of Brigadier Denis Walter Furlong. Dill’s honours include a GCB (1942), an honorary degree from Princeton University (1944), the Howland Memorial Prize of Yale University (1944), and a posthumous Distinguished Service Medal (DSM) from the United States government. There are portraits of him in Cheltenham College and the Imperial War Museum, and a statue in Washington, D.C.

(From: “Dill, Sir John Greer” by David Murphy, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009 | Pictured: Sir John Greer Dill, bromide print, 1932, by Walter Stoneman, National Portrait Gallery, London)


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Birth of Poet Francis Edward Ledwidge

Francis Edward Ledwidge, Irish poet sometimes known as the “poet of the blackbirds,” is born on August 19, 1887, to a poor family in Slane, County Meath. He is later also known as a World War I war poet.

Ledwidge starts writing at an early age and is first published in a local newspaper at the age of fourteen. Finding work as a labourer and miner, he is also a trade union activist and a keen patriot and nationalist, associated with Sinn Féin. He becomes friendly with a local landowner, the writer Lord Dunsany, who gives him a workspace in the library of Dunsany Castle and introduces him to literary figures including William Butler Yeats and Katharine Tynan, with whom he has a long-term correspondence. He is elected to a local authority post and helps organise the local branch of the Irish Volunteers, while Dunsany edits and helps him secure publication for a first volume of his poetry.

Having sided with the faction of the Irish Volunteers which oppose participation in the war, he enlists in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers in October 1914, and continues to write poetry on assignment, sending work to Lord Dunsany and to family and other friends. The poems he writes on active service reveal his pride at being a soldier, as he believes, in the service of Ireland. He often wonders whether he would find a soldier’s death.

On July 31, 1917, a group from Ledwidge’s battalion of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers are road-laying in preparation for an assault during the Third Battle of Ypres, near the village of Boezinge, Ypres Salient, Belgium.

According to Irish author and lecturer Alice Curtayne, “Ledwidge and his comrades had been toiling since the early morning at roadmaking. The army’s first need was men; their second, guns; their third roads. These latter consisted mainly of heavy beech planks bolted together, which could be rapidly laid down. No advance could be supported in that sodden land without a sufficiency of these communications tracks, six or seven feet wide. Supplies were conveyed by pack mules over the wooden paths. Survivors concur in placing the road work done by B Company that day one mile northeast of Hellfire Corner, so called because it was very exposed to German shelling. There was a violent rainstorm in the afternoon, shrouding the region in a gray monochrome. Sullenly, the enemy’s long-range guns continued to fling their shells far behind the lines. Roadwork could not be suspended, however, as the tracks were in use as fast as they were laid down. Tea was issued to the men and, drenched to the skin, they stopped to swallow it. A shell exploded beside Ledwidge, and he was instantly killed.”

A Roman Catholic military chaplain, Father Devas, is the first on the scene. That night, Father Devas writes in his diary, “Crowds at Holy Communion. Arranged for service but washed out by rain and fatigues. Walk in rain with dogs. Ledwidge killed, blown to bits; at Confession yesterday and Mass and Holy Communion this morning. R.I.P.”

Ledwidge is first buried at Carrefour de Rose, and later re-interred in the nearby Artillery Wood Military Cemetery, at Boezinge, where the Welsh poet Hedd Wyn, who was killed in action on the same day, also lies buried.

Dunsany arranges for the publication of more of Ledwidge’s poems, and a collected edition in 1919. Further poems, from the archives at Dunsany Castle and some material held by family, are later published by Ledwdige’s biographer, Alice Curtayne, and by one of the Ledwidge memorial societies. Ledwidge is selected as one of twelve prominent war poets for the exhibition Anthem for Doomed Youth at the Imperial War Museum in London in 2002, and memorialised at an event in Inchicore, Dublin, in 2017, with his work set to music by Anúna. A museum of his life and work is opened in his birthplace cottage in 1982. Some of his manuscripts are held in the National Library of Ireland and more in the archives of Dunsany Castle.


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Death of David Lord, RAF Officer & Victoria Cross Recipient

David Samuel Anthony Lord, VC, DFC, recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to British and Commonwealth forces, is killed at Arnhem, Netherlands, on September 19, 1944, during World War II. A transport pilot in the Royal Air Force, he receives the award posthumously for his actions during the Battle of Arnhem while flying resupply missions in support of British paratroopers.

Lord is born on October 18, 1913, in Cork, County Cork, one of three sons of Samuel (a warrant officer in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers) and Mary Lord (née Miller). One of his brothers dies in infancy.

After World War I the family is posted to British India and Lord attends Lucknow Convent School. On his father’s retirement from the Army the family moves to Wrexham and then he is a pupil at St. Mary’s College, Aberystwyth, and then the University of Wales. Later, he attends the English College, Valladolid, Spain, to study for the priesthood. Deciding that it was not the career for him, he returns to Wrexham, before moving to London in the mid-1930s to work as a freelance writer.

Lord enlists in the Royal Air Force on August 6, 1936. After reaching the rank of corporal in August 1938, he applies to undertake pilot training, which he begins in October 1938. Successfully gaining his pilot’s wings, he becomes a sergeant pilot in April 1939, and is posted to No. 31 Squadron RAF, based in Lahore, India. He later flies the Vickers Type 264 Valentia biplane transport. In 1941, No. 31 Squadron is the first unit to receive the Douglas DC-2 which is followed by both the Douglas DC-3 and Dakota C-47 Skytrain transports. That year he is promoted to flight sergeant and then warrant officer. He flies in North Africa, supporting troops in Libya and Egypt for four months, before being posted back to India. Commissioned as a pilot officer in May 1942, he flies supply missions over Burma, for which he is mentioned in despatches.

Lord is awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in July 1943, receiving the award at Buckingham Palace, and is promoted to flight lieutenant shortly afterwards. By January 1944, he has joined No. 271 Squadron RAF, based at RAF Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, and begins training as part of preparations for the invasion of Europe. On D-Day, he carries paratroopers into France and his aircraft was hit by flak, returning to base without flaps.

The Battle of Arnhem is part of Operation Market Garden, an attempt to secure a string of bridges through the Netherlands. At Arnhem, the British 1st Airborne Division and Polish 1st Independent Parachute Brigade are tasked with securing bridges across the Lower Rhine, the final objectives of the operation. However, the airborne forces that drop on September 17 are not aware that the 9th SS and 10th SS Panzer divisions are also near Arnhem for rest and refit. Their presence adds a substantial number of Panzergrenadiers, tanks and self-propelled guns to the German defences and the Allies suffer heavily in the ensuing battle. Only a small force manages to hold one end of the Arnhem road bridge before being overrun on September 21. The rest of the division becomes trapped in a small pocket west of the bridge and has to be evacuated on September 25. The Allies fail to cross the Rhine, which remains under German control until Allied offensives in March 1945.

Lord is 30 years old, and a flight lieutenant serving with No. 271 Squadron, Royal Air Force during World War II when he is awarded the Victoria Cross. On September 19, 1944, during the Battle of Arnhem in the Netherlands, the British 1st Airborne Division is in desperate need of supplies. His Dakota III “KG374” encounters intense enemy anti-aircraft fire and is hit twice, with one engine burning. He manages to drop his supplies, but at the end of the run finds that there are two containers remaining. Although he knows that one of his wings might collapse at any moment, he nevertheless makes a second run to drop the last supplies, then orders his crew to bail out. A few seconds later, the Dakota crashes in flames with its pilot and six crew members.

Only the navigator, Flying Officer Harold King, survives, becoming a prisoner of war. It is only on his release in mid-1945, as well as the release of several paratroops from the 10th Parachute Battalion, that the story of Lord’s action becomes known. He is awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross.

After Arnhem is liberated in April 1945, Grave Registration Units of the British 2nd Army move into the area and began to locate the Allied dead. Lord is buried alongside his crew in the Arnhem Oosterbeek War Cemetery. There are many plaques in memory of him, including one at Wrexham Cathedral in Wales.

Several aircraft have carried tributes to Lord. Between 1993 and 1998, the RAF Battle of Britain Memorial Flight‘s Dakota, serial “ZA947”, is painted in the colours of Lord’s aircraft during the Arnhem battle and bears the same code letters: YS-DM. Between 1973 and 2005, the Dakota displayed at RAF Museum Cosford is similarly painted and coded to represent Lord’s aircraft. From 1966 until its disbandment in 2005, No. 10 Squadron RAF is equipped with Vickers VC-10s, each of which is named after a Royal Air Force or Royal Flying Corps VC recipient. Aircraft serial number ‘XR810’ is named David Lord VC.

Lord’s Victoria Cross is presented to his parents at Buckingham Palace in December 1945. In 1997, his Victoria Cross, along with his other decorations and medals, are sold at auction by Spinks to Lord Ashcroft. As of 2014, the medal group is on display at the Imperial War Museum.


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Death of Irish Poet Francis Edward Ledwidge

Francis Edward Ledwidge, Irish poet from County Meath, sometimes known as the “poet of the blackbirds,” is killed in action He was later also known as a World War I war poet. He was killed in action on July 31, 1917 at the Battle of Pilckem Ridge near Boezinge, Ypres Salient, Belgium.

Born on August 19, 1887 to a poor family in Slane, County Meath, Ledwidge starts writing at an early age, and is first published in a local newspaper at the age of fourteen. Finding work as a labourer and miner, he is also a trade union activist and a keen patriot and nationalist, associated with Sinn Féin. He becomes friendly with a local landowner, the writer Lord Dunsany, who gives him a workspace in the library of Dunsany Castle and introduces him to literary figures including William Butler Yeats and Katherine Tynan, with whom he has a long-term correspondence. He is elected to a local authority post and helps organise the local branch of the Irish Volunteers, while Dunsany edits and helps him secure publication for a first volume of his poetry.

Having sided with the faction of the Irish Volunteers which oppose participation in the war, he enlists in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers in October 1914, and continues to write poetry on assignment, sending work to Lord Dunsany and to family and other friends. The poems he writes on active service reveal his pride at being a soldier, as he believes, in the service of Ireland. He often wonders whether he would find a soldier’s death.

On July 31, 1917, a group from Ledwidge’s battalion of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers are road-laying in preparation for an assault during the Third Battle of Ypres, near the village of Boezinge, northwest of Ypres.

According to Irish author and lecturer Alice Curtayne, “Ledwidge and his comrades had been toiling since the early morning at road-making. The army’s first need was men; their second, guns; their third roads. These latter consisted mainly of heavy beech planks bolted together, which could be rapidly laid down. No advance could be supported in that sodden land without a sufficiency of these communications tracks, six or seven feet wide. Supplies were conveyed by pack mules over the wooden paths. Survivors concur in placing the road work done by B Company that day one mile northeast of Hellfire Corner, so called because it was very exposed to German shelling. There was a violent rainstorm in the afternoon, shrouding the region in a gray monochrome. Sullenly, the enemy’s long-range guns continued to fling their shells far behind the lines. Road-work could not be suspended, however, as the tracks were in use as fast as they were laid down. Tea was issued to the men and, drenched to the skin, they stopped to swallow it. A shell exploded beside Ledwidge and he was instantly killed.”

A Roman Catholic military chaplain, Father Devas, is the first on the scene. That night, Father Devas writes in his diary, “Crowds at Holy Communion. Arranged for service but washed out by rain and fatigues. Walk in rain with dogs. Ledwidge killed, blown to bits; at Confession yesterday and Mass and Holy Communion this morning. R.I.P.”

Ledwidge is first buried at Carrefour de Rose, and later re-interred in the nearby Artillery Wood Military Cemetery, at Boezinge, where the Welsh poet Hedd Wyn, who was killed in action on the same day, also lies buried.

Dunsany arranges for the publication of more of Ledwidge’s poems, and a collected edition in 1919. Further poems, from the archives at Dunsany Castle and some material held by family, are later published by Ledwdige’s biographer, Alice Curtayne, and by one of the Ledwidge memorial societies. Ledwidge is selected as one of twelve prominent war poets for the exhibition Anthem for Doomed Youth at the Imperial War Museum in London in 2002, and memorialised at an event in Inchicore, Dublin, in 2017, with his work set to music by Anúna. A museum of his life and work is opened in his birthplace cottage in 1982. Some of his manuscripts are held in the National Library of Ireland and more in the archives of Dunsany Castle.


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Birth of John Barry, Victoria Cross Recipient

john-barry-vcJohn Barry is born on February 1, 1873 in St. Mary’s Parish, Kilkenny, County Kilkenny. He is by birth an Irish recipient of the Victoria Cross (VC), the highest and most prestigious award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to British and Commonwealth forces.

Little is known of Barry’s early life prior to his enlistment with the 1st Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment of the British Army. Shortly after his enlistment, he finds himself sailing to South Africa for the outbreak of the Second Boer War, a conflict which ultimately leads to the award of the Victoria Cross, albeit tragically posthumously.

During the night attack on Monument Hill on January 7-8, 1901, Private Barry, although surrounded and threatened by the Boers at the time, smashes the breach of the Maxim gun, thus rendering it useless to its captors. It is in doing this splendid act for his country that he meets his death.

Barry dies of wounds received during his VC action at Monument Hill, South Africa. At the time, no posthumous awards of the VC can be made. However, as so often in the history of the Victoria Cross it is an individual, the mother of Alfred Atkinson, that brings about a decisive move to investigate those servicemen who would have been recommended for the award of the VC if they had not died beforehand. The outcome of the War Office investigation results in an announcement being published in The London Gazette on August 8, 1902. In fact, Barry’s family had already received his medal via registered post on April 30, 1902.

Barry is buried in Belfast Cemetery, east of Johannesburg, South Africa. His medals are sold at auction on September 22, 2000 and purchased at a hammer price of £85,000 by the Ashcroft Trust and displayed in the Lord Ashcroft Gallery in the Imperial War Museum, London.


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The SS Aud Begins Gun-Running Voyage to Ireland

the-ss-aud

The German merchant steam ship SS Libau, also known as SS Castro and masquerading under the cover name of SS Aud, sets sail from the Baltic port of Lübeck on April 9, 1916, loaded with guns and ammunition for the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) as part of the preparation for the Easter Rising.

Masquerading as SS Aud, an existing Norwegian vessel of similar appearance, SS Libau sets sail from the port of Lübeck, under the command of Karl Spindler, bound for the southwest coast of Ireland. Under Spindler is a crew of 22 men, all of whom are volunteers. SS Libau, laden with an estimated twenty thousand rifles, one million rounds of ammunition, ten machine guns, and explosives under a camouflage of a timber cargo, evade patrols of both the British 10th Cruiser Squadron and local Auxiliary patrols.

After surviving violent storms off Rockall, SS Libau arrives in Tralee Bay on April 20. There they are due to meet Roger Casement and others, with Casement having been landed nearby by the German submarine U-19. The SS Libau has no communications equipment aboard, giving them no means of contacting the Irish while en route. As a result, they are unaware that the date for its arrival off Fenit has been altered from Thursday, April 20 to Sunday, April 23.

One of the two cars carrying Volunteers who are supposed to meet SS Libau crash into the River Laune, many miles away, at Ballykissane pier, Killorglin, resulting in the death of three of the four occupants of the car. This leads to no hope of an organised transfer of arms and the gun-running plan nears an end.

SS Libau, attempting to escape the area, is trapped by a blockade of British ships. Captain Spindler allows himself to be escorted towards Cork Harbour, in the company of the Acacia-class sloop HMS Bluebell. The German crew then scuttles the ship. Spindler and his crew are interned for the duration of the war. Roger Casement and his companions are captured in an old ringfort or rath between Ardfert and Tralee.

A number of rifles are recovered from SS Libau before the vessel is scuttled. Several examples exist in various museums in Britain and Ireland. Among these are the Cork Public Museum in Fitzgerald’s Park in Cork, a museum in Lurgan County Armagh, the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin, and the Imperial War Museum in London.