‘The Coastwatchers’: Ireland’s Second World War early warning system
For Heritage Week 2024 Dr Michael Kennedy, Executive Editor of the RIA’s Document on Irish Foreign Policy series, explores the remains of a network of coastal early warning military look out posts, a chapter in Ireland’s Second World War history which can still be found along the Irish coast.
A theme of Heritage Week this year is ‘networks’. Along the Irish coast an 80-year-old network of structures integral to Ireland’s Second World War foreign policy is waiting to be discovered.
Ireland was neutral in the Second World War. As the Documents on Irish Foreign policy series shows, the global conflict was very close to Ireland and took place in our seas and skies. Indeed the Battle of the Atlantic, the longest campaign in the war, took place off Ireland’s coast.
Neutrality had to be protected. To keep watch on our seas and skies and on our island’s almost undefended coastline a network of eighty-three interconnected lookout posts (LOPs) was set up by the Defence Forces in September 1939. They were manned by the soldiers of the Marine and Coast Watching Service – the Coastwatchers.
The Coastwatchers LOPs had every mile of coast under observation to try to provide an early warning if an invasion should occur. On many headlands the ruins of their huts can still be found. The size of garden sheds with large windows looking seaward they were manned 24 hours, seven days a week for the duration of the war.
Artist Tim Schmelzer has reimagined these LOPs as a coastal art project. The results are spell-binding. They can be found here on www.lookoutpost.com.
The phone network in Ireland was basic during the 1930s and 1940s, yet the Coastwatchers were in constant phone contact with Defence Forces headquarters and with each other along the coast and reported anything suspicious or unusual. They noted what they saw and found in special logbooks and many of these can now be found in Military Archives in Dublin. You can find your nearest Look Out Post on the Military Archives website and download selections from logbooks to read.
In the logbooks you will find records of the Second World War as it happened around Ireland. Air Corps aircraft on coastal patrols, United States Air Force B-17 ‘Flying Fortresses’ on transatlantic flights; Luftwaffe ‘Condor’ bombers seeking out Allied convoys to attack; sightings of troopships, convoys and destroyers, submarines – Allied and Axis, lifeboats coming shore, and, most tragically, the discovery of bodies of the dead of war washed up on Ireland’s shores.
If your read a logbook while imagining where the events they record took place the history on each logbook’s pages comes vividly alive and you are transported back to the Second World War.
Perhaps the most well-known legacy of the Coast Watching Service is a second network, the massive white stone ‘ÉIRE’ aerial marker signs constructed near each LOP in the final years of the war. These told Allied aircraft where they were along the Irish coast. Ireland twisted its neutrality here: it was better to enable a lost aircraft to leave Irish territory than crash land on it. It twisted neutrality further in that only Allied airmen had the special numbered maps showing where each Éire sign was located.
Treasa Lynch’s wonderful Eiremarkings website lists those ‘Éire signs’ that remain. In recent years many have been restored and are now tourist attractions such as the sign at Hawk Cliff in Dalkey.
The Coastwatchers were Ireland’s wartime eyes and ears. Men who lived in communities on the coastline they guarded. They knew the coast and they knew the sea like the backs of their hands. They knew their reports were part of a wider network and went ‘up the line’, but perhaps they did not know to where they ultimately went.
In fact, Coastwatchers reports went right to the heart of wartime Irish foreign policy – the diplomatic and political battlefield of wartime British-Irish relations. Here they are mentioned in one of the most significant documents of Second World War Irish foreign policy – a memorandum from the Department of External Affairs in Dublin listing help given to Britain during the war.
This Heritage Week, discover in the records of the Coast Watching Service some of the most dangerous moments in twentieth century Irish foreign policy.
With our own www.difp.ie website and with Google Earth, Google Maps, the Ordnance Survey’s geocache map viewer, and with the wonderful websites listed above you can visit the coast of Ireland and explore the history of Ireland and the Second World War through original documents from the archives of the Department of External Affairs and the Defence Forces.
If you do venture to the coast do not trespass on private property and to not take chances – LOPs and Éire signs have been abandoned since 1945 and LOPs are not safe to climb on.
You can read more about the Coast Watching Service in Michael’s book Guarding Neutral Ireland: the coast watching service and military intelligence 1939-1945 (Dublin, 2008).
Header image: The Hook Peninsula in Co. Wexford in the 1940s, with the word ‘Éire’ clearly visible to denote Irish territory to any belligerent pilots passing through, or near, Irish airspace. A lookout post can be seen to the right of the image, on the edge of the rocks. Image courtesy of the Military Archives.
