IN APRIL 1937, two years before the outbreak of the second World War, the German battleship Schleswig-Holsteinsailed into Dublin Bay and anchored outside Dún Laoghaire Harbour, writes Éamon de Buitléar.
It was returning home after having visited Central and South America. Thousands of people lined the shore to get a view of the battleship as it hoisted the Tricolour and boomed a 21-gun salute.
A gun battery from the Irish Army at the East Pier returned the salute, whereupon the battleship hoisted the German flag with the swastika insignia in the centre. The ship remained in Dublin for five days.
I was only seven years of age at the time but I remember my younger brother Ruairí and myself going aboard with my father, who was an Army officer. He was a fluent German speaker, having been sent by the Army in 1934 to learn German at the Insitut für Auslaender at Berlin University. Although the course was well under way by the time he had reached Berlin, he soon settled in and won first place. He secured the institute's certificate of proficiency and was also awarded the certificate of proficiency in phonetics. Conversing with the battleship's commander and his crew in Dublin Bay three years later must have been an interesting experience for him.
At the outbreak of the war my father was serving as aide-de-camp to Ireland's first president, Dr Douglas Hyde. During his time at Áras an Uachtaráin, he had also been working secretly on breaking coded messages and ciphers being sent to German agents in this country. He must have been well aware of the activities of Nazis in pre-war Ireland during the early 1930s, as he had even purchased a decoding machine during his time in Berlin. The Army authorities eventually began to press for my father's return to headquarters but President Hyde refused to let him go. In June 1941, after the President had become ill, my father took up duty at G2 Branch (Intelligence). A month later he was put in charge of the espionage and counter-espionage section at G2, where it seems the desired results were not being achieved, owing to a lack of method and system.
My father was working in collaboration with the only other skilled cryptographer in the country, Dr Richard Hayes, head of the National Library. Richard Hayes was not a member of the military but the Germans knew him as Capt Gray. Both Hayes and my father were instrumental in breaking a sophisticated cipher being used by the Nazi agent Dr Herman Goertz, a former Luftwaffe pilot who, in May 1940, had landed by parachute in Co Meath. The system that Goertz used was a complicated one in which he used a figure for each letter and where the figure was then split in two halves. Even the British team at MI5 had not succeeded in breaking Goertz's cipher.
I remember my father recalling an episode concerning another German, whose name was Marschner. This was in fact an alias used by the agent Gunther Schutz. Two of the top brass in G2 were cross-examining Schutz, whom they suspected of having some hidden secrets in his possession. During the interview the German was instructed to remove his clothing, which he did, apart from his underpants. He was then granted permission to go to the toilet, which of course gave him a golden opportunity to flush his hidden material down the lavatory. Schutz also had other papers with him that had earlier been handed over to detectives. But these documents, according to my father, were never properly examined.
It would appear that being put in charge of the espionage and counter-espionage section in G2 very shortly after re-joining his unit may not have endeared Capt Éamon de Buitléar to some of his superior officers. One report mentions that he had been foisted on his commanding officer only because of his knowledge of German. He knew several other languages including Irish, having been a translator in the Dáil before joining the Army in 1922. He was also fluent in French and spoke some Italian.
Both he and Douglas Gageby (later to become editor of The Irish Times), were the only German-speaking officers in the Army at that time.
There have been quite a number of publications in recent years documenting various aspects of those second World War years in Ireland and especially espionage activities. I am sure that there must be many more sides to some of these stories surrounding that fascinating period of our history, but I like to believe my late father's version of what he experienced at that time. He retired from the Army in 1963 with the rank of colonel and he died in August 1981.
At the end of August 1939, two years after her Dublin visit, the battleship Schleswig-Holsteinsailed to Danzig under the pretext of a courtesy visit and on September 1st at 4.45am she began to shell the Polish garrison at Westerplatte.
The Luftwaffe bombed other Polish towns at about the same time. The invasion of Poland on that day marked the start of the second World War.