Chapter 14: The Battle of Ireland
General Ricagno, the commanding officer of our newly created 1st Expeditionary Army, had planned the invasion of Ireland while marshalling his forces in Iberia at La Coruna.
General Babini would also have his 3rd army in reserve.
Our political intelligence could not tell us for sure what England’s reaction would be, therefore, our commanders on the ground (Ricagno would not be arriving himself until after the beachheads had been secured and our transports could bring most of the troops over) would need to be flexible in reacting to the potentially crushing British response.
General Ricagno’s plan had two phases. Phase One was the Republic of Ireland. We wanted to secure the Irish surrender as quickly as possible. We would assault the major ports, then move inland as far as necessary. Phase Two was to secure Northern Ireland, with one prong assaulting the ports of Belfast and Coleraine to cut off the supply of any British units still on the island, and the second one, coming up the west side to enclose the remaining, cut off troops and finish them off.
While D-Day for the landings in Ireland was originally scheduled for June 1, 1943, all of our preparations were made early. On the recommendation of General Ricagno, I approved moving the date up of our assault on Ireland to May 25. On that morning, we launched our invasion on two fronts. Our 1st Marine Corps assaulted the capital of Dublin, and our Special Forces Corps commenced their assault on the port of Waterford.
While these two corps were fighting, we had three screening fleets in St. George’s Channel and the Celtic Sea in order to hold off British, Irish, and American ships while we made our landings.
Our first engagements with the RN came quickly, on D-Day, May 25. The first battle in the Celtic Sea was weighted heavily in our favour, with Campioni directing our massed fleets in defending his transport fleets.
In St. George's Channel, our carrier fleets were sent to assist Thaon di Revel in order to eliminate the larger British fleet under Admiral Cunningham with 2 escort carriers.
The landings went quickly and Dublin fell on May 27.
As soon as we controlled the airfields in Dublin, we brought almost the entire Regio Aeronautica to Dublin, using our interceptors to clear some of the skies and naval and tactical bombers to start working on the UK fleet at Anglesey.
With our transport fleets free, they began making runs back to La Coruna to ferry in more divisions to take the fight to the British. The first reinforcements brought up were our armoured divisions. Their speed and power would be able to close any gaps and hit far harder than our infantry and marines. However, our marines were invaluable fording and attacking over the many rivers of Ireland.
After we took Dublin, the seat of government moved to Cork, and we dispatched a paratroop division to take Cork. The victory was swift and on May 31, 1943, the Irish offered their unconditional surrender.
Immediately following this, the British enforced their claim over the rest of the island, and true to one of the possible scenarios presenting by the general staff, the British flooded south into what was the Republic of Ireland (now annexed by Italy).
Our forces proved stout, and our fleet handled anything the British, or Americans threw at them. Our only weakness was the Regio Aeronautica. While they held their own against the RAF, there weren’t enough fighters to hold off all of their tactical and strategic bombers in all of the locations that they were attacking. And while we had a large portion of the RN bottled up in port at Anglesey, our bombers could not do too much damage to the fleet without losing too many of their own planes.
We quickly moved our reinforcements north to take Belfast, the biggest port in Northern Ireland. On June 11, Belfast fell, and the southern prong of our pincer was closing up quickly, meeting little resistance.
Our transports made sortie after sortie to bring up the rest of our 1st Expeditionary Army Group, and once all the forces based at La Coruna were ashore at Waterford, our transports sailed for Beirut to pick up the rest of the 3rd Army that had not been able to brought up to Spain in time for the first waves of the invasion.
Once again, our navy held it's own, inflicting heavy damage on an American attempt to run our blockade, sinking two destroyer divisions and the heavy cruiser USS Portland.
A later attempt by the British resulted in the sinking of the light cruiser HMS Diomede.
The British fought but were outnumbered, and our troops were quickly moving to cut off the British forces from the remaining port at Coleraine. Battles raged at places like Limerick, Loughrea and Larne.
They even raged at places that didn't begin with the letter "L".
The epic Battle of Longford was particularly bloody at which a combined 12,000 men lost their lives.
The Battle of Ireland culminated with our encirclement of British (with American Expeditionary forces) at Donegal.
(June 18th)
Our generals told us that no fewer than 144,787 soldiers were caught in the encirclement before they surrendered on July 8, 1943.
We counted 10 full infantry divisions, one armoured and one mechanised division as well as 9 HQ brigades caught, including Field Marshall Montgomery-Massingberd's, although the Field Marshall himself managed to get away.
We quickly began moving troops back down south in order to capitalise on the massive losses for the British. Babini’s 2nd Expeditionary Army (formerly the 3rd Army) was left in place to guard against invasion, as the British were trying to ford the channel from Stranraer to Larne, and the Scatini’s 1st Expeditionary Army was moved south in order to begin assaulting England herself.
This great victory will be remembered as one of the most glorious military achievements of Italy, and the heroes of the Battle of Ireland will be heroes forever more!