The Guns of 1916: Ireland’s Easter Rising Was Fought With Smuggled Rifles, Stolen Revolvers, and Improvised Weapons

by Susan Katz Keating

The Asgard came in low, riding heavier than it should have for a vessel of its size. Below deck, rifles were stacked four feet high. The ship sailed into Dublin Bay, through one of the most consequential gun-running lanes in modern military history. 

THE ARMS SITUATION

By 1914, Ireland was an armed camp; but only one side was holding the guns.

The Ulster Volunteer Force, a pro-British Protestant militia, had landed 35,000 modern rifles and three million rounds of ammunition at Larne, County Antrim. The Nationalists had mostly dummy rifles for drill, some personal revolvers, and farmers’ pikes.

So the Irish Volunteers hatched a plan.

GERMANY

Envoys went to Hamburg to buy weapons. They came back with Mauser Model 1871 rifles – single-shot, bolt-action weapons that had been the cutting edge of Prussian military technology during the Franco-Prussian War. 

The envoys bought 1,500, along with 49,000 rounds of ammunition. Now they needed to get them past the Royal Navy, the coastguard, British intelligence, and into Ireland.

THE ASGARD RUNS THE CHANNEL

Writer Erskine Childers was the perfect man for the job. He was a former British Army artillery volunteer who served in the Boer War. He was also a committed Irish nationalist, a superb sailor, and the owner of a 51-foot yacht, the Asgard.

The smugglers leaked word to British intelligence that arms would be coming into Ireland via fishing trawler. Coastguard stations all along the Irish coast began to search every trawler in the water. Meanwhile, the Asgard and a second yacht, the Kelpie, rendezvoused with a German tugboat off the Belgian coast. They took the weapons aboard. They stacked rifles in the cabin four feet deep, leaving crew members to sleep and cook on top of the guns. The smugglers sailed for Ireland posing as a group on holiday.

A false report of guns landing on the Wicklow coast drew a British gunboat south, clearing Dublin Bay. After 19 days at sea, the Asgard came into harbour at Howth at noon on Sunday, July 26, 1914.

THE LANDING

On the quayside, 700 Irish Volunteers and members of a nationalist boy-scout organization were waiting. Rifles went hand-to-hand down the pier. The boy scouts heaved 2,000 rounds into a trek-cart and wheeled it away. Six motor cars took on ammunition and dispersed it to safe houses, farm cellars, and nationalist hands across the county.

The second shipment landed quietly at County Wicklow a week later under cover of darkness. 

Roger Casement went to Germany for help. He struck a deal for 20,000 rifles, 10 machine guns, and one million rounds of ammunition. The guns were Mosin-Nagant rifles captured from Russian soldiers. The tranch was loaded aboard the Aud, a freighter disguised as a Norwegian merchant vessel.

Casement went back to Ireland aboard a German U-boat..

On Good Friday, April 21, 1916, the British Navy intercepted the Aud off the coast of Kerry. The captain scuttled his ship, sending 20,000 rifles to the bottom of Cork Harbour. On the same day, Casement was put ashore from a U-boat in Kerry, exhausted and half-dead. He was captured within hours. 

Some wanted to cancel the rising, but it went on anyway. On Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, approximately 1,600 men and women seized the General Post Office on Sackville Street and a ring of strategic buildings across Dublin.

WHAT THEY FOUGHT WITH

The Howth Mauser was the iconic weapon of the Rising. It also brought challenges. One Volunteer described firing from a barricaded window: 

“Flame about three foot long came out through the barrel when it was fired and a shower of soot and smoke came back in one’s face. After three shots were fired from it, it would have to be thrown away to let it cool and the concussion of it was so severe that it drove me back along the floor several feet.”

Where the rebels could get them, the preferred weapon was the British Lee Enfield .303, mostly stolen from British soldiers or raided from armories. Webley revolvers, captured from the Royal Irish Constabulary, were common sidearms. Shotguns, standard on every Irish farm, showed up in the hands of men who had nothing else. Home-forged pikes reappeared as if from the hands of rebels from 1798.

SIX DAYS

Reinforcements flooded in from across Britain. A Royal Navy gunboat steamed up the Liffey and opened fire with artillery. Eighteen-pound field guns were rushed in from storage, and began reducing rebel strongholds block by block.

Within a week, the Rising was over.

Portions of Dublin were in shambles. Local officials worked on reconstruction, and referred to the Rising as “the recent disturbances.”

THE AFTERMATH 

Fourteen leaders were executed by firing squad in Dublin. A fifteenth, Thomas Kent, was shot in Cork. Roger Casement was hanged.

James Connolly was last. He had been shot in the ankle during the fighting; gangrene had set in. They shot him anyway. He was carried to the jailyard on a stretcher, tied to a chair, and executed where he sat.

Among the surviving prisoners was a Cork man named Michael Collins. He spent his time in prison not brooding but organizing. 

Collins emerged from internment and built the Irish Republican Army for the next phase of rebellion. His IRA didn’t plan for holing up inside fixed garrisons. They staged ambushes on narrow country roads, raids on barracks, and ran pistols and ammunition with women hiding them beneath their coats or inside baby prams.

Michael Collins

Irish rebels under Collins launched a war of independence that ended in a treaty with Great Britain. The treaty established the Irish Free State in 1922. The terms of the agreement formed the basis of what later became 30 years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

THE CHANNEL REMAINS

The lighthouse still stands over the bay, a beacon against the gray. The Asgard sits in Collins Barracks in Dublin, preserved behind glass, still carrying more than 70 percent of her original hull. A few of the 1871 Mausers are in the National Museum of Ireland. They still have the hand-carved initials of the men who carried them.

The channel at Howth remains open.

Susan Katz Keating is publisher and editor in chief of Soldier of Fortune.