Gerry O'Donnell

In the summer of 1940, hundreds of corpses appeared along the shores of Mayo, Sligo, and Donegal. Locals and Gardaí found bodies caught in kelp, cast onto rocks or drifting into quiet bays. They were the mangled and water bloated corpses of Italians, Germans, Austrians and British soldiers. The victims of the Battle of the Atlantic who had been carried for days by the restless currents. For the neutral communities of the west, it was a shocking reminder that the war was at their door. The story began on the 2nd of July 1940, when the SS Arandora Star, a converted passenger liner pressed into military service, was torpedoed by U-47 some 75 miles off Donegal. On board were over 1,500 souls, around 800 German and Italian civilian internees, their British guards, and the ship’s crew. It was a grim cargo of men bundled aboard in Liverpool and sent across the Atlantic to internment camps in Canada. The Arandora Star bore no Red Cross markings, and when the torpedo struck, more than 800 lives were lost. Among them were men who had fled Nazi persecution, only to drown under a British flag. Over the following weeks, the sea began to surrender them. Bodies came ashore in Donegal’s Rosses and Inishowen, on the sands of Sligo’s Mullaghmore and Drumcliffe, and along the wild coastline of Belmullet in Mayo. The new Coast Watching Service, set up to guard neutrality, was quickly forced into the role of undertaker. Gardaí recorded each discovery, fishermen helped haul the remains from the surf, and local councils struggled to find enough coffins and graves. Some of the dead were nameless, buried under simple crosses marked “Unknown Seaman.” Others could be identified by papers, photographs, or the fading ink of a paybook tucked into a pocket. In Termoncarragh graveyard, Belmullet, two men were laid side by side. Luigi Tapparo, an Italian internee, and Trooper John Connelly of the Lovat Scouts, his British guard. In death, they became neighbours in Irish soil. The tragedy was not confined to the Arandora Star. Just weeks later another troopship, the Mohamed Ali El-Kebir, was torpedoed by U-38 in the Atlantic. Many of her victims too were carried eastwards, joining the grim tide of corpses that washed up through late summer and autumn. At its height, over 200 bodies came ashore in a matter of weeks, forcing the reopening of famine-era graveyards that had lain untouched for nearly a century. For the communities of the west, 1940 became the year of the “men who came in with the sea.” Children walking beaches stumbled upon corpses. Parish priests blessed the dead in hurried ceremonies, often in languages they did not speak. Local people, bound by decency and tradition, carried out burials with dignity, regardless of whether the bodies wore a British uniform or carried an Italian rosary. Today, the graves remain scattered along the coastline. Carndonagh in Donegal, Ahamlish and Drumcliffe in Sligo, Termoncarragh and Fallmore in Mayo. Some bear names, many do not. They are markers of a strange and terrible summer, when the Atlantic brought the war to Ireland’s shores, and the west became a cemetery for the drowned of Europe.