Campaign Groups and Pairs


‘C’ Company began patrolling the neighbouring roads, raiding and searching villages, travelling in Crossley tenders. These tenders were a versatile, open-topped light truck, an ancestor of the modern pick-up, which could carry a driver and commander on the front bench seat and up to ten well-armed men sitting on wooden benches along the length of its rear wooden flat-bed. On 16 October Ballymakeera was raided and an Auxie shot dead James Lehane, an incident which was reported by local newspapers (Sunday Independent, 17 October 1920 p 5 refers). Republican sources claim that the Auxie was Guthrie, but this appears to be an attempt to justify his subsequent execution. It also seems unlikely, given his role in a similar incident on 10 November, when an Auxie killed Christopher Lucey, an unarmed I.R.A. member who was on the run. Guthrie officially reported what had happened (none of his colleagues planned to do so). As a result, the Auxie was sent to Dublin Castle and dismissed by order of the Police Advisor (Cafferata papers refer).


The Kilmichael Ambush


The leaders of ‘C’ Company, in particular District Inspector F.W. Crake, the Number 2 Platoon Commander, quickly grew complacent, falling into predictable patterns of patrol activity that the watchful eyes of the Republicans quickly detected. Cadet Alexander Lewis makes this clear in a letter to his mother, dated 17 December 1920 – this letter also exposes the cruel trick of fate that sent Guthrie to his death: “On the Sunday afternoon, old Crake… took out two cars for a patrol that afternoon. I was fitting a new petrol tank on to my bus, my old one having been punctured, otherwise I should have been on that fateful patrol. I had been on that same road three times with Crake that same week, so Guthrie who was also driving the car, took his instead…”


Late on the afternoon of Sunday 28 November, the two Crossley tenders, travelling at about forty miles an hour and about fifty feet apart, entered a sharp double bend at a desolate, boggy spot on the Macroom to Dunmanway road. As they slowed down to enter the second bend, a figure appeared by the side of the road, wearing the uniform of an army officer, standing erect and impassive, probably with his hands behind his back, a common pose adopted by British officers. The patrol commander, Crake, who was sitting in the front next to the driver, knew that there were army units operating in rural co. Cork and may not have worried (or even noticed) that the man’s uniform was subtly different in colour and cut from normal. The British army was full of regiments that proudly cherished their traditional variations on the regulation ‘uniform’, and he would have been quite used to meeting oddly-dressed officers. Tom Barry was actually wearing the uniform of an officer in the Irish Volunteers, ancestors of the I.R.A., which was modelled on standard Service Dress.


Crake ordered his driver to stop, so that he could speak to the unknown officer. As the Crossley slowed down, Barry suddenly lobbed a grenade into the tender, produced a pistol and shot Crake through the head, before wounding the driver. It was an act of enormous daring and audacity, which required great self-control and perfect timing. Before setting up the ambush, Barry had given his men orders not to take prisoners. He had stationed sections of men armed with rifles on nearby rock outcrops which overlooked the bend, and they opened fire on the Auxies who were rapidly dismounting from the first tender. The I.R.A. gunmen were armed with Canadian Ross service rifles and bayonets which they had captured from Irish Coastguard stations, straight-pull bolt-action weapons which could deliver high rates of fire. All of the nine Auxiliaries in the first tender were put out of action before they could fully deploy to take on their ambushers.


The fighting around Guthrie’s tender was more protracted. Our understanding of what happened is guided by a sketch map of the scene made the next day, on which the relative positions of the two tenders and each of the Auxie bodies was carefully noted, statements made by I.R.A. participants and by an Auxie from the second Section who, grievously wounded and left for dead, became the only British survivor.


“It was our job to deal with the second lorry…” wrote Jack Hennessey. “I heard a shot followed by a bomb explosion from the Column O/C’s position. At this time the second lorry was just opposite our position. The Auxies jumped out and tried to find cover. The lorry driver held his seat and attempted to back the lorry out of the position. I was engaging the Auxies on the road. I was wearing a tin hat. I had fired about ten shots… [when bullets passed through Hennessey’s helmet and wounded him in the scalp.] Vice/Comdt. McCarthy got a bullet through the head and lay dead.”


It seems that, as the first tender slowed, Guthrie had conformed to its movements, so as to maintain the 50 yards separation distance. When the first shot was fired, Section Leader W.T. Barnes, who was in charge of the second tender, yelled orders to dismount. According to the positional map of the Auxie corpses, two were very close to the first tender, three were over 100 yards further back and the remainder lay individually within 100 yards of the second tender, which was 300 yards away from the first Crossley. This would be consistent with Guthrie reversing back over 200 yards as men were jumping from it, while at least one man was attempting to cover them by (accurately) firing at the I.R.A. ambushers. It is unclear why Guthrie’s tender stopped where it did, still inside the killing zone of the ambush. Maybe he was wounded, maybe he misjudged and ran off the road into the bog, maybe he decided to join the fight, using his revolver. The surviving Auxie believed that the Crossley’s differential, which was notoriously unreliable, suddenly broke.


The firefight did not last long. The ranges were extremely close, and when the I.R.A. gunmen moved down to the road from the rocky outcrops they had initially occupied, it was an affair of Ross bayonets and rifle butts, as the I.R.A. were short of ammunition. The retired small-arms expert, Commandant Murphy, deduced that the Auxies fired 31 rounds from their SMLE service rifles and at most 68 from their pistols. Guthrie emptied his pistol, which, as a former pilot, was the weapon he was most used to firing. He may have been unable to reload it or to get to his rifle. Two I.R.A. men died from bullet wounds and a third was killed when the bolt of his rifle blew out backwards into his face (an uncommon but well-documented hazard of the Ross rifle). Hennessey describes how, once the Auxies had been finished off, Barry’s men started stripping the bodies of their weapons, ammunition and equipment:


“One of our men, Sonny Dave Crowley, shouted to the Column 0/C that an Auxie was running away across country. He was the driver who had been hiding under the lorry and who had slipped out from cover while our men were engaged taking the stuff of the other Auxies. Some shots were fired at the fleeing Auxie, but he got away… “


‘Disappeared’


In Father Patrick Twohig’s words [slightly abridged], Guthrie stumbled back towards Macroom “though the winter darkness, rain and cold, alone, wounded and despairing. He called at Twohigs of Cooldaniel, and asked to be driven into Macroom. They pleaded that the horse was indisposed. Once he left, word was passed on. He passed Dromcara Bar, where the Dromeys have been for over a hundred years, and down the bog road towards the Gaeragh marshes. He was trailed from the Bar first by the O'Mahony brothers, Jerry and John, who were then joined by Danny and Mikey O'Shea. A message was sent to Louis Dromey, the local I.R.A. Commander. At the "cross of four roads" they lost him in the darkness. They headed for the wilderness crossing and passed him sitting in a bush. He said "Good Evening". They walked on a little, then returned. He said "If I had ammunition for this, you fellows wouldn't take me". He threw out his empty, now useless, revolver. Louis Dromey arrived and a council of war was held. There were no alternatives. He was taken to a section of the Annahalla bog, shot and buried.”


Guthrie was shot on the evening of 28 November 1920. Reports that he was held for two days before being killed are not credible and are probably due to Guthrie being confused with two other ‘C’ Company men, Mitchell and Agnew, who were abducted earlier in November, held for interrogation and executed before being buried in a bog at Rusheen (their bodies have never been found up to this day).


After the 1922 Anglo-Irish Treaty ended the war, the British Government made official inquiries about a number of Crown Forces personnel among ‘the Disappeared’. The Free State Government replied: ”Lt. C. J. GUTHRIE, R.A.F. This officer escaped from the


scene of the Kilmichael ambush on 26th (sic) November, 1920, and ran in the direction of Macroom Town. He was captured within two


miles of the town, convenient to a marsh land known as “The Garagh” where he was shot and buried. The exact place of burial cannot be located.”


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