Grounded in Eire: The Story of Two RAF Fliers Interned in Ireland During World War II

Sidney Allinson is Canadian news correspondent for Britain’s The Army
Quarterly and Defence. He is the author of The Bantams: The Untold Story
of World War I, Jeremy Kane, and Kruger’s Gold: A Novel of the
Anglo-Boer War.

Under the edict of President deValera, the Republic of Ireland was the
only English-speaking nation that remained neutral throughout the Second
World War. Then still called Eire, it impartially interned any military
personnel of either side who landed there. Grounded In Eire is based on
the experiences of the author’s father as an inmate of Curragh prison
camp, near Dublin, after his RAF Wellington bomber crashed. In this
little-known aspect of the war, Canadian Pilot Officer (PO) Bob Keefer
and 30 other Royal Air Force comrades were held behind Irish barbed
wire. Yet, the guards were mostly easygoing, and the internees could
walk free outside on parole to drink in local pubs or socialize with
sympathetic Protestant gentry. The author, a Vancouver lawyer, brings
out the almost unreal circumstances of word-of-honor imprisonment and
writes perceptively about 1941 Irish politics.

Keefer’s narrative style is disconcerting, however. Large segments of
the book quote invented dialogue—page after page of dramatic
conversations that obviously could not have been recorded verbatim at
the time. The book is also riddled with minor errors of fact and
spelling. For example, Keefer misnames the Lockheed Hudson aircraft as
“Loughheed” and then illustrates it with a photo of an obsolete
Boulton-Paul Overstrand bi-plane. Also overlooked by the editor are some
(frequently entertaining) malapropisms, such as “hits like a sledge
slammer,” “affectionado,” and “tow the line.”

Keefer nevertheless did a thorough job of retracing his father’s
steps and researching official records. Documents from Irish military
archives support many of the points in his story, and camp snapshots
taken at the time give faces to names. Finally, PO Keefer and another
Canadian made a successful dash to freedom across the border into
Ulster. They returned to active duty, but sadly, Keefer’s
fellow-escaper was killed within a year. Several other ex-internees made
the supreme sacrifice after returning to air combat. Now, half a century
later, one survivor’s son tells us what sort of men they were.