Arrest of Roger Casement

On the night of 20–21 April 1916 the German submarine U-19 landed three men in Tralee Bay, on the west coast of Ireland: Roger Casement, Robert Monteith and Daniel Bailey. That same day Casement was arrested by the Irish police. The British chronology of the war records the event under 20 April. On the evening of that day U-19 reached the bay, but the three men got ashore in the early hours of 21 April, Good Friday, and Casement was detained a few hours later.

Casement was one of the best-known figures among Irish nationalists. As a British consul he had become famous for his reports on atrocities in the Congo Free State and on the Putumayo river in South America, for which he was knighted in 1911. After leaving the service he devoted himself to the cause of Irish independence, and from the autumn of 1914 he was in Germany. There he tried to form an Irish Brigade from Irish prisoners of war held in the camp at Limburg, but only about fifty men volunteered. In the spring of 1916 he learned that the leaders of the Irish Republican Brotherhood were preparing a rising at Easter, and that the Germans were providing only a single shipment of arms for it, without officers or soldiers. He concluded that such help doomed the rising to defeat, and wanted to reach Ireland to stop it. The Germans agreed to take him by submarine. The first boat assigned, U-20, broke down, so in mid-April Casement and his companions sailed on U-19. She was commanded by Raimund Weisbach, who a year earlier had been torpedo officer on U-20 at the sinking of the Lusitania.

U-19 was to meet a ship carrying German arms in Tralee Bay, but the rendezvous did not take place. The Aud was waiting in another part of the bay, and nobody came out from the shore to meet her. Early on the morning of 21 April Weisbach launched a collapsible boat, in which the three men rowed to Banna Strand, about 12 kilometres north-west of Tralee. The boat capsized in the surf. Casement, weakened by a recurrence of the malaria he had caught in Africa, was unable to go any further. Monteith and Bailey set off for Tralee to find the local Irish Volunteers, while he hid in the ruins of an old ring fort, known as McKenna’s Fort, near the village of Ardfert.

Local people found the abandoned boat and notified the Royal Irish Constabulary barracks at Ardfert. A sergeant and a constable searching the area came upon Casement in the ring fort and detained him in the early afternoon. Buried pistols and ammunition were found nearby. Casement gave a false name, but was soon recognised. He was taken to the police barracks in Tralee. According to accounts from the cell, he managed to pass a message through a local priest to the Volunteer leaders that the rising should be called off. The Kerry Volunteers did not attempt to rescue him, because they had been ordered from Dublin not to fire a single shot before the rising broke out. The next day Casement was taken via Dublin to London, where he was interrogated at Scotland Yard by the head of the Criminal Investigation Department, Basil Thomson, and the Director of Naval Intelligence, Captain Reginald Hall. Bailey was detained soon afterwards and began to talk; Monteith managed to hide and later escaped to the United States.

The rising broke out in Dublin on 24 April, when Casement was already in a British prison. At the end of June he stood trial in London, charged with high treason for recruiting prisoners and seeking German help. On 29 June 1916 he was sentenced to death. During the trial the British authorities showed influential people and journalists typescripts of Casement’s alleged diaries describing his homosexual life, which weakened support for the campaign for a reprieve. The authenticity of these so-called Black Diaries was disputed for decades. His appeal was dismissed, and petitions for clemency, supported among others by Arthur Conan Doyle and George Bernard Shaw, had no effect. Casement was hanged in London’s Pentonville Prison on 3 August 1916.