Irish Troops with a Vickers .303 MG during the Congo Crisis of 1960.
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Just a little later than 1960 in 1961 as these troops have the 7.62mm FN, earlier Irish contingents in 1960 had the .303 Lee-Enfield rifle
Location is known as "The Tunnel" in Elizabethville, Congo.
The Irish were ordered to take it from the Katangian Gendarmes and White Mercenary Forces.
Lt Pat Riordan DSM, Pte Andy Wickham both lost their young lives in the battle of the Tunnel, Elizabethville.
Looking towards the Vicker's gun emplacement on top of the railway bridge in Elizabethville.
Gunners view.
"By African standards, it was not much - a small but bloody skirmish outside a railway tunnel in a town now called Lumumbashi. Yet the Tunnel provided one of those turning points in Irish self-esteem which is almost impossible to understand today, now that Irishness is associated with an almost excessive self-confidence and international esteem. Forty years ago, the reverse was true.
By 1960, Irish independence seemed to have been a disaster. Ireland had actually grown poorer during the 1950s. A church-ridden culture of philistine authoritarianism and gombeen statism had crushed almost all enterprise. The country produced little but a handful of college graduates who joined the hordes of unlettered emigrants vomiting miserably on the Liverpool cattle-boats, which they shared with Ireland's third export. Irishness meant certain failure. It seemed as simple as that. Until the Tunnel.
High morale
Admittedly, it was courageous for the Government of the day to decide that the Army was sufficiently well-trained and equipped to undertake a peacekeeping mission in the Congo. In fact, it was neither. But what it had, almost uniquely in Irish life, was high morale: and that enabled it to embark upon a seemingly impossible assignment for which it had had, and could have had, absolutely no preparation. For nothing could be further from the Curragh and the Glen of Imaal than the rain forests of central Africa.
A composite battalion, the 36th, was specially put together and trained for its new role under Lt-Col Mike Hogan. It was sent out on its unique peace-enforcing duties in November 1961 to join UN units near the town of Elizabethville, in the breakaway province of Katanga. If they were in any doubt about the gravity of the situation they were in, it was dispelled soon after they arrived, when soldiers attending Mass came under mortar fire from mercenaries and Cpl Michael Fallon of A Company was killed.
The mercenaries and their allies in the Katangan gendarmerie, 150 men in all, were in possession of the railway tunnel, a vital approach to Elizabethville, from which they were able to put down harassing fire on the Irish troops by machine-gun and mortar. Both to implement their UN mission, and to suppress enemy operations against his men, Col Hogan decided to send in the 36th battalion to take and hold the tunnel.
"A" Company, mostly of Dubliners, under Cmdt Joe Fitzpatrick, was to lead the attack. "B" Company, under Cmdt Bill Callaghan, was to make the secondary attack. "C" Company, under Cmdt Dermot Hurley, was in reserve.
At dawn, in pouring rain, on December 16th, 1961 - 40 years ago last Sunday - the Army of the Irish Republic went into action for the first time on a foreign field. Their enemy were battle-hardened Katangans and South Africans who knew the terrain and were holding prepared positions. For the first few hundreds yards, the advancing Irishmen came under sporadic machine-gun and mortar fire, but as they approached their objective, it became more intense, both from the tunnel itself, and from flanking positions in railway carriages.
Fierce fire
The Irish assault was driven home against fierce fire. Leading the attack, Lieut Paddy Riordan, platoon commander, was killed. So too was Pte Andrew Wickham, a signaller, from Wexford. Sgt Paddy Mulcahy from Tipperary was fatally injured.
Six Katangan soldiers were killed. In the light of the next morning, Operations Officer Capt James Fagan saw a dead white mercenary lying on the road. "Who shot him?" he asked. "I did, sir," said a boyish Dubliner nonchalantly.
The men of the 36th Battalion had wondered how good they were. Now they knew. The tunnel was theirs. The thoroughly neglected Irish Army had produced a unit that could live up to the very best traditions of Irish soldiering down the centuries. Almost for the first time since Independence, a wholly Irish institution had been tested in the most trying international conditions, and had triumphed.
No wonder veterans of the Congo were treated as heroes; no wonder that the country, finally, had something to be proud of. So, in its own little way, the performance of the Army in the Congo was a turning point in Irish self-esteem. Here was an example of Irishmen, on the instructions of the Irish Government, and under Irish command, achieving a combat victory in the field.
Words are cheap
Two score years on, the Army is still - in public, anyway - verbally cherished, just as it was in the days after the assault on the tunnel; but words are cheap and guns are not. Governments have consistently behaved as if it is possible to have a standing army without paying for it; and even after three decades of war in the North, the Army has not a single troop-carrying helicopter, and still makes do with a few ancient and risible personnel carriers you could disable with a knitting needle.
With the decision on an order for troop-carrying helicopters soon to be announced, will this Government yet again go down the contemptible road of short-term political and economic expediency, instead of presuming that we have a duty to give our Defence Forces the equipment necessary to do its job over the longer term?
It was one thing for an economically backward country in 1961 to send an under-equipped 36th Battalion into action, and Lt Riordan, Pte Wickham and Sgt Mulcahy to their deaths. We have no excuses today for starving the Army of the resources it needs - aside, that is, from those traditional and frequently used escape clauses filed in the Department of Defence under "m": miserliness and moral torpor.
Source -
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/an-irishman-s-diary-1.342655
also -
https://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/magnificent-a-company-battle-in-the-congo-26845730.html
