Thousands of Irish men served in the Second World War, but many discovered that the hardest part of the journey was the one back to Ireland. Through Bernard Kelly’s Returning Home, this piece revisits a forgotten and uncomfortable part of Irish history, shaped by neutrality, secrecy, and a lack of recognition for those who fought.

The book “Returning Home” (2012) by the Galway historian Bernard Kelly investigates the shameful way the estimated 12,000 Irish veterans who returned to Ireland after the Second World War were treated.

Let’s put it like this — it’s a long way from “Saving Private Ryan.”

You would think that after fighting Hitler’s armies,  the returning ex-servicemen would have gotten a hero’s welcome home.

But they didn’t.

Instead, they came back to a country that was scornful of, ignorant of, and indifferent to what they had been through. In many cases, they faced open hostility. Their service in the British forces was seen by many at home as anti-national, almost traitorous.

The book tells the stories of many of these Irish servicemen and women who fought in the war, but I particularly liked the one about a guy called John Kelly who left rural Kilkenny to join the British Army and ended up fighting the Germans in North Africa.

In 1943, after the heat of the battle to liberate Tunis, the capital of Tunisia, he was sitting in a bar in the city center having a drink; also, there celebrating the liberation of the city were some American conscript soldiers.

Hearing his Irish accent, the Americans said, “Say, you guys are neutral, you’re not in the war at all!” Kelly explained that he was a volunteer. The reaction of the Americans was, “Are you goddamn mad or something?”

It was a fair question. Kelly, and thousands of other Irishmen like him, had left the safety of neutral Ireland and risked death or injury to fight in the Second World War. They played their part in defeating Hitler.

But they got no thanks for it when they came home. It’s a disgraceful and shameful part of recent Irish history. It shows how small-minded and inward-looking Ireland was at the time.

Taoiseach Éamon de Valera had kept Ireland neutral during the war while the British and the Americans fought the most brutal and evil regime the world had ever seen.

Whether that decision was morally justifiable,  given the murder and mayhem unleashed across Europe by Hitler,  is arguable. One can take the view that as a weak, newly independent country, we had other priorities.

But at the very least,  the sacrifice made by thousands of Irish people who volunteered to fight Hitler should have been recognized when they came back. After fighting the Nazis, the 12,000 Irish veterans deserved that much.

Instead, they came back to a country where their attitude to them was so poisonous that they quickly learned to keep their war service secret.

Even worse, of the 12,000 Irish veterans,  an estimated 5,000 had deserted from the Irish Army to join the British and fight Hitler,  and they faced potentially severe punishment when they returned home.

All of the veterans also had a practical reason for keeping their mouths shut – they came back to a country that was severely depressed, and being an ex-serviceman did not help in the search for a job.

There was a lot of ignorance in Ireland about the war. Unlike in Britain, where the entire country had been caught up in the war effort and as a result had great admiration for the returning soldiers, the Irish public had little understanding of the veterans’ experiences.

All the Irish public had been through were the minor inconveniences of what de Valera called “the Emergency,” which involved keeping the country on alert and enduring some shortages and rationing.

Even the terminology says a lot about Ireland at the time. The rest of the world was at war. In Ireland, we had “the Emergency.”

Despite the ignorance here, however, by 1945/’46, many Irish people were aware that details of Nazi atrocities were emerging. You would think that this might have changed attitudes. But it didn’t.

“Word of Nazi atrocities were filtering back to Ireland, partly through the media and partly through people like Dubliner Albert Sutton, who visited Belsen soon after it was liberated and saw harrowing scenes there,” Kelly said at the launch of his book.

“But the whole experience of neutrality had opened an emotional breach between the Irish population and the U.K. Censorship, isolation and neutrality meant that while many people in Ireland were well aware of the war, they had no attachment to it. There was a genuine sense of pride and satisfaction that Ireland had avoided the war, despite pressure from London and Washington.

“When ex-servicemen returned their friends and family were delighted to see them, but they encountered indifference from the government and much of the population. There were no bands out to meet them because most people did not see the Second World War as Ireland’s war; it wasn’t something to be celebrated.

“From the government’s point of view, they had not fought for Ireland, so they were not Dublin’s responsibility. As for the bulk of the public, they simply didn’t understand what the veterans had been through,” Kelly said.

One writer quoted by Kelly recalls that in his home city of Cork,  they “were more concerned with the horrors of rationing than with anything that was happening in Europe.” This sums up Irish attitudes at the time.

The whole business is still a very sensitive subject, even today. When Kelly was doing interviews for the book, many of the surviving veterans and the families of deceased veterans asked him not to use their surnames or addresses. For that reason, the servicemen and women are referred to in the book by first name only.

A man called George returned to Dublin from service with the Royal Navy, and he said it felt “as if you didn’t exist — nobody wanted us.”

Another man, William, who left Dublin to join the RAF, was dumbfounded by the ignorance about the war in Ireland. He was told by his neighbors that stories about German concentration camps were simply “British propaganda.”

Another man called Larry, who left Wicklow to join the Royal Navy, was absolutely “shattered” by people’s attitudes when he returned home. He says that his fellow countrymen were interested only in “drinking themselves into oblivion, not a single thought about what was going on beyond the horizon. And they didn’t care a damn either.”

One can understand the anger of many Irish ex-servicemen who had been through a lot during the war, in ways that changed their lives forever. Back home, however, people did not want to know or just didn’t care.

John Kelly, the guy in the bar in Tunis, is an example. He was aboard the Polish ship Chobry when it was sunk off the Norwegian coast in April 1940, and barely escaped with his life. He fought his way through North Africa and stormed ashore at Anzio in Italy in 1944, where he was severely wounded and almost died.

He says he was rescued by a Kerryman, but then was further wounded by an RAF airstrike. He was evacuated and was invalided out of the army afterward.

His brother fought in the Far East. John died in 2009 and there are pictures of him in the book.

But my favorite picture is the one on the cover of the book, which you see here:

The two young men are Michael and Paddy Devlin, both from Longford Town.

Like many Irish from the south, they crossed the border to join the British army in Enniskillen in 1939 at the start of the war. They were posted to different units and fought in France.

Their units were smashed by the German attack in May 1940. Both were evacuated from French beaches. The men survived the ordeal but are now deceased.

Based on interviews with surviving veterans and drawing on a wide array of archival sources, Returning Home explores how the Irish ex-servicemen coped with the frosty welcome they got when they came back to Ireland, with the difficult task of reintegration, their economic difficulties, and psychological problems.

The treatment of deserters from the Irish Army who joined the British to fight in the war is only now being addressed, nearly 67 years after they came home.

(*Editor’s Note: In June 2012, Ireland’s then-Minister for Defense Alan Shatter issued an apology on behalf of the State “for the manner in which those members of the Defence Forces who left to fight on the allied side during the Second World War, 1939 to 1945, were treated after the war by the State.” In 2013, the “Defence Forces (Second World War Amnesty and Immunity) Act 2013” became law in Ireland.)

It’s been a long time coming. It’s disgraceful that it has taken so long.

But of course, the delay did not stop people here from getting all misty-eyed over movies like “The Longest Day” or “Saving Private Ryan” over the years.

Overall, “Returning Home” makes an important contribution to our understanding of Ireland’s connection to the Second World War and Irish participation in it.

It is November 2019, and Arthur Voigt Jr. looks on as a lone piper plays a mournful lament at a remembrance service at the German Military Cemetery in Glencree, County Wicklow. 

Dignitaries from Ireland, Germany, and other European countries have gathered at the cemetery to pay their respects to the German war dead who perished on Irish soil during the two World Wars, while a smattering of locals have also braved the cold November conditions to attend the service.

The German Military Cemetery in Glencree is a cornerstone in Ireland’s post-war relationship with Germany and is a significant site for anyone with German heritage living in Ireland. For Arthur Voigt, however, the connection is far more personal.

Arthur Voigt Sr. was part of a five-man Luftwaffe crew that belly-landed on Rostoonstown Beach, in County Wexford, on March 3, 1941.

The bombardier and navigator were lucky to survive an ill-fated assault on a British tanker in the Bristol Channel unscathed, but the flight’s mechanic, Gerd Rister, was less fortunate.

Rister was hit by machine-gun fire after his pilot, Alfred Heinzel, made the questionable decision to make a second bombing run on the tanker without the element of surprise. For Arthur Voigt, this decision was “pure madness”.

Rister died in the plane moments after the bombing run, but his crew didn’t have time to mourn for him.

With one engine blown out completely and the other significantly damaged, the crew’s Heinkel 111 plane had no chance of making it back to the German base in Brest, in northern France.

Crash landing

Faced with a decision of crash landing in Ireland or Britain, the four surviving Germans chose to make for neutral Ireland in the hope that they would receive more favorable treatment than if they landed in hostile Britain.

And so, the four airmen were to be found on a remote beach in southern Wexford, becoming some of the first German soldiers to crash land in Ireland during the Second World War.

The men were under orders to destroy their plane if they landed in a foreign territory, and set about their task after carefully removing Rister’s body to the sanctuary of a nearby dune.

Voigt took a stick of dynamite from his pocket and placed it under the plane’s partially damaged engine, but soon discovered that none of the men had any matches to set it alight. However, salvation came in the form of a bemused elderly Irishman, who provided a box of safety matches at the behest of the desperate soldiers.

Unfortunately for the soldiers, the dynamite still refused to ignite, forcing Voigt to think quickly.

He ripped a mounted machine gun from the plane and carried it to a nearby dune along with two full magazines before emptying both magazines into the plane. At long last, a bullet made its way into the plane’s fuselage and blew it to pieces. Those were the last shots Voigt fired during the war, and he cast his Walter P38 pistol into a local lake, symbolizing that his fighting days were over.

Unsurprisingly, the commotion alerted Ireland’s defense force,s and an Irish Army officer soon arrived at the scene astride a motorbike to take the men into custody.

They were taken to a local pub, in the tiny village of Tacumshane, where they were given a fry-up, Guinness, and other food and drink that they hadn’t seen in years before they were taken to Wexford Barracks.

Internment

The next day, the men were taken to the internment camp at the Curragh, thus beginning the “best four years” of Voigt’s life and an unlikely and enduring tale of romance.

The men were almost instantly proved correct in their assumption that they were better served by crash-landing in Ireland than Britain, and internment in the Curragh proved to be a four-year holiday from the horrors of war, especially when Hitler made the ill-fated decision to invade the Soviet Union as part of Operation Barbarossa shortly after their internment.

The soldiers were able to enjoy life in a country that largely avoided the perils of the Second World War, earning a salary from the German Legate in Dublin, and taking advantage of the Irish Government’s “honor system”, which allowed internees to come and go from the Curragh so long as they were back before an agreed time.

While British soldiers chose to use that system to their advantage by traveling across the border to Northern Ireland, there was no point in German prisoners doing the same, considering they had nowhere to go.

A Kildare romance

Consequently, Arthur Voigt found himself talking to his future wife at a race meeting in the Curragh as war raged around Europe.

Arthur and his future wife, Sheila, enjoyed a whirlwind romance, spending summer days swimming in the River Liffey or cycling to hurling matches at Croke Park, while spending their nights at dances in Newbridge.

In a bizarre twist of fate, Voigt’s former radio operator, Rudi Hengst, began dating Sheila’s sister, Mona, at the same time. The couple would also end up married, but neither romance was straightforward.

American victory in Japan brought about the end of the Second World War and the repatriation of prisoners of war all over the world.

For the German soldiers who spent the tail-end of the war in the comfortable surroundings of the Curragh, the end of the war meant a return to a country that had been devastated by bombings throughout. For Voigt and Hengst, it meant deportation to East Germany, which was now under Soviet control.

Post-war Germany

Voigt returned to Germany to live with his mother in the city of Leipzig, which had been severely damaged by Allied air raids throughout the war. From spending the “best four years of his life” in Ireland with the love of his life, Voigt now feared being ordered to work in a Soviet salt mine.

Sometime after his return to Germany, Voigt received a letter from the East German authorities ordering him to work in a salt mine. His friends advised him to ignore the letter until the authorities sent a follow-up, which subsequently arrived in 1949.

Voigt faced a decision: either stay and endure the grueling work of a Soviet salt mine or attempt to flee to West Germany. Voigt chose the latter.

The former Luftwaffe bombardier trekked from Leipzig to the West German border, where he was faced with a tributary of the River Eider.

Being a strong swimmer, Voigt undressed and rolled his clothes into a ball before swimming across the wide river one-handed while his other hand clutched his rolled-up clothes.

Like something out of a movie, Russian soldiers had noticed his daring escape, however, and sent a volley of bullets after him as he made his way across the river. Fortunately, none of the Russian soldiers found their target, and Voigt was able to climb to safety on the opposite bank.

Return to Ireland

Voigt spent several years in West Germany thereafter while he attempted to secure refugee status in Ireland. He finally returned to Ireland in 1952 thanks to the help of Frank Aiken, Ireland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs.

From then on, Voigt’s life was far less eventful – a welcome change for a soldier who had seen too much of war.

He joined Bord na Móna as an electrician and married his Irish sweetheart Sheila, with whom he had two children, and lived out the rest of his days in Newbridge, not too far from where he had the time of his life in the Curragh.

Today, Arthur Voigt Jr. regularly visits the German Military Cemetery in Glencree to pay respects to Gerd Rister, the German mechanic who perished on the bombing run that inadvertently sent his father to a new life in Ireland.

“He’d be 100 years old now if he was alive, so I’m sure that any relations he has now would be distant at this stage,” Voigt Jr. told IrishCentral. “I just feel slightly honor-bound to go and pay my respects.”

Voigt Jr. said that his father returned to Ireland with a dream of owning a house and raising a family with Sheila, and that he shied away from his wartime activities until later in life, avoiding calls from friends in Germany who invited him to attend annual gatherings.

“It was only in his later years that he started going back to Germany for an annual reunion of Luftwaffe pilots. He wanted nothing to do with it,” Voigt Jr. said of his father.

At his wife’s behest, Voigt finally agreed to return to Germany, and he enjoyed it so much that he returned every year until he could no longer.

Meanwhile, Voigt Jr. revealed that he traveled to Meyler’s Millhouse in Wexford – the local pub where the four German airmen were briefly detained before being moved to more official quarters. There, the pub owner presented him with his father’s flare gun that had been left behind on March 3, 1941 – the date that changed his life irreversibly.

*Originally published in May 2021. Updated in Feb 2026.