A US armored division in Northern Ireland

On 16 May 1942 the United States Army’s 1st Armored Division, known as “Old Ironsides”, arrived in Northern Ireland. It was the first American armored division sent overseas in the Second World War. A few days earlier, on 11 May, its soldiers had boarded the Queen Mary in New York, the great liner converted into a troopship, which thanks to her speed crossed the Atlantic without escort. The date of arrival agrees with the division’s own history. The movement of so large a formation was not, however, a single event: liners carrying troops usually ended their voyage in the Firth of Clyde in Scotland, from where the men were taken on in smaller ships, while heavy equipment and some sub-units arrived in separate convoys.

Operation Magnet

The division’s arrival was the next stage of Operation Magnet, agreed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the turn of 1941 and 1942 during the Arcadia Conference. On 26 January 1942 the first units of the 34th Infantry Division came ashore in Belfast; a second echelon arrived in March, and further ones in May, including the armored division. The Americans were taking over from the British the defence of the province against a possible German landing, which might also come by way of neutral Ireland, and were freeing British units for the fighting on other fronts. By May 1942 more than 30,000 American soldiers were stationed in Northern Ireland, under the command of US Army Northern Ireland Force and the headquarters of V Corps.

In the spring of 1942, however, the purpose of the whole undertaking changed. In April the Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, won the British over in London to a plan under which the United States would assemble a great army in the British Isles within a year for an invasion of France in the spring of 1943. The build-up of troops and supplies was given the code name Bolero. Northern Ireland, beyond the reach of most German air raids and with its ports at Belfast and Londonderry, became one of the first links in that chain, alongside the bases in England where American airmen had been organising since February. The armored division was needed there less for defence than to learn how to fight in European conditions.

Old Ironsides

The 1st Armored Division was formed on 15 July 1940 at Fort Knox, Kentucky, a few weeks after the fall of France had shown what German panzer divisions could do. It was built on a mechanised cavalry brigade and was one of the US Army’s first two armored divisions. In the autumn of 1941 it took part in the great manoeuvres in Louisiana and the Carolinas, and after the attack on Pearl Harbor it began preparing to go overseas. From March 1942 it was commanded by Major General Orlando Ward, a gunner who had earlier served as secretary of the General Staff under Marshall. On 11 April the division moved to Fort Dix, New Jersey, from where it set out for the port.

The division was organised on the “heavy” establishment of the day: its core consisted of two armored regiments, the 1st and 13th, equipped with M3 medium tanks and M3 Stuart light tanks, together with an armored infantry regiment, three artillery battalions, a reconnaissance battalion, engineers and services. It numbered well over ten thousand men and several hundred tanks. Like the whole US Army of 1942, it was well equipped but inexperienced: its officers knew armoured warfare from manoeuvres and from reports on the German campaigns, not from the battlefield.

In Northern Ireland the division set up its headquarters at Castlewellan Castle in County Down, and its units were quartered in camps in the east of the province. Over the following months the local people grew used to tanks, half-tracks and jeeps on their narrow roads and fields. Training on the moors and hills of Ulster was difficult: the ground resembled neither Louisiana nor the desert in which the division would soon be fighting, and ammunition and firing ranges were still in short supply. The soldiers were nonetheless learning how to live in a foreign country, how to work with the British and the basics of logistics in wartime conditions.

Ireland and its neutrality

The presence of ever larger American forces in the north of the island was a sensitive matter for Dublin. The Irish Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera, had protested publicly in January against the arrival of the first troops, calling it a violation of the Irish nation’s rights to the whole island. Washington treated the protest as a gesture for domestic consumption and did not change its plans, and Dublin went no further. Ireland remained neutral, but in practice its neutrality was benevolent towards the Allies: Allied shipwreck survivors and airmen who ended up on its territory were often quietly returned to the north, and the Irish meteorological service passed weather forecasts to the British. The arrival of the armored division in May caused no new dispute.

Place in the war

The plans of spring 1942 soon changed. In July Roosevelt and Churchill abandoned a landing in France in 1942 and decided on a landing in French North Africa. Some of the division’s soldiers met war even earlier: according to the unit’s history, in June 1942 several M3 tank crews under Henry Cabot Lodge, attached to the British Army as observers, fought at Gazala in Libya. That summer, at Carrickfergus in Northern Ireland, the first battalion of American Rangers was formed from volunteers of the 1st Armored and 34th Infantry Divisions, and several dozen of its men took part in the Dieppe Raid in August.

On 29 October the division left Northern Ireland for England, and on 8 November its Combat Command B landed near Oran in Algeria as part of Operation Torch. It was the first American armored division to go into action in the Second World War. In February 1943, at Sidi Bou Zid and in the Battle of the Kasserine Pass, it suffered heavy losses at the hands of Rommel’s forces, and in April Ward lost his command to General Ernest Harmon. The division then fought in Italy until the end of the war, including at Anzio and in the advance on Rome.

Some 300,000 American soldiers passed through Northern Ireland during the war, and in the spring of 1944 the province was one of the areas where preparations were made for the invasion of Normandy. May 1942, when the first American tanks rolled onto the roads of County Down, marked the beginning of that presence in its full, armoured form. It also showed that the “Germany first” principle, adopted by Washington at a time when the Japanese were winning victory after victory in the Pacific, was more than a declaration.