Qualla: Crossbarry Ambush

Crossbarry Ambush: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit El Gringo (talk) (Uploads), CC BY-SA 3.0. By half past five in the morning, the volunteers were in position. Tom Barry's column had only forty rounds per man and roughly an hour, by his own reckoning, before British troops in twelve different directions converged on the crossroads at Crossbarry and closed the trap. About a hundred IRA men against twelve hundred soldiers and Auxiliaries. Barry had decided that running would mean dying. The only way out was through.

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Crossbarry Ambush: The Twelve Dark Days

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit El Gringo (talk) (Uploads), CC BY-SA 3.0. What brought everyone to this small West Cork crossroads was a month of disasters. On 4 February 1921, the 3rd Cork Brigade's commander Charlie Hurley had been shot at a safe house. Two more men were killed in their beds on the 14th by Black and Tans. The Upton train ambush on th...

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Crossbarry Ambush: An Hour at the Crossroads

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit El Gringo (talk) (Uploads), CC BY-SA 3.0. The first British lorries appeared in the IRA's sights at eight o'clock. Twelve vehicles, by Barry's count. The volunteers opened fire from between five and ten yards. At that range nobody missed much. The British took heavy casualties and many men fled. The volunteers stripped t...

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Crossbarry Ambush: Counting the Cost

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit El Gringo (talk) (Uploads), CC BY-SA 3.0. Casualty figures from Crossbarry vary, as they often do for fast and chaotic actions. The British acknowledged ten dead and three wounded. The Royal Irish Constabulary memorial later recorded one RIC constable and six soldiers killed. The New York Times, reporting the next day, g...

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Crossbarry Ambush: What the Ambush Meant

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 3.0. Crossbarry was one of the largest engagements of the Irish War of Independence. It mattered less for what it killed than for what it proved. A flying column with little ammunition and no fixed position had broken out of a planned encirclement by a force more than ten times its si...

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 3.0