The attack on January 21, 1919, in which two Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) members were killed at Soloheadbeg in County Tipperary, is usually described as the first action of the Irish War of Independence.

However that distinction really belongs to an incident in Kerry almost ten months earlier.

On April 10, 1918, the day after Prime Minister Lloyd George announced conscription would be introduced in Ireland, seven members of the Ballymacelligott company of the Irish Volunteers met to discuss what to do about the impending crisis.

They were John Cronin, Maurice Carmody, Maurice Reidy, John Browne, Richard Laide, John Flynn and Tom McEllistrim. They decided to raid the RIC hut at Gortatlea for weapons to resist conscription.

The raid was planned for the night of Saturday, April 13, while two of the four RIC men stationed in the hut would be out on routine patrol.

While his six colleagues waited on the railway line about sixty yards away, Flynn watched from the railway station for the two policemen to go on patrol.

As the two RIC men left the hut, Flynn saw an opportunity to establish an alibi for himself by conveying a friend home before telling his colleagues that Sergeant Martin Boyle and Constable Patrick Fallon had gone on patrol. He did not realise, however, that they had only gone as far as the railway station to await the arrival of the Cork-Tralee train.

As the train pulled into the station at about 10.25, the six walked up to the hut and knocked on the door. When Constable John Considine opened it, McEllistrim dashed past him and made for Constable Michael Denning inside, while the others overpowered the startled Considine at the door.

Denning grappled briefly with McEllistrim but promptly surrendered, when Cronin entered with a double-barrel shotgun.

"We had the barracks captured in less than three minutes," McEllistrim noted. He and Cronin proceeded to collect the arms in the hut. They took two rifles off a rack and placed them on a table when a shot rang out.

Sergeant Boyle and Constable Fallon, who had seen what was happening from the railway station, had slipped up to the open door of the hut and began shooting, according to McEllistrim.

Browne was shot in the head, while Laide was wounded by a bullet that entered his back and went through a kidney and stomach.

They decided to fight their way out, McEllistrim noted: "We thought at first that we had been surrounded."

"Will we shoot those two prisoners before leaving?" someone asked.

"How can we shoot them with their hands up?" McEllistrim replied.

They took the wounded Laide to a nearby house, from where he was transferred to hospital in Tralee, but he died the following afternoon. Browne never really had a chance, because of the nature of his head wound.

The first press reports were on the inquest into the two deaths. The raid itself was essentially ignored.

But there was a dramatic sequel two months later, when a couple of them sought to avenge their colleagues' deaths. Sergeant Boyle had been promoted to Head Constable, and Constable Fallon became a Sergeant, which added insult to injury in the eyes of the volunteers.

On learning that the two would be giving evidence at a court case in Tralee on June 14, 1918, McEllistrim and Cronin decided to shoot them in The Mall as they were walking through the town from the Court House to the RIC barracks at lunchtime.

They brought two shotguns in a sack into the snug of a pub, where they had a "full view of the main street", McEllistrim recalled.

"We knew that Boyle and Fallon would have to pass that way." It was a busy day in town. About five minutes past one, they saw the two coming down the street.

"There were scores of people passing to and fro," according to McEllistrim. "Cronin was by my side and we dashed together across the street.

"There was great excitement and shouting, and when we got halfway across the street, Boyle and Fallon heard someone shout, 'look out'."

"They turned in our direction and saw us facing them with two shotguns," McEllistrim continued. "They first attempted to draw their guns. We lifted our guns to fire. We were now only ten yards from them. As we did, they flung themselves backwards in a somewhat sitting position on the flags. We took aim and fired."

Fallon turned instinctively and was hit in the back around the shoulder, but made a full recovery. Boyle was missed altogether. McEllistrim and Cronin dropped the shotguns on the spot and raced back through the pub to the rear, "where we jumped on our bicycles and got clear away".

In 1921, in what was really the first book covering the period of would become known as the War of Independence, Cecil JC Street described the attack on the two policemen in Tralee as "a most daring outrage committed in daylight in the presence of over a hundred inhabitants, who were too terrified to interfere or subsequently identify the culprits".

That was a second major incident in Kerry, and it was almost seven months before the Soloheadbeg ambush.

You can learn more about the War of Independence in Kerry in the book 'Rebel Kerry', published by The Kerryman and Mercier Press and on sale at The Kerryman offices in Tralee and all good bookshops.

Kerryman