Soldiers enjoying a gym workout at the Curragh, the bizarre ‘prison’

Disorientated as they emerged from their wreck, they thought they were close to their Scottish base. Spotting a pub, they decided to celebrate their survival but when they entered the saloon bar they found it full of Germans in Nazi uniforms who shouted at them to “go to their own bar”. The Nazis pointed at the public bar which turned out to be full of Allied men. To the Canadians it seemed as if they had fallen down a rabbit hole and emerged in some kind of Wonderland where the Second World War had been reduced to a minor rivalry about which side of a pub to sit in. What they had actually discovered were the inmates of the Curragh, a prisoner of war camp that has been described as “Colditz meets Father Ted”. Here guards had blank rounds in their rifles, inmates were allowed to come and go, one officer had his horse shipped from England so he could fox hunt and – crucially for a country that stuck rigidly to the principle of wartime neutrality – Allied and Nazi prisoners co-existed peacefully on either side of a 4ft corrugated iron fence. One of the Allied men was Bud Wolfe, a young American volunteer for the RAF whose Spitfire came down in a peat bog in County Donegal in 1941.

This week a team of archaeologists began to recover his wrecked plane for a series to be shown on the BBC next year. But presenter Dan Snow acknowledges that the truly unique element of the story is the camp in County Kildare to which Wolfe was taken by the Irish authorities. “It was not just the British and their allies who got lost above and around Ireland,” he says. “German sailors from destroyed U-boats and Luftwaffe aircrew also found themselves interned. The juxtaposition of the two sides made for surreal drama.” The Curragh, a wide plain west of Dublin, had been used as a military muster area and training ground for centuries. The camp’s first permanent structures were built for British soldiers preparing for the Crimean War in the 1850s but by the time the Second World War broke out, Ireland was an independent state and determined to stay neutral. Accordingly, Eamonn de Valera’s government made a deal with Britain and Germany under which any soldier, sailor or airman from either side would be interned for the duration of the war. “De Valera was determined that nobody could look at Ireland from the outside and say it wasn’t being completely neutral,” says Professor Clair Wills of Queen Mary, University of London and author of That Neutral Island.

“They had no defences – no anti-aircraft guns, no navy. If they had been bombed it would have been catastrophic. And while Churchill felt personally betrayed by Irish neutrality, everyone else in the British government could see that neutrality was a good deal for Britain.” She says there was a high level of covert intelligence co-operation that the British public were not aware of. Furthermore, keeping Ireland neutral was definitely a better option than seeing it fall to Hitler. The interned servicemen were sent to the Curragh and it turned out to be a very cushy deal indeed. Some 40 British, Canadian, New Zealand, French and Polish airmen received full service pay, dined well in a country where meat and dairy products were unrestricted, had full access to duty-free alcohol, had their laundry done for them, were provided with a radio and newspapers from home and could borrow bicycles to leave the camp.

Some of them even brought their families to live nearby. Meanwhile more than 200 men from the German Navy and the Luftwaffe were treated almost as well. They spent their time planting gardens, making tennis courts, organising exercise classes and occasionally singing Nazi songs to taunt the Allies. All the internees were allowed to attend dances on Saturday nights, signed themselves out for weekend rounds of golf, fishing expeditions and played each other at boxing, table tennis and football. In one match that might be better forgotten the Germans beat the British 8-3. On the Allies’ side of the camp, a Spitfire pilot called Aubrey Covington organised a bar where drinks cost 10 US cents a shot and internees poured their own drinks. They wrote down what they owed in an honesty book. Some of the men felt guilty about the comfort of their situation while the war raged elsewhere. Pilot Officer Wolfe yearned to join the action and broke his parole, escaping into Northern Ireland. To his astonishment he was sent back to the camp by the British authorities – the principle of neutrality was too important to risk. Another time he was caught by the Irish and sent back. Aside from men such as Wolfe, the only truly disenchanted members of the camp were a much larger group of up to 2,000 Irish internees.

“The government rounded up anyone they thought might endanger neutrality – people suspected of IRA sympathies or of being Right wing Quisling types,” says Professor Wills. “They were uprooted from their families and jobs and were often very angry at the loss of their liberty. But from the point of view of the Allied and German men interned there it was jolly nice for them to have been sent to the Curragh.” While the detention of Irish internees has remained central to the story of that country’s neutrality, the PoW element of the Curragh camp became largely forgotten – helped by De Valera’s strict wartime censorship of the media. Knowledge of it was only revived when an English novelist called John Clive stumbled across the facts in the early Eighties.