When Orne-McNeill, who had been interim President of the Republic of Ireland for just 29 days, announced his resignation as a result of the defeat in Dublin and authorized Parliament to take over all the affairs of the country, a coup d'état that threatened to trigger an Irish civil war came to fruition. Just a few hours after McNeill announced his resignation www.biquge.info, the provisional parliament of the Republic of Ireland passed a resolution abandoning the democratic republic and replacing the state with a constitutional monarchy, establishing a new provisional constitution and electing His Royal Highness Joachim, Prince of Prussia, a member of the royal family of the German Empire, as a candidate for the throne of the Kingdom of Ireland. Parliament announced that the Irish Independent Armed Forces would be under the command of Prince Joachim with immediate effect, and that after all British troops had been expelled from Ireland, they would be crowned as King of Ireland.

The three continents of Europe, Asia and Africa, as well as the Atlantic, Pacific, and Mediterranean Seas, were all reduced to battlefields, and hundreds of millions of people were involved. In the eyes of the discerning man, this was a naked political bargain, in which the Irish paid a huge price for the throne in exchange for the full support of the Germans for their armed independence - the independence that the Irish had coveted for centuries, and the Germans had achieved both the strategic goal of weakening Britain and expanding the sphere of influence of the Hohenzollern royal family.

Despite the defeat in the war at sea, the flag of the British Empire still flies in all corners of the world, the troops and supplies provided by the Commonwealth countries are still gathering at an alarming rate, and the British royal family, government troops and even most ordinary people cannot accept the great shame of slipping from the peak to the dark trough in half a year, and the crisis at home is undoubtedly the most direct damage to the foundation of the country. When the British announced that the Irish had chosen Prince Joachim of Germany as their candidate for the throne, the British government reacted in the strongest possible way by declaring that any force that supported Irish independence would be regarded as an enemy by the British, and that the British army would indiscriminately exterminate all those involved in the armed rebellion in Ireland.

The rare appearance of the word "extermination" alone shows that the British have been poked in the real sore spot this time.

The German submarine forces deployed in the waters of Ireland were thus ushered in a feast. They spotted dozens of convoys, large and small, between the British and the island of Ireland, and although the British Navy dispatched a large number of escort ships, the skilful and sophisticated German captains took every opportunity to attack. Within a week, as many as 35 British ships were torpedoed, and these transports were either laden with soldiers or war materiel, so that at least five or six thousand British officers and men were killed, and tens of thousands of tons of munitions and equipment sank to the bottom of the sea.

The British navy did not fail to achieve nothing at all costs, sending large numbers of British Commonwealth troops to the island of Ireland, bringing the British army against the German-Irish forces to an unprecedented size, and then launching a ferocious strategic counteroffensive from the two strongholds of Dublin and Belfast. The Irish independence armed forces supported by the German army could not resist the British attack at all, the military towns in the north and southeast of Ireland changed hands one by one, and the British army invested a large number of cavalry troops, the offensive advanced quickly, a large number of Irish armed men and German officers and soldiers who came to Ireland in the name of voluntary fighters did not have time to retreat and were surrounded, and finally became British prisoners of war, and the situation of the Irish War of Independence was unprecedentedly grim.

The brutality of the Commonwealth troops burned and looted along the way, and the brutality along the way was very different from their previous restraint in Ireland......

On 4 March, after the British occupation of Wicklow, Wexford, and Watford, Cork Harbour, the glorious place where the Irish had fought their war of armed independence and had twice been chosen as the seat of the Provisional Government of Ireland, was once again attacked by British troops. At this time, the two main forces of the Irish Volunteers, the 1st and 2nd Corps, were exhausted and demoralized after retreating, and they thought they would resist the enemy's attack in Cork Harbour, but they received orders to continue to retreat and retreat to the line of McLuum and Bandon west of Cork Harbour before settling down.

The task of defending Port Cork was given to the Combined Corps, consisting of thirteen thousand German marines and seven thousand Irish independence fighters. In the face of the attack of the 1st Canadian Cavalry Division, the Allied soldiers fought with great poise, using heavy machine guns and field guns to break up the charge of the Canadian cavalry. In just half a day, more than 3,000 well-trained Canadian cavalrymen were strewn across the field, while the coalition forces suffered fewer than 100 casualties.

Upon learning of the presence of the elite German main force in Port Cork, two British Home Divisions, a combined Anza-New Zealand Division, and the Canadian 2nd Army, which had been targeting Limerick, quickly assembled as if they had been attracted by a magnet. Most of the British artillerymen fighting in Ireland used mules and horses to tow their cannons, and their normal marching speed was relatively slow, but the news of the heavy damage of the Canadian 1st Cavalry Division spurred them on the road day and night, and reached the front line in Cork with astonishing efficiency. As a result, the German-Irish forces holding on to Cork Harbour had to fight against the British with 20,000 troops, and the difference in strength between the two sides was huge, but the coalition force that had won the Battle of Limerick not long ago was full of fighting spirit. Before the arrival of the British, they used the standard of trench warfare on the Western Front to dig fortifications, used the water network of the Li River basin to build layers of defense, cleared the waterway with minesweepers, and brought in a large number of heavy weapons, including field artillery, by sea.

The most reassuring thing for the German soldiers and their Irish allies was that since the outbreak of the war, the Ares of War, who had repeatedly beaten the British army and had not yet tasted defeat, had been personally directing the defensive deployment in Cork Harbour.

On 7 March, the British 9th Infantry Division, announced four months earlier, launched a roundabout attack west of Cork Harbour with the support of the remnants of the Canadian 1st Cavalry Division, attempting to encircle the defenders of Cork Harbour, but the British infantry attack failed to frighten the defenders, who only broke through the opponent's outpost and were halted by the heavy blows of the defenders' field artillery groups. The British artillery immediately launched suppressive fire. The standard configuration of German artillery - but also the standard weapon of choice for the Bulgarian and Ottoman Turkish armies - the 77 mm M96 Krupp gun, although it was repeatedly beaten by the French 1897 75 mm rapid-fire guns on the Western Front, its range and rate of fire had a significant advantage over the British army's 15-pounder BLC field guns, and the artillery positions built in advance by the Allied forces had relatively complete bunkers, and the British artillery only used woods or villages as shelter and did not have the ability to resist the enemy's shelling. Moreover, the British reconnaissance and school firing planes were never able to seize air supremacy in Port Cork from the German naval aviation, but were used as live targets for shooting training by enemy fighter pilots, and it was difficult for British artillery to get air support, but the allied gunners could bombard British artillery positions with their eyes closed.

In the case of unfavorable artillery battles, the British army, which had several times the superiority in troops, quickly gave up the intention of encircling Port Cork, and they launched simultaneous offensives in the east and north directions, and the leaping infantry advance and positional infiltration tactics were faintly visible in the demeanor of the German army on the western front. In the northern section of the outer line of the Port Cork line, the coalition forces lost several positions in the battle and then strategically abandoned others, so that the British commander thought he had made a breakthrough in this direction. At the same time, the coalition forces deployed in the eastern section of Cork Harbour held their trenches and mobilized two old protective cruisers anchored in Cork Harbour to participate in the battle, so that the British fought fiercely in this direction for three or four hours without success. As a result, the British army adjusted the focus of the attack, and when the 11th Home Division was fully engaged in the onslaught, the combined division of Australia and New Zealand was sent into battle. By dusk, the British 11th Home Division had reached the edge of the city and was able to wobble to the harbor.

After nightfall, what little optimism the British officers and men had was blown away by the heavy shells that rained down from the sky. During the day, two German battle cruisers, cruising more than 100 nautical miles away, quickly approached Cork Harbour and launched artillery bombardment of British positions under the guidance of the signal of the land observation post. The trenches seized by the British from the Allied forces were enough to withstand the bombardment of ordinary field guns and medium-caliber howitzers, but the 12-inch high-explosive shells fired by the German war cruisers were far more powerful than the land artillery, and each shot brought a violent shock that shook the ground and shook the mountains, and the British officers and soldiers wedged into the Allied defense line were immediately dizzy. The German battleship's artillery fire began to extend to the rear of the British troops, and the German marines rushed forward with Mauser pistols, Mauser short rifles and Madsen light machine guns.

The British were not unprepared for the appearance of German warships, deploying army artillery to a position within reach of the harbor and ambushing submarines and mine-striking ships near Cork Bay. However, there was a duck-shaped body of water between Cork Harbour and Cork Bay, with narrow upstream and downstream channels that could easily be cordoned, and the water in between was wide enough to allow large ships such as battlecruisers to maneuver, and the German Navy had detailed hydrographic information on this water, and with the help of the Irish, it was able to operate at night.

In the early morning of the next day, the coalition forces that had broken into the British defense zone during the counterattack retreated to their own positions, and the front lines of the attacking and defending sides in Port Cork were basically restored to their original state, but after this night's hard fighting, the spirit of the British Commonwealth army had suffered a heavy setback, the 11th Infantry Division from the British mainland was disabled, and the combined Australia-New Zealand Division, which had experienced a night battle for the first time, was close to collapse, and the Canadian troops assembled in the rear of the battle line were on standby, and the camping camp was 20 kilometers away from the shelling position of the German battleships, but it did not escape. Nearly a third of the men were wounded or killed in the shelling, and the army headquarters and several nearby camps were missing, leaving only a huge crater on the ground.

(End of chapter)