The Curragh is a 5,000 acre open plain, 35 miles from Dublin, just east of Kildare town. During the Napoleonic wars in 1854 a military camp for training soldiers was established here. To this day, the Curragh is the headquarters of the Irish Army.

During World War two the Curragh military base was used as an internee prisoners camp. Between the summer of 1940 and the latter half of 1943 there were about forty RAF internees and about sixty members of the German Luftwaffe. The RAF men were British, Canadians, Poles, Free French and an American who had enlisted in the volunteer force attached to the RAF known as the Eagle Squadron. In the early 1940s there were also dozens of IRA men interned in the Curragh. So here we have Irish army soldiers guarding a very diverse group of prisoners - strange bedfellows indeed! They were all held in their own separate compounds.

With the sanctuary of Northern Ireland so close it was easier for the Allies to escape than the Germans. The latter forces made only one known escape bid which took place in February 1942. Nine of them managed to confuse the guards into letting them out when only eight of them had signed their parole form. One man made his way to Dublin and succeeded in boarding a ship bound for Portugal. Obviously German luck bore no comparison with the proverbial luck of the Irish, the ship made an unscheduled stop in Wales and the German was arrested and imprisoned. Surely a case of jumping from the frying pan into the fire!!

The prisoners were allowed to leave the camp each morning, on condition that they signed the form promising to return that evening!! This parole applied equally to RAF and Luftwaffe and IRA internees alike.

Nowhere else in World War Two did opposing sides find themselves "prisoners of war" together.