You’ll never beat the Irish, at least when it comes to online polls. A vote to find “Britain’s greatest foe” is being led by Michael Collins, who is comfortably ahead of Napoleon and Rommel.
Irish internet users take pride in ensuring their choices, however unlikely, come out top in such polls. In 2002, the Wolfe Tones’ A Nation Once Again was voted the world’s best song, in a BBC World Service poll. The Beatles failed to make the top 10.
In 1999, an Irish footballer topped a Time magazine poll to find the person of the century. Such was the support for Ronnie O’Brien, a former shelf stacker from Co Wicklow, over rivals such as Einstein, that Time’s poll website crashed.
Undaunted, the National Army Museum in London has asked the public to help decide which army commander has given British troops “the most trouble”. Organisers have taken steps to stop the online vote being rigged and believe there is no orchestrated campaign behind Collins.
“Last year we ran a poll to find Britain’s greatest military commander and there was evidence of multiple voting,” said a museum spokeswoman. “This time we have introduced software to prevent more than one vote from one computer during a set period of time.”
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Voters are presented with a short list of 20 “outstanding military commanders” who have faced Britain. They include George Washington, a former US president; Louis Botha, who fought in the Boer war; Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey; and Ntshingwayo kaMahole, a Zulu warrior.
Political leaders such as Hitler are not included.
“Our main criterion was that each commander must have led a force against the British in the field of battle,” the organisers say, although several people have pointed out on the museum’s website that, technically, Collins never led an army on a battlefield. However, a similar objection could be levelled at Napoleon, who only personally fought against Britain twice: at the Siege of Toulon in 1793 and at Waterloo.
In its citation, the organisers point out: “Collins was the oustanding leader of the Irish war of independence and fought the British to a standstill. He made much of Ireland ungovernable with an army that never exceeded 3,000 volunteers at any given time.”
Yesterday, Collins was leading the field, with just over 700 votes compared with 234 for Napoleon, 160 for Rommel and 101 for Washington. Currently in fifth place is Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, who led a four-year campaign against the British in East Africa.
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However, winning the vote would not mean Collins is automatically crowned as “Britain’s greatest foe”. Instead, the top five in the vote when it closes on March 30 go forward to a “final” to be held at the museum on April 14.
At the event, each of the commanders will be championed by a leading historian, followed by a vote of those present. Organisers say the aim is to highlight the achievements of Britain’s most celebrated enemies, “but also to draw attention to some of our lesser-known adversaries”. These include Akbar Khan, a young Afghan commander, who led his country’s forces against Britain in the early 1840s.
Collins’s lead in the poll has prompted a lively debate on the museum’s website. “Legend? Yes. Genius? Yes. Field commander? No,” George Barry commented. “The only two times Collins saw fighting was as an Irish Volunteer captain at the GPO in Dublin in the 1916 Rising and at Beal na mBlath, Cork in August 1922 when his convoy was ambushed.”
Barry argues Collins’s decision to stand and fight rather than flee resulted in his death, a poor military decision. “This is not an attempt to denigrate him but to prove that, unlike others on the list, he was certainly not a field commander along the lines of Rommel, Bonaparte and Washington.”
“Seriously, an Irishman?” commented Nikolai Kutuzov. “How big was the possibility of Collins taking a parade of his soldiers on the Mall while defeated Londoners looked on?”
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Collins’s supporters say his skill was in guerilla warfare, tactics later imitated by other revolutionary movements, and he would not have been interested “in puerile victory parades down the Mall in London”.
Those who want to vote (for Collins) go to nam.ac.uk.