Irish Free State offensive 1922 -Irish Civil War

Irish Free State National Army offensive

Date	28 June - late August, 1922
Location	Ireland
Result	Decisive National Army victory

Belligerents

Anti-treaty Irish Republican Army

National Army of the Irish Free State

Commanders and leaders

Liam Lynch

Michael Collins†

Strength

~15,000

14,000

Casualties and losses

300 killed and wounded, 6,000 taken prisoner

185 killed, 674 wounded

The Irish Free State offensive of July–September 1922 was the decisive military stroke of the Irish Civil War. It was carried out by the National Army of the newly created Irish Free State against anti-treaty strongholds in the south and southwest of Ireland.

At the beginning of the Civil War in June 1922, the Irish Free State government, composed of the leadership faction who had accepted the Anglo-Irish Treaty, held the capital city of Dublin, where its armed forces were concentrated and some other areas of the midlands and north. The new National Army was composed of those units of the Irish Republican Army loyal to them, plus recent recruits, but was, at the start of the war, still relatively small and poorly armed.

Much of the rest of the country, particularly the south and west, was outside of its control and in the hands of the anti-Treaty elements of the IRA, who did not accept the legitimacy of the new state and who asserted that the Irish Republic, created in 1919, was the continuing legitimate all-island state. This situation was rapidly brought to an end in July and August 1922, when the commander-in-chief of the Free State forces, Michael Collins, launched the offensive.

The offensive re-took the major towns for the Free State Government and marked the end of the conventional phase of the conflict. The offensive was followed by a 10-month period of guerrilla warfare until the republican side was defeated.

The civil war started in Dublin, with a week of street fighting from 28 June to 5 July 1922 in which the Free State's forces secured the Irish capital from anti-Treaty IRA troops who had occupied several public buildings. With Dublin in pro-treaty hands, the conflict spread throughout the country, with anti-Treaty forces holding Cork, Limerick and Waterford as part of a self-styled independent "Munster Republic". They also held most of the west of Ireland. The Free State, on the other hand, after its taking of Dublin, controlled only of the eastern part of its territory.

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