Finland, Norway and the Easter Rising

The flagship of the small flotilla which sailed to Ireland at Easter 1916 was called by the planners of the expedition the Aud . The Aud’s first baptismal launching name was evocative; it was christened the Castro . It was owned by the Wilson line of Hull and was almost new when taken as a prize by German destoyers early in the war. The Castro was renamed by its captors the Libau (a port in Latvia) and at Lübeck was fitted out for its voyage to Ireland under Lieutenant Karl Spindler. The cover story which Spindler spread in Lübeck was that he was going ‘to take aboard troops in Libau which were to carry out a “coup” in Finland. That sounded quite credible’.[1] After the Libau slipped through Danish coastal waters the crew painted out Libau and wrote in letters a yard and a half long Aud-Norvege . The Finnish coup, credible indeed, was carried out in 1917 with the help of the German bayonets of General Von Der Goltz, but in 1916 the Finns had to stand behind the Irish in the queue for German help. Karl Spindler and the Aud raced with Casement’s submarine to land a cargo of Russian weapons (seized perhaps by Finnish Jägers fighting on the Eastern front) with which to arm the Irish volunteers.[2] These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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• Clandestine Japanese activity in the Baltic during the Russo-Japanese war

  A R G Griffiths•Journal of Baltic Studies•1987

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