- [Narrator] North King Street, Dublin, Ireland,
April 26th, 1916.
Crouched behind captured barricades,
a British officer issues the order every soldier dreads,
"Fix bayonets."
His platoon complies, sliding the long blades
onto their Lee-Enfield rifles.
A momentary pause as the soldiers wait,
collecting their courage.
"Charge!"
Shouting, the British surge over the barricades
and up the street.
Rifle fire booms from the tall,
tightly-packed buildings surrounding them
and blasts out from a barricaded pub.
The officer leading the charge takes a bullet.
His men drop, killed or wounded.
The attack lasts mere seconds as without cover,
the soldiers are easy targets for the Irish nationalists
sheltering behind the street barricades.
The survivors withdraw, wasting no time.
A few nationalists, desperate to replenish their supplies,
leap from cover to grab weapons and ammunition
from the slain.
And they'll need every round,
for blood is now trickling into the gutters
of North King Street.
And as more men give their lives for the conflict
and more civilians find themselves caught in the crossfire,
that trickle soon swells to a torrent.
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Two days after the start of the Easter Rising,
British efforts were focused on isolating and crushing
small Irish nationalist enclaves
that had dug in throughout Dublin City Center.
The Four Courts and neighboring North King Street,
where the British launched their doomed bayonet charge,
was one such rebel stronghold.
The area was a tangle of slum housing
and narrow streets and alleys,
a nightmare for any attacker.
So the British mostly tried to tunnel through walls,
going from one building into the next,
rather than risk the open street.
Nationalists fired from windows and rooftops
or from behind their barricades,
some moving from house to house
to ensure they kept the element of surprise.
And the British claimed that, when cornered,
the rebels would throw away their weapons
and pretend to be civilians,
even going so far as to use women as shields.
Now, this may have been true
or it may have simply been a justification
to excuse what happened next,
or it might have been both.
By Friday, the bloodshed around the Four Courts
still showed no sign of ending.
And, furious at the casualties sustained,
British soldiers burst into a series of homes
late Friday night.
In an event that became known
as the North King Street Massacre,
they shot or bayoneted 15 unarmed men,
none of whom were taking part in the Rising.
Such were the realities of rebellion.
For the nationalists, North King Street
was just another example of British brutality,
added to centuries of oppression and injustice.
And to the British, North King Street
was the inevitable result of the nationalists
intentionally blurring the lines
between soldiers and civilians,
thus bringing death and ruination
down upon their own people.
And as the uprising raged on,
many Dubliners actually shared that British view.
They saw the Rising as a betrayal of the homeland,
especially since hundreds of thousands of Irishmen,
including Irish nationalists,
were giving their lives in the struggle overseas
against Imperial Germany.
But regardless, as the brutal fighting
near the Four Courts dragged on,
it quickly became clear
that it would not be the bloodiest engagement that day.
Northumberland Road, Dublin, Ireland, that same day.
A column of British soldiers march along the street
through a leafy well-to-do part of Dublin.
They are reinforcements heading into the city,
fresh troops newly arrived from London
and most, just out of basic training.
One man, Adjutant Captain Frederick Christian Dietrichsen,
briefly falls out of ranks
to greet a woman and two children.
They are Dietrichsen's wife, son and daughter.
The captain had sent for them from London,
moving them to Ireland
in hopes to avoid the threat of German zeppelin bombings.
He could have never imagined
an even greater danger awaited them here.
But for now, he's relieved to see that his family is safe.
And they, for their part, will never see him again.
Just a few minutes later,
Dietrichsen and nine other soldiers die in a rebel ambush
not far from Mount Street Bridge.
Caught in the open, the inexperienced soldiers
suffer terrible losses.
And rather than retreat, they're ordered to press on.
So they did, marching directly into a disaster.
At Mount Street Bridge, spanning the Grand Canal,
those British reinforcements
struggled against a small detachment of dug-in rebels.
Ill-equipped and inexperienced,
they suffered 216 casualties,
accounting for two-thirds of all of the British Army losses
during the Rising.
In addition, around 20 civilians were also killed or wounded
while trying to help fallen British soldiers
caught in the open.
Elsewhere, at the Mendicity Institution Charity Building,
26 Irish volunteers made a stand
against repeated British assaults.
Enduring sniper fire and a hail of bullets
from machine guns,
the outpost continued to resist
until they ran out of ammunition.
And this was just one of many similar incidents
across the city.
For the nationalists fighting from the Northumberland Hotel
to the South Dublin Union,
all of whom had resolved to take up arms despite the odds,
this Rising was the ultimate moment of reckoning,
the struggle they believed they had inherited
from their forefathers.
Further west, at the South Dublin Union,
more brutal close combat played out.
The fighting went from building to building
and room to room as the British attempted to pry the rebels
from their positions.
Some of the structures in the complex were taken,
but others remained in the hands of the volunteers.
The rebels fought for every inch.
And when one nationalist officer was severely wounded,
he ordered his men to leave him behind
while he continued to fight on alone,
armed only with his pistol.
Though frontal assaults were the order of the day
in some parts of the city,
in others the nationalists were instead subjected
to ranged bombardment.
British artillery opened fire on Wednesday
from Trinity College and Phibsborough,
supported by a gunboat that had sailed up the River Liffey.
The relentless shelling killed volunteers
and civilians alike
and kept most of the rebels pinned down.
In a matter of days, the grand architecture
of several Dublin neighborhoods had been reduced to rubble.
Meanwhile, outside Dublin, counter orders had insured
that most of the Irish volunteers beyond the city
stayed at home.
Others mustered but didn't engage in combat.
And in Cork, Roman Catholic clergy
successfully persuaded the volunteers
to surrender their weapons to the British Army,
though elsewhere a few chose to ignore their directives
and fight anyway.
The largest entanglement outside Dublin
occurred to the north of the city,
where an Irish volunteer battalion
convinced a string of royal Irish constabulary stations
to surrender.
The last one did so only after a five-hour-long firefight
that left eight policemen and five volunteers dead.
Despite this, there was still next to no support
for the uprising from the general Irish populace.
So the success or failure of the Rising
would ultimately hinge on the events playing out in Dublin.
Sackville Street, April 29th, 1916.
The General Post Office is in flames,
its ruins blazing as a pale of black smoke
joins the dozens of smudges
already blotting the Dublin skyline.
However, the structure is mercifully abandoned.
The nationalist leadership who fought from it
have evacuated at the last minute, tunneling through walls
to escape the all-consuming fire.
They set up a new command post in nearby Moore Street.
Every one of them, from the newest volunteer
right up the chain of command
to Pearse himself, is exhausted.
Some are wounded, some dying.
James Connolly has taken a bullet to the leg.
Food, water, ammunition and medical supplies,
all of it is almost gone.
The volunteers called but Ireland has not answered.
They have no more left to give.
Pearse knows that the cost to the city
has already been appalling and fighting to the death
will only lead to more civilian casualties.
So reluctantly, he orders his men to lay down their arms
and sends a message to the British asking for terms.
The Easter Rising is over.
Pearse, Connolly and the other leaders
of the uprising in Dublin are taken into captivity.
It takes a few days for the surrender orders
to reach the various pockets of rebel resistance.
And after the high emotion and intense combat,
many are reluctant to give up their weapons.
This had been their chance,
their moment to change the history of their country
and avenge centuries of oppression,
and yet they'd failed.
When the last of them finally submitted,
the cost of the uprising became clear.
At the final count, 126 British soldiers,
including 35 from Irish regiments,
had been killed along with 17 policemen.
And among the nationalists, 66 had died.
But the greatest number of dead
(somber music) were the civilians,
260 in all, with thousands more wounded.
Parts of Dublin were in ruins from shelling
and smoke continued to cloud the sky for days.
But while the fighting may have been over,
the dying hadn't yet run its course
because in defeat, the Easter Rising
and the British response to it
would serve as a fault line that would break Ireland apart.
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