577. The Irish War of Independence: The Violence Begins (Part 2)

26:54And in terms of the personalities, does de Valera's absence in America enable Collins and other figures to attain a greater kind of leadership role? Yeah, while he's away, it's Collins and Griffith, but particularly Collins is growing in stature and importance. And of course, Collins straddles the two worlds in a way that de Valera now doesn't anymore. De Valera is much more on the, even though he had been out with a gun in 1916, that world is, he's now back in the politics side of things where Collins is absolutely straddles both sides of the movement. So with the failure to get a seat at the Paris Peace Talks, it's pretty obvious that if this struggle is going to be won, it's going to be won in Ireland.

27:31and there's obviously the propaganda but there's also the labour movement which plays a big part in this. There's a series of strikes and boycotts I guess. Well there's the Limerick Soviet isn't there? There is which is and it's kind of a term which is bandied around a little bit. The key thing is the strikes that took place at various stages. Four key strikes I think one in support of conscription that we've talked about already in 1919 a general strike in Limerick against the imposition of a special military area where permits needed to come in and out. And the third one, a two-day strike in support of political prisoners and railway munition strike, which ran from May to December 1920, an enormous strike.

28:14And then you have Dublin dockers who refused to handle war material. So all of this had a huge impact later on the British ability to combat the IRA. I should say, by the way, that there was the prospect of recognition from the USSR for the New Irish Republic. And what ended up actually happening was the Dáil got kind of recognition from the International Socialist Conference in Bern in February 1919. But it didn't move quick enough to secure the agreement with Moscow and left it too late. And instead, it was Britain who actually smoothed over its relationships with Moscow, which stopped that recognition coming in the end.

28:54Fidius Albion. So before we get to the break, you mentioned the IRA a couple of moments ago. So the IRA, that's the term now being used for the Irish volunteers. But it never becomes official, does it? I would say termed, it's used always. By 1920, it is the term, the Irish Republican Army, that's pushed out. The thing that struck me reading about this was, I mean, this is a slightly, it might seem an odd and indeed heretical comparison to Irish nationalists, but how similar the people who joined the IRA are to people who joined paramilitary groups, let's say in Eastern Europe, or indeed, a very famous one, the Freikorps, the German paramilitary group is fighting in the Baltic at the same time.

29:33So men who've either spent a couple of years in the war, or perhaps have just missed it, and are eager for action. There's a kind of cult of manliness and heroism and bravado. Is that a fair comparison, do you think? So there are a lot of different groups of people who are involved in the IRA and its ancillary organization and coming them on, men and women who are involved in the war of independence and they were dismissed at the time and condemned as a rabble as corner boys and gurriers. Gurriers. Gurriers is just this phrase that's used to describe the rabble of every town and city with a few intellectuals thrown in at the top of the movement.

30:10That was the idea of it and it really missed the point of what was happening. This is a huge generational shift and I agree I can see the parallels with those organisations that you're talking about. These or men and women in their late teens and in their twenties, most of whom had been born in the 1890s. They were, in very many cases, they were literate, they were educated, they were skilled. They had a group of people who were denied emigration, which was the great Irish safety shoot since the famine, was to go to New York, to go to London, to go ultimately to Australia in later times and South Africa and Argentina, actually, a huge focus of Irish things, but that was denied them during the war.

30:47So they stayed around. But they spanned people from farm labourers and farm workers up to medical students. Again, it's age often that binds them together. Many had been through a Christian brother school education. We should actually have spoken about this, the importance of radicalisation and how history is perceived and how it was taught in various places. There was a brilliant Methodist conference in Belfast after the rising where this guy's turned up, he was a commissioner of education and he says he worried about Ireland because there didn't seem to be enough history to go around to solve or to base every cause on it.

31:22In other words, there was a shared history here which people wished to pull apart. And the nature of the teaching of history was a contested space here. So it was said in the Commission on the Rebellion and repeatedly by people like Mahaffey, who is the Provost of Trinity, and by British castle officials that a huge problem here was the history of rebellion and of rejection of Englishness and of Britishness that was taught in the Irish national schools and then by its Christian brothers. So that's lurking there in the background. There are the ballads that we started with. Now, that wasn't a ballad at the time, but before that you had stuff like A Nation Once Again.

31:58It's A Nation Once Again that's sung when Markovic comes back. And Paul, can I bowl you up a half-volley, to use an English phrase? The sport, isn't there? There is. We'll probably, in the third episode, talk a little bit about sport when it comes to Bloody Sunday and what happened in Croke Park on Bloody Sunday. But what it is, is an Irish imitation of the English Sporting Revolution. The English Sporting Revolution, which saw the construction, people have always played sport, we know that across every society. And in the English Sporting Revolution, what you have is the formalisation of games and they're squeezing them into a modern playing field.

32:33And you get the spread of cricket, most popular field game in Ireland in the 1870s and in the 1880s. We'll be doing an episode on exactly this. Well, rugby and soccer, rugby and soccer as well spread. But the GAA turned that revolution on its head and by founding the Gaelic Athletic Association for the cultivation and preservation of the Irish national pastimes and founded a game, invented a game which had called Gaelic football in opposition to others and reimagined the game of hurling for a modern era. I should say before I finish on the GEA, why the GEA matters in this context of revolution is there are people like Michael Collins and Harry Boland and J.J.

33:07Walsh who learn their administrative skills and come to prominence and confidence through leadership within the Gaelic Athletic Association. And it gives them a status which they can then use elsewhere. And Paul, one other thing before we come to the break. You talked about men and women. Yes. And to pursue Dominic's analogy with the situation in Germany, Rosa Luxemburg, an example of the way that women in the aftermath of the war are stepping forwards and taking a much more prominent role in revolutionary movements than they would ever have done before the war. And the same thing is happening in Ireland, isn't it?

33:39We've talked about Countess Mautschwitz, but there are others as well. Okay, so women matter in the Irish War of Independence in multiple ways. They are, it is true, the victims of violence at various stages. From both sides, you have women who get their head shaved and are also the victim of rapes during this period. There is degrading treatment on both sides, it should be said. There are women who are involved in the IRA. It is so important to remember when you talk about the IRA. The majority of members of the IRA didn't fire a gun. They were there for logistical support. They may be involved in espionage.

34:15They may be involved in the trafficking of guns, in the provision of intelligence, all the ancillary supports that are involved in that. And women did all of those things during those years. And they were also fundamental to propaganda. So you see people like Mary and Muriel McSweeney, whose brother in Mary's case and whose husband in Muriel's case, he died on hunger strike while he was Lord Mayor of Cork. So they went to the United States after the death of Terence McSweeney and they went on a fundraising campaign. Mary spoke to 300 meetings in 58 cities. And again, the most recent biography of her, or the biography of her written by Leanne Lane, does this brilliantly as a series of, she comes on from people, after people like Rosamund Jacob, who are all women who are central to this world of kind of the construction of a national community.

35:09Nationalism, which goes way beyond just those boys who are in their late teens and early 20s. All right. Well, let's get back to the narrative. We're still in 1919. So as we've heard, the Doyle is raising money, the IRA recruiting all these young men, there are women in the organization, the propaganda making converts, the strikes have gained momentum. But so far, if you've been through the fighting on the Western Front, this does not look like an all-out war by only means and that's all going to change when we get through into 1920 and the death toll begins to mount so we will do that side of the story after the break

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37:02Hello, welcome back to The Rest is History. We opened with a misty-eyed and, in the opinion of Dominic, mawkish ballad about freedom fighters on the run. But actually, Paul, so far in this episode, we've had very little fighting. It's basically been Wild West shootouts. So how does the pace start to pick up? When do the British start to realise they are in a war? By the time you get to early 1920, the war is beginning to get much more fierce. So the IRA go after police barracks. And by Easter 1920, there are 350 police barracks around the country which have been destroyed. And the RIC, the Irish police, basically have to withdraw to just the larger towns.

37:44On top of that, there was about 30 courthouses which are demolished, destroyed, and local taxation offices too. And they kept that, this, from the rest of the world. So this is the retreat of the British state. But here's a question. Tom said, when does the British ever, you know, when does it strike them that it's a war? And as we'll find out, there are people all through this story who basically dispute that it is a war. There are kind of British hardliners, diehards, who say we're facing a murder campaign, this is a criminality, pure and simple, and these people are, you know, this is what we're facing.

38:16It's a law and order issue. Just to follow up on that, British power is being projected through the police force or through the army? Through the police force, but then the police force proves unable to do it and the army is around the place as well, always. So I wouldn't separate one from the other. I think you look at it all in the round as crown forces. It's seen as a policing issue. It's seen as a policing issue and that's the problem as well because what happens with the policing issue is that the police are unable to cope. As you mentioned earlier, Dominic, they are leaving the organisation.

38:44There are about 50 policemen a week leaving by the summer of 1920. You need to get recruitment somewhere. So what they do is they recruit unemployed soldiers from Britain and they do that at a rate about 100 a week until June 1920 and these new soldiers or these new policemen wear distinctive khaki and green, dark green uniforms and they become famous in Irish history as the black and tans and this is one of the terms that is used for this war of independence is the tan war because in the popular mind it's remembered some of the things that they did. They are joined also in the summer of 1920 by another crucial group who were involved in again in policing, called the Auxiliaries.

39:26And these are mainly former officers within the British Army. And between both of those forces, you're looking at possibly around 10 ,000 people, and they are famous within Irish history. And in reality, from the reports at the time, for their brutality, for their drunkenness, and for the unrestrained violence, which characterised some of their behaviour in some places. So here the parallel, I would say, is again with what's happening in Eastern Europe, where you have large numbers of ex-servicemen joining paramilitary groups, basically, often because they're unemployed, because there's been a massive economic downturn at the end of the First World War.

40:01So they need a job. They want regular pay. They like having a uniform. They like carrying a gun. But also, I mean, this is a thing that I think is always underappreciated in all these stories. For a lot of these men, it's fun. It gives them a sense of, I mean, rather like joining any paramilitary group, it gives you a sense of brotherhood and belonging and excitement and all of these kinds of things. And they say this. They say this in interviews which were recorded later in the 60s for various television documentaries, where, for example, there's one who was on his way to join the French Legion in early 1920 for a really small sum of money.

40:35And then he goes, the pay here is good. I'm going to join this. It'll put me into fellowship again. That world which he had lived in in the army for years is now recreated in a different context in Ireland. Now, you're right in what you said earlier, Tom. This is not the battlefields of the Somme or Verdun. This is the complete opposite. And it drives people crazy that they do not know where the enemy is coming from, that they're coming from hedges, they melt from the population, they come from it, they kill and they go back into it. And is this a new kind of warfare? In the Irish context, yes, it is.

41:09It is a new kind of warfare. It is seen and it is seen as kind of a prototype guerrilla warfare, which is then taken on in different countries afterwards. I'm not enough of a military historian to say that this is some sort of a pioneering way of fighting. But the way in which it's kind of joined in with the ballads and everything else that we've been talking about, there is a sense, isn't there, that the British are confronting a form of combat that no militarised army has faced before. And this in part must be why they struggle to get a handle on a strategy for coping with it, because no army has had to deal with something like this.

41:47Yes, but it's more than that as well. They are singularly failed by the quality of the leadership in Dublin Castle and in the Viceroy. So Lord French was the field marshal at the time. Now, he wasn't helped by the fact that his sister, Charlotte Despard, was actually in full swing with the Republican movement. He failed to take the Republicans seriously until it was too late. And he was shot in December 1920, or shot at in December 1920 and almost killed. but you had people like Ian McPherson and Edward Scott and people like that who were just overwhelmed by the nature of their tasks, so much so that the head of the British Civil Service, Sir Warren Fisher, was sent to Dublin Castle to have a look at how the castle was run and he wrote a report which is savage on the nature of the castle.

42:32He said it was almost woodenly stupid how it conducted its affairs. So you have a situation whereby you have a creaking administration and then you don't have a unified military command because the police and the army are separate and it's not quite clear. And then you have at the top of this a government who does not know what to do. And they oscillate between, oh, we'll allow for reprisals if someone's killed in an area, but we're not going to go down the route of absolutely going after everybody here and raising the place. So it gets caught in a swinging boat ways argument. So this is one thing that strikes me, that if you're criticising the British strategy, The British are, either you don't do any reprisals, I would say, and you try to kill with kindness, or you're sort of, you know, the Russians in Chechnya, and you just go in and say, listen, we're just going to kill as many people as it takes.

43:22We'll get this done, and we have far more force than you do. And actually, the British completely fall between those two stools. They're never going to go for the sort of utterly brutal raise everything to the ground. They can't, Dominic, they can't. They don't have the legitimacy, they don't have the support at home. You know, they're inhibited, I think, from doing it even if they wanted to. They can't do it with America apart from anything else. And they can't do it because of British public opinion. Because there's enough people in Britain who are appalled at what's going on. The Labour Party sends over delegations.

43:52The Manchester Guardian is filled with articles of people opposing what's happening. But they're still doing enough reprisals to turn opinion against them in Ireland. And really kind of localised, brutal acts. The destruction of Cork, the sacking of Balbriggan, various other places, Bile in County Roscommon, Le Hinch in County Clare, the towns of Trillis and Le Stoll and Kerry. You get these havoc wrought by the Black and Tans or the auxiliaries when they arrive in. There's a magnificent comment by Sir Neville Macready, who gets appointed Supreme Military Commander in Ireland in early 1920. And he is comically pessimistic.

44:36The whole way through this campaign, he's kind of saying it's all awful. He says, whatever we do, we are sure to be wrong. And I mean, he's right. But the world had changed. Like their world had changed. And the British state was also incredibly sick of war. And it was in financial turmoil as well. And it was really clear that if you want to keep a really major army in the field here, It's going to cost you a lot of money that you don't necessarily want to spend. And all the while, there's no obvious political solution. And also there are, as Dominic said, colonial situations in Egypt and India, which may actually be prioritised.

45:17Yes, and you can't be seen to lose Ireland significantly while those situations are unravelling or unless you get to a certain point with them. They're in the horns of a dilemma. They don't know what to do. their legitimacy has been utterly destroyed in large sections of the country. So let's go through to the summer of 1920. We started with that mention of, I joined the flying column in 1916. You couldn't have joined a flying column then because they didn't have them. But they do have them from summer 1920. Why do the flying columns matter? Why do they change things? So, of course, the great thing about ballads are that they don't have to be slavish to history.

45:53They create an atmosphere and an idea. We create an atmosphere, but we're also slavish to history. which is why podcasts are better than balance. So the IRA are changing their tactics? Is that what they're doing? Yes, they are changing their tactics and they go on the run and they're getting more arms. Their arms have been run in from around America. They tried to get Tommy guns from America, which come across through Liverpool. The IRA in England and in Scotland are sending arms over and there's money coming through, so there's a little bit more there. The army, its intelligence is much better than it was previously.

46:26run by Michael Collins in Intel War which was really really important he managed to get four junior members of the detectives in Dublin Castle basically the turn notably Ned Brough and David Nelligan and they gave him names and inspiration and this intelligence war is vital because there are women in this as well And there are typists aren't there? Yeah there are typists and there's people who work in Dublin Castle more generally and there are typists in the GPO Nancy O 'Brien who is a cousin of Collins and people who work on the trains are passing information. And a special unit is set up in Dublin in mid-1919 in which they kill various people.

47:07And that really is flourishing through the 1920s. And this is an army which is developing its power. It runs flying columns around the place. Now, it has to be said that it was very localised, the violence were. There were some counties where it was extremely potent and successful and other counties where there was no real action at all during these years. And is that just because the movement is a kind of bottom-up movement rather than top-down? Yes, it's impossible. Dublin does not run what's happening in the IRA around the country, what the IRA does locally. There is communication and there are weapons flows, but broadly speaking, it's up to local commandants to run them, and that's not a straightforward operation.

47:47So talking about the IRA and its activities on the ground brings us to probably the single most controversial question of this whole subject. This is the issue of whether the violence is sectarian. And I know probably the most contentious book ever written about Irish history by Peter Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies. He published this groundbreaking book, later got a lot of criticism, in which he said, this is an aspect of the fighting that has been undervalued and kind of erased, which is there's a lot of sectarian violence and Protestants are the victims of it in some areas. Of course, there's an awful lot of, we should say there's an awful lot of sectarian violence undoubtedly in the North, in which both sides are carrying it out, but Catholics are predominantly the victims.

48:28But just on the IRA and its violence, do you think there's a sectarian edge to it? I don't think you can make the point that religion is central to Irish identity and to broader identities 100 years ago. I don't think you can make that point and then pretend that there is no sectarian element to what happens in the Irish War of Independence. I am not for a minute saying it was a sectarian war and I wouldn't want that to be mischaracterized. But to imagine that there were not people in the IRA who were sectarian, who disliked Protestants intensely, who were excluded from land ownership or from positions of power and wealth, who had inherited a history in which their people and their religion had been stripped of the land as against others who won't.

49:16I think it is a denial of reality to imagine that there is no sectarian element in it. I think the question is, and it has to be posed on an individual basis, to what extent somebody was motivated by sectarianism or by other impulses in causing them both to join the IRA and then to kill you. You'll notice in a lot of Irish ballads, it's all about dying for Ireland. Nobody really wants to talk about killing for Ireland, but killing is massive in its impact on the lives, obviously, of the people who also do the killing. And it's an extremely difficult conversation for people to have. And Peter Hart, so I was on a train to Belfast.

49:58It's 20 years ago now, more or less. And I ended up talking to somebody across from me in the time when people used to talk to each other on trains before phones really got going. And I had this great chat with this Canadian bloke. and after about half an hour really because I'm obviously not the greatest detective of all time I realised it was Peter Hart and we're going to a conference in Belfast which I was talking at as well and in the way of these things he was a really really nice fella we went for a pint on the way to the conference which softened the blow Belfast at lunchtime is most enjoyable and we walk around the corner into the conference and there's people protesting about him outside.

50:43They've set up a table. They're handing out material against him and his book and his reading of history. And so they view the work as being a scurrilous assault on the legacy of the IRA, particularly in Cork. So what Peter Hart did was he wrote a study of the IRA in Cork during the War of Independence. And it's a brilliant book in large measure. it gives a study of social class it gives a statistical basis around the violence and everything around a really really formidable original piece of scholarship the two controversial parts of it largely speaking are a Kilmichael ambush which was a major ambush run by a man called Tom Barry and we'll come to him in the next episode we will come to Tom Barry and so Tom Barry and the second part of it is the murders of 13 Protestants in the Bandon Valley after the truce.

51:43And Peter Hart charted all of those. And he did so, I think the mistakes he made in them, and he did make mistakes in them, and they are significant and serious mistakes in that his footnoting, first of all, of interviews was inadequate. And that left the door open. And we can pass that off as the fallibility of historical scholarship, which we are all prone to, and to imagine that any of us escape from that is not right. The sense was that Peter Hart had kind of used interviews in a way, however, that were not accurate and that he had invented interviews with people who were dead. Now, I think that's subsequently been proven not to be the case, but that argument still continues.

52:29The second point is a much more important point, And that is the point that he used language to describe what happened in West Cork and in the Bandon Valley in a really loose way, in a way to be provocative, not almost. He used language around ethnic cleansing in some of the stuff that he wrote and so forth. And it was very much of the time of the Balkans and Rwanda. And you can see how this happened. And it is also the work of a historian who's trying to make his name in a field. and you can see it when you do a PhD and you turn it into a book that you can get lured into over, into a use of language.

53:07And he got stuff entirely wrong in my view. And he did, not entirely, but he significantly walked back some of that language. Could I, I mean, just going back to the war itself, could I frame the question in a slightly different way, which is to ask the ideal that dates from the Napoleonic period of Protestants and Catholics as part of a single island, which of course is expressed in the tricola, the green and the orange are both there. Is that starting to fade over already in 1920? Through the 19th century, the identification of Irish nationalism with Catholicism was something that gathered momentum through that century.

53:49It was given a huge amount of momentum by Daniel O 'Connell and his campaigns in the 1820s and onwards. The identification, the growth of power in the Catholic Church and the kind of deal of around education and health that they did with the British government to allow them a sort of a pastoral role and much more is vital in all of this. And the increasing identification of Irishness with Catholicism was well underway by the time there was a revolution in 1916. And you can see that in the poetry that was written and in the beliefs of other things. But there is also a strand of republicanism which utterly rejects the Catholic Church and believes in secularism.

54:28And it's that stuff going to shade in this period. It is well into shade at that period as the nationalist movement expanded, particularly before 1919. So just as we move towards the end of the episode, let's remind ourselves that we are in 1920. The British have been flailing around. They've got a divided command. They don't really have a clear strategy or clear instructions from London, where David Lloyd George is still leading this coalition, this wartime coalition that he has managed to perpetuate after the end of the war, which is reliant on the Tories in particular, and they, of course, are very close to the Ulster Unionists.

55:03So the British finally pass the Government of Ireland Act, and they hope this is going to somehow magically fix the whole issue. And the key thing here is that you're going to have two new Home Rule parliaments, one in Dublin and one in Belfast. And this is massively important because this is what effectively establishes Northern Ireland, which is going to be six counties, three of which, well, two and a half of which are overwhelmingly Catholic. So if you have six counties, Ulster was historically a nine-county province, but the number of Catholics in the nine counties in the 1911 census was about 43%, which was a little bit close to the 50 % rule, which would have left things tricky for the future Northern Ireland.

55:54If you went with six counties, you had a 34 % Catholic population, which was still seen as a big enough area to be viable. But there was enough of a majority, a Protestant majority, on which to do it. So that was chosen. But what this meant, and this is the deep irony of all of this, is that the one thing that Ulster Unionism had been founded on initially was the rejection of the idea of home rule. Any home rule. It wanted only to be ruled from London. And now they're left with the situation whereby they must take, as they see it, their own parliament on a permanent basis to keep them out of an all-Ireland 32-county home-rule parliament.

56:35Right. But they gladly take this. Gladly take it. And in the context of the situation, and you're left then, on the other hand, with a 26-county Home Rule plan, the Government of Ireland Act, a reheating of the 1914 Government of Ireland Act, which is nowhere near enough for Sinn Féin. Right, so this is not going to fix it at all. I mean, it might fix it in the north while leaving a massive Catholic minority, but in the remainder of Ireland, the Government of Ireland Act is kind of irrelevant? Oh, it's entirely irrelevant. Right. So we've reached the autumn of 1920. The conflict's been going on for almost two years.

57:12We began with a misty-eyed ballad, but there's a real edge to the story now. You've described the reprisals of the black and tans in the auxiliaries, houses being burned down, families being driven from their homes and so on. And now we're going to come to the 21st of November 1920, the most controversial day of the entire conflict, the game at Croke Park between the Dublin and Tipperary Gaelic football teams. And that day will go down in history as Bloody Sunday. And Tom, we will be moving now to Croke Park for the next part of the story. And can anybody, is there any way that people desperate to hear that episode with Paul, is there any way they can do that?

57:52Well, Dominic, it will stun you, it will stun Paul, and it will stun all our listeners to learn that there is. Because members of the Rest is History Club can hear that episode right now by signing up to therestishistory.com. And that is a website that no one has ever heard before. The rest is history.com. Go there and you can hear all about the most notorious episode in the entire history of the Irish Revolution. For everyone else, people who don't want to do that, we will be back on Monday and we will see you then. Bye bye. Thanks so much, Paul. Bye bye. Goodbye. Hey everyone, here's that Jaws clip that we mentioned during the break.

58:32You can listen to the whole episode for free on therestisentertainment.com.

58:39there's no cast at this point as well the cast is so last minute for this it was nine days before principal photography was due to start two of the three main parts Quentin Hooper still hadn't been cast nine days before so everyone's ready everyone's ready to go you know the whole unit who were eventually played by Robert Shaw and Richard Rofus exactly in the movie and those two have a massive feud there were so many other different people that they considered now Brody who was actually played by Roy Scheider and it's a brilliant performance. He's so sort of, it's an amazing performance. Yeah, so put upon and like every man, but...

59:11Yeah, I mean, the other people consider Paul Newman, Charlton Heston, Robert Duvall, Gene Hackman, like definitely the last two of those could have done it. Yeah, so I think Charlton Heston was desperate to be in it and Spielberg, again, you know what? He was smart right from the beginning, Spielberg. Yeah. He said, think about Charlton Heston, he's too big a star. Why is he too big? Because you know Charlton Heston always wins. That's the problem. You know Charlton Heston is going to defeat the shark. you don't know what Roy Scheider is going to do. You just don't know. So it's really important.

59:36Roy Scheider has the look of a man who could be eaten. Who could definitely be eaten. You'd be like, yeah, I can see it. I don't know if his agent is going to be saying he's going to be in it, but he can't be eaten. He could definitely be eaten. Charlton Heston eats sharks. Charlton Heston eats sharks. Another, again, another great title for the book. Roy Scheider actually heard Steven Spielberg talking about it at a party. And Steven Spielberg was saying he'd had this idea for how he could get the shark to jump onto a boat. and Porsche I thought I'd like to be in that movie that sounds good I like this kid and he said I would like to be in this movie anyway Charlton Heston by the way vowed never to work with Spielberg after that