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This story was gathered and submitted to the WW2 Peoples War by Oliver Murphy

Patrick Gerald Quinn
Lance Corporal, 6th Battalion,
Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers
Died 13 January 1943

Patrick Quinn was born on 17 February 1907, the second son of Michael and Agnes Quinn. Paddy (as he was known by everyone close to him, even his teachers) was born into a well-off family who lived at 21 Montpelier Hill, Dublin. His father was well known in racing and sporting circles as an affable, liberal-minded man. He owned the then-famous Riding Academy near the Phoenix Park.

Paddy himself was fascinated by horse-racing, and from an early age displayed the same kind of love for riding as his father, his grandfather and others in the family. As soon as he was old enough, he began to help out at the stables, and proved to be an efficient and committed worker. He was said to be an enormous show-jumping fan, and even as a little boy insisted upon attending every equestrian event that the RDS had to offer.

He attended Eccles Street Primary School, where he was a good pupil, though he did not exhaust himself with work. He enjoyed Maths and Irish, but had a dislike for English, which he regarded as slightly superfluous to his needs. He was enrolled as a student of Belvedere College on 3 September 1917. He was referred to by his friends and colleagues as: "Above all else, a staunch Catholic of the old order." He was, by now, an excellent student. In 1918, he came fourth in a class of over twenty boys. He got 100% in his Arithmetic exam in 1919.

Patrick was also renowned for his debating skills (though he made sure that his true feelings came through - at one debate, having won the floor vote against independence, he began to sing " The Fields of Athenry").

He left the school in 1923, and soon progressed into the family business of horse breeding and training. He was an accomplished jockey, having won minor race tournaments in Leinster (though he never actually progressed to going professional), but he was mainly occupied with looking after the horses of the more famous riders. He helped to produce four Grand National winners in the time that he worked at his father's Academy.

On the death of his father in 1934, he took over the reins at the school of riding. In the five years before the war, he doubled the size of the stables and quadrupled the number of horses bred at the stables. He was said to have been an inspired businessman, who led the Academy to a new era of prosperity. Revenues doubled.

In 1939, however, he realised that there were more important things in the world than horses. As the war broke out, he abandoned his fiercely nationalist principles and decided that it was his duty to act for the greater good and to help liberate a continent from Hitler’s control.

He joined the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, an infantry division in the British Army, and was sent to Algeria (at the time a French colony) to fight against Rommel's Afrika Korps in the desert. He was a skilled marksman, and quickly worked his way up the chain of command to Lance Corporal - while not an officer, a commander of a small unit and a man who commanded the authority and respect of his fellow soldiers. He was a popular man, who played a role in the victory in Oran, a major port city. He himself commanded the platoon that took the garrison on the cliff at al-Gafud.

However, his life was brutally cut short in the otherwise successful ‘Operation Electric Sandstorm’ in Tunisia, where Allied troops swept in from the dunes to take the important oil town of Sfax in the Gulf of Benghazi. His platoon was pinned down in the harbour and, drawing heavy machine gun fire from positions on the sea front, was cut to pieces. They fought to the last man; thirty soldiers were lost from his platoon.

Patrick Gerald Quinn is buried in the Massicault War Cemetery in Medjez-el-Bab, Tunisia. He died at the age of 35. He was described in the obituary which appeared in the 1943 Belvederian as ‘loyal, good, sincere and honest, a dear friend and a gallant Irishman.’

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