The mission evolved from peace-keeping to ‘peace enforcement’, involving more aggressive (and dangerous) actions to expel foreign mercenaries and prevent civil war. Over a four-year period, 6,191 Irish soldiers volunteered to serve in the Congo but at a high price: 26 Irish soldiers were killed, nine in the Niemba ambush of November 1960 alone. In July 1960 the Irish Army made its first major commitment to a United Nations peace-keeping mission, contributing two battalions (the 32nd and 34th) to a UN force whose goal was to bring stability to the newly independent Congo. All these stories have been made into fairly inaccurate films, but The siege of Jadotville tells a generally accurate story of the inexperienced Irish Army suddenly finding itself in someone else’s civil war in the 1960s and the problems they faced during the battle.

There are many examples of sieges in colonial wars in which Irish soldiers played a part-the Alamo (1836), Little Big Horn (1876) and Rorke’s Drift (1879) come to mind.

The siege of Jadotville tells the story of what happened to 155 soldiers from the Irish Army’s A company of the 35th Battalion who found themselves in the unenviable position of being in a remote mining town far from reinforcements and surrounded by a population who did not support the United Nations in the Congo in 1961. Above: Guillaume Canet as René Faulques, commander of the attacking Belgian and French mercenaries.

Company of heroes movie inaccuracies