The Belfast Blitz
Tuesday-Wednesday 15th-16th April 1941
Easter Tuesday had been a dull oppressive day but the sky was clearing that
evening as 180 German bombers predominantly Junkers 88s and Heinkel
111s, flew in formation over the Irish sea. The crews had closely studied
photographs taken five months before by a Luftwaffe reconnaissance
aeroplane, and they had memorised their principle targets... die Werft
Harland & Wolff LTD., die Tankskelle Conns Water, das Flugzeugwerk Short
& Harland, das Kraftwerk Belfast, die Grossmuhle Rank & Co... "Long
presumed by both Whitehall and Stormont to be too far from Germany for
concentrated air attack, Belfast was almost defenceless. There were no
searchlights, no night fighters, only two small ballon barrages, only one
RAF Hurricane squaddro9n, only a few scattered and defective shelters, and
only thirty-eight anti aircraft guns in all of Northern Ireland.
As the bombers approached the Ards peninsula, they dropped to 7,000
feet. On the Castlereagh Hills ground crews manned anti-aircraft guns;
Hawker Hurricane Mark Ils sped down the runway at Aldergrove Airport
and at 10.40 pm sirens wailed in Belfast. Casting intense light, hundreds of
flares drifted down; then incendiaries, high—explosive bombs and parachute
mines rained on the city. It was not the industrial heartland but the congested
housing north of the city centre that received the full force of the attack. This
was not the German intention: perhaps the Cavehill Waterworks was
mistaken for the harbour; perhaps a hastily contrived smoke screen at the
shipyards confused the pilots; or perhaps the instruction to take a bearing
on the twin spires of St Peter's on the Falls caused the Germans to overshoot
their targets. The result was a fearful carnage in the New Lodge, the lower
Shankill and the Antrim Road.
At least twenty parachute mines, designed to rend apart the reinforced
concrete and steel of factories and workshops, fell in the New Lodge. Veryan
Gaedens and Hogarth Street, off the Antrim Road, were totally destroyed.
York Sreet Spinning Mill, the largests of its kind in Europe, was sliced in two;
7 an steel of factories and workshops, fell in the New Lodge. Veryan
Gardens and Hogarth Street, off the Antrim Road, were totally destroyed.
York Street Spinning Mill, the largest of its kind in Europe, was sliced in two;
the collapsing six storeys obliterated forty—two houses in Sussex Street and
twenty-one in Vere Street. Oversixty people died when a bomb fell next to
a shelter in Percdy Street. In one house in Ballynure Street sixteen were killed,
nine from one family. Altogether 203 metric tons of bombs and 800 fire-bomb
canisters were dropped in Belfast.
At 1.45am, a bomb fell at the corner of Oxford Street and East Bridge
Street, wrecking the city's central telephone exchange. All contact with Britain
and the anti-aircraft operations control room was cut of, The guns on the
ground fell silent for fear of shooting down the Hurricane Fighter Command.
For another two hours the German aircraft attacked Belfast completely
unopposed. Bombs fell at an average of one every minute.
Around 140 fires now raged in the city and several of these spread into
conflagrations. Just as the Auxiliary Fire Service arrived to fight the great
inferno sweeping across the Antrim Road, the water pressure fell away ~
the water mains had been cracked in thirty places. From his house in suburban
east Belfast J.C. MacDermott, the Minister of Public Security, watched the
flames enveloping the city. As he heard the crash of his windows shattering
he crawled under his desk and, at about 1.30 am, he telephoned neutral Eire
for help. It is likely that he asked Cardinal MacRory to intercede with the
premier, Eamon De V alera. Soon afterwards Major Comerford, Dublin's
Chief Fire Superintendent was getting together thiry volunteers at the Tara
Street station Altogether thirteen fire engines from Dublin, Dun Laoghaire,
Drogheda and Dundalk sped northwards.
As they approached the city outskirts the southern firemen saw smoke
and flames rising hundreds of feet into the air. Horrified at the carnage, one
senior officer in the Chichester Street fire station was found beneath a table,
weeping and refusing to come out. In any case there was little the firemen
could do to fight the flames - hoses were cut by falling buildings, fittings
were often the incorrect diameter, and the water pressure had fallen too far.
Some of the fires continued to burn for another twelve hours.
As dawn came slowly on Wednesday 16 April a thick yellow pall covered
the city. Exhausted air-raid wardens, firemen and ambulance men tore at
the smouldering rubble to bring the trapped, dead and injured to the surface.
’We wrestled with street doors blown halfway down hallways,’ Sam Hanna
Bell remembered. ’From under the stairs of a house we extricated an old
woman still clutching a miniature Union Iack.’ The Rev. Eric Gallagher, then
minister of Woodvale Methodist Church, helped to dig the bodies of fourteen
members of his congregation from the ruins of houses in Ohio Street. The
evening before he had called at a house and he remembered a five—year-old
boy there. ’He sat sitting on my knee for some time, and we were playing
while I talked to the family,’ he recalled. ’I helped to dig him out of the rubble
the next morning.’
On the Crumlin Road army lorries were piled high with corpses and Severed
limbs. Many of the dead were brought into the Falls Road Baths; as mgre
arrived, the pool had to be emptied in order to lay out over 150 corpses,
Andrew McFall, a swimming bath attendant, remembered:
One coffin contained all open » a young mother with her two dead
children, one in each arm. One lovely girl of sixteen lay in a coffin in
her white confirmation robe with blue silk ribbon and black
hair . . . Another son was trying to get his old dead mother's wedding
ring off, but this was impossible. We tried to get the lid on a coffin of
a man with only a stump for a leg. Rigor mortis had set in and I had
to force the stump down to get the lid on . . .
‘Bodies of the poor they were, of the homeless poor, lying in their own shabby
blankets,’ Ioseph Tomelty wrote later. There they lay for three days as
relatives attempted, often in vain, to identify them. Over 200 bodies ‘were
laid out in St George's Market only half the bodies there were eventually
identified. Five days la.ter the unidentified were buried in mass graves
Protestants at the City Cemetery and Catholics (recognised by their rosaries
and emblems) in the Milltown Cemetery. There was even a shortage of horses
to draw the hearses. William Wilton recalled:
We lost 47 Black Belgian funeral horses in the Easter raid. They were
killed by the fumes, not by the force of the blast. We let another '10
horses run loose on the road and picked them all up again next day.
One of them found his way back to my own house at the top of the
The official figures were 745 people dead and 430 injured The actual total
was probably much higher. No other city, except London, had lost so many
lives in one air raid.
Some 6,000 people arrived in Dublin from Belfast including an air-raid
warden still wearing his helmet. Tens of thousands left the city for the
countryside. ’Children clutched their favourite toys,’ the Belfast Telegraph
reported. ‘little girls carrying dollies . . . Many brought with them their pets,
from budgerigars to tabbies . . Of those who remained, 40,000 had to be
put up in rest centres and 70,000 given meals every day in emergency feeding
centres ~ ‘wretched people’, the Right Rev. J.B. Woodburn observed, 'very
undersized and underfed down-and-out looking men and women’. Every
night for several weeks thousands left the city for ditches and fields outside
Belfast. For a time the common experience of hardship dulled the memory
of ancient hatreds A as Andrew McFall observed:
. . . before the raids the Shankill was the Shankill and the Falls was the
Falls and ne'er the twain did meet. But after that big raid at Easter half
the Shankill spent their nights at the Clonard Monastery and it was
amazing the transformation that really came over people . . .
One response by the Ministry of Public Security to the desperate situation
was to issue this order on 19th April: ‘Destroy all dangerous animals at the
zoo immediately.' Two RUC marksmen were sent to Bellevue Zoo and,
the Belfast Telegraph recorded, Head Keeper Dick Foster ‘stood by with tears
strearning down his lace, as the executioners proceeded from cage to cage
and despatched the animals 33 in number, and a vulture’. The animals
included, unbelievably, two raccoons.
