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The Blitz of Belfast
Desmond Devoy
Outside of London, the people of Belfast suffered the largest cumulative loss of civilian life during a single night during the Second World War, and Germany’s infamous Blitzkreig.
The city of Belfast was perhaps the least-defended British city during the Battle of Britain, a situation which led the German Air Force, the Luftwaffe, to launch the first of a series of attacks on April 7th, 1941.
An earlier reconnaissance mission by the Germans on November 30th, 1940 had revealed that Belfast was virtually undefended. There were only four public air raid shelters in the whole city, made out of sandbags, located at Belfast City Hall. Underground toilets at Shaftesbury Square and Donegall Square North were also used by those seeking refuge from the German bombs. Not a single shelter was provided anywhere else throughout Northern Ireland.
Ulster’s capital also had no fighter squadrons to protect it and only seven anti-aircraft guns ringed the city.
While the first attack was deadly enough, the second attack of April 15th was by far the worst to hit the city. As the people of Belfast enjoyed the end of the Easter holiday, more than 180 German planes were taking off from airfields in France, headed for Ulster’s largest city. As the home of the Harland and Wolff shipyards, which supplied many boats for Britain’s war effort, and the Shorts aircraft factory, it was an obvious target.
At around 10:40 p.m., the air raid sirens began to sound. Crowds of people began to make their way to air raid shelters and into the hills around the city. Incendiary, high explosive bombs and parachute mines fell on the city, hitting residential areas like the New Lodge, Lower Shankill and Antrim Road. More than 130 homes are destroyed in Vandyk and Veryan Gardens.
The York Street Mill was cut in half and, as it collapsed, it crushed 42 houses and damaged 21 others. Hundreds of residents spilled out onto Whitehall Road, looking for shelter. About 170 were injured, 46 fatally.
Meanwhile, other bombs fell throughout Ulster. Two parachute mines fell near the Buncrana Road in Derry, killing 15 and leaving 150 homeless. The Newtownards Aerodrome in County Down is targeted, killing 10 guards. About 14 bombs hit Bangor, County Down, killing five and injuring 35.
Back in Belfast, shortly after 1 a.m., a bomb hits a shelter on Percy Street, killing 30 people. Then, at 1:45 a.m., a bomb takes out the Central Telephone Exchange.
During this part of the barrage, amazingly, the anti-aircraft guns were instructed to cease firing, lest they accidentally damage Royal Air Force planes coming to the city’s defence. The RAF Hurricane planes however had already been withdrawn from the sky.
In the wee hours of the morning, more than 140 fires raged throughout Belfast city. Since the city did not have enough manpower to fight the flames, the North’s government swallowed its pride and, at 4:15 a.m., the North’s Security Minister, John McDermott, asked Sir Basil Brooke for permission to ask the neutral Republic of Ireland for help. At 4:35 a.m., Taoiseach Eamon de Valera granted the request for help and two hours later, 70 firefighters from 13 fire brigades from Dun Laoghaire, Dublin, Drogheda and Dundalk sped their way north to help fight the flames.
The Falls Road Baths and St. George’s Market had to be used to store bodies, as the city morgue was overrun with the dead. The unclaimed and unidentifiable bodies are later buried at the City and Milltown cemeteries in mass graves.
That Easter Tuesday, more than 900 people died that dreadful night, under the weight of 203 metric tons of bombs, and 800 fire bombs. More than 100,000 people became refugees as people took to the hills during the attacks to escape the carnage, and about half of the city’s residential homes, about 56,000 houses, were destroyed.
To rub it in, Lord Haw Haw, (aka William Joyce) himself the son of an Irishman, who had lived in County Galway during his formative years, mockingly told the people of Belfast on his Nazi propaganda radio show “Germany Calling,” later that week that “The Fuhrer will give you time to bury your dead before the next attack…Tuesday was only a sample.”
(For those who believe in karma, Joyce was executed on January 3rd, 1946 at the age of 39 by British authorities. He became the second-last person to be hanged for a crime – in his case, treason – other than murder in the United Kingdom. In 1976, Joyce was reinterred to the New Cemetery in Bohermore, County Galway).
All told, around 1,200 people died in the three waves of German attacks between April and May of that year, with a final attack on May 4th, which focused mainly on the docklands area of the city.
If any good came of the attack, it helped to melt away – even if only temporarily – animosities between the nationalist and unionist communities in the city, and indeed, across the island.
As the bombs fell on the city they both called home, some eyewitnesses remembered the scene in one shelter, where opposing groups of Protestants and Catholics took turns singing songs like “The Sash,” and “A Soldier’s Song,” respectively. But then, an ominous hush fell over the shelter as the explosions got louder and closer. Following one barrage, the whole shelter, together, broke out into singing the song “Nearer My God To Thee.”
On April 17th, The Irish Times said, in its lead editorial that “humanity knows no borders, no politics, no differences of religious belief. Yesterday for once the people of Ireland were united under the shadow of a national blow. Has it taken bursting bombs to remind the people of this little country that they have common tradition, a common genius and a common home? Yesterday the hand of good-fellowship was reached across the Border. Men from the South worked with the men from the North in the universal cause of the relief of suffering.”
Eamon de Valera also touched on this theme in a speech, saying “they are our people – we are one and the same people – and their sorrows in the present instance are also our sorrows.” He also lodged a formal complaint with the German government in Berlin.
Sadly, the Northern Ireland government could have taken steps to prevent this devastating loss of life.
But the level of apathy, inaction and incompetence on behalf of both the British and Northern governments to protect the North’s citizens is and was, in retrospect, galling, especially considering what was known in the run-up to the first attack. More than a year earlier, Edmond Warnock, the Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Home Affairs, according to the BBC, resigned, saying “the government has been slack, dilatory and apathetic.”
Even when the Home Affairs Ministry was informed by defence experts that Belfast was a certain target for the Luftwaffe, nothing was done. The Stormont government had even gone so far as to cancel an order for fire-fighting equipment, hoping that the British government would foot the bill for defending the province. However, the North’s politicians made sure to protect their own skin, making sure that the Assembly was painted black to foil an attack.
Just as the memorandum presented to President Bush in the summer of 2001, entitled “Bin Laden Prepared to Strike Within U.S.” now seems hauntingly ominous, so too does the letter from the North’s Security Minister, John McDermott, to Northern Prime Minister John Andrews, dated March 24th, 1941.
In it, McDermott wrote prophetically, that “up to now, we have escaped attack. So had Clydeside [the Scottish port] until recently. Clydeside got its blitz during the period of the last moon. There [is] ground for thinking that the…enemy could not easily reach Belfast in force except during a period of moonlight. The period of the next moon from, say, the 7th to the 16th of April may well bring our turn.” And so it was, twice.