The Belfast Blitz

At 10.40 p.m. on Easter Tuesday, 15 April 1941, the sirens wailed over Belfast. An hour later the first wave of German bombers arrived over the city, and the last bombs fell before five in the morning of 16 April. According to more recent findings by the Northern Ireland War Memorial, some 180 aircraft reached the target and dropped more than 200 tons of high explosive, including several dozen heavy parachute mines, and some 29,000 incendiaries. Most of them hit not the shipyards and factories but the densely built working-class districts of the north of the city. Several hundred people were killed – about 900 according to older tallies, more than 700 according to newer ones – the highest death toll from a single night raid anywhere in the Blitz outside London. Towards morning the government of Northern Ireland asked neutral Ireland for help, and Dublin’s firemen, with the consent of Éamon de Valera, crossed the border.

The Belfast raid is usually dated to 16 April. The date is correct provided one remembers that it refers to the night of 15–16 April: the British usually speak of it as the Easter Tuesday Raid. War chronologies note under 1 April that “heavy bombing of British cities continues this month”, and under 3 and 11 April raids on Bristol, Coventry and Birmingham. The Belfast raid was the climax of precisely that wave.

April under the bombs

At the beginning of April the Luftwaffe was continuing the spring offensive against ports and industrial centres that it had opened in March with the raid on Clydebank and a heavy raid on London. Some bomber units had admittedly left for the Balkans, where on 6 April Germany attacked Yugoslavia and Greece, but the main forces of Field Marshals Albert Kesselring’s and Hugo Sperrle’s Luftflotte 2 and Luftflotte 3 were still operating over Britain. As in March, the bombers flew deep inland chiefly on clear nights, under a waxing or full moon, which in April fell in the second week of the month.

Bristol, with its port at Avonmouth and the aircraft works at Filton, was bombed on the night of 3–4 April; according to lists of civilian dead compiled from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission register, some 20 people were killed. The mention, found under 3 April, of “another heavy attack” on Bristol therefore needs qualifying: much heavier was the raid of the night of 11–12 April, Good Friday, the last of the six great raids on the city. Bombs fell then on the city centre and on the districts of Knowle, Hotwells and Cotham, destroying the tram network, which was never rebuilt, and some 180 people were killed, according to the same lists. On the morning of 12 April the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who was Chancellor of the city’s university, came to Bristol. Amid the smoking ruins he presided over a ceremony conferring honorary degrees, among others on the American ambassador John Winant and the Prime Minister of Australia, Robert Menzies; some of the professors wore under their gowns the fire service and civil defence uniforms in which they had been fighting fires during the night.

The raids usually placed under 11 April came somewhat earlier. On the night of 8–9 April some 230 bombers struck Coventry, dropping around 315 tons of high explosive and 25,000 incendiaries; a second raid followed two nights later, on 10–11 April. Some 450 people were killed in the two raids and more than 700 seriously injured. Factories, a hospital, the police headquarters and the medieval St Mary’s Hall were damaged, and of Christ Church only the spire was left standing. For a city that in November had suffered the most famous raid of the Blitz, it was a second great calamity. On the night of 9–10 April some 235 bombers attacked the centre of Birmingham: the Midland Arcade and the Prince of Wales Theatre burned down, and St Martin’s Church by the Bull Ring market was damaged. The following night some 245 aircraft bombed the southern and northern districts of the city. According to local figures, the two raids cost Birmingham more than 1,100 killed and injured.

A city that felt safe

Belfast was the capital of Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom, and one of its important centres of war production. The Harland and Wolff shipyard, which employed tens of thousands of people, built and repaired warships for the Royal Navy and merchant ships to replace those sunk by U-boats. The Short & Harland works, a joint enterprise of the shipyard and Short Brothers, produced four-engined Short Stirling bombers and Sunderland flying boats, and the Mackie factory made anti-aircraft shells. The Admiralty used the waters of Belfast Lough as an assembly point for convoys.

Even so, the city was convinced that the air war would not reach it. Belfast lay at the limit of the range of German bombers flying from France and the Netherlands, further than any other large city in the United Kingdom. The government of Northern Ireland – led since November 1940, after the death of the long-serving Prime Minister James Craig (Lord Craigavon), by the elderly John Miller Andrews – had made very poor preparations for civil defence. In the most densely populated city in the country there were some 200 public shelters; the evacuation of children, planned since 1939, had taken in only a few thousand. Only 22 anti-aircraft guns, 16 of them heavy, had been set up around Belfast, searchlights reached the city only on 10 April 1941, and there were no night fighters at all over Northern Ireland. The Germans knew this well: as early as November 1940 one of their reconnaissance aircraft had photographed the city, and the Luftwaffe had selected its targets, from the shipyard and the aircraft factory to the power station, the waterworks and the Victoria Barracks.

On 24 March 1941 the Minister of Public Security, John MacDermott, warned Prime Minister Andrews in a letter: “Up to the present we have escaped attack. So had Clydeside until recently. […] The period of the next moon, say from 7th to 16th April, may well bring our turn.” He was right to the day.

On the night of 7–8 April, when cloud hid Glasgow and Clydeside, some of the bombers sent over Scotland looked for alternative targets. Over Belfast the sky was clear, the lighthouses in Belfast Lough were shining as in peacetime, and radar picked up barely a dozen or so aircraft over the city. For three and a half hours they bombed the port, the timber and grain stores and the Short & Harland works, where they destroyed the hall in which Stirling fuselages were assembled, together with several dozen fuselages. Thirteen people were killed, and another died in hospital. The newspapers wrote of a “wall of steel” protecting the city, and the inhabitants watched the fires from their doorsteps as if they were a show. German airmen, meanwhile, reported that Belfast’s defences were “weak, scanty and inadequate”.

The night of Easter Tuesday

On Easter Monday and Tuesday many of Belfast’s people had the day off. On the afternoon of 15 April spectators at a football match at Windsor Park noticed a lone German aircraft circling over the city. Nobody suspected that Belfast was the Luftwaffe’s main target that night. In the evening Heinkel He 111s, Junkers Ju 88s and Dornier Do 17s took off from airfields in northern France and the Netherlands. According to some accounts more than 200 were dispatched, but around a third failed to find the city. The first wave came in from the Irish Sea, passed Belfast to the east and turned over the lough to attack from the north-west.

The leading aircraft dropped hundreds of parachute flares, which flooded the northern districts with white light – “as bright as day”, as witnesses recalled. But they marked the target badly: instead of the port and the shipyards they pointed to the dense housing west of them, between York Street and the Antrim Road. After the flares came incendiaries and high-explosive bombs of 250 kilograms up to a ton, and parachuted sea mines, which exploded above the ground and flattened whole rows of houses. The first bombs hit the water mains, which later hampered the firefighting; because of the drop in water pressure, firemen time and again stood helpless beside burning buildings. Bombs also struck the Harland and Wolff shipyard, its power station and ships under construction, but the main works came through the raid without heavy damage.

The most terrible scenes were in the brick terraces of the working-class north of the city. In Hogarth Street some 70 people were killed and 40 houses reduced to rubble. A direct hit destroyed the communal shelter in Atlantic Avenue, where 38 people died, and the shelter in Percy Street. The six-storey wall of a flax-spinning mill in York Street collapsed onto Vere Street and Sussex Street, killing nearly 40 residents who had stayed at home. A parachute mine hit Holy Trinity Church, whose tower fell onto an air raid wardens’ post. People who had never before lived through a real raid often ran from their homes into the streets and were killed by splinters and blast; many survived under the stairs. At the same time, several hundred people, most of them Protestant women and children from the neighbouring Shankill Road, found shelter in the crypt of the Redemptorist Clonard Monastery on the Catholic Falls Road.

The defences were all but non-existent. According to the Northern Ireland War Memorial, the heavy anti-aircraft guns fired some 1,700 rounds, and the German airmen judged their fire weak and badly directed. At 1.55 a.m. a parachute mine destroyed the telephone exchange and cut communications with the batteries, which from then on stopped firing altogether; no RAF night fighters came over the city. Bombs kept falling until five in the morning. Individual aircraft also attacked other places: in Londonderry two parachute mines killed 13 or 15 people (the figures differ), in Bangor 5 people died, and at the airfield near Newtownards bombs hit the guard huts, killing 10 soldiers.

Firemen from the South

By around four in the morning the whole northern part of the city seemed to be ablaze. The local fire brigade and reinforcements from the surrounding towns could not cope, and help from Great Britain could not arrive by sea for many hours. The telephones had been dead since 1.45 a.m. At 4.15 a.m. MacDermott obtained from Basil Brooke, the Minister of Agriculture and the only member of the government he managed to reach, consent to ask for help from a state with which Northern Ireland had practically no relations at all. Brooke noted in his diary that he had agreed because “it is of course a question of expediency”. At 4.35 a.m. a telegram was sent to the Irish Taoiseach by the railway telegraph, the only link still connecting Belfast with Dublin.

De Valera, who six months earlier had refused to let the British use the ports and had steadfastly defended his country’s neutrality, agreed at once. Within two hours some 70 firemen with 13 appliances from Dublin, Dún Laoghaire, Drogheda and Dundalk were on their way north. All of them were volunteers, since going abroad lay outside their duties. They crossed the border and worked in Belfast shoulder to shoulder with the local crews until the Northern Ireland authorities sent them home; by then several hundred British firemen had arrived from Clydeside. The neutral state, whose citizens might be killed in a further raid, was also unwilling to expose them any longer. On 17 April The Irish Times wrote that “humanity knows no borders” and that “yesterday the hand of friendship was stretched out across the border”.

On Sunday 20 April, at Castlebar in County Mayo, de Valera said of the people of Belfast: “In the past, and probably in the present, too, a number of them did not see eye to eye with us politically, but they are our people – we are one and the same people – and their sorrows in the present instance are also our sorrows.” The Irish government also sent a formal protest to Berlin. The German minister in Dublin, Eduard Hempel, “visibly moved”, according to a note by the Irish Department of External Affairs, by the number of civilian casualties, offered his condolences and promised to ask his government to confine its attacks to military targets. According to some authors, German propaganda, which had at first triumphantly announced the destruction of Belfast, soon stopped mentioning it at all, so as not to provoke the Irish and Irish Americans in the United States.

The help sent across the border after the night of Easter Tuesday passed into the traditions of both parts of the island. More than 10,000 refugees from Belfast officially crossed it in the following days, and several hundred were cared for by the Irish Red Cross in Dublin.

The toll and the flight from the city

When the last delayed-action bombs had gone off on the morning of 16 April, north and west Belfast lay in ruins. According to the Northern Ireland War Memorial, more than half the houses in the city had been destroyed or damaged, and some 100,000 people had lost, at least temporarily, the roof over their heads. Many churches, two hospitals, schools, the York Road station and the banqueting hall of the City Hall had burned down or been badly damaged.

The city services had been prepared for 200 dead at most. Bodies were laid out in the public baths on the Falls Road and at Peter’s Hill and in the St George’s Market hall, where for several days crowds searched for their relatives. On 21 April more than a hundred unidentified dead were buried in two mass graves in the City Cemetery and the Catholic Milltown Cemetery. The death toll long remained uncertain. Early press reports spoke of 200 dead; for decades afterwards the figure of about 900 was repeated, and some studies give as many as 987 dead and some 1,500 injured. More recent findings by the Northern Ireland War Memorial speak of some 710 killed in Belfast itself that night – nearly 750 including those who died later – and 983 dead in all four raids on the city. Whichever figure is accepted, it was the bloodiest single raid of the Blitz outside London.

The following night, fearing a repeat, tens of thousands of people fled the city. Trains and buses were packed; people left on army lorries and carts, or walked with their bedding on their backs. An Irish officer, Seán O’Sullivan, sent by the government in Dublin to assess the effects of the raid, described an “unending procession to the stations” of people who were “dazed and terrified”. For weeks afterwards thousands of residents left the city every evening to spend the night in ditches, barns and fields; the practice came to be called “ditching”. By June, according to the Northern Ireland War Memorial, up to half of Belfast’s inhabitants had left the city either for good or for the night. People were furious with the government that had failed to protect them, and with the newspapers that had assured them Belfast “could take anything”. The independent Unionist MP Tommy Henderson told the Northern Ireland Parliament that Catholics and Protestants were now sleeping together in the same ditches and barns and were all saying the same thing: that the government was useless.

Its place in the war

For the German staff officers the Easter Tuesday raid was a failure: the bombs had destroyed neither the shipyard nor the aircraft factory. The Luftwaffe therefore returned to Belfast on the night of 4–5 May 1941, this time aiming at the port and at Queen’s Island with its shipyard. In this “fire raid”, in which incendiaries predominated, some 200 people were killed, and the Harland and Wolff shipyard and the Short & Harland works were badly damaged; a fourth, smaller attack followed the next night. This time the Irish fire brigades crossed the border without waiting to be asked. Production at the shipyard returned to normal only in the autumn, and the aircraft factories were dispersed around the surrounding area.

April 1941 was the heaviest month of the Blitz since the autumn. On the nights of 16–17 and 19–20 April London suffered the two biggest raids yet made on it, and from 21 April successive nights of bombing laid Plymouth in ruins. In May came the “May Blitz” on Liverpool and the last great raid on London. After that most of the German bombers left for the east, ahead of the attack on the Soviet Union.

Belfast paid for having been thought safe. The raid laid bare the weakness of the Northern Ireland government, and two years later Andrews had to make way for Basil Brooke. The question of unblacked-out Dublin, whose lights were said to help German crews navigate, and the help sent across the border raised anew the question of Irish neutrality. De Valera did not abandon it: Dublin itself was soon to feel the effects of the air war, as it had before when, in January 1941, German bombs fell on Ireland. But the night of 15–16 April showed that the border dividing the island stopped neither bombs nor human solidarity.