The bombing of Dublin

On Saturday 31 May 1941, between 1.28 and 2.05 a.m., four German high-explosive bombs fell on the north side of Dublin. The first three, dropped a few minutes apart, demolished houses around Summerhill, blew a crater in the North Circular Road and damaged the residence of the President of Ireland in the Phoenix Park. The fourth, dropped by an aircraft that had circled over the city for half an hour under anti-aircraft fire, fell on North Strand Road, a densely built-up working-class street. Twenty-eight people were killed and some 90 injured, and according to the city archives about 300 houses were destroyed or damaged. It was the most tragic night of the air war in the history of neutral Ireland.

Popular chronologies speak of a “heavy bombing” of the capital of neutral Ireland and “numerous civilian casualties”. There were indeed many victims, but the word “heavy” needs to be qualified: this was not a raid of the kind that devastated London or Liverpool that spring, but four bombs dropped by single aircraft, one of which, on North Strand, killed most of the victims. Everything happened during the night of Friday to Saturday, which is why Irish documents speak of “the morning of 31 May”, while Winston Churchill in his memoirs speaks of “the night of 30 May”.

A neutral country in the spring of 1941

Ireland had kept to neutrality since September 1939, and the Irish referred to the war years simply as “the Emergency”, after the state of emergency declared at the time. In the autumn of 1940 the government of Éamon de Valera refused the British access to the ports on the west coast. German bombs had fallen on Irish territory before: in August 1940 on a creamery at Campile in County Wexford, and in the first days of January 1941 on several counties in the east of the country and twice on Dublin. Six people were killed then, none of them in the capital.

In the spring the war came right up to the border. In April and at the beginning of May the Luftwaffe heavily bombed Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, and de Valera sent Dublin firemen there and spoke of the people of the North as “our people”. Refugees from Belfast arrived in Dublin at Amiens Street station, today’s Dublin Connolly. In the last weeks of May de Valera was also engaged in a sharp dispute with London over the plan to introduce conscription in Northern Ireland; on 27 May Churchill told the House of Commons that the government was abandoning it, because enforcing such a policy would be “more trouble than it is worth”. Four days later bombs fell on Dublin.

The night of 30–31 May

After midnight Irish observers reported aircraft over the east coast, and searchlights came on over Dublin. The aircraft were not flying in formation but singly; they wove about, and some circled over the city. In accordance with procedure, the gunners first fired three flares in the colours of the Irish flag, warning the crews that they were over neutral territory, and then red ones, warning that they would be fired on if they did not leave. A quarter of an hour later the order to open fire was given. The capital’s anti-aircraft defences were modest, however, and its gunners poorly trained; no aircraft was hit.

At 1.28 a.m. the first bomb fell, a minute later the second, and two minutes after that the third. One demolished two houses in Ballybough, near Summerhill. Another fell in the Phoenix Park, by a pumping station next to the zoo, and damaged Áras an Uachtaráin, the residence of President Douglas Hyde, as well as the United States legation building in the park. The third blew a crater in the North Circular Road. Some of the aircraft flew away, and the guns fell silent.

One of the bombers, fired on over Collinstown airfield, today’s Dublin Airport, turned back and reappeared over the city. For nearly half an hour it circled over Dublin, dodging shells and searchlights and coming lower and lower. At 2.05 a.m. it dropped the last bomb. It fell on North Strand Road, between Seville Place and the bridge over the Royal Canal, a few hundred metres from Amiens Street station. The explosion razed 17 houses and badly damaged some 50 more.

The victims

The list of the dead published by Dublin City Archives contains 28 names. Most of the victims lived on North Strand Road. At No. 25 the entire Browne family was killed: 67-year-old Mary Browne, her son Henry, his wife and their four children aged between three and seven. At No. 156 Alice Fitzpatrick was killed with her five-year-old son and her three-month-old baby, and at Nos. 23 and 29 four other members of the Fitzpatrick family. Three of the dead lived on nearby Summerhill Parade, among them a two-year-old boy. The oldest victim was 79.

The figures in the sources differ slightly. In the note of protest prepared on 2 June, the Irish government wrote, on the basis of the first reports, of “at least thirty” dead. On 5 June de Valera told Dáil Éireann that 27 had been killed, 45 seriously injured and 300 houses rendered uninhabitable. A Department of Defence report of 8 July 1941 lists 28 dead, 45 seriously injured and some 300 less seriously hurt; some later publications speak of 29 victims. According to various tallies, some 400 people were left homeless.

The rescuers – firemen, the air-raid precautions services, soldiers, volunteers and the St John Ambulance Brigade – brought the last survivors out of the rubble by 7.30 a.m., according to the Brigade’s report. The Irish Red Cross set up shelter for the homeless in the Mansion House, the Lord Mayor’s residence, and in parish halls. On 5 June de Valera and members of the government walked in the funeral procession of twelve of the victims.

Protest and apology

At noon on 31 May, on de Valera’s instructions, the Secretary of the Department of External Affairs, Joseph Walshe, summoned the German minister, Eduard Hempel. According to Walshe’s note, Hempel was “visibly moved”, expressed his sympathy, gave assurances that the bombing could not have been intentional, and made no attempt to shift the blame onto others. Walshe warned him that German radio must not lay the responsibility on the British. The following night a bomb fell on open ground near Arklow in County Wicklow.

On 2 June Dublin instructed its chargé d’affaires in Berlin, William Warnock, to lodge a formal protest. The Irish government pointed out that at each of the sites hit plastic bomb fragments had been found bearing the German words “Hier nicht anheben” (“Do not lift here”), and that no neutral country had yet suffered such heavy losses in a single bombing; it demanded full compensation and guarantees that German aircraft would stop flying over Ireland. On 10 June the Germans replied that their inquiry had not confirmed the involvement of German aircraft, but since the bombs were German and a very strong wind had been blowing at high altitude that night, it could not be ruled out that aircraft blown off course had dropped them without knowing where they were. The Reich government expressed its “sincere regret” and its readiness to pay compensation at a date to be fixed later. Dublin announced the apology on 19 June and took its promptness as proof that the attack had not been intentional.

A mistake, the beams or a warning?

The causes of the bombing remain uncertain to this day. The explanation most often given is a navigational error. In 1999 a German living in Canada, who gave his name as Heinrich, said on Irish radio that he had flown that night in a pathfinder aircraft and that his squadron was meant to bomb Belfast but had come over Dublin by mistake; his account could not be fully verified. Some historians point out that the last bomb was dropped by an aircraft that had been under fire over the city for a long time, whose crew may have taken Dublin for a British city or may have been responding to the fire.

After the war Churchill stated that the bombing of Dublin may have been an “unforeseen and unintended result” of British interference with the German radio-navigation system “Y”. Historians note, however, that in 1941 jamming could at most have made it harder for crews to receive the signals, not have steered them over a particular different city.

In the memory of the people of North Strand a third version lived on: the bombs were supposedly a warning, a punishment for the help given to Belfast, or an attempt to hit Amiens Street station. Colonel Edward Flynn recalled years later that Lord Haw-Haw, the English-language voice of German radio, had earlier announced that the station would be bombed. This announcement has never been confirmed, and the case for a mistake is supported by Berlin’s prompt apology, since in 1941 Germany was anxious to keep Ireland neutral.

Place in the war

The bombing did not change Ireland’s policy. De Valera did not break off relations with Germany, nor did it bring him closer to London; on 5 June he told the Dáil only that a protest had been sent to the Reich government. In July bombs fell once more, without casualties, on Dundalk, but North Strand remained the deadliest German bombing on the territory of the Irish state. A few weeks later most of the German bombers flew east to the war against the Soviet Union.

The homeless were rehoused in new council estates in Cabra and Crumlin, and the owners of destroyed houses were compensated under the war damage legislation of 1941. Germany paid only after the war: the Federal Republic, after the settlement of Germany’s foreign debts in 1953, paid Ireland £327,000 by 1958, chiefly for the damage in North Strand. The Irish government considered more than two thousand claims and paid out some £344,000 in all.

Compared with the thousands killed in London, Liverpool or Belfast, these were small losses, but for a neutral state the night of 30–31 May became proof that neutrality offered no protection against air war. On the 60th anniversary, 31 May 2001, a plaque in memory of the victims was unveiled at the public library in Charleville Mall, which after the bombing had served as the headquarters for the stricken district.