German bombs on Ireland

In the early morning of 2 January 1941, at around 6.45, eight bombs fell in a single line on the slopes of Mount Leinster in County Carlow, near the hamlet of Knockroe, not far from the small town of Borris. One of them destroyed the Shannon family’s house, killing three women. That same night bombs also fell in several other counties in the east of the country, and in the morning on Dublin as well. The following night, shortly before four in the morning of 3 January, two high-explosive bombs wrecked houses on Donore Terrace, South Circular Road, in the capital. The fragments bore German markings. Ireland, which had held steadfastly to neutrality since September 1939, found itself under German bombs for the second night running.

Under 2 January one often reads that German bombers attacked Ireland “for the second night running”. The statement is accurate but needs to be made more precise: the first wave of bombs fell on the night of 1–2 January and on the morning of 2 January (Carlow, Kildare, Meath, Wexford, Wicklow and the Dublin suburb of Terenure), the second on the night of 2–3 January (South Circular Road). Some accounts move Terenure to the night of 2–3 January, or list the seaside town of Bray among the places hit; contemporary reports and local tallies, however, speak of bombs on Terenure on 2 January and of two parachute mines dropped near the village of Enniskerry, a few kilometres from Bray, in County Wicklow.

A neutral country on the bombers’ route

Ireland had not been entirely safe before. On 26 August 1940 a German aircraft bombed the creamery at Campile in County Wexford in daylight, killing three women, and on 20 December two bombs fell at Glasthule near Dún Laoghaire, injuring three people, with one more near Carrickmacross in County Monaghan. The country lay, however, on the fringe of the routes by which the Luftwaffe flew its night raids in the winter of 1940–1941 on the ports and industrial centres of western Britain: Liverpool, Bristol and Cardiff. Irish observers noticed that German bombers often made landfall on the south-east coast, flew north along it and checked their position against the lights of Dublin, which was not blacked out.

Irish air defence was modest: there were barely a dozen or so guns around Dublin, among them six modern 3.7-inch guns and Swedish Bofors guns, while coast-watching posts could report overflights but not stop them. The government of Éamon de Valera, which only two months earlier had refused the British access to the ports, justified neutrality partly on the grounds that a country without anti-aircraft defences could not afford to take part in an air war.

The night of 1–2 January

According to accounts, the weather over the Irish Sea was bad that night. Bombs fell in County Meath, north of Dublin: five near Duleek and three near Julianstown. No one was hurt. Three bombs fell without casualties at Ballymurrin in County Wexford, and two parachute mines in County Wicklow, near Enniskerry.

Most alarming for the authorities was the attack in County Kildare, on the plain of the Curragh, home to the Irish Army’s main camp. At around 6.45 a.m. eight high-explosive bombs fell roughly a mile west of the town of Newbridge, while incendiaries were scattered over the surrounding farms. Craters pitted the Curragh pastures and the paddocks of the Ballymany stud, owned by the Aga Khan III, and on one farm some 200 tons of hay and straw went up in flames. People and animals escaped unharmed. One bomb failed to explode and buried itself almost two metres into the ground; Irish Army engineers defused it and found German markings on its casing. This became the strongest piece of evidence in the hands of the government in Dublin.

At about the same time eight bombs fell on the slopes of Mount Leinster in County Carlow. They lay in a straight line, which suggests that a single aircraft had jettisoned its whole load at once. The third bomb struck the Shannons’ house at Knockroe, in the parish of Rathanna, directly. Three women asleep in the western part of the house were killed: according to local sources, forty-year-old Mary Ellen Shannon, her sister Bridget, two years younger, and sixteen-year-old Kathleen. Two other members of the family, among them James Shannon, were seriously injured. The dead were buried two days later beside the church at Rathanna. They were the first people killed by German bombs in Ireland since the August tragedy at Campile.

On the morning of 2 January bombs fell on the Dublin suburb of Terenure, in the south of the city. Two hit terraced houses in Rathdown Park, destroying two of them and damaging those nearby; two more landed at the corner of Lavarna Grove and Fortfield Road. According to press reports seven people were injured and no one was killed. These were the first bombs to fall on the city itself.

The second night: South Circular Road

The following night the Luftwaffe carried out a heavy raid on Cardiff in South Wales, in which more than 150 people were killed and bombs wrecked the roof of Llandaff Cathedral. Single aircraft appeared over Ireland again. At 3.55 a.m. on 3 January two high-explosive bombs landed behind the houses of Donore Terrace on South Circular Road, in a densely built-up working- and middle-class part of Dublin between today’s boxing stadium and Donore Avenue. Nos. 91 and 93 collapsed completely, and, according to various tallies, anything from several dozen to around fifty buildings nearby were damaged. Among them were Donore Presbyterian Church with its church school and the synagogue on South Circular Road, at the heart of Dublin’s small Jewish community, then popularly known as “Little Jerusalem”.

According to the city’s air-raid precautions report 22 people were injured, according to other tallies 20; no one was killed. The American weekly Time reported that among those taken to hospital were a rabbi with his wife and daughter, and wrote, with some exaggeration, of the “destruction” of the synagogue. The city’s air-raid precautions service brought the last casualties out of the rubble within half an hour. According to the press of the day some forty families had to leave their damaged homes.

Protest and Berlin’s response

The Irish government was in no doubt about where the aircraft had come from. Joseph Walshe, secretary of the Department of External Affairs, instructed the chargé d’affaires in Berlin, William Warnock, to lodge a “vigorous protest” over the bombing of the Curragh and the violations of Irish airspace, and the government reserved the right to compensation. British radio stressed with satisfaction that German markings had been found on the fragments.

Berlin prevaricated. On Saturday 4 January the Associated Press attributed to a German Foreign Ministry spokesman the statement that the bombs in Ireland were “English or imaginary”. On 7 January the German minister in Dublin, Eduard Hempel, told Walshe that the spokesman had said no such thing, but had merely declined to comment before a reply was given to the Irish government. In Berlin Warnock was told that the Reich government had ordered an inquiry, which so far had produced a “negative” result; should that result change, however, Germany “would not refuse to express regret and pay compensation”. The Germans asked to examine the fragments, remarked that British involvement should not be ruled out, and reproached the Irish newspapers for supplying arguments to British propaganda and the American press by prejudging the Reich’s guilt. Later the explanation was also repeated that the airmen had mistaken the east coast of Ireland for the west coast of Britain.

Mistake or warning?

Why the bombs fell on Ireland is still not known with certainty. The simplest explanation points to navigation: in bad weather, with cloud and strong winds, bomber crews easily lost their bearings over the sea, and those that failed to find their target or were fleeing night fighters jettisoned their bombs so as to return to base more safely in a lighter aircraft. The pattern of the bombs in Carlow and Kildare, dropped in sticks on open ground, would point that way. A second hypothesis links the incidents to electronic warfare (PL): from the autumn of 1940 the British had been jamming and distorting the German radio navigation beams, which could lead bombers off course, although no one could predict exactly where their bombs would fall. Winston Churchill himself admitted after the war that the later bombing of Dublin might have been an “unforeseen and unintended result” of British interference with the German guidance system.

A third hypothesis, popular in Ireland, saw the bombs as a warning. December 1940 had been the most difficult period in Irish–German relations: Berlin wanted to fly new legation staff into Dublin, Dublin suspected that they were officers, and de Valera personally talked the Germans out of the plan (on 6 January Hempel confirmed that the Reich was withdrawing the request). At the same time the question of the Irish ports and of food supplies for Ireland was resurfacing in Washington and London. Historians, however, generally see no coordinated reprisal in the January bombs: they fell in scattered places, mostly on fields, and their victims were people caught by chance.

Place in the war

The January bombs did not change Dublin’s policy. De Valera had no intention either of breaking with Germany or of drawing closer to London because of it; the protest in Berlin was firm, but the matter was to remain an incident between a neutral state and a belligerent. For the Irish, though, it became a warning that neutrality offered no protection against the air war, and a spur to expanding anti-aircraft and civil defence. When the Luftwaffe bombed Belfast in April 1941, de Valera sent Dublin firemen to the North.

The heaviest blow came on the night of 30–31 May 1941, when bombs fell on the working-class district of North Strand in north Dublin. According to official figures 28 people were killed (first reports said 34), about 90 were injured, and several hundred houses were destroyed or damaged. This time the Germans fairly quickly admitted that the aircraft were theirs, expressed regret and promised compensation, while insisting that there could be no question of a deliberate attack on Ireland. Alongside the hypothesis of British interference with the navigation beams, a rumour circulated at the time that the propagandist William Joyce, German radio’s “Lord Haw-Haw”, had announced the bombing of the nearby Amiens Street station – something that was never confirmed.

For the bombing of Campile Germany paid £9,000 in 1943. The remaining claims were settled only after the war: by 1958 the Federal Republic of Germany had paid Ireland £327,000 for the damage caused by German bombing, above all at North Strand. Some residents of the South Circular Road area who sought reimbursement from Dublin’s municipal authorities for wrecked gardens and greenhouses went away empty-handed.

According to Irish tallies, German bombs killed more than thirty people on Irish territory during the war. Compared with the victims of the raids on Liverpool, Coventry or Southampton these were small numbers, but for a neutral state that had refused to join the war at the price of a bitter dispute with London, the nights of 2 and 3 January 1941 were proof that in the air war there were no safe borders.