The Liverpool May Blitz

At 10.15 p.m. on Thursday 1 May 1941 the first German bomb fell on Seacombe, part of the town of Wallasey on the west bank of the Mersey. So began the series of raids that the people of Liverpool and the whole of Merseyside would later call the May Blitz. For seven successive nights, until the night of 7–8 May, Luftwaffe bombers returned to the largest port on Britain’s west coast. According to figures cited by British museums and historians, a total of 681 aircraft took part in the raids over that period, dropping 2,315 high-explosive bombs, 119 other explosive devices, including parachute mines, and tens of thousands of incendiaries. The most terrible night was that of 3–4 May, when the burning ammunition ship Malakand blew up in Huskisson Dock.

War chronologies record under 1 May the start of seven nights of bombing on Liverpool, “causing widespread damage”, under 4 May another heavy raid on Belfast, and under 8 May the bombing of Nottingham. All three events belonged to a single, final wave of great raids on British ports and industrial centres. The description of Liverpool is accurate: some accounts, including a British domestic intelligence report of June 1941, do speak of an “eight-day” Blitz, because single aircraft still appeared over Merseyside later on, but the great raids came on the seven nights from 1–2 to 7–8 May. The raid on Belfast took place on the night of 4–5 May, and the one on Nottingham on the night of 8–9 May.

The port the war ran through

Liverpool, together with Birkenhead across the river, Bootle to the north and Wallasey, was Britain’s main window on North America. After the fall of France, shipping avoided the English Channel and the ports of southern England, and convoys from Halifax and New York took the northern route round Ireland to the Mersey and the Clyde. Along more than ten miles of quays dockers unloaded grain, meat, oil and steel, and increasingly also weapons and aircraft bought in the United States, which from March were to flow to Britain under the Lend-Lease Act. From February 1941 the Western Approaches Command, which directed convoy escorts in the Atlantic, operated from a bunker beneath Derby House in the centre of Liverpool. For the Germans, destroying the Mersey docks was an extension of the Battle of the Atlantic: whatever the U-boats failed to sink was to be destroyed at the quayside.

Merseyside was no stranger to bombs. The first large raid struck it on the night of 28–29 August 1940; in November a parachute mine killed 166 people in the shelter on Durning Road; and in the three nights of the pre-Christmas Blitz, 20–22 December, some 365 people died. After the winter lull, in line with Adolf Hitler’s February directive ordering the bombing to be concentrated on ports, Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe returned to the coasts in the spring: in March it devastated Clydebank, in April Belfast and Plymouth, and on the nights of 16–17 and 19–20 April it carried out its two largest raids on London. At the end of April bombs also fell on Liverpool. In early May the moon was waxing towards the full, which fell on 11 May; bright nights made it easier for crews to navigate over land and water.

Seven nights

The first two nights, 1–2 and 2–3 May, were a foretaste. Bombs fell on residential districts, churches, shops and quays on both sides of the river; the local press, which was not allowed to name the city, was already writing after the second night of “the heaviest raid this year”. The worst was the third night, from Saturday 3 to Sunday 4 May. According to German figures cited in British studies, close to 300 bombers were sent against Merseyside that night, and from about 10 p.m. they dropped more than 360 tons of high explosive and nearly 50,000 incendiaries. A German communiqué quoted by The Times on 5 May boasted of one of the heaviest attacks ever made on Britain and of a fire “greater than any yet observed during a night attack”. According to the Merseyside Maritime Museum, firemen tackled about 400 fires that night alone.

The centre of Liverpool was ablaze. The great Lewis’s department store burned down; the Custom House, which was demolished after the war, was damaged; and incendiaries gutted the city museum on William Brown Street, together with a large part of the collections that had not yet been evacuated, and the neighbouring library. A bomb hit the hospital on Mill Road, killing patients and staff. A high-explosive bomb pierced the roof of the Anglican cathedral, under construction since the beginning of the century, but bounced off an inner wall and exploded in mid-air, destroying mainly the stained glass. The docks and the working-class districts of north Liverpool and Bootle that adjoined them suffered just as badly.

The bombers came back on the following nights, though usually in smaller numbers. On the night of 5–6 May an incendiary struck St Luke’s Church at the top of Bold Street; it burned down to its bare walls, and its ruin, never rebuilt, became a memorial to the victims of the Merseyside raids. The last of the great nights came on 7–8 May. Bombs fell again and again on Bootle, the small port town north of Liverpool through which a large part of the dock estate ran. In proportion it was the most heavily damaged town in the region: according to post-war figures only a small fraction of its houses came through May unscathed. There a direct hit destroyed the shelter at the Co-operative store on the corner of Ash Street and Stanley Road; the exact number of victims was never established, and the temporary mortuary in which more than 180 bodies had been laid was itself later burned out by incendiaries.

The defences were weaker than the attack, but not helpless. In the spring of 1941 Bristol Beaufighter night fighters equipped with airborne radar were at last beginning to shoot bombers down. According to British figures, nine German aircraft were brought down over the country as a whole on the night of 3–4 May – a high score by the standards of the Blitz, though for a raid by several hundred aircraft it still meant losses of only a few per cent.

The explosion in Huskisson Dock

On the night of 3–4 May the Malakand, a Brocklebank Line ship built in 1919 and loaded with about a thousand tons of bombs and ammunition, lay in Huskisson No. 2 Dock in Kirkdale. Accounts often repeat that she was set alight by a burning barrage balloon that fell on her deck. According to the Merseyside Maritime Museum that fire was put out; the ship caught fire only later, from the burning, bombed-out transit sheds on the quay. Firemen and seamen struggled for hours to bring the blaze under control, but it reached the holds. The Malakand blew up several hours after the raid had ended, on the morning of 4 May. The explosion wrecked the whole of Huskisson No. 2 Dock and the surrounding quays; pieces of hull plating landed more than a mile away, and a two-ton anchor stock came down outside a hospital in Bootle. The Liverpool Overhead Railway, which ran above the docks, was also damaged. The fire burned for 74 hours. According to the most commonly cited figures four people were killed – surprisingly few, given the force of the blast.

The Malakand explosion became the symbol of the May Blitz, but the sum of the damage was more dangerous for the port. According to the Merseyside Maritime Museum, the raids put 69 of the 144 berths out of action, and the tonnage handled by the port fell sharply for a time. Railway and tram lines were destroyed; some 500 streets were closed to traffic; about 700 water mains and 80 sewers were damaged, as were the gas, electricity and telephone networks. Some 9,000 workers from outside Liverpool and 2,700 soldiers were brought in to clear the rubble. Yet the docks never stopped, and the convoys kept coming.

The toll

Counting the victims of the May Blitz took a long time. According to post-war figures cited in British studies, 1,453 people were killed in Liverpool, 257 in Bootle, 28 in Birkenhead and 3 in Wallasey, 1,741 in all, and in Liverpool alone more than a thousand were seriously injured. Other studies speak of about 1,900 dead in the first eight days of May; the difference probably depends on whether those who later died of their wounds and the victims in neighbouring towns are counted. According to the same figures, about 4,400 houses in Liverpool were destroyed and more than 16,000 badly damaged; across Merseyside some 6,500 homes were completely destroyed and about 190,000 damaged. Around 70,000 people were made homeless – according to some figures 51,000 in Liverpool and 25,000 in Bootle. The May raids were the heaviest blow to fall on Merseyside in the whole war, and after London the region remained the most heavily bombed area of Britain: by the end of the war bombs had killed some 4,000 people there.

Rumour and censorship

Censorship prevented the newspapers from giving either the name of the city or the scale of the damage. The people of Merseyside were left feeling that their suffering had been passed over in silence, while the whole world wrote about London and Coventry. Rumours grew in the vacuum left by the official communiqués. A special report on the situation on Merseyside, prepared in June 1941 by the Home Intelligence division of the Ministry of Information, recorded stories of 30,000 dead and treated their popularity as a sign of weakening morale. According to accounts repeated in many later studies, people around the country also said that martial law had been declared in Liverpool, that there were food riots in the city and even peace demonstrations. None of these rumours was ever confirmed, but the authorities in London took them seriously, because they showed how easily prolonged bombing could undermine confidence in the government.

The same report also described real problems. By some estimates as many as 50,000 people left the city every evening to spend the night in surrounding towns and villages, in churches, halls and fields; the authorities decided neither to encourage this exodus nor to obstruct it. Officials, especially in a region divided among many separate local authorities, were criticised as helpless and slow, and among crowds looking for someone to blame hostility towards Jews, foreigners and communists revived. At the same time the report stressed the “remarkable solidarity of families” and the fortitude with which the inhabitants had endured the bombing. Winston Churchill’s government introduced no emergency rule on Merseyside; instead it stepped up help for the homeless, feeding stations and rest centres, through which tens of thousands of people passed every week.

Belfast: the Fire Raid

In the middle of Liverpool’s week, on the night of Sunday 4 to Monday 5 May, the Luftwaffe struck Belfast in strength for the second time. Three weeks earlier, on the night of Easter Tuesday, the bombs had fallen mainly on the working-class districts of the north of the city, while the shipyards and factories had come through the raid almost unscathed. This time the Germans aimed more accurately. The sirens sounded just after midnight, and according to the Northern Ireland War Memorial more than 200 aircraft were heading for the city from France and the Netherlands. The bombers concentrated on the harbour area and Queen’s Island, home to the Harland and Wolff shipyard and the Short & Harland aircraft works, a joint venture of the shipyard and Short Brothers. Some 237 tons of high-explosive bombs and parachute mines fell, together with about 96,000 incendiaries, which gave the raid its character: in Belfast it became known as the Fire Raid.

Industrial losses were heavy. According to the Northern Ireland War Memorial, three nearly completed corvettes burned on the slipways at Harland and Wolff, three loaded ships sank and five others were damaged; no other shipyard in the United Kingdom suffered so much damage in a single raid. At Short & Harland the production hall, stores and drawings were destroyed, and production of Short Stirling bombers came to a halt. The power station, the gasworks, flour mills and the great Belfast Ropeworks, which was still burning a day later, were all on fire. At the height of the raid some 200 fires were raging in the city. Bombs also fell on the densely built districts of east Belfast around the shipyard.

Between about 150 and more than 200 people were killed: older studies give a figure of just over 150, the Northern Ireland War Memorial more than 200. This time the defences were stronger than in April – the number of anti-aircraft guns had been increased to 28 and the balloon barrage reinforced – but they did not stop the raid. Firemen again came from neutral Ireland: according to the Northern Ireland War Memorial some 130 men with engines and ambulances, who went home in the evening. The following night, 5–6 May, only a few aircraft came over the city; 23 people were killed. It was the last of the four raids on Belfast. Despite the damage, the shipyard was back at full production within a few months, and aircraft production was dispersed around the surrounding area.

Nottingham and the decoy fires

As the great raids on Merseyside came to an end on the night of 7–8 May, the Luftwaffe turned to ports in the east and industrial centres inland. On the nights of 5–6 and 6–7 May bombers attacked Greenock at the mouth of the Clyde, and on the nights of 7–8 and 8–9 May Hull. On the second of those nights, from Thursday 8 to Friday 9 May, more than a hundred bombers were also sent against Nottingham and Derby. In Derby the main target was the Rolls-Royce works, which built Merlin engines for Spitfires, Hurricanes and bombers. The British, however, had detected the radio beams of the X-Gerät system that were meant to guide the bombers to it and jammed them, and the raid on Derby failed.

On the bombers’ route to Nottingham, in turn, lay a decoy: in the Vale of Belvoir, near the village of Cropwell Butler, a Starfish site of dummy fires had been lit, which from the air looked like a burning city. According to British studies many of the bombs meant for Nottingham fell on fields. Enough of them fell on the city itself, however, to start 97 fires. Three factories of the Boots pharmaceutical company burned; the medieval St Mary’s Church, where firemen fought a blaze in the transept, and the University College building were damaged; and St John the Baptist’s Church in Leenside and the Stadium Hotel were destroyed. The most tragic hit wrecked the Co-op bakery on Meadow Lane, where 49 workers and members of the Home Guard were killed. According to local figures 159 people died in the city as a whole and 274 were injured. It was the heaviest raid on Nottingham of the whole war: according to post-war figures, eleven raids on the city killed 178 people in all.

Place in the war

The May Blitz was the last great attempt to cut Britain off from the Atlantic with bombs. For a time the port of Liverpool was working with only about half its berths, and German propaganda presented the raid of 3–4 May as one of the Luftwaffe’s greatest successes. Yet the port was soon back at work, and in the years that followed the Mersey quays handled the greater part of Britain’s wartime imports, including a growing volume of American supplies. The last raid on Liverpool came on 10 January 1942; it destroyed several houses on Upper Stanhope Street, including, by chance, the one in which Hitler’s half-brother Alois had lived before the First World War.

The raids of the first half of May brought the Blitz to a close. On the night of 10–11 May the Luftwaffe carried out its last and bloodiest great raid on London, and on the night of 16–17 May its last major attack on Birmingham. After that most of the bomber units, including the whole of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring’s Luftflotte 2, moved east, where under Directive No. 21 they were to support the attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June. In the west there remained chiefly Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle’s greatly weakened Luftflotte 3. The raids on Merseyside, Belfast and Nottingham did not change the course of the war, but their toll – more than two thousand dead outside the capital in a single week – was a reminder that in this war the front line ran through port and factory towns. In Liverpool the memory of those nights lived on in the ruins of St Luke’s, known simply as “the bombed-out church”.