The Germans targeted Belfast only four times, but the raids had a huge impact on a relatively small-sized city. A small bombing raid took place on the night of 7-8 April, perhaps a test run, followed by a larger assault on the evening of Easter Tuesday, 15 April 1941. A third raid took place on 4-5 May 1941 which saw incendiaries causing major fires, followed by a final raid on 5-6 May. In total, 1,300 houses were demolished, and 5,000 badly damaged. 50,000 other houses sustained some degree of damage.[1]
Easter Tuesday features prominently in public memories of the Belfast Blitz due to its (probably accidental) targeting of residential areas. Up to 750 Belfast inhabitants were killed by German bombs. The northern part of the city was worst affected. Houses and buildings were destroyed around Royal Avenue, Carlisle Circus and Crumlin Road.[2] In the neutral south, Éamon de Valera dispatched fire engines from as far away from Dublin to help put out the blazes.[3]
ARP first aid box. Courtesy of Northern Ireland War Memorial.
Civilians were un-used to ‘total war’. Many people under-estimated the devastation which the enemy could potentially inflict with air-borne bombs. One oral history interviewee, Jean Spiers, recalled her older brothers likening the war to a game of ‘cowboys and Indians’.[4] When the bombs finally arrived, people hid naively under tables or in stairwells. Only luck saved families whose houses were bombed directly.
Some survived, but many people were dug out of the rubble of their homes, not always alive. Thirty-five people took refuge in a mill in the Catholic New Lodge Road area, assuming that the sturdy building would keep them alive. All were crushed to death when a wall fell on them. Meanwhile, the towering side-wall of the York Street Spinning Mill fell on the tiny houses of Sussex Street and Vere Street.[5]
Image from Atlas of Air-Raid Injuries (London: HMSO, 1944). Wounds of Scalp due to Falling Debris (Faked casualty). Courtesy of Northern Ireland War Memorial.
Bodies, whether dead or alive, were horrifically mutilated. Heads were crushed, faces and abdomens were wounded, bodies had been mangled and penetrated by beams. As well as being crushed by falling debris, those caught under burning hot bricks risked being cooked alive.[6] One North Belfast resident, Hugh Dixon, watched salvage workers digging in the debris. He recalled:
You know they’re trying to get at some bodies. They’re gently dragging at something. It’s a woman. She seems bent in two, probably spine smashed. As they turn her over, a nurse rushes forward. There’s a child in the woman’s arms. It’s alive. Evidently, the mother has sheltered the infant with her own body.[7]
A curious story later circulated that the gasworks received a direct hit, causing a temporary but fierce vacuum in the surrounding area (Donegall Pass) that drew air, slates, windows and loose items out of the nearby houses. Inside the occupants lay unblemished but dead in their beds, eyes open in fear and mouths gaping in a desperate attempt to breathe.[8] This was an urban myth. The gasworks is located in the south side of Belfast and was not bombed.[9]
Red Cross helmet. Courtesy of Northern Ireland War Memorial.
Injured survivors were treated by amateur first-aid operators until professional medical help arrived.[10] Being caught up in a bombing attack was psychologically traumatic. James Doherty was a warden who recalled encountering traumatised people roaming the streets. He remembered:
They were all in a state of shock. One man had twisted or broken his ankle. I stayed with him and helped him along. Near Clifton Street, another group of people joined us. A woman in this group had severe facial injuries. Like the others, they were wandering around lost in the maze of debris, and shock had left them with no recollection of what had happened to them or how they had got there.
There were many similar cases with the same pattern. Those civil defence workers who found casualties wandering about could illicit no information from them and when they handed them over to first aid posts or hospitals, they could only give the location of where they found them as a key to their identity.[11]
Stretcher used to transport the injured to hospital during the Belfast Blitz. Courtesy of Northern Ireland War Memorial.
The Mater was a voluntary, sparsely staffed Catholic hospital located on Crumlin Road, geographically close to the worst affected areas. The Mater was never designed to cope with such a huge task. All available beds were soon occupied. Makeshift beds were squeezed into the wards, but still patients endlessly flowed in. Casualties overflowed on to the corridors.[12] A queue of ambulances filled the street leading to the Mater waiting to set down the injured.[13] All that remained of the nurses’ home at nearby Frederick St. was a shell, and some reports suggest that the Mater Hospital itself was briefly alight.[14] Agnes Campbell, a nurse at the Royal Victoria Hospital, recalled seeing large numbers of burns, serious injuries caused by people bumping into lamp-posts and many people feeling so traumatised that they struggled to remember their own names.[15]
Even this disaster failed to entirely quell sectarian feeling. During the Blitz, Belfast-born novelist Brian Moore worked in the Mater mortuary. In The Emperor of Ice Cream, published in 1965, he recalled an injured elderly woman refusing to go to the Mater as it was ‘the papist hospital’. She would ‘die in the street’ rather than ‘go to any Fenian hospital run by them nuns to get myself poisoned and kilt [sic]’. ‘Take me to the Royal Victoria’, she demanded. Not everyone was so picky, and a number of Protestants sought shelter in the Clonard Monastery.[16]
[1] The most thorough account is Barton, The Blitz, pp. 123-4.
[2] Trevor Parkhill, A Nurse in the Belfast Blitz: The Diary of Emma Duffin, 1939-42 (Belfast: Northern Ireland War Memorial, 2016), p. 7.
[3] For a first-hand account from a southern firefighter, see Sean Redmond, Belfast is Burning 1941 (Dublin: IMPACT, 2002).
[4] Northern Ireland War Memorial, Oral History Interview US15, Betty McIlwaine.
[5] Sean McMahon, The Belfast Blitz: Luftwaffe Raids in Northern Ireland, 1941 (Belfast: Brehon Press, 2010), p. 56. See also Northern Ireland War Memorial, Oral History Interview W&M29, Anon.
[6] Doherty, Post 381, p. 35.
[7] Stephen Douds, The Belfast Blitz: The People’s Story (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2011), p. 67.
[8] McMahon, The Belfast Blitz, p. 59.
[9] Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (hereafter PRONI), COM/61/533. ‘War Damage to Gas and Electricity’, 1941.
[10] McMahon, The Belfast Blitz, p. 62
[11] Doherty, Post 381, p. ?
[12] Doherty, Post 381, p. 43.
[13] Quoted in McMahon, The Belfast Blitz, pp. 58-9.
[14] Barton, The Blitz, pp. 123-4.
[15] Barton, The Blitz, p. 124.
[16] McMahon, The Belfast Blitz, pp. 59-60.