The most heavily bombed cities outside London were Liverpool and Birmingham. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. 55,000 houses were damaged leaving 100,000 temporarily homeless. On May 11, 1941, Hitler called off the Blitz as he shifted his forces eastward against the Soviet Union. In the New Lodge area people had taken refuge in a mill. O'Sullivan reported: "There were many terrible mutilations among both living and dead heads crushed, ghastly abdominal and face wounds, penetration by beams, mangled and crushed limbs etc.". Nurse Emma Duffin, who had served in World War I, contrasted death in that conflict with what she saw:.mw-parser-output .templatequote{overflow:hidden;margin:1em 0;padding:0 40px}.mw-parser-output .templatequote .templatequotecite{line-height:1.5em;text-align:left;padding-left:1.6em;margin-top:0}. One of every six Londoners was made homeless at some point during the Blitz, and at least 1.1 million houses and flats were damaged or destroyed. Northern Ireland is a part of the United Kingdom . The next took place on Easter Tuesday, 15 April 1941, when 200 Luftwaffe bombers attacked military and manufacturing targets in the city of Belfast. Still, many in Northern Ireland believed no Luftwaffe attack would come. Mr Freeburn set out to find out more about those who died, their personal stories and the tales of those left behind. John Wood Dunlop invented the pneumatic tyre in Belfast in 1887. Thank you. Hundreds of incendiary and many high-explosive bombs were dropped, doing little material damage but causing many casualties. Neighbouring residential areas were also hit. Omissions? "But there is no such equivalent in Belfast. After his optician business was destroyed by a bomb, Mickey Davies led an effort to organize the Spitalfield Shelter. As many as 5,000 people had packed into this network of underground tunnels, which was dangerously overcrowded, dirty, and dark. Moya Woodside[23] noted in her diary: "Evacuation is taking on panic proportions. During what was known as the "Belfast Blitz," 1,000 people were killed by bombs dropped by the Nazis in 1941 during the Second World War. continuous trek to railway stations. The Luftwaffe crews returned to their base in Northern France and reported that Belfast's defences were, "inferior in quality, scanty and insufficient". The creeping TikTok bans. Another attacked Bangor, killing five. St George's Church in High Street was damaged by fire. For 57 nightsuntil November 2more than 1 million bombs were dropped on the capital city. Train after train and bus after bus were filled with those next in line. Nearby were the citys main power station, gasworks, telephone house and the Sirocco Engineering works. And then naturally as I was over the target, I did pick up flak but I have no sense of exactly how weak or how strong it was, because every bit of flak you get is dangerous.. While the balloons themselves were an obvious deterrent, they were anchored to the ground by steel tethers that were strong enough to damage or destroy any aircraft that flew into them. [citation needed]. The higher the German planes had to fly to avoid the balloons, the less accurate they were when dropping their bombs. The RAFs Spitfire was a superlative fighter, and it was not always easy for the Germans to distinguish it from the slightly less maneuverable but much more numerous Hurricanes. Over 500 received care from the Irish Red Cross in Dublin. With the surrender of France in June 1940, Germanys sole remaining enemy lay across the English Channel. What's the least amount of exercise we can get away with? Most of the objectives laid out by the reconnaissance crews were of either military or industrial importance. After the war, instructions from Joseph Goebbels were discovered ordering it not to be mentioned. British Spies and Irish Rebels by Paul McMahon, Report by the Garda Sochna 23 October 1941 IMA G2/1722, Learn how and when to remove this template message, Irish Minister for the Co-ordination of Defensive Measures, "Eamon de Valera and Hitler: An Analysis of International Reaction to the Visit to the German Minister, May 1945", "Extracts from an article, "The Belfast Blitz, 1941", "Historical Topics Series 2 The Belfast Blitz", "Your Place and Mine The Belfast Blitz", "Northern Ireland Parliamentary Elections Results: Biographies", "Belfast Blitz: The night death and destruction rained down on city", "Multitext - the Blitz - Belfast during the second World War", http://www.niwarmemorial.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/The_Belfast_Blitz.pdf, http://www.proni.gov.uk/historical_topics_series_-_02_-_the_belfast_blitz.pdf, Extracts from an article on The Belfast Blitz, 1941. At 10:40pm the air raid sirens sounded. Death should be dignified, peaceful; Hitler had made even death grotesque. No significant cut was made in necessary social services, and public and private premises, except when irreparably damaged, were repaired as speedily as possible. Around 20,000 people were employed on the site with 35,000 further along in the shipyard. The Belfast blitz devastated a city that up until 1941 had remained unscathed during World War Two. Prior to the "Belfast Blitz" there were only 200 public shelters in the city, although around 4,000 households had built their own private shelters. The South Hallsville School disaster prompted Londoners, especially residents of the East End, to find safer shelters, on their own if necessary. However Belfast was not mentioned again by the Nazis. But Mr Freeburn's research casts doubt on this. THE BELFAST BLITZ was a series of four air raids over Northern Ireland during the spring of 1941. It would appear that Adolf Hitler, in view of de Valera's negative reaction, was concerned that de Valera and Irish American politicians might encourage the United States to enter the war. Half of the city's housing was damaged over the course of all the raids. The famous Harland and Wolff cranes are called Samson and Goliath. A charitable relief fund for the people of London was opened September 10. Six Heinkel He 111 bombers, from Kampfgruppe 26, flying at 7,000 feet (2,100m), dropped incendiaries, high explosive and parachute-mines. Your donations help keep MHN afloat. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. The period of the next moon from say the 7th to the 16th of April may well bring our turn." [25] He followed up with his "they are our people" speech, made in Castlebar, County Mayo, on Sunday 20 April 1941 (Quoted in the Dundalk Democrat dated Saturday 26 April 1941): 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; and I want to say to them that any help we can give to them in the present time we will give to them whole-heartedly, believing that were the circumstances reversed they would also give us their help whole-heartedly Frank Aiken, the Irish Minister for the Co-ordination of Defensive Measures was in Boston, Massachusetts at the time. Belfast is located on the island of Ireland. From a purely military perspective, the Blitz was entirely counterproductive to the main purpose of Germanys air offensiveto dominate the skies in advance of an invasion of England. Over 20 hospitals were hit, among them the London (many times), St. Thomass, St. Bartholomews, and the childrens hospital in Great Ormond st., as well as Chelsea hospital, the home for the aged and invalid soldiers, built by Wren. At the time of the first attack in April 1941, there were no operational searchlights, too few anti-aircraft batteries and scarcely enough public air raid shelters for a quarter of the population. By mid-September 1940 the RAF had won the Battle of Britain, and the invasion was postponed indefinitely. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. 10 Facts about Belfast City. By the. On 4-5 May, another raid, made up of 204 bombers, killed another 203 people and the following night 22 more died. The seeming normality of life on the Home Front was shattered in 1944 when the first of the V1's landed. Since 1:45am all telephones had been cut. However, the Docklands was also a densely populated and impoverished area where thousands of working-class Londoners lived in run-down housing. It remains a high death toll - a shocking number of people killed in just a few weeks. Video, 00:02:54Living through the London Blitz, At least 17 dead in Jakarta fuel storage depot fire. On the 17th I heard that hundreds who either could not get away or could not leave for other reasons simply went out into the fields and remained in the open all night with whatever they could take in the way of covering. Clydeside got its blitz during the period of the last moon. Corrections? 9. The youngest victim was just six-weeks-old. Video, 00:00:26, Living through the London Blitz. Hitlers intention had been to break the morale of the British people so they would pressure their government to surrender. It was solemn, tragic, dignified, but here it was grotesque, repulsive, horrible. The creeping TikTok bans, Hong Kong skyscraper fire seen on city's skyline. 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The first deliberate raid took place on the night of 7 April. The bombs continued to fall until 5am. The M.V. Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Historical Topics Series 2, The Belfast Blitz, 2007, This page was last edited on 31 January 2023, at 20:18. He was asked, in the N.I. The attacks by both V1's and V2's only ended as the Allies advanced up through Western Europe . An air raid shelter on Hallidays Road received a direct hit, killing all those in it. Air power alone had failed to knock the United Kingdom out of the war. Fighter Commands efforts were greatly aided by the lack of any consistent plan of action on the part of the Germans. Several theatres and many cinemas were open, and there were even a few sporting events. Sir Basil Brooke, the Minister of Agriculture, was the only active minister. There were few bomb shelters. On 24 March 1941, John MacDermott, Minister for Security, wrote to Prime Minister John Andrews, expressing his concerns that Belfast was so poorly protected: "Up to now we have escaped attack. The sense of relative calm was abruptly shattered in the first week of September 1940, when the war came to London in earnest. By 6am, within two hours of the request for assistance, 71 firemen with 13 fire tenders from Dundalk, Drogheda, Dublin, and Dn Laoghaire were on their way to cross the Irish border to assist their Belfast colleagues. In the mistaken belief that they might damage RAF fighters, the anti-aircraft batteries ceased firing. 29 - Belfast was once bigger than Dublin Read about our approach to external linking. The ill-fated ship was built in the city in 1912, and to this day, there is a museum dedicated to its building and the lives of all of those on board. All were exhausted. Many bodies and body parts could not be identified. Another defensive measure employed by the British was barrage balloonslarge oval-shaped unmanned balloons with stabilizing tail finsinstalled in and around major target areas. The couple, who ran a children's home, stayed with Anna's parents, William and Harriette Denby, and her sisters, Dot and Isa, at Evelyn Gardens, off the Cavehill Road, in the north of the city. Many of the surface shelters built by local authorities were flimsy and provided little protection from bombs, falling debris, and fire. At 4:15am John MacDermott, the Minister of Public Security, managed to contact Basil Brooke (then Agriculture Minister), seeking permission to seek help from the Irish government. Many "arrived in Fermanagh having nothing with them only night shirts". The 2017 film Zoo depicts an air raid during the Belfast Blitz. The British government had anticipated air attacks on its population centres, and it had predicted catastrophic casualties. 3. The Belfast blitz. High explosive bombs predominated in this raid. Nearby residential areas in east Belfast were also hit when "203 metric tonnes of high explosive bombs, 80 land mines attached to parachutes, and 800 firebomb canisters containing 96,000 incendiary bombs"[16] were dropped. Belfast was Ireland's industrial home, famous for tobacco, rope-making, linen, and ship-building, which made it the powerhouse it was. On September 1, 1939, the day World War II began with Germanys invasion of Poland, the British government implemented a massive evacuation plan. Although it arrested German spies that its police and military intelligence services caught, the state never broke off diplomatic relations with Axis nations: the German Legation in Dublin remained open throughout the war. High explosives were dropped. In the course of four Luftwaffe attacks on the nights of 7-8 April, 15-16 April, 4-5 May and 5-6 May 1941, lasting ten hours in total, 1,100 people died, over 56,000 houses in the city were damaged (53 per cent of its entire housing stock), roughly 100,000 made temporarily homeless and 20 million damage was caused to property at wartime values. 6. I was definitely one of the first over the target and as I flew in there was no great defence because there were not a great many aircraft over the target at that point, recalled Becker. After the war, when the first girl from the home got married Billy gave her away, having lost his only daughter. The mass relocation, called Operation Pied Piper, was the largest internal migration in British history. Van Morrison is from the east part of the city. He went to the Mater Hospital at 2pm, nine hours after the raid ended, to find the street with a traffic jam of ambulances waiting to admit their casualties. Looking back on the Belfast Blitz, Oberleutnant Becker signed off with the following words: A war is the worst thing that can happen to Mankind. By Jonathan Bardon. Major O'Sullivan reported that "In the heavily 'blitzed' areas people ran panic-stricken into the streets and made for the open country. Between Black Saturday and December 2, there was no 24-hour period without at least one alertas the alarms came to be calledand generally far more. For two hours, 348 German bombers and 617 fighters targeted the city, dropping high-explosive bombs as well as incendiary devices. Indeed, on the night of the first raid, no Royal Air Force (RAF) aircraft took to the air to intercept German planes. Wave after wave of bombers dropped their incendiaries, high explosives and land-mines. It is situated at on the banks of the River Lagan on the east coast. Heavy jacks were unavailable. They remained for three days, until they were sent back by the Northern Ireland government. A victory for the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain would indeed have exposed Great Britain to invasion and occupation. By the middle of December it had reached nearly 1,700,000 (adjusted for inflation, this was the equivalent of roughly 100 million in 2020). About 1,000 people were killed and bombs hit half of the houses in the city, leaving 100,000. Video, 00:01:37, Thanks, but no big speech, in Ken Bruce's sign off, Tear gas fired at Greece train crash protesters. A Luftwaffe terror bombing attack on the Spanish city of Guernica (April 26, 1937) during the Spanish Civil War had killed hundreds of civilians and destroyed much of the town. He believed that key targets identified across the city were hit. Munster, for example, operated by the Belfast Steamship Company, plied between Belfast and Liverpool under the tricolour, until she hit a mine and was sunk outside Liverpool. It was not the first time the alarm had sounded to signify the presence of Luftwaffe bombers over the city. Just eight days earlier, eight planes destroyed the aircraft fuselage factory and damaged the docks, with 15 people ultimately killed as a result of that raid. Streets heavily bombed in the city centre included High Street, Ann Street, Callender Street, Chichester Street, Castle Street, Tomb Street, Bridge Street (effectively obliterated), Rosemary Street, Waring Street, North Street, Victoria Street, Donegall Street, York Street, Gloucester Street, and East Bridge Street. While Anderson shelters offered good protection from bomb fragments and debris, they were cold and damp and generally ill-suited for prolonged occupancy. In 1995, on the 50th anniversary of the ending of the Second World War, an invitation was received by the Dublin Fire Brigade for any survivors of that time to attend a function at Hillsborough Castle and meet Prince Charles. During the first year of the war, behind-the-lines conditions prevailed in London. No attendant nurse had soothed the last moments of these victims; no gentle reverent hand had closed their eyes or crossed their hands. J.P. Walshe, assistant secretary, recorded that Hempel was "clearly distressed by the news of the severe raid on Belfast and especially of the number of civilian casualties." These shelters, made of corrugated steel, were designed to be dug into a garden and then covered with dirt. Also, on Queens Island, stood the Short and Harland Ltd. Aircraft Factory. Several accounts point out that Belfast, standing at the end of the long inlet of Belfast Lough, would be easily located. Only four were known still to be alive. On August 25 the British retaliated by launching a bombing raid on Berlin. Nevertheless, through sheer weight of numbers, the Germans were on the brink of victory in late August 1940. Revised estimates made decades later indicated that close to 600 men, women, and children had been killed in the bombing. Up to now, we have escaped an attack, said John MacDermott, the Minister for Security, Belfast, on March 24, 1941. It was the worst wartime raid outside of London in the UK. [4], The Government of Northern Ireland lacked the will, energy and capacity to cope with a major crisis when it came. 150 corpses remained in the Falls Road baths for three days before they were buried in a mass grave, with 123 still unidentified. The A.R.P. This option had been forbidden by city officials, who feared that once people began sleeping in Underground stations, they would be reluctant to return to the surface and resume daily life. Later, guided by the raging fires caused by the first attack, a second group of planes began another assault that lasted until 4:30 the following morning. Belfast Blitz: Marking the lost lives 80 years on A force of 180 bombers dropped 750 bombs - including 203 tonnes of high explosives - and 29,000 incendiaries over a five-hour period. The government was blamed by some for inadequate precautions. Beginning on Black Saturday, London was attacked on 57 straight nights. NI WW2 veterans honoured by France. These balloons, the largest of which were some 60 feet (18 metres) long, were essentially an airspace denial tool. Where they are going, what they will find to eat when they get there, nobody knows. Instead of pressing his advantage, however, Hitler abruptly changed his strategy. Over 100 German planes made contact with barrage balloon cables during the Blitz, and two-thirds of them crashed or made forced landings on British soil. Accounts differ as to when flares were dropped to light up the city. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. The attacks were authorized by Germany's chancellor, Adolf Hitler, after the British carried out a nighttime air raid on Berlin. Belfast's Albert Clock tower is sinking - it leans by four feet. James Craig, Lord Craigavon, had been Prime Minister of Northern Ireland since its inception in 1921 up until his death in 1940. Video, 00:01:38, At least 17 dead in Jakarta fuel storage depot fire, Australia's 'biggest drug bust' nets $700m of cocaine. The database Mr Freeburn has compiled is, he believes, the most accurate list of those killed and includes 222 children aged 16 or under. The nights of November 3 and 28 were the only occasions during this period in which Londons peace was unbroken by siren or bomb. The telegram was sent at 4:35am,[citation needed] asking the Irish Taoiseach, amon de Valera for assistance.
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