Very early in the German bombing campaign, it became clear that the preparationshowever extensive they seemed to have beenwere inadequate. On 4-5 May, another raid, made up of 204 bombers, killed another 203 people and the following night 22 more died. However that attack was not an error. The raids hurt Britains war production, but they also killed many civilians and left many others homeless. They all say the same thing, that the government is no good. Video, 00:02:54Living through the London Blitz, At least 17 dead in Jakarta fuel storage depot fire. By the end of the attacks, between 900 and 1,000 people were dead and thousands more were injured, homeless and displaced. This article was most recently revised and updated by, https://www.britannica.com/event/the-Blitz, National Museums Liverpool - Merseyside Maritime Museum - The Blitz, The History Learning Site - The Blitz and World War Two. Video, 00:01:41, The German bombing of Coventry. Churches destroyed or wrecked included Macrory Memorial Presbyterian in Duncairn Gardens; Duncairn Methodist, Castleton Presbyterian on York Road; St Silas's on the Oldpark Road; St James's on the Antrim Road; Newington Presbyterian on Limestone Road; Crumlin Road Presbyterian; Holy Trinity on Clifton Street and Clifton Street Presbyterian; York Street Presbyterian and York Street Non-Subscribing Presbyterian; Newtownards Road Methodist and Rosemary Street Presbyterian (the last of which was not rebuilt). In Newtownards, Bangor, Larne, Carrickfergus, Lisburn and Antrim many thousands of Belfast citizens took refuge either with friends or strangers. ", Dawson Bates, the Home Affairs Minister, apparently refused to reply to army correspondence and when the Ministry of Home Affairs was informed by imperial defence experts in 1939 that Belfast was regarded as "a very definite German objective", little was done outside providing shelters in the Harbour area.[14]. 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. THE BELFAST BLITZ was a series of four air raids over Northern Ireland during the spring of 1941. ", Dawson Bates informed the Cabinet of rack-renting of barns, and over thirty people per house in some areas.[24]. Find out how it began, what the Germans hoped to achieve and how it severe it was, plus we visit nine places affected by the attacks. Sir Basil Brooke, the Minister of Agriculture, was the only active minister. Video, Russian minister laughed at for Ukraine war claims, US-made cheese can be called 'gruyere' - court, AOC under investigation for Met Gala dress, Saving Private Ryan actor Tom Sizemore dies at 61, The children left behind in Cuba's exodus, Walkie Talkie architect Rafael Violy dies aged 78, Alex Murdaugh's legal troubles are far from over, Mother who killed her five children euthanised. A modern bomb census has attempted to pinpoint the location of every bomb dropped on London during the Blitz, and the visualization of that data makes clear how thoroughly the Luftwaffe saturated the city. However, the Docklands was also a densely populated and impoverished area where thousands of working-class Londoners lived in run-down housing. But Mr Freeburn's research casts doubt on this. For two hours, 348 German bombers and 617 fighters targeted the city, dropping high-explosive bombs as well as incendiary devices. Train after train and bus after bus were filled with those next in line. Here are 10 facts about both the German Blitzkrieg and the Allied bombing of Germany. In the New Lodge area people had taken refuge in a mill. Belfast was not properly prepared for the attacks, with too few shelters and not enough anti-aircraft guns. 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. Protection of the city fell to seven anti-aircraft batteries of 16 heavy guns and six light guns. In another building, the York Street Mill, one of its massive sidewalls collapsed on to Sussex and Vere Streets, killing all those who remained in their homes. By British mainland blitz standards, casualties were light. He described some distressing consequences, such as how "in one case the leg and arm of a child had to be amputated before it could be extricated. Video, 00:01:37, Thanks, but no big speech, in Ken Bruce's sign off, Tear gas fired at Greece train crash protesters. Beginning in September 1940, the Blitz was an aerial bombing campaign conducted by the Luftwaffe against British cities. Brian Barton of Queen's University, Belfast, has written most on this topic.[19]. High explosive bombs predominated in this raid. Air-raid damage was widespread; hospitals, clubs, churches, museums, residential and shopping streets, hotels, public houses, theatres, schools, monuments, newspaper offices, embassies, and the London Zoo were bombed. When the war began, Belfast, like many other cities, adopted the wartime practices of rationing and blackouts. Belfast is as worthy a target as Coventry, Birmingham, Bristol or Glasgow.. The higher the German planes had to fly to avoid the balloons, the less accurate they were when dropping their bombs. The government was blamed by some for inadequate precautions. The fourth and final Belfast raid took place on the following night, 56 May. Video, 00:01:23Watch: Matt Hancock message row in 83 seconds, One-minute World News. After the bombing began on September 7, local authorities urged displaced people to take shelter at South Hallsville School. But the authorities were afraid that bombs might not be the. 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. Belfast is the capital and largest city of Northern Ireland. The Luftwaffe crews returned to their base in Northern France and reported that Belfast's defences were, "inferior in quality, scanty and insufficient". This raid overall caused relatively little damage, but a lot was revealed about Belfast's inadequate defences. 10,000 "officially" crossed the border. The success of Mickeys Shelter was another factor that urged the government to improve existing deep shelters and to create new ones. The devastation was so great that the Germans coined a new verb, to coventrate, to describe it. By the time the raid was over, at least 744 people had lost their lives, including some living in places such as Newtownards, Bangor and Londonderry. 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. On occasion, forces consisting of as many as 300 to 400 aircraft would cross the coast by day and split into small groups, and a few planes would succeed in penetrating Londons outer defenses. And even then, Westminster stated it was not ample provision; Stormont still worried about the costs to industry. By then most of the major fires were under control and the firemen from Clydeside and other British cities were arriving. On May 11, 1941, Hitler called off the Blitz as he shifted his forces eastward against the Soviet Union. On September 1, 1939, the day World War II began with Germanys invasion of Poland, the British government implemented a massive evacuation plan. Belfast made a considerable contribution towards the Allied war effort, producing many naval ships, aircraft and munitions; therefore, the city was deemed a suitable bombing target by the Luftwaffe. With Britains powerful Royal Navy controlling the surface approaches in the Channel and the North Sea, it fell to the Luftwaffe to establish dominance of the skies above the battle zone. Around 20,000 people were employed on the site with 35,000 further along in the shipyard. Once more, London was targeted and children were victims. 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. People hung black curtains in their windows so that no lights showed outside their houses. Belfast was bombed by the Nazis in World War II. 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. At the beginning of the Blitz, British ack ack gunners struggled to inflict meaningful damage on German bombers, but later developments in radar guidance greatly improved the effectiveness of both antiaircraft artillery and searchlights. As well as photographs, the Luftwaffe gathered information on landmarks, potential targets and defences or lack thereof. Barton insisted that Belfast was "too far north" to use radio guidance. 11 churches, two hospitals and two schools were destroyed. These shelters were vital as these factories had many employees working late at night and early in the morning when Luftwaffe attacks were likely. By 1941, production of the Short Stirling Bomber and the Short Sunderland Flying Boat was underway. These figures are based on newspaper reports of the time, personal recollections and other primary sources, such as:- In the mistaken belief that they might damage RAF fighters, the anti-aircraft batteries ceased firing. Richard Dawson Bates was the Home Affairs Minister. He believed that key targets identified across the city were hit. He was replaced by 54-year-old Sir Basil Brooke on 1 May. Contributions poured in from every part of the world in such profusion that on October 28 its scope was extended to cover the whole of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland. The phrase Business as usual, written in chalk on boarded-up shop windows, exemplified the British determination to keep calm and carry on as best they could. James Craig, Lord Craigavon, had been Prime Minister of Northern Ireland since its inception in 1921 up until his death in 1940. Several accounts point out that Belfast, standing at the end of the long inlet of Belfast Lough, would be easily located. 6. Similar initiatives bearing the same name were ordered in the past decade by former mayors Libby . [citation needed]. Although there were some comparatively slight raids later in 1941, the most notable one on July 27, the May 1011 attack marked the conclusion of the Blitz. So had Clydeside until recently. The most heavily bombed cities outside London were Liverpool and Birmingham. On April 16 an attack even fiercer and more indiscriminate than those of the previous autumn started at 9:00 pm and continued until 5:00 the following morning; 500 aircraft were believed to have flown over in continuous waves, raining an estimated 450 tons of bombs across the city. The British, on the other hand, were supremely well prepared for the kind of battle in which they now found themselves. Elsewhere in the skies over Britain, Nazi official Rudolph Hess chose that same evening to parachute into Scotland on a quixotic and wholly unauthorized peace mission. The World's Most-Famous Ship, The Titanic, was constructed here. The database Mr Freeburn has compiled is, he believes, the most accurate list of those killed and includes 222 children aged 16 or under. By then 250 firemen from Clydeside had arrived. [13] However at the time Lord Craigavon, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland since its inception in 1921, said: "Ulster is ready when we get the word and always will be." At 10:40 on the evening of Easter Tuesday 1941 air raid sirens sounded across Belfast, sending people across the city scrambling for safety - in one of the 200 public shelters in the city or the thousands of shelters or other "safe" spaces in private homes. 6. In late August the Germans dropped some bombs, apparently by accident, on civilian areas in London. As the UK was preparing for the conflict, the factories and shipyards of Belfast were gearing up. As well as these two major targets, other firms in Belfast produced valuable materials for the war effort including munitions, linen, ropes, food supplies and, of course, cigarettes. In every instance, all stepped forward. Just before Easter 1941, Anna and Billy Burdett and their 12-year-old daughter, Dorothy, returned to Belfast from England to visit Anna's family. Of the churches, besides St. Pauls cathedral, where at one time were five unexploded bombs in the immediate vicinity and the roof of which was pierced by another that exploded and shattered the high altar to fragments, those damaged were Westminster abbey, St. Margarets Westminster, Southwark cathedral; fifteen Wren churches (including St. 55,000 British civilian casualties were sustained through German bombing before the end of 1940 This included 23,000 deaths. I felt outraged, I should have felt sympathy, grief, but instead feelings of revulsion and disgust assailed me. The first attack was against the city's waterworks, which had been attacked in the previous raid. By mid-September 1940 the RAF had won the Battle of Britain, and the invasion was postponed indefinitely. devised the Morrison shelter (named for Home Secretary Herbert Stanley Morrison) as an alternative to the Anderson shelter. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. After the war, when the first girl from the home got married Billy gave her away, having lost his only daughter. 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. 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. It became a city by royal charter in 1888. By the. Government apathy, a lack of leadership and a belief the Luftwaffe could not reach Belfast lead to the city lagging behind in terms of basic defences. The danger faced in London was greatly increased when the V2 attacks started and the casualty figures mirrored those of the Blitz.. These shelters, made of corrugated steel, were designed to be dug into a garden and then covered with dirt. department distributed more than two million Anderson shelters (named after Sir John Anderson, head of the A.R.P.) 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. Simpson shot down one of the Heinkels over Downpatrick. The Belfast blitz devastated a city that up until 1941 had remained unscathed during World War Two. [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. Your donations help keep MHN afloat. Over the course of three days, some 1.5 million civiliansthe overwhelming majority of them childrenwere transported from urban centres to rural areas that were believed to be safe. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. On 28 April 1943, six members of the Government threatened to resign, forcing him from office. The Luftwaffe never attacked the city after May 1941, but it would be many years before life returned to normal for many in the city. Death should be dignified, peaceful; Hitler had made even death grotesque. Mr Freeburn set out to find out more about those who died, their personal stories and the tales of those left behind. The youngest victim was just six-weeks-old. In early 1941 the Germans launched another wave of attacks, this time focusing on ports. The attacks by both V1's and V2's only ended as the Allies advanced up through Western Europe . Taoiseach amon de Valera formally protested to Berlin. John Wood Dunlop invented the pneumatic tyre in Belfast in 1887. In The Blitz: Belfast in the War Years, Brian Barton wrote: "Government Ministers felt with justification, that the Germans were able to use the unblacked out lights in the south to guide them to their targets in the North." The creeping TikTok bans. 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.. ISBN 9781909556324. After his optician business was destroyed by a bomb, Mickey Davies led an effort to organize the Spitalfield Shelter. Read about our approach to external linking. 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. Their Chain Home early warning radar, the most advanced system in the world, gave Fighter Command adequate notice of where and when to direct their forces, and the Luftwaffe never made a concerted effort to neutralize it. Belfast is the capital and largest city of Northern Ireland . The creeping TikTok bans, Hong Kong skyscraper fire seen on city's skyline. When the bombing began, 76-year-old William and 72-year-old Harriette took refuge under the stairs along with Dorothy, Dot and Isa. Accounts differ as to when flares were dropped to light up the city. Some are a total loss; others are already under repair with little outward sign of the damage sustained: Besides Buckingham palace, the chapel of which was wrecked, and Guildhall (the six-centuries old centre of London civic ceremonies and of great architectural beauty), which was destroyed by fire, Kensington palace (the London home of the earl of Athlone, governor general of Canada, and the birthplace of Queen Mary and Queen Victoria), the banqueting hall of Eltham palace (dating from King Johns time and long a royal residence), Lambeth palace (the archbishop of Canterbury), and Holland house (famous for its 17th century domestic architecture, its political associations, and its art treasures), suffered, the latter severely. The House of Commons, Westminster Abbey, and the British Museum were severely damaged, and The Temple was almost completely destroyed. Video, 00:00:36Tears of relief after man found in Amazon jungle. He spoke with Professor Flynn, (Theodore Thomson Flynn, an Australian based at the Mater Hospital and father of actor Errol Flynn), head of the casualty service for the city, who told him of "casualties due to shock, blast and secondary missiles, such as glass, stones, pieces of piping, etc." By Jonathan Bardon. Over 150 people died in what became known as the 'Fire Blitz'. to households. Gring had insisted that such an attack was an impossibility, because of the citys formidable air defense network. Wherever Churchill is hiding his war material we will go. As many as 5,000 people had packed into this network of underground tunnels, which was dangerously overcrowded, dirty, and dark. Other targets included Sheffield, Manchester, Coventry, and Southampton. In just these few hours, 430 people were killed and 1,600 were badly injured. It was not the first time the alarm had sounded to signify the presence of Luftwaffe bombers over the city. 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Belfast is located on the island of Ireland. Many of the surface shelters built by local authorities were flimsy and provided little protection from bombs, falling debris, and fire. That evening over 150 bombers left their bases in northern France and the Netherlands and headed for Belfast. 2023 BBC. Video, 00:00:46Hong Kong skyscraper fire seen on city's skyline, Watch: Matt Hancock message row in 83 seconds. 255 corpses were laid out in St George's Market. Author Lawrence H. Dawson detailed the damage to Londons historic buildings for the 1941 Britannica Book of the Year: The following curtailed list identifies some of the better known places in inner London that have been damaged by enemy action. Subs offer. Yesterday the hand of good-fellowship was reached across the Border. Tommy Henderson, an Independent Unionist MP in the House of Commons of Northern Ireland, summed up the feeling when he invited the Minister of Home Affairs to Hannahstown and the Falls Road, saying "The Catholics and the Protestants are going up there mixed and they are talking to one another. [citation needed] However on 20 October 1941 the Garda Sochna captured a comprehensive IRA report on captured member Helena Kelly giving a detailed analysis of damage inflicted on Belfast and highlighting prime targets such as Shortt and Harland aircraft factory and RAF Sydenham, describing them as 'the remaining and most outstanding objects of military significance, as yet unblitzed' and suggesting they should be 'bombed by the Luftwaffe as thoroughly as other areas in recent raids'[28][29], After three days, sometime after 6pm, the fire crews from south of the border began taking up their hoses and ladders to head for home. Neighbouring residential areas were also hit. The use of the Tube system as a shelter saved thousands of lives, and images of Londoners huddled in Underground stations would become an indelible image of British life during World War II.

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