The Easter Tuesday Belfast Blitz

BRASS BAND PLAYS "ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT"

The sky was clearing in Belfast on Easter Tuesday, 15th April 1941,

as 180 German bombers took off from aerodromes in Northern France.

Flying over Cherbourg and Cardigan Bay,

the raiders dropped to 7,000ft as they approached the Ards Peninsula.

At 10.40pm, the sirens in Belfast began to wail.

AIR-RAID SIRENS

The elite pathfinder squadron Kampfgruppe 100

led in the first wave of bombers.

Casting intense light, hundreds of flares drifted down.

Incendiaries and explosives followed,

including 76 land mines.

Designed to rend apart the reinforced concrete

and steel of factories, they floated down on silky green parachutes

over the congested housing north of the city centre.

Perhaps the Belfast Waterworks at the foot of the Cave Hill

had been mistaken for the harbour.

The result was a fearful carnage in the New Lodge, the Lower Shankill

and the Antrim Road.

In the Ulster Hall,

the popular singer Delia Murphy kept singing through the raid.

Some of her audience were later forced to take refuge

and shelter in Percy Street,

When a parachute mine fell next to it, 30 people were killed.

HMS Furious was the only vessel in port

to add to the anti-aircraft barrage,

but she sheared loose from the recoil of her guns.

At 1.45am, a bomb wrecked the central telephone exchange.

All contact with Britain

and Belfast's anti-aircraft operations control room was cut off.

The defending guns on the ground now fell silent

for fear of shooting down the RAF's Hurricane fighters, which,

with cruel irony, had been withdrawn shortly before by Fighter Command.

For another two hours,

the Luftwaffe attacked Belfast completely unopposed.

Around 145 fires now raged in the city.

Just as the auxiliary fire service arrived to fight the great infernos

sweeping across the Antrim Road, the water pressure fell away.

The mains had been cracked in 30 places.

At 4.35am, a plea for help was telegrammed to Dublin.

Eamon de Valera, the Taoiseach, was awakened.

He agreed without hesitation to send aid.

Fire engines from Dublin, Dun Laoghaire,

Drogheda and Dundalk spread northwards.

Horrified at the carnage,

John Smith, Belfast's chief fire officer, was found beneath a table

in Chichester Street fire station weeping and refusing to come out.

At 4.55am on 16th April, the all-clear sounded.

The writer Joseph Tomelty remembered...