Tremendous Devastation The Belfast Blitz

Towards the end of the 1941 Easter Tuesday Blitz,

a Luftwaffe pilot described, on German radio,

his impressions of Belfast.

He spoke of...

Whole blocks of building set on fire, and pouring out smoke.

Flashes of lightning from exploding bombs, coming up towards us,

some hundreds of metres into the air.

Belfast wasn't the only place in Northern Ireland

to feel the impact of 203 metric tons of bombs and parachute mines,

and 800 firebomb canisters, cast down by 180 German aircraft.

In an attempt to block the Foyle River at Londonderry,

a single German plane dropped two large parachute mines

on Messines Park, off the Buncrana road.

One totally demolished five houses and killed 15 people.

In County Down, bombs fell on Scrabo Hill,

and on the Green Road and Comber Road in Newtownards.

The aerodrome at Newtownards was deliberately targeted

and ten guards were killed.

14 bombs fell in Bangor,

most destructively in Ashley Gardens, killing five people.

At dawn on Wednesday the 16th of April,

a thick, yellow pall covered Belfast.

Exhausted air raid wardens, firemen and ambulance men

tore at the smouldering rubble

to bring the trapped, dead and injured to the surface.

The writer Sam Hanna Bell remembered...

We wrestled with street doors blown halfway down hallways.

From under the stairs of a house, we extracted an old woman,

still clutching a miniature Union Jack.

On the Crumlin Road,

army lorries were piled high with corpses and severed limbs.

Many of the dead were brought into the Falls Road public baths.

As more arrived,

the pool had to be emptied in order to lay out over 150 corpses.

One of the attendants, Joseph McCann, recalled...

One coffin contained a young mother with her two dead children -

one in each arm.

One lovely girl of 16 lay in a coffin,

in her white confirmation robe,

with blue silk ribbon and black hair.

255 corpses were laid out in St George's Market.

On Monday, the great number of unclaimed dead

were buried in mass graves -

Protestants at the City Cemetery,

and Catholics, identified by rosaries and emblems,

in the Milltown Cemetery close by.

Meanwhile, widespread looting and panic reigned.

Around 6,000 terrified people arrived in Dublin from Belfast,

including an air raid warden still wearing his helmet.

Tens of thousands were now pouring out of the city for the countryside.