AROUND Easter time every year, the thoughts of many folk in Northern Ireland turn to the German Luftwaffe’s devastating Belfast blitz between April 7 and May 6, 1941.

This year marks the 80th anniversary of this particular blitz, and there are still some Belfast people who remember the attacks first-hand, and country people who recall the city’s shocked evacuees arriving at rural railway stations.

Belfast still has ‘gaps’ on its streets, and marks on buildings, that are poignant reminders of Hitler’s bombardment, 80 years ago.

The first raid by eight German bombers that April 7/8 followed a single reconnaissance flight in November, 1940.

About 180 German aircraft returned on Easter Tuesday evening, April 15, and by the end of another raid on May 4/5, more than 1,000 Belfast people were dead, thousands more were injured, and half of the city’s houses, along with numerous industrial and commercial buildings, had been destroyed.

Probably attracted by the flames, two or three more bombers destroyed the streets around the still-burning Ropeworks on May 5/6.

Aside from the London raids, Belfast’s Easter Tuesday attack brought the greatest loss of life in any single-night raid on the UK during World War Two.

As well as its permanent exhibition about that war and the Blitz, the Northern Ireland War Memorial Museum (niwarmemorial.org) is running a series of online events marking the 80th anniversary.

Amongst the museum’s poignant artefacts is an Ordnance Survey map used by Hitler’s air-crews to target Belfast.

The ‘Stadtplan von Belfast’ was a hit-list of the German bombers’ principal objectives (Einzelobjekte), such as the city’s docks, railway stations and reservoirs.

Strategic target

German pilots and navigators, peering through their goggles at Stormont (Parlamentsgebäude und Ministerien) and the City Hall (Stadthalle) far below, must have wondered as they released their bombs on the shipyard (Werft von Harland and Wolff) how a German family-name became associated with a strategic enemy target.

There was a serious lack of defences in the city.

In his book, The Belfast Blitz, author Sean McMahon recounts “civilian air-raid shelters were essentially non-existent”.

There was no air defence, few barrage balloons, and no searchlights.

Amidst the bustle of Belfast evacuees alighting from a train onto a country railway platform, a dazed and despairing man – blinded by tears, and howling with grief – elbowed his way through the new arrivals, clasping a single, small, flame-scorched shoe.

His wife and children had been asleep in their house when it received a direct hit by a German bomb.

His daughter’s little shoe was all that was left of the man’s family.

Two vividly illustrated Home Office Booklets – The Duties of Air Raid Wardens, and Incendiary Bombs And Fire Precautions – sombrely highlight the horrors of the blitz.

Photographs illustrate personal protection against gas; how to escape from burning buildings; First Aid for causalities; and – endearingly – Air Raid Precautions for Animals!

“The giant linen mills, the rope works and the shipyards were essentially defenceless,” Sean explained in his book.

“Streets of tiny houses that huddled round the factories collapsed like dominoes when even a single bomb fell in the vicinity.”

A policeman guarding a secure open-air enclosure on the Harland and Wolff estate stood in the pitch-darkness at a main gateway set in a long, high, brick wall.

Miraculously, he survived an almost direct hit, and after brushing the debris from his shoulders, he faithfully stood guard for the rest of the night.

When dawn broke, he discovered he’d been guarding a gate with nothing left on either side!

The brick wall had been completely flattened, leaving only a badly-dented gate hanging from two wobbly but defiant gate posts.

The late and prolific local historian Noel Kirkpatrick’s book, In the Shadow of the Gantries, contains many poignant pages about the blitz.

The former shipyard worker’s description of local people watching a land-mine dropping from a Luftwaffe bomber is grippingly fearsome.

20-foot crater

As they looked upwards, the device slowly and silently descended by parachute onto an east Belfast road-junction, where it blew a 20-foot crater across the whole width of the roadway.

With a deafening roar, the road surface became airborne, and tram lines were hurled high over the disintegrating houses, landing bent, twisted and tangled, several streets away.

The explosion revealed a curious geological secret. Noel Kirkpatrick was one of the local kids who clambered into the crater the next day, and encountered a strange, natural phenomenon – a shimmering, powdery ‘waterfall’ of sand.

He recounts in his book that their “footprints were soon smoothed over by the continuous pouring of fine silver sand, similar to that found inside an hour-glass or egg-timer”.

If you’re crossing the junction between Albertbridge and Mountpottinger today, there’s a silvery labyrinth beneath the street that’s marked with happy little foot-prints that all of Hitler’s airborne terror couldn’t erase!