HISTORY: CATRÍONA CROWEreviews The Bombing of Dublin's North Strand, 1941 – The Untold StoryBy Kevin C. Kearns Gill and Macmillan, 380pp, €24.99
JUST AFTER 2am on the morning of May 31st, 1941, the Saturday of Whit weekend, the North Strand area of Dublin was bombed by a German plane, causing extensive loss of life, injury and destruction of homes and businesses. Many thousands were made homeless. Ireland was neutral during the second World War and ill-prepared for such an attack. However, the previous months had seen a number of other German bombings, none on anything like the scale seen in the North Strand, but some causing death. Also, the Irish government had recently come to the aid of suffering, bombed Belfast by dispatching the Dublin Fire Brigade to help with firefighting and rescue, and had received more than 3,000 refugees from Northern Ireland in the aftermath of this event.
Kevin Kearns’s vivid account of the bombing, its consequences and its continued life in Dublin memory does not attempt to answer the probably unanswerable question as to whether the bombing was deliberate, in retaliation for perceived Irish aid to Germany’s principal adversary, or whether it was a mistake, possibly caused by the British capacity, recently discovered, to interfere with radar systems and put planes off their courses. The east coast of Ireland was a popular route for German bombers en route to Manchester, Liverpool and Belfast, and the sound of their engines overhead was familiar to Dubliners.
Early 1941 saw bombs fall in various places in Ireland, most to no effect, but one killed three people at Campile, Co Wexford. Belfast was blitzed in April, and Kearns describes in detail the extraordinary journey of Dublin’s firemen, most standing on the outside of their fire tenders, to Belfast and back, all in the space of 20 hours, and their welcome in Belfast once people realised they were not Germans.
The government seems, like some of the main local players in this story, to have had presentiments of forthcoming calamity. In January, Seán Lemass, minister for supplies, said in a public speech: “We in this country have a right to be neutral in this conflict if we so decide. We have a right to expect that the belligerents will take care to ensure that of the thousands of bombs falling from the skies around us, none will fall on our territory. We have thousands of rights, but rights alone are poor protection for small states when great Empires go to war.” A good example of the realpolitik that made Lemass such a pragmatic leader later on.
The government’s premonitions did not translate into adequate safety precautions for the citizenry in the event of attack. The city had an air-raid siren system that remained unused, a number of open air-raid shelters that quickly became public lavatories and thereby unfit for purpose, and locked shelters to which no keys could be found. There was no provision for accommodation for large numbers of people rendered homeless, although the calamity did ensure that Cabra got built in six weeks rather than six months. The valiant ARP personnel who spent the night rescuing people from the wreckage were, in some cases, docked pay and refused time off to rest by their employers when they reported for work next day.
Four bombs fell on Dublin in the early morning of May 31st – at Summerhill, at the North Circular Road, at the Phoenix Park and at the North Strand between the Five Lamps and Newcomen Bridge. The last was by far the biggest (a 500lb landmine) and caused extraordinary suffering and destruction. The death toll from all four, with added deaths from a collapsed tenement in the Liberties which was destabilised by the blast, came to more than 40, with hundreds injured.
The fire service, ambulance personnel, ARP and LDF volunteers were unstinting in their efforts to rescue trapped and injured people, to find the dead, and to help frantic survivors to cope. The book has many illustrations showing the extent of the damage, and some of the ordinary public servants and dedicated volunteers who behaved heroically on that night and for days afterwards.
It is clear just how heroic they were when we read the coroner’s account of causes of death: “asphyxiation, burning, bleeding to death, severe head injury, being crushed, decapitation, heart failure due to shock, being blown apart”.
This book should be compulsory reading for anyone who blithely assumes the right to bomb urban areas in pursuit of any claim. The sheer awful attrition on fragile human bodies in such events is appalling, not just for the victims and their loved ones, but for those who have to do the work of cleaning up the terrible mess.
Kearns’s book, published next week, is valuable because of his use of vernacular accounts from people, most of them very old, who remembered the bombing. He combines those accounts with extracts from contemporary newspapers, giving a flavour of what Dublin was like then; thriving cinemas and theatres; race meetings at Baldoyle and the Phoenix Park; great steaks and plenty of butter; severe shortages of flour, white bread, fuel, tea, and above all, cigarettes. It was a city full of bicycles, with its inhabitants burning wet turf from the Phoenix Park, drinking recycled tea leaves, laughing at Jimmy O’Dea, fishing in the Royal Canal, and paying very little attention to the war raging in Europe.
THERE ARE LOVELY MOMENTS in the book: an elephant in the zoo was so frightened by the bomb in the Phoenix Park that she managed to open two padlocked gates and escape to the Hollow, where she was later retrieved; a man with a wooden leg who was saved from the North Strand is described by his niece as being “duplicated” with drink at the time; a woman in the Liberties described the victims as having been “blown into maternity”. But what shines through most vividly is the courage and goodness of ordinary people, untrained for such catastrophe, in their attempts to save and help their fellow Dubliners.
Catríona Crowe is a senior archivist at the National Archives of Ireland. She was on the board of the North Inner City Folklore Project in the 1980s and 1990s.
