大象传媒

The Night Derry Was Bombed
By Bernard Mc Cormack

It was late in the evening when the sirens sounded. My younger brother and I were already asleep upstairs. My father woke us and told us to come to the kitchen.
鈥淵ou will be safer under the table鈥�, he said.

I noticed that my parents were kneeling on the floor and had started to pray. My father leaned on the back of a chair as he prayed. His face was obscured by his slightly raised arms. Wrapped around his fingers were his rosary beads, swinging gently to the rhythm of the prayer being spoken aloud.

By this time the plane was rapidly approaching from up 鈥� river. The sound of the engines was a surprise to me. It was more like an uneven throb than anything else. By this time it was directly overhead. The noise was tremendous and truly terrifying to a child. I was convinced it was at a level with the roof tops. Then it swung in the direction of Pennyburn and the American base. For a brief moment there was silence as the plane鈥檚 lethal cargo of landmine drifted earthwards on its parachutes. There was a tremendous explosion, so much so that the very earth itself shook as the shock waves travelled under ground, below the river and below our house in the Waterside to where we lay under the kitchen table. The ground shook violently.

Next day all the people in our street gathered in little clusters to talk about the night before after all of a family had been wiped out in the blast and a sole survivor could be seen.

Years later wandering demented through the streets further out along the Lough, many people had their windows shattered by the blast. Bad as all this was, it was nothing compared to what Belfast experienced that same night.

After the raid many people refused to sleep in their own beds and for several nights after; preferred to take to the hills armed with a bin lid for protection. The German Aircraft returned safely to it base in Northern France and we children were perfectly happy the following morning to comb the back lanes of the Waterside for bits of Shrapnel.

Some of our companions to this very day swear that the jagged bit of metal that they found was still hot to touch.

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.