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This story was given to Conor Garrett and transcribed by volunteer Wendy Cornett

Easter Blitz in Belfast 1942

SAM WALGAR

It was just after the blitz; it would have been the Easter blitz, 1942. It lasted for 5 hours and you wondered was there ever going to be any of Belfast left at all. When you went over to the town, there was very little of High Street left standing and all that whole area. Royal Avenue seemed to have got a very bad touch. What you realise is that war has its place, yes, but at the same time, all are losers; irrespective of who causes it to start, all are losers at the end of the day. I went down just to see Royal Avenue and found how terrible things were. Of course, when the siren went, you might not have bothered moving; this was because the siren went quite a few times and then there was the all clear, maybe half an hour or so after that; nothing had happened at all really. But anyway, we could never be sure, because the Germans had the time set for when to bomb here and when to bomb there more or less.

I lived on the Castlereagh Road at the time, and of course whenever a siren would have sounded after the first blitz, they said we had to be more or less prepared for the next time. The first blitz was a smallish blitz, but still bad enough. So instead of going to bed at 11.00 we would have stayed up to maybe 1.00 in the morning waiting, yet maybe nothing would have happened. When the siren did go off, as I said, maybe after half an hour or on hour as the case my be, the all clear would have been given and that was another hoax call, so to speak.

When any of the houses did get hit, a lot of people would have been saved because of the way the stairway was built; people would have all went in under the stairs. In the house that we lived in, there was a doorway into the stairway from the living room. We would have gone in there and you would have heard the bombs whistling across. You see, whenever a plane drops a bomb, it doesn鈥檛 come down straight; it travels and travels and travels until it hits wherever it is directed for.

I think I was about 16 or 17 years of age or thereabouts; I can鈥檛 remember the exact age. One particular night I was up in a friend鈥檚 house up at Dundonald and there was a blitz started there. It wasn鈥檛 the Easter Blitz, this was a different one. At this time there was a direct hit on a house on the Comber Road, and there was a man who was killed there; one of the big concrete blocks fell on him and that was the end of him. After this first episode more or less, you realised what was happening and you sort of got yourself settled. It really didn鈥檛 give you much thought as regards maybe being afraid or anything like that. The air raid shelters for the most part weren鈥檛 really of use at all. They were in every street, some streets had one at the top, one in the middle of the street, and one at the other end of the street.

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