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This story was written by Brian Morgan with the permission of Mr Robert McIlroy

As he recalls, letter writing was no bother for Robert McIlroy and he would have even seen himself as a somewhat 'descriptive writer'.
However these were not normal times and therefore when he was writing home he had to be careful about the contents of the letters, just in case German spies might, somehow, get their hands on them and use any information from it. Information that they might find useful, for example where they were based, what regiments were based where, numbers of troops etc. All this information might seem perfectly innocent and harmless to the untrained eye, but for German intelligence gatherers it might provide vital data that they could use against allied forces.
When Robert was in Europe he heard news of the blitz back home in Belfast through correspondence with his father. ‘All the Ulster fellows felt like marching straight back to Belfast’ he recalls as their first reaction to the news that Belfast had been heavily bombed by the Nazis. Robert received a letter from his father revealing that things were bad, especially in the Glencairn area of the city where his family lived and where he had grown up. His father relayed to him that their area had especially been badly damaged by German bombs. However the most memorable news was, Robert laughs, ‘was when my father wrote that my favourite fishing spot in Glencairn, that was only about fifteen foot wide, was now about sixty foot wide’

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