FROM THE ARCHIVES:About 2am on the morning of Saturday, May 31st May 1941, four German bombs were dropped on Dublin, hitting the Phoenix Park, North Circular Road, Summerhill and the North Strand, where most of the casualties occurred. Eyewitness accounts were carried in the following Monday's newspaper. – JOE JOYCE
A BRIEF chat with any representative of the various volunteer or official groups on the scene revealed these flashes of drama that lit up the desolation. Typical was the experience of Mr. Adamson, of the Fitzgibbon Street Local Defence Force Group, who happened to be on patrol with a comrade around the Ballybough region when the horror struck.
Some 35 minutes before those two terrific explosions, on the North Circular Road and on Summerhill nearby, which heralded that most havoc-stricken blast of all, on North Strand, he had purchased a package of cigarettes at a shop owned by Miss Catherine Slater, 44 Summerhill Parade.
It was probably the last time anybody ever bought cigarettes there, for that shop was in a few minutes now doomed to be flattened like a crunched match box on top of its owner. Father Flynn, of Portland Place, annointed Miss Slater when finally, after an hour and a half of frantic digging, she was lifted from what was once her home and taken, critically injured, to the Mater Hospital.
Mr. Adamson then went to the bridge . Suddenly, the throb of engines sounded. Pencils of searchlights slowly plotted arcs in the night, converging now as, like a callipers, they seemed to hold that humming menace in their grip. Now anti-aircraft fire split the skies in solemn peals and sharp cracks, and the aeroplane hum arose, and then there was a blinding flash and a deafening smash, followed by stillness.
By this time Mr Adamson had taken cover near the railway wall near the bridge, but even so, the blast of the explosion - or the two explosions - hammered his back with a hail of gravel. When silence came he went back towards the shop. It was gone – flattened. So was the house next door, No 43, which was occupied by Mrs. Fitzgerald and her family.
They were all alive.
There was no panic in this stricken sector, Mr. Adamson states, nor was there any in the adjacent Richmond Cottages.
About three paces to the right, was the home of Mr. and Mrs. Peter Purdue, 45 Summerhill Parade. Neither was injured, though they had to leave their shattered home. Their escape was typical of a series of miracles that mitigated the horror.
Peter, a bootmaker, was out with his wife looking at the searchlights. They were about to go back up the stairs when they heard the plane. It looked bad to them, so they started out again, and just as they opened the door and saw the beams of the searchlights converge, there came a whistling, then a bomb-burst, the blast of which hurled them both backwards.
L.D.F. member Adamson got other comrades to cordon off the roads. He remained on duty throughout the subsequent explosion on North Strand; went home at 5 a.m. and went to work on a plumbing job at 8 o’clock, knocked off at 4.30 p.m., and, by the time this reporter toured the region for the second time later that afternoon he was seen still patiently, helpfully, on the job again near the remains of that shop where so much happened
on the previous night – just another of those thousands of Dublins volunteer workers whose self-sacrifice, coupled with that epic courage shown by the stricken, was the one bright light in the pall of misery.
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