My Grandma said a lot of people used to hold a grudge against the Irish because, according to her, they had left their lights on during blackouts, to enable German bombers to hit Liverpool. Anyone know if there's any truth to this or just an old wives' tale?
While undoubtedly there were some vehemently anti-British and thus deemed Nazi sympathisers in neutral Eire, just as there were Nazi sympathisers here in the UK too, considering
Dublin was bombed by the Germans, on more than one occasion I would treat that very much as an old wives tale.
The Luftwaffe largely navigated to the their target at that stage of the war using a radio beam system, Knickebein, two widely spaced transmitters on the continent broadcasting directional beams with different pulses that were set up to intersect approximately over the intended target. It was very effective and better than the average navigator trying dead reckoning using the stars to get his position over a blacked out country like the UK ,something that the Luftwaffe navigators were not even trained in as they believed very much in Vorsprung durch technik.
To target Liverpool the beams would get them to the general area and if out over the Irish sea and at altitude, the lights of Dublin could possibly be seen and used to confirm a general position, but no more than the lights in Switzerland or Sweden when the RAF bombed close to those areas.
Anyway, we discovered largely by a bit of
fortuitous Enigma that the Germans used this system quite early on and what followed became known as the
Battle of the beams, and we found a way to bend them ie move the target without the Germans realising it. This caused a lot of confusion resulting in many bombs being dropped by the Germans in strange places.
There is still a persistant myth that resurfaces every so often that the devastation of Coventry was possibly the result of this bending, as well as the (accidental) bombing of Dublin, but there is no proof beyond conjecture.
