Coventry Blitz
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The Coventry blitz was a series of bombing raids (blitzes) that took place in the English city of Coventry. The city was bombed many times during World War II by the Nazi German Air Force (Luftwaffe). The most devastating of these blitzes occurred on the evening of November 14, 1940.
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[edit] Before the bombing
At the start of World War II, Coventry was an industrial city of about 320,000 people which, like much of the industrial West Midlands, contained "metal bashing" industries. In Coventry's case, these included, cars, bicycles, aeroplane engines and, since 1900, munitions factories. It was a centre of Britains war industry.[1]
In the words of the historian Frederick Taylor, "Coventry ... was therefore, in terms of what little law existed on the subject, a legitimate target for aerial bombing",[1] (See also Area Bombardment: Aerial area bombardment and international law ). Like many of the industrial towns of the English West Midlands which had been industrialised during the Industrial Revolution, industrial development had occurred before zoning regulations had come into existence and many of the small and medium-sized factories were woven into the same streets as the workers' houses and the shops of the city centre.
[edit] July and August 1940
Several small raids on Coventry during July and August 1940 killed several dozen people. The most notable damage was to a new cinema which had been completed just before the start of the war in September 1939.
[edit] November 14, 1940
The raid on November 14, 1940 was made by 515 German bombers, two thirds from Luftflotte 3 and the rest from the pathfinders of Kampfgruppe 100. The attack, code-named Operation Moonlight Sonata, was intended to undermine Coventry's ability to supply the Royal Air Force and the British Army by demolishing factories and industrial infrastructure, although it was clear that the damage to the city, including monuments and residential areas, would be considerable. The initial wave was of 13 specially modified Heinkel He 111 aircraft of Kampfgruppe 100, which were equipped with X-Gerät navigational devices, accurately dropping marker flares at 19:20.[2] The British and the Germans were fighting the Battle of the Beams and on this night the British failed to fully disrupt the X-Gerät signals.
The first wave of follow-up bombers dropped high explosive bombs, the intent of which was to knock out the utilities (the water supply, electricity network and gas mains), and to crater the road - making it difficult for the fire engines to reach fires started by the follow-up waves of bombers. The follow-up waves dropped a combination of high explosive and incendiary bombs. There were two types of incendiary bombs: those made of magnesium and those made of petroleum. The high explosive bombs and the larger air-mines were not only designed to hamper the Coventry fire brigade, they were also intended to damage roofs, making it easier for the incendiary bombs to fall into buildings and ignite them.
At around 20:00 Coventry Cathedral, dedicated to Saint Michael, was set on fire for the first time. The volunteer fire-fighters managed to put out the first fire but other direct hits followed and soon new fires in the cathedral were out of control. During the same period, fires were started in nearly every street in the city centre. A direct hit on the fire brigade headquarters disrupted the fire service's command and control, resulting in problems communicating to the fire fighters the priority of which blazes to tackle first. As the Germans had intended, the water mains were damaged by high explosives. As a result there was not enough water available to tackle many of the fires. The raid reached its climax around midnight with the final all clear sounding at 06:15 on the morning of 15 November.
Unlike the Allied raids later in the war when 500 or more heavy, four-engine bombers would deliver their bomb loads in a concentrated wave lasting only a few minutes, the German two and three engined bombers carried relatively light loads (2,000-4,000 lb) and each flew several sorties over the target, returning to their bases in France in German-occupied Europe to rearm between each sortie. This led to lulls in the raid when the fire fighting and rescue services could reorganise and evacuate civilians.[3] As Arthur Harris, commander of RAF Bomber Command, wrote after the war "Coventry was adequately concentrated in point of space [to start a firestorm], but all the same there was little concentration in point of time".[4]
The raid destroyed or damaged about 60,000 buildings over hundreds of hectares in the centre of Coventry and is known to have killed 568 civilians. The raid had reached such a new level of destruction that the Germans later used the term Coventriert ("Coventrated") when describing similar levels of destruction to other enemy towns. During the raid, the Germans dropped about 500 tonnes of high explosives, including 50 parachute air-mines and 36,000 incendiary bombs of which 20 were incendiary petroleum mines.[5]
The raid of November 14 combined several innovations which were to influence all future strategic bomber raids during the war.[6] These were:
- The use of pathfinder aircraft with electronic aids to navigate, to mark the targets before the main bomber raid;
- The use of high explosive bombs and air-mines (blockbuster bombs) coupled with thousands of incendiary bombs intended to set the city ablaze.
The actual death toll of the Coventry Blitz was never officially confirmed. It has been reported that many bodies may never have been found, or had been burnt and severed beyond recognition. The raids of munitions factories may have claimed victims from different parts of the country who may not have had any close relatives to report them missing. As mentioned earlier, 568 people died in the Coventry Blitz, but some sources have said that as many as 1,000 people were killed.
A theory surrounding the bombing is that Coventry (due in part to such books as Winterbotham's The Ultra Secret) was deliberately undefended in order to prevent the Germans realising that Enigma cipher machine traffic (information from which was termed Ultra) were being read by British cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park. This claim is unproved — Winston Churchill was aware that a major bombing raid was to take place, but no one knew beforehand where the raid was meant to strike [7][8].
[edit] April 1941
On the night of April 8/April 9, 1941 Coventry was subject to another large air raid when 237 bombers attacked the city dropping 315 high explosive bombs and 710 incendiary canisters. In this and another raid two nights later on April 10/April 11 about 475 people were killed and over 700 seriously injured. Damage was caused to many buildings including some factories, the central police station, the Warwickshire Hospital, King Henry VIII's School, and St. Mary's Hall.[9]
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Taylor, Frederick; Dresden Tuesday 13 February 1945; Bloomsbury, First Pub 2004 (ISBN 0-7475-7078-7),used as a reference in this article: paper back 2005 (ISBN 0-7475-7084-1). Chapter 10 Blitz
[edit] In fiction
- Christopher Hyde's novel "A Bodyguard of Lies" involves a London serial killer being tracked to Coventry on the night of November 14, 1940, and also involves themes of ULTRA intelligence.
- Alan Pollock's 2008 play One Night in November (premiered at the Belgrade Theatre in March 2008) involves a Bletchley Park codebreaker and his dilemma as to whether or not to reveal his foreknowledge of the raid to his lover from Coventry. It also perpetuates the accusation that Winston Churchill knew Coventry would be raided but sacrificed it in order to safeguard the secrecy of the ULTRA intellignce, though Churchill does not appear in person in the play.[10]
[edit] Further reading
- David McGrory The Coventry Blitz CWN - News & Information for Coventry & Warwickshire
- David McGrory Photograph - City Centre
- Coventry Air Raids The Coventry Blitz Resource centre
- Peter Calvocoressi, Top Secret Ultra, includes an account of the Coventry Raid, and the actual cryptanalytic intelligence available before the raid.
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ Taylor References Page 117
- ^ The British were on British Summer Time (GMT +1) during the winter months of the war (and double summer time during the summer months)
- ^ Taylor References Page 120
- ^ Harris, Arthur "Bomber Offensive; (First edition Collins 1947) Pen & Sword military classics 2005; ISBN 1-84415-210-3. Page 83
- ^ Taylor References Page 120. But this source War in the West gives different numbers "449 bombers dropped 150,000 incendiary bombs, 503 tons of high-explosives (1,400 bombs) and 130 parachute sea-mines (causing extensive blast damage) on Coventry"
- ^ Taylor References Page 118
- ^ historiccoventry.co.uk
- ^ The Churchill Centre
- ^ A History of the County of Warwick: Volume 8: The air raids of 1940. British history on line.
- ^ Billington, Michael. "One Night in November (review)", The Guardian, 13 March 2008. Retrieved on 2008-03-13.
