The Coventry blitz (blitz: from the German word Blitzkrieg meaning "lightning war") was a series of bombing raids that took place in the English city of Coventry. The city was bombed many times during the Second World War by the German Air Force (Luftwaffe). The most devastating of these attacks occurred on the evening of 14 November 1940.
Contents |
At the start of the Second World War, Coventry was an industrial city of about 238,000 people which, like much of the industrial West Midlands, contained metal-working industries. In Coventry's case, these included cars, bicycles, aeroplane engines and, since 1900, munitions factories. 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]
During World War I, thanks to the advanced state of the machine tooling industry in the city that quickly could be turned to war purposes and industries such as the Coventry Ordnance Works it had assumed the role of one of the leading munition centres in the UK, for example manufacturing 25 percent of all British aircraft produced during the war.[2]
Like many of the industrial towns of the English West Midlands that 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. However, it already had many large interwar suburbs of private and council housing, which were relatively isolated from industrial buildings as a result of being built after the zoning regulations had been made law.
Following the Rotterdam Blitz, RAF Bomber Command was authorised to attack German targets east of the Rhine on 15 May 1940; the Air Ministry authorized Air Marshal Charles Portal to attack targets in the Ruhr, including oil plants and other civilian industrial targets which aided the German war effort, such as blast furnaces (which at night were self-illuminating).[3][4] The underlying motive for the attacks was to divert German air forces away from the land front in France.[5] Churchill explained the rationale of his decision to his French counterparts in a letter dated the 16th: "I have examined today with the War Cabinet and all the experts the request which you made to me last night and this morning for further fighter squadrons. We are all agreed that it is better to draw the enemy on to this Island by striking at his vitals, and thus to aid the common cause."[6] Due to the inadequate British bomb-sights the strikes that followed "had the effect of terror raids on towns and villages,"[5]
Despite the British attacks on German cities, the Luftwaffe did not begin to attack military and economic targets in the UK mainland until 6 weeks after the campaign in France had been concluded.[5]
On 24 August, fate took a turn, and several off-course German bombers accidentally bombed residential areas of London.[7][8][9][10] The next day, the RAF bombed Berlin for the first time, targeting Tempelhof airfield and the Siemens factories in Siemensstadt.[11] These attacks were seen as indiscriminate bombings by the Germans due to their inaccuracy, and this infuriated Hitler;[12][13][14] he ordered that the 'night piracy of the British' be countered by a concentrated night offensive against the island, and especially London.[15] The Luftwaffe, which Hitler had prohibited from bombing civilian areas in the UK, was now ordered to bomb British cities. The Blitz was under way.[16]
There were seventeen small raids on Coventry during the Battle of Britain between August and October 1940, during which around 198 tons of bombs fell. Together, these raids killed 176 people and injured around 680.[17] The most notable damage was to the new Rex Cinema which had only been opened in February 1937, and which had already been closed by an earlier bombing raid in September.[18]
The raid that began on the evening of 14 November 1940 was the most severe to hit Coventry during the war. It was carried out by 515 German bombers, from Luftflotte 3 and from the pathfinders of Kampfgruppe 100. The attack, code-named Operation Mondscheinsonate (Moonlight Sonata), was intended to destroy Coventry's factories and industrial infrastructure, although it was clear that damage to the rest of the city, including monuments and residential areas, would be considerable. The initial wave of 13 specially modified Heinkel He 111 aircraft of Kampfgruppe 100, were equipped with X-Gerät navigational devices, accurately dropped marker flares at 19:20.[19] The British and the Germans were fighting the Battle of the Beams and on this night the British failed to disrupt the X-Gerät signals.
The first wave of follow-up bombers dropped high explosive bombs, knocking out the utilities (the water supply, electricity network and gas mains) and cratering the roads, 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 bomb: 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, accelerated by firestorm, 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, making it difficult to send fire fighters to the most dangerous blazes first. As the Germans had intended, the water mains were damaged by high explosives; 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.
Coventry's air defences consisted of twenty four 3.7 inch AA guns and twelve 40mm Bofors. Over 6,700 rounds were fired. However only one German bomber was shot down.[20]
In one night, more than 4,000 homes in Coventry were destroyed and around two-thirds of the city's buildings were damaged. The raid was heavilly concentrated on the city centre, most of which was destroyed. Two hospitals, two churches and a police station were also among the damaged buildings.[21].[22] Around one third of the city's factories were completely destroyed or severely damaged, another third were badly damaged, and the rest suffered slight damage. Among the destroyed factories were the main Daimler factory, the Humber Hillman factory, the Alfred Herbert Ltd machine tool works, nine aircraft factories, and two naval ordnance stores. However the effects on war production were only temporary, as much essential war production had already been moved to 'shadow factories' on the city outskirts. Also, many of the damaged factories were quickly repaired and had recovered to full production within a few months[23]
An estimated 568 people were killed in the raid (the exact figure was never precisely confirmed) with another 863 badly injured and 393 sustaining lesser injuries. Given the intensity of the raid, casualties were limited by the fact that a large number of Coventrians "trekked" out of the city at night to sleep in nearby towns or villages following the earlier air raids. Also people who took to air raid shelters suffered very little death or injury. Out of 79 public air raid shelters holding 33,000 people, very few had been destroyed.[24]
The raid reached such a new level of destruction that Joseph Goebbels later used the term Coventriert ("Coventrated") when describing similar levels of destruction of other enemy towns. During the raid, the Germans dropped about 500 tonnes of high explosives, including 50 parachute air-mines, of which 20 were incendiary petroleum mines, and 36,000 incendiary bombs.[25]
The raid of 14 November combined several innovations which influenced all future strategic bomber raids during the war.[26] These were:
In the Allied raids later in the war, 500 or more heavy four-engine bombers all delivered their 3,000–6,000 pound bomb loads in a concentrated wave lasting only a few minutes. But at Coventry, the German twin-engined bombers carried smaller bomb loads (2,000–4,000 lb), and attacked in smaller multiple waves. Each bomber flew several sorties over the target, returning to base in France to rearm. Thus the attack was spread over several hours, and there were lulls in the raid when fire fighters and rescuers could reorganise and evacuate civilians.[27] 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".[28]
The British used the opportunity given them by the attack on Coventry to try a new tactic against Germany. The "first deliberate terror raid on a German town was carried out ... 16 December 1940 as part of Operation Abigail Rachel ... against Mannheim.[29] The British had been waiting for the opportunity to experiment with such a raid, and the opportunity was given after the German raid on Coventry.[29] This was the start of a British drift away from precision attacks on military targets and towards area bombing attacks on whole cities.[29]
In his 1974 book The Ultra Secret, Group Captain F. W. Winterbotham asserted that the British government had advance warning of the attack from Ultra: intercepted German radio messages encrypted with the Enigma cipher machine and decoded by British cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park. He further claimed that Winston Churchill ordered that no defensive measures should be taken to protect Coventry, lest the Germans suspect that their cipher had been broken.[30] Winterbotham was a key figure for Ultra; he supervised the "Special Liaison Officers" who delivered Ultra material to field commanders.
However, Winterbotham's claim has been rejected by other Ultra participants and historians who argue that while Churchill was indeed aware that a major bombing raid would take place, no one knew what the target would be.[31][32]
Peter Calvocoressi was head of the Air Section at Bletchley Park, which translated and analysed all deciphered Luftwaffe messages. He wrote "Ultra never mentioned Coventry... Churchill, so far from pondering whether to save Coventry or safeguard Ultra, was under the impression that the raid was to be on London."[33]
Scientist R. V. Jones, who led the British side in the Battle of the Beams, wrote that "Enigma signals to the X-beam stations were not broken in time," and that he was unaware that Coventry was the intended target. Furthermore, he explained that a technical mistake caused jamming countermeasures to be ineffective.[34] Furthermore Jones argues in his book 'Most Secret War' that Churchill returned to London that afternoon, and that in Jones opinion indicated that Churchill believed that London was the likely target for the raid of November 14th.
On the night of 8 April/9 April 1941 Coventry was subject to another large air raid when 230 bombers attacked the city, dropping 315 tons of high explosive and 25,000 incendaries. In this and another raid two nights later on 10 April/11 April about 451 people were killed and over 700 seriously injured.[35] Damage was caused to many buildings including some factories, the central police station, the Coventry & Warwickshire Hospital, King Henry VIII School, and St. Mary's Hall.[36]
The final air raid on Coventry came on 3 August 1942, in the Stoke Heath district approximately one mile to the east of the city centre, six people were killed. By the time of this air raid, some 1,250 people had died in Coventry as a result of air raids. Around 80 per cent of them had been killed in the raids of 14/15 November 1940 and 8–10 April 1941.[22]
The devastating raid on the night of 14/15 November 1940, and its aftermath, were vividly described by several civilians interviewed by the BBC several days later. The speakers included Mr E. Letts, Muriel Drewe, Miss G.M. Ellis and the Very Reverend R.T. Howard. These archive 1940 recordings feature on The Blitz, an audiobook CD issued in 2007.