Everything about The Coventry Blitz totally explained
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.
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.
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", (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.
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.
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. 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 wasn't 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. As
Arthur Harris, commander of
RAF Bomber Command, wrote after the war "Coventry was adequately concentrated in point of space [tostart a
firestorm], but all the same there was little concentration in point of time".
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.
The raid of
November 14 combined several innovations which were to influence all future strategic bomber raids during the war. 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 .
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.
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