Coventry Blitz 14th November 1940

Family Tree Researcher: Coventry Blitz Resource Centre

 

Diane

Just after the main bombing- I worked at Daimler #2 near Courtaulds for a year making aero engines and we were bombed almost every night - can't recall

ever making a full shift - finally moved to Birmingham making Crusader Tanks before call up- we were only bombed once per week….

cheers

 

Diane

Can't recall how we were paid in those days but I do know it was WEAKLY…..fairly well but lungs are getting smaller

Cheers

 

http://ww2talk.com/forums/topic/22449-coventry-cathedral-photos/

 

Coventry Cathedral illuminated by the Tricolour.

http://www.coventrytelegraph.net/news/coventry-news/photos-coventry-blitz-hundreds-join-10446579

 

'Hysteria, terror and neurosis'

 

BBC Radio 4 - The Raising of Coventry

BBC audio - 28mins

The Raising of Coventry tells the story of the bombing of Coventry 80 years ago. This documentary explores the city being razed to ground by 500 Nazi planes, to the rising up as a post war city, to Coventry being the City of Culture in 2021.
During the programme, dramatic story telling is used as 3 fictional characters tell their story of the bombing from emerging from the shelter, to a German pilot, to a priest who is in the Cathedral after and questioning his faith. This is mixed with historical news clips and eyewitnesses who lived through that night.
The show examines the true impact of 14th November 1940. Exploring the myth that Churchill sacrificed Coventry, so the Germans didn’t know the UK had cracked the enigma code. The show unearths the truth that Coventry was used to draw in allies as it was the first bombing of a City to be reported.
Through soundscapes, eyewitness and experts the show takes the listener to that November night and explores the sights, sounds and feelings of that terrifying night.
The show later explores the legacy of a post war city the highs it felt in the 50’s and 60’s, to disparaging remarks of it's architecture to the city re-emerging as the UK City of Culture in 2021.
The Raising of Coventry is narrated by Midlands Actor Cassie Bradley who is joined by Coventry actor Jay Sutherland, German Marcel Rasche and Brassic’s Steve Evets to tell the story of that night and the events that followed. They take the listener on a journey, exploring myths and discovering the real legacy of that night - not a city reborn but a City that has become a symbol around the world as a place of peace and reconciliation.

 

Coventry's Blitz: Coventry's Blitz - Moonlight Sonata

14th November 1940

1. The air raid on Coventry on the night of 14 November 1940 was the single most concentrated attack on a British city in the Second World War.
2. Following the raid, Nazi propagandists coined a new word in German - coventrieren - to raze a city to the ground.
3. Codenamed 'Moonlight Sonata', the raid lasted for 11 hours and involved nearly 500 Luftwaffe bombers, gathered from airfields all over occupied Europe.
4. The aim was to knock out Coventry as a major centre for war production. It was said too, that Hitler ordered the raid as revenge on an RAF attack on Munich.
5. 14 November was a brilliant moonlit night, so bright that the traffic could move around on the road without light.
6. The Luftwaffe dropped 500 tons of high explosive, 30,000 incendiaries and 50 landmines. It was also trying out a new weapon, the exploding incendiary.
7. Coventry lost not only its great medieval church of St Michael's, the only English Cathedral to be destroyed in the Second World War, but its central library and market hall, hundreds of shops and public building and 16th century Palace Yard, where James II had once held court.
8. The smell and heat of the burning city reached into the cockpits of the German bombers, 6,000 feet above.
9. More than 43,000 homes, just over half the city's housing stock, were damaged or destroyed in the raid.
10. The fire at the city's huge Daimler works was one of the biggest of the war in Britain. Up to 150 high explosive bombs and 3,000 incendiaries turned 15 acres of factory buildings into a raging inferno.
11. At midday the next day in Coventry, it was as warm as spring and almost dark because of the effects of the firestorms.
12. King George VI is said to have wept as he stood in the ruins of the burned out Cathedral, surveying the destruction.
13. The people of the city were traumatised. Hundreds wandered to the streets in a daze and little children were seen trying to burrow their way through solid brick walls to escape the terrifying noise.
14. One of the city's three statues of Peeping Tom was blown out of a niche in its high building and lay in the street, where shocked passers-by mistook it for another human corpse in the blackout.
15. One man recalled being pursued down a street by a knee-high river of boiling butter from a nearby blazing dairy.
16. At one point during the night, an abandoned tram was blown clean over a house and into a garden. It landed with its windows still intact.
17. The official death toll from the night was 554, but the real figure could have been much higher with many people unaccounted for.
18. As help poured in the next day, demolition crews had to be prevented from pulling down the Cathedral tower. They didn't realise it had been leaning for at least 100 years.
19. On the day of the mass funerals, fighter patrols were sent up into the skies above the city. It was thought that the Germans might try to bomb the cemetery.
20. Yet by 1947, Coventry had adopted its first German twin city, Kiel. Dresden followed in 1956. The ruined Cathedral now stands for international peace and reconciliation.
21. 20 facts you might not know about the Coventry Blitz | 20 facts you might not know about the Coventry Blitz | Coventry City Council

 

My Uncle in Worcestershire Constabulary was sent to Coventry the following day. He stayed there for some considerable time, mainly recovering bodies from the rubble. Oddly my father was in a reserved occupation and in St John. He spent some time in Birmingham with his ambulance during air raids but was not called to Coventry. They stood too all night listening to the planes going over and watching the glow in the sky, waiting for a call.
The the town was a mass of shadow factories. We lived 500 yds from the BSA making Besa Machine guns so perhaps the authorities felt that they might be needed where they were. What spooked a lot of people around the midlands was that the guns didnt open fire on the aircraft flying overhead unlike Bristol where my relatives lived. However Warwickshire and Worcestershire was home to a number of decoy fires after the Coventry Raid.

 

The Bombing of Coventry in WWII
Intelligence Information

On 14-15 November 1940, a wave of German Luftwaffe bombers targeted the city of Coventry, an important engineering and armament production centre in the Midlands. There have been historical anecdotes (and a widely spread myth) that the city of Coventry was sacrificed to protect the Bletchley Park work on the German Enigma as a source. This is a complex story and is well dissected in Appendix 9 of Volume 1 of Professor Hinsley's History of British Intelligence in the Second World War. Almost a third of the city was flattened, with 568 people killed and hundreds more injured. Even the medieval cathedral was hit

On 11 November 1940 an Enigma decrypt of a message of 9 November showed that an unusual bombing operation was being planned; the codename MOONLIGHT SONATA suggested it would be at the next full moon (15 November) and that it might come in three parts – though four (unidentified) target numbers were listed.

The next day a Luftwaffe Prisoner of War (PoW) told a stool-pigeon sharing his cell that a heavy raid, at maximum strength, was to be carried out between 15 and 20 November (Goering believed that a major attack on a working class area would provoke an anti-war revolution), and that the targets were to be Coventry and Birmingham. Unfortunately a captured map suggested there were four future targets in London and the SE of England, which was just as good an interpretation of the Enigma evidence. Also on 12 November a further Enigma message gave beam transmitter (X-Gerät) bearings which intersected over Wolverhampton, Birmingham and Coventry; but again unfortunately, this was discounted, because there had been a lot of such messages, many of them setting up beam intersections over the industrial Midlands, and nothing had happened - they had just been practice.

On 13 November the prisoner was further interrogated and confirmed that there would be three separate attacks ‘in the industrial district of England’. All this evidence had been assessed and the results distributed to the usual authorities. The prisoners latest version caused an assessment made in the early morning 14 November to say that the operation might be in three phases on one night, or might be on three consecutive nights, with the former more likely.

A few hours later the Air Staff alerted the Prime Minister to the possibility of a major raid, saying that the targets were probably in or near London, but that ‘if further information indicates Coventry, Birmingham or elsewhere, we hope to get instructions out in time’. Churchill was informed that ‘the information which comes from a very good source indeed is confirmed to some extent by a Prisoner of War shot down on the 9th.’ Understanding that the original source was a decrypt, the expectation that the raids would be on London were sufficiently strong for the Prime Minister to arrange to be in London rather than in the country as originally scheduled.

At 1300hrs on the 14 November the beam transmissions began (as predicted in the first Enigma message which however did not give a date) and by 1500 airborne intercept had established that the beams intersected over Coventry, confirming both the date and the target for MOONLIGHT SONATA.

The beam jammers were switched on - they made no difference to KG100’s (Pathfinders) accurate arrival over the target, possibly because (as R V Jones’ section reported, but two months later) they used the wrong audio modulating frequency (if this was really the case, it is not possible to say how the mistake came about, whether it was because of poor measurement or a misunderstanding of the communications being used); but equally possibly, a bright moonlit cloudless night made navigation simple, and after the pathfinders had dropped incendiaries, the fires could be seen by aircraft from hundreds of miles away.

Interdiction attempts over German bases, were standard, but ineffectual; the AAA defences of Coventry had been strengthened early in November as part of normal planning, but were unable to cope with the numbers of aircraft; and although 121 fighter sorties were despatched, only 11 (out of 330) enemy aircraft were sighted, only two of these were engaged, and only one was damaged. There were not three separate attacks; possibly the three targets set up in the Enigma message of 12 November were alternatives, and Coventry was unlucky enough to be at the top of the list on a cloudless night.

 

Speaking to people over the years who lived around the Midlands, many reasons were given as to why the guns did not fire at the enemy planes as they approached or left the area.
There were several airfields in Warwickshire that apparently had aircraft on them as well as Birmingham Elmdon Airport on the Coventry Road, where they trained pilots and tested new aircraft next to the Castle Bromwich Aircraft Factory which produced fighters and bombers.
There was a fear that if all the guns had opened up they would have given their locations away for successive raids so the general rule was only to fire to defend the installations under attack. Similar logic was applied to ARP response. They held their ground not to go running about in the dark diluting resources.
South West Birmingham had a defensive band of Barrage Balloons with heavy AA to defend the Austin works this defensive band extended across the south of the city. The most heavily defended area being Tyesely, Aston, Smallheath area with Marshalling Yards, The Locomotive Works, BSA Guns, Fort Dunlop, Ely/ Kynock/ IMI munition factories.
Some of these companies had large Shadow Factories in Redditch Worcestershire all of which survived the war.