Death by moonlight: 75 years on from the devastating Luftwaffe blitz of Coventry

IT WAS the bombing raid that led to the coining of a new verb “Koventrieren”, or in English, to Coventrate. 

Just one night of bombing killed 568 men, women and children and left more than 1,200 people injured

“The word embodied the idea of the physical and psychological destruction of an entire city,” explains historian Angus Calder.

The Luftwaffe’s attack on Coventry, which took place exactly 75 years ago today, marked a new departure in the Blitz.
On just one night 500 tons of high-explosive bombs and 30,000 incendiaries were dropped, killing 568 men, women and children and leaving 1,200 people injured, over 800 of them seriously.
The historic centre of the Midlands city was destroyed, with its 14th-century cathedral left in ruins.
Almost one-third of Coventry’s houses were made uninhabitable.
Yet, despite the devastation and their heavy losses, the people of Coventry showed a remarkable resilience in rebuilding their lives and getting the war effort back on track.
In November 1940 Britain stood alone against the Nazis, with millions facing the nightly terror of bombing raids from the Luftwaffe.
The Germans had been targeting London since September. But instead of damaging civilian morale, the raids on the capital had done the opposite and made Londoners more defiant.

Much of coventry was destroyed during the devastating Luftwaffe raid

London though was a large, sprawling city.
What would happen if the Nazis bombed other, smaller British cities?
“In a smaller, isolated city, the quality of life for survivors would be far more seriously reduced. When the centre was razed, the symbols of local pride and centres of local pleasure perished with it,” writes Calder by way of explaining the Germans’ strategy.
Seventy-five years ago Coventry was a city of about 213,000 people.
It was an important engineering and manufacturing centre with many factories involved in war production.
It was a logical target for the Nazis and had already been bombed 17 times between August and late October.
But these attacks, while leaving 180 dead, were on a different scale altogether to what the Nazis had planned for the night of November 14, 1940.
The operation to raze Coventry to the ground was given the codename “Moonlight Sonata” as it would take place during the full moon.
The attack began about 7.20pm with a wave of Heinkel bombers.

Some believe Coventry was deliberately sacrificed by Churchill to win more support in the war

They dropped more than 10,000 incendiary bombs which set off over 200 fires.
“Soon the red glow in the sky could be seen by the incoming German planes even before they had crossed the coast in endless waves of bombers that kept coming all through the night,” writes Juliet Gardiner, author of Wartime: Britain 1939-45.
Coventrians soon realised that this was no “normal” air raid but something altogether more terrible.
However, those whose job it was to look after people did not shirk from their responsibilities.
Gardiner describes how nurses at the Coventry and Warwickshire hospital covered every patient with a mattress to protect them: “As the bombs fell, nurses were wheeling beds down from the top floors and lining them along the ground floor away from the flying glass.”
She quotes a female patient who was recovering from an operation.
She awoke “as the sirens sounded to see the wall opposite my bed disappear. A doctor and nurse were lying on top of me to protect me from flying glass and debris”.
The hospital received five direct hits that night and all but 100 of its 1,600 windows were blown out.

Coventry's historic cathedral was all but flattened during the bombing

It was the most dangerous night of the war to be a civilian.
“A civilian had a 60 per cent greater chance of being killed or seriously wounded during that one night in Coventry than during the whole six years of the war elsewhere,” writes Norman Longmate, author of Air Raid: The Bombing Of Coventry, 1940.
Today, controversy still exists over whether Coventry was deliberately sacrificed by Prime Minister Winston Churchill to win a bigger victory.
The theory is that the government did not want the Germans to know that the top-secret Bletchley Park had broken into their Enigma encoding machine.
On November 11, Bletchley Park had decrypted a message that there was to be a very heavy raid codenamed Moonlight Sonata as it would take place at the height of the full moon.
A further decrypt the following day found that three potential targets were Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Coventry.
But there was also a belief in official circles that London might be the target.
It was only at 3pm on the afternoon of November 14 that radio signals confirmed that Coventry was the target and the raid would take place that same night.
Some argue that there was still time for an evacuation, others that it would have been impossible at such a late hour.

Sinclair McKay, author of The Secret Life Of Bletchley Park, contends that “the theory proposing that Coventry was sacrificed omits certain essential facts”.

A German map of Coventry circling targets to be raided by the Luftwaffe

"A civilian had a 60 per cent greater chance of being killed or seriously wounded during that one night in Coventry than during the whole six years of the war elsewhere"

Norman Longmate, author

Most crucially, that Churchill got the message about the city only when he returned to Whitehall that evening.
The next day, those who survived the 10-hour raid surveyed the ruins of their city.
The BBC reported that it was “impossible to see where the central streets had been”.
Not only had a third of houses been hit but also 21 factories, the majority of them involved in aircraft production. Telephone lines were down and rail lines were blocked. Half of Coventry’s buses had been wrecked.
There was no gas, electric light and for most people, no water.
Around 500 shops had also been bombed out of action.
But the citizens of Coventry, helped by people in other towns, showed great spirit in the face of adversity.
Roaming vans distributed bread and water.
“A hundred thousand loaves were rushed from neighbouring cities in a single day. The Women’s Voluntary Service brought in their mobile canteens and cooked stew in the ruined streets,” writes Calder.

Not only were a third of houses hit, but also 21 military aircraft factories

Workers were keen to get back to their factories, whatever state they were in, to help the war effort.

 

The roof had been blasted off at the Morris Motor Engines works but that still didn’t stop the majority of the factory’s staff turning up for work in the week following the bombing.
“They went on with their jobs under the open sky, through snow, wind and rain, in greatcoats, sou’westers and gumboots, and sometimes with tin hats to ward off chunks of falling masonry… within six weeks Morris’s production of tank engines, airscrews and other vital components was back to normal,” records Calder.
The building of a new St Michael’s Cathedral, next to the roofless ruins of the old cathedral, came to symbolise the way the city had literally risen from the ashes.
Tomorrow evening, the cathedral will host a special service of commemoration to mark the 75th anniversary of Moonlight Sonata.
The Nazis had tried to destroy Coventry but the city and its people proved indestructible.