Taylor - Coventry Thursday, 14 November 1940

A Note on the Author

FREDERICK TAYLOR was educated at Aylesbury Grammar School, read History and Modern Languages at Oxford and did postgraduate work at Sussex University. He edited and translated The Goebbels Diaries: 193831 and is the author of four acclaimed books of narrative history, Dresden, The Berlin Wall, Exorcising Hitler and The Downfall of Money. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and lives in Cornwall.

COVENTRY

Thursday, 14 November 1940

FREDERICK TAYLOR

I. M. Gtz Bergander

b. Dresden 1927, d. Berlin 2013

These houses are deserted, felt over smashed windows,

No milk on the step, a note pinned to the door

Telling of departure: only shadows

Move when in the day the sun is seen for an hour,

Yet to me this decaying landscape has its uses:

To make me remember, who am always inclined to forget,

That there is always a changing at the root,

And a real world in which time really passes.

Philip Larkin, New Year Poem

Contents

The near-destruction in 1940 of Coventry, a substantial city in the English Midlands of both historical and industrial importance, ranks as one of the iconic events of the Second World War. Coventrys subjection to attack by the German Luftwaffe its 240,000 inhabitants own Blitz lasted, in fact, almost two years, from August 1940 until June 1942. However, for most of those many other people, all over the world, who still react to the name Coventry by picturing a citys sudden destruction, their frame of reference is the massed, twelve-hour bomber raid during the night of 14/15 November 1940. Many are not even aware that the city was raided before and after that date, or that more Coventrians were killed in those other attacks than in the most famous or notorious one.

All the same, the November raid was, and remains, a central experience for the citys people and a central element in the consequent Coventry legend. That this legend was assiduously cultivated by the wartime British governments propaganda machine, to its considerable and lasting advantage, does not negate the shocking facts of the citys fate especially shocking at the time, when bombing raids were still connected in the public mind, however tenuously, with the actual war being fought on the ground.

The Polish capital, Warsaw, lay under siege in late September 1939, when terrible destruction was visited upon it by the Luftwaffe. The levelling of the historic heart of Rotterdam the following May, dreadful as it was, occurred in the context of a German attempt to force the Dutch ports surrender. Even the sporadic raids on London during the first weeks of the Battle of Britain, and certainly those on air bases and individual factories, fitted into an existing framework of understanding. The ability of aircraft to inflict damage on enemy assets and installations from the air was well established. Indeed, during the First World War, especially its final couple of years and despite cases of terrible collateral damage to civilians, it had been recognised in principle as legitimate by both sides. Only improvements in military technology and armaments during the subsequent quarter-century changed the degree (and perhaps also thereby the moral sustainability) of aerial bombardment as a justifiable tool of attack.

The first great attack on Coventry, involving more than 500 German bombers and using advanced radar-guided techniques to approach and find their target, represented both a quantitative and qualitative change in the concept of aerial warfare. It raised this central issue: how much damage to civilian as well as military targets could be inflicted, on what scale, and how indiscriminately, without the supposed legitimacy of such a military method coming into question? After the big raid against Coventry, the function of aerial warfare was clearly shown to be not merely tactical and immediate but strategic and long term. The normally accepted military needs of the moment were no longer directly relevant. Against precisely which factories or installations the damage was inflicted was significant, but less important to an air bombing war that was starting to look like a process not of immediate knockout but of drawn-out attrition. In this process, the notional protection of civilians always a somewhat dubious proposition was inevitably all but abandoned.

The very shock, and sinister novelty, of the attack on Coventry helped give birth to a number of urban legends. The most stubborn of these holds that the city was sacrificed; that at Churchills behest no steps were taken to strengthen its defences because of an all-consuming need to protect the invaluable British ability to read secret German codes. These, so the story went, had provided the government with foreknowledge of the raid, but the information could not be used to prevent Coventrys destruction for fear that the enemy might realise his signals communications were compromised.

The government seems, in fact, to have known in advance (albeit at very short notice) of the impending attack. The problems with the sacrifice theory are nevertheless many. First, as we shall see, the government did not really learn of the planned attack on Coventry through reading German secret codes, but through basic human intelligence of the traditional kind. Second, the government did take steps to protect the city, but they were neither obvious nor successful. Third, the government did decide against warning Coventry of the attack. However, this decision almost certainly had nothing to do with protecting the famous Ultra secret and everything to do with a hard-headed calculation that balanced humanitarian concerns against risk to public order.

Stubbornly durable legends are a common legacy of major catastrophes of all kinds, and especially of devastating bombing raids. As I learned when researching my book on the bombing of Dresden, it is very hard to gainsay such stories once they have achieved purchase in the collective consciousness of the survivors. The disorienting shock of such events, irrupting into the peaceful daily lives of their civilian victims, most of whom have no previous experience of the horrors of war, certainly plays a role. In fact, for a historian to present an alternative account can be seen by survivors as insolent, even offensive.

As was also true in the case of the population of Dresden, so for Coventrians, the even tempo of everyday modern life, with its taken-for-granted securities and its deceptive predictability, provided little preparation for the destruction that came so suddenly from the sky. In earlier centuries, cities at war at least had news of the enemys approach, giving time for psychological and physical preparation. Also, of course, for surrender or escape. The modern air war granted the individual civilian no such comforts, however cold they might prove, and the level of destruction it could inflict was instant and terrible. It is always fascinating, if grimly so, to be permitted insight into the feelings of human beings at war, and in the case of civilians, for all the reasons outlined above, especially so. It is also instructive.

Growing up in decent but humble circumstances on the outskirts of a prosperous English town in the 1950s, I experience a shock of recognition when I read or hear the many vivid accounts by urban and suburban victims of the bombing of Coventry. The interrupted life they describe resembles, with a few but unimportant differences, that of my own early childhood, a post-war Britain that was little different from their pre-war Britain, before the near-universal spread of television and the advent of the age of the motor car and of you- never-had-it-so-good consumerism.