Air raids on Coventry
The air raids on Coventry , often referred to as Coventry Blitz - derived from the term Blitzkrieg - were a series of bombing raids by the German air force on the English city of Coventry . The most momentous of these attacks came in the evening and night of November 14, 1940, a few days after the daytime raids on London during the Blitz .
background
Coventry is an industrial city in the central West Midlands of England. At the beginning of the war it had about 320,000 inhabitants. The metalworking typical of the region was one of their industries; At the beginning of the 20th century, ammunition factories were established there. The city had been the center of British vehicle and engine construction since the 1920s: BSA / Daimler , Morris , SS Cars , Rootes / Humber and Standard Motor built various types of motor vehicles - the halls of the former Triumph Motor Company in the city center were suppliers to the aircraft industry housed; Armstrong Siddeley manufactured aircraft engines in his Parkside factory on the southern edge of the city center . Frederick Taylor therefore describes Coventry as a legitimate target for bombing.
Coventry's industrialization came so early that factories and factories were built before the city's planned development. Coventry therefore had a very mixed urban structure with little spatial separation of residential and industrial areas. Small and medium-sized industrial plants were often located next to residential and commercial buildings on the same street. It was only after the First World War that pure housing estates emerged in Coventry at greater distances from industrial areas.
Air strikes
Coventry was hit by minor attacks during the Battle of Britain . People also died in July and August 1940. Coventry was not attacked as intensely as London and Birmingham.
Overall, the death toll in the attacks on Coventry through 1942 was around 1200.
November 14, 1940
On the evening of November 14th, Coventry was the target of Operation Moonlight Sonate , flown by Air Fleet 3 and the Scout Units of Combat Group 100 (KGr 100). The entire association comprised 515 aircraft. The targets of the attack were the factories and the industrial infrastructure of Coventry, whereby it was accepted that residential areas and cultural assets would also be affected to a significant extent.
The 13 He-111 target marker aircraft of the KGr 100 that arrived first used the new " X-Procedure " to find the target . At 7:20 p.m., they first dropped lightning bombs to mark them.
The following formation of He 111 dropped explosive bombs and parachute air mines . Roofs were blown open and streets were difficult to pass through craters; this hindered later use of extinguishing units. The bombs also damaged the water and gas supply network. The waves that followed threw a mix of high explosive and incendiary bombs . The latter contained magnesium or petroleum as an incendiary agent. The incendiary bombs entered the buildings via the roofs covered by air mines.
The Coventry Cathedral , a few hundred meters from the Armstrong Siddeley Flugmotorenwerk away, stood at 20 o'clock in flames. The fire was successfully fought by the fire brigade; later hits rekindled it. The fire brigade building was also hit directly by bombs, so that the coordination and management of the fire fighting was no longer possible. Hits on the city's water pipe network also hindered the extinguishing work or made it impossible in places.
At midnight the bombing peaked; at 6:15 am the all-clear sirens sounded.
At least 568 people were killed in the attack. About 1000 people were injured. Around 4,000 apartments, as well as around three quarters of the industrial facilities between the residential buildings, were destroyed. 60,000 buildings were hit in the attack; Hardly a building in the city center remained undamaged. Two hospitals, two churches and a police station were also hit or destroyed. Coventry Cathedral was destroyed in the attack.
The Luftwaffe dropped a total of around 500 tons of explosive bombs, 50 air mines and 36,000 incendiary bombs over Coventry in the attack. The attack pattern differed from those that the Royal Air Force later flew: Overall, the smaller attack waves were spread over time. The bombers were used several times and ammunitioned in France, as they were designed for a smaller bomb load than the bombers in later Allied attacks over Germany. This left time between the waves of attacks to fight fires and rescue them, while the repeated attacks disrupted countermeasures on the ground for hours. Arthur Harris later found, regarding the requirements for a firestorm , that the attacks, while concentrated in space, were not in terms of time.
The attacks brought information to the Luftwaffe and the Allied air forces
- through the use of electronic route guidance
- on the use of air mines to blow up buildings and thus to ignite firestorms
The type of attacks on Coventry in November 1940 was presumably formulated shortly afterwards by Joseph Goebbels as " coventrate " propagandistically.
April 1941
On the night of April 8th to 9th, Coventry was again the target of a major air strike. It was flown by 237 planes which dropped 315 high explosive bombs and 710 incendiary canisters. Coventry was attacked again the following night. About 475 people were killed and 700 injured in these two attacks. Public buildings such as the Central Police Station and Warwickshire Hospital were hit again in the attack.
August 1942
The last attack on Coventry occurred on August 3, 1942. It did not target the city center, but part of the city east of the city center.
Coventry and Ultra
Publications since the 1970s have repeatedly alleged that the attack on Coventry was known in advance through deciphering and ultra- information . Winston Churchill had therefore forbidden measures against the attack in order not to reveal to the Germans that the Enigma machine had broken .
These publications aroused sometimes violent criticism from military historians and cryptologists in the press and specialist media . One of the first authors, the British Air Force Colonel Frederick W. Winterbotham , had served in the ultra units of the British military, but his presentation could be refuted because he had not been officially involved with many of the matters he detailed. However, its publication contributed to the fact that, from the late 1970s, the British authorities made documents previously classified as "secret", including hundreds of thousands of deciphered radio messages, available for historical research.
After the night bombing raids on London from the beginning of September to mid-November 1940, the German air force command also wanted to launch heavy attacks on other British cities known as industrial centers. On November 9, a German radio message addressed to Kampfgruppe 100 with reference to an "Operation Moonlight Sonata" was intercepted; it was broken on November 11th at the British deciphering center at Bletchley Park . The radio message indicated a major attack by Luftflotte 2 and Luftflotte 3 ; the combat group 100 should be used for targeting. Only “Goals 1 to 4” were given as goals. Shortly before, a map with the details of destinations 1 to 4 in the London area had come into the possession of the British. The previous attacks were also concentrated in the greater London area, so the information on the map and the radio message were linked and a particularly serious attack on the capital was expected.
On November 12th, from a bugged conversation between a German pilot captured on November 9th and a comrade, it became known that the full moon would be used for a mass attack on Birmingham and Coventry from November 15th to 20th. Another radio message came out on the same day; this time the new "targets 51 to 53" were specified for the combat group. The information on VHF beacons also included pointed to Birmingham, Coventry and Wolverhampton. The High Command of the Royal Air Force nevertheless continued to assume a massive attack on London and was moreover of the opinion that another target would be identified in good time based on the intercepted sample beacon transmissions. Prime Minister Churchill broke off a trip he had already started to stay in the alleged target of attack, London.
Shortly after 3:00 p.m. on November 14, 1940, a test aircraft intercepted sample beacons crossing over Coventry. Immediately afterwards, prepared countermeasures were taken, such as disrupting the direction finding signals, alerting the air defense including the night fighters , attacks against direction finders and airfields in occupied France and attacks on German cities. All measures were ultimately unsuccessful: For example, in this first major attack with a new target-finding device, the wrong interference frequency was used, the attacks in France and Germany had little effect, and the fighters deployed against the approaching bombers were poorly guided.
Reginald Victor Jones later wrote that messages to the German radio beam stations had been intercepted but could not be deciphered until the attack.
literature
- Frederick Taylor: Dresden. Tuesday February 13, 1945. Pantheon, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3570550595 , Chapter 10: Blitz.
- Peter Calvocoressi : Top Secret Ultra, 2nd revised Edition. Baldwin, 2001, ISBN 978-0947712419 .
- Frederick William Winterbotham: The Ultra Secret. Dell, 1975, ISBN 978-0440190615 (German: Frederick William Winterbotham: Aktion Ultra. Germany's code machine helped the Allies win. From the English by Günter Stiller. Ullstein, 1976, ISBN 978-3550073359 ).
Web links
- David McGrory The Coventry Blitz
- David McGrory Photograph - City Center
- Coventry Air Raids
Individual evidence
- ^ Frederick Taylor: Dresden. Tuesday February 13, 1945. Pantheon 2008, ISBN 978-3570550595 , Chapter 10: Blitz.
- ↑ BBC: 1940: Germans bomb Coventry to destruction (= On this day, November 15) Online , accessed September 4, 2013.
- ^ Frederick Taylor: Dresden. Tuesday February 13, 1945. Pantheon 2008, ISBN 978-3570550595 .
- ^ WB Stephens: The City of Coventry: Introduction . In: WB Stephens (ed.): A History of the County of Warwick: Volume 8: The City of Coventry and Borough of Warwick. 1969 British History Online , accessed September 4, 2013.
- ↑ Frederick William Winterbotham: The Ultra Secret . Dell, 1975, ISBN 978-0440190615 (German: Frederick William Winterbotham: Aktion Ultra. Germany's code machine helped the Allies win. From the English by Günter Stiller. Ullstein, 1976, ISBN 978-3550073359 ).
- ↑ a b c d Jürgen Rohwer: The influence of the Allied radio reconnaissance on the course of the Second World War. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, vol. 27, issue 3, 1979, pp. 325–369 Online PDF 1,890 kB, accessed on September 5, 2013.
- ^ Reginald Victor Jones: Most Secret War. British Scientific Intelligence 1939-1945. Hamish Hamilton, London 1978, ISBN 0-241-89746-7 .
Coordinates: 52 ° 24 ′ 30.8 " N , 1 ° 30 ′ 25.6" W.