Further quotes of enormous interest from Nicholson Barker’s ‘Human Smoke’:
A newly caught German prisoner of war had a conversation with his cellmate. The cellmate, who was an informant for British intelligence, wrote up a report: “He believes that riots have broken out in London and that Buckingham Palace has been stormed and that ‘Herman’” – Herman Goering – “thinks the psychological moment has come for a colossal raid to take place between the 15th and the 20th of this month at the full moon and that Conventry and Birmingham will be the towns attacked.” It was November 12, 1940.
That same day, another burst of information came in from crypt-analysts at Bletchley Park. An operation of “very considerable dimensions” was upcoming, the decoders reported, which was to use “all available aircraft.” The commanding officer of a special unit of the Luftwaffe, the Kg100, which was trained to use radio-direction beams, would be personally leading the attack. It’s code name was MOONLIGHT SONATA. The British Air Staff, collating the incoming intelligence, wrote a memo to the prime minister about MOONLIGHT SONATA. “It is probably a reprisal for our attack on Munich,” the memo said. “We believe that the target areas will be noted in paragraph 1 above, probably in the vicinity of London, but if further information indicates Coventry, Birmingham or elsewhere, we hope to get instructions out in time.”
In response, Bomber Command proposed a “knock-for-knock policy.” The commander in chief, Richard Peirse, would chose a German city – Berlin, Essen, or Munich, depending on the weather – and bomb it.
It was November 12, 1940.
(‘British Intelligence in the Second World War’ by F.H Hinley, volume 1, pp. 539-41)
The German Squadrons received the attack signal – “MOND,” ”moon” – and their directional radio beams angled so that they intersected over Coventry. It was November 14, 1940.
By one o’clock that afternoon, British signals watchers knew that operation MOONLIGHT SONATA was on for that night. Two hours later, they knew where: “By three o’clock on the afternoon of the raid, No. 80 Wing was able to report that the X-Gereat beams were intersecting over Conventry,” wrote an intelligence officer, Aileen Clayton, after the war. “All RAF commands were informed, as were Home Security and Home Forces.”
(‘The Enemy Is Listening’ by Aileen Clayton, page 71.)
The British counterplan, Operation COLD WATER, went into effect: Thirty airplanes took off for Berlin.
Churchill was in the car with one of his secretaries, on his way to Ditchly, the borrowed country house where he stayed on moonlit nights, when Chequers was overly visible from the air. He held a locked box marked “Only to be opened by the Prime Minister in person.” He opened it. In it were deciphered messages, sorted for Churchill by Frederick Winterbotham, the spy who had helped to photograph Germany. Churchill read the messages and immediately told the driver to turn back to London. “False start for Ditchly,” wrote the secretary, John Martin, in his diary.” “The moonlight sonata.”
(‘Churchill War Papers’ by Martin Gilbert, volume 2, page 880; Ibid, page 1095)
Nobody called up Conventry to tell the people who lived there that an enormous attack, involving hundreds of airplanes, was coming their way in several hours’ time. The Conventry Fire Brigade was not notified; the mayor was not notified; the ambulance service was not notified. Twenty minutes before bombs fell, a local antiaircraft team got a message: “Major raid expected on Coventry tonight.”
(‘Air Raid’ by Norman Longmate, pp 263-64; Ibid, page 74)
At 7:10 PM., German pathfinder planes arrived over the target. They dropped ten thousand incendiaries in the first half hour. The bombing continued until dawn.
Several hundred thousand people lived and worked in Conventry. Rolls-Royce made bomber engines there, and Armstrong Siddeley made the Whitley bomber. The city also held a fourteenth-century cathedral church – “one of the finest specimens of Perpendicular architecture in England,” according to the 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica. The central part of the city was destroyed; five hundred people died; fifty thousand houses were damaged. The tower and some of the walls of the cathedral were left standing amid the obliteration. “All the shops, Boots, Flinns the jewelers, Marks, Woolworths, all along and down Smithford Street, gone, not a shop standing,” one inhabitant recalled.
A reporter for the German Propoganda Ministry flew in one of the bombers. He wrote that it was the greatest attack in the history of aerial warfare and that it had crippled Britain’s aviation industry. “It looked as if the earth had broken open and spewed fiery masses of lava far over the land,” he wrote. “The collapsed iron girders of great factory buildings were surrounded by gigantic columns of flames.” The attack was, the German command explained, a reprisal for the attack on Munich while Hitler was giving his anniversary speech.
“Conventry as a production centre for ammunitions has passed out for the time being,” wrote Cecil King, the publisher, in his diary. It troubled King that there apparently had been no evacuation plan, even though Conventry “must be the most concentrated conglomeration of military objectives of an industrialo nature in the whole country.”
The German Propoganda Ministry later prepared a pamphlet for children about the raid. “In revenge for the attack on Munich, bombs have fallen on an important area of the English Midlands and have had their effect,” the pamphlet said. “As the fall morning dawns over Conventry, this armaments centre is badly damaged.”
(‘Operation Moonlight Sonata’ by Alan W. Kurki, page 17; ‘With Malice Toward None: A War Diary’ by Cecil King, pages 85-86; ‘The Worst Night Of Our Lives by Harry Oakley; New York Times, November 16 1940; “Bombs On Conventry” by Carl Henze)
Margaret Couling, returning to Conventry the day after the bombing, found that her office building was standing. She went up to the top floor and looked at the remains of the cathedral, which were still standing. “There was a little procession came from the back end of the cathedral and walked down Hay Lane,” she said. It was the king and other notables. “They’d brought their own picnic basket,” she said, “so that they could have lunch before they went on elsewhere.”
The king wrote in his diary: “I think they liked me coming to see them in their adversity.”
Winston Churchill asked for heavy publicity to be given to the Conventry raid. He didn’t visit.
Raymond Daniell was at a mass burial ceremony in Coventry – the first of two. It was November 20, 1940.
Two hundred unnamed flag-draped coffins lay in a row, Daniell said – “a long, narrow, deep gash cut in the red earth by a steam shovel and shored up with rough boards so that it looked like an excavation for a water main.” There was a pile of dirt with spades poking out of it, and there were shovelers waiting in rubber boots. The bishop, standing on a bare mound with the steam shovel behind him, asked people to remember that Hitler had killed their loved ones but could not kill the human spirit. Assistants sprinkled dust and ashes on the stacked coffins, and a thousand mourners moved past. There was no music. The king and queen weren’t there. Winston Churchill was in London discussing Greece with his war cabinet and being photographed by Cecil Beaton.
Daniell’s article was “heavily censored without explanation” by the British authorities, said an italicized note printed at the end.
(“Conventry Dead Laid in One Grave; Air Raid Siren is their Reqium”, New York Times November 18, 1940; “Fringes Of Power” by John Colville, page 298.)
Churchill visited Birmingham, where eight hundred people had been killed in a raid a few days earlier. It was the end of November 1940. “A very pretty young girl ran up to the car and threw a box of cigars into it,” Churchill later wrote. “I was very glad (in my official capacity) to give her a kiss. I then went on to see the long mass grave in which so many citizens and their children had been newly buried.”
(“Their Finest Hour” by Winston Churchill, page 377.)