Bomber Boys. Patrick Bishop

walked through mounds of smoking debris flickering with flame, around craters big enough to swallow a bus. The most shocking sight was the cathedral. It lay open to the sky. The roof and the pillars had collapsed and everything inside the nave had burned to ash, piled up within the sagging external walls. All that remained was the spire and tower.

      Coventry had been hit by 503 tons of high explosive, 56 tons of incendiaries and 127 parachute mines. The city was like others which had expanded during the Industrial Revolution. The workers’ houses were huddled along the flanks of the factories they worked in. It was inevitable that the German bombs, no matter how well aimed, would hit them. Altogether 42,904 homes were destroyed or damaged, 56 per cent of the housing in the city. The number of dead was put at 554. Another 863 were seriously injured.

      This was the most concentrated attack of the Blitz to date. To Britain and its allies it seemed that the Germans had set a new standard in ruthlessness. Those who took part in the raid believed they were engaged in a respectable act of war. At the pre-operation briefing, crews were told by their commander that Coventry was ‘one of the chief armament centres of the enemy air force and has also factories which are important for the production of motor vehicles and armoured cars.’ If the raid succeeded, he said, ‘we shall have dealt another heavy blow to Herr Churchill’s war production.’⁹

      The raid was indeed a great success. Eight hours after it ended, German radio listeners were told that bombers had ‘inflicted an extraordinarily heavy blow on the enemy’ and that Coventry had been ‘completely wiped out’. In the broadcast a notorious word was heard for the first time. What the bombers had done was to koventrieren, to Coventrate, the city.¹⁰

      Until now civilian spirits had held up well in air attacks. Coventry provided a new and sterner test of morale. The raids on London so far had been heavy but scattered. The attacks on places like Liverpool and Southampton had been limited and of much shorter duration. The violence against Coventry seemed more focused and therefore potentially more traumatic than anyone else had experienced. It was here that the question of whether Britain could take it might be answered.

      The first evidence was troubling. As people struggled to recover, a feeling of numb hopelessness appears to have set in. By now there were reporters around to record the city’s mood. Hilde Marchant, a thoughtful and courageous Daily Express correspondent who had witnessed the war in Spain, arrived while fires still burned and buildings toppled. She came across a dazed-looking group standing helplessly in the street, ‘occasionally asking when bread was coming into the city. There was no clamour, just sullen resentment at the inconvenience. They had patience because they were too weary to be angry.’ Outside the Council House, the municipal headquarters, she saw a long queue. ‘Men without collars and still in their carpet slippers. Women in woollen dressing gowns and slippers just as they had come from the shelter … asking for food and money.’

      When an aeroplane appeared overhead there was a wild scramble and women hauled their children to the nearest shelter. The aircraft shifted in the sky to reveal RAF roundels, but it was some time before anyone was persuaded to come out. Some people had never left the shelters after the all-clear. Peering into one, Marchant saw two adults and two children ‘with greenish faces, so still that they looked dead’. A team from the pioneering social study group Mass Observation, veterans of bomb attacks on London and elsewhere, arrived in Coventry on Friday afternoon less than a dozen hours after the raid finished. Their report claimed the attack had caused ‘unprecedented dislocation and depression’, compared with what they had seen before. ‘There were more open signs of hysteria, terror, neurosis observed than during the whole of the previous two months together in all areas,’ it said. ‘Women were seen to cry, to scream, to tremble all over, to faint in the street, to attack a fireman and so on. The overwhelmingly dominant feeling on Friday was the feeling of utter helplessness. The tremendous impact of the previous night had left people practically speechless in many cases. And it made them feel impotent. There was no role for the civilian. Ordinary people had no idea what they should do (original emphasis).’¹¹

      The lack of organization or direction was unsurprising given the power of the attack. The mayor and his officials, the men who ran the city’s services, had all suffered the same experience as everyone else. An individual report by a Mass Observation representative suggested that Coventry’s relative smallness meant the ‘shock effect of the bombing was much greater than in London … everybody knew somebody who was killed or missing … everybody knew plenty of people who had been rendered temporarily or permanently homeless. And these subjects occupied literally 90 per cent of all conversation heard throughout Friday afternoon and evening. Even in Stepney at the beginning of the Blitz there was not nearly so much obsession with damage and disaster.’

      This was to be expected and no indication of despair. But the observer also noted that people seemed anxious to leave Coventry behind, reporting that ‘the dislocation is so total in the town that people easily feel that the town itself is killed (original emphasis).’¹²

      This was the reaction that the authorities had feared, opening the way to anarchy. It was particularly disastrous if it happened in Coventry. If the city descended into chaos and flight, who would man the war factories when they were rebuilt, as they would have to be if the struggle was to continue?

      Senior government figures rushed in to test the mood themselves. The Home Secretary Herbert Morrison, the Minister of Health Ernest Brown and the Minister of Aircraft Production Lord Beaverbrook converged on Coventry. The city officials who met them were angry. They demanded to know why there had been no night-fighters to protect them and so few guns. Morrison wrote later that he found ‘an almost total lack of will or desire to get the town moving again’ and detected an ‘air of defeatism’. This was desperately unfair. The men in front of him were still in shock from an experience that was unknown to the men from London. The chief fire officer, who showed up covered in grime from the smoke, fell asleep at the table.

      Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian-born press baron and crony of the prime minister, seemed particularly unsympathetic. Instead of offering any apology for the absence of fighters he made a florid speech, reminding the officials of their duty to get Coventry working again. This was the brutal truth. Coventry was essential to the war effort and the resumption of production was given precedence over easing the plight of survivors. The first major decision was to set up an organization under the chairmanship of a powerful local car manufacturer, William Rootes, to oversee the restoration of gas, water, electricity and transport so that the war factories could function again.

      Apprehension rather than defiance was the prevailing sentiment in Coventry’s shattered streets on the morning after the Blitz. There was no reason to doubt that the Germans would be back again that night and no expectation that anyone would be able to stop them. The story went round that they had deliberately left the cathedral spire intact to provide an aiming point for the next bombardment.

      As the short day wore on the city emptied. It reminded Hilde Marchant of what she had seen in Spain and Finland. ‘Yet this was worse … these people moved against a background of suburban villas, had English faces … they were our own kind.’ Both sides of the road were filled with ‘lorries, cars, handcarts and perambulators … the lorries were packed with women and children sitting on suitcases or bundles of bedding … the most pathetic of all were those who just leaned against the railings at the roadside, too exhausted to move, their luggage in heaps around them and a fretful tired child crying without temper or anger …’ Those with relations round about were hoping they would have room to take them in. Those without were looking for cheap or free lodging with strangers and often they found it. Church halls and Scout huts opened up to supplement the existing emergency centres. Some gave up looking and slept under hedges or against walls.

      But over the following days, people began to drift back. Many spent the day in town then trekked back to the country in the evening. There was no real choice but to return. Coventry was where their lives were. There, they joined a significant number who had stayed put, either because their duties demanded it or out of a refusal to be driven out. The pride involved in having endured quickly asserted itself. Tom Harrisson, one of the founders of Mass Observation, arrived on Friday afternoon and found the city in low spirits. ‘It would