Bomber Boys. Patrick Bishop

the following night. The most common remark he had heard from people as they first surveyed the mess of their city was ‘poor old Coventry’. But by Saturday, he found the mood had changed. ‘I was out in the streets again before daylight. It was a mild clear morning and the first thing I heard was a man whistling. Soon people began crowding through the town but today they were talking, even joking about it. Instead of the despair I heard them say “we’ll recover – life will go on, we can get used to it.” People still felt pretty helpless but no longer hopeless. The frightened and nervous ones had already left. Those left behind were beginning to feel tough – just as the people of London had felt tough before them.’

      A week later a visitor noticed a card in the window of a half-wrecked baby-clothes shop.¹³

      BUSINESS AS USUAL

      KEEP SMILING

      There will always be an ENGLAND

      It was the spirit of Sydney James, the Rialto troubadour.

      The story of what had happened in Coventry was played down in the BBC’s first big news broadcast of the day at 8 a.m. By 1 p.m. it was being given unusually full treatment. For the first time, the Ministry of Information allowed a blitzed city other than London to be mentioned by name. This was gratifying for those who endured the raid but the official version of what had happened differed sharply from what they had experienced. According to the BBC ‘the enemy was heavily engaged by intensive anti-aircraft, which kept them at a great height and hindered accurate bombing of industrial targets.’ It did admit heavy casualties – a figure of a thousand was given – and that many buildings had been destroyed and damaged. The attack, it emphasized, was an ‘indiscriminate bombardment of the whole city’. This account was repeated in the following day’s newspapers. T. S. Steele of the Daily Telegraph described the operation as a ‘terror raid’. He accused the Germans of seeking ‘to reproduce the Spanish tragedy of Guernica on a larger scale’, a reference to the Condor Legion’s destruction of the Basque capital in 1937.

      Steele repeated the line that a fierce anti-aircraft barrage had kept the raiders five miles above the city. ‘There was not even a pretence at an attempt to select military targets,’ he wrote. ‘For ten hours raider after raider flew over at an immense height and dumped bombs haphazard (sic) at the rate of nearly one a minute on the town. The result is that factories which are legitimate military targets have escaped comparatively lightly. The brunt of the destruction has fallen on shopping centres and residential areas – hotels, offices, banks, churches and – no Nazi raid is complete without this – hospitals.’

      Much of the information contained in the reports came from a Ministry of Home Security communiqué. Faced with the magnitude of the raid, the government had chosen to play the story up. The wisdom of publicizing the attack was questioned at the War Cabinet meeting on Monday 19 November. The Secretary of State for War, Anthony Eden, had listened to Harrisson’s Saturday night talk on the BBC and felt it had ‘been a most depressing broadcast’. The prime minister disagreed. The effect of the publicity had been considerable in the United States and in Germany he said.

      American correspondents indeed covered the raid in detail and seized on the city’s ordeal as a symbol of British steadfastness and Nazi barbarity. The Germans responded by claiming that 223 had been killed by the RAF during a raid on Hamburg carried out the night after the Coventry attack (the true number was in fact twenty-six who died when bombs hit the Blohm and Voss shipyard). The assumption was that transatlantic indignation at what had been done to Coventry had stung Germany into insisting that its civilians were also suffering. To one watching American, it seemed clear what was coming next. Raymond Daniell of the New York Times told his readers that people in Britain now found it difficult to escape a feeling that a ‘war of extermination is beginning. Each bomb that falls intensifies hatred and stimulates the demand for retaliation in kind.’

      The note of the all-clear siren had barely faded before calls for retribution began. When King George visited the city less than two days afterwards a man in the crowd called out to him: ‘God bless you. Give them what they gave to us! We can take it.’¹⁴ The intelligence reports reaching the city’s emergency services during the raids that preceded the big attack suggested that people had thought bombing attacks would be worse than they in fact were. As a result, ‘more people than hitherto now feel that indiscriminate bombing of Berlin would be an unwise policy.’¹⁵

      That attitude had now changed. Hilde Marchant had been one of the first to report the calls for revenge. She had issued one of her own. ‘The Nazis added one more word to the English language – “Coventrated”,’ she wrote. ‘Let us add one more – “Berliminated”.’ Her observations had been contradicted by Harrisson in a throw-away remark at the end of his broadcast. ‘I see some reporters stressing the fact that Coventry is clamouring for reprisals,’ he said. ‘That wasn’t borne out by my own observations … it only makes Coventry realize that this sort of thing doesn’t end the war and only makes it more bitter.’

      This judgement was not supported by the findings of his own teams. A fortnight after the raid they asked people in the streets of the city what they would like the government to do. ‘Knock bloody hell out of them,’ said a forty-five-year old man, described as middle class. ‘For every one he gives us, we ought to give him twenty,’ said a sixty-year-old working-class male. Another, youngish man replied. ‘We’re fighting gangsters, so we’ve got to be gangsters ourselves. We’ve been gentlemen too long.’¹⁶

      Whatever gentlemanly attitudes lingered among those making Britain’s war decisions were about to disappear for the duration of the war. It was a month before the government moved to avenge Coventry. The attack took place on the night of the 16/17 December and the target was Mannheim, an industrial town that straddles the Rhine in south central Germany. There were 134 aircraft on the raid, the biggest force to be used so far. At first sight there is nothing in the operations book or subsequent intelligence reports to suggest that the purpose of the raid was any different to many that had preceded it. The order was to attack the industrial centre of the town and the primary targets were the Mannheim Motorenwerke and naval armaments factories. The clue to the special nature of the raid lay in the bombs that the aircraft were carrying. There were a few 1,000-pound bombs and many more 500- and 250-pounders, packed with high explosive and designed to knock down walls and collapse roofs. But by far the largest number of bombs were incendiaries, weighing only four pounds each but capable when dropped in sufficient numbers, as Coventry knew all too well, of setting a city ablaze.

      The raid was led by eight Wellingtons which carried nothing but incendiaries in their bomb bays, flown by the most experienced crews available. The aircraft that followed them were to use the light of the fires they started as their aiming point and in the words of Sir Richard Peirse, who succeeded Portal as commander-in-chief of Bomber Command, ‘to concentrate the maximum amount of damage in the centre of the town.’ It was a perfect moonlit night over Mannheim and the returning crews thought they had done well. More than half the aircraft claimed to have hit the town. Some reported later that when they flew away at 3.30 a.m., the target area was a ‘mass of fires’.

      In fact the raid was only a partial success. The first Wellington ‘fire-raisers’ failed to accurately identify the centre of the city and many incendiaries fell in the suburbs which were then bombed by the following aircraft. Other bombs fell on Ludwigshafen on the western bank of the Rhine. The city authorities reported 240 buildings destroyed or damaged by incendiaries and 236 by high explosive. They included thirteen shops, a railway station, a railway office, one school and two hospitals. The total casualty list was thirty-four dead, eighty-one injured and 1,266 bombed out of their homes. Of the dead eighteen were women, two were children, thirteen were male civilians and one was a soldier.

      The Cabinet had given their approval for the plan three days before. If they had hoped for destruction to match that done to Coventry the reconnaissance photographs told another story. It was a disappointment and the exercise was not repeated for some time. But it was the shape of things to come.

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