The lack of organization or direction was unsurprising given the power of the attack. The mayor and his officials, the men who ran the citys services, had all suffered the same experience as everyone else. An individual report by a Mass Observation representative suggested that Coventrys 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 Coventrys 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 be an insult to the people of Coventry to ballyhoo them and exaggerate their spirit, he said in a talk broadcast after the BBC Nine Oclock News 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 well 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 BBCs 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 days 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 Legions 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 Harrissons 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.
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 Harrissons 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 citys 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 citys 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 wasnt borne out by my own observations it only makes Coventry realize that this sort of thing doesnt 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. Were fighting gangsters, so weve got to be gangsters ourselves. Weve been gentlemen too long.16
Whatever gentlemanly attitudes lingered among those making Britains 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.
3 To Fly and Fight
Bomber Command was poorly equipped to face the challenges of this new and vulnerable phase of its existence. In one respect, though, it was extraordinarily rich. The quality and quantity of men available to it were the best Britain and its overseas Dominions could provide. The Bomber Boys were all volunteers and the supply of aircrew candidates never slackened, even when losses were at their most daunting.
They were an extraordinarily varied bunch. Most were British. There was a sprinkling from the diaspora of the defeated nations, Poles, Czechs, Norwegians, French and Belgians, wanting their revenge on Germany. They were outnumbered by large numbers of Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans, the colonials as they were mockingly but affectionately called, whose lands were not directly threatened by Nazism but who, driven by a sense of adventure or fellow-feeling for their British cousins, nonetheless offered themselves for what it was soon understood were among the most dangerous jobs in warfare.
For imaginative boys growing up in the 1930s, the prospect of going to war in an aeroplane carried an appeal that the older services could never match. Aviation was only a generation old and flying glowed with glamour and modernity. In the years before the war Peter Johnson, languishing in a hated job as a breakfast-cereal salesman, looked at this world and longed to join it. I read aviation magazines, he wrote, watched the activities at an RAF aerodrome from behind a hedge and even once penetrated into a flying club on the pretext of finding out the cost of learning to fly. That, needless to say, was well out of my income bracket but the contact with the world of flight, the romantic instructors in their ex-RFC leather coats, the hard, pretty girls with their long cigarette holders, the rich young men boasting about their adventures, fitted perfectly with my picture of a dream world to which, if I joined the Air Force, I could find a key.1