Today in WW II History
World War II History for November 14
1940 - During World War II, German war planes destroyed most of the English town of Coventry when about 500 Luftwaffe bombers attacked.
German bombers devastate the English city of Coventry, demolishing tens of thousands of buildings and killing hundreds of men, women, and children. The verb “Koventrieren” (to Coventrate) passed into the German language, meaning “to annihilate or reduce to rubble.”
On November 8, Adolf Hitler had to move up his scheduled speech in Munich on the anniversary of his 1923 attempted coup in Bavaria because British bombers were on their way to take out a railway yard. Hitler was determined to avenge this audacious offensive. The Fuhrer let his bomber pilots know that he was not “willing to let an attack on the capital of the Nazi movement go unpunished.”
And so, on this day, almost 500 German bombers unleashed some 150,000 incendiary bombs and more than 500 tons of high explosives on the British industrial city, taking out 27 war factories. Of the 568 people killed, more than 400 were burned so badly they could not be identified. Among the more than 60,000 buildings destroyed or severely damaged was St. Michael’s Cathedral.
There have been claims that the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, knew several days in advance that the Germans would attack Coventry but deliberately held back the information.
His intelligence supposedly came from the scientists at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, who, in utmost secrecy, had cracked the Enigma code the Germans used for their military communications.
From an intercepted message, they had discovered that the city was a target.
But warning the city of Coventry and its residents of the imminent threat would have alerted the Germans to the fact that their codes had been cracked and their security breached.
Churchill considered it worth the sacrifice of a whole city and its people to protect his back-door route into Berlin’s secrets.
But is it true? Did it really happen this way? The end of 1940 was a terrible and frightening time in Britain.
