Eyewitness to Hell
It was the night 16,000 Nazi bombs turned Coventry into the ‘city of the dead’. Now a new book relives the terror – and reveals how one survivor was haunted by the chance he’d missed to kill Hitler
‘We did not care whether we lived or died’ ‘We gazed down
on the sea of flames in silence’
ON ARMISTICE Day in 1940, British interrogators made a chilling discovery. As the Blitz raged over London, a captured German pilot was overheard revealing to his room-mate that a colossal air raid, perhaps the biggest yet, had been planned to coincide with the next full moon. The industrial strongholds of Coventry and Birmingham were the targets.
Three days later, during the frosty night of November 14, Coventry was indeed laid waste by a brutal aerial bombardment. Between 30,000 and 40,000 incendiaries fell on both military and civilian targets, a fifth of them containing a hideous delaying device deliberately intended to cause an explosion in the faces of firefighters and rescue workers.
More than 500 tons of high explosives tumbled through the night sky in an estimated 16,000 bombs, some weighing as much as 1,100lb. Another 50 deadly parachute mines, each one capable of destroying a row of houses, floated down on to roofs and streets.
The entire city centre was destroyed and more than 1,400 people were killed or seriously injured in the raid, which lasted 11 hours. The circumstances of their demise are shocking, with victims burnt, crushed, shocked or frightened to death.
To this day, Coventry is still dogged by rumours that the true toll of fatalities was far higher than official statistics suggest.
As the heart of England became its front line for a night, the devastation was witnessed by 48-year-old Henry Tandey, the most decorated veteran of World War I. More than 20 years earlier he had spared Hitler’s life in the final throes of the previous conflict.
According to a version of events given by the Fuhrer himself to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Tandey had raised his rifle to kill Hitler, who was then a young soldier, then lowered it again when he realised that his enemy was dazed and unarmed. Both men had then waved respectfully before losing sight of each other.
Chamberlain reported that after telling this story, Hitler pointed to a painting of Tandey which he kept on a wall in his Bavarian mountain retreat as a reminder of his lucky escape. ‘That man came so near to killing me that I thought I should never see Germany again,’ he told the British PM.
If Hitler was to be believed — and some historians have suggested that it is open to question — it was an intolerably heavy burden f or Tandey, who worked as an Air Raid Precautions (ARP) warden in Coventry throughout World War II, to bear for the rest of his life.
With the carnage wrought by the Luftwaffe all around him, he is reported to have said: ‘If only I had known what he would turn out to be. When I saw all the people and women and children he had killed and wounded, I was sorry to God I let him go.’
Whatever the truth of the story, the terrible consequences of Hitler’s survival were all too plain to see as the city reeled from the shattering blow it had been dealt.
‘It was as if all hell had been let loose that night,’ wrote one witness later. ‘The constant crash of bombs preceded by that terrifying whistle as they came down, f i re engine and a mbulance bells ringing, folks shouting, screaming and crying and digging in the ruins, a red glow over all from the flames and t he air filled with choking smoke fumes.’
Another Covent r y resident described in a letter to her daughter ‘a city of the dead’. She and her husband had sheltered under the stairs of their home for 11 hours and ‘waited for death’.
‘There is nothing left,’ she wrote. ‘ The cathedral is in ruins — only the spire is l eft. The l i brary has gone, the market hall has gone. In fact, it would be easier to say what hasn’t gone.
‘One can’t get near the council offices for people waiting for death certificates. The military powers have taken over the city and everyone has to obey orders.’
Another said simply: ‘We did not care if we lived or died.’
The first sign that German planes were approaching — even before the banshee wail of the sirens — came from a chorus of dog barks around the city. With their remarkable hearing, the animals had perceived the impending danger some minutes ahead of the human population. Their cacophony of yapping was soon drowned out as the early wave of bombs began to fall at 7.10 pm.
Within an hour the whole city was alight, with a mass of small fires — and the main hospital, previously thought immune from attack, had already taken several direct hits.
‘I could see the men of the hospital staff running from bomb to bomb, dousing them in buckets of sand,’ wrote one doctor who viewed the destruction from the roof of the building. ‘Some of the male patients spent most of the night in the grounds, putting out incendiaries.’
Soon the flames were as tall as houses and Coventry had become, one witness said, ‘a first-hand view of Hell’.
Jean Taylor remembers how she had been celebrating becoming a teenager when the raid began. A chorus of ‘ Happy Birthday’ had only j ust finished as t he first explosions boomed.
She spent the night in a shelter at a school with several hundred others. ‘I was sitting between my sister, who was really upset, and my brother-inlaw who’d come back from Dunkirk s hell - s hocked,’ s he r ecalls. ‘I remember saying to God that I just wanted to make it to 14.’
At the city’s Hippodrome Theatre, the Forces’ sweetheart Betty Driver, who would later find fame as barmaid Betty Turpin in TV’s Coronation Street, was cowering on the floor of her dressing room with her sister Freda and five-year-old Julie Andrews, the future Mary Poppins star, who was performing as part of a family troupe.
Above them, three stagehands were beginning an unscheduled ten-hour shift on t he r oof, t hrowing off incendiaries to stop the building igniting. Just an hour into the raid, a number of small fires were already melding together inside Coventry’s medieval cathedral.
Firefighters found themselves looking on helplessly as the roof, south aisle, nave and the top of three chapels blazed uncontrollably and their water supplies dried up.
Wooden cathedral furniture helped to feed the flames as molten l ead dripped from what remained of the roof and the elegant organ, once played by Handel, was swallowed by the inferno. Firefighters finally gave up and j oi ned t he t e ams rushing in to save priceless artefacts from destruction.
Before midnight, hours before the raid ended, only the tower, spire, an outer wall and the tomb of Coventry’s first bishop remained. Poignantly, though, the cathedral bells continued to sound long into the night, until the electricity that drove them was finally lost.
Elsewhere, f actory f i re tenders manned by volunteers working in tandem with the national service had taken to the city’s streets in force. ‘It looked like a spring garden — the yellow and purple colours of the flames were just like crocuses,’ said one fireman. ‘We’d put a fire out and the bombs would strike it up again.’
A machine operator at Alvis Mechanisation, who spent his nights with the works fire brigade, was blown by the force of a blast into Burton’s menswear store in the city centre. ‘The blast was so great that it split my trousers up the middle,’ he remembered later. ‘I was tempted to help myself to a pair from Burton’s. I was in dire necessity, but thought better of it. There were harsh penalties for looting.’
As Coventry burnt below, t he German pilots f ound themselves confused and conflicted about the nature of their target. While they were happy to knock out Britain’s i ndustrial and military capability, they were less certain about raining destruction on civilians.
‘The usual cheer that greeted a direct hit stuck in our throats,’ reported one Luftwaffe pilot many years later. ‘The crew just gazed down on the sea of flames in silence. Was this really a military target?’
There is little doubt that acts of superhuman courage were carried out by Coventry’s citizens that night, some of them acknowledged, many not.
Leading fireman Joseph Brown was left unconscious after one blast, but when he came round he insisted on continuing his job. And when an incendiary fell on one of the vehicles towing a fire tender, he leapt into the driverless cab to steer it to a hose so the fire could be extinguished.
Messenger Derek Durbridge was blown across the street by the force of a bomb as he guided a fire crew to the scene of a call- out. He was buried under debris but eventually managed to free himself and reported for duty at the Central Fire Station, only to be caught up again in a blast shortly
afterwards. both he and Joseph brown were later awarded the order of the british empire.
doctors and nurses worked calmly through the night, even as buildings shook with the force of the last bomb. John sargent, a st John Ambulance brigade volunteer, examined the faces of medical staff frozen in concentration, marvelling at the way the surgeons’ hands barely flinched as whistles and loud bangs filled the air.
When it finally came, the all-clear at 6.15 the following morning was an understated affair.
people emerged into grey daylight barely able to comprehend that they had survived and with no idea whether absent family members had lived or died. It would be days before some found out, and for many it was years before they recovered from the shock.
The night had seemed to last for days rather than just hours. ‘The complete silence after the last bomb explosion was as uncanny as the mystery of our survival,’ remarked one fireman.
Within hours, those who had survived were being scarred by the kind of sights that inevitably follow such large-scale devastation.
Two men carrying a stretcher with a blanket- covered body on it were pursued down the street by a little girl desperately screaming ‘ mother! ’ . The u n wary traveller around the city would f i nd s evered l i mbs, headless bodies and disembodied heads littering the ruins.
With the city counting its dead, the atmosphere remained mournful despite the non-appearance of enemy bombers the next night. A much-needed boost to morale came f rom George VI, who made a surprise visit to Coventry on saturday, november 16.
dilwyn evans was at work as a red Cross volunteer, trying to recover a body, when he felt a tap on the shoulder. It was Coventry mayor Jack moseley, who had only been in the post for five days before the raid. He quickly introduced the King.
evans remembered years later: ‘He put his hand out and thanked me very much for what I was doing. That repaid me for everything I had done.’
resplendent in his Field marshal’s uniform, the King encountered a man carrying two chickens he had rescued from a crushed coop. ‘Good luck, your majesty,’ he called out. ‘We’re ruined but we’re happy!’
before his departure, the royal visitor made an unscheduled home visit to the moseley household to say a final goodbye to the mayor. The mayor’s wife, nell, was sweeping up broken glass at the time. not realising who was knocking, she called out that they should go to the back of the house — and was startled moments later to find the King walking into her kitchen.
other heartwarming stories emerged from the chaos.
Len stephens and his girlfriend Christina decided to get married almost immediately after the raid, fearing each day could be their last. before going to the service, Len stood at the remains of the cathedral, holding aloft two shiny gold wedding bands in their box for a silent blessing. Their marriage lasted more than 70 years.
If the raid on Coventry proved anything, it was that a group of diverse people bound together by a common aim could give an excellent account of themselves even in the face of appalling horrors.
The courage and compassion exhibited that terrible night seemed to be written somewhere in the dnA of Coventry.
Although he had no special affection for the city or its people, visiting Coventry no more than twice despite its importance to the war effort, Winston Churchill r emained aware of t he c ost exacted f rom them and other ordinary people in the battle to stop the spread of fascism. It was those in Coventry, among others, whom he had in mind when he fashioned the following tribute:
‘This is no war of chieftains or of princes, of dynasties or national ambition,’ he said. ‘It is a war of peoples and of causes.
‘There are vast numbers not only in this island but in every land who will render faithful service in this war, but whose names will never be known, whose deeds will never be recorded. This is a War of the unknown Warriors.’
THE Blitzed City by Karen Farrington is available for £11.39 (40 per cent discount) — visit www.mailbookshop.co.uk. Offer for a limited time only. P&P free on orders over £12. Offer applies to UK mainland only. Subject to availability.