Bomber Boys. Patrick Bishop

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СКАЧАТЬ falling bombs – the shattering explosions – the showers of incendiaries, literally thousands, and then … perhaps the most horrifying sight of all – the sudden fires leaping up, their flames, fanned by the wind, rapidly spreading and enveloping all within reach.’³ The smell of the burning city reached up to the bombers. A crewman, Hans Fruehauf, who had taken part in the first London raids, looked down on the lake of fire and wondered what he was doing. ‘The usual cheers that greeted a direct hit stuck in our throats. The crew just gazed down at the flames in silence. Was this really a military target, we all asked ourselves?’⁴ A ‘Front Reporter’ for the German propaganda service was a passenger in one of the aircraft. He had no doubts of the legitimacy of what he witnessed. ‘We could see enormous fires raging, some white and brilliant, others dark red. Then came the high spot of the raid, the dropping of the bombs … a tremor went through the machine as the bombs dropped … our bombs had hit their mark; the fires extended … it is the nerve centre of the British armament industry which had been hit, and I am proud that I witnessed this.’⁵

      The anti-aircraft guns soon ran out of ammunition and there was no sign of RAF night-fighters so the Germans were free to bomb as they pleased, swooping in low to improve accuracy. As mains were shattered and hydrants buried under rubble, the firemen’s hoses ran dry. Crews drafted in from outside watched impotently as Coventry burned. The fire was fiercest in the old city centre. John Sheldon who owned a stables in Little Park Street described the din of ‘falling walls, girders, pillars, machinery crashing four storeys, the droning of the planes as they let go their bombs and the rattling of shrapnel on corrugated sheeting’. It seemed to him that no one caught in the open could possibly have survived.⁶

      The fire created weird effects. In Broadgate, in the heart of the city, the smell of roasting meat from burning butcher shops mingled with the scent of fine Havanas from the tobacconists, Salmon and Gluckstein. Inside the shelters, the air was thick with plaster and brick dust shaken loose by the pounding, and the stench of filth from the primitive or non-existent latrines. The overwhelming feeling was of powerlessness. It was better to be outside doing something. The ARP and Auxiliary Fire Service workers, the ambulancemen, doctors and nurses found they were too busy to be afraid. The urge to not let oneself down, to be seen to be coping and doing one’s best was a strong antidote to fear or at least a help in suppressing it. ‘Everyone was working as a member of a team,’ said a student nurse at Gulson Road Hospital which was inundated with casualties after the Coventry and Warwickshire Hospital suffered heavy damage. ‘Even the consultants who were normally treated like little gods and who to us poor nurses never seemed to be in the best of moods became human.’ During her training she had dreaded having to assist at an amputation and had arranged to be off duty when such operations were scheduled. ‘The blitz on Coventry changed all that for me. I didn’t have time to be squeamish.’⁷

      Despite the ferocity of the attack, rescue workers struggled on. Instead of reducing the value of life, the scale of the slaughter seemed to increase it. Every death averted, every existence saved, was a small victory. The hope of preserving a life drove the rescue teams to extraordinary lengths of selflessness. Les Coleman, an air-raid warden, heard a baby crying from beneath the rubble of a demolished house. He and his mates scrabbled for hours at the pile of bricks, fearful of using picks and shovels in case they hurt the child. Overhead the Luftwaffe were busy and the bombs fell steadily. They only stopped digging when the crying faded to silence.⁸

      The all-clear sounded at 6.16 p.m., eleven hours after the first warning. Few heard it. Most of the electricity cables that powered the sirens were cut. Gradually people crept from the shelters into a drizzly morning and a changed world. The first thing they did was to look for their houses. Dennis Field found his, ‘like most around, with windows out and roof damaged and clearly uninhabitable.’ At least it was still standing. Whole streets had disappeared and landmarks vanished. The town seemed to have dissolved. The survivors 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 СКАЧАТЬ