Echoes of the Coventry Blitz

‘Smoke rises in the City of Three Spires, the smouldering remnant of the Nazi hate. Coventry and England will remember and repay’. From August 1940, Hitler’s Luftwaffe mercilessly and indiscriminately bombed cities and towns in Britain. The historic West Midlands city of Coventry did not escape the carnage as, night after night, high-explosive and incendiary bombs rained down on the hapless production centre of cars, munitions and aero engines. Then came Operation Mondscheinsonate (Moonlight Sonata), in which thirteen waves of more than 500 German Heinkel bombers sparked an inferno of hundreds of fires, including a devastating and uncontrollable firestorm.

On this fateful night of 14 November 1940, 4,400 homes were destroyed and two-thirds of the buildings in the city centre sustained structural damage. Today, the iconic shell of Coventry’s once majestic medieval cathedral offers a silent memorial of remembrance to that dreadful night. For the city’s residents of now, it is a poignant echo of a violent and destructive part of their history.

With the digital juxtaposing of archival images with photographs taken by the author himself for this publication, and drawing from contemporary press accounts of the Coventry Blitz, this book presents a totally unique comparative insight into the Nazi bombing of Coventry in the Second World War.