Download Coventry: Thursday, 14 November 1940 AudioBook Free
The German Luftwaffe's air raid on Coventry, England, on the night of November 14, 1940 represented a new kind of air warfare. Targeted generally at obliterating all areas of city life, it was systematic, comprehensive, unconnected to any immediate military goal, and indifferent to civilian casualties. Within a night, approximately two-thirds of the city's buildings were destroyed or demolished as the bombers laid waste materials to legitimate industrial targets and civilian buildings likewise. The old St. Michael's Cathedral, a 14th-century Gothic structure that burnt to the bottom that nights, still stands in ruins today as a testament to the city's destruction through the raid. Pragmatic English administration propagandists would exploit Coventry's recognized position as a "ancient town", playing down the city's industrial reputation. This might end up being a robust tool, and, as Frederick Taylor shows, was instrumental in tipping general population judgment in the then-neutral United States away from isolationism and in favor of help for Britain. However the bombing would also establish an unhealthy and dangerous precedent as Allied air makes would examine the Germans' methods in the episode and ultimately make use of similar tactics in their evenly ruthless and dangerous episodes on German places, eventually leading to the bombings of Hamburg in 1943 and Dresden in 1945 that wiped out hundreds of thousands, mostly civilians. On the 75th wedding anniversary of the Coventry bombing, acclaimed historian Frederick Taylor brilliantly details this momentous work and analyzes its impact on World War II and the moral quandaries it still engenders about the nature of warfare.
