Embedded bombs
Coventry city centre 2021.
Newly planted areas have strange WW2 bomb looking objects in them (I think they might be lighting). I find the shape at odds with the modern history of Coventry.
On the night of 14 November 1940, 515 German planes set out to destroy the major manufacturing city of Coventry, and the results were devastating.
Four thousand homes, three quarters of city-centre buildings and two-thirds of industrial buildings were destroyed; 568 civilians were killed. The psychological reaction was just as stark: hysteria, panicking, acute aphasia, looting. ‘The city [was] suffering from a collective nervous breakdown’.
The Germans had not only intended the raid as a strategic one but as a deliberately psychological one, too, designed to break the will of the British people. The bombing was considered such a triumph that the Germans coined the word koventrieren – ‘to coventrate’, to devastate by aerial force.
An estimated 568 people were killed in the raid (the exact figure was never precisely confirmed), with another 863 badly injured and 393 sustaining lesser injuries.
Today the City of Coventry is twinned with the German City of Dresden.
Embedded bombs
Coventry city centre 2021.
Newly planted areas have strange WW2 bomb looking objects in them (I think they might be lighting). I find the shape at odds with the modern history of Coventry.
On the night of 14 November 1940, 515 German planes set out to destroy the major manufacturing city of Coventry, and the results were devastating.
Four thousand homes, three quarters of city-centre buildings and two-thirds of industrial buildings were destroyed; 568 civilians were killed. The psychological reaction was just as stark: hysteria, panicking, acute aphasia, looting. ‘The city [was] suffering from a collective nervous breakdown’.
The Germans had not only intended the raid as a strategic one but as a deliberately psychological one, too, designed to break the will of the British people. The bombing was considered such a triumph that the Germans coined the word koventrieren – ‘to coventrate’, to devastate by aerial force.
An estimated 568 people were killed in the raid (the exact figure was never precisely confirmed), with another 863 badly injured and 393 sustaining lesser injuries.
Today the City of Coventry is twinned with the German City of Dresden.