Jonathan Thomas (00:12)
Welcome to the Anglotopia podcast, the podcast for people who love British travel history and culture. I'm your host, Jonathan Thomas. And today we're marking the 85th anniversary of one of the most devastating nights in British history, the Coventry Blitz. My guest is Dr. Chris Smith, the historian at Coventry University and an expert on the bombing of Coventry during World War II. On the night of November 14th, 1940,

More than 500 German bombers laid siege to the city, leaving parts of Coventry in ruins. Hundreds died and the medieval cathedral was destroyed. It was a raid so devastating that the word Coventrated allegedly entered the German language. But Chris is here to help us understand not just what happened that night, but also the myths that have grown up around it, particularly the persistent claim that Churchill knew about the raid in advance, sacrificed the city to protect the ultra intelligence secret. We'll explore why Coventry was targeted, how the city rebuilt itself.

from the ashes and why the story of Coventry's transformation from devastation to a symbol of peace and reconciliation remains so powerful today, even 85 years later. Welcome, Chris.

Chris Smith (01:18)
Thank you very much for having me.

Jonathan Thomas (01:20)
Thank you for being on the podcast. I love talking to historians. You're usually my favorite interview subjects though. So take us right to the night of November 14th, which we're recording this on the 14th. It's not coming out on the 14th, but it's we're recording on the 14th. Can you paint a picture of what happened on the night of November 14th? What time did the raid begin? How long did it last? Cause as we know it's four, it's 4 PM there. It's dark already. So let's paint a picture.

Chris Smith (01:48)
Yes, so the raid takes place on the 14th of November, as you say, and ⁓ it begins around seven o'clock in the evening, 10 past seven in the evening, and then it lasts for a good 11 hours. the all-clear isn't actually announced until 6.16 the following day on the 15th, on the morning of the 15th. So to that point in the war, it's one of the largest, most devastating raids to that point. ⁓ We're talking about ⁓

Jonathan Thomas (02:01)
Wow.

Chris Smith (02:17)
over 500 fighters, or not fighters, sorry, aircraft hindcalls are used in it.

they dropped something in the region of 30,000 incendiary bombs, 500 tons of high explosives and 50 landmines. They even used some brand new types of explosive that they hadn't really been using to that point. So it's a really, really massive raid by the standards of the war to that point.

Jonathan Thomas (02:39)
So more than 500 German bombers attacked that night. Can you put that scale into context? Like, how does that compare to, the better known London Blitz?

Chris Smith (02:50)
Well, for the London Blitz, isn't an individual night. So the London Blitz goes on for a long time during the Second World War and obviously is much more significant in terms of the amount of devastation and death that it's caused. So something in the region of 40,000 people are killed in London over the course of the Second World War as a result of strategic bombing. in Coventry, it's around 1,250, but we have to recall that Coventry is a much smaller city than London is.

So in some ways, I suppose that because of that concentration of bombs and bombing on that night, it makes it larger in those sorts of terms, in terms of concentration. So there are some other larger raids which do take place in the war, particularly against London. So I've got it written down here actually. on May the 10th, 1941, 1,463 people are killed in London. So that's the largest raid of the Second World War against Britain.

To put that in some wider context though, if we start looking at the bombing campaigns against other countries, then this is all relatively small, relatively minor. So for example, in Dresden, a really famous bombing raid conducted by the Allies, over 22,000 people are killed as a result of that. If we look at some of the things that, for example, the US Air Force is doing against, for example, the war against Japan, then we have the conventional bombing of Tokyo, which kills over 100,000 people.

or have things like obviously the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So by those standards, what we're talking about is relatively light, but by the context of what's happening in Britain, it's extremely serious.

Jonathan Thomas (04:25)
Well, and like you said, the raid left hundreds dead. So from in a small city, that's, you know, per capita that that's just as damaging to lose. so beyond the human cost, what parts of the city were destroyed? Like, I understand the cathedral was destroyed. Well, what other significant buildings were lost?

Chris Smith (04:48)
Yeah, so the cathedral obviously it's the most important, well not important, but most obvious example of that. Certainly the most famous because its shell, the old shell of the cathedral still exists in Coventry. They didn't knock it down. They built a new cathedral right next to it. So if any of your listeners ever visit Coventry or ever visit the UK, and I strongly suggest they do visit Coventry at some point, you can actually walk around the ruins of the old cathedral. But it's not just that which is destroyed. A huge part of the city centre is destroyed as result of this.

So St. Mary's Guild Hall, which is a medieval guild hall that's damaged by fire. There's another religious site, Christ Church, which is nearby, which is also burned as a result of this. It's not totally destroyed, but it's certainly burned. The library and market hall are destroyed, along with also 43,000 homes are damaged, which again gives us the scale of this. But there's also some industrial damage as well. So for example, the Dalmer.

works which is a big part of industry that gets hit as well.

Jonathan Thomas (05:49)
Well, that kind of leads into my next question. Were they deliberately targeting the center of Coventry or were they aiming for the industrial ⁓ factories?

Chris Smith (05:59)
Well, a lot of the industrial factories actually is in the city center anyway, quite bit of it. So, and also we're talking about the sheer scale of the bombing that you're going to end up taking out a lot of both anyway. I think that's kind of how that works. mean, common trees isn't like Birmingham and certainly not like London, which is obviously a much, much bigger city. But yeah, they don't necessarily hit as much of the industrial stuff as they might have liked. It's certainly the stuff on the outskirts, but they're not just doing it for that reason. There's also the...

Jonathan Thomas (06:02)
go.

Chris Smith (06:29)
One of the points of strategic bombing is terror, is to cause terror amongst the citizens and the inhabitants of the country. So you don't just want to destroy industry, even though that's obviously a bonus because it reduces Britain's ability to fight the Second World War. But you also want to kill citizens. And that's not something which is, again, unique to the Germans. mean, the British actually have a really nasty euphemism for this, which was to dehouse people as a result of bombing. And that's how they basically

described killing citizens and making other citizens homeless. this idea of de-housing. So terror is a big part of this.

Jonathan Thomas (07:03)
All right. All that kind of leads again, it leads into my next question. Why did they choose to lead such a massive rate on Coventry and why was it the target? Was it the industrial significance or was it like you said, was it for terror? Was it just to level a British city and, and invoke terror?

Chris Smith (07:20)
It's all three of those. It's all three of those. mean, Coventry is hugely important industrially to Britain's war effort. So Coventry is a really old settlement. It's been there, know, hundreds if not thousands of years Coventry. And if you went back to, it's certainly some medieval cities. So a lot of the architecture and things like that would have been medieval. But it becomes really important, particularly in the 19th century because of industry. So you've got things like ribbon making, lace making,

coal mining, all going on in Coventry at that point, which makes it a very large city relative to perhaps other communities. So that's one of the reasons why it grows in the way that it does. But its industrial heritage doesn't just stop there. So by the time we get into the 20th century in particular, this is where we're seeing things like bicycle manufacturing going on. We're seeing, for example, the auto industry, the car industry becomes very important to Coventry.

which has both boons to it, also again, it makes it a ripe target. So one of the boons it does is it makes the city quite wealthy. And which means that because it's got these new industries, when you have things like the Great Depression, which hits ⁓ Britain really, really badly in the 1930s, Coventry doesn't do as badly as other industrial centers because it has this new car manufacturing industry. And so when we get to the Second World War, you can then utilize these

factories and use them to make things that you want. know, for example trucks for the army or ⁓ you know tanks or aircraft or engines things like this all which could be put towards the war effort. So it becomes really important. So I mentioned the Daimler works earlier, but you've also got things like ⁓ Rolls Royce have a presence in Coventry who obviously are hugely important in terms of car manufacturing, but also things like aircraft production. So

Coventry is really important in that sense and they obviously want to try to wipe out as much industrial potential from Coventry as possible because it will have a strategic impact on Britain's ability to fight the Second World War. But then as I mentioned before, you've also got the terror impact of this. It's thought certainly throughout the 1920s and 1930s that bombing is almost apocalyptic in the way that it impacts societies. So there's a really famous quote.

from the British Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, which he makes, I think it's in 1932, I wanna say. And he makes this speech in parliament where he says that the bomber will always get through. So there's no protection from the bomber. You can't have like a standing army, which has a front line, which can defend the nation or the Navy in that sort of way, which can prevent ships getting across the English Channel. The bomber will always get through.

And a lot of these ideas are then reinforced, for example, by the bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War by ⁓ the Germans. So that, again, reinforces this idea of mass destruction. There's a very famous Pablo Picasso picture of Guernica, which shows people in terror. So these ideas are very, very persistent. And there's the belief, which is one of the reasons why there's the evacuation campaign right at the beginning of the Second World War.

so in early September 1939, to remove all the children, or as many children as possible from Britain's urban areas. So you've got the 900,000 children are evacuated from the cities, as are other people such as teachers and expectant mothers and so on and so forth. And that's just the official scheme. There's also a voluntary scheme which sees something like a million people also leave these cities. So that's the kind of the level of fear that this provokes.

So they even think that within six weeks, basically, Britain could be defeated by bombing and that it's going to cause 600,000 deaths within six weeks. Of course, over the course of the whole six years of the Second World War, actually, strategic bombing only kills, well, I say only, but kills 60,000 people. So they totally get that wrong. They overestimate it. But the fear that this causes is obviously a huge part of the reason why the Germans want to do it and also why the Allies want to do the same thing.

as well. So if you just think about that for a minute, one of the problems that Britain has in 1940 is that it's not fighting alone. It has the British Empire. It also has in some ways tacit support from the United States economically through things like cash and carry. But it's not really able to attack the Germans where they want to. They want to be able to basically invade Germany or to be able to invade Europe, which is obviously just beyond their capacity in 1940 following the fall of France. So

Bombing is one of the few things you can do. And that kind of works, I suppose, also for the Germans in terms of attacking Britain. They can't actually invade Britain because of obviously the English channel on the Royal Navy. So what you can do is you can launch these bombing attacks. So that leads us also onto, I think, a third point about the reason why Coventry is selected is because there's an element of vengeance to it. one of the things or one of the targets that the RAF had picked out

before this night was to bomb Munich, the city of Munich, again, a beautiful medieval city. But it also has, yeah, it also, yeah, it has that particular kind of association with Nazism. So the Munich Beer Pool pushed, so ⁓ basically the origins of the Nazi party can be found in Munich and it is the symbolic ideological heart of the Nazi project in many respects. So when it is hit and hit very hard by the RAF,

Jonathan Thomas (12:33)
the heart of Nazism. Yeah.

Chris Smith (12:57)
It sends Hitler into a rage and the argument is that therefore they had to pick out another city and massively smash it to take revenge. And Coventry again has this reputation at this point of being one of the best preserved medieval cities in Europe. And the Luftwaffe and then later the British government through rebuilding and knocking a lot of it down ensure that it isn't. So the city now has a very 1950s aesthetic to it, partly because of the bombing and partly because of the British government's own choices.

Jonathan Thomas (13:27)
Well, we'll get in. Yeah, we'll get to that later on. You know, that's partly why it's not really on the tourist trails because that history was just obliterated. Now, famously during the London Blitz, know, the Londoners would shield from the bombing raids and the London Underground or in shelters. And so what what did the people of Coventry do when they were under a raid?

Chris Smith (13:51)
Well, so one of the things that the British government do is they introduce air raid shelters that you've got public air raid shelters. But you've also got personal air raid shelters. There's a famous set of shelters named after ⁓ Arthur Hennessy. can't remember who it was now, but Anderson, the Anderson shelters, which are basically shelters which you build in your back garden and people would go in and hide in those while the raid is on. But as you say, there's not like the London Underground, which famously.

people used to shelter in it London. But there are these communal shelters as well which often in some cases were built out of brick and had these concrete roofs to them which were a little bit unfortunate because if there was a bomb which went off too near them the shockwaves would actually collapse the walls and they would the concrete roof would fall in on the people who are inside and so these were sort of rather morbidly nicknamed sandwich shelters because that was what would happen to people.

So yeah, that's the kind of provision that people have at this time in cities like Coventry.

Jonathan Thomas (14:53)
So, before we get into Churchill and all that, was there any warning that Covertory might be targeted or that it was being targeted on this specific night? Or did the raid come as a complete surprise?

Chris Smith (15:05)
Yeah, so this is, there's bits and pieces of evidence which people could piece together to suggest that Coventry was a likely target, but there's no kind of certain evidence that it is going to be Coventry. So for example, you've got reports from prisoners of war who suggest that it's probably going to be in Midland City, either Birmingham or Coventry, but you've also got things like radar data, which suggests where things might be being launched to. You've also got ultra intelligence,

which again suggests that there's going to be a major raid against a British city. But again, it doesn't specify exactly which city ⁓ which is going to be targeted or necessarily precisely which day. So I think people probably could have guessed it might well have been commentary, but there's no ⁓ sure thing to it. There's no smoking gun piece of evidence.

Jonathan Thomas (15:55)
Well, that's going to lead into our next few questions. So one of the most persistent myths about the Coventry Blitz is that Churchill actually knew about it in advance from ultra intelligence, but chose not to warn the city to prepare for a raid to protect the secret. So can you explain where this origin of this theory comes from?

Chris Smith (16:16)
Yeah, so that means we need to talk a little bit about something called signals intelligence, which is what, pardon. Yeah, so that's what I did most of my research on is in the world of espionage and intelligence. And I wrote my PhD thesis on a place called Bletchley Park, which again, your listeners should definitely visit. It's an amazing place. So this was the home of what was called Cryptanalysis.

Jonathan Thomas (16:21)
Okay, please. Please do.

Chris Smith (16:44)
which we basically just call code breaking for the sake of convenience. But it's basically everything which is sent via the radio can be listened into by anybody with a receiver within perception range. So this is really great for military purposes. So you can send a, I don't know, a battalion here. You can send a tank corps there and you'll know where they are and you'll be able to instruct them. But the problem is, that anybody else can listen in as well.

which means that a lot of this strategic military talk needs to be in ciphered. It needs to be placed into code to prevent people from listening in. at the end of the First World War, around the end of the First World War, 1918, 1919, a commercial cipher system is developed by a man called Arthur Sherbius. And this is called Enigma. it's basically, it looks a bit like a typewriter. And every time you press a key on the keyboard,

⁓ You've got a lamp board above which has a cross onto a letter of the alphabet. So you press A and then I don't know Z will come up and someone just writes down that and then calls it over the radio and you can basically spell out a message. It's a really effective system and about 1926 the German state begins to adopt Enigma. It begins to roll it out particularly for the military and they massively improve it. And it gives them the sense of massive security that this is going to be something which is going to be

incredibly difficult to break and they're not wrong. So it creates about 159 quintillion possible combinations. To give you a sense of that, your chance of being, I think it's struck by lightning is around one in 700,000. To give us another kind of way of thinking about it, ⁓ the chance of say winning the Euro lottery is about one in 100 million.

Or ⁓ to think about it in a different way, the entire age of the universe is less time in seconds if you were to try it every single time. It'd be longer than the has existed if you tried to break it in brute force. So it gives this illusion of massive security. But one of the problems that it's got is it can't ever encipher the same letter as itself. So you could press A 26 times and you'll never get A again. It'll never work that way.

So it's not completely random, which means that if you're very clever, then you can actually find a way into this system. And that's precisely what's ⁓ done first by the Poles, who break this in the interwar period, and then by the British from early 1940 onwards. And they do that in a place called Bletchley Park, which is around 40 miles north of London and probably about 20 miles sort of south east of Coventry.

So it's probably about halfway between Birmingham and London. And it's also on the main train line if anyone wants to visit and you can simply get out at Bletchley and it's just over the road from the train station. that's well worth, as this is a travel podcast as well, I've just got to flag that up for you. Yeah, and it becomes this massive organization. So by the time we get to of December, 1940, there's around probably what, 600 people working at Bletchley Park.

Jonathan Thomas (19:42)
Good travel tip there, yeah.

Chris Smith (19:55)
But by the time we get to the end of the Second World War, or at least the end of 1944, December, January 1944, 1945, then you're looking at something in region of 12,000 people working for this organization. And it's hugely effective. They can end up breaking Enigma with various different technologies which they create in sometimes between 10 and 20 minutes. Faster even than some cases the Germans are deciphering it themselves on the other end and they've got the solution.

So this creates a kind of idea that intelligence, because they're cracking so much of it, is some sort of palantir. I don't know if you've watched or read Lord of the Rings, the idea of the palantir, the seeing stones that allow you to sort of access to the thoughts and what other people can see. And it creates that illusion that intelligence makes you all powerful almost. It's almost, yeah, some sort of divine ⁓ object or divine device.

Jonathan Thomas (20:37)
Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Smith (20:52)
which allows you to see into the minds of the enemy. That's not really how it works. Even if you are really successful and the British are, you're not able to necessarily break the cipher every single day. Certainly not in 1940. So one of the things that which might have given away the inflation about the raid on the 14th itself doesn't get broken that day. It just simply doesn't happen. But there is indication, I say from earlier,

earlier in the week, for example, that there is going to be this large raid. But somehow this gets conflated in the minds of people who actually at the time or worked in British intelligence that this is something which could have been prevented. So there's an individual called F.W. Winterbottom, Freddie Winterbottom, who was a group captain in the Air Force and had been in, for example, MI6 and things like that earlier.

and he's allowed to write a book which he publishes in 1974 which reveals the existence of this signals intelligence which they codename Ultra. So this book is called The Ultra Secrets and unfortunately for Frederick Winterbottom he's not allowed access to any of the archival material. He's not allowed to have sight of anything where he could have checked some of these factual claims. And so he obviously misremembers this or didn't fully appreciate the reality at the time

and says that Coventry is sacrificed, that the Prime Minister and the British authorities knew that Coventry was going to be attacked, but to evacuate the city in advance would give away the fact that the British had this intelligence. And it's more important to allow the city to be sacrificed than it is to lose this intelligence because it is so valuable. But again, as for the reason to be pointed out, it's not actually true.

Freddie Winterbottom gets this wrong and it's rapidly pointed out in other publications which come out soon afterwards, so by people like Peter Calvosarese, but it sets this standard, this tone, persists even to this day. mean, even in the 21st century, people are still repeating this narrative even though gets debunked very, very quickly. There's a whole play which is made about it, about this idea that this has been debunked. And you mentioned earlier, was it the Babylon Five?

Jonathan Thomas (23:11)
Yeah.

Chris Smith (23:11)
have also played into this

myth which I didn't know about. that's where it comes from and that's the reason why it's untrue is that the information which you get from Altruism is pretty partial.

Jonathan Thomas (23:23)
So then let's settle the historical record. Churchill didn't know about the raid in advance.

Chris Smith (23:29)
Well, he knew that a raid was going to take place and there was some suggestion it might be Coventry, but equally possible. It could have been London. It could have been another town or city in the home counties, or it could have been Birmingham. You know, it's not clear from the information that they have at the time. It's definitely going to be Coventry.

Jonathan Thomas (23:47)
Well, I think, ⁓ you know, and the idea that an entire city would be evacuated anyway is kind of absurd. Like, that would be something on the scale that never really happened, you know?

Chris Smith (24:02)
Well, 2.5 million people were evacuated from cities at the beginning of the war in 1939.

Jonathan Thomas (24:08)
Yeah, but

I mean that was over a long period of time that wasn't like there's gonna be there's gonna be Yeah, there's gonna be a raid tomorrow everybody leave like I don't think that would happen. But I mean, I'm not a historian so ⁓ Why do you think that myth has persisted for so long? What do you and what do you think? Is it because it's a good story that it makes a good story?

Chris Smith (24:12)
Yeah, over a day or so.

I think it's partly that, but also because I think it speaks to a kind of British sense of what Britain does in the war. There's a joke which goes around in the Second World War, that the Soviet Union provides the men, the United States provides the factories, and Britain provides basically the time to survive the war.

and that Britain doesn't necessarily contribute as much as we'd have liked in the popular imagination. So for example, it's difficult to argue with the size of the losses that suffered by the Soviet Union, 20 million dead, huge battles at the Eastern Front. It's very difficult to argue that the United States isn't obviously as important as it is because it effectively manufactures most of the things which are being used or all the stuff which being used during the Second World War and obviously plays a huge role, for example, in the Pacific.

also a massive role in the key kind of events of the Second World War in Europe. obviously Operation Torch, is the sort of amphibious attack ⁓ on North Africa, but also obviously D-Day, which obviously looms very large in sort of the imagination, both in Britain and the United States, know, the sort of the pictures of the men coming off the troop transports.

while being shot in that very famous scene from Saving Private Ryan ⁓ looms very large. There's also things like Band of Brothers, which again is hugely important. And I think there's a sense that, well, what does Britain really contribute, is really something which we can be proud of in a period of kind of post-imperial decline. And obviously Bletchley Park is just such a great story, is such an important contribution to the Second World War. This seems to be, I think,

which people can latch onto. And it's so important that the fact that Coventry is sacrificed, it just only proves how important it is and how worthwhile this is to the British narrative of its own sense of self and its own contribution to the Second World War. So I think it's partly that. It's also partly because, certainly in Coventry, it's because, you know,

the city gets really badly damaged and it causes outrage in Coventry when this myth first comes out in 1974. How dare they have let Coventry be destroyed in this kind of way? I think its longevity speaks more to this sense of what is Britain about? What does Britain contribute towards the Second World War? What is the British sense of it? Is it only the fact that we held out in 1940 when other people didn't? Is that the only thing that Britain really contributes until the Americans and the Russians get involved?

which obviously is untrue as well. mean, British are hugely important in other theatres of the Second World War. But it's that kind of idea, I think, that it's something which the British can be extremely proud of in a way that other people can't be quite as proud.

Jonathan Thomas (27:20)
Well, and I think when you look at something as large and complex as World War II, it's so easy to try and find simple narratives that tell a story and make a point. But there are no simple narratives, especially in World War II. Everything is so complicated, and one event happening depends on 20 events happening before it and 50 events happening after it.

that it's so hard to ascribe victory based on just this or just this or just this. I think that's probably why this myth is so tantalizing is because it's a simple narrative that makes a good story.

So what was the immediate aftermath like in Coventry? How did the city and its residents kind of respond in the hours and days following?

Chris Smith (28:12)
So that's a really good question because it's also the source of another myth which is worth talking about regarding the Coventry Blitz. So one of the things that happens is that the propaganda machine of the United Kingdom, which is immensely sophisticated in this period, goes into full overdrive. So obviously they immediately send off Winston Churchill to go and explore and observe for himself what's happened. There's a really famous photograph of him walking through the rubble.

of the bombed out cathedral. then, so the government ⁓ pushing for this sort of idea of unity. And then you've also got the same kind of thing happening with the newspapers. So the Daily Mail, for example, sends its reporters to Coventry and it reports that ⁓ the people of Coventry have like stout hearts, they're calmly getting on with the job of the Second World War. They're not gonna be intimidated by the Luftwaffe and the Nazis.

And this kind of fits within ⁓ wider British propaganda efforts. And obviously there's an element of truth to all of that. There always is. There are people who ⁓ keep calm and carry on as the fake poster kind of lets us regularly know. And we can talk a little bit about that poster as well if you want, ⁓ which is obviously ubiquitous in the UK and it has been for years now. ⁓

Jonathan Thomas (29:26)
You

Chris Smith (29:32)
But it also hides ⁓ this idea of calmness hides the realities that people have just been bombed and people are people not everyone ⁓ is into this idea of unity or public spirit as everybody else. And this is also true of the way they talk about the Blitz in London. So there's this idea of the stout cockney heart there as well. And there's a really famous picture by the cartoonist David Lowe, who drew for the London Evening Standard of

Herman Goering flying a bomber over London and these bombs just bounce off this stout cockney heart. And the exact same kind of narrative emerges regarding Coventry. But it isn't really true. mean, I either myth. I mean, if you actually look at, for example, what happens in the bombing in the Blitz, because you've got things like the blackout, then we see that the number, for example, of sexual assaults goes up because the city is just unlit. That's certainly true of London.

There's also people, if a house gets bombed out or burned out, people go in and they steal from it. So all these ideas of unity and people getting on, cutting together, you know, the people's war, it has a lot of tarnishes to it. And again, it's, as you said earlier, simple ideas, you know, are really, really easy to latch onto. And people in the Second World War absolutely do.

And you can sort of point to these examples of people behaving very well, but you just kind of ignore the people behaving very very badly. So in terms of what actually happens in the aftermath of Coventry, we have some really good sources for this. So there was an organization called Mass Observation. Have you spoken about that before or known anything about it? Okay, so it's a really fascinating organization. It's set up in 1937. Basically to

Jonathan Thomas (31:13)
No, I don't. So please tell us.

Chris Smith (31:21)
look at two different things really. So on the one hand they're interested in the rise of basically fascism and communism and other things like that in Europe and they want to see what the public's reaction to these weird times are. But also they're really interested in the abdication crisis which is where the King of England has to basically resign the throne because he wants to marry a divorcee.

this creates a constitutional crisis which I think is so quaint that this is the cause of a constitutional crisis and not some other you know kind of a big big issue but it's very very British I think in that sense.

Jonathan Thomas (31:58)
Yeah,

I'm rewatching The Crown right now, many episodes were spilled on that topic.

Chris Smith (32:07)
Yeah, exactly. So it becomes this huge issue. so mass observation is basically created to sort of monitor these weird things which are going on in society. It's a bit like, I suppose, opinion polling. And opinion polling has a history is not that much earlier than this. Now people like Gallup. And this is a different way of doing it. This is a way of rather than creating quantitative data, it's way of creating qualitative data. So what they would do is they'd ask members of the public to basically, for example,

write diaries, they would fill out surveys, questionnaires, thousands and thousands of them, thousands of people contribute towards this. They'd even have people who would go, for example, to pubs and sit in the pub and then write down what other people are saying in the pub, which kind of feels really kind of intrusive. And I don't think a university would give you ethical clearance or something like that anymore. Or standing in a queue to get into the cinema and again, writing down what people were saying about

⁓ what they've been getting up to. So one of the things they do shortly after the Coventry Blitz, so on the Friday just after, they send their investigators, they send three investigators to Coventry to basically see what the aftermath of all of this is. And it makes a very, very difficult reading and it ⁓ very much contradicts what the Daily Mail and the government propagandists are really saying.

So if you don't mind I'll read some of it out. They say that finally the small size of the place makes people feel that the only thing they can do is get out of it altogether. The dislocation is so total in the town that people easily feel that the town itself is killed. Coventry is finished and Coventry is dead with the key phrases of Friday's talk.

Jonathan Thomas (33:37)
Yeah, go ahead.

Chris Smith (33:58)
So we get a sense, which is very different from this idea that everybody's calm and everyone carries on. That's not really how it works. They describe people bursting into tears or being hysterical as soon as the night comes again, because they fear that it's going to happen again. They talk about, for example, people ⁓ fighting to get onto a bus before the evening comes, because they think it's the last place. And actually, it's just going back to the depot.

So it takes a very, very different idea. Again, this idea that commentary has been destroyed thoroughly, that commentary had been killed as a city, which again, isn't what the propagandists really wanted people to think about these kinds of attacks and events. What they want is this, again, this narrative that everybody, again, keeps calm and carries on, even though that poster is actually never sees the light of day.

Jonathan Thomas (34:52)
⁓ So how did the rest of Britain react to this raid on Coventry? ⁓ Did it change the national mood or the approach to the war or was it just like, it was another raid? What do we do?

Chris Smith (35:04)
Well,

because it's such a large raid, mean, the Germans even come up with a term for it, which is quite sort of morbid. They say that what they've done to the cities to coventrate it, to coventrate, to play on concentrate and also coventry, and at that comes from sort of the German propagandists and humorists. And that's kind of ⁓ what they say about it. And again, it causes, I think, a lot of outrage in the United Kingdom.

But again, this sense that opportunity for the propagandists to tell a very different story. So I think also by the time we're getting to this point, there's going to be more and more large bombings anyway. But yeah, because of the sheer scale of it at the time, it does have a very large impact in the public kind of consciousness. It's not a case that they're not talking about it. It's in every single major newspaper that they're telling this story.

Jonathan Thomas (35:56)
So King George VI visited Coventry shortly after the bombing. What impact did that royal visit have on morale?

Chris Smith (36:04)
Yeah, along with, for example, Winston Churchill. So again, I think this does have helped with morale. I think it helps morale not only nationally, but also locally, that it is the case that the powers that be ⁓ have taken notice, they have taken interest, they're not staying in the safety of wherever they are. For example, whichever palace, Blenheim Palace, wherever it is that might be that the wars might be hanging out or...

in Czechos, which is the Prime Minister's country home, they're not there. They have come to Coventry to see what the damage has been done and what things are like. And it reinforces again this idea that the government wants to push that everybody is in this war together. There's no kind of rich who are getting out of it. There's no poor people. Everybody has to come together in this people's war, as the kind of the idea goes. So I think it's sort of, yeah, I think it does have a

repairing effect both nationally and also locally.

Jonathan Thomas (37:06)
So before we move on to the reconstruction after the war, were there any more large bombing raids after this? Were the other major British cities hit? Were they bigger raids or was this the raid of the war outside of?

Chris Smith (37:21)
There are massive raids which take place. I couldn't tell you off the top of my head if any of the ones outside of Coventry and London are larger individually, but there are again massive raids. mean there's even further raids on Coventry itself. I mean this raid kills approximately 550 people, but over the course of the war about 1,250 people are killed in Coventry alone. So there's another big raid of Coventry itself again I think it's in April 1941.

which again uses something in the region of 350 tonnes worth of high explosive. Not as much obviously as the earlier raid on November the 14th, 1940. But again, it gets hit again very, very hard. But you've also got massive raids in places like Liverpool, Birmingham, even places like Canterbury get hit during the Second World War. So you've got all this, I don't know if any of your listeners have ever been, but if you go down sort of the mile in...

in Canterbury, past the cathedral. If you notice every now and again a very modern building will appear and again that's a product of Canterbury being bombed during the Second World War. again, lots of places get hit very very hard, again Plymouth gets hit very hard as well.

Jonathan Thomas (38:39)
So looking, speeding ahead to after the war, how quickly did Coventry begin to rebuild and what were the early plans for reconstruction? Cause I know if you contrast this to some European cities that were bombed, they sought to rebuild their medieval cities almost exactly as they were before they were bombed. So why did they not take that approach in Coventry?

Chris Smith (39:04)
really interesting because actually the government of the 1930s had already planned to do a lot of this anyway. They wanted to basically modernize Coventry and build a modern city. So they actually had a lot of plans to knock down a lot of the old medieval city anyway and then the Luftwaffe I suppose just give them little bit of impetus to start that job a little earlier than they were going to anyway. So there's all that and that's a big part of it. It's not just the Luftwaffe who've done this, it's not just the Germans who we can blame, no we need to blame the British government.

partly for this and the way they kind of saw the world and what would need to happen. So when does the rebuilding ⁓ start? Obviously it starts both during the war itself because you need to rebuild for example the damaged factories, things like that, so you need to try to rebuild at least some sorts of housing as quickly as possible because you've got all these people who have now effectively become refugees, so you've got to do all that kind of thing. But a lot of the rebuilding then does take place after the war.

partly because Britain has received an awful lot of money from the United States through the Marshall Plan, which basically funds a lot of British reconstruction. So things like the, can't tell the exact date that the new city begins construction, but I wanna say it's in the 1950s, and I can't remember exactly which year it is. But they decide to build obviously a new cathedral, and it is built next door to the ruins of the old cathedral, which they leave standing.

Jonathan Thomas (40:30)
Yeah, that leads right into my next question. What was behind the decision to do that? It's interesting, you go all around Britain and there's ruin cathedrals everywhere, but this is a ruin that was made much more recently.

Chris Smith (40:45)
Yeah, so you're talking about like the ruined ⁓ cathedral or monasteries and things like that from the Reformation, right? Yeah, yeah. So yeah, so there are a lot of these. But obviously, this one's a little bit different because it's not destroyed in, you know, through, you know, effectively the state or the crown deciding to do it itself because they have a new set of religious views and the king wants to get divorced. So this is a product of war. And so the

Jonathan Thomas (40:50)
Yeah, yeah.

Chris Smith (41:13)
day after the bombing raid. can't remember the name of the guy, but basically the head of the cathedral in Cometree comes out and basically gives a blessing, reading, and he basically says, Father, forgive, which obviously ⁓ references back to Jesus, Father, forgive them for they know not what they have done. So obviously a clearly biblical reference, which again suggests that you can't allow war and the tensions which ⁓ divide people

⁓ to basically motivate your life and your existence that even in the height of war and after this terrible event has just fallen the city, you still need forgiveness and you still need to remove, I suppose, the reasons which caused the hatred which lead to a war like the Second World War, that these things should never happen again. And so I think that's kind of part of it.

The cathedral itself, the ruins of the cathedral have a meaning now, which is about peace and it's about reconciliation. And it's really, really symbolic. if you go inside the ruins of the cathedral, which you can, it's got lots of little pieces of art, which reflect these kinds of ideas, including a memorial to the people who were killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So this is an image of basically two people.

on their knees hugging each other, who presumably been turned to ash, like something out of Pompeii by this attack. And so in that sense, all these cities which have been so heavily hit by the Second World War, all have something in common, and there's more which we have in common than which divides us. So I think that's the kind of symbolic mission that Coventry sees that has both on the civic level, but also in terms of the cathedral itself.

Jonathan Thomas (43:08)
I think that's remarkable and it's very moving and you're making me want to visit Coventry on my next trip. It's just not on the itinerary, but I'm going to have to figure out how. yeah, go ahead. Yeah. mean, I'm more the merrier.

Chris Smith (43:19)
Since there's a... can add on that if you like.

Yeah, so also like Stalingrad has a big place in this story as well. So obviously, Stalingrad has perhaps the most brutal battle of the Second World War, which I think over a million people are killed in that battle alone. And the city is utterly, utterly gutted by this vast ⁓ invasion and defense of it. And so during the war, people of country...

Jonathan Thomas (43:34)
Yeah.

Chris Smith (43:51)
basically created almost like a tapestry, I suppose, which they then send to the people of Stalingrad. Again, reflecting this idea that both cities had suffered the ravages of Nazism and both were in some ways twinned as result of this. And this is where the idea quite often of twinning comes from, the idea of twin cities and twin towns is because of Coventry and Stalingrad. So Contri is also...

twin with the city of Kiel, obviously which is famous for making U-boats but also for being destroyed by ⁓ the British, but also of Dresden. And Dresden is another city in Germany which is attacked extremely heavily by the Allies. And in fact, that bombing raid makes Coventry look minuscule by comparison. Over 22,000 people are killed. It's one of the largest raids of the Second World and it's not even the largest raid of the Second World War, but it's one of

And again, so Coventry is also twinned with Dresden, again, in this idea of peace and reconciliation, which is such an important part of the city. And so too in terms of other symbologies. So, for example, my university, Coventry University, its symbol is that of a phoenix, again, suggesting that even through the fire of the Second World War, something new and positive can be born from it.

Jonathan Thomas (45:15)
⁓ and what's interesting is, ⁓ is the, the, the bombing, the mass bombing raids that took place in World War II are almost a microcosm of history because we wouldn't, we wouldn't do that now, you know, as, a military strategy, we're more, because weapons are more sophisticated. You can do more targeted destruction. And generally the goal is not to destroy an entire city.

I'm making a blanket statement. There are conflicts going on right now in the world where that's not happening. you know, it's, it's almost unprecedented though, that you had an ongoing strategy of destruction like that, where now with the mutually assured destruction of nuclear weapons, that destroying cities isn't really the aim of war now more, it's more targeted. And I think it's interesting that we shouldn't forget that.

we would destroy our cities because we don't want to do that again.

Chris Smith (46:16)
Well, that's the abiding sort of message which comes out of the Second World War. And obviously the Holocaust is this expression, never again. One of the things which happens as a result of the Second World War and the sheer horror that it unleashes is the largest conflict in human history. More people are killed in it than any other conflict before. And what comes from that is things like, for example, the, you

laws of war are updated and changed. The concept of genocide is coined and created to and ways to prosecute people who committed these kinds of crimes is created out of this. yeah, I think that's a telling point of this is that the Second World War has to mean something in a way that perhaps people argued that or certainly argued very shortly after the First World War that it had meant nothing, that it had been all been

a pointless war, of course, that's not true. mean, the first of all was hugely consequential in the fact that, for example, it leads to the end of multiple empires and rewrites the sort of the map of Europe and global power. But people pretty rapidly come to the view that it'd all been pointless, it'd all been for nothing. And the Second World War can't be like that anymore. the argument is that

for example, this is one of reasons why the Labour Party won the 1945 general elections because they want the Second World War to have meant something. We can't just go back to the old Tory ways of the Great Depression. need to, no matter how important Winston Churchill and how grateful they were to him, is that these men have just been off fighting the army, come back and ⁓ they want a new Britain, they want a new Jerusalem. And so there's all these sorts of ideas that society fundamentally has to be different. So if we look, for example, at Japan, know, the kind of the

The fanaticism of Imperial Japan is basically washed away by the Second World War and obviously the United States efforts to re-education which go on. know, in Germany, Germany barely has any kind of armed forces anymore because they don't want to go back to, you know, what happened in the Second World War. So I think that, again, it psychologically has to mean something. And I think there's a lot to be said to that. But then again, we could kind of argue that, well, perhaps it doesn't.

that maybe we're all just being very kind of, you know, ⁓ kidding ourselves a little bit. So if we look, for example, as you were sort of, I think, alluding to what's what might say is happening between Russia and Ukraine or Israel and Gaza, you know, that that maybe these are just high minded ideas. the reality is that human beings are just, you know, human beings.

Jonathan Thomas (48:41)
Yeah.

You know, we can't move on from our base instincts. Well, that's a philosophical discussion we don't have to get into today. So why do you think this blitz remains such an important part of Coventry's identity now, or even 85 years later?

Chris Smith (49:07)
Well, I think it's partly aesthetic. Again, I know I mentioned earlier that the government planned to of, you know, create a 1950s Coventry anyway, which is what they did. But I think it's partly that. look at the city itself, and as you mentioned earlier, and I think I'm slightly unfortunate that it's not on the sort of the tourist trail in the way that perhaps other

⁓ cities might be. mean, I think a lot of people, your listeners, if they come to this part of the Midlands, they'd probably go to Leamington Spa before they'd go to Coventry. Yeah. So I think it's partly that. It has such an enduring legacy on even the look and the feel of the city, but also because it is such a monumental bombing raid at that stage in the war. And it does have that legacy. It does have all these kinds of ideas attached to it.

Jonathan Thomas (49:38)
Yeah.

Chris Smith (49:58)
that it's just always stayed. It's just always stayed because of that.

Jonathan Thomas (50:02)
So how are they commemorating this anniversary today? And in fact, are they doing anything special or did they do it on Remember It's Sunday or?

Chris Smith (50:09)
Yeah, so they've,

yeah, well, they've done that as well. mean, every weekday, they go off to the old cathedral and they give this sort of message of forgiveness. But I believe they've got a church service going on, or service going on right now, as we're talking at the cathedral. Yeah, so I'm going there after this, actually, because I'm going on, basically doing the same thing on Midlands Today on television, talking to them. Yeah, so they're doing that.

Jonathan Thomas (50:24)
Well, thanks for being with me and not there.

⁓ okay, cool.

Chris Smith (50:37)
Obviously I think it's partly because this is the 85th anniversary and we seem to like anniversaries which end on numbers in some way sort of related to fives and zeros so I think that's kind of a big part of what they're doing.

Jonathan Thomas (50:50)
Well, that's, that's one of the things I love about Britain is, is you don't, you don't want to forget these things specifically here in the U S we, we honor our veterans and we have veterans day Memorial day, but it's more of a blanket, all conflict and war that we remember not necessarily remembering specific events. And I think that's something we should, we should learn from because

Chris Smith (51:13)
Hmm. Yeah, the British are

very sort of obsessed with the First World War, I think, in terms of remembrance. I mean, it's on the 11th of November, for that reason. the whole, don't know if you know, but the poppy appeal and things like that, which I don't know if your listeners do know, but every year in sort of early November, British people are kind of almost forced to go around wearing poppies, or they suffer social stigma. And that's again, because of the poppy fields of the Battle of the Somme in the First World War and how they all kind of

Jonathan Thomas (51:19)
Yeah. Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Chris Smith (51:43)
they grew out of the blood and mud and sort of a quite beautiful kind of idea. And it's one of these great sort of solemn national memorial events, I suppose. And again, it's very much fixated with the First World War, but they argue of all conflict and all people who are kind of veterans and all that sort of stuff. But really it's the First World War and arguably to an extent the Second World War. And almost every village in the UK has a war memorial because of people who died in the First World War.

and it have all these massive list of names of ⁓ the people who died in the First World War, there's over 700,000 British troops die in that. And if you go around the back of it, you can sort of see the names of those who died, significantly fewer who died in the Second World War. So I think, yeah, it's odd that, well, it's not odd, there's an obvious reason for it, it's because it was such a massive war for the British, but the First World War looms almost as large, I think, in our national memory as the Second World War does.

Jonathan Thomas (52:37)
And we could talk, we could do a whole podcast on how Britain's attitude towards those wars affected its present state and outside the scope of this discussion. But before I'm going to start wrapping this up.

Chris Smith (52:45)
Yeah.

Jonathan Thomas (52:52)
So are there any questions about the Coventry Blitz that remain unanswered that are still being researched?

Chris Smith (52:59)
So think certainly it's used in, for example, propaganda. I think that's one of the subject areas which kind of never really goes away. How do these great events of the Second World War, how do they get framed at the time? But also how they get framed now and at different points in the past. So one of the things I'm really interested in and writing about at the moment, is this stuff we've talked about in terms of mythology and how a myth is used.

So one the things we have to remember is a myth isn't necessarily untrue. What it does is it presents a particular narrative, usually at the expense of things which are somehow unfortunate to the narrative that we want to tell. So I'm really interested in that. And I think there's a lot to be written about that. as you sort of suggested earlier, why is this story so good? You know, that it has this longevity and no matter how many times that the myth of Coventry and Churchill is debunked.

Why do we always keep on coming back to it? So I think that's areas of research which are really interesting is almost that they're not so much about the history itself, they're more about kind of how people think the history is, which is not necessarily the same thing at all. So I think that the commentary fits really, really interestingly in that kind of idea. This whole sort of idea of a blitz spirit, this whole idea of a people's war, the whole kind of ⁓ mythology of Churchill and how the...

the really famous image that you would get from commentary in the Second World War is of Churchill right in the middle. And I think there's a lot of kind of things you could say quite interesting, which would be semiotically driven about that particular image as well. So yeah, that's the sort of thing I'm very interested in.

Jonathan Thomas (54:36)
and that's probably the image we'll use for the thumbnail for this podcast. ⁓ you mentioned the keep calm and carry on poster. Go on, debunk that for us before we wrap up.

Chris Smith (54:39)
Yeah.

⁓ yeah,

have you had this debunked before by anyone on your podcast?

Jonathan Thomas (54:51)
No, but I've actually, I've been to the bookstore in Northumbria and I've seen the original and I know the story, but I'm interested to hear it from you.

Chris Smith (54:59)
Yeah, so this is a British decided before the Second World War to create a number of different posters and propaganda campaigns which were designed to because again, they thought that mass bombing was going to basically obliterate morale and people would just panic and and so the state basically created these posters which are really really dull. They're bright red and in big text and they say things like keep calm and carry on. And these are basically wildly kind of they test them and they're wildly unpopular.

you know, because it's really patronizing, isn't it? It's really patronizing. It's the state saying, keep calm, carry on, because you'll lose your head. know, it's so, they're not particularly popular. There's other ones which say things like, your courage, your decisiveness, something will bring us victory, which kind of like is almost at the state saying, you little people, if you do the work, then you'll give us the establishment victory. So these are wildly unpopular. And basically, they never really get used. I mean,

couple of them might have done, but mostly just stay in a warehouse and then are pulped before the blitz even starts for paper. So, but some of them have survived and they've now become, they've taken on this massive life. I think it was about what 10, 25 years ago or so that they basically get rediscovered. And now they're on, you cannot go to London without going past a sort of a tourist shop, which will, which will sell you a mug or a t-shirt, which has keep calm and carry on on it. But you wouldn't have seen that in the second world war at all. It's a very

Jonathan Thomas (56:11)
Yeah.

Chris Smith (56:25)
you know, they're designed just before the Second World War, but they're never really used in the Second World War. But yet they've come to symbolize the Second World War in a way which is just absolutely ubiquitous.

Jonathan Thomas (56:35)
Well, and like the barter books, people kind of argue it's a, it's a very nice message from a time of peril that at end of the day, keep calm and carry on. Yeah, exactly. That's what's funny. It's such a false narrative, but you know.

Chris Smith (56:45)
But it's not the message which people at the time thought was nice. They thought it was nice.

Yeah, the message

and the propaganda they like are people like the punch artist Fugas, who did these really kind of quite jolly, funny images, which have a really kind of dark undertone. Things like the Keep Calm and Carry On campaign, which would have like a Cartesian picture of two little old ladies, naturing on a bus and sat behind them at Hitler and Mussolini or Goering. Or there's two guys sort of sitting in a pub drinking and it will say things like

Jonathan Thomas (56:56)
Yeah.

Chris Smith (57:17)
just between you and me and then you've got like ⁓ Hitler in the glasses, images of Hitler with the glasses above and they're quite funny but actually they're really dark in terms of what they actually suggest. It's this idea that behind every blade of grass there might be a German spy and you can't trust your neighbours but it's quite funny so the British public like it whereas they think that this patronising toner for example, keep calm and carry on and that campaign is just really bad and there's other

campaigns which fail as well, like the silent column campaign, is the idea of people should, everyone should be quiet and not talk about what's going on in the war. And they call it the silent column. And again, it's just an absolutely kind of dreary failure.

Jonathan Thomas (57:59)
Interesting. Well, again, we could have a whole podcast on propaganda. ⁓ So before we go, please tell our listeners about your books and I will link to them in the show notes.

Chris Smith (58:01)
haha

Yeah, so I've written two books. One of them is called The Hidden History of Bletchley Park, which I would not recommend that any of your listeners try to buy or get because it was based on my PhD thesis and it reads like that. And it will cost you £65 or about $80, would thought. So I would studiously avoid that one. But my other book is called The Last Cambridge Spy, which is about a member of the Cambridge Ring of Five, Soviet infiltrators into the British state.

⁓ And it's a biography of one of them, man called John Cairncross, who among other positions, he actually works at Bletchley Park, ⁓ but while working also for the Russians. So he leaks all the information he's getting from Bletchley to the Russians. So that's that book. And that is more modestly priced and should be available on all good online bookstores.

Jonathan Thomas (59:00)
And what are you working on next, if you can talk about it?

Chris Smith (59:03)
Yeah, so I'm working on a couple of books about it. So I'm writing a book actually about Bletchley-Park and mythology and that's going to be another one of these academic texts which again your ⁓ audience should studiously avoid because it also cost about $100 so I wouldn't recommend that. But I've also just agreed to write a ⁓ textbook, a very short textbook again on Bletchley and that's going to be about 50,000 words and that'll again be very modestly priced. But I've only just agreed to do that and they haven't even sent me the contract yet so...

Google will say.

Jonathan Thomas (59:34)
Hopefully it wasn't a secret.

Chris Smith (59:37)
Yeah, well yeah, I hope not.

Jonathan Thomas (59:40)
So anyway, what a wonderful and powerful conversation and an important reminder that understanding the truth of our history, it matters as much as remembering it. Thank you for joining us on the Anglotopia podcast, Chris, and for helping us separate myth from reality as we mark this solemn anniversary. The story of Coventry from devastation to reconciliation remains one of the most compelling narratives of the Second World War. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe.

like or leave a comment wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you'd like early access to new episodes and to help support independent long form writing about British history, travel and culture, please consider joining the Friends of Anglotopia Club link in the show notes. For those planning to visit Coventry, I highly recommend exploring the ruins of the old cathedral. And it's a testament to the city's resilience and commitment to peace. And I have to go as soon as I possibly can. So thank you again, Chris, and thank you for listening.

Chris Smith (1:00:35)
very much for having me.