The city in which I was born and brought up was raided 41 times by the Germans between 1940 and 1942, but the greatest of all these raids was one called Operation Moonlight Sonata which occurred during the night of 14 November 1940 and involved 500 German bomber planes.
I remember it well and was tugged back to the memory of that evening by the 60th Anniversary ceremony of the end of World War II in Moscow -- not by the ceremony itself but by reading about a book that has been published simultaneously called I Saw It (Ya Eto Videl). This contains hundreds of first-hand accounts of how Russian soldiers and citizens suffered during the war, as much by the incompetence of Stalin and Russia's general unpreparedness as directly from the German invasion.
The account which took me back immediately to 14 November 1940 was one by N. S. Aleinikova from Kuibyshev and concerns an unexploded bomb that was probably sabotaged by forced labour in German-occupied Polish factories:
"On the 10th Line on Vasilyevsky Island by Syezdovsky Pereulok, where we lived, the Fascists dropped a powerful bomb but it didn't explode. They dug it up and took it away. Later we found out that they found a note in Russian inside, saying, "We help as much as we can." Who were those brave people?"
I probably owe my life similarly to unknown Polish factory workers who sabotaged the detonators of 10ft long landmines that were dropped on Coventry. I didn't discover this until about five years ago, and suddenly it explained a great deal of what happened in our street, Ro-Oak Road, during the night of the heaviest raid.
My brother and I were under the stairs during the bombing. We could hear the whistling of the bombs coming down. I, being six years old, thought I was indestructible, and considered that it was all very exciting. I badly wanted to go into the garden to see what was happening. My father, a policeman, was on duty in the centre of the town -- then one of the finest Medieval cities in England if not in Europe -- that was being laid waste. (Only two Tudor houses survived the raid.) My mother in the kitchen of our house, however, was frantic. As well as the rumblings and lights of the bombers and the incendiary bombs screaming down she could see many parachutes and naturally assumed that we were being invaded by German soldiers. So she pushed me back under the stairs more than once as I struggled to get into the garden to see the show.
The parachutes belonged to the landmines. Some landmines were designed to explode on impact while others could be tripped off electromagnetically by the slightest movement. As a policeman, my father had been briefed not to approach any such unexploded landmine. During that night, my father had already had a close shave with death. He was standing with his Inspector, a bomb came down nearby, they both threw themselves to the ground. After the bomb exploded my father stood up but the Inspector didn't, a piece of shrapnel having burrowed into his head.
My father decided to forsake his city centre duties -- of what little use they were at the time -- and proceed home to see how we were. When he arrived, he saw two parachutes draped across neighbours' gardens. Either of these landmines, had they exploded, would have reduced our house to rubble. Most of the street were crowded into the air raid shelter in the street but some families, as ours, had decided to stay in their own homes. The houses on one side of us had vacated but on the other was a couple who, unusually for those times, also had a car. My father roused them and they agreed to get their car out and evacuate themselves and us to nearby Kenilworth, a small town about 10 miles away that was completely unscathed, the Germans being able to bomb Coventry with great precision by means of radio beams which crossed over Coventry -- chosen because the city manufactured large numbers of tanks and aeroplane engines.
The man got his car out, then went back to his house while we emerged from our house with bundles of clothes under our arms and joined his wife. My father by this time was flapping his arms about in agitation, running around the car, because the man had not returned to the car and it was in his garden that one of the landmines had landed. My father rushed back to the house and then discovered the houseowner in the garden. He had placed a pair of steps against the bomb and was proceeding to cut off the parachute with a pair of garden shears. Being made of silk, this parachute material was almost priceless in those days. He obviously thought that the bomb was a complete dud and didn't know anything about the possible electromagnetic detonator. My father pulled him off the ladder and threw him out of the house.
We then proceeded to Kenilworth, of which I remember precisely nothing. As already mentioned, it was not until recent years that I read that many of the landmines destined for Coventry had been made in Polish factories under the supervision of the German SS. Many of the Polish workers risked their lives in sabotaging the detonators. As with N. S. Aleinikova, how I wish I could have thanked those unknown Polish workers.
Keith Hudson
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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