11.09. Bombs, Bombers and the Bombed
Maud Settle had headed off for the short half mile walk to her night shift in the Coventry Ordinance factory in time to be there for the start of her twelve hour night shift at eight that evening. She left her younger sister Rose sitting at the kitchen table doing her home work and revising hard for her exams. Maud had hardly reached her work bench and started assembling the first of her quoter of six inch shell fuses, when the air raid sirens started their dreadful wailing. With a muttered ‘not again’ Maud quickly replaced her tools in their storage places and headed for the works bomb shelter. Maud hoped it would not be a long raid as she ducked through the blackout screen and into the dank concrete shelter.
Back at the house in Strathmore Avenue Maud’s parents and sister also heard the wail of the siren. Both Rose's parents had only just got home from their shifts her father was an engineers with English Electric and her mother worked in the doping shop making wings for Anson aircraft. Grabbing their things all three headed into the garden, Roses father , listened , not hearing the un-synchronised throb of German bomber engines He suggested to his wife and daughter that they had time to make the public shelter a couple of streets away rather than use the rather damp and unlit Anderson shelter in the garden. As they walked quickly down the avenue they saw the flash of AA fire in the sky to the south off them, something they had not seen in any of the earlier raids on Coventry. Just as they reached the shelter the sky a few miles to the south was illuminated by strings of flares shortly followed by the sudden flash of exploding bombs.
Pausing to watch the explosions Rose glimpsed a string of flashes crossing the sky between her and the flares, as quick as they appeared the flashes were gone, but there remained a faint glow that slowly transformed into a flaming streak that painted a curving course earth-woods. As Her father uttered “that's done for one of the bastards”, Rose watched in fascinated horror as the aircraft with its doomed crew of men probably little older than her, silently prayed that some had got out. With the sound of aircraft engines now clearly audible the family hurriedly entered the shelter and settled down to wait the raid out. All around them were other family groups who were similarly making the best of it.
Rose struggled to concentrate on the textbook she had brought with her. She was not helped by the dimness of the light and the occasional tremor from an exploding bomb transmitted through the earth . She was thankful that tonight at least there were no bombs falling close enough to their shelter to really shake. Being only half a mile from the city centre and in a area surrounded by war industries , railways and of course the major London road made here feel very vulnerable. Despite this fear Rose later fell asleep and only woke when her mother shook her and told her that the ARP wardens had announced that the all clear was sounding. Exiting the shelter in the predawn dark Rose noticed the glow of a couple of fires to the north near the city centre. Turning the other way to look south there were more indications of bomb damage but it all looked fairly small compared to the fires they had seen in Birmingham to the west just a couple of weeks earlier. Heading home to try and grab a couple of hours proper sleep before she had to go to the Grammar school, she new the boys would be full of all the nights alarms and explosions.
Some miles to the south as that dawn broke the men at the QF sites finally stood down, Most had spent the night in their shelters but some had had to venture out out to set fires on adjust the fuel supply to make more or less flames. Others were watching for marker flares and then trying to mimic them with the ones they had ready. One man laughed at the dark humour expressed by his “Oppo” in that very few other people considered that the more bombs that fell on them the better their work had been! By that measure they had had a very successful night as every where they looked was pockmarked with craters of the black scars on incendiary bombs, A copse adjacent to the QF site had been half flattened evidence of one of the large Luft-miens the Luftwaffe were using.
Not far away on the other side of the copse was an AA battery that had also had a busy night. There they were counting their blessing as thy stacked the empty shell cases that the Luftmein had been no closer, as it was the site had been buffeted hard by the blast. That blast wave had caused the RDF boffins to carefully check their aerials and equipment for damage. ‘Taffy Bowen might have banned his fellow scientists from flying trials, only permitting more junior technicians to do so and only if the equipment used had already been replicated. This was to prevent the loss of vital and possibly unique prototypes and of essential scientific personnel. When test flights were permitted then only a single observer and maybe a junior scientist were authorised. However on the ground there were no such restriction and on this night a team from TRE, who being based at Cheltenham did not have far to travel had arrived by arrangement at the AA site the day befor with a lorry fitted with a new version of the twenty five centimetre tracking and ranging RDF units bur more importantly as far as Bernard Lovell was concerned was the fact that the unit was fitted with the latest of his parabolic, and cheese slice aerials. By setting up close to the Batteries RDF unit they would be able to directly compare the effectiveness of this new system with the Batteries existing one point five meter wave length one. By having scientist observing both sets of RDF instruments, taking notes and talking to each other by headsets much data was gathered. Getting some of the Batteries RDF operators to use the new system under operational conditions was a really important part of the exercise and had been proposed by the Operational Research Team when they first got an inkling that Lovell was going into the ‘Field’ so to speak. At TRE the expression “going into the field” had special meaning, as it was not just a statement of fact but of expectation, as it harked back to the successful Daventry experiment early in 1935 from which all RDF development had sprung.
Benard Lovell and A.D. Blumlein were not the only TRE people busy that night. Down at Staverton airfield earlier that evening a team had been fussing around an unusual black painted aircraft. It was not just its tricycle undercarriage that made it different from the other night fighters on test there.The G for Guard painted on its’ matt black fuselage marked it out as something special. The Aircraft was a North American Havock, originally ordered by the French as a medium bomber but taken over by the RAF when France fell. One problem with these early Havok ones was that being ordered by and built for the French Armee D L Aire, all their instruments were in metric units and their throttle levers were reversed, so that the pilot pulled them back for more power. The TRE test flight had in this case solved that problem by simply using a Polish pilot who had flown in France. The fact that prewar “Ski” as he was known had been a wireless technician was helpful as well. It was however one of the technical people from TRE ,a lover of Shakespeare, who had named the aircraft ‘Wardog’ which was now proudly painted on both sides of the nose. It was the nose that really made this aircraft special for it housed behind a Plexiglas dome the first airborne axially scanning antenna on a twenty five centre meter waveband AI set. Nestling in the bomb bay with their barrels passing either side of the front undercarriage were the four 20 mm cannons with which the aircraft was armed. Alongside the RDF sets in the fuselage was the aircraft's truly secret weapon, a receiver designed and built to locate the X-Gerait beams. This receiver was on loan from 80 Wing and came complete with its own operator. The plans was to sortie when 80 Wing found an active beam and fly out over the Channel, there the Ventnor Chain Home would talk them onto the Luftwaffe bombers as they approached the beam line. Being able to follow the beam line using their of X-Gerait receiver the plan was that the twenty five centre meter would then be able to pick up and guide them onto an enemy bomber in the bomber stream. an important addition to the aircraft's electronic suite was a IFF receiver that should prevent them from attacking one of their own night fighters. All the PPI stations had been briefed about “Wardogs” flight plan were therefore aware that if they got a second ‘Crown of thorns’ on their PPI screens closing on one of their own night fighters then they would need to warn the crew of “Wardog” or the other fighter as necessary. One of the objects of the nights test flight was to investigate if this was a viable tactic for getting more night fighters into the bomber stream than could be sustained by the GCI/PPI system on its own. The Pilot of “Wardog” had named this tactic ‘Widdog’ which in his native Polish translated as ‘dziki pies’ which to his English comrades sound like he was saying “dizzypies” so that was the term they used for this sortie type.
Analysis of the RDF traces and of “Wardogs” crews debriefing and flight records showed that they detected no less than five potential targets in the stream once they had got into and were embedded in the bomber stream, They had fired on two contacts, one hastily as the target bomber had fired at them, the other was a more deliberate attack and hits were claimed but no visible evidence of damage done was observed. Two of the other contacts were persuade but lost and one was broken of when Cricklade GCI/PPI informed them that they appeared to be stalking one of their own fighters. Real positives from the nights efforts were the range at which the twenty five centimetre set was able to lock onto the targets aircraft, the minim range was also better than the one point five meter AI Mark IV.The real star of the night had been the cloned X-Gerait receiver that had enabled the Eighty Wing technician to bring them into the bomber stream time and time again without outside assistance.
Though much damage had been done to Coventry, there was no wholesale destruction or great fire as there had been in the east end of London. The Historic old city centre had got off lightly with some important buildings destroyed by bombs. The Cathedral had some of its ancient stained glass windows blown in by a Luft Mien that landed a couple streets away. Luckily no incendiaries actually landed on the Cathedral and those that did land within the precinct were dealt with by ARP Wardens and the Auxiliary Fire-brigade who stayed on fire watch throughout the raid. Civilian casualties had been unfortunately high due to a direct hit on a street shelter.
Back at their house in Strathmore Avenue, Rose was getting ready to walk to the Grammar school as her parents were getting ready to leave together for their shifts. Maud had not come home yet and Rose surmised that she was doing some overtime to try and help recoup some of the production lost due to the air raids.