Download or read book Coventry s Blitz written by David McGrory and published by Amberley Publishing Limited. This book was released on 2015-08-15 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book on the blitz that blighted Coventry during the Second World War, commemorating its 75th anniversary.

Download or read book Aunty Nell s Table written by John Kelly and published by . This book was released on 2018-10-17 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the night of 14th November 1940 the Germans bombed the city of Coventry with a million pounds of high explosives & thirty thousand incendiaries. The raid lasted eleven hours.Coventry was a prime target in early World War II as its factories made war planes, motor vehicles and communications for Army and Air force.Even so the inhabitants were civilians, who had once considered themselves safe and far from the front line. Now, many of these people lost their homes or, far worse, loved ones.Despite the suffering there were many stories of altruism and heroism. At the centre of the story are the Mansell family, the staff of their pub and a group of Polish airmen.The family, like their neighbours, rallied round, rescuing bomb victims, providing emergency accommodation, eking out food and fuel supplies, and keeping the factories and city going.Through it all they tried to maintain normal lives, but the constant threat of death changed those norms; homes were looted, children evacuated. Coventry was bombed over forty times. For the Mansells, it was an experience that changed their lives forever. The author was a boy in Coventry at the time. The book is founded on his experiences and those of his family and friends. Most of the stories in the book are true, all are typical of peoples experiences.

Download or read book The Blitzed City written by Karen Farrington and published by Aurum Press. This book was released on 2016-08-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Luftwaffe's targetting and destruction of Coventry city remains the biggest and most destructive air raid on British soil during the Second World War. Seen as a centre of British armaments production, the German high command wished to inflict terror and panic on the British public, a plan that had paid dividends during their relentless conquest of France that year. Attacking over two nights in November, 1940 they systematically bombed and destroyed the bulk of the city, making thousands homeless, and killing over 400 men, women and children. Such was the devastation, panic and disorder it wrought, that Winston Churchill ordered a news blackout for three weeks in order to quell the unease and morale-sapping effect that the raid had. But people at the time acted with great bravery to save those trapped in bombed out and burning buildings, as well as caring for those badly injured (of which there were thousands), and fighting the Nazi planes coming in to attack the city itself. Now, for the very first time we interview those veterans who survived the raid and helped fight the flames and bombs to tell the story of this iconic event. Such was the effect it had on the country that when Bomber Command began night time raids against German cities — Hamburg, Cologne and most famously, Dresden — the call 'Remember Coventry!' went up.

Download or read book Coventry written by Frederick Taylor and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-10-22 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a few minutes past seven on the evening of Thursday, 14 November 1940, the historic industrial city of Coventry was subjected to the longest, most devastating air raid Britain had yet experienced. Only after eleven hours of continual bombardment by the German Luftwaffe could its people emerge from their half-sunk Anderson shelters and their cellars, from under their stairs or kitchen tables, to venture up into their wounded city. That long night of destruction marked a critical moment in the Second World War. It heralded a new kind of air warfare, one which abandoned the pursuit of immediate military goals and instead focused on obliterating all aspects of city life. It also provided the push America needed to join Britain in the war. But while the Coventry raid was furiously condemned publically, such effective enemy tactics provided Britain's politicians and military establishment with a 'blueprint for obliteration', to be adapted and turned against Germany. A merciless four-year war of attrition had begun. In this important work of history Frederick Taylor draws upon numerous sources, including eye witness interviews from the archives of the BBC which are published here for the first time, to reveal the true repercussions of the bombing of Coventry in 1940. He teases out the truth behind the persistent rumours and conspiracy theories that Churchill knew the raid was coming, assesses this significant turning point in modern warfare, looks at how it affected Britain's status in the war, and considers finally whether this attack really could provide justification for the horror of Dresden, 1945.

Download or read book Blitzcat written by Robert Westall and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-12-13 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: She made her way down the cliff, and on to the beach. At the edge of the waves, she stopped, shaking her wet paws. She knew that somewhere ahead was her person, but far, far away. She miaowed plaintively; stood staring at the moving blur of uncrossable sea. She led the way to safety, out of the blazing hell of blitzed Coventry. People touched her for luck; feared her as an omen of disaster. Wherever she went, she changed lives . . . From her beginning to her end she never wavered. She was the Blitzcat. Blitzcat by Robert Westall is the Smarties Prize-winning book about one brave cat's experiences during World War Two. Now with a brilliant new cover look and including an extended author biography.

Download or read book Dresden written by Frederick Taylor and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-04-10 with total page 755 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published to coincide with the bombing, this dramatic and controversial account completely re-examines the Allied attack on Dresden For decades it has been assumed that the Allied bombing of Dresden was militarily unjustifiable, an act of rage and retribution for Germany’s ceaseless bombing of London and other parts of England. Now, Frederick Taylor’s groundbreaking research offers a completely new examination of the facts, and reveals that Dresden was a highly-militarized city actively involved in the production of military armaments and communications concealed beneath the cultural elegance for which the city was famous. Incorporating first-hand accounts, contemporaneous press material and memoirs, and never-before-seen government records, Taylor documents unequivocally the very real military threat Dresden posed, and thus altering forever our view of that attack.

Download or read book The King Cried for Coventry written by Mark Scott and published by . This book was released on 2019-04-06 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The King Cried for Coventry" is a factual account of a "Who do you think you are?"- style family history quest to uncover the story of civilian fireman called Frank Archer. He was killed in April 1941 in the Blitz on Coventry. The investigation started with a tiny and fragile newspaper clipping announcing his death. It was found among the effects of the author's deceased grandmother. The story that unfolds is one of an ordinary young family caught up in an extraordinarily fierce assault on one of Britain's proud cities. Although far from the first such raid (London, in particular, having been repeatedly targeted prior to this), the fury that was unleashed against Coventry during the first Blitz was unprecedented at the time it first occurred. It marked a new type of attack that was overwhelmingly intense. Fireman Frank Archer was killed in the April 1941 Blitz raid on Coventry. But how and where did he die? What happened to his family? Answering these questions provides a window through which one can glimpse the war experience of this representative family, and how they coped. Doing so illustrates the reality of one of the greatest disasters British people have faced, and the way those left behind are affected for decades after.

Download or read book Coventry written by Helen Humphreys and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2009 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the night of the Luftwaffe's devastating bombing of Coventry, two women traverse the city and transform their hearts.

Download or read book A Dancer in Wartime written by Gillian Lynne and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-11-08 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: London during the Blitz was a time of hardship, heroism and hope. For Gillian Lynne – a budding ballerina – it was also a time of great change as she was evacuated from war-torn London to a crumbling mansion, where dance classes took place in the faded ballroom. Life was hard, but her talent and dedication shone through and an astonishing journey ensued, which saw Gillian dancing a triumphant debut in Swan Lake, performing in the West End with doodlebugs falling and touring a devastated Europe entertaining the troops. A Dancer in Wartime paints a vivid and moving picture of what life was really like during the hard years of the Blitz and brings to life a lost world.

Download or read book The Next War in the Air written by Brett Holman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-17 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early twentieth century, the new technology of flight changed warfare irrevocably, not only on the battlefield, but also on the home front. As prophesied before 1914, Britain in the First World War was effectively no longer an island, with its cities attacked by Zeppelin airships and Gotha bombers in one of the first strategic bombing campaigns. Drawing on prewar ideas about the fragility of modern industrial civilization, some writers now began to argue that the main strategic risk to Britain was not invasion or blockade, but the possibility of a sudden and intense aerial bombardment of London and other cities, which would cause tremendous destruction and massive casualties. The nation would be shattered in a matter of days or weeks, before it could fully mobilize for war. Defeat, decline, and perhaps even extinction, would follow. This theory of the knock-out blow from the air solidified into a consensus during the 1920s and by the 1930s had largely become an orthodoxy, accepted by pacifists and militarists alike. But the devastation feared in 1938 during the Munich Crisis, when gas masks were distributed and hundreds of thousands fled London, was far in excess of the damage wrought by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz in 1940 and 1941, as terrible as that was. The knock-out blow, then, was a myth. But it was a myth with consequences. For the first time, The Next War in the Air reconstructs the concept of the knock-out blow as it was articulated in the public sphere, the reasons why it came to be so widely accepted by both experts and non-experts, and the way it shaped the responses of the British public to some of the great issues facing them in the 1930s, from pacifism to fascism. Drawing on both archival documents and fictional and non-fictional publications from the period between 1908, when aviation was first perceived as a threat to British security, and 1941, when the Blitz ended, and it became clear that no knock-out blow was coming, The Next War in the Air provides a fascinating insight into the origins and evolution of this important cultural and intellectual phenomenon, Britain's fear of the bomber.

Download or read book The Spirit of the Blitz written by Paul Addison and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-08-06 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edited and introduced by two leading historians of the period, this volume tells the inside story of Home Intelligence and why it proved so controversial in Whitehall, the complete and unabridged sequence of reports provide us with a unique and extraordinary window into the mindset of the British during a momentous period in their history.

Download or read book Revival of a City written by Jason Begley and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-07-26 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2021 Coventry celebrates being the national City of Culture. Modern Coventry is a product of successive rounds of industrial, economic and social developments driven by regional, national and global forces. This book presents a timely opportunity to reflect on this rich, and often misunderstood, history. The book examines the development of industry, services, infrastructure and social transformation, and the role which globalising forces have played in influencing these, particularly since the 1950s. It looks at the experiences of the city of Coventry in responding to the challenges of socioeconomic change, technological advances, reconstruction and renewal. Issues of investment, economic decline, reconstruction, employment change and local and national governance are all considered in assessing the story of modern Coventry, a city influenced by new industries and development opportunities while still being shaped by its historical economic challenges. By focusing on the case of Coventry this book contributes to debates surrounding urban structural change, economic diversification and resilience from the perspective of a medium-sized city.

Download or read book Britten s Unquiet Pasts written by Heather Wiebe and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-04 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heather Wiebe's book looks to the music of Benjamin Britten to elucidate a British postwar vision of cultural renewal.

Download or read book Moonlight and Ashes written by Rosie Goodwin and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2010-12-23 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two evacuees. One caring mother. One World War. Moonlight and Ashes is a heart-breaking wartime saga from Rosie Goodwin, the bestselling author of A Mother's Grace, Mothering Sunday and The Little Angel. This warm and compelling read is sure to stay with you long after you have finished the last page. Perfect for fans of Cathy Sharp and Pam Evans. 'Not only is Goodwin's characterisation and dialogue compelling, but her descriptive writing is a joy' - Nottingham Evening Post Despite being trapped in an abusive marriage, Maggie still feels blessed with her eight-year-old twins, Danny and Lizzie, and baby girl, Lucy. But when the Second World War begins it seems that her blessings may have run out. Although the war lets her escape her husband when he's sent to the front, she must also lose the twins, as they're evacuated to North Wales. Lizzie seems to be in the perfect family, while Danny is left with a man who seems to resent his presence. But appearances can be deceptive, and while Maggie struggles to survive the bombings at home, her children face danger of a different kind. What Amazon readers are saying about Moonlight and Ashes: 'Once again Rosie has written another gripping tale with fantastic plots, events and realism. You won't be able to put the book down as you will want to find out what happens to Maggie, her children and the people that surround her life as they deal with the Coventry Blitz in World War 2. Rosie Goodwin is an author you can trust to deliver and every single novel she has produced has given millions of readers' great pleasure' 'I have just finished this wonderful book and I have to say it's the best book I have read in a very long time. The characters are so believable and life like, I just didn't want to put it down! Well done Rosie!'

Download or read book Between the Regions of Kindness written by Alice Jolly and published by Unbound Publishing. This book was released on 2019-04-18 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coventry, 1941. The morning after one of the worst nights of the Blitz. Twenty-two-year-old Rose enters the remains of a bombed house to find her best friend dead. Shocked and confused, she makes a split-second decision that will reverberate for generations to come. More than fifty years later, in modern-day Brighton, Rose’s granddaughter Lara waits for the return of her eighteen-year-old son Jay. Reckless and idealistic, he has gone to Iraq to stand on a conflict line as an unarmed witness to peace. Lara holds her parents, Mollie and Rufus, partly responsible for Jay’s departure. But in her attempts to explain their thwarted passions, she finds all her assumptions about her own life are called into question. Then into this damaged family come two strangers – Oliver, a former faith healer, and Jemmy, a young woman devastated by the loss of a baby. Together they help to establish a partial peace – but at what cost?

Download or read book The Little History of Coventry written by Peter Walters and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Little History Of Coventry packs into its pages the colour and incident of a thousand years, telling the story of a city that has perhaps been overlooked by mainstream historians, but has often been at the heart of this country's great events. From the testing ground of the saintly Godiva to fourteenth-century boom town, from Second World War Blitz victim to the next UK City of Culture, Coventry has always been an inventive place with an unerring ability to bounce back from misfortune and make its mark. This is a truly eye-opening journey through the events and characters that have shaped its story and made the city one of England's hidden jewels.

Download or read book The Blitz Companion written by Mark Clapson and published by University of Westminster Press. This book was released on 2019-04-02 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Blitz Companion offers a unique overview of a century of aerial warfare, its impact on cities and the people who lived in them. It tells the story of aerial warfare from the earliest bombing raids and in World War 1 through to the London Blitz and Allied bombings of Europe and Japan. These are compared with more recent American air campaigns over Cambodia and Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, the NATO bombings during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, and subsequent bombings in the aftermath of 9/11. Beginning with the premonitions and predictions of air warfare and its terrible consequences, the book focuses on air raids precautions, evacuation and preparations for total war, and resilience, both of citizens and of cities. The legacies of air raids, from reconstruction to commemoration, are also discussed. While a key theme of the book is the futility of many air campaigns, care is taken to situate them in their historical context. The Blitz Companion also includes a guide to documentary and visual resources for students and general readers. Uniquely accessible, comparative and broad in scope this book draws key conclusions about civilian experience in the twentieth century and what these might mean for military engagement and civil reconstruction processes once conflicts have been resolved.