The myth that Winston Churchill had prior knowledge to one of the most brutal attacks on UK soil has been around since the 70’s, we’re diving into it today at MindFckd…

Operation Moonlight Sonata, known as The Coventry Blitz, descended upon the city of Coventry on the night of November 14th 1940, being the single most concentrated attack on a British city in the whole of World War Two.

But in the years since a rumour has spread that Winston Churchill, the serving PM, had prior knowledge of the planned attack. The theory is that he didn’t want to alert the Germans that the UK government had cracked The Enigma Code, so he sacrificed Coventry to gain an advantage in the war. 

The Enigma Code machine was believed to be unbreakable during WWII. Created by the Germans it was unlike any other code, it used a polyalphabetic substitution cipher. This meant that unlike a traditional code, the letter allocation changed with every single keystroke. If you typed “AAAAA” into an Enigma machine, you’d get five different ciphertext letters, for example: “FJQGS”. 

This code gave the Germans a huge advantage, but also an inflated sense of confidence. The UK and the rest of Europe worked on the code from 1932 until 1941 officially. It was a huge operation. 

These claims substantiated in 1974 when former intelligence officer F.W. Winterbotham published his book titled “The Ultra Secret” which detailed Winterbotham’s experience working on the team that cracked The Enigma Code (as well as other codes). 

Winterbotham claims that he himself passed the information onto Churchill that Coventry was going to be the target of the attack. He says “Coventry” came through the code clearly. However, the head of Scientific Intelligence, whom all messages had to pass, has clearly and definitively said that no message was ever received that even hinted Coventry was the target of the attack.  

Winterbotham’s account, which was purely based on memory, has also been challenged by multiple historians. 

While the British government was aware a large-scale attack was to be launched on November 14th, Wolverhampton, Birmingham and London were all more heavily suspected than Coventry. 

In the diary of a friend and colleague at No.10, Sir John Colville it was recorded that the afternoon of the 14th after opening the yellow “Ultra” box containing the information that one of the heaviest attacks was being launched on the UK Churchill asked his driver to turning away from the direction of Colville’s country house where he was planning to spend the evening. 

He headed back towards London, where he himself believed the raid was planned to hit. It’s reported he then went up onto the Air Ministry roof with a colleague to await the arrival of the Germans.

515 German bombers launched a continuous attack over an 11 hour period through the night. The aim of this attack was to put Coventry’s aircraft manufacturing facilities out of order (factories like Rolls-Royce aero engines) and other manufacturing facilities. 

Nearly 3,000 homes and shops were completely destroyed, and over 43,000 homes (over half of the homes in the city) were severely damaged. And approximately 568 were killed in the air raid, with 863 seriously injured and 393 minorly injured.

Even if the British government had prior knowledge, that knowledge would’ve been only a few hours before. It would have been incredibly hard to prevent mass fatalities given the tremendous job it would be to evacuate a city as large as Coventry. 

Speculation often follows mass tragedy as people want to find an explanation for the events they are trying to comprehend, this theory has been regarded as a bit of a myth among most historians.