On the evening of November 14, 1940, the English city of Coventry was bombed by the German Air Force. Based on that date, you

probably surmised that this was a World War II bombing run, but what you might not know is that

this particular attack was one of the most intense, concentrated, and devastating of the war

within the United Kingdom. Coventry was an industry city, filled

with factories and assembly lines, most of which were turned to the war effort, repurposed for the

moment to produce munitions and such, rather than cars and bikes and commercial airplane engines,

as per the usual. As a consequence of that solid

infrastructural setup, Coventry was at one point responsible for producing a full 25%, one-fourth

of all British aircraft produced in country during the war. It makes sense then that the Germans

would choose to bomb this city of around 238,000 people,

and to bomb it in such a way that it would have trouble rebuilding.

Operation Moonlight Sonata was the codename for this particular German Air Force mission,

and it involved a novel approach to designating the target

bombing area, which involved sending out smaller scout aircraft ahead of the main

bombers to drop marker flares and start fires in the city, lighting up the area so that it could

be more easily hit by the higher-flying bombers that came in a short time later. They also deployed a new type

of incendiary bombs that were intended to cause more devastation to the structures of the buildings.

The combination of magnesium-based and petroleum-based incendiaries allowed the bombers to burn away

roofs and then drop high explosives deeper into the skeleton of a building,

leaving many of the targets completely leveled rather than just burnt and damaged but reparable.

The level of destruction in Coventry, after this one night of bombing, which involved

515 German bombers alongside the smaller flare-dropping planes,

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