page_title: Coventry Blitz
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Coventry Blitz / Background
caption_attribution_description: Broadgate, Coventry
context_page_description: The Coventry Blitz was a series of bombing raids that took place on the English city of Coventry. The city was bombed many times during the Second World War by the German Air Force. The most devastating of these attacks occurred on the evening of 14 November 1940 and continued into the morning of 15 November.
context_section_description: At the start of the Second World War, Coventry was an industrial city of around 238,000 people which, like much of the industrial West Midlands, contained metal and wood-working industries. In Coventry's case, these included cars, bicycles, aeroplane engines and, since 1900, munitions factories. In the words of the historian Frederick Taylor, "Coventry was therefore, in terms of what little law existed on the subject, a legitimate target for aerial bombing".
  During the First World War, the advanced state of the mechanical tooling industry in the city meant that pre-war production could quickly be turned to war production purposes, with industries such as the Coventry Ordnance Works assuming the role of one of the leading munition centres in the UK, manufacturing 25% of all British aircraft produced during the war.
  Like many of the industrial towns of the English West Midlands region that had been industrialised during the Industrial Revolution, many of the small and medium-sized factories in the city were woven into the same streets as the workers' houses and the shops of the city centre. However, it developed many large interwar suburbs of both private and council housing, which were relatively isolated from industrial buildings. The city was also at the centre of Britain's car industry, with many carmakers being based at different locations in Coventry, although many of these factories had switched to help supply the war effort.
caption: Broadgate, Coventry in 1917
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