Wartime miscellany

This day in history will be remembered for a very long time, and forever with some Coventry families - in 1944 one of the biggest battles of any war. The 8th Battalion of the Parachute Regiment was a Midland unit, 80% of around a thousand men were from the Midlands, and about 20% from Coventry and its surrounding villages. These were the first men to touch French soil and release the French people back to freedom, but it cost lives. Brooke's Poem If I should die, think only this of me That there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England.

D-Day in WWII and Eisenhower remained cautious during the morning. By mid-afternoon his broad grin had gone, replaced by anxiety, he was really upset he had heard nothing from the beaches. Next day he got in touch with General Bradley, giving him a real tongue lashing. "Why the devil didn't you let us know what was happening?", he snapped. "We haven't heard a damned word. I didn't know what had happened to you." It was several minutes before General Bradley could get a word in. "We radioed you every hour, every scrap of information we had", said Bradley. A few days later the messages had been traced. His hourly dispatches lay on a desk in General Montgomery's radio room, undeciphered, untouched. Eisenhower would have done better to listen to the BBC news.

Ooh, I missed this before! I recently read a book about Yugoslav, Dusko Popov, who was a double agent (part of our Double-Cross System). The Germans paid him handsomely for giving them information that he "stole" from us - while all the time we were feeding him vetted information to pass to them - containing just enough truth to make it believable. Anyway, the Germans also sent him to the States, along with secret questionnaires contained within microdots - hidden within full stops on an innocuous looking letter. The questions were asking for very detailed information about Pearl Harbour [sic] (!), which appeared to be very obviously for feeding back to Germany's axis friends, the Japanese. In the States, Popov was required to report to J. Edgar Hoover, and with the revelation of Germany's microdot he hoped he could persuade the USA that an attack on Pearl Harbour was the obvious inference to be drawn by their questions. Hoover did not trust Popov, though - partly due to him being a double agent, and partly because Dusko lived a frivolous, womanising and expensive lifestyle - something Hoover abhorred. (In fact, this lifestyle, plus being a spy, has given Dusko Popov the label of being "the real James Bond"!) So, did Hoover not pass on this crucial information to Roosevelt..... or, as I've also read elsewhere, did Hoover or Roosevelt purposely ignore the warnings in order that they had a real excuse for entering the war? I believe there are some war secrets that are still unrevealed.... will the truth behind this one day be known publicly, I wonder?

Do we know how many Coventry churches were totally destroyed in the war apart from the Cathedral, Christ Church & St Michael's Baptist Church? Plymouth has left the remains of one bombed church on a busy traffic island in the city. It's a very poignant reminder of war.

St Nicholas in Radford was another one.

Thanks Anne 'Lest we forget'

The West Orchard Church was destroyed too. There were a lot of chapels but it's hard to know which were destroyed during the war or just by demolition.