It’s 70 years since Germany launched one of the most devastating bombing raids of World War II, on Coventry. But did Winston Churchill have prior warning of the attack?
It has been claimed in a number of books that the wartime prime minister knew that the city was to be targeted by the German Luftwaffe, but chose to do nothing because it would have alerted Adolf Hitler to the fact the Allies had recently cracked the Nazis’ top-secret Enigma codes.
Coventry and its people were sacrificed, the theory goes, “for the greater good” – that is, that the benefits of playing the long game outweighed the short-term costs of leaving the West Midlands city to a terrible fate.
It’s not just historians who have written about the so-called Coventry conspiracy, though – it’s a theory which lives on to this day.