One of the first regulations to be passed after the British declaration of war was the blacking out of homes, factories and buildings. These required that all windows and doors should be covered at night with suitable black material such as heavy curtains, blinds, cardboard or paint. The blackout was designed to ensure that no light could be seen from above by enemy planes so making it harder for them to bomb targets. Although unpopular because of the restrictions they imposed on normal life, the blackout regulations were rigorously enforced by Air Raid Precautions wardens who had the powers to enter people’s properties if they did not adhere to the rules. However, blacking out the moon proved far more challenging.
The most famous raid aided by moonlight was the bombing of Coventry on the night of 14 November 1940. It was the single most concentrated attack on any British city during the war and because it was carried out by moonlight, it was given the infamous codename by the Germans of Operation Mondscheinsonate or ‘Moonlight Sonata’. On the night of the attack the moon was so bright that the enemy pilots could see the individual houses and the traffic below from over 6,000 feet up in their cockpits.36 One eyewitness said that ‘the moon had just got up a bit and had got nicely brilliant – as the evening wore on it became the brightest moon I have ever seen’.
The aim was to knock out Coventry as a major centre for war production, Hitler ordering the attack as revenge for an RAF attack on Munich. The raid lasted for eleven hours and involved nearly 500 Luftwaffe bombers, flown from airfields across occupied France. The bombers dropped 500 tons of high explosive (including a new exploding incendiary bomb), 30,000 incendiaries and fifty land mines. The final death toll amounted to over 550 people, many of whom were buried in mass graves to prevent the spread of disease. Great swathes of the city were also reduced to rubble including the city’s magnificent medieval church of St Michael’s, the only cathedral to be completely destroyed during the war and the sixteenth-century Palace Yard, where King James II had once held court. More than 43,000 homes, over half the city’s total, were damaged or destroyed, together with Coventry’s central library, market hall and hundreds of other buildings.
To get the blackout message across to children, Blacking Out the Moon was produced, the game being made entirely of cheap paper and card.
One of the major reasons that the raid was so devastating was that the enemy bombers met little or no resistance, very few anti-aircraft guns being fired, and no fighters scrambled. This has fuelled the conspiracy theory that Winston Churchill knew about the raid beforehand but sacrificed Coventry so he wouldn’t give away the secret that the British had cracked the German’s Enigma code (many historians believe that Churchill only knew there would be a raid but didn’t know the location, his code breakers informing him that they thought it might be London). Another reason was that despite the blackout regulations, chinks of light could clearly be seen from the air coming from people’s homes. These included young boys and girls drawing back the curtains to get a better look at the raid when they should have been in the family air-raid shelter.
To get the blackout message across to children a new game was devised called Blacking Out the Moon. In line with wartime economy standards, the game was made entirely of cheap paper and card and was designed to make the blackout fun. It consisted of a small box, four ‘moon boards’ consisting of twelve circles, each with a score ranging from one to six, black paper counters, a paper dice shaker and very small wooden die. The illustration on the box cover showed a happy boy and girl applying a blackout curtain to cover up an equally merry moon.
The aim of the game was simple: each player on throwing the die covered up the relevant circular score with a black counter. The winner was the first person to totally cover up or black out their moon, but to make the game harder the rules had a twist:
A Game for two, three or four players. Each player selects a Moon. The Players throw the dice in turn and cover with a counter each number scored on the Moon. If, however, a player throws a number that he does not want, e.g., he has No. 4s all covered and he throws a 4, he must miss that turn and uncover a No. 4 and give it to an opponent. If more than one opponent has a space for that particular number, they must throw the dice for it and the highest will take it. If, however, all players have that particular number all covered, they must each uncover No. 4. The first player to black out his Moon is the winner.
For a simple game the complex rules which required players to miss turns or gift their counters to others were designed to keep children occupied for as long as possible, the game usually being played in the parlour or the air-raid shelter. The government used games like Blacking Out the Moon to ensure that children in the cities understood the blackout regulations which were widely resented because they interfered so much with family life. Sadly, the game came too late for Coventry and, following the raid, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, coined an infamous new word in German – coventrieren – which meant to raze a city to the ground. According to German pilots who took part in the raid, the smell and heat coming from the burning city could be felt in their cockpits, 6,000 feet up. However, after the war Coventry rose triumphantly from the ashes and was twinned with both Kiel and Dresden, the latter also being razed to the ground by the RAF. Today the ruined cathedral in Coventry stands much as it did after the night of the raid and has become an international symbol for peace and reconciliation.
Designed to make the blackout fun, players covered up circular scores with black counters. The winner was the first person to totally cover up or blackout their moon.