The sirens went off at around 6.30 p.m.
Firefighters and anti-aircraft riflemen rushed to their posts, parents carried their children into the bunkers.
The people of Coventry had experience with air raids - the German Air Force flew over the city more often to attack nearby Birmingham.
Sometimes individual planes had bombed factories in Coventry.
On the evening of November 14, 1940, however, the residents quickly realized that this time it was a major attack.
The first planes reached the city at 7:10 p.m. and marked the target with flare bombs.
In the next eleven hours, around 500 aircraft dropped explosive and incendiary bombs - a total of around 500 tons.
The whole center went up in flames.
The next morning Coventry was a field of rubble and a third of the 60,000 houses uninhabitable.
Of the Gothic cathedral from the Middle Ages, only the tower and a skeleton remained.
Cinemas, hotels, the library and the market hall were destroyed, at least 568 people burned or killed by rubble.
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