Coventry was, and is, full of factories, especially car factories. It holds the same position in England that Detroit holds here. It was a legitimate military target, insofar as any industrial center is.
The mythos that surrounds Coventry is based on two things:
1. Churchill knew Coventry was to be bombed that night, because the cryptologists at Bletchley Park had broken the codes of the German Enigma machines. However, if he had moved a fighter wing there suddenly, or alerted the civil-defense authorities and evacuated the city, the Germans would have known the code was compromised. So he had to stand by in silence as the city was destroyed.
2. Coventry had many beautiful and historic buildings dating back hundreds of years, most of which were destroyed. The most famous was the 14th-century Coventry Cathedral. Its ruins have been preserved as a memorial, next to the new modernist Cathedral, which I find repellent.
-ccm
Have you seen Koln cathedral? Same thing...although the interior of the modernist lump is quite beautiful. They took all the shattered glass from the original's stained glass windows and put them into the walls of the modern one. You see this hideous lump from the outside, but the inside is a really interesting sort of nighttime stars feel, with colored lights coming from all sides.