...and while the testimony of the survivors was very moving I did find myself wondering why this wasn't on the radio. There is hardly any actual film of the events they were describing so can't the story be told in words?

Is the 80-something ex-copper who described himself lying in the gutter shaking with fear, and found some poor old dear's husband sliced in half under a pile of bricks in their back garden. He advised her to put the kettle on.

Weirdly, the "Dramatic reconstruction" section involved some people cowering in a farmhouse. The actor playing the policeman who called in at the farmhouse was the spit of my Dad, whose next door neighbours weren't very lucky one night in 1941. One or two metres "rechts" and I wouldn't be here.

Mind you, there's a reason why everything in the northern German cities is so modern, but that's a whole new discussion.

All the way through I was thinking of what the RAF did to German cities in 1944-45 and that the horrors wrought upon Coventry were re-enacted tenfold on a nightly basis. The last bit of the documentary emphasised this almost perfectly. The only bit they missed was the concentration. The Coventry raid took place over many hours using four hundred medium bombers each dropping 1500kg of bombs; the RAF would use the same number of Lancasters each carying four times this amount but they would carry out the bombing over around thirty minutes, possibly in two waves. The consequences are horrible to contemplate and the debate as regards the justification still rage.