Coventry's cathedrals

There's a German term, 'Coventrieren', that was coined by Joseph Goebbels in 1940. It describes what was done to Coventry, ie the levelling of a city by air raids.

The city was pretty well rebuilt after the war, but the remains of the 14th century St Michael's Cathedral was left as a memorial. The new St Michael's Cathedral was built right next to it in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

I grew up a mere 30km or so from Coventry, but I've hardly ever been there, and never explored the place at all. I made a point of getting there last month, on an easy day trip from Birmingham. It's well worth the visit.







The new cathedral was designed by Sir Basil Spence, and is a Grade 1 listed building.

The Japanese tunnels of Bukittinggi

The Japanese Caves, or Japanese Tunnels, in Bukittinggi are one of the city's most interesting features. They were built during Indonesia's World War 2 occupation by Japan, by local slave labour.

Bukittinggi was a major centre of Government during the Japanese occupation, as it had been during Dutch colonial times. In 1948 and 1949 it was the capital of the new Emergency Government of the Republic of Indonesia.

It's an enormous complex, with a total tunnel length of 1.4km. There are ammunition rooms, dormitories, kitchens, meeting rooms, even a torture room.













Indonesians do not have fond memories of the Japanese occupation, and I was told that very few Japanese tourists come here even today.

Enigma variations

I'd been wanting to visit Bletchley Park for a while, and on this trip I made it. It was the site where Britain's World War 2 codebreakers broke codes. Most famously the German Enigma code.

In fact it was technically the Poles who first cracked it, in 1932, and they later joined the Bletchley team.






It makes for a good day out. The park is a very short walk from Bletchley railway station, and once there, there's lots to see and do.










You get a good feel for the working conditions, the day-to-day activities, how it all worked.

And here's an Enigma machine. There were dozens of variations on the design, as it evolved over the years. It was the device of choice for the German military to encrypt and decrypt their communications, so there were hundreds of them altogether. The Bletchley people would work away at uncoding them, and it has been claimed that the war was shortened by years as a result. The code changed every day, so if you could crack it quickly, you got to read all the messages for the rest of that day. Or something like that.

In due course, Alan Turing built his 'Bombe', an early computer, which greatly sped up the daily codebreaking process.

The technicalities are a bit complicated of course, and I forget most of the details and correct terminology, but they did an excellent job of trying to explain it all.

The 2014 film The Imitation Game was about Turing and his feats at Bletchley Park. Much of the film was made on location there, and you get to visit some of the sets, like the 1940s pub.




They've rebuilt a Turing 'Bombe', and they fire it up frequently.