On the night of November 14–15, 1940, the German Luftwaffe launched Operation Moonlight Sonata — a concentrated raid of over 500 bombers dropping approximately 500 tons of high explosives and 30,000 incendiaries on Coventry. St. Michael's Cathedral, the fourteenth-century parish-church-cathedral of the city, was gutted by fire.
The following morning, the cathedral's stonemason Jock Forbes was walking through the ruins. From the medieval oak roof — burnt but not entirely consumed — he pulled three long iron nails, wired them into the shape of a cross, and stood the cross upright on the rubble of the sanctuary altar. Provost Richard Howard, arriving shortly after, took a piece of charcoal and wrote on the standing chancel wall the words 'FATHER FORGIVE'.
The Cross of Nails became the sign of the cathedral's post-war ministry of reconciliation. Copies of the original cross were sent to the destroyed Frauenkirche of Dresden, to the Berlin Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, to Volgograd (Stalingrad), and to over 250 other 'Community of the Cross of Nails' centers on every continent. The original three-nail cross remains on the altar of the ruined cathedral, now preserved as a memorial garden beside the new cathedral consecrated in 1962.