Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s (21 page)

Even those on the site when the rocket landed did not at first know what had happened. Among them was an engineering worker, alone in a house in Wilmington Avenue, parallel to Staveley Road and about 200 yards from it. Having just got home from work, she had ‘put on the kettle for a cup of tea . . . and put down a bowl of food for the family cat, Billy . . . large and white and not particularly friendly’:

I left him happily eating in the kitchen and went into the lounge to put a match to the fire. I was . . . waiting for it to burn up when Billy came into the lounge and tried to jump on my lap, as I crouched in front of the fire. This was a very unusual thing for Billy to do, so I stood up and lifted him up in my arms. He was quite still for a second, then suddenly he leapt from my arms and rushed out of the lounge and through the cellar door, which was just outside. . . . Before I could gather my senses there was an almighty explosion, quite the biggest I’ve heard. I remember seeing the half-alight lounge fire blow out at me as my legs carried me out of the lounge door to the safety of an inside corridor between the lounge and kitchen. I remember looking back at the partly boarded windows and the outside door of the lounge as I ran and they were crumping into the room. I crouched in the corridor hiding my face in the coats hanging there for a few minutes, wondering what the hell had happened. . . . Soon I ventured out to survey the damage. Every door had burst in or out, practically all the back windows, even the boarded-up ones, had been broken, the lounge fire miraculously had caused no damage. . . . It must have been sucked back into the grate where it was burning away merrily. The cat would not come up out of the cellar, not even for his food. . . .

I don’t think I was particularly frightened, mystified maybe. I couldn’t think what had caused such a tremendous explosion. Neighbours were gathering in the road, saying ‘What was it?’ I went out of Wilmington Avenue and towards Staveley Road, where I thought the explosion had come from, but there were ARP squads setting up barriers and turning people back. . . . Presently I went to a phone box to phone my fiancé, who was on a 24-hour [pass] from the RAF and from the box I saw a very large black official-looking car drive towards Staveley Road. . . . Then I knew it was really something unusual.

Sixteen seconds after the explosion in Staveley Road, Chiswick, a second occurred in Epping, 18 miles north-east of Whitehall, and more than 20 miles from Chiswick, destroying some wooden huts. It attracted less attention than the Chiswick incident for no one was hurt and no real damage done, but the fragments of the missile were duly collected up and taken to Epping Police Station, where they were later inspected by some of the officials who had earlier been to Chiswick. The party, less high-powered than earlier, reached the site around 9.30 and the historian of the Chiswick incident now chronicled his second rocket of the day – though, oddly, it appears in the official records as the very first:

Incident Parndon Wood, Epping Long Lane. . . . The area was not under the alert and an enemy missile fell in a wooded part of the open country, forming a crater about 30 feet across and 16 feet in depth. Blast caused considerable damage to undergrowth and trees but there were no casualties.

Although, for reasons which will be explained shortly, no reports of what had happened at Chiswick or Epping appeared in the press or in wireless news bulletins, news of them rapidly crossed the Atlantic. Lord Cherwell was in Quebec, too far away to hear his ‘mare’s nest’ explode, but an informant in Downing Street sent him a detailed account in a style calculated to appeal to him:

I was showing a visitor out and when I got to the door the policeman and guards were saying ‘Was that thunder?’ and another said ‘It sounded like bombs’. When I got back I found Room 59 had heard two explosions, close together, one slightly fainter than the other, but both loud. . . . There is going to be criticism of Morrison and Sandys for having crowed too soon.

The explosion is usually described as giving a reddish flash and a large plume of black smoke.

Ministry of Home Security report, 24 September 1944

The immediate response of the British government to the arrival of the rocket was to keep dark about it. The ‘sealing off’ of the country for which such elaborate plans had been prepared did not take place, but internal censorship was immediately imposed. The explosions in Chiswick and Epping brought both photographers and reporters flocking to the scene, but none of the pictures taken then appeared at the time. One reporter in Staveley Road who asked if a new type of bomb was responsible was told ‘It might have been a gas main’ but he was not deceived and, as the Chief Censor, Admiral Thompson, later recorded, ‘The Press Association reporters at those places telephoned reports of the incidents within a few minutes to their Head Office, who submitted them to censorship.’

I suspected that at long last we were now having a taste of the much talked-of rocket and I accordingly instructed the censors to hold the reports and requested editors not to mention anything about the explosions pending further notice. The Minister of Home Security soon afterwards approved the action I had taken and informed me that he felt no doubt that the incidents had been caused by rockets.

On Saturday morning the authorities, with the Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee in charge, endorsed the ‘silence’ policy, as Admiral Thompson discovered:

Next day I went out to see Mr Morrison who requested me to inform editors that for the time being absolutely nothing should be published about the explosions which had undoubtedly been caused by some form of rocket shell fired from Holland; that these two explosions might well be ranging shots and that it was quite posible the enemy didn’t even know they had arrived in England, much less in any particular area. I accordingly informed Mr Will, Chairman of the N.P.E.C. [Newspaper Proprietors Emergency Council], of the request I had made to editors and soon received the reply that his Council were in entire agreement.

The no-publicity policy had one unforeseen, offbeat result: it nearly ruined a wartime wedding, as one photographer with a Fleet Street news agency learned that morning. He had agreed to act as best man for a friend, a
Daily Mirror
cameraman due to get married that Saturday at the ‘journalists’ church’ of St Bride’s, Fleet Street:

At about 9 a.m. that morning his bride-to-be telephoned me in a most agitated state as her husband-to-be, who had been on night duty at the
Mirror
, had not put in an appearance that morning as had been arranged. I telephoned the
Mirror
and they also were confused as it appeared they had sent him out to the Epping incident on Friday night and he had not returned. The next hour was spent in telephone calls to many sources . . . and it was ultimately discovered that my colleague was in an Epping police cell, having been arrested the night before for photographing the V-2 crater in the open field. . . . by some type of Reserve policeman . . . although my colleague had all the official photographic permits. . . . However, he was released and arrived at the church for his wedding with a few minutes to spare.

Already it was clear that hopes of any warning system being possible were unfounded; radar had failed to detect either missile. The only possible counter-measure was to try to stop the rockets at source and that Saturday the Vice-Chief of the Imperial Staff, another of the ‘second eleven’ left behind while the ‘top brass’ went to Canada, sent a MOST IMMEDIATE signal to the recently promoted Field Marshal Montgomery at the Tactical Headquarters of 21 Army Group:

2 rockets, so called V-2, landed in England yesterday. Will you please report most urgently by what approximate date you consider you can rope off the coastal area contained by ANTWERP-UTRECHT-ROTTERDAM. When this area is in our hands the threat from this weapon will probably have dispersed.

The Vice-Chiefs of Staff decided that weekend – they met on both Saturday and Sunday – to install new radar equipment in British-held areas of the continent. To lend point to their deliberations, rocket number 3 arrived, at 9.29 on the evening of Sunday, 10 September, at North Fambridge, near Maldon, in Essex, abut 40 miles east of London. It caused no damage or casualties, while the next two were also innocuous. The fourth rocket arrived just after 9 a.m. on Monday, 11 September, at Chelsfield, near Orpington, in Kent, 16 miles from London, causing a spectacular explosion just above the ground after the warhead had hit a tree. The fifth, half an hour later, was 25 miles away, at Magdalen Laver, near Harlow, in Essex, confirming that the missile’s accuracy left much to be desired: these first shots had been spread over an area 50 miles square. Next day the Cabinet concluded that the Germans had no means of controlling their rockets in flight or of detecting where they landed and that the policy of press silence should therefore continue.

The most serious incident so far – and the first involving an industrial target – followed, at 6.15 in the morning of Tuesday, 12 September 1944, when a rocket plunged down into the Chrysler vehicle works in Mortlake Road, Kew, a mainly residential area. Eight people were killed and 14 seriously injured and the damage to property was enormous, but, though the busy Mortlake Road, now part of the South Circular Road, ran through the very centre of the area, still the secret was kept. Thereafter the rockets went on arriving at an annoying and increasing but not, so far as the Civil Defence services were concerned, an intolerable rate. There were three more on the 12th, one on the 13th and three on the 14th, of which the first landed in the centre of Walthamstow, the start of what was to be a long series. It came down, like many of the most destructive of its successors, in the early morning – in fact at 4.55 a.m. – causing the largest crater so far, 50 feet across and 10 feet deep, and demolishing, or leaving fit only for demolition, 13 houses within a 100 feet radius of the point of impact, and badly damaging another 39 up to 250 feet away. Luckily only one side of the road was built up at this point, but even so 6 people were killed outright, one of the 10 badly hurt died later, and another 54 had lesser injuries.

The rocket at Farnan Avenue caused much ill-feeling in north-east London, where the lack of warning – for which the government was not to blame – and the conspiracy of silence about the rocket danger – for which it was responsible – were blamed for the loss of life and other suffering. The Civil Defence controller for Walthamstow, a local alderman, was scathing about the official policy in the wartime history which the borough published a year later:

At the end of August . . . Mr Duncan Sandys . . . fatuously and prematurely announced ‘the Battle of London is over’
¹³
. . . . The next government pronouncement was to the effect that the second Battle of London was ‘won but not over’. What exactly this meant in English it was difficult to decide, but, as the speaker was Mr Willink, the Minister of Health – responsible for evacuation – it had the to-beexpected but lamentable result of causing thousands of evacuees to come back to London. It also unfortunately inclined people to abandon the habit of sleeping in shelters. . . . I drew the attention of the Regional Commissioner to this when he visited us. I suggested that the policy of secrecy on the one hand, and the fatuous optimism of government speakers on the other, ought to be debited with these six deaths.

Walthamstow, a robustly independent, mainly working-class area, was not at all impressed by the arguments in favour of secrecy:

From the beginning . . . local authorities were variously advised by London Region to announce to their citizens that the explosions were those of gas mains, ammunition wagons or delayed action bombs. This, of course, was absurd and one of our own people dealt with the situation very adequately when, looking at a 50-foot crater in Farnan Avenue, he said solemnly to the Regional Commissioner, who had enquired the time of the incident: ‘The Delayed Action Bomb fell at 04.55 hours, sir’.

The rocket bombardment once again put the families of many servicemen in greater danger than their menfolk, and exposed those who did have a dangerous job to new risks while on leave. On the day before Walthamstow had its first brush with the V-2s, and with the government, one young radar operator had arrived home in Farnan Avenue while his ship, HMS
Leeds
, was in dock for boiler-cleaning:

I walked to the shops with my mother and spoke to many of her neighbours who were about their various cleaning activities on our street. The topic of conversation seemed to be the mysterious explosions that had occurred in the London area . . . and there was talk about the official explanation, which was reported as gas explosions.

This scepticism was now to be vindicated:

I woke in the early hours of the next morning to a terrific explosion, which I imagined as my boat being torpedoed. I saw a large hole and imagined this to be a gap in the ship’s side. It was only when I realized I was in bed, I remembered I was at home. I . . . attempted to go to sleep again when my parents insisted I should get up because the road was on fire. I quickly dressed and walked between the ruins of the houses adjacent to my own home. There were large piles of rubble by the side of the road and the gas main was burning furiously. Water was cascading down the footway from broken water mains. I was one of the first in the road and there were a number of cries from the debris. I was joined by one other person and . . . we uncovered the head and shoulders of a young man who said he was a New Zealander training with the Royal Navy in the North-East Polytechnic, which was situated nearby. We were unable to remove him . . . as a slate penetrated his side between his ribs. . . . At this point the rescue team arrived and we left him to them. I next recall seeing an elderly man still in his bed on the remains of an upper floor in a room with only one wall standing. As we went to reach him, he cried out that there were younger members of his family in the wreckage. . . . He asked if we would rescue them first. We were able to trace their position by their cries and clear the way to a mother and daughter who were together in bed and trapped by heavy timbers across their legs. I recall that this young girl, who was in the ATS, explained that her army skirt was underneath the mattress and was therefore being very adequately pressed! . . . We joked about the situation in which they found themselves, trapped in bed, with a body of men trying to release them. . . . I recall one woman being dead in the branches of a tree, her chow dog being dead at the base of it. . . . I did not return to my own home till about 4 p.m.

Even men in Ack-Ack units, who had been the first to learn about the flying bombs, had no knowledge of this new danger. One Bofors gunner, on leave in Croydon from the Kent coast, was astounded by the discovery:

I had previously written to an aunt saying how glad I was she was at last having peace and quiet and she wrote back and said ‘I like your idea of peace and quiet. Things are popping off all over the place!’ I took this to mean she was still being troubled by flying-bombs. . . . My wife said nothing to me about rockets, probably because she didn’t want to spoil my leave and didn’t wish to worry me. Next day, however, I was chatting to my neighbour over the garden fence and he said:

‘What do you think about the rockets?’

‘Rockets?’ I said. ‘What rockets?’

‘Didn’t you know?’ he said. ‘Haven’t you been told?’

I was speechless. At that very moment there was an almighty explosion and slowly a huge column of black smoke rose in the sky in the direction of Catford.

‘There you are,’ he said. ‘That’s one!’

I was flabbergasted and very worried. . . . All that effort and suffering on the gun sites for nothing. No wonder they hadn’t told us troops. It would have shattered our morale.

Kammler’s twelfth rocket landed three hours after the one in Walthamstow, in Dairsie Road, Woolwich, with very similar results, followed by a harmless ‘airburst’ – of the kind that had earlier so much troubled Dornberger – over Rotherfield in Sussex at lunchtime, and the fourteenth met a watery grave in a filter bed of the Metropolitan Water Board works at Sunbury, at 4 a.m. on Friday, 15 September. This was the point at which the Ministry of Home Security undertook its first stocktaking, in a report circulated ten days later:

Out of the 14 projectiles reported crossing the coast, 8 fell in London Region. This is a slightly higher ratio than was obtained in the early days of FLY attack. The mean aiming error so far, however, appears to be larger. . . . A curious feature of the distribution so far obtained is that, of the incidents outside the London Region, all were very close to the correct line or to the correct range for London. The beaten zone [i.e. the area affected by V-2s] is thus approximately in the shape of a cross, as if . . . it were possible to control either line or range but not both.

The early assumption that, because it plunged deeper into the earth, the rocket would be less destructive than the flying-bomb was not borne out by this larger sample. The four rockets in residential areas had destroyed all houses within an 85 foot radius, compared to 72 feet for the V-1, had made others uninhabitable up to 108 feet, compared to 102, and caused serious damage up to 181 feet, against the V-1’s 172. The death rate per missile for the first week of the attack was identical, at 2.7 for each V-1 or V-2, though this figure had dropped to 2.1 for the V-1 ‘as evacuation took effect and more people took shelter’. The V-1 had, however, seriously injured slightly more people per incident than the V-2 – 9.1 against 8.5 – but on crater size the rocket was an easy winner, the average being ‘34½ ft diameter by 9½ ft deep, the maximum being 50 ft by 10ft‘ compared to ’an average crater size of 17 ft by 4 ft for FLY’.