Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s (27 page)

After the watch-night service at St Paul’s, I felt the familiar vibration of a rocket bomb and could swear that during the pealing of the bells I also heard an explosion. Then Big Ben struck midnight and we heard ‘Auld Lang Syne’ sung by wounded servicemen, nurses and doctors, accompanied by the Band of the Welsh Guards, at the Royal Herbert Hospital, Woolwich.

A few hours later she learned that her ears had not deceived her:

A disastrous New Year for our old friend Miss G. of Crouch Hill! She sits today shivering in the kitchen, with all the windows in her house blasted, for the second time. . . . The top floor of her house is uninhabitable. It has been freezing all day. . . . So we begin the New Year.

It was a miserable New Year’s Eve for the Foreign Minister of the Polish government-in-exile, awaiting the liberation of his country. In his diary diplomatic discretion could be forgotten:

The end of the war is not yet in sight. In autumn it seemed near and it is all the more depressing that the struggle continues, with more slaughter than before. . . . A gloom has descended on the allied camp.

For Kammler’s men it had been a busy evening. After the successful launching of the missile which killed 15 people in Crouch Hill they fired two more A-4s ‘to wish Londoners a happy New Year’, but one failed to achieve lift-off and the other, having staggered into the air, came down on a nearby German barracks. One Dutchman living in the area, on learning what had happened, opened one of his hoarded bottles of gin to drink at midnight to more such ‘successes’. It was a toast which, as 1945 began, millions of people in southern England would have echoed.

The V-2 has become far more alarming than the V-1, quite contrary to what I thought at first.

Chelsea resident in his diary, 3 January 1945

In the summer of 1944 the belief had been widely held that nothing could be worse than the flying bomb. The rocket proved it wrong. Debating which of these two achievements of German technology was the more unpleasant provided one of the few recreations of the winter and even, in December 1944, occupied George Orwell in
Tribune:

People are complaining of the sudden unexpected wallop with which these things go off. ‘It wouldn’t be so bad if you got a bit of warning,’ is the usual formula. There is even a tendency to talk nostalgically of the days of the V-1. ‘The good old doodlebug did at least give you time to get under the table,’
etc.
Whereas, in fact, when the doodlebugs were actually dropping, the usual subject of complaint was the uncomfortable waiting period before they went off. Some people are never satisfied.

The question is one that still interests those who lived through both menaces. What might be called the pro-V-1 case was put by a man then living and working in Woolwich, with close personal experience of the effects of both weapons:

Personally I found that the evil you could not see far less trying than the evil you could see coming towards you. . . . With the rocket there was simply nothing that you could do, but with the doodles there was plenty of time to watch its approach and to wonder if all that could be done was done. . . . There was nothing for it but the basic philosophy of the soldier in the First World War . . ... ‘If you don’t hear the bang and are not alive then you can’t worry’, which was the only way to regard something that was utterly beyond your control.

A Chiswick woman, whose house was damaged by the very first rocket, shared this attitude. ‘There wasn’t that moment of fear before they landed,’ she recalls. A Streatham resident regarded the V-2 as belonging to the same category as a thunderbolt. ‘By the time it had arrived,’ she reflected, ‘you were either dead or it had missed.’ A third woman, living at Abridge near Epping, put the same point more succinctly: ‘No buildup. Just bang or oblivion.’ Technically minded males – the technically minded female was a rare being in 1944 – were sometimes so lost in awe of what one calls the ‘tremendous technical mastery’ demonstrated by the Germans that they almost overlooked the associated danger. ‘One felt one was moving into a strange new age with these things rising 130-140 miles up above the earth,’ recalls a then agricultural scientist living in central London. To him their arrival brought back memories of his childhood in a quarrying area of Wales, with ‘the crack of the blast followed by the rumble of the falling rock face’.

But these were minority views. Most people would have agreed with the conclusion reached by Gwladys Cox in West Hampstead as early as mid-September:

The rockets, if less frequent, are a worse affliction than the flying bombs, as their entirely silent approach cannot be heralded by sirens and clear weather does not deter them. Travelling faster than sound, they are well-nigh impossible to stop.

Four months later James Lees-Milne in Chelsea was expressing similar sentiments:

The V-2 has become far more alarming than the V-1, quite contrary to what I thought at first, because it gives no warning sound. One finds oneself waiting for it and jumps out of one’s skin at the slightest bang or unexpected noise, like a car backfire or even a door slam.

A weapons-design draughtsman, living in Mottingham, reached the same conclusion, even though the family home, in Lee, had been wrecked by a flying bomb:

The V-2s were far more frightening than the V-1s. . . . One didn’t know what was happening until it had happened; and so life became a 24-hour-per-24-hour stint of realizing that ‘It can happen now, this instant; but since it hasn’t, perhaps it will when we’ve counted twenty, but it didn’t so let’s forget it. . . .’ And then it happens a mile away and you start all over again. After a while you think you’ve forgotten it, but in fact you’re subconsciously waiting for it all the time.

A fifteen-year-old schoolboy in Dagenham decided that ‘after the takeover by the V-2s’ the flying bombs ‘seemed almost like old friends’, and made an interesting comparison, based on his cinema-going:

If the V-1s were like the ‘great Big Saw’ always drawing nearer to the heroine in Saturday morning matinees, the V-2s were a bit like being under sniper fire for six months at a stretch. . . . The V-1s were old-fashioned melodrama, the V-2s were a threatening horror from outer space, abstract, unreal.

A then ten-year-old boy, living in Crayford, Kent, also chooses a metaphor appropriate to his age-group at that time:

The poor old doodlebugs . . . were somehow familiar. One could watch them chugging comfortably along. The difference was the same one feels about ‘good old steam engines’ and the anonymous new modern locomotives, streamlined and unfamiliar.

A woman living in Leigh-on-Sea on the Essex coast considered, like many other people, that the V-1s had been almost ‘sporting’ in contrast to their successors, ‘a far more insidious and dirty weapon . . . you had no chance of avoiding’. It was this, and the fact that there was evidently no defence of any kind against the rockets, that was so unnerving, as is explained by a woman who was then a nineteen-year-old in Walthamstow:

When going about your daily chores you were rocked out of your skin by the sound of these explosions just coming from nowhere. . . . These really did shake our morale and . . . had they continued . . . a large proportion of the population would have lost their sang-froid.

A then ARP instructor in the City of London acknowledges the difference between one’s superficial calm and inner fear:

We were often in bed when we would hear this ominous rumbling and the windows would rattle.My wife or I would say something like ‘Oh dear! There is another of those things.’ [But] if they had gone on a little longer I expect I should have been a casualty . . . or taken to the madhouse, because they were really getting me down and I was nearly reaching the state of surrendering, Churchill or no Churchill.

This was a more widespread reaction than was ever admitted. Dedication to the Prime Minister in the solidly Labour areas which had borne the brunt of every German bombardment had never been quite as solid as the newsreels like to suggest, and public confidence in its leaders reached a new low point that winter. One man then working on war damage repair in the Lambeth and Brixton areas remembers seeing ‘women praying in the street for them to stop the war’, something he had never observed at the height of the blitz or the buzz-bombs. Even hardened servicemen found the new danger hard to bear. One sailor, whose home was in Ilford, experienced ‘a feeling of utter helplessness in the face of this new form of attack’ – even before his own house was damaged by it. This was the reaction, too, of a ‘regular’ artillery officer, in Chiswick when the first V-2 arrived, aware of the success his battery had had against the flying bombs. ‘To say he was frightened was an understatement,’ recalls a woman then living in Lee Green of the response of her husband, newly back from the Middle East, after a rocket had brought down the kitchen plaster on the gooseberry pies she was making. ‘He admitted that Rommel’s guns and army . . . hadn’t scared him so much.’

Horror of the V-2s affected all ages. One man, already an adult in 1944 and now looking back in his sixties, regards the rocket months, when he was living in Carshalton and working in Southwark, as ‘the most nightmarish part of [my] life. . . . I’m sure many of my age-group will agree that these silent monsters were the most frightful weapon of all.’ Even a V-2 seen in a museum after the war he found ‘absolutely terrifying’ and, he believes, if the Germans had possessed it in 1939 the war would have ended as soon as it had begun, for ‘the public would have demanded a cessation of hostilities’. A then thirteen-year-old, living in Waltham Abbey – then part of the borough of Waltham Holy Cross – and attending school in Chingford, sees in retrospect that this was the moment when he grew up in his attitude to war:

Until the V-2s came it was all rather fun and just part of everyday life. . . . The V-2s were the first thing in the war to frighten me despite going through the blitz and the buzz-bombs. For the first time I really felt the Germans were not playing fair.

The flying bombs had prompted many jokes and attracted nicknames. Apart from the derisory ‘flying gas main’, aimed at the government rather than the enemy, of the early days, no nicknames are on record for the rocket, and only one joke, reported from Woodford and supposedly based on the doostep conversation of two Cockney-type housewives. ‘Just fancy, you might be blasted into maternity at any minute,’ one has remarked to the other, who responds: ‘Yus. And you’ll never know who done it.’

The official renaming of the pilotless aircraft as the flying bomb and its unofficial renaming as the doodlebug had helped to defuse some of the V-1’s terrors, as had the growing public familiarity with its appearance and effects. The rocket, by contrast, seemed all the more horrific the more one learned about it. The government, from the moment its existence was officially admitted, had done its best to remove the veil of secrecy surrounding this new weapon. As has been seen, a reasonably accurate account of its main features had appeared in the press along with Churchill’s statement of 10 November 1944, and a few days later the first ‘artist’s impression’ was published, followed by a remarkably accurate drawing of a launching site in the
Illustrated London News
, which reached a much wider audience when reproduced in the Daily Express on 4 December. On Saturday, 9 December, the newspapers carried cut-away drawings showing how the rocket was constructed under such captions as ‘The V-2 gives up its secrets’, the fruits of earlier research by Air Intelligence and of the ‘scavenging’ expeditions of RAF officers at the sites of the first incidents. The twentieth rocket, which had broken up in the air into a few large fragments, scattered among the trees at Dagnan Park, Noak Hill, Romford, had proved particularly useful, but eventually the British experts had more than enough pieces for their ‘jigsaws’ and the amount of scrap left behind by many V-2s became an embarrassment. One man remembers how, even after several loads had been removed, portions of rocket casing and mechanism still littered the area surrounding his firm’s head office at Danbury, near Chelmsford, and in the most rocket-plagued areas even schoolboy collectors eventually had their fill of souvenirs. ‘Remains of V-2s were easy to come by,’ remembers a then seventeen-year-old engineering apprentice in Essex, ‘fairly large pieces of engine and exhaust nozzles and glass wool being found round the bombed site,’ and often the combustion chamber lay around for weeks, being too heavy for removal by bicycle. (The tail fins, or perhaps the whole rocket, seen sticking up in the mud off Shoeburyness, visible only at low tide, defeated even the most ardent souvenir hunters.)

To oberve the signs of a rocket taking off was not, especially for those professionally concerned with counter-measures against the missile, an uncommon experience. A pilot based at RAF Newchurch on the Kent coast found it ‘very frustrating’, when sent against suspected launching sites in Holland to arrive just ‘in time to see these large rockets climbing up and away from us, leaving long trails of white smoke against the dawn sky’. A gunner stationed at Maidstone watched another V-2 ‘like a golden thread climbing high into the sky’ in the distance over Holland, ‘the exhaust trail lit by the early sun’. A wartime soldier, stationed in the Welsh mountains, saw a speck of light far to the east, around Christmas 1944, very different from the star appropriate to the season, for ‘it looped up, reached its zenith and plunged down – a V-2 falling on London’. A soldier serving near the Rhine in the closing stages of the war was intrigued to see ‘many miles in the distance a rocket . . . rising . . . a straight white trail in the sky, which on dispersing became a zigzag line. I remember thinking that it might land on my home’ – though it was more probably aimed at Antwerp.

On a clear day or night a rocket’s trail might be briefly glimpsed from a hundred miles away or more – indeed, the government’s original, and abortive, plans for a warning system had relied on such visual identification. In the event, the Royal Observer Corps plotted many such sightings, though to no purpose, by linking the reports from various posts. One ROC member stationed at Cranleigh remembers spending many hours that winter gazing in the direction of Holland for this reason and another Observer, stationed at Rainham in Kent, now realizes that the ‘spiralling vortex trails’ he could see on exceptionally bright moonlight nights before the attack began must have been V-2 test flights over the Baltic. Even ordinary civilians sometimes shared such experiences. A seventeen-year-old apprentice, walking across Mitcham Common on his way to work, found himself studying ‘silhouetted against the dawn glow the gilden stream of a vapour trail rising from below the horizon . . . to the stratosphere’, and the wide reaches of the Thames also favoured such observation, as a man working in the heavy-gun shop at Woolwich Arsenal discovered:

It was not strictly true to say that the rockets were undetectable, for if one was looking down river at the right time it was possible to see what appeared to be a shooting star climb upwards and you knew that in Robb Wilton’s classic phrase ‘I’ve only got three minutes’. Also at the point of re-entry into the atmosphere if the sky happened to be clear it was possible to see a vapour trail, but most of those claimed . . . were left by high-flying aircraft.