Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s (32 page)

A member of the staff of the
Ilford Guardian
happened by pure chance to be on the spot:

I was walking along the High Road when suddenly the air became filled with flying glass and dust. Masonry fell from the tops of the shops and two people a few yards in front of me were hit and fell moaning to the ground. The shopping centre resembled a battlefield, for people were stretched on the pavements and a number of shop assistants came running out with their faces streaming with blood. . . . I raced round to the Super Cinema and found a tragic scene of destruction. The NFS workshop had been demolished, cars were burning outside a garage, a trolley bus standing near the theatre had its windows smashed, the road was littered with rubble and the roof of the cinema had caved in. . . . The manager, who had been blown full length across the vestibule, had blood trickling down his face. He seemed totally unconscious of his own injuries and was only concerned with the fate of two of the usherettes who were buried in the main hall. They were found dead in their uniforms.

Twelve days later, on Tuesday, 20 February 1945, again at lunchtime, came what was remembered as the ‘Ilford Ltd rocket’, for it fell behind the factory, smashing the boiler house, so that, as the
Ilford
Guardian later reported, ‘steam hissed across the road for some minutes, while debris from the houses’ – over twenty were wrecked – ‘piled up to add to the confusion’. Unusually, owing to some misunderstanding, ‘the call for assistance was sent in a little late’, and one Civil Defence member, whose office happened to be near by, was very conscious of what followed:

Several army ambulances were quickly on the spot and rendered some very valuable assistance, but there was not enough accommodation for the many casualties who required immediate removal to hospital. A Post Office van driver offered assistance and I used his van to send to hospital a small child, who was bleeding profusely from head and face wounds. I asked the mother to hold the child tightly to her breast in order that any vibration of the moving child would not unnecessarily aggravate the injuries. . . .

Women suffering from ghastly and bloody wounds were sitting or lying about the pavements and in front gardens, some receiving treatment and others waiting. It seemed ages waiting for our own services to arrive. . . . The rescue squad and ambulances did in fact arrive in about 25 minutes, but a delay . . . on these occasions appears to be unending.

As often happened in ‘industrial’ incidents, there were some unforeseen consequences. One woman living nearby, whose father was ‘blown across the room . . . severely shocked and . . . died six weeks later’, learned how at the same instant an Ilford Ltd employee had been crippled, for he was ‘crossing the laboratory with a large bottle of ammonia’ and ‘had his fingers blown off as the bottle exploded’. He was one of 94 people injured in the incident; another 7 were killed.

By now even the dead could not rest in peace, for the occasion was marked by a gruesome accident, as the explosion damaged a house from which a funeral was taking place. According to current rumour, the coffin was blown into the road but the proceedings went ahead, although the mourners not merely suffered ‘a terrible shake-up’, as one man on the spot commented, but ‘afterwards had to return to a badly damaged house’.

This third explosion in the vicinity of Ilford Broadway finally completed the destruction of the battered Hippodrome, inside which the electrician quoted earlier had been at work, helping to connect up a cable serving a crane employed on demolition work. It also brought him his own narrowest escape:

Suddenly a bright bluish light illuminated the sky. Before I could duck or crouch, I was thrown backwards against the doors and was surrounded by a rushing, roaring sound. The doors checked my fall and I was still on my feet . . . facing an ironmonger’s . . . outside of which was a three-foot-high pile of galvanized buckets and a couple of dustbins. The buckets took off and went sailing in the air in all directions and the dustbins flew across the road among the passing traffic and the plate-glass window of the shop disintegrated into fragments. Several of the boarded-up theatre doors crashed inwards behind me. . . . The sky to my left had darkened and . . . the whole sky was blackened by a sheet of flame, blending into a huge black cloud of smoke and debris in which I could plainly see great chunks of wood and pipes twisting around. . . . I now threw myself . . . into the protection of the entrance corner wall . . . as lumps of debris rained onto the road and the sound gradually subsided.

His next step was to search for his workmate, whom he found in rubble-strewn darkness, hesitating to feel his way to safety along the wall for fear of brushing against ‘live’ terminals. But, with the help of a cigarette lighter and a policeman sent to look for them, both men eventually got out unscathed and another dinner hour in Ilford resumed its now all too familiar course:

We cleared our pushbikes of odd debris, said ‘Cheerio!’ and went outside to great activity as Civil Defence personnel and vehicles hurried by and policeman redirected traffic and pedestrians away from the roped-off area. We then went home to lunch and returned to work at two o’clock glad to be alive.

By the time Ilford’s last rocket had landed, on Tuesday, 27 March, the town had reported 465 serious casualties, a total second only to Deptford’s; of these 117 were dead, 349 badly injured. Undoubtedly the constant bombardment was too much for some people. ‘Morale’, believed the Civil Defence official quoted earlier, ‘was at a very low ebb and many people, temporarily, completely lost their nerves’ when the second V-2 within twenty-four hours landed in the same district, Uphall Road. But, fearful though they might be, the public carried on with their daily round, and there seems no reason to doubt the verdict of the
Ilford Guardian
, when it could at last tell the grimmest story in the borough’s history, just before the end of the war:

Looking back one wonders how Ilfordians managed to carry on so splendidly, knowing that any moment might be their last. Certainly the shopping centre round Ilford Broadway did become slightly less crowded than usual, but on the whole housewives and workers alike made no break in their usual routine throughout the five months of constant tension.

It can be stated that Walthamstow had more than its share of V-2s.

Civil Defence controller for Walthamstow, 1945

‘The air was crystal clear, electric . . . and we hunched our shoulders and tensed our muscles in anticipation of the next rocket.’ That is how a then fifteen-year-old schoolboy, living in Dagenham, remembers one moment in the long winter of 1944-45, while he stood on Becontree Station after three or four V-2s had landed within earshot within a few minutes. For if Ilford was like an exposed salient during the rocket offensive the area around and behind it also formed a distinctly unhealthy sector. The eleven boroughs which belonged to Group 7 of the London Civil Defence Region and made up the north-east corner of London and its immediate suburbs were hit by 199 V-2s all told, far more than any other group, and their casualty figures – 645 dead, 1441 seriously injured – were thirty times as high as the least-affected group in the region. Ilford’s 35 rockets put it well ahead of other places in terms of incidents, but in the number of dead West Ham did even worse, for its 27 V-2s killed 215 people, though its total of seriously injured, 205, was smaller than Ilford’s. Third in the group, with 21 rockets, came Barking, which lost 23 citizens dead and had 172 other serious casualties, and it was followed by Dagenham, which was also very close to the ‘one death per rocket’ formula, with its 19 V-2s, 18 fatal and 127 other serious casualties. Eighteen rockets hit Walthamstow (of which more will be said later) and 15 Waltham Holy Cross, whose low death rate – 7 dead, with 21 badly hurt – reflected the low density of population in this outer suburb. The socially and geographically ‘mixed’ area of Wanstead and Woodford, with 14 rockets, lost 51 dead and 77 hurt; East Ham, with 14 V-2s, had a somewhat similar toll to report: 50 dead and 124 other major casualties. Chigwell, with 13 V-2s, was lucky to escape with 1 person dead and 9 badly injured. Leyton, with 12 V-2s, did far worse: 67 killed and 162 injured. Chingford, with only one fewer rocket, 11, suffered far fewer casualties: 10 dead and 46 others.

Nowhere in north-east London that winter was out of earshot of a rocket for long, and to the schoolboy living in Dagenham previously quoted the rocket’s ubiquitous character appeared almost to violate a law of nature:

The V-2s seemed to be more random in distribution, to scatter over a much wider area than the V-1s. Ilford seemed to get particularly clobbered for some reason. This seemed to conflict with the vaguely apprehended World War II convention that indiscriminate destruction should mainly be confined to the shabby areas like Plaistow or Canning Town or the docks. A better class of person generally lived in Ilford or Epping. Even Pitsea in Essex, where my father’s sister lived in a bungalow, was hit. My aunt had a favoured neighbour . . . who was definitely middle class with a nice bungalow with accoutrements which I recognized as belonging to somebody a bit classier than us. Her manners showed breeding too. One night her bungalow received a direct hit from a V-2 and she was killed. Just a big hole where all this order and decency had formerly lived.

Clearly cursed with an overactive imagination, this boy found the presence of danger frightening rather than stimulating:

I tried to imagine what it would be like to be hit directly by several tons of rocket travelling above the speed of sound, but I gave up. It all seemed a bit esoteric when set against the humble background of life in Dagenham. . . . Life went on as usual. There was no point in taking shelter. . . . Everything was so normal. One’s scruffy back garden, lessons on the top floor of the South-East Essex Tech., morning assembly, trips on one’s bicycle, National dried egg, scrambled, or fried tomatoes for breakfast. The only difference was you knew that at any minute without warning
you
might explode . . . all over your familiar mantelshelf, or the classroom or the street you were walking to work.

The ending of the blackout added to the unreality ot the whole experience:

An eerie feature of the last phase of the attacks in 1945 was that street lights were once again on in London. I remember walking along a street in East Ham on a visit to my future stepmother’s house, seeing these lamps on for the first time since 1939 with all their suggestion of peace and the war coming to an end and being more than ever conscious of the fact that at any moment I could still get bumped off by a rocket. It’s a bit poignant to have survived through all sorts of . . . lethal high drama and then get pipped on the post.

This boy was also troubled by a V-2 which landed on a church in a neighbouring borough, St George’s, Barking, in midservice:

I speculated on the theological significance of this event. Were the congregation perhaps less in touch with God than I had been at moments of crisis? It seemed a pretty abrupt sort of answer to public prayer, anyway.

Dagenham, a long, roughly axe-shaped borough, with its narrow shaft running alongside Ilford and its blade on that great sounding-board, the Thames, heard many more V-2s than landed within its borders. The roof spotters on the great riverside Ford factory which dominated the borough ‘heard and recorded 579 rockets’, according to its wartime history, though Ford’s itself, as during the flying-bombs, continued to lead a charmed life:

Although seven crashed in the neighbourhood of the factory none . . . actually hit it, the nearest falling in the river some thirty yards south of the jetty on 15 March 1945. Though muffled by the water, the force of the explosion broke most of the windows in the General Office building. . . . On three occasions the blast from the explosion of . . . rockets which had narrowly missed the factory covered the boiler-room with a blanket of coal dust, so that the operators at work scanning the charts appeared like performers in an old-fashioned nigger minstrel band.

To the west of Barking, merging with the ‘East End’ proper, lay East Ham and West Ham, in both of which the V-2s constantly intruded into daily life. The Chief Superintendent for ‘K’ Division of the Metropolitan Police, which embraced these and some adjoining boroughs, speedily discovered that Kammler was no respecter of ‘the Met.’ Within a single week, around the end of January, one constable was killed while on duty at Upton Park, Plaistow, in West Ham, 80 bachelor police officers were bombed out of their section house behind East Ham police station, and West Ham police station was damaged – as his own house in Ilford had been – while almost every day he found himself visiting new incidents, many of them industrial, as will be described later.

Another guardian of public decency, of a different kind, the vicar of St George and St Ethelbert, East Ham, also found his activities constantly disrupted, as his wife has recalled:

One night a V-2 fell in Lonsdale Avenue. My husband immediately went into the house [from the Anderson where they were sleeping] for his overcoat so that he could go to the scene of the disaster, only to find our doors jammed and he had to climb over fences and walls to reach the road. Arriving on the scene, he found only an elderly lady whom he helped to rescue. Another time a V-2 fell in Haldane Road, which was near his church. . . . When daylight came, we saw a magnolia tree in bloom . . . still standing amid the devastation. . . . The next day, Sunday, my husband had to officiate at a wedding. . . . The west window of the church was smashed; the choirboys had cleared some of the broken glass, but the bride had to pick her way up the aisle among the splinters. . . . On the following Friday . . . the rocket burst on the roof of our house.
¹⁹
. . . We had all the windows blown out and no windows for many months. . . . The snow lay deep on the ground. The chairs were also damaged by shrapnel. Part of the rocket was hanging over the bed where our daughter was asleep. I remember pulling [it] away with a sense of trepidation. . . . The day following, we were holding a party for children and we tripped over pieces of the rocket that had fallen the previous night.

To the north of West Ham was Leyton, which suffered from two ‘outstanding’ incidents, one just before midnight on 16 February 1945 when 25 people were killed and 10 badly injured in Crownfield Road, and a month later, at 6.38 in the morning of 16 March, when 23 more Leytonians lost their lives in Albert Road, and 18 were badly hurt. The V-2s had a dismal effect upon morale, here as elsewhere, as one woman travelling each day from Woodford Green to work as a ledger clerk at a bank in Leyton High Road while her husband was serving in France, observed. ‘We public were mostly feeling rather depressed and thinking how much longer were we going to live in the tension and fear.’ Still plagued by V-1s as well as rockets, the staff took what precautions they could. ‘Some days we worked in the safe, but were afraid it would jam, so mostly worked at desks. I had frosted glass facing me but had to sit there.’ As an ex-nurse, however, she did take the precaution of providing a first-aid box at her own expense, a prudent precaution as it turned out, for at the end of October the bank was damaged by a rocket in Leyspring Road, about 400 yards away, which killed 6 people and seriously injured another 30, among them the manager of the branch, while the lesser casualties, numbering 118, included herself,
²⁰
the glass surrounding them proving as dangerous as she had feared.

A then thirteen-year-old girl attending Chingford County High School, previoiusly quoted, who lived in Waltham Abbey, remembers what happened after their house was badly damaged on 15 January 1945, luckily while she and her sister were sleeping downstairs:

I was blown partly out of bed and hit my head on the door, but not badly. Molly and I got up and went to the Morrison and soon we were asked to look after neighbours’ children; some had been shocked by being trapped in bedrooms when doors jammed with the blast. About eight children joined us, reading comics, sipping soup, drinking tea, all in our Morrison; the following night they all wanted to come back.

No one in the area needed to be told the reason when suddenly called home. One steam-train fireman, ‘working’ the route between Liverpool Street and Chingford, ‘guessed what that meant’ when a relief fireman was waiting to take over from him in mid-shift, at Wood Street Station, Walthamstow. ‘When I arrived home [in Gordon Road, Wanstead] . . . all that was left of my house was the front wall.’

Nowhere in this part of London were the rockets more resented than in Walthamstow, a largely working-class borough which perhaps felt that it had done its fair share of ‘taking it’, if not rather more. Its population of 131,000 was almost exactly the same as Ilford’s, but packed into a much smaller area, and its comparatively heavy casualty list was due to the steady drain of average-sized incidents rather than to any major catastrophe. Walthamstow’s disagreement with the original ‘no publicity’ policy has already been mentioned, but the existence of the V-2s was difficult to keep dark and people protected themselves as best they could. The borough’s mortuary at the Queen’s Road Cemetery proved adequate for all the demands made upon it; the reserve premises, in the car park of Walthamstow Stadium, never had to be opened.

Every one of Walthamstow’s ten ARP districts, however, had to cope with at least one rocket and, like Ilford’s, Walthamstow’s rockets were spread out in time as well as space. After the first, on 14 September in Farnan Avenue, already mentioned, they arrived at frequent intervals, so that life never felt really secure. In November a rocket landed on a Sunday beside allotments, but luckily most of those ‘digging for victory’ had gone home for lunch. Later that month, another V-2 hit a road on the edge of Waltham Forest, causing some casualties but missed, as the ARP controller recorded, ‘the schoolchildren and others returning home to dinner’. At times the missiles seemed to show a malign intelligence in seeking out their victims. One ‘fell in one of the few parts of the Marshes where it could cause damage . . . at the foot of the bank of the Warwick Reservoir . . . and managed to demolish a boathouse’ occupied by a watchman, who was fatally injured. And so it went on, a few missiles landing harmlessly in the adjoining Forest or River Lea Marshes, but most taking their toll of three or four dead and another twenty or so badly injured. To the ARP controller, Alderman Ross Wyld, the ‘type of case in which casual travellers were killed always seemed particularly hard luck’, such as one where, ‘in an area surrounded by Forest . . . the driver of a lorry from Yarmouth and . . . a soldier from Birmingham who was driving an army lorry’ were among the victims. To local residents the deaths of servicemen while on leave also seemed exceptionally hard to hear, like this one recorded by Alderman Wyld:

At teatime on a Tuesday in March . . . ‘E’ District received its first rocket, which fell at the junction of College Road and Grove Road. . . . The crater completely blocked the road and . . . 17 houses were wiped out. Included in the killed was a soldier who had called round to one of the houses to say goodbye to some friends before returning to his unit. . . . An RAF man returning home on leave . . . knew nothing of the death of his wife until he actually arrived at the incident where we were still searching for the body.

Among the memories of one man then aged eleven is the sight of ‘thousands of blue salt packets’ scattered around the junction of Woodford Road and Forest Road after a V-2 had caught a Smith’s Crisps delivery lorry, the ‘salt in the bag’ being then almost the company’s trademark. An outstanding recollection of the Civil Defence workers involved was that of a dog which dashed in excitement out of a wrecked house and promptly fell into the crater. ‘He was found alive and unhurt at the bottom . . . out of which he was unable to climb owing to the steepness of the sides’ and was ‘duly retrieved by NFS ladder’.