Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s (35 page)

I arrived at South Norwood about 11 a.m. . . . The road was blocked and guarded by police and troops and at first they barred my way but I soon explained that I lived there. . . . My house was totally demolished. I was dazed and saw no one I knew to find out anything as to what had happened. There was . . . a senior ‘brass hat’ with a red band standing in the road near my place, and there was I saluting him, with all this on my mind. Shortly afterwards I espied a little girl, about five years old, who had lived next door and she informed me that my wife and child had survived and had been taken to a place of shelter at a local church, although she did not know which one. I later found this was a church in Suffolk Road, South Norwood, and so I hurried there . . . but I could not see my family.A steward told me they had been taken to Croydon Hospital, probably the Mayday Hospital, so I hurried there, but they had no knowledge of my wife or child. They suggested I try the Croydon General, so I went there and, to my relief, found my wife and son . . . bandaged round his head. My wife had a bad cut down her leg and a cut on the head. We were brought out by ambulance and proceeded to my wife’s parents at Penge, pending making arrangements where to go.

By Croydon’s next V-2, on 29 December, the public were at least allowed to know how their homes were being devastated. This, in the words of the local historian quoted earlier, ‘demolished a ‘pretty, small house . . . in an enclave in the chalk cliffs on the north side of Croham Valley Road’, a ‘secluded and apparently protected spot’, but all the occupants were killed. Croydon’s third V-2, on the night of 5 January 1945, infuriated local golfers, introducing a new and unwelcome hazard to Addington Golf Course, as a Civil Defence worker on duty that night remembers:

The secretary of the golf club rang to say that some sheep were running loose across some of his grass and added, almost as an afterthought, that his windows were broken too. There had been some people out on the course and we went looking for them. . . . The shepherd was lost and so far we hadn’t found the crater. When we did, it was forty feet across and very deep. Happily no one was seriously hurst, although the shepherd had been taken to hospital with a suspected broken arm.

Croydon’s last rocket, on 26 January 1945, fell harmlessly on open ground in a park. It was only its fourth but they had seemed far, far more numerous; indeed, a then seventeen-year-old schoolboy, who kept a detailed diary of all the explosions he heard, recorded 204 between 12 September 1944 and 27 March 1945.

East during the V-2 period meant increased danger, and the south-eastern suburbs of Group 8, which lay between Croydon and the Thames, had to endure 76 rockets, more than six times as many as the neighbouring group, as were the total of dead, 152, and seriously injured, 558. Worst hit in terms of incidents, though not of deaths, were Erith and the borough of Chislehurst and Sidcup, with 17 V-2s each, which left 36 dead and 137 other serious casualties in Erith, 30 dead and 103 others in Chislehurst. Orpington, with 14 incidents, escaped with 9 dead but had 116 injured, Bexley, with 12 rockets, had the worst death toll, 39, with 78 injured, not, however, so different from that of Bromley (6 V-2s, 31 dead and 109 injured), though in Beckenham 5 rockets killed only 6 people and injured only 11, and in Crayford another 5 claimed only 1 fatal casualty and 4 others. Penge, hard-hit by the flying-bombs, this time escaped altogether.

In spite of the more or less continuous bombardment, the area reported only one ‘outstanding’ incident, in Southborough Lane, Bromley at 9.15 on a Sunday evening when the Crooked Billet public house (later rebuilt as The Beckets) was destroyed as already described.
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It was not the only ‘pub’ to suffer: the George, Hayes, in the same borough, and the White Horse Inn at Chislehurst were both damaged within four hours on 9 February 1945, and the Bickley Arms, Chislehurst, joined the melancholy list on 26 March, the last pub in England to receive the Germans’ attentions. Churchgoers suffered with drinkers. Kammler’s men also struck the Baptist Chapel in Chislehurst; Christ Church, Chislehurst; and St John’s, Eden Park, Beckenham, the vicar of which was injured for the second time, though his daughter, asleep in a pram by the badly cracked kitchen wall, never even woke up.

Many other public buildings were also affected. Besides thousands of houses and shops of every kind, a fire station (in Orpington) also suffered, as did railways stations (at St Mary Cray, near Orpington, and Chislehurst), a cinema (the Commodore, Orpington), a hospital (Queen Mary, Sidcup), a working-men’s club (Chislehurst), a golf club house (Sundridge Park, Bromley), and several schools, most notably Bickley Hall, Chislehurst, damaged by the penultimate rocket in the area, at 3.20 p.m. on Monday 26 March. Here a major disaster was narrowly avoided, for the boys were ‘lining up . . . before proceeding to the gymnasium to watch a boxing match’, and one was ‘carried away to be given treatment for a gash in the head. . . . The boxing match was cancelled’, but the boys instead hurried on to the playing field to hunt for rocket fragments.

Like much of outer London, ‘metropolitan’ Kent contained a great deal of open space. In January, for example, the Midland Bank sportsground in Beckenham harmlessly absorbed one rocket, while a week later another, on a nearby cricket field, killed no one. But any explosion could have tragic consequences, and the owner of a horticultural nursery which bore the brunt of one V-2’s impact, and his son, were both . . . . killed.

Here, too, as in comparable areas to the north of London, there were a surprising number of small factories and other ‘military objectives’. One of the last V-2s to land caused what could fairly be called an ‘industrial incident’, as this account by the area’s wartime historian makes clear:

On 20 March, at breakfast time, the junction of Rectory Lane, Sidcup Hill and Craybrooke Road was busy with workers arriving at local factories. Like a thunderbolt hurled by an angry god a rocket landed at this moment outside a printing works, killing seven people at the intersection and two others in Sidcup High Street. 80 others were reported injured. A dozen fires broke out in the ruins of houses, a dairy and T. Knight’s builders’ yard, while blast damage spread to printing works, municipal offices and shop and houses in the High Street, Old Forge Way, Sidcup Hill,
etc.

There were lighter moments. One local Civil Defence worker who heard a strange voice in damaged premises he was searching in Mottingham village, eventually uncovered a grey parrot, safe in its cage, repeating angrily a single, most appropriate, line, ‘This is a hell of a storm, mate!’ The same man, based in Chislehurst, failed, however, to persuade an old lady to give up the bottle of whisky she was clutching and it was still with her when she reached the rest centre in the church hall. ‘Later that night the vicar rang me up and said the lady would not go to bed unless I was there to tuck her up. I went with the greatest of pleasure and kissed her goodnight.’

As mentioned earlier, Bexley suffered more fatal casualties than any of its neighbours, and Welling, on its London side, seemed one of those small districts destined to attract rockets. A woman then serving as an ARP telephonist in the area remembers the arrival of the very first, while they were still a secret:

My job was to fill in a form, taking the details from the warden in whose area the bomb had dropped. . . . When I answered the telephone I knew immediately something was very different this time. The warden appeared to be suffering from shock. When we came to the question, ‘How large do you estimate the bomb?’ he said, ‘The biggest yet, no idea how large.’ To the question, ‘How many houses destroyed or badly damaged?’ his answer was ‘Thirty!’ I thought I had not heard correctly and he became very abusive at my doubts.

By February the V-2 was no longer a mystery, as the same woman, who had joined the ATS and was stationed in rocket-free Edinburgh, discovered:

My father wrote to me in the most alarming manner about the rockets. He reported that Welling and Bexleyheath hardly existed any-more. They had no food, as deliveries had been disrupted. He couldn’t stand it any longer; he was obviously on the verge of a nervous breakdown. . . . I was very worried. I spoke to the Catholic padre. He very kindly arranged for a couple of nuns to visit my parents to find out what was wrong. That did the trick. The sight of the two Catholic nuns on our established low church doorstep was sufficient for both my parents to completely forget the war and V-2s. I then received a letter of fury and anxiety from them that I was perhaps embracing the Roman faith. To this day [1976] they remember the nuns’ visit and have entirely forgotten the V-2s.

Also in Welling, was a girl then aged twelve, one of the occupants of what was ‘known locally by us children as the “half-sandwich house” because the semidetached built on to ours had to be pulled down by the demolition squad’. Now the V-2s were to take a final bite at the sandwich on that rocket-plagued day, Shrove Tuesday, 13 February 1945:

We had saved up our rations and were looking forward to a rare meal of pancakes, but . . . on open land about a hundred yards from our houses an unoccupied air-raid shelter received a direct hit from a rocket at about 7.30 p.m. We had absolutely no warning of its arrival. . . . My sister was blown from one side of the room to the other but received very small injuries, as did the rest of the family. . . . Damage from the blast was colossal. I distinctly remember our back door being a mass of tiny wood splinters. The rescue squad was amazed to get us out alive. . . . There was no panic. The fireman were quickly on the scene to put out the blaze. People were once again handing out blankets and cups of tea. Our warden was amusing the frightened children by taking off his tin helmet, lifting it up to the skies and reassuring us he would ‘catch the next one’. . . . The rocket did not seem to worry people for long and I remember the lady who used to come around collecting pennies for our Victory Party joking about the ‘doodlebug delights’ and ‘rocket cakes’ we would all be consuming once the war was over.

Once again it was my shift that was elected.

Craftsman recalling V-2 at Woolwich Arsenal, 1944

The Germans’ avowed intention in using the V-2 was to harm morale; any military damage they did was a bonus. But the London area contained so many factories and docks, warehouses and railway lines that some, under a continuous, indiscriminate bombardment, were almost bound to be hit. When the Ministry of Aircraft Production had made plans to move particularly important plants away from London it had seemed to other departments to be displaying excessive caution, but events soon endorsed its foresight. ‘During the critical period of the use by the enemy of V-1 missiles and V-2 rockets’, wrote the director of the ministry’s Emergency Services Organization, ‘as many as 50 factories were put out of action in one day in the London area.’ Of about 30,000 factories engaged on essential work of some kind no fewer than 919 were affected by rockets, several often being blasted in the same explosion. War production in Greater London was never seriously threatened for the V-2s caused nothing like the interruption of the V-1s, which had constantly driven workers to take shelter. None the less as the winter wore on the number of V-2 incidents affecting output reached serious proportions. In September there were 8; in October 22; in November and December together 209; in January and February 436; in March 224.

Just how successful even an imprecisely aimed rocket could be was made clear by the experience of the most famous centre of ordnance manufacture in the country, Woolwich Arsenal, spread along the south bank of the Thames near the Germans’ suspected aiming point on its north side. The borough of Woolwich was hit by 33 rockets, the second highest total in the country, and the number of V-2s landing there left one craftsman, a skilled fitter in the Heavy Gun Shop, convinced that ‘it could only be a matter of time before the Arsenal suffered, for many rockets were dead in line, but a trifle short’. On the evening of Monday 27 November 1944 his forebodings proved justified:

Once again it was my shift that was elected [as by the flying-bombs]. The shifts had just changed over, days to nights, and this Monday started out as any normal shift at the time. I was working on the breech end of a 15-in in the lapping machine in 2 Bay. Tom M. was measuring the bore sizes at the muzzle. . . . Arthur R. had pulled strings to stay on nights for a while, and so was with us this shift, everything as normal. At our cocoa break – we had run out of tea until the next ration was due – Don S. and I were pulling each other’s legs, bench versus the [gun] bore gang. As one of our [i.e. the gun gang’s] manifold advantages I mentioned that if anything happened I would have a shelter handy, while he would find his bench no cover at all. I have regretted that joke ever since, for in half an hour, at 10.30, that is just about what did happen. . . .

I did not see or hear the actual impact, all I know is that the lights went out and I was blown over, guessed what had happened and rolled underneath the gun and watched a large section of roof or wall plating float past the window. Being in a natural shelter with the gun over me and alongside a heavy borer to take the blast I was not even deafened completely, while Ted M. at the muzzle was. . . . It was not possible to see in the shop until the dust and debris had settled but I went out through the door space to see where it had dropped. . . . Outside was a shambles with the tender shop partly demolished . . . the book-keeper’s office blasted and the South Mill seeming to end at 4 Bay, with fires burning where 7 Bay ought to be. . . .

In spite of my twenty years’ service in the shop I could not place myself, everything being covered by a mass of debris some three feet thick. . . . I heard a cry for help and making my way to it found that old Charlie the night-shift storeman was trapped between his counter and the drawing rack which was blazing and as I started to lift him clear Wally K. . . . from the press in 6 Bay came round and together we got him out. . . .

Charles . . . was the only survivor from 7 and 8 Bays. Don was dead under his bench, which was blazing matchwood, the unfortunate youngster [who worked with him] dead at his slab and [an inspector] under the gantry, or where it had been. . . . The blast had given him a clown’s face, jet black except for a vivid red pulped nose. In a very short time mobile searchlight from the army and proper rescue teams turned up and a search seemed to indicate that all the casualties had been cleared, but a roll call was ordered. . . . There was a trifle of difficulty over this owing to the scattering of staff on various tasks . . . and . . . one gentleman . . . failed to answer his name at the roll call and we searched around in the wreck for some time before he was found standing by the searchlight watching us. . . . We were not the best pleased with him when we found that there was now no transport home and we would have to stay with the wreck till morning. Some bedded down in the first-aid posts, but I invited Pat C. and Harry N. to be my guests at my Home Guard armoury, where we spent what was left of the night. Passing through the [gun] carriage [area] we noticed the rocket on the scoreboard [marking the location of local incidents] as ‘10.30. Too bloody close’, which was our sentiment exactly.

In spite of the damage done, this man recorded, ‘we only had 6 killed and 17 or so injured out of a shift of about 90’ with ‘no machine . . . rendered incapable of repair’, and it was not long before its effects had been overcome:

All hands turned to salvaging and clearing up and the women were sent to grease and oil equipment as it was brought to them. . . . Regardless of minor irritations the shop worked with a will to get . . . in production again as quickly as possible, partly as a matter of pride and partly to stop any transfer of the shop [elsewhere]. We did start production going in two and a half days after the blow-up. Mind you, the fact that we were all on flat rate until the work would start flowing again and could go back into piecework helped.

Industrial incidents, like domestic ones, left a legacy of losses to be made good, and not everyone was too scrupulous in valuing their property:

Some of the fitters whose tool kit was reputed to have consisted of a five-eighths Whitworth spanner put in claims for replacement kits that ran into hundreds of pounds. . . . [One man] claimed all salvaged private tools that were not marked as his private property and this was . . . difficult to disprove as some of the owners were dead and one tool from the same maker looks very like another. . . . Much the same thing happened in the women’s changing rooms which . . . seemed to have contained everything from the bottom drawer to ball gowns.

Woolwich Arsenal was to be hit by two more V-2s, one ‘on the extreme end of the Iron Pier from which the heavy guns were loaded’, the next ‘on the Heavy Gun gantry . . . an example of how limited damage could cause a great deal of delay’, for it made it impossible to bring some 16-inch guns ‘into the shop for their fitting’ until one of the gantry supports had been replaced. These three rockets, with another which ‘fell just short in St Nicholas’s churchyard’, this observer considered ‘a very creditable group’, but it was their incidental, rather than their direct, effect which damaged morale and output most, for a windowless tarpaulin-roofed workshop was just as uncomfortable as a damaged house:

After the excitement and high hopes of the autumn, the bogging down of the armies in Holland was depressing and . . . when the really cold weather set in . . . we were in trouble. With no doors, windows, [no] heating and not very much wall it was a case of do what you could do for yourself. This took the shape of running up shacks and lean-tos in the shop from packing cases . . . sometimes for single persons but more often for small groups. I shared one . . . that we built beside the big rifler [i.e. rifling machine for gun barrels] under the shadow of the gantry. Quite a substantial erection from a lease-lend packing case it gave us three sides, a roof and a floor and we used to say that it was the most useful thing that we had received from America.

The struggle to keep warm added to the rivalry between different groups and to the often pointed gossip which was a feature of life at the Arsenal:

When the cold snowy weather set in with a vengeance there was a rush for braziers, buckets or anything that would hold a fire and these were at a premium, and so was fuel. A supply of coke was dumped outside at intervals to be scrambled for and the borers again lost popularity by having their mates on the lookout for the lorry and cornering far more than they were entitled to. One was found to have five dustbins of coke hoarded for his privare fire when there was not a bucketful of fuel in the rest of the shop. Equally unpopular was the office staff in 2 Bay, who were fitted out with a round cast-iron stove and kept a temperature of 70° in there when the rest of the shop was well below freezing. . . . At the worst period there was a rum ration issued, but reputedly it was so generous that one foreman drank the lot without realizing that it should have been shared out between a hundred men.

The Germans were clearly never aware that they had hit Woolwich Arsenal, and also never discovered that they had, by a remarkable piece of luck, scored a direct hit on what was classed officially as ‘A Very Important Key Point’, the ‘bascule bridge’, a swing bridge operated by a weight at one end of it, at Silvertown, North Woolwich, just across the river. A woman from Leytonstone, working in the offices of the shipbuilding firm Harland and Wolff close by that Saturday morning – it was 11.15 a.m. on 10 February 1945 – witnessed the incident, the outstanding ‘military’ success of the whole bombardment:

A blinding flash, and then all the windows, which were enormous and almost covered the walls, came in. Fortunately I was sitting with the windows on my left-hand side, one floor up, so glass missed me but those people who were facing the windows were badly cut. The other side of the building seemed to catch more of the blast. One of my friends had a fractured skull where the window frame came in as well as the glass. . . . We all filed out into the space between the offices and works, where those that were injured were taken to the Seamen’s Hospital, at Custom House. . . . We, the uninjured, went back to our offices and tried to clear up, but were sent home.

Rapidly on the scene was the chief superintendent of police for ‘K’ Division, quoted earlier, whose diary recorded what followed:

The bridge carried the road between East Ham and North Woolwich . . . forming the lock gate linking the Royal group of docks with the River Thames. The bridge and lock were completely destroyed, barring exit from docks to river. . . . The Royal docks were being extensively used for shipping supplies of all kinds to the British forces moving towards the Rhine. A large number of vessels . . . were imprisoned. Action was swift and drastic. The Royal Engineers took charge. The shattered bridge and lock were cut away and, within a few days, temporary structures replaced the damage and the docks were reopened to traffic.

Power supplies were also a legitimate target and in the same area the V-2s scored a number of hits that threatened, and sometimes interrupted, supplies. A little ironically, in view of the earlier ‘cover story’ about exploding gas mains, several gasworks were hit in this riverside area, including, as mentioned earlier, the one at Beckton covering 400 acres and said to be the largest in Europe. Other strikes occurred on the docks themselves, and the Ministry of Home Security drew attention in its report for 21—28 February 1945 to further serious damage to warehouses in Silvertown, the area of West Ham just up-river from North Woolwich, which had now been hit by seven rockets. Electric power stations were also affected. Another rocket, a member of the local electricity supply company remembers, ‘scored a hit on the pulverised-fuel-fired boiler house’ at Barking which ‘seriously affected the use of steam raising plant for many months’, though the public supply of current was not impaired. The diary of the chief superintendent for ‘K’ Division chronicled those events that concerned his area. It was an alarming list:

The enemy’s transport system could also, under the rules of war, fairly be attacked, and in one respect the rockets were more troublesome even than their predecessors, for the craters they produced tore up the tramways on which a large part of the poorer areas of east and south-east London still largely relied. As early as November 1944, the board’s historian recorded, ‘a track was cut by a crater measuring 40 ft by 20 ft’, and similar incidents followed in Lambeth, Wood Green and Southwark, where ‘sewer damage held up repair work for several weeks’. West Ham was the only tram ‘garage’ hit, but the trolley buses, still a novelty, and the famous red petroldriven buses, suffered far more, mainly while being serviced. Forest Gate depot in Hendon was badly damaged twice in twenty-four hours, the first explosion, just after midnight, ‘shattering the roof glasses, damaging 32 buses and depriving the garage of water, gas, electricity and the telephone’. Next morning, however, every bus left on time ‘although some ran without windows’. Another V-2 the following day damaged the roof again and blew the windows out of three more buses.