Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s (20 page)

An enemy missile dropped in the centre of the concrete roadway, forming a crater about 40 feet across.

Ministry of Home Security report, prepared on 11 September 1944

Friday, 8 September 1944 had been a typical autumn day in southern England. After a cold night, the morning was bright and sunny, but during the afternoon the skies clouded over, and rain followed. In spite of the weather there was much to feel cheerful about. On Saturday, 26 August, the papers had reported a turning point in the campaign in Europe. ‘Gen. de Gaulle enters liberated Paris. Last Germans surrender after ultimatum,’ ran the
Daily Telegraph
headline, while downcolumn was recorded ‘A US Forecast. End of war by October’. ‘London’s buildings quickly broke out into a flutter of tricolours,’ reported the
New Yorker’
s excellent correspondent, Mollie Panter-Downs, on reaction to the news from France. ‘Nobody appeared to mind when one confused building superintendent ran up the Dutch flag instead.’ The ringing of the church bells added to the general sense of jubilation, for those of St Paul’s had not ‘uttered a sound since June, when it was decided that the bells might drown out an approaching robot’. The 3rd of September revived many poignant memories, for it was not merely the fifth anniversary of the outbreak of war but, like that earlier 3rd of September, a Sunday, and also a National Day of Prayer. For Londoners, even more significantly, it was explosion-free. ‘The peace of these last few days passed belief,’ wrote Vere Hodgson, in Notting Hill. ‘I have been out twice today and never had to listen for danger.’

The following week the good news continued. On Tuesday, 5 September, a corner of
The Times’
s front page, otherwise devoted to advertisements – ‘No Coupons. Rust tweed suit, unworn: £15’, ’For sale, Excellent indoor shelter, steel arch, £25’ – contained the small announcement, ‘Allies enter Holland’. On the main news page one cheerful item jostled with another: ‘Antwerp captured’, ‘Pressing on in Italy’, ‘Cease Fire in Finland’, even ‘Standing-Down of the Home Guard’. The impending replacement of the blackout by a dim-out, with thinner curtains permitted and even some street lighting restored, due on Sunday, 17 September, added to the feeling that it was all over except the flag-waving. The
Daily Herald
on Wednesday, 6 September 1944 described events in the capital the previous day:

Rumour upon rumour swept through London yesterday: Germany had capitulated; the King was to broadcast; Parliament had been recalled. Not one of these rumours was true but they spread from London to the suburbs, from the suburbs to the provinces. People left their suburban homes and came to town to join in the celebrations. There were taxis full of singing soldiers. There were stories that barricades were being put up in Piccadilly to control the overjoyed crowd. . . . Brussels radio had announced that ‘foreign stations’ had announced at 9.30 that morning news of the capitulation of Germany. A little later . . . the message was ‘killed’, but the report had got a flying start.

The next morning, Thursday, 7 September, the press carried Herbert Morrison’s cheerful ‘Hitler has lost the Battle of London’ speech of the previous day, but one man at least remained unconvinced. ‘It appears that Civil Defence is ending,’ wrote the borough librarian of much-flying-bombed Croydon in his diary. There is a sort of dizziness in the news; it is so good that one wonders if all is really well.’ On Friday Duncan Sandys’s press conference was splashed across every newspaper, often accompanied by congratulatory leading articles. All this made pleasant reading that Friday evening, when there was not much to tempt anyone out. The two films which had just opened,
Wing and a Prayer
, with Don Ameche winning the war in the Pacific, and Take It or Leave It, about an American sailor on leave, were, on the kindest interpretation of the reviews, undistinguished, while the theatre had not yet recovered from its doodlebug doldrums. The current bestsellers, G. M. Trevelyan’s
English Social History
and Somerset Maugham’s The
Razor’s Edge,
were hard to come by and the most popular occupation in London that Friday evening was probably listening to the radio. On the Home Service one could hear Jack Payne’s Orchestra,
American Commentary
and
As You Like It
, interrupted by the great event of the day, the
Nine O’Clock News
. It was a typical evening’s listening for what seemed all set to be a typical wartime evening.

The London Borough of Brentford and Chiswick, formed in 1932, lay just outside the London County Council area, but well within that of the London Civil Defence region, being served by both the Underground and the Southern Railway – Chiswick Station to Waterloo took twenty minutes. Its wartime experience had been ‘middle of the road’. Chiswick was fiftyfifth in the ‘league table’ of V-1 incidents suffered by the 95 boroughs in the London Civil Defence Region, with 13 flying-bombs, and it had, to 8 September 1944, endured 635 incidents, inflicted by two parachute mines, 359 HE bombs and some 7000 incendiaries.

Close to the river, which formed Chiswick’s southern boundary, lay Staveley Road, a ‘middle-middle-class’ district, with semidetached, and a few detached, houses. At first, when the area was developed in the 1920s, they had enjoyed the social cachet of names alone – Westcourt, Elsmere, Dunrobbin – though further building had led to their being numbered. Although it now included a ‘council school’ for eleven – to fourteen-year-olds, the road still contained some vacant plots and was quiet and spacious, renowned for the cherry trees which lined it; every spring the King’s mother, Queen Mary, came to look at their blossom. But on the evening of Friday, 8 September 1944, Staveley Road was a dismal place, with the few people about hurrying home to get indoors before the drizzle that was just beginning settled down into a steady downpour.

At 6.34 p.m., totally without warning, a huge hole appeared in the middle of the roadway opposite number 5. Houses on both sides of the road collapsed and for hundreds of yards around walls cracked, tiles clattered to the ground and windows shattered into lethal fragments. All that anyone heard was a ‘plop’ and a sudden rumble, though many felt the force of the explosion, like the caretaker of Staveley Road School who had been crossing its playing field and suddenly found himself hurled twenty feet to the ground. ‘I picked myself up’, he told a
News Chronicle
reporter, in an interview destined not to be published till a whole year later, ‘and staggered to the nearest wrecked house; a woman – I later learned it was Mrs Harrison – crawled out of the wreckage and died in my arms.’ Mrs Harrison, a sixty-five-year-old housewife, had been sitting by her fireside with her husband. In the same instant died a young soldier, Frank Browning, walking down the road to visit his girlfriend, and a three-year-old infant, Rosemary Clarke, killed in her cot. Dornberger and von Braun had claimed their first victims.

Thanks to the evacuation after the flying-bombs, and because some people had not yet arrived home, the casualty list was surprisingly light: 3 dead (although the official figure at the time was 2), 10 seriously injured, another 10 slightly hurt. Three wrecked houses, numbers 24, 26 and 28, had all been empty. A fifteen-month-old girl living next door to the dead baby survived; her mother, the wife of an airman, had taken her to safety in North Wales a few days before, although, as she recalled bitterly, she and her husband had only just finished paying for their now ruined home. This was only one of many families with new reason to hate the Germans; 11 houses had been demolished outright, 15 more had to be evacuated for extensive rebuilding, 12 more had been seriously affected and 556 more had suffered ‘minor damage’, though a far larger number of people had been inconvenienced, for there was, the official account noted, ‘a very large crater 20 feet deep in the middle of the road’, and the water and gas mains had been broken.

Brentford and Chiswick coped well with incident no. 636 – it was to suffer only one more, a very minor one, during the rest of the war. A rest centre, on ‘St Thomas’s playing field’ – the areas was full of sportsgrounds and pavilions – was promptly opened, and provided shelter for sixteen people, until closed on 15 September. Ultimately fourteen families were rehoused and three individuals found private billets. An incident inquiry point, opened on Saturday, was needed only for a day, since everyone affected was soon accounted for.

What was for Chiswick almost the end of its war was for the British government the start of a new and particularly troublesome campaign. By some strange acoustic quirk the explosion, which was barely heard near at hand, echoed over London and was easily audible in Westminster, seven miles away. The double bang – the sound of the impact following a split second after the sonic boom as the missile re-entered the earth’s atmosphere – rapidly became the rocket’s trademark. Among those alerted by it that Friday evening was R. V. Jones, busy in his office with his assistant. ‘He and I looked at one another and said almost simultaneously, “That’s the first one!” ’he later recalled. Duncan Sandys, a few hundred yards west of Broadway, in his office in Shell Mex House on the Embankment near the Savoy, instantly telephoned the Home Security War Room to find out where the rocket had fallen and then called for his car. Within an hour Staveley Road was full of VIPs, including Herbert Morrison, in his invariable dark overcoat and black Homburg, accompanied by the even more unmistakable figure of his red-headed Parliamentary Secretary, Ellen Wilkinson. The regional commissioner for London, Admiral Sir Edward Evans (famous as a First World War hero, ‘Evans of the
Broke’
) was soon there, resplendent in his naval uniform, and several senior officials from Group 6, the regional sub-headquarters responsible for Chiswick. So, too, were the Civil Defence controller for the borough, and the borough engineer, in charge of the rescue service. It was immediately clear to all of them that Big Ben had made its historic debut in Chiswick, and one of Morrison’s officials recorded the facts in impressive detail:

Incident
Staveley Road, 8 September 1944, 1845 hours. The area was not under the ‘Alert’. An enemy missile dropped in the centre of the concrete roadway, forming a crater about 40 feet across x 10 feet in depth, causing damage of gas services, the demolition of 7 houses, damage beyond repair to 5 other houses, together with major blast damage to about 600 other houses within a radius of 600 yards from the crater, including the school on the south side of Staveley Road.
¹²

The area is a dormitory one with 2-storey semidetached houses – on a density of about 8 to the acre – erected in 1920, of reasonably good construction with 9 in. walls, wood floors and tiled roofs.

The size of the crater was that usually associated with 1000 kg bombs from piloted aircrafts, but a feature was the penetration of the reinforced-concrete roadway. Blast damage was on a more limited scale than that experienced by fly bombs. The size of the crater was such that blast took an upward passage and the open areas in the vicinity of the incident helped in its dispersal.

Rescue operations were under the direction of Mr Skinner, Deputy Rescue Officer, with 3 Heavy and 5 Light Rescue parties, assisted by NFS personnel and voluntary helpers. At the time of visit the incident was much overcrowded by workers, who were standing on live debris [i.e. liable to move if people walked on it]. I instructed Mr Skinner to call off all workers other than the Rescue Service and form chains of men with baskets so as to allow the rescue personnel to work from the lower levels. . . . At 2015 hours the incident was cleared of all known casualties, 1½ hours after the fall of the missile.

The noise of the explosion left most of those who had heard it puzzled. An American civilian working for the US Office of Strategic Services was told by his taxi-driver in Piccadilly that a bomber had crashed. Vere Hodgson, nearer the scene, in Notting Hill, having just rejoiced at a whole week of nights spent in bed instead of on the office floor, decided that as there was ‘No Warning on . . . it could not be the new secret weapon’ and that ‘perhaps it was an explosion at a munitions factory’. Another diary-keeper, the wife of a former barrister, living in West Hampstead, was more perceptive:

An hour or so ago, I was listening to the wireless with Bob [her cat] on my lap, when he gave a great start and sat up, my chair shuddering at the same time. Ralph came running in: ‘Had I heard that one?’ He says there was a very loud report indeed and from their behaviour passers-by in the street seem to have heard it too. They just stopped dead and stared about – it was just a single very loud crack, or report, something like a gun. Ralph rang up Mr T. [a friend in the Post Office], who said he had also heard it. . . . Presently he rang us to say . . . his office in Whitechapel . . . said it was ‘gunfire at an unidentified aircraft’. I just wonder if it is some munition works explosion; or the heralded ‘V-2’!

Surprisingly few people, however, in spite of Churchill’s recent hints, seem to have realized what this latest ‘big bang’ meant. The usual explanation, though it rapidly became something of a joke, offered a non-military reason for the sudden noise. One member of the staff of the West Middlesex Hospital in Isleworth, on seeing Civil Defence ambulances arriving, telephoned the main gate to ask ‘what was happening. I got the reply “Gas main explosion” ’. The same rumour was current among the crowd which gathered in Staveley Road, as one member of it, a Royal Navy petty officer home on leave, discovered. But he was unconvinced. ‘If that’s a bloody gas main,’ he told his father, ‘I don’t know what Hitler’s messing about wasting his time on bombs for!’