Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s (26 page)

The excellent local newspaper, the
South London Press,
carried a first-hand account from the assistant chief warden of Deptford, identified only as ‘the borough’:

On the roadway and pavements were bodies, some terribly injured, including some very young children. Yet in all this hell I never heard a murmur. Those spared and comparatively free from injury were all running to help others, soon sizing the terrible situation up and doing what good they could. . . . The control room [of the borough Civil Defence services, in the town hall] itself was full of smoke. It was barely possible to breathe, yet everyone was calm, and the work of restoring some order and putting the vital services into organization proceeded with efficiency.

There is no record of Lord Cherwell visiting New Cross, and almost certainly he was, on that fatal Saturday, enjoying his usual weekend break at Christ Church, Oxford. Two days before, however, he had written to the Prime Minister to suggest that the rocket, which he had – though this he did not recall – stated to be scientifically impossible, was not proving a very fearsome weapon. With 960,000 acres of London in which it could fall, one’s chances of being killed or injured, on existing data, were, suggested Cherwell, only 1 in 384,000, a calculation which the Deptford disaster made out of date. In that unlucky borough, indeed, the risk of death or wounding was very much higher. All told, Deptford was to suffer nine V-2s, far less than some other places, but no fewer than five caused ‘outstanding incidents’, so that Deptford’s toll of dead and seriously injured, 625 (297 of them killed) far surpassed that of any other borough, and, though nothing that happened later was to match the horror of the Woolworths rocket, the story of its ordeal may conveniently be given here.

Deptford’s first bad incident, on 2 November, had left 31 people dead; its fourth, on 2 February, killed 24. But far worse was to come, at 3 o‘clock on the morning of Wednesday, 7 March 1945, when a V-2 landed in the courtyard of a group of seven three-storey blocks of tenement flats known as Folkestone Gardens, built forty years before to replace slum-style back-to-back housing. The rocket pitched to earth between two blocks, which were demolished, brought down an air-raid shelter between them, and badly damaged the remaining five blocks. Another 25 two-storey terrace houses in Trundleys Road, which ran past the site, ‘of poor construction . . . with 9” walls in lime mortar, wood floors and slated roofs’, were also, as a Home Security official who visited the incident at 5.30 that morning recorded, wrecked, and the first rough estimate was that ‘total casualties might be in the neighbourhood of 160’, reckoning four occupants in each of the 40 flats destroyed.

As dawn broke over Folkestone Gardens the ruined flats formed a huge mound of debris, over which, in the light of the searchlights, three huge cranes cast their weird shadows, as twenty rescue squads and a small army of firemen struggled to extract the dead and injured. Folkestone Gardens was apparently regarded as a model incident, for a whole string of VIPs were brought to see operations in progress, including an American admiral (duly greeted by the mayor of Deptford) and ‘Madam Wellington Koo’, representing the Chinese government. Eventually 52 bodies were recovered, and 32 badly injured patients were detained in hospital, making this, in terms of dead, the third-worst incident of the whole campaign so far, surpassed only by the Woolworths incident in November, and another at Islington, in December, to be described shortly.
¹⁸

Deptford’s misfortunes helped to inflate the total casualties for the Civil Defence area of which it was part – ‘Group 4’, which was made up of five boroughs – to 526 dead and 1078 seriously injured, caused by 83 V-2s. Its neighbours got off more lightly. Bermondsey, with 7 V-2s, escaped with 14 deaths and 117 serious injuries; Lewisham, with 12 V-2s, had 67 deaths and 233 other serious casualties; Greenwich, hit by 22 rockets, suffered 81 fatal casualties, 198 badly injured; Woolwich, with more rockets, 33, had fewer deaths, 67, and almost the same number of badly wounded, 201.

To those living in the area these totals must have seemed at the time even larger. This is what one woman, then aged eleven and living in Charlton, remembers of one of the Greenwich V-2s:

There was an awful explosion and the doors leading from our classroom on to the playground were blown out. All we children just ran into the playground in panic until the teachers quietened us and made us line up in rows. Some children had to go to the first-aid post for attention to cuts. Then I saw my mother. She was covered in soot, where she had been cleaning out the fire. She thought the school had been hit and did not realize she had run past the actual site where the rocket had dropped. She kept saying, ‘The school, the school!’ A man stopped her at the end of the road and said to her, ‘The school is all right. Look! Look!’. . . . My grandmother had pieces of glass in her back. She had been pickling red cabbage and the place looked like a slaughterhouse with red cabbage everywhere. My mother had . . . been sewing a new coat for me by the window and the large doors in that room were found in the road. . . . After the rocket attack my mother, grandmother, young cousin and myself were evacuated to Wrexham in North Wales. We went to the cinema and in the newsreel were pictures of the damage the rocket had done in our road at home.

Greenwich was the scene of two ‘outstanding incidents’, on Shooters Hill, at 6.30 p.m. on 11 November, when 24 people were killed, and at one o‘clock in the morning of 30 November, when 23 others died in Sunfield Place. Its riverside neighbour, Woolwich, did not feature on the ‘outstanding incident’ list, but was the second-worst hit borough in the country, in terms of the number of rockets landing within its boundaries. They became so frequent that people began to sleep in the shelters again, as one man whose own nights were mainly spent at work at Woolwich Arsenal remembers:

My father . . . when he was alone during my night shift used to go to the underground shelters at Danson Mead and to take my dog with him. . . . She was a beautiful dog with charming manners and used to go round the bunks to see that the children were tucked in and to kiss them goodnight. This . . . calmed them no end, for, as the mothers pointed out, if Tony [the dog] was not afraid, why should they be? Unfortunately, some people . . . complained to the warden who, much against his wishes, had to order that the dog must not come back the next night, so my father stayed away, too. . . . The next night was bedlam, for the children were crying for the dog . . . the parents were rowing with the warden, [and] the people who had started the trouble . . . found themselves so unpopular that they had to remove themselves to another hole.

To one woman who travelled up each day from Maidstone to a tall office block near Waterloo, the whole area seemed to be under continuous bombardment:

We heard the boom . . . and saw the column of smoke rising high into the sky. From my desk I had a wonderful view of the Surrey Hills and many fell between us and the hills. When they fell in the Lewisham-New Cross area, I would pick up the telephone and ring my cousin, who worked there. If the phone rang following an explosion, her boss would say to her, ‘You had better answer. It’s sure to be your cousin to see if you are safe.’

Among the damaged buildings was a public house which was crowded at the time of the occurrence and which took fire.

Report by regional casualty services officer on incident in Islington, 26 December 1944

Even without the rockets it would have been a miserable Christmas. The war seemed to have been going on for ever. Children were now starting school who had never lived in peacetime, and thousands more had not seen their fathers for four or five years. The replacement of the blackout by the dim-out, on 17 September, had had little effect; such extra light as there was served to show up how shabby everything had become. ‘London really is a frightful spectacle of damage and dirty buildings,’ commented one sympathetic American resident after a walk through a normally fashionable residential area on 8 October. He had no illusions about the state of morale. ‘People are shaking their heads over the approaching winter,’ he confided to his diary on 31 October, having long since learned about the rockets. ‘If London is to be peppered with V-2s it will be a grim experience.’

By now the Minister of Food had unveiled the contents of what one paper called his ‘Christmas box’: an extra half-pound of sweets for everyone aged up to eighteen in the four-week ration period beginning on 10 December, an extra half-pound of sugar for everyone, an extra 8d. worth of meat for Christmas week only, bringing the ration up to 1s. 10d. (9p) worth, even ‘a few thousand turkeys’, for the very fortunate, and some dates, peanuts and sultanas. The prospect did not do much to raise spirits, lowered by bad weather. ‘Early snow does not mean hard winter,’ the
Daily Telegraph
assured its readers on 14 November, but it was soon proved wrong. By 10.30 p.m. on the following evening, the normally cheerful Mrs Gwladys Cox in West Hampstead was distinctly despondent as she made her daily diary entry:

Colder than ever! I am writing this lying on my bed, fully dressed. The V-1s and V-2s are so frequent we never know! However, if a rocket bomb did hit this block we should simply disappear, together with all our possessions. We Londoners are certainly going through a time of terrible strain.

Even those hoping to see a new social order after the war were infected by the universal miasma. George Orwell encapsulated the prevailing pessimism in his weekly column in
Tribune,
published on 1 December 1944:

I am no lover of the V-2, especially at this moment when the house still seems to be rocking from a recent explosion, but what depresses me about these things is the way they set people talking about the next war. Every time one goes off I hear gloomy references to ‘next time’ and the reflection: ‘I suppose they’ll be able to shoot them across the Atlantic by that time.’

The flying bombs had dictated a whole new pattern of life in southern England, in which you avoided loud noises and kept an eye open for the nearest shelter. ‘Dodging the doodlebugs’, as the more flippant referred to it, had in its way been stimulating. There was nothing stimulating about the unavoidable, ever-present rocket. How indeed, when you heard that alarming double bang echo across the sky, should you respond? The publisher Philip Unwin recalls leaving the Haymarket Theatre one evening to find ‘everyone standing about looking shocked and awed’ revealing ‘a sudden consciousness that something horrible had happened’. The then editor of
Woman’s Own
faced a similar problem while entertaining her ATS sister, when she heard ‘the unmistakable crump of a V-2. . . . We didn’t mention it in case, perhaps, it bothered the other. We just went on talking and had tea.’

In the week ending at midday on Wednesday, 6 December 1944, 40 rockets landed, the same as the previous week, which had been the worst so far. The casualty figures for November were by a long way the highest since August, with 716 men, women and children killed and 1511 badly injured, though these totals included some flying-bomb victims. The new ‘rocket week’, starting at noon, made a disastrous start, with the first rocket so far in the West End – not, in fact, particularly bad in casualty terms but, because of its location, far more talked about, and causing more widespread apprehension, than much more serious incidents in less well-known areas.

The ‘Duke Street rocket’, as it became known, landed at 11 p.m. on the corner of Duke Street and Barrett Street, just off Oxford Street, the capital’s main shopping thoroughfare, all along which windows were blown out, scattering such modest Christmas displays as they contained. A local resident, a BBC producer, noted next morning how houses in wealthy Wigmore Street had lost their windows, among them those of that great resort of upper-middle-class ladies up from the country, the Times Book Club. His wife, called out of bed in the small hours to man a WVS incident inquiry point in a ‘school in a side street’, found it ‘rather a grim business . . . one room utilized for the WVS and the room opposite . . . converted into a mortuary’. Among the items brought in for the WVS to care for – its owner no doubt dead or in hospital – was ‘a woman’s shopping bag’ full of ‘odds and ends obviously intended to be Christmas presents’ along with ‘three little Union Jacks, bought . . . in readiness for the peace’.

The roping off of the approaches to Selfridges just as the Christmas shopping rush was starting spread news of the incident over a wide area, not always received with overmuch regret. ‘Being a woman with a strong hatred of the well-to-do and employing classes, Mrs W. could ill conceal her pleasure that the West End had been hit,’ observed the American OSS official quoted earlier of his maid’s reaction. ‘Mayfair, after all, nearly escaped the flying bombs. To have it immune from V-2 would be more than Mrs W . . . could bear.’ More Americans suffered in the Duke Street incident than from any other rocket. Much of the blast had been taken by an annexe to Selfridges being used as a canteen by US government employees, while a passing taxi had been blown into one of Selfridges’ windows, and some of its GI passengers were never found. All told, 8 Americans were killed and 32 injured; 10 British civilians also died, with seven badly wounded. Among the dead was a woman who had been walking quietly with her husband when the rocket exploded and ‘simply disappeared, whisked from his side’, her body being ‘afterwards found at the back of Selfridges’.

The Duke Street explosion shook the whole West End. At the famous American forces canteen, Rainbow Corner, in Piccadilly Circus nearly a mile away, it set the chandeliers swinging. In a studio in Broadcasting House, a little nearer, it caused a gramophone needle to jump from its groove as the presenter of the American forces programme closed down with a disc of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. The noise was also heard several miles away, often creating the illusion it came from close at hand. One actor living in Streatham while rehearsing an ENSA production of
Yellow Sands
found that ‘the whole house shook, the curtains blew in and the plastic sheeting in the windows rattled’, only to find himself greeted next morning by a fellow member of the cast with the remark, ‘We had a V-2 in St John’s Wood last night’ – the same ‘Selfridges’ rocket, they rapidly realized.

December, having begun badly, got no better. 22 rockets arrived in the week beginning on 6 December, 12 of them reaching London, and the proportions remained roughly the same in the following week, with 20 V-2s between 13 and 20 December, 9 of them in the London region. In the following week, which covered Christmas itself, running from 20 to 27 December, there were 25, though only 6 reached London, and in the five days which rounded off the year, from 27 to 31 December, 21, again with 6 in London.

The war news, meanwhile, had taken a sharp and totally unexpected turn for the worse. The
Nine O‘Clock News
on Saturday, 16 December 1944, reported a heavy German counter-attack in the Ardennes area of Belgium, and though an official spokesman described it in Monday’s newspapers as ‘a last throw, like March 1918’, the public was not so sure. The rockets, an American historian has commented, had ‘reinforced Hitler’s “bogey-man” image. No matter how often Germany was bombed they could always come up with a new and nasty surprise, just when everybody thought the war was finally over.’ The Ardennes offensive seemed to confirm this fear and sent spirits, already low, plummeting still further. ‘Did I tell you,’ asked a Bethnal Green Evening Institute worker, in a letter to her soldier husband on 18 December, ‘that poor Miss C. had had her home destroyed by a rocket? She reached home, at Eltham, one evening, to find her house gone and both her parents in hospital. Her mother has an unrecognizable face, from which both eyes have had to be removed, and is practically cut to pieces.’ Social worker Vere Hodgson, in Notting Hill, had an equally melancholy tale to record in her diary the following day: ‘Mrs S. [an office colleague] phoned us details of her bomb. Twelve people were killed. Every slate is off her roof. Her chimney is cracked. . . . Merry Xmas to all.’

On 26 December, after a lull enforced not by goodwill but by the needs of the battle in Belgium, the Germans returned to their familiar pleasure of trying to kill English civilians, and in Islington that Boxing Day they succeeded with one of their most destructive missiles yet. Islington, as yet ‘ungentrified’, was then a solidly proletarian borough, containing row upon row of small, mainly unmodernized houses in often attractive terraces and squares, just north of the great railway area around Kings Cross. Every group of streets had its ‘local’, and typical of these was the Prince of Wales, on the corner of Mackenzie Road and Holloway Road, which was crowded on that holiday evening, a little island of cheer and jollity on a particularly wretched night; a dense fog, of Dickensian thickness, had been blanketing London on and off for weeks.

At 9.26 p.m. a rocket burst in the concrete roadway just outside, causing two craters, one 40 feet across and 12 feet deep, the other 10 feet by 4 feet. The impact shattered the gas and water mains, so the main crater was soon flooded, adding to the hazards facing the first wardens and rescue men as they struggled to reach the scene through piles of rubble, hidden by the fog and by the smoke from the several small fires which had broken out. The first reports showed that some 22 or 23 storey houses and shops had been destroyed, and another 20, damaged beyond repair, would have to be cleared. One end of a brick surface shelter, luckily empty – on Boxing Day people were celebrating in their homes or in the pub – had been brought down by the blast, helping to block the road still further. The centre of the devastation, however, presenting a classic problem to the rescue men, was the Prince of Wales itself, for the cellar, normally the safest place in any building, had become a death trap. It had been in use as a bar and crowded with drinkers, nearly all of whom were killed or badly injured as the roof and the debris above crashed in upon them, while to add to the horror fire broke out, so that some of the bodies were charred, when recovered at last.

The first reports, at half past midnight on the morning of 27 December, spoke only of 8 dead and 81 injured, but by 6 a.m. on Thursday, more than thirty hours after the rocket had landed, the total had risen to 64 killed, 86 seriously injured, 182 lightly injured and 4 still trapped. The publican, his wife and a barmaid, all serving on the ground floor, were carried out with minor injuries, and, the regional casualty services officer learned ‘one lad . . . trapped for over nineteen hours’ was removed to hospital, ‘suffering from multiple minor injuries, but . . . stated to be doing well’. A woman trapped in the burning cellar was less lucky. A doctor had managed, at great risk, ‘to get into the cellar and was able to administer morphia’, but she ‘was subsequently extracted dead’.

The timing and nature of the incident, as much as its high casualty figures, which finally reached 68 dead and 99 seriously injured, caused it to be remembered with particular indignation. ‘We were surprised because it was normal to have a truce during the Christmas holiday,’ remembers a man, then a boy aged twelve, who lived in the Caledonian Road in the same area.

Having ruined Boxing Day in Islington, the Germans also marked New Year’s Eve with the borough’s second ‘outstanding incident’, which occurred at 20 minutes to midnight on 31 December in Stroud Green Road and Stapledon Hall Road, Crouch Hill, at the northern end of its area, close to the boundary with Finsbury. This time 15 people were killed and 34 badly injured, and 15 more families started the New Year with their homes destroyed. It was the 382nd rocket to reach the United Kingdom and the last of 1944, which everyone saw vanish without regret. The only ray of hope was that Field Marshal von Rundstedt’s last great offensive was now seen to have failed, but for Londoners this meant that Kammler’s attentions would now be again directed even more vigorously against themselves. During December, including a few flying-bomb casualties, 367 people had been killed – 64 of them children – and 847 – 121 of them children – seriously injured. For their families it must have been a melancholy Christmas, and 1945 seemed to promise little better. James Lees-Milne, on his way home to Chelsea with a friend, observed the curious mixture of celebration and danger typical of the time:

We walked in the moonlight. At Hyde Park Corner we heard a crash, followed by the roar of a rocket that made our hearts beat. Then we laughed. Just before midnight I left him at Sloane Square station and continued homewards. Crowds were singing in the Square. . . . There were sounds of merriment from lighted windows. They seemed forced to me. There were no church bells.

The ‘crash’ was that of the missile descending on Crouch Hill, and one woman living in Birmingham who telephoned her parents in Croydon, on the other side of London from Islington, heard ‘over the phone the distant explosion of a V-2 while wishing them “A Happy New Year” ’. Much nearer was Gwladys Cox in West End Lane, NW6, who had spent the last few minutes of 1944 listening to a religious service on the BBC: