Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s (28 page)

A few people believe they saw a rocket itself in flight. A man living in Warlingham recalls ‘a Scots caber or telegraph pole hurtling through the sky, not straight like an arrow but turning over and over like a boomerang’. ‘Like a telegraph pole with a vapour trail behind it,’ thought a young man watching from a factory roof in Mitcham. ‘A long black object like a thick telegraph pole with a dull red flame coming from the back,’ agrees an artillery NCO, then stationed in Kent, of the missile he saw approaching the ground. ‘A shooting star falling to earth . . . followed by a flash’ is the description of a man then aged fifteen whose ‘first and only sighting of a V-2’ occurred as he left his youth club in east London.

More common were claims to have sensed a rocket’s approach, but a Ministry of Home Security report, compiled late in 1944, was sceptical.

There have been isolated reports, from persons near the site of the incident, of a short ‘swish’ just before the explosion and several reports of a ‘feeling of pressure’ or a premonitory instinct of impending disaster immediately before the explosion. It is possible that this may be due to confusion of time in the memory afterwards.

The evidence suggests, however, that a few – a very few – people may have reacted in this way, like the wife of a warden in Croydon, who was, he realized, ‘possessed of hearing equivalent to a wild animal’s’, a gift which proved useful when the area’s first V-2 arrived. ‘Suddenly she made a dive under the table. “What the hell is the matter?” I said. She replied: “It sounds like an express train flying through the air.” A split second later I heard a huge explosion.’

Similar, and more widespread, claims were made for family pets, who had certainly shown a more than human facility to detect flying bombs. A young nurse living in Balham observed that the family cat, Junior, ‘asleep on a chair . . . suddenly leaped up in the air, gave a wail of terror and rushed under the sideboard in the corner of the room’, just before the ‘terrifying explosion’ of the first local V-2, and he was to repeat the performance ‘on two more occasions’. Usually, however, the first sign of a rocket’s arrival was a bright flash, a phenomenon made use of by a Mitcham family, where the son of the house, whose bedroom faced over London, went to bed before his parents. When a flash lit up his room he would bang twice on the floor with a shoe to warn his parents that in a few seconds they were likely to hear the roar of the explosion as the sound wave reached them. A then eleven-year-old has vivid memories of the ‘big, blue flash’ which preceded the destruction of her home in Dalton Lane, Hackney on St Valentine’s Day 1945. ‘There was’, she remembers, ‘no bang, only everything falling on us and my dad saying “Hello, Jack. This is your lot!” ’ Fortunately it wasn’t. The upper half of the house was ‘smashed to nothing’, but the family were all downstairs and unhurt. And some of those very close to an exploding V-2 did not even see the flash. One Walthamstow woman whose husband was working as a welder in a factory building outside which a V-2 landed – he was, he believed, ‘only about fifty feet away’ – ‘did not hear a thing, only saw a white haze and then the debris falling all round him’, memories on which he had ample time to reflect during his subsequent three months in hospital.

The sound of a rocket detonating rapidly became familiar to millions of people in Greater London and Essex, and a Ministry of Home Security report in December confirmed the interim description compiled in mid-September. The sharp ‘crack’, as the warhead exploded, was, the ministry agreed, followed by ‘a drawn-out rumbling sound, caused by the passage of the missile through the air faster than sound . . . described as “more echoing and more prolonged than a flying bomb, like a peculiar peal of thunder”.’ The report also endorsed what many people had already discovered for themselves – that the ears provided an unreliable guide to locating the point of impact:

Sounds seems to be no indication of either the distance or of the direction of the explosion. Explosions have been heard distinctly twenty or thirty miles away. At ten miles that has been loud enough to give the impression that the incident is very close, yet to people within half a mile of the incident it has sounded too far away to be of their immediate concern.

The ministry had also assembled much evidence on the nature of the craters caused by the V-2, some of it obtained, as at least one document hinted, by unwelcome calls to busy officials made in the small hours. However, the duty of garnering every possible scrap of information was not shirked. ‘Craters . . .’, the ministry advised regions with as yet no first-hand knowledge of the V-2, ‘are generally . . . steeply cone-shaped or saucer-shaped. The cone-shaped craters are anything between 20 and 45 feet across and between 6 and 20 feet deep. Those of saucer shape are from 3 to 5 feet deep and from 30 to 45 feet across. . . . The deepest craters seem to be found where the missile has struck the hardest surface, such as a concrete roadway.’ It was such impacts which produced the ‘earthquake’ effect sometimes felt several miles away, and able to bring down buildings over a wide radius. This experience of being physically shaken many people found the most alarming aspect of the whole campaign. ‘The whole building seemed to sway,’ remembers one woman who had been sitting in the Brixton Palladium watching
Rebecca.
‘I was very scared and . . . wanted to go home but my sister would not leave and said, ‘It’s down now”.’ ‘I felt the floorboards shudder beneath my feet, the fire shifted and various small things in the room moved or rattled,’ recalls a Croydon woman of a similar occasion. A man then aged fourteen remembers his astonishment when cycling with a friend past a shop in Lee Green when ‘the blind suddenly gave a double flap’, explained seconds later as ‘the long rumbling roar’ of an explosion two miles away ‘caught up with it’. An AFS woman had an even more disconcerting experience at a bus stop in Streatham. ‘The legs of my trousers started to move as though shaken by invisible hands’, while warm air rushed up her legs, from a V-2 which ‘had exploded the other side of the Common’.

It was not always clear whether, as here, it was blast which was to blame or the tremor of the explosion spreading through the earth. One actor who was walking along Regent Street towards Broadcasting House observed ‘the glass windows in a building just ahead . . . shaking like fury’ while still ‘reflecting the blue of the sky’. A Wandsworth woman treasures the memory of one of the oddest sights of the period, seeing a huge ball of dust and debris blowing over her house in which she could distinguish a cloud of feathers – whether from a ruined mattress or some unfortunate flock of hens she never discovered. As with sound, distance seemed to bear little direct relation to damage outside the immediate vicinity of the explosion. One American noted that the Duke Street rocket had not even knocked off the hat of a friend near enough to it to be ‘conscious . . . of a sheet of flame’ and to endure ‘for a minute or two following the explosion . . . a rain of minute particles of glass’, although ‘windows in buildings a mile and a half distant were blown out’.

What it felt like to be on the distant fringes of an explosion is vividly recalled by a man then working in the New Kent Road who was waiting for a train at the Elephant and Castle Station when a V-2 landed in St George’s Circus, nearly a quarter of a mile away:

I stood on the station leaning over the parapet awaiting my train . . . when this awful tearing draught occurred, the sky lit up by a myriad of colours, a bright mauve being predominant, followed by an explosion that . . . [left] my ears affected for days. The station parapet, a massive stonework affair, literally lifted quite six inches, pushing my hands in the air – then dust, smoke and an acrid smell in the nostrils. I felt shaking in my limbs. It was so silent: no whistle like a bomb, or the throb of a doodle, but this awful draught.

Of all the manifestations of the rocket, to those not directly harmed by it, the most spectacular was the airburst, which, to Dornberger’s despair, had become such a common sight over the Blizna rocket range. One wartime schoolboy remembers his newspaper round in Tottenham being enlivened by ‘an enormous explosion in the sky . . . like an enormous firework, or a whole boxful of rockets going off together, with all the colours of the rainbow’. An RAF dental officer at Biggin Hill watched ‘a succession of fine curved black lines emerge from behind a cloud at a very great height, fanning out across the blue sky . . . as though a pebble was thrown . . . and the ripples were spreading out’. The writer William Sansom, based in Westminster, described seeing a premature V-2 explosion in even more poetic terms:

When this occurred in daylight, there appeared suddenly and silently – as once in a clear-blue afternoon sky – a white expanding blossom of smoke like a puff of anti-aircraft fire, only larger; and only some seconds afterwards echoing down to earth its resonant, distant thunderclap of sound. At night a rocket-burst occurring far up, without warning, would paint an abrupt orange moon in the high black sky; again silently, suddenly, arriving and expanding and quickly fading, as though up in the night an evil orange eye had winked at man’s frailty.

One of the first rockets to break up in the air disintegrated above the village of Tillingham, near the coast between Bradwell-on-Sea and Burnham-on-Crouch, one hot September afternoon. In the village school, suddenly ‘shaken by a tremendous explosion’, was one ten-year-old boy who, like his classmates, was excited rather than alarmed:

The window above my head shattered and we all rushed out into the playground. High above the village it looked as though a giant handful of silver paper had been thrown into the air as the broken casing of the rocket floated down in the afternoon sun. . . . On arriving home I found that the V-2’s rocket engine had landed in the field opposite our bungalow. Only two or three feet of the six-foot, one-ton engine was visible above the ground. Some weeks later, my cousin with his team of four Suffolk Punches helped to drag the engine to the side of the field where it was later collected by the army.

To be in the middle of an airburst was even more impressive: One night-fighter pilot, travelling in an unarmed transport, an Airspeed Oxford, nearby achieved the unique feat of being shot down by a V-2:

We were flying over Hertfordshire, just north of London, at about 2000 feet. The naked fields rolled peacefully by, and from an almost cloudless sky the comforting sun smiled down on the frost-cracked earth. . . . I was feeling very moved by the promise of spring. . . .

And then, like a sudden blotch in the blue sky, there appeared a small, reddish cloud about half a mile ahead and high above us. . . . At one moment there was nothing and then, in a flash, it was there, complete, ugly and menacing. As we flew on, gazing in atonishment at this phenomenon, smoky tendrils spread outwards and downwards from its billowing heart. . . . This was no cloud; it was a V-2 rocket, exploding prematurely. . . . In a moment it was nearly overhead. Then something big and black smacked down heavily into a ploughed field just ahead of us. The soil spurted up as it went in and all over the field little puffs of earth begun to spring up as smaller fragments of the rocket rained down. . . . The air all around us was filled with assorted ironmongery . . . pieces of casing, cylinders, gear wheels, nuts, bolts and straggling lengths of wire went whizzing past. . . .

At last the air cleared. . . . We . . . turned and circled over the field. Some farm workers were running out to gather souvenirs and one of them made for the most tempting prize, the big casing that we had seen crashing to the earth. He had taken a good grip on the casing, but then he instantly let go of it and started hopping around sucking his fingers.

Welcome though they were, the airbursts deprived the British authorities of the opportunity to acquire a complete V-2, which was essential if the bomb-disposal section of the Royal Engineers were to learn how to deal with any rockets that failed to explode. An almost undamaged V-1 had fallen into British hands during the first ten days of the flying-bomb campaign, but the V-2s proved less accommodating. As one leading expert, Major Hartley, explained, ‘with the outer casings made red hot by atmospheric pressure, any actual or other technical weakness was more likely to result in a premature burst than failure to detonate on arrival’. It was not until the night of Sunday, 11 March 1945, after six months of rocket bombardment, that the first unexploded V-2 was reported, and ‘at first light on the morning of the twelfth,’ Major Hartley recorded, the officer responsible for bomb disposal in the area – the missile had landed in a field at Paglesham in Essex – ‘started to make his reconnaissance’.

The entry hole made by the rocket was impressive, a shaft five and a half feet wide and apparently some eighteen deep. [Major] Gerhold had himself lowered down it and soon discovered minute traces of grey paint adhering to the sides while in the loose soil at the bottom were small fragments of fibre glass and plywood. . . . There could be no reasonable doubt but that an unexploded V-2 warhead had passed that way. . . . From the nature of the entry hole it was evident that a large sized excavation was going to be necessary and . . . no very speedy recovery of the remains of the rocket could be anticipated. From the point of view of the Civil Defence authorities the incident in a field on a remote farm was of no particular urgency. . . . However, as a specimen it was obviously of great interest. A strong excavation party was soon at work.

The sweating soldiers were still digging when the following Sunday, 18 March, news arrived of a second unexploded rocket, at Hutton near Brentwood, also in Major Gerhold’s area, and he immediately set off for it ‘armed with authority to disregard speed restrictions’. Once again, however, it seemed that recovery was likely to be a long job – but this time there was another complication, sightseers: