Triumph and Tragedy (The Second World War) (9 page)

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rooftops by hidden collaborators. The crowd scattered, but after a short moment of panic the solemn dedication of the liberation of Paris proceeded to its end.

By August 30 our troops were crossing the Seine at many points.
6
Enemy losses had been tremendous: 400,000

men, half of them prisoners, 1300 tanks, 20,000 vehicles, 1500 field guns. The German Seventh Army, and all divisions that had been sent to reinforce it, were torn to shreds. The Allied break-out from the beach-head had been delayed by bad weather and Hitler’s mistaken resolve. But once that battle was over, everything went with a run, and the Seine was reached six days ahead of the planned time.

There has been criticism of slowness on the British front in Normandy, and the splendid American advances of the later stages seemed to indicate greater success on their part than on ours. It is therefore necessary to emphasise again that the whole plan of campaign was to pivot on the British front and draw the enemy’s reserves in that direction in order to help the American turning movement. The object of the Second British Army was described in its original plan as “to protect the flank of the U.S. armies while the latter captured Cherbourg, Angers, Nantes, and the Brittany ports.” By determination and hard fighting this was achieved. General Eisenhower, who fully comprehended the work of his British comrades, wrote in his official report:

“Without the great sacrifices made by the Anglo-Canadian armies in the brutal, slugging battles for Caen and Falaise the spectacular advances made elsewhere by the Allied forces could never have come about.”

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3

The Pilotless Bombardment

The Attack on London Begins, June
13 —
The
Construction and Performance of the Flying Bomb

— The Destruction of the Guards Chapel, June
18

—
Damage and Casualties — Allied Counter-Measures — I Appoint a Small Committee, June
22 —
My Speech to the Commons, July
6 —

Bomber Command Find New Targets — The ReDeployment of the Anti-Aircraft Batteries Along the
Coast, July
17 —
The Flying Bomb is Mastered —

Credit for All — The Long-Range Rocket —

Controversy About its Size
—
The Swedish Rocket
and the Scientific Intelligence Report of August
26

—
An Impressive Technical Achievement — The
First Rockets Fall on London, September
8 —
The
Advance of the Allied Armies — An Opinion by
Speer — The Failure of the “V3
”—
The Sufferings
of Belgium — Duncan Sandys’ Report to the War
Cabinet on Guided Missiles.

T
HE LONG-STUDIED ASSAULT on England by unmanned missiles now began: the target was Greater London. For more than a year we had argued among ourselves about the character and scale of the attack, and every preparation which our wits could devise and our resources permit had been made in good time.

In the early hours of June 13, exactly a week after D-Day, four pilotless aircraft crossed our coast. They were the Triumph and Tragedy

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premature result of a German order, sent urgently on D-Day in reaction to our successes in Normandy. One reached Bethnal Green where it killed six people and injured nine; the others caused no casualties. Nothing further happened until late on June 15, when the Germans started their campaign of “retaliation”
(Vergeltung)
in earnest. More than two hundred of the missiles came against us within twenty-four hours, and over three thousand were to follow in the next five weeks.

The Flying Bomb, as we came to call it, was named “VI” by Hitler, since he hoped — with some reason — that it was only the first of a series of terror weapons which German research would provide. To Londoners, the new weapon was soon known as the “doodlebug” or “buzz bomb” from the strident sound of its engine, which was a jet of new and ingenious design. The bomb flew at speeds up to four hundred miles an hour, and at heights around three thousand feet, and it carried a ton of explosive. It was steered by a magnetic compass, and its range was governed by a small propeller which was driven round by the passage of the bomb through the air. When the propeller had revolved a number of times which corresponded to the distance of London from the launching site, the controls of the missile were tripped to make it dive to earth. The blast damage was all the more vicious because the bomb usually exploded before penetrating the ground.

This new form of attack imposed upon the people of London a burden perhaps even heavier than the air-raids of 1940 and 1941. Suspense and strain were more prolonged.

Dawn brought no relief, and cloud no comfort. The man going home in the evening never knew what he would find; his wife, alone all day or with the children, could not be certain of his safe return. The blind impersonal nature of the

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missile made the individual on the ground feel helpless.

There was little that he could do, no human enemy that he could see shot down.

My daughter Mary was still serving in the Hyde Park Anti-Aircraft Battery. On the morning of Sunday, June 18, when I was at Chequers, Mrs. Churchill told me she would pay it a visit. She found the battery in action. One bomb had passed over it and demolished a house in the Bayswater Road. While my wife and daughter were standing together on the grass they saw a tiny black object dive out of the clouds, which looked as if it would fall very near Downing Street. My car had gone to collect the letters, and the driver was astonished to see all the passers-by in Parliament Square fall flat on their faces. There was a dull explosion near by and everyone went about his business. The bomb had fallen on the Guards Chapel at Wellington Barracks. A special service for which a large number of distinguished officers of the Brigade, active and retired, had gathered was going on. There was a direct hit. The whole building was demolished in a second, and nearly two hundred Guardsmen, including many distinguished officers, and their relations and friends, were left killed or maimed under the ruins. This was a tragic event. I was still in bed working at my boxes when my wife returned. “The battery has been in action,” she said, “and the Guards Chapel is destroyed.”

I gave directions at once that the Commons should retire again to the Church House, whose modern steel structure offered somewhat more protection than the Palace of Westminster. This involved a lot of messages and rearrangement. We had a brief interlude in Secret Session, and a Member indignantly asked, “Why have we come

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back here?” Before I could reply another Member intervened. “If the honourable gentleman will walk a few hundred yards to Birdcage Walk he will see the reason.”

There was a long silence and the matter dropped.

As the days passed, every borough in London was hit. The worst damage lay in a belt extending from Stepney and Poplar southwestward to Wandsworth and Mitcham. Of individual boroughs Croydon suffered most hits, including eight bombs in a single day, followed by Wandsworth, Lewisham, Camberwell, Woolwich and Greenwich, Beckenham, Lambeth, Orpington, Coulsdon and Purley, West Ham, Chislehurst, and Mitcham.
1
About three-quarters of a million houses were damaged, twenty-three thousand of them beyond repair. But although London was the worst sufferer the casualties and the damage spread well outside its bounds. Parts of Sussex and Kent, popularly known as “Bomb Alley” because they lay on the line of route, paid a heavy toll; and bombs, although all were aimed at Tower Bridge, fell far and wide over the countryside from Hampshire to Suffolk. One landed near my home at Westerham, killing, by a cruel mischance, twenty-two homeless children and five grown-ups collected in a refuge made for them in the woods.

Our Intelligence had accurately foretold six months before how the missiles would perform, but we had not found it easy to prepare fighter and gun defences of adequate quality. Hitler had in fact believed, from trials he had witnessed of a captured Spitfire against a flying bomb, that our fighters would be useless. Our timely warning enabled us to disappoint him, but only by a narrow margin. Our fastest fighters, specially stripped and vigorously boosted, Triumph and Tragedy

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could barely overtake the speediest missiles. Many bombs did not fly as fast as their makers intended, but even so it was often difficult for our fighters to catch them in time. To make things worse, the enemy fired the bombs in salvoes, in the hope of saturating our defences. Our normal procedure of “scrambling” was too slow, and so the fighters had to fly standing patrols, finding and chasing their quarry with the help of instructions and running commentaries from radar stations and observer corps posts on the ground. The flying bombs were much smaller than normal aircraft, and so they were difficult either to see or to hit. There were poor chances of a “kill” from much more than three hundred yards; but it was dangerous to open fire from less than two hundred yards, because the exploding bomb might destroy the attacking fighter.

The red flame of their exhausts made the bombs easier to see in the dark, and during the first two nights our anti-aircraft batteries in London fired on them and claimed to have brought many down. This tended to serve the enemy’s purpose, since some of the missiles might otherwise have fallen in open country beyond the capital.

Firing in the Metropolitan area was therefore stopped, and by June 21 the guns had moved to the advanced line on the North Downs. Many of the bombs flew at heights which we at first thought would be awkward for the guns, rather too low for the heavies and too high for the others; but fortunately it proved possible to use the heavies against lower targets than we had previously thought. We had realised of course that some bombs would escape both fighters and guns, and these we tried to parry by a vast balloon barrage deployed to the south and southeast of London. In the course of the campaign the barrage did in fact catch 232 bombs, each of which would almost inevitably have fallen somewhere in the London area.

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Nor had we been content with defensive measures. The original “ski sites,” ninety-six in number, from which the bombs were to have been launched in France had been heavily attacked by our bombers from December 1943

onwards and substantially eliminated.
2
But, despite all our efforts, the enemy had succeeded in launching the assault from new and less pretentious sites, and bombs were penetrating our defences in numbers which, although far smaller than the enemy had originally hoped, were presenting us with many problems. For the first week of the bombardment, I kept the control in my own hands. But on June 20 I passed it to an Inter-Service Committee under Duncan Sandys which was known by the code name of

“Crossbow.”

Prime Minister to

22 June 44

Home Secretary, Sir