Hitler's Revenge Weapons
Page 13
The first V1 to fall in the author’s area landed beside The Grange in Sewardstone, at 13.40 on Monday, 26 June. Chief Warden Ted Carter (Chapter Six) was on the spot in minutes, to find that the ‘Fly’ had destroyed much of the house and its contents, leaving the propulsion unit, still very hot, in a crater 4-feet deep and 10-feet in diameter. Two casualties were recovered and the ARP had the whole area cleared within an hour of the missile’s impact – ready for the next one. They did not have long to wait; on 27 June another V1 landed on Lancaster Cottages, Avey Lane, Waltham Abbey, killing several cows sheltering from the rain in their shed, and this was quickly followed by another at Enfield Lock, where it killed four people and injured two more. So it went on, with increasing, if sporadic intensity – getting too close for comfort.
With 2,000 V1s having been launched from France by 29 June, personal tragedies abounded and rumours were circulating that there was worse to come with a new and more devastating weapon. It has been claimed that all this was now causing the traditional British ‘stiff upper lip’ to sag, but the author cannot recall any overt sense of despair, especially with the imminent prospect of an advance by the Allies into the continent of Europe. True, many Londoners had suffered and were suffering, with 213 children killed and 500 injured by the V1s already, and there was again talk of evacuation, somewhat tempered when a V1 destroyed a fully-occupied evacuation centre at Westerham, Kent, on 30 June, which killed twenty-two children and eight nurses, underlining the need for evacuees to go much farther afield to escape errant V1s. In fact, a partial evacuation did go ahead on 5 July 1944, the second time in five years that bewildered children and some of their mothers were leaving their homes; so they went with no great enthusiasm. For the remainder, life went on more or less as usual, many cinemagoers staying in their seats when the screens showed a Doodlebug alert, and long weekend parties continued unabated, albeit with ‘Doodlebug watchers’ posted at high points nearby.
This photograph is believed to have been taken at Dartford, Greater London, in the early stages of the V1 campaign. (Author, Courtesy HTM Peenemünde)
One-hundred-and-twenty-one civilian and service worshippers were killed, and 68 seriously wounded, when the Guards Chapel on Birdcage Walk took a direct hit from a V1 during the Sunday morning service on 18 June. Only a small part of the Chapel could be incorporated in the new building shown here. (Author)
As a schoolboy allowed to roam freely around rural Cheshunt and Waltham Holy Cross, on the northern outskirts of London, and throughout the capital itself, the author saw, heard and survived unscathed the onslaught by the flying bombs, as he had the blitz in 1940 and the ‘baby blitz’ of early 1944. He had watched the battles between the RAF and the mighty Luftwaffe raging overhead, day and night, and saw London burn, night after night, while multiple searchlights searched for the elusive bombers and the docile but dangerous barrage balloons waited for their prey, the whole scene set to the music of sirens, guns, bombs and the incessant clanging bells of the emergency vehicles. This was the ‘London Concerto’ of the time, and it would be performed many times, to different tunes in the next few months.
Peter Rooke, the head boy of the author’s school at the time (Cheshunt Grammar School), and later a prominent local historian, added much to the V-weapons story in his Cheshunt at War. With the school having no dedicated shelter, the pupils were merely ordered to a strengthened centre lobby or to get under their desks, depending on how much warning they were given as the ominous sound approached – and there were some near misses. On 22 July the sirens wailed and the noise of a pulse jet ceased abruptly as the V1 crossed the Lea Valley and glided directly towards the school. As it did so it brushed the top of a tree in neighbouring Grundy Park, the explosion wrecking the park’s sports pavilion but merely breaking a few classroom windows and depositing a large piece of timber onto the roof of the headmaster’s car. As this was an airburst there was no crater, but the blast blew the leaves off several trees and stripped the bark of one, as it scattered large, tubular pieces of the bomb around the park.
Fate intruded again a few days later when the headmaster, Mr Moxom, decided that, with a slight lull in the hitherto almost continuous attacks, the end-of-term swimming gala should go ahead, as planned, at the nearby pool on the River Lea. The whole school mustered there just as the offensive resumed and a horrified Mr Moxom was forced to watch a V1 glide directly and silently towards the swimming pool – but it missed, to crash beyond the packed grandstand. This was all getting too close for comfort but, in the event, no school in the area suffered a direct hit and as time went on there was a noticeable tendency for many residents of the area to ignore the warnings, diving for cover only when the unmistakeable sound of a doodlebug’s engine stopped. While the V1s were now getting most of the attention in and around London, the air continued to be full of other warlike noises, the author remembering the early morning of 5 August, the demented roar of an American B-24 Liberator as it skimmed the rooftops in its death throes, before crashing in a nearby field on the A10, exploding on impact and killing all aboard. The bomber had collided with a B-17 Flying Fortress, which crashed elsewhere, both having been en route to the home of Hitler’s Vergeltungswaffen.
The V2 which came down at Chiswick, Greater London, at the start of the V2 offensive caused widespread damage. (Medmenham Collection)
A V1 struck trees off Honey Lane, Waltham Abbey, onto Larsen’s Recreation Ground, where the author had been playing a little earlier. (Courtesy Janet Grove/WAHS)
V1s in flight kept everyone guessing: when would the engine stop – either to disrupt everyday life or fall harmlessly in open ground? On the afternoon of 17 August 1944, during their summer holiday, the author and his sister were rowing on Connaught Waters, Chingford, when a doodlebug passed over their heads, heading north-west, its engine shutting down shortly thereafter. They agreed that their house was in the firing line, but there was nothing they could do about it, and they were going to get their full two shillings worth on the water before making for home. Minutes later, Ted Carter, playing bowls in the Sports Field in Albury Ride spotted the same missile seemingly heading for Goffs Oak. They were all right, Ted later reporting that it had left ‘an awful mess’, with a crater in the middle of Goffs Lane, demolishing several small cottages, killing six of the residents and leaving twelve injured – but the boaters’ house had survived.
The weather on 24 August was atrocious, with low cloud, poor visibility and drenching rain well into the night, as multiple V1s droned overhead Ted Carter and his wardens, invisible to them, the fighters and AA, and thus giving them a high degree of immunity, except from the radar-laid guns and balloons), again with those below left to guess where they would come down. One did come down on the fringe of the local area, at Holmwood Road, Enfield, Ted reporting that the darkness and heavy rain added to the chaos among the severely damaged houses, in a nightmare of ‘dirt, muddle, and stink of leaking gas, wet sodden leaves, all set against the eerie light of the burning gas main’, the cries of the injured and the wailing of sirens, in what had been, minutes before, a quiet little side-street’.
On 26 December 1944 a V2 destroyed the Prince of Wales public house on Mackenzie Road, Islington, which dated back to 1856, many customers enjoying the Christmas festivities being among the 68 fatalities. (Medmenham Collection)
Understandably, the people of Cheshunt and Waltham Holy Cross kept repeating the question they had asked during the heavy bombing of 1940 and 1941: ‘what were the Germans looking for in their area?’ There were no significant military installations, so they could only assume that the bombers were targeting the Royal Gunpowder Mills, on the River Lea at the north-west corner of Waltham Abbey, but if so they were unlucky, with only one bomb exploding at the very northern tip of the site, without causing any damage or injury. In any event, the question was irrelevant in the V-weapons campaign, the missiles being too inaccurate to task against pin-point targets, they being aimed at central London (Tower Bridge) – so
me ten miles away.
On 20 September Warden Carter was soon on the scene again after a V1 ploughed into Cobbins Brook, on the edge of Larsen’s Recreation Ground, Waltham Abbey, the author having left this favourite playground only a couple of hours before. The impact was at 21.35, and although there were no casualties, some 400 houses were damaged nearby. Again, there was much praise for the exemplary reaction of the ARP and local volunteers, in what was described as a copybook operation. The ARP were now well and truly rehearsed for this sort of eventuality.
From late August 1944 there had been a progressive reduction in the number of flying bombs reaching England, prompting Duncan Sandys to announce, on 7 September, that only sporadic raids by them could be expected thereafter, delivered mainly from the Heinkel bombers flying over the North Sea. He added that, in the past eighty days, 2,300 V1s had eluded the defences and reached Greater London, which had sustained 92 per cent of the fatal casualties caused by the V1s throughout England, but that the battle of the flying bombs was now all but over. They left a legacy; in addition to the all-pervading fatigue of war, the writer H.E. Bates reported that London and its people were now ‘grey with the dust which hung over everything like a mask of death’. There were also rumours spreading throughout the country, perhaps stemming from – or surely encouraged by German propaganda – that members of the Royal Family had been killed, Buckingham Palace had been destroyed, 600 flying bombs per day had pounded the capital and that poison gas had been used; above all, that there was more to come, with the addition of a new and more powerful weapon. Other than the latter threat, none of this was true, but morale did suffer, there was a rise in the criticism of national defence. Sadly, V1 attacks had not ended, and the time had come for the V2 rockets to join the party.
On Tuesday 2 January 1945, at 9.20 am, a V2 destroyed the Acorn Brush Factory in Swanfield Road, Waltham Cross, killing 7 and injuring 108. (Courtesy Daphne Rooke)
At 18.43 on 8 September an enormous explosion destroyed the tranquillity of that late summer evening, followed by a short rushing sound and a second bang, signalling that a rocket had passed through the transonic zone, just before the first V2 to arrive in Britain struck Chiswick, in west London. Sixteen seconds later, a second rocket fell harmlessly in Epping Long Green, shaking windows and doors in nearby Waltham Abbey. At first, Chief Warden Ted Carter believed this to be the ‘rumble and echo’ of approaching thunder and went on picking apples in his garden, but after a few ‘phone calls it was clear that the V2 offensive had begun. Accompanied by Wardens Ellis and Smith, Ted made his way through Epping Forest to Parndon Wood, where they found a crater, 8-feet deep and 20-feet in diameter, surrounded by a mass of light alloy fragments. The size of the crater was not surprising, given that the V2 weighed some 13 tons, had a one-ton warhead of Amatol high explosive, and that its near vertical, supersonic dive gave it a terminal velocity of some 3,000 mph.
The government had expected rocket attacks on England, but kept this from the public, and continued to do so well after the first V2s had landed in England, by perpetuating the myth that the sudden explosions were nothing more than ‘exploding gas mains’. Such stories held little water, especially among those on the receiving end of the new weapon, also because there were so many of such incidents and because the German public radio was proclaiming the success of rockets which would ‘bring London to its knees’ – so eventually the government had to come clean. By then every V2 which landed in England, or just off the coast, was being given a ‘Big Ben’ number, thirty-six being listed in September 1944, ninety-five in October and 150 in November.
The second rocket to hit the author’s district, arrived at Goose Green, Hoddesdon, on 5 October, and the third, on Sunday, 12 November, found its way to the middle of St Leonard’s Road, Nazing. This was the worst V2 incident locally, to date, destroying a small hamlet of cottages, close to where the author was visiting his uncle at Monkham’s estate. Ted Carter remembers the very sorry sight of workers from all the emergency services and local civilians ploughing their way through the rubble, searching for casualties, finally to recover ten bodies and many injured.
The worst destruction caused by a V2 in the author’s area occurred on 7 March 1945 when a V2 impacted on Highbridge Road, the only direct route between Waltham Cross and Waltham Abbey, and close to where the author had been fishing on the River Lea only a short time before. Four people were killed and 53 injured. (Courtesy Janet Grove/WAHS)
Smithfield Meat Market and Farringdon Railway Station, below, suffered extensive damage and over 150 fatal casualties from a V2 on 8 March 1945. (Courtesy Janet Grove/WAHS)
A V2 ended its days at the confluence of Bury Green Road, Cromwell Road and Churchgate on Sunday afternoon 14 January 1945, breaking all the windows on the south side of St Mary’s Church where 100 children were attending Sunday School. (Courtesy Janet Grove/WAHS)
Farther afield, and arguably the worst V2 incident in London, occurred at New Cross, Lewisham, at 12.26 on 25 November, when a V2 demolished Woolworth’s and the next door Co-op Stores, both packed with people, the former said to have ‘bulged outwards before imploding’, the passengers in a passing bus and army lorry also adding to the 168 deaths and 121 seriously injured. Debris scattered between the Town Hall and New Cross Station took three hectic days to clear.
Christmas Day 1944 was quiet, with no missiles reported over London, but Boxing Day saw another major tragedy caused by a V2 which fell beside a pub on Mackenzie Road, Islington, at 21.26, at the height of the festivities, causing the floor to collapse and throwing many of the revellers into the cellar below. To make matters worse, the freezing conditions and heavy fog hampered rescue and recovery, with ice having to be smashed to reach the water needed to douse several fires. Firemen and rescue teams toiled well beyond dawn on the following day, having had to tunnel into the cellar with great care, for fear that more of the building would collapse. Sixty-eight people died there that night, and hundreds more were injured.
On 2 January 1945 the author was nearby again, looking over a wall from Cedar’s Park, watching the trains go by on a branch line from Cheshunt to Enfield, when a massive explosion rent the air over Swanfield Road, Waltham Cross, as the Acorn Brush Factory disappeared in a cloud of dust and flame. There having been no warning, this was clearly another V2. Help appeared at once, from all directions, as if well-choreographed, and Ted Carter was among them. He helped load the dead and wounded into ambulances, and recalls the sight of a very brave woman, a factory clerk, standing on a box, ‘herself cut, bleeding and dirty, calling the roll and ticking the names as the survivors answered’. Ted said that this was ‘the biggest, dirtiest incident he had seen to so far’, with seven killed and 108 injured.
There was another serious V2 incident in Cheshunt at 15.30 on the afternoon of 14 January when a rocket landed on the junction of College Road and Bury Green Road leading to the cemetery. Several people had just alighted there from a No.242 bus to Cuffley, and two of those killed were visiting the grave of their daughter, who had died in the mayhem at the Acorn Factory two weeks before. Two other adults, again bound for the cemetery, were also killed and several buildings suffered considerable damage, while two children of the Thompson family, who were only 50 yards from the rocket when it exploded, were badly injured, one of whom died later in hospital. A little farther up Bury Green Road, the Misses Butler and Smerdon, two of the author’s schoolteachers, seemed completely unperturbed by the chaos around them, but had to decline advice to have ‘a nice cup of tea’, because there was no longer any water or gas on tap. Slivers of shattered glass from all the windows on the south side of St Mary’s Church, in College Road, could also have hurt many of the 100 children at Sunday School there, but miraculously, they all escaped without a scratch, and after a suitable prayer departed to their homes.
The author’s last close shave was at 17.00 on Wednesday 7 March 1945 when a V2 landed on Highbridge Street, the only road between Waltham Cross to Waltham Abbey, igniting fi
res and leaving a very deep crater some 75 feet in diameter, which immediately filled with water from severed sewage pipes, all telephone lines, gas and electricity supplies also being destroyed. The local ARP and rescue services were quick to react, the wardens setting up control points and incident rooms, while the NFS provided emergency field telephones, but it would be some time before any motor vehicles could drive around the crater between the two towns. Additional help homed in from Cheshunt and Chigwell, the WVS provided meals and mobile canteens did a roaring trade all the following day, while unsafe buildings were demolished and work began to restore the utilities and services. Meanwhile an enthusiastic bulldozer driver, while attempting to create a temporary road through the debris, ventured too close to the water-filled crater – and toppled in.
An hour earlier, the author had been fishing on the River Lea, 200 yards from the impact point, and was there again the next day to see a scene of well-organised activity and major changes to the local landscape. A wardens’ post had disappeared completely and many properties both sides of the road, including the Alms Houses, the County Court, the Home Guard Drill Hall and the Ordnance Arms had been badly damaged, some irreparably. This was to be the worst and last V2 incident in the Waltham Holy Cross district, leaving a great deal of damage, four dead and sixty-three injured.