Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s

by Norman Longmate

  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!’

  Even those on the site when the rocket landed did not at first know what had happened. Among them was an engineering worker, alone in a house in Wilmington Avenue, parallel to Staveley Road and about 200 yards from it. Having just got home from work, she had ‘put on the kettle for a cup of tea . . . and put down a bowl of food for the family cat, Billy . . . large and white and not particularly friendly’:

  I left him happily eating in the kitchen and went into the lounge to put a match to the fire. I was . . . waiting for it to burn up when Billy came into the lounge and tried to jump on my lap, as I crouched in front of the fire. This was a very unusual thing for Billy to do, so I stood up and lifted him up in my arms. He was quite still for a second, then suddenly he leapt from my arms and rushed out of the lounge and through the cellar door, which was just outside. . . . Before I could gather my senses there was an almighty explosion, quite the biggest I’ve heard. I remember seeing the half-alight lounge fire blow out at me as my legs carried me out of the lounge door to the safety of an inside corridor between the lounge and kitchen. I remember looking back at the partly boarded windows and the outside door of the lounge as I ran and they were crumping into the room. I crouched in the corridor hiding my face in the coats hanging there for a few minutes, wondering what the hell had happened. . . . Soon I ventured out to survey the damage. Every door had burst in or out, practically all the back windows, even the boarded-up ones, had been broken, the lounge fire miraculously had caused no damage. . . . It must have been sucked back into the grate where it was burning away merrily. The cat would not come up out of the cellar, not even for his food. . . .

  I don’t think I was particularly frightened, mystified maybe. I couldn’t think what had caused such a tremendous explosion. Neighbours were gathering in the road, saying ‘What was it?’ I went out of Wilmington Avenue and towards Staveley Road, where I thought the explosion had come from, but there were ARP squads setting up barriers and turning people back. . . . Presently I went to a phone box to phone my fiancé, who was on a 24-hour [pass] from the RAF and from the box I saw a very large black official-looking car drive towards Staveley Road. . . . Then I knew it was really something unusual.

  Sixteen seconds after the explosion in Staveley Road, Chiswick, a second occurred in Epping, 18 miles north-east of Whitehall, and more than 20 miles from Chiswick, destroying some wooden huts. It attracted less attention than the Chiswick incident for no one was hurt and no real damage done, but the fragments of the missile were duly collected up and taken to Epping Police Station, where they were later inspected by some of the officials who had earlier been to Chiswick. The party, less high-powered than earlier, reached the site around 9.30 and the historian of the Chiswick incident now chronicled his second rocket of the day – though, oddly, it appears in the official records as the very first:

  Incident Parndon Wood, Epping Long Lane. . . . The area was not under the alert and an enemy missile
fell in a wooded part of the open country, forming a crater about 30 feet across and 16 feet in depth. Blast caused considerable damage to undergrowth and trees but there were no casualties.

  Although, for reasons which will be explained shortly, no reports of what had happened at Chiswick or Epping appeared in the press or in wireless news bulletins, news of them rapidly crossed the Atlantic. Lord Cherwell was in Quebec, too far away to hear his ‘mare’s nest’ explode, but an informant in Downing Street sent him a detailed account in a style calculated to appeal to him:

  I was showing a visitor out and when I got to the door the policeman and guards were saying ‘Was that thunder?’ and another said ‘It sounded like bombs’. When I got back I found Room 59 had heard two explosions, close together, one slightly fainter than the other, but both loud. . . . There is going to be criticism of Morrison and Sandys for having crowed too soon.

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  A PLUME OF BLACK SMOKE

  The explosion is usually described as giving a reddish flash and a large plume of black smoke.

  Ministry of Home Security report, 24 September 1944

  The immediate response of the British government to the arrival of the rocket was to keep dark about it. The ‘sealing off’ of the country for which such elaborate plans had been prepared did not take place, but internal censorship was immediately imposed. The explosions in Chiswick and Epping brought both photographers and reporters flocking to the scene, but none of the pictures taken then appeared at the time. One reporter in Staveley Road who asked if a new type of bomb was responsible was told ‘It might have been a gas main’ but he was not deceived and, as the Chief Censor, Admiral Thompson, later recorded, ‘The Press Association reporters at those places telephoned reports of the incidents within a few minutes to their Head Office, who submitted them to censorship.’

  I suspected that at long last we were now having a taste of the much talked-of rocket and I accordingly instructed the censors to hold the reports and requested editors not to mention anything about the explosions pending further notice. The Minister of Home Security soon afterwards approved the action I had taken and informed me that he felt no doubt that the incidents had been caused by rockets.

  On Saturday morning the authorities, with the Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee in charge, endorsed the ‘silence’ policy, as Admiral Thompson discovered:

  Next day I went out to see Mr Morrison who requested me to inform editors that for the time being absolutely nothing should be published about the explosions which had undoubtedly been caused by some form of rocket shell fired from Holland; that these two explosions might well be ranging shots and that it was quite posible the enemy didn’t even know they had arrived in England, much less in any particular area. I accordingly informed Mr Will, Chairman of the N.P.E.C. [Newspaper Proprietors Emergency Council], of the request I had made to editors and soon received the reply that his Council were in entire agreement.

  The no-publicity policy had one unforeseen, offbeat result: it nearly ruined a wartime wedding, as one photographer with a Fleet Street news agency learned that morning. He had agreed to act as best man for a friend, a Daily Mirror cameraman due to get married that Saturday at the ‘journalists’ church’ of St Bride’s, Fleet Street:

  At about 9 a.m. that morning his bride-to-be telephoned me in a most agitated state as her husband-to-be, who had been on night duty at the Mirror, had not put in an appearance that morning as had been arranged. I telephoned the Mirror and they also were confused as it appeared they had sent him out to the Epping incident on Friday night and he had not returned. The next hour was spent in telephone calls to many sources . . . and it was ultimately discovered that my colleague was in an Epping police cell, having been arrested the night before for photographing the V-2 crater in the open field. . . . by some type of Reserve policeman . . . although my colleague had all the official photographic permits. . . . However, he was released and arrived at the church for his wedding with a few minutes to spare.

  Already it was clear that hopes of any warning system being possible were unfounded; radar had failed to detect either missile. The only possible counter-measure was to try to stop the rockets at source and that Saturday the Vice-Chief of the Imperial Staff, another of the ‘second eleven’ left behind while the ‘top brass’ went to Canada, sent a MOST IMMEDIATE signal to the recently promoted Field Marshal Montgomery at the Tactical Headquarters of 21 Army Group:

  2 rockets, so called V-2, landed in England yesterday. Will you please report most urgently by what approximate date you consider you can rope off the coastal area contained by ANTWERP-UTRECHT-ROTTERDAM. When this area is in our hands the threat from this weapon will probably have dispersed.

  The Vice-Chiefs of Staff decided that weekend – they met on both Saturday and Sunday – to install new radar equipment in British-held areas of the continent. To lend point to their deliberations, rocket number 3 arrived, at 9.29 on the evening of Sunday, 10 September, at North Fambridge, near Maldon, in Essex, abut 40 miles east of London. It caused no damage or casualties, while the next two were also innocuous. The fourth rocket arrived just after 9 a.m. on Monday, 11 September, at Chelsfield, near Orpington, in Kent, 16 miles from London, causing a spectacular explosion just above the ground after the warhead had hit a tree. The fifth, half an hour later, was 25 miles away, at Magdalen Laver, near Harlow, in Essex, confirming that the missile’s accuracy left much to be desired: these first shots had been spread over an area 50 miles square. Next day the Cabinet concluded that the Germans had no means of controlling their rockets in flight or of detecting where they landed and that the policy of press silence should therefore continue.

  The most serious incident so far – and the first involving an industrial target – followed, at 6.15 in the morning of Tuesday, 12 September 1944, when a rocket plunged down into the Chrysler vehicle works in Mortlake Road, Kew, a mainly residential area. Eight people were killed and 14 seriously injured and the damage to property was enormous, but, though the busy Mortlake Road, now part of the South Circular Road, ran through the very centre of the area, still the secret was kept. Thereafter the rockets went on arriving at an annoying and increasing but not, so far as the Civil Defence services were concerned, an intolerable rate. There were three more on the 12th, one on the 13th and three on the 14th, of which the first landed in the centre of Walthamstow, the start of what was to be a long series. It came down, like many of the most destructive of its successors, in the early morning – in fact at 4.55 a.m. – causing the largest crater so far, 50 feet across and 10 feet deep, and demolishing, or leaving fit only for demolition, 13 houses within a 100 feet radius of the point of impact, and badly damaging another 39 up to 250 feet away. Luckily only one side of the road was built up at this point, but even so 6 people were killed outright, one of the 10 badly hurt died later, and another 54 had lesser injuries.

  The rocket at Farnan Avenue caused much ill-feeling in north-east London, where the lack of warning – for which the government was not to blame – and the conspiracy of silence about the rocket danger – for which it was responsible – were blamed for the loss of life and other suffering. The Civil Defence controller for Walthamstow, a local alderman, was scathing about the official policy in the wartime history which the borough published a year later:

  At the end of August . . . Mr Duncan Sandys . . . fatuously and prematurely announced ‘the Battle of London is over’13. . . . The next government pronouncement was to the effect that the second Battle of London was ‘won but not over’. What exactly this meant in English it was difficult to decide, but, as the speaker was Mr Willink, the Minister of Health – responsible for evacuation – it had the to-beexpected but lamentable result of causing thousands of evacuees to come back to London. It also unfortunately inclined people to abandon the habit of sleeping in shelters. . . . I drew the attention of the Regional Commissioner to this when he visited us. I suggested that the policy of secrecy on the one hand, and the fatuous optimism of go
vernment speakers on the other, ought to be debited with these six deaths.

  Walthamstow, a robustly independent, mainly working-class area, was not at all impressed by the arguments in favour of secrecy:

  From the beginning . . . local authorities were variously advised by London Region to announce to their citizens that the explosions were those of gas mains, ammunition wagons or delayed action bombs. This, of course, was absurd and one of our own people dealt with the situation very adequately when, looking at a 50-foot crater in Farnan Avenue, he said solemnly to the Regional Commissioner, who had enquired the time of the incident: ‘The Delayed Action Bomb fell at 04.55 hours, sir’.

  The rocket bombardment once again put the families of many servicemen in greater danger than their menfolk, and exposed those who did have a dangerous job to new risks while on leave. On the day before Walthamstow had its first brush with the V-2s, and with the government, one young radar operator had arrived home in Farnan Avenue while his ship, HMS Leeds, was in dock for boiler-cleaning: