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

by Norman Longmate

I walked to the shops with my mother and spoke to many of her neighbours who were about their various cleaning activities on our street. The topic of conversation seemed to be the mysterious explosions that had occurred in the London area . . . and there was talk about the official explanation, which was reported as gas explosions.

  This scepticism was now to be vindicated:

  I woke in the early hours of the next morning to a terrific explosion, which I imagined as my boat being torpedoed. I saw a large hole and imagined this to be a gap in the ship’s side. It was only when I realized I was in bed, I remembered I was at home. I . . . attempted to go to sleep again when my parents insisted I should get up because the road was on fire. I quickly dressed and walked between the ruins of the houses adjacent to my own home. There were large piles of rubble by the side of the road and the gas main was burning furiously. Water was cascading down the footway from broken water mains. I was one of the first in the road and there were a number of cries from the debris. I was joined by one other person and . . . we uncovered the head and shoulders of a young man who said he was a New Zealander training with the Royal Navy in the North-East Polytechnic, which was situated nearby. We were unable to remove him . . . as a slate penetrated his side between his ribs. . . . At this point the rescue team arrived and we left him to them. I next recall seeing an elderly man still in his bed on the remains of an upper floor in a room with only one wall standing. As we went to reach him, he cried out that there were younger members of his family in the wreckage. . . . He asked if we would rescue them first. We were able to trace their position by their cries and clear the way to a mother and daughter who were together in bed and trapped by heavy timbers across their legs. I recall that this young girl, who was in the ATS, explained that her army skirt was underneath the mattress and was therefore being very adequately pressed! . . . We joked about the situation in which they found themselves, trapped in bed, with a body of men trying to release them. . . . I recall one woman being dead in the branches of a tree, her chow dog being dead at the base of it. . . . I did not return to my own home till about 4 p.m.

  Even men in Ack-Ack units, who had been the first to learn about the flying bombs, had no knowledge of this new danger. One Bofors gunner, on leave in Croydon from the Kent coast, was astounded by the discovery:

  I had previously written to an aunt saying how glad I was she was at last having peace and quiet and she wrote back and said ‘I like your idea of peace and quiet. Things are popping off all over the place!’ I took this to mean she was still being troubled by flying-bombs. . . . My wife said nothing to me about rockets, probably because she didn’t want to spoil my leave and didn’t wish to worry me. Next day, however, I was chatting to my neighbour over the garden fence and he said:

  ‘What do you think about the rockets?’

  ‘Rockets?’ I said. ‘What rockets?’

  ‘Didn’t you know?’ he said. ‘Haven’t you been told?’

  I was speechless. At that very moment there was an almighty explosion and slowly a huge column of black smoke rose in the sky in the direction of Catford.

  ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘That’s one!’

  I was flabbergasted and very worried. . . . All that effort and suffering on the gun sites for nothing. No wonder they hadn’t told us troops. It would have shattered our morale.

  Kammler’s twelfth rocket landed three hours after the one in Walthamstow, in Dairsie Road, Woolwich, with very similar results, followed by a harmless ‘airburst’ – of the kind that had earlier so much troubled Dornberger – over Rotherfield in Sussex at lunchtime, and the fourteenth met a watery grave in a filter bed of the Metropolitan Water Board works at Sunbury, at 4 a.m. on Friday, 15 September. This was the point at which the Ministry of Home Security undertook its first stocktaking, in a report circulated ten days later:

  Out of the 14 projectiles reported crossing the coast, 8 fell in London Region. This is a slightly higher ratio than was obtained in the early days of FLY attack. The mean aiming error so far, however, appears to be larger. . . . A curious feature of the distribution so far obtained is that, of the incidents outside the London Region, all were very close to the correct line or to the correct range for London. The beaten zone [i.e. the area affected by V-2s] is thus approximately in the shape of a cross, as if . . . it were possible to control either line or range but not both.

  The early assumption that, because it plunged deeper into the earth, the rocket would be less destructive than the flying-bomb was not borne out by this larger sample. The four rockets in residential areas had destroyed all houses within an 85 foot radius, compared to 72 feet for the V-1, had made others uninhabitable up to 108 feet, compared to 102, and caused serious damage up to 181 feet, against the V-1’s 172. The death rate per missile for the first week of the attack was identical, at 2.7 for each V-1 or V-2, though this figure had dropped to 2.1 for the V-1 ‘as evacuation took effect and more people took shelter’. The V-1 had, however, seriously injured slightly more people per incident than the V-2 – 9.1 against 8.5 – but on crater size the rocket was an easy winner, the average being ‘34½ ft diameter by 9½ ft deep, the maximum being 50 ft by 10ft‘ compared to ’an average crater size of 17 ft by 4 ft for FLY’.

  Only two rockets were definitely known to have broken up in the air, though others might have done so, the report writer suggested, but about its arrival on the ground there was now all too much evidence:

  Two loud reports are commonly heard . . . presumably associated with the ‘shell-wave’ due to the arrival of the projectile and with the detonation. . . . Other sounds of long duration, rumbling or crackling, may also be heard and are presumably due to air disturbances in the wake of the projectile. The rocket is infrequently seen with the unaided eye, particularly at night, when it is usually described as glowing red or orange. . . . Several persons claim to have seen the projectile. They describe it as long and narrow (‘about the size of a Spitfire without wings’) and travelling very fast . . . nearly east to west. The explosion is usually described as giving a reddish flash and a large plume of black smoke.

  By now others had suffered the same experience as some of the residents of Staveley Road, Chiswick, in not hearing the explosion which had wrecked their homes. The Civil Defence controller of Walthamstow later offered an explanation:

  This so-called ‘zone of silence’ was a marked feature of rocket incidents, persons within a range of even up to 250 or 300 yards not hearing the explosion although they would, of course, feel the earth tremor when the rocket burst on the ground. The zone of silence was apparently caused by the terrific speed of the out-rush of the blast driving the air before it and in . . . a practical vacuum, no sound could travel.

  The silence was not always total. One woman who lived almost opposite a house which suffered a direct hit recalls a noise ‘like a heavy sigh, or a rapid intake of breath’, while other reported a sudden pressure in the ears. As the bombardment went on, such experiences became daily more common. After lunch on Friday, 15 September, another rocket landed in the water, this time in the Thames Estuary at All Hallows in Kent, and there were five more on the 16th and another five on the 17th, until Kammler reached his quarter-century just before 7 o’clock in the evening of 17 September, nine days almost to the minute since his first successful strike. Rocket number 25, in Adelaide Road, Brockley, in south-east London, was one of the worst so far, with 14 dead and 41 badly injured, illustrating once again the capricious nature of the missile, for 14 of the first 25 had caused no casualties at all and many had done no worse damage than set a corn-rick on fire or destroy a patch of brambles. On 18 September – marked by a solitary rocket which scored a direct hit on a church at West Norwood – the Cabinet decided to postpone a decision about publicity until 24 September.

  It had previously been agreed that once the Germans publicly claimed to be bombarding London with rockets some form of ‘official statement’ would have to be made, and the Germans now put out what the Chief Cens
or considered a ‘fishing report’ on Berlin radio to the effect that an unspecified secret weapon had destroyed Euston Station. It was agreed, however, that this hardly qualified, and a meeting of ministers where Admiral Thompson represented his minister, Brendan Bracken, decided that their lips should stay sealed.

  Mr Herbert Morrison pointed out that the rockets were causing no panic nor any real anxiety among the population. And I reported that editors were in full agreement with the policy of silence. It was therefore decided to ignore the German report and that I should inform editors that they were to continue to report nothing about the rockets. . . . Our policy of complete silence mystified the enemy, who could not be sure even that his rockets were landing in England.

  One reason for the government’s decision was the expectation that the whole nuisance would soon be over, for on 17 September Operation Market Garden had been launched, to secure a bridgehead at Arnhem and thus, it was hoped, end the war by a quick thrust into Germany itself. At the very least Holland might be liberated and the known launching sites be overrun. No lack of information existed about their general area, for the Dutch hated the Germans with a loathing second only to that the Poles felt for ‘the master race’, and information poured in from informants in The Hague. The trouble was that, by the time the bombers arrived, the birds had flown, while, even when their location was known, identifying the sites from the air was extremely difficult. Storage sites were an easier target and on 14 and 17 September Bomber Command dropped around 200 tons of bombs on suspect estates, at Raaphorst and Eikenhorst, in the suburb of Wassenaar, reserving a third, Ter Horst, for later attention. Holland was within range, too, of the fighters of ADGB, which flew constant ‘interdiction’ patrols, firing on any vehicles and troops they spotted. This effort produced no visible (or indeed any real) results and efforts to locate the rockets when fired had little more success. Special teams were formed to try to spot the flash as a rocket was fired, and to fix its position by sound-ranging equipment. The 10th Survey Regiment, Royal Artillery, was sent to Belgium as part of a new formation, 105 Mobile Air Reporting Unit, stationed at Malines near Brussels, while the 11th Survey Regiment was established near Canterbury, as a form of long stop, but neither proved able to provide even the minute or so’s warning essential if anyone was to get into shelter in time.

  On 25 September 1944, by now aware that the great gamble at Arnhem had failed, the Chiefs of Staff formally reported to the Cabinet on the rocket menace. The V-2’s normal maximum range, they advised, seemed to be 200 miles, and this could probably be extended without any basic change to 240 miles, increasing the need to occupy the whole of Holland. But they still opposed any public announcement, since once the subject could be mentioned at all ‘we should have difficulty in restraining the press from publishing information of value to the enemy, such as we experienced in regard to flying-bomb incidents’.

  At a separate Cabinet meeting later that day the Minister of Information endorsed this policy and Stafford Cripps, a ‘prorocketeer’ in the past, agreed they should take their cue of silence from the Germans. Herbert Morrison dissented, arguing that a public statement was overdue, but he was overruled, and the only action decided on was to ask the US Chiefs of Staff to discourage any reference to the explosions in London in the American press.

  The policy of secrecy resulted in the emergence in the capital of ‘three nations’: those who knew about the rockets, those who guessed the truth, and those who, conscious that they had been told about conventional raids and the flying bombs, assumed that no announcement about the V-2s meant that none had yet arrived. To the first category belonged those like the American OSS official who had accepted his taxi-driver’s story of a ‘bomber crashing’ to explain away the mysterious explosion on 8 September. By the following Tuesday he was reporting ‘all sorts of rumours . . . at Buck’s club’ and acknowledging that ‘it was an eerie sensation to know that such explosions are happening and to have them ignored’. By next morning a better-informed colleague had taken pity on him and told him that ‘the recent explosions were caused by 1100-pound rocket bombs that plummeted out of the sky from heights estimated to approach fifteen miles’. The barrister’s wife in West Hampstead who had correctly guessed the cause of the ‘Friday night explosion’ learned the following day that it had occurred in Chiswick, only to be misled that afternoon by another informant who explained that it ‘came from the explosion of the power station there’ – a nonexistent institution. By Tuesday, 12 September, however, the same helpful friend to whom her husband had applied for information on the Friday, an assistant postmaster in an East End borough, was able to provide an up-to-date bulletin. “Some enemy weapon, V-2,’ he said, ‘had demolished some thirty houses in Dagenham this morning.” Such a weapon’, the diarist commented, nicely confusing the truth, ‘would account for the blowing up of the Chiswick power house.’

  The Dagenham rocket, the seventh in the series, which seriously injured 14 people and slightly hurt another 70, though happily it killed no one, was much talked about in the area: it had landed on a school for crippled children, in Marston Avenue, doing considerable damage and starting a fire. It also meant for one small boy one of the most frustrating experiences of the war:

  At about 8 o‘clock in the morning I had got up and made my parents a pot of tea in bed when [in fact at 0819 hours] there was a loud bang and clouds of smoke rising from across the roof tops about half a mile away. Since there had been no siren or aeroplane or flying-bomb engine noise my parents dismissed it as a gas main explosion. Soon after I walked down our street to meet the milkman when I saw a large piece of metal in the gutter. It was similar to the metal used in aeroplane fuselage and was hot to touch. Another boy joined me but as we were discussing the ‘spoils’ an air-raid warden came up on his bike and claimed it for ‘the authorities’ and eventually cycled off with it under his arm.

  There was, this informant recalls, ‘an air of mystery at first about what had happened’, and an electrician in Ilford was told that the explanation for the explosion in the neighbouring borough was that ‘some secret war work in Fords had blown up’, leaving – just the sort of nice, circumstantial touch in which rumour-mongers delighted – ‘a very large crater which would hold quite easily two double-decker buses’. Frustratingly, too, some of those ‘in the know’ found less well-informed people eager to mislead them. The West Hampstead woman quoted earlier recorded in her diary for Thursday, 14 September, the conflicting information pressed upon her, following the Farnan Avenue incident:

  Our peace has been short-lived. We now exist under another cloud, V-2 rockets. There was another loud explosion this morning. The barber at the club told Ralph some enemy missile had hit Walthamstow and done considerable damage. So Ralph range up Mr T., who very much knew all about it as one of his post offices had been hit. . . .

  While out this morning, I ran into Miss D., who assured me that the explosions we were having came from guns across the Channel.

  Such explanations were given little credence in fly-bombed Croydon. ‘Explosions now believed by public to be either long-range shells or rockets,’ noted one seventeen-year-old schoolboy in his diary that week. But at Clapham, not far away, it was still possible to remain in blissful ignorance. ‘My wife explained there had been lots of these explosions,’ recalls a then RAF electrician, puzzled by the constant bangs while they sat in the ‘pictures’. ‘The rumour was that the army and the ARP were blowing up dangerous buildings damaged during the V-1 raids.’

  Aware of the marked improvement in morale which had followed the first full statement about the flying-bombs, Herbert Morrison was probably right in arguing that, whatever its military merits, his colleagues’ insistence on tacitly denying the rockets’ existence was having an adverse effect on the public. Although, as will be described, spirits were to sink even lower later in the winter, they began to decline significantly during the late autumn, with Arnhem a failure and the near certainty that the war would drag on in
to another year. Even Civil Defence workers were not immune, either from ignorance or sagging morale, as one woman then working as a ‘control’ telephonist at Welling in Kent recalls:

  No one told us what they were. We were left guessing and yet they were the most devastating thing that had come our way. We were all terrified and nervy. The weather was very foggy at this early stage, which added to the nightmare. People started talking about poison gas as they had in 1939.

  The prevailing gloom is vividly remembered by a woman then working as a student nurse in a North London hospital, where the staff could only judge what was happening by the broken victims they treated of a weapon which officially did not exist:

  The stories that filtered into the hospital left a picture of Highgate Hill and Hampstead looking like the white cliffs of Dover, with nothing between them and us in Holloway. I had a particular fear of being left suspended in a bed overhanging a gaping hole.

  When they did realize the truth there was a grim satisfaction for Londoners in seeing visitors from other parts of the country wake up to it too, as a wartime resident of Woolwich observed:

  Some of the repair men coming into London thought that it was lineshooting when they heard of explosions caused by rockets . . . but they were not in London long before they were convinced of the truth. . . . A joke that went the rounds was that one man on the train, having refused to believe that such a thing was possible, arrived at the terminus at the same time as a rocket. . . . so turned round and took the next train back.