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

by Norman Longmate

  The Germans’ second objective, apart from killing or maiming the maximum number of British civilians, was to damage property. A post office and village institute, a public house, two shops, three schools and six churches were affected, plus about 750 dwelling houses, most of them by the only V-2 that landed near Norwich, on the north side of the Hellesdon Golf Course, at 1950 hours on Tuesday, 3 October. ‘The whole city was shaken’, according to a local observer, but only one person slightly hurt. The Germans also succeeded in destroying a few haystacks and – no doubt the most spectacular victim – a glasshouse. Seven farms and five other farm buildings or barns were damaged, and an acre of sugar beet rendered uneatable. Two cows were also injured, at Bedingham on 1 October. It was, by any test, an unimpressive record for such a sophisticated weapon.

  The people of Norfolk needed no story of exploding gas mains to explain away those loud but distant bangs. The county was the great airfield of the British Isles, and crashing Allied aircraft, or objects inadvertently dropped from them, had become a feature of daily life. But some people inevitably knew, or suspected, what was happening. Ice-laden or other fragments of missiles were sometimes picked up, and occasionally a missile was glimpsed as it hurtled to earth from the wide Norfolk skies. One woman then serving in a heavy Ack-Ack battery on the Norfolk coast remembers the frustrations of those weeks. ‘Some [V-2s]’, she recalls, ‘fell on the marshes behind Caister and Yarmouth. . . . We were not involved as we had no defence against them and saw only a kind of waterspout as they fell in the marshes.’ At least another five came down in the sea near enough to the shore to be visible. These melancholy splashes, harming no one, provide a fitting commentary on the whole Norwich campaign, though the county was to suffer from one more V-2, on 6 March 1945, at Raveningham, 10 miles south-west of Norwich, a ‘stray’ which, like its predecessors, did little harm.

  Only one V-2 is believed to have been aimed at Ipswich, unsuccessfully, and the thirteen rockets that landed in Suffolk were all, with this exception, probably intended for Norwich. They caused no deaths or serious injuries and aroused so little interest that the County Record Office contains no information concerning them, though one local resident secured a more tangible souvenir, in the shape of a fuel tank found at Hopton, near Lowestoft, on 2 October. The same man also recalls how ‘On several clear mornings in 1944, from a vantage point near the police station in London Road, Beccles, I saw the zigzag vapour trails of V-2s climbing from Holland, the zigzags being caused by differences in direction and velocity of the wind in successive air layers.’

  If the Norfolk campaign was not a victory for Kammler, it was also hardly a triumph fbr the British. It was some time before Friesland was identified as the source of the rockets now landing in the eastern counties – it was, of course, more thinly populated than The Hague, with fewer potential agents – and, when it was, it became realized that the town of Sneek, the suspected railhead serving the launching sites, was not within range of United Kingdom-based fighters. ‘Policing’ the area was now entrusted to the 2nd Tactical Air Force, based on the continent, and an RAF mission from England, to discuss the arrangements, was surprised to learn that already more than fifty rockets had been fired at targets in France and Belgium. Meanwhile the attack against London had ceased, so that the urgency had gone out of plans to protect it. An additional Mobile Air Reporting Unit, which offered the best hope, though still a slim one, of detecting rocket launchings by radar, was assigned instead for use against sites firing on continental targets. Roderic Hill’s 10th Survey Regiment was sent elsewhere, and its sister unit, the 11th, moved from England to Belgium to replace it. Hill, recently promoted to Air Chief Marshal and now C-in-C of Fighter Command, which had replaced the short-lived Air Defence of Great Britain, thus found himself in mid-October with depleted resources to meet what he, though apparently no one else, feared might be a growing attack.

  On 30 September, with the recent danger to his units now passed with the collapse of Operation Market Garden, Kammler ordered one battery of 485 Abteilung back to The Hague. On 12 October 444 Abteilung also ceased fire from Friesland and around 22 October, along with the other battery of 485 Abteilung, also arrived back in The Hague. Thus for the first time Kammler had three full batteries available to him for the campaign against London, which, on 12 October, Hitler had ordered should be the sole British target, though the bombardment of Antwerp was also to continue. It was this diversion of effort, violating the basic military principle of concentrating one’s strength, which alone reduced the number of V-2s reaching England, for British counter-measures were still proving totally ineffective. In the five weeks beginning mid-October, about 600 anti-rocket-site sorties were flown by United Kingdom-based fighters, and Bomber Command was asked to attack two places on the southern outskirts of The Hague suspected of sheltering rocket units. Mosquitoes of the 2nd Tactical Air Force, based on the continent, were sent against a third site and the two railway stations at Leiden, through which rockets were believed to reach the Meillerwagen . None of this effort had much real effect. For the moment, as had so often happened in the history of war, the advantage lay with the side which had developed a new weapon, and the defence lagged behind.

  15

  THE LIAR ON THE THAMES

  The liar on the Thames has withheld from the world the fact of the German V-2 bombardment until today.

  Commentator on German radio, 10 November 1944

  The bombardment of London had been resumed even before the attack on Norwich had ceased. On 3 October 1944 rockets again began to be directed at the capital, though not at first with much success. In the week ending 4 October, the final phase of the Norwich offensive, 14 V-2s reached the United Kingdom. Between 4 and 11 October the number rose to 23, then between 11 and 18 October dropped to 14, and in the week ending at noon on 25 October to 12. Of the total of 63 only 6, less than 10 per cent, reached the London Civil Defence Region.

  The government’s continuing insistence on concealing the rocket’s very existence was by now having some curious results. ‘Complete secrecy was kept as to the nature and effects of the bomb,’ wrote Croydon’s war historian of its first V-2, on the evening of Friday, 20 October – more will be said of it later – but the next of kin of those affected still had to be informed, like a sergeant then serving in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps at Dunstable:

  I was having a shave in the ablution shed when an orderly called, saying that a police message had been received to the effect that my house . . . had been bombed, but that my wife and baby son were ‘still alive’. I was dumbfounded by this, and frankly sceptical, as there had been no report on the radio of any enemy activity on the previous night. . . . A friend of mine at HQ . . . promised to contact the War Office in London to confirm whether there had in fact been any bombing . . . and he later told me there had been none. This reassured me somewhat. . . . However, I was given leave to proceed home and I arrived at South Norwood about 11.0 a.m. and on approaching my road I was no longer in doubt.

  Kammler was now beginning to step up both his rate of fire and its accuracy. In the week ending at midday on 1 November 1944, 26 V-2s landed in London, against only 8 elsewhere, a success rate of 76 per cent, though the ‘wides’ were a long way off target, one landing in a field at Barley, near Royston, in Hertfordshire, well to the north of London, and another the next day ploughing up Windsor Great Park, near Egham, to the west. An increasingly high proportion, however, were landing on built-up areas like Walthamstow, Bermondsey, West Ham and Camberwell, and a few had done quite serious damage to transport or industry. At 6.45 p.m. on 26 October a rocket landed directly in front of a stationary train at Palmers Green Station in north London: 15 people were seriously hurt and another 38 suffered cuts or bruises. The following week began disastrously. On a single day, 30 October, V-2s hit the Becton Gasworks in Barking, knocking out 7 retort houses, the Victoria Docks in West Ham – where, the official summary acknowledged, there was ‘heavy damage [to] No. 2 and 3 sheds
and RE [Royal Engineers] equipment’ and ‘a small fire [in] No. 7 shed’ – and Hermitage Wharf, Wapping, where 150 feet of dock wall was demolished and warehouses were seriously damaged. At 2.56 a.m. next morning, Tuesday, 31 October, the Swedish Yard of the Surrey Commercial Docks in Bermondsey suffered a direct hit, ‘exposing wheat to weather’, and there were four more rockets that day, at places as far apart as Hendon – an airburst which distributed fragments over an area a mile wide – and Orpington. ‘The public’, noted one seventeen-year-old in his diary in neighbouring Croydon that night, ‘[are] becoming alarmed by explosions’ – as well they might be, for still the government, by implication, denied that anything was amiss.

  In the absence of fact, speculation flourished. Even so well-informed a figure as the art historian James Lees-Milne, in Chelsea, was reduced in his diary for Tuesday, 31 October 1944, to recording rumour:

  Several loud crumps during the night, which woke me up. Several more today. They are becoming worse. . . . They say they come from inside Germany, even from the Tyrol. Nancy Mitford saw one descend in a ball of fire, like the setting sun. Even she had a cold sweat and was riveted to the ground.

  As always, the poorest districts of London suffered most. At ten past two in the morning of Wednesday, 1 November, seven people were killed in Eglington Road, Woolwich, and people all over south-east London were roused again at ten past five by an even worse incident, in Friern Road, Camberwell, where a rocket landing behind a row of houses killed 24 people and seriously injured another 17. This casualty list was in turn surpassed that evening in Shardeloes Road, Deptford, where a rocket plunged into the centre of the street at 6.30 p.m., just as people were on their way home from work, wrecking houses up to a hundred yards away and inflicting much the worst toll of casualties so far, 183, of whom 31 were dead and 62 others needed hospital treatment as in-patients. 15

  This was the start of the worst week so far. In the seven days ending at midday, 8 November, 15 rockets landed outside London and 12 inside it, the former being in many cases well ‘grouped’, i.e. close together. Even more alarmingly, the last two rockets had come down within a mile or two of what the Ministry of Home Security already suspected to be Kammler’s aiming point, somewhere in the Tower Bridge area – a deduction, as will be seen later, not too wide of the mark. By eliminating all V-2s which were obviously miles off target and drawing on a map a pattern of lines linking up the rest, a mean point of impact had been calculated, and any landings within 15 miles of the supposed aiming point were considered, in view of the size of Greater London, to be roughly ‘on target’. By this test 50 of the 70 rockets arriving between 2015 hours on 20 October and 1458 hours on 6 November were accurate, and almost all the ‘misses’ belonged to the first half of the period. Between 20 and 30 October the figures were 18 ‘on target’ out of 33, while of the next 47 rockets only 5 failed the ‘15-mile test’.

  From the beginning of November the pattern of incidents – still officially not happening at all – settled down at between three and five a day, with an average of about one airburst in every ten rockets, though these could also do damage: one struck the trees outside a mental hospital at Banstead at 5 p.m. on 2 November, killing 3 people and seriously injuring another 11. ‘Airbreaks’, where the warhead fell to earth intact after the rocket itself had disintegrated, proved very few. Clearly much depended on chance. The first three disastrous rockets on Wednesday, 1 November, which had killed 62 people and seriously injured another 90, were followed by a fourth which landed harmlessly on a gun site at Wanstead Flats, Woodford, and a fifth, in a gravel pit at Dartford in Kent, where only one person was badly hurt. Three of the following day’s four rockets, though causing five serious injuries, killed no one, the exception being the Banstead rocket just mentioned. One fell on a railway embankment at Esher in Surrey, another burst in the air over Upper Sydenham Station in south-east London, and a third plunged into the Thames off the Garrison Jetty at Dartford.

  There were, similarly, good days and bad days. Sunday, 5 November, which in more peaceful times would have been disturbed only by the Roman Candles and Catherine Wheels of Bonfire Night, was a bad day. It began with a rocket at 35 minutes after midnight at Collier Row in Essex, continued with another, at Penshurst in Kent, an hour later, followed by a third, on Tooting Bec Common, at 7.45 a.m., got really into its stride with a direct hit on an iron bridge in Southwark Park Road, Bermondsey, at 10.45, which tore up 250 feet of railway track, and continued with a disaster at Grovedale Road, Islington, at 1713 hours, which caused 249 casualties, 84 of them serious and 31 of them fatal. Two minor incidents, in Rainham, Essex, and at North Romford, were still to come. This was a single Sunday in London after five years of war, leaving 32 British citizens dead, 121 badly hurt, 150 more nursing minor wounds – and thousands of others homeless. It was not as bad as the 10 ton warheads pounding down at the rate of one an hour, feared a few months earlier, but it was bad enough.

  Almost all the really bad incidents occurred in London, at which only one had to go on firing missiles to be sure eventually of hitting some vulnerable target, but there were a few exceptions, and one was now about to occur 30 miles away in Bedfordshire. Just before 9.50 a.m. on Monday, 6 November, one of Kammler’s crews, refreshed perhaps by a weekend pass in The Hague or Amsterdam, launched a rocket which dropped miles off course, into Biscot Road, Luton, a town famous in peacetime for hat manufacture but now in wartime largely devoted to vehicle production. The explosion wrecked 17 houses and damaged another 1500. The steel-strengthened walls of the Commer-Karrier factory nearby – the V-2 had come down close to its dispatch department – stood up well to the blast, though it wrecked the canteen on an upper floor, opened at a cost of £25,000 only a week before – and did other damage to the works. More seriously, 19 people, according to local records, were killed and 196 injured. (The Home Office records show 16 dead, 31 seriously injured, plus 79 minor casualties.) This was to remain the second-worst industrial incident of the whole campaign; the other, in London, was not to occur until its very end.

  Within an hour or two of the much talked-about, but still strictly censored, disaster at Luton, two more rockets had arrived in England, at Yalding and Bexley, both in Kent. About thirty were now landing every week, excluding those which came down in the sea, and they were doing a great deal of damage and causing many casualties: the 150 recorded as arriving up to 8 November had killed 235 people and seriously injured another 711 – a casualty rate of more than 7 per rocket, and a death rate alone of 1.6. The prospects were bleak, for, with no warning possible, there was no reason why the number of casualties should decline; indeed, it was likely to get worse. Between 3 and 26 October, while Kammler’s men were in Friesland, many missiles had tended to fall short and the north-eastern side of London had escaped relatively lightly. Now they were back in The Hague, accuracy was improving and likely to get even better as they became more expert.

  In the circumstances it was remarkable that the government had managed to suppress all references to the rockets for so long, especially after an unfortunate, and irresponsible, ‘leak’ in an American newspaper. ‘Yesterday New York Times Hanson Baldwin talks of rocket attack on UK,’ an Air Ministry representative in Washington cabled London on 7 October. But, the Cabinet decided two days later, the ban would remain in force, and their decision proved justified; the Germans, it seemed, did not read the New York Times.

  The continuing deletion from all reports submitted for censorship of any references to the sufferings of the rocket-afflicted areas caused growing friction between the newspapers and the Ministry of Information. A new policy was now tried by the Chief Censor of letting through ‘reports of both flying-bomb and rocket incidents provided the total number of reports released did not exceed the total number of flying-bomb incidents and that there was nothing in the published report which indicated whether the incident had been caused by a V-1 or V-2’. This ingenious compromise, taking advantage of the Germans’ continuing use of noct
urnal, air-launched V-1s, pleased no one, as Admiral Thompson sadly concluded:

  Both the press and the censors . . . heartily disliked the new scheme. Indeed the reports had to be so heavily censored that some newspapers didn’t think it worthwhile publishing them. It entailed the deletion of all such statements as ‘I heard the engine of the bomb cut off . . .’, or, ‘I was having my breakfast when I heard a tremendous explosion’, indicating that it was daytime and a rocket.

  At a meeting on Monday, 16 October, the Cabinet minutes recorded, ‘the Minister of Information asked whether it would be possible to release the ban on the mention of rocket attacks against this country’, but Herbert Morrison argued against any change and his view prevailed. Behind the scenes, however, some MPs were growing restive, and one, the recently elected W. J. Brown, an Independent, had, the Cabinet noted on 23 October, put down a private notice question asking for information about German rockets. There was some discussion about whether the Prime Minister should cover the subject in his forthcoming review of the war situation on 27 October, but the Chief Whip thought this might lead to a demand for a debate, and on 30 October Churchill reaffirmed his unwillingness to make any announcement about it.