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

by Norman Longmate

  In the end the Germans forced his hand. The curious compact of silence which had developed between the two sides was finally broken at 2.19 p.m. on Wednesday, 8 November 1944, in the regular daily communique broadcast on the German Home Service and picked up and circulated by the BBC monitors at Caversham:

  The German High Command announces: The V-1 bombardment of the Greater London area, which has been carried out with varying intensity and only brief interruption since 15 June, has been supplemented for the last few weeks by another and far more effective explosive missile, the V-2.

  The same announcement was issued soon afterwards by the German News Agency and at 7.15 the Germans were treated to a morale-boosting commentary about the new weapon from Heinz Rieck, allegedly a reporter at the Front:

  Not quite five months ago, the High Command communique startled the world on the employment of a novel explosive missile; this is the case again today. Once again, everyone is burning to hear details, and the questions ‘What is it?’ and ‘What is the effect?’ . . . are on everybody’s lips. . . . The thanks of the homeland today go out to the innumerable hands which have worked on V-2, to the German inventors and workers who, despite enemy terror, in unending and self-sacrificing labour, and by the strength of their organizing ability, created this weapon, tested it, collected experience and finally, with the help of our soldiers, put it into use. . . .

  All our thoughts go out to those soldiers who have been chosen to send out this explosive missile. . . . They know the sufferings of the homeland under enemy terrors. . . . Now they stand with clenched teeth . . . playing their part in the great plan of this war.

  To the great annoyance of Dr Goebbels the British press next day reported the German claims without comment. ‘Nothing speaks more eloquently of its devastating effect than the silence on the other side of the Channel,’ claimed one German report, making the best of things. The V-2s, it was suggested, had ‘literally taken London’s breath away’. Not, however, for long. On 10 November the Prime Minister at last revealed to the House of Commons what was now becoming an open secret:

  For the last few weeks the enemy has been using the new weapon, the long-range rocket, and numbers have landed at widely scattered points in this country. In all the casualties and damage have so far not been heavy. The reason for our silence hitherto is that any announcement might have given information useful to the enemy. We were confirmed in this course by the fact that, until two days ago, the enemy had made no mention of this weapon in his communiques. Last Wednesday an official announcement, followed by a number of highly coloured accounts of attacks on this country, was issued by the German High Command. I don’t propose to comment upon it except to say that the statements in this announcement are a good reflection of what the German government would wish their people to believe, and of their desperate need to afford them some encouragement.

  May I mention a few facts?

  The rocket contains approximately the same quantity of high explosive as the flying bomb. However, it is designed to penetrate rather deeper before explosion. This results in somewhat heavy damage in the immediate vicinity of the crater but rather less explosive blast effect around. The rocket flies through the stratosphere going up to 60 or 70 miles, and outstrips sound. Because of its high speed no reliable and sufficient public warning can in present circumstances be given. There is, however, no need to exaggerate the danger. The scale and effect of the attacks have not hitherto been significant.

  Some of the rockets have been fired to us from the Island of Walcheren. This is now in our hands and other areas from which rockets have been or can at present be fired against this country will doubtless be overrun by our forces in due course. We cannot, however, be certain that the enemy will not be able to increase the range, either by reducing the weight of the warhead, or by other methods.

  Doubtless the enemy has hoped by his announcement to induce us to give him information he has failed to get otherwise. I am sure this House, the press and the public will refuse to oblige him in this respect.

  The Germans had been waiting with growing annoyance for some reference to the V-2 from the other side of the Channel and responded to Churchill’s statement with alacrity. ‘In accordance with his tactics, the liar on the Thames has thus withheld from the world the fact of the German V-2 bombardment until today,’ declared a political commentator on the German Home Service at 12.35 p.m. By 2.53 p.m. the German Telegraph Service was assuring the world that the speech amounted to an admission of the new weapon’s effectiveness, and at 4.36 it revealed a remarkably accurate knowledge of the security measures affecting foreign diplomats over which the British Cabinet had agonized three months earlier. At 6.35 the Germans put out an article, in English, for any overseas paper or radio station that cared to use it:

  For three weeks now V-2, which according to British sources seems to be a kind of monstrous rocket-bomb, has been hurtling silently down out of space to deal death and destruction in addition to that caused by V-1. Naturally the German authorities are not interested in making public any particulars regarding the construction of V-2. They are content to listen to what the British say about the effect. And this effect is such as to make H. G. Wells wonder whether one of his ‘things to come’ hasn’t prematurely come to life in Germany. The most remarkable thing about V-2 seems to be its enormous speed, which exceeds that of sound waves. The result is that V-2 crashes down without preliminary warning. There is no way of defence. . . . A period of horrible and silent death has begun for Great Britain. England is reaping the reward of its merciless slaughter of German civilians in countless German towns and cities.

  After its long period of enforced silence the British press made the most of its belated freedom. Churchill’s statement made front-page news everywhere and in the Daily Herald, for example, it was the lead story, accompanied by photographs long held up by the censor and a graphic account of a recent incident:

  I have just come away from a district recently hit by a V-2. It dropped at teatime. It hurtled through a house, exploded and dug a deep crater. Several people were killed. Children at a birthday party in a tiny, old house, died as they sat at their table with the cake and its candles fascinating them. People poke around the debris. Cranes are at work. Men with torn hands are scratching away to find an old woman who is buried deep down in the piled-up wreckage of her home. The local Rest Centre is busy. . . . The local parson moves about saying a kind word to the people who are suffering again in the sixth year of war. . . . I am writing this in the front line. There is no siren warning now. No time to take shelter. For this is the most indiscriminate weapon of this or any other war. It is a sinister, eerie form of war.

  But the reporter could not withhold his admiration for the Germans’ technical ingenuity and achievement:

  The rocket has been described to me by a scientist as a ‘superb piece of invention. Its craftsmanship is magnificent’. . . . Each component I have seen has been wired delicately and intricately – even fine-spun glass has gone into the lining of the units. . . . Another unit is frosted when found. It contains liquid air. In a field today I stood ankle-deep in mud to examine a massive urn-shaped component weighing 15 cwt, which had buried itself deep in a crater between the bean rows. It looks like an old-fashioned kitchen copper.

  One of these ‘coppers’ crashed into a front garden of a house in a suburb. . . . A 69-year-old woman and her married daughter were at home, saw it coming down, slammed the front-door – and were spattered with mud and broken glass.

  ‘We had a miraculous escape,’ they told me. ‘It seemed as if Hitler was chucking the whole of the kitchen at us.’

  Not all restrictions on reporting incidents were lifted, but the press agreed to ‘stagger’ reports so that, as the Chief Censor explained, ‘the report of an incident on Monday would be released on Wednesday and so on’, to prevent the Germans ‘having any idea which rocket had caused any particular incident’. The fact that one could now acknowledge their existence
made the rockets more bearable – but not much. By 23 November 1944 more than 200 had landed on the English mainland, of which more than half had reached the London Region, and around 500 people had been killed. That day Duncan Sandys advised his colleagues that it had proved impossible to jam the rocket’s radio guidance system; in fact only 20 per cent of rockets had been fitted with radio at all, and the proportion was decreasing. The prospect of finding a warning system seemed equally remote, for though, very occasionally, the survey teams installed on the continent or the east coast did manage to identify a rocket by radar as it took off such successes were too few to form the basis of any general scheme.

  And so the rockets went on descending unannounced and in what must have seemed to those concerned intolerable numbers. Orpington, for example, already hit three times by 17 September, suffered another V-2 in October, while a further three landed there, or in adjoining Bromley, in the first half of November, followed by the worst yet, at 9.15 on 19 November, when the bars of the Crooked Billet in Southborough Lane, Bromley, were crowded with Sunday evening drinkers. A V-2 in the car park destroyed both the public house and surrounding premises, so that 23 people were killed, 63 others had to be detained in Farnborough and Bromley Hospitals and 34 more needed first-aid treatment. It was the worst casualty list so far – but not for long.

  The week of 15 to 22 November had seen 36 V-2s arriving; the next week, 22 to 29 November, it rose to 40, with, on the 22nd, another bad incident in the East End, when 25 people were killed and 44 badly injured in Totty Street, Bethnal Green.

  At 8.30 p.m. on Friday, 24 November, another East London street, McCullum Road, Poplar,16 suddenly erupted into flame and flying debris. When they had subsided 18 more East-Enders lay dead and another 53 badly hurt, the start of the worst weekend of the whole offensive. Around midday on Saturday, 25 November 1944, Kammler succeeded in landing two rockets in heavily built-up areas. The effects of the second will be described in detail later. The first, at 11.15 a.m., shattered a combined block of flats and offices in High Holborn, close to Chancery Lane, in the very heart of London. Six people were killed and an enormously high number, many of them no doubt caught in the street, seriously injured: 292. Among them was a young newly married secretary to a solicitor, who had just moved into a vacant flat owned by the firm, having ‘had enough of south-east London’ after being plagued by flying bombs in New Cross. Her husband, on leave from the RAF, was with her when ‘without any warning whatsoever . . . we were both buried in the rubble’; three of her office friends and a young mother in the flat below were killed. Both she and her husband later realized that they were lucky to have survived:

  I remember thinking as they lifted my husband clear, ‘I didn’t know this was a red brick building’ and then I realized it was blood soaked into his uniform tunic. Afterwards he told me he thought, ‘What a way to die, just me and Gym in a heap of rubble’. 17

  Not far away, in Fleet Street, a staff sergeant in the US Signal Corps suddenly discovered what it meant to be in ‘a war zone’:

  I was knocked clean off my feet by the concussion. I picked myself up outside Mooney’s pub and went into the bar for a Guinness. The half-pint helped, so I ordered another. Halfway through my second drink, my hand began to tremble. I could not hold the glass.

  This incident, much witnessed and much discussed, left behind the usual trail of tragedies, major and minor. One actor, then living in Streatham, who was walking in Theobalds Road, about 200 yards away, is still uncertain to which category the scene he now witnessed belonged:

  Windows fell out of the shops I was passing and, with a shrill whistling sound, a small piece of metal, almost certainly part of the V-2, fell at my feet. After it had cooled down I picked it up. . . . I remember seeing a man with blood streaming down his face and a little boy clinging to an empty pram, crying uncontrollably, but no one seemed to be comforting him, perhaps because no one knew what to say.

  16

  DISASTER IN DEPTFORD

  A Long-Range Rocket detonated at 12.25 hours on the 25th instant on the north side of New Cross Road. . . . The Casualty List was very heavy.

  Report by London Region Casualty Services Officer, 29 November 1944

  The Holborn rocket, right in the centre of the capital and in a previously inviolate, commercial, area, was the most ‘public’, but was to be totally overshadowed by another which landed an hour later in the working-class borough of Deptford on the far side of the Thames. In the history of the V-2s Deptford has a unique place. Other boroughs were to be hit by more rockets, but the dead of Deptford were to be far more numerous than those of any other place, outnumbering those of every other community in London and of all the eleven rocket-affected counties outside London put together.

  In New Cross Road, in the very heart of Deptford, and in the middle of its modest shopping centre, stood Woolworths, which that Saturday morning was even more crowded than usual. The confectionery counters were besieged by children eager to spend their ‘personal points’ on sweets, the hardware section was at the end of a long queue of housewives waiting to buy a saucepan. Under wartime regulations non-perishable goods could not be wrapped, so news of the arrival of a consignment of these rare items had spread rapidly. It had even reached Romford, as one woman then living there remembers:

  I had word via the grape-vine. . . . I was a very young bride of a couple of years, with first baby of about two months, so . . . I promptly thanked my informer, dressed my baby daughter in her outdoor clothing and put on my coat and hat and set off armed with my handbag for a hopeful purchase.

  The streets around Woolworths were also exceptionally busy, but just after 12.20, observed a former police sergeant then living in Brockley, ‘the traffic lights at the Marquis of Granby road junction released three stationary lines of traffic, including crowded tramcars’. This, he later realized, was to be New Cross’s solitary piece of good fortune that day; by 12.25 the passing flow of vehicles outside Woolworths was no heavier than normal. At that moment the young mother from Romford just quoted reached the same road junction:

  I had walked as far as the turning opposite the Marquis of Granby on the corner of Lewisham Way. The road was very steep at this point and I walked up the road on the right-hand side, with my bag in the right hand and my baby on my left arm. At that point there came a sudden airless quiet, which seemed to stop one’s breath, then an almighty sound so tremendous that it seemed to blot out my mind completely.

  To anyone watching it must have seemed as if Woolworths had been struck by a giant hammer, followed by a volcano-like eruption of rubble and bodies flung skyward, before they sank, slowly it seemed, back to earth, landing with a series of clatters and crashes. Then, as the last of these died away, there seemed to be a moment of silence, before it was broken by the screams and groans of the dying and injured, invisible beneath the tall column of dust that hung over the mound of shattered brick and timber that a minute earlier had been a busy store, and the sobs and cries of frightened children calling for their mothers. Those involved were slow to realize what had happened, like the Romford woman waiting to enter Woolworths:

  When I came to seconds later I found myself over the road, pinned to the wall. . . . After a second or two I was released and slid to the ground. . . . I turned to continue my journey and a horse and cart, with its driver’s legs waving in the air, came wildly rushing round from Lewisham Way. . . . I was laughing hysterically. I gradually quietened down and then looked at my child and then myself. Our clothing was undone. Buttons, ribbons, etc., all loose and clothing twisted and untidy. My baby’s bonnet was twisted grotesquely and hung round her neck. Her hair was blown back tightly as if she had none. She was staring at space, not comprehending. Neither of us was hurt, so we continued up the hill, and round the corner a rescuer stopped me and asked where I was going. I said, ‘Woolworths, for a saucepan.’ He gently turned me round and said, ‘Not today, my love. Go home and try tomorrow.’

  Everyone in New Cross
knew what a sudden explosion meant. Living then in New Cross Road itself was a young railway worker who, only three months earlier, had been injured when a flying bomb, which had killed nine of her neighbours, had blown in the kitchen window. Now, it seemed, it was about to happen all over again:

  Our windows came in and there was smoke and dust everywhere. I went to see what was going on. I knew that my younger brother had gone swimming with two of his friends and always went into Woolworths to have a hot drink on the way home. My mother and I went along New Cross Road and what we saw was horrible, people were lying on the road, some dying. There was a No 53 bus and all the people were sitting . . . most of them dead from the blast. The police then roped off the whole road. We had to go back to our house and wait for news of my brother, who had [still] not returned home. We then knew that something terrible had happened to him.