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

by Norman Longmate

  In fact, as the family later learned, ‘he was one of the lucky ones’:

  He was standing waiting to be served with a hot drink [when] he was buried for six hours, [but] got out alive and taken to hospital with a broken collar bone. His two friends standing next to him were killed.

  There was equally sad news for many people in New Cross that day. Everyone, it seemed, knew someone – a relation, an acquaintance, a workmate – whom they would now never see again. The experiences of a postman living in Peckham who heard the news after returning to the sorting office after making his noon collection were typical:

  New Cross sorting office had telephoned that a V-2 had dropped on Woolworths opposite. I had a great many friends there and . . . it being the end of my duty, I cycled to New Cross. Ropes were across the road at New Cross Gate station and no one was allowed through [but] being a postman the police waved me on. The road was strewn with masonry, glass and timber. Woolworths had ceased to exist. In its place was a skeleton of jagged brickwork and hanging timbers. . . . I went into the sorting office and found them all shocked, with little recollection of what had happened. Only a few were in the office at the time. . . . Those that were just heard a loud blast and felt the whole building shaking. They said the whole earth trembled as if an earthquake had occurred. I asked if anyone was hurt. One driver on his way to the office had his leg broken and the overseer had not arrived for duty. He never did arrive. His hand, with a ring recognized by his wife, was the only clue that he had been in Woolworths.

  The ripples of the tragedy spread far and wide through south-east London and beyond. One man then aged fourteen remembers how the ‘devoted mother’ of five children living close to them in Brockley ‘went out shopping that Saturday morning and never returned’. Further afield, in north-west London, a young woman born in New Cross, but now working as a milkman in Stanmore, was waiting for her mother to join her in Harrow until her father, injured by a V-1, came out of hospital.

  My address was pinned behind her door so that I could be notified in any such emergency. Unfortunately the police had the wrong address and they didn’t notify me until the Tuesday. I had to go up to New Cross to identify my mother after I had done my morning milk delivery. The bodies were in such a very bad state that I could only identify my mother from a piece of clothing.

  The Civil Defence authorities in Deptford knew at once that they had a major catastrophe on their hands and responded energetically. Within minutes the bells of the NFS appliances and ambulances, and the horns of the rescue-party lorries, could be heard approaching and, such was the scale of the problem, two incident officers were appointed to take charge of different sections of the affected area, and their chequered white and black flags were soon waving in the thin dust-obscured November sun. It was immediately obvious that outside help was needed, and within two hours officials from group and regional headquarters were on hand to coordinate these efforts and the deputy chief executive officer of the LCC heavy rescue service, since it was clear this would be ‘a rescue and casualty job’. By now it was known this was much the worse incident so far, with 40 dead and 84 seriously injured casualties already recovered. Many, many more were still buried, but ‘4 mobile cranes, 16 heavy and 8 light rescue parties, assisted by about 100 NFS personnel’, were already at work, noted a regional officer, and other helpers were still arriving.

  Darkness fell early that winter day, about 5.30, but in New Cross Road the ‘dim-out’ was ignored as the NFS set up mobile lights, group headquarters sent in its floodlighting set, an Ack-Ack unit provided a searchlight and the US forces a mobile generator. The work of rescue went on all night and at 10.45 on Sunday morning, when a visitor from group headquarters came to inspect progress, was still ‘proceeding for the release of an unknown number of trapped persons’. But the Monday morning journey to work had to go on and ‘it was agreed . . . to clear parts of buildings which were dangerous in New Cross Road during the afternoon in order that tram services could be re-established . . . to allow factory employees to reach the Woolworth area’.

  Four days after the rocket had struck, the casualty services officer from regional headquarters set out, in strictly professional prose, how the consequences had been coped with:

  The missile caused complete destruction of Woolworths store of three and four storeys, of half the adjacent Cooperative Store premises, and of a draper’s establishment on its other side. On the south side almost complete destruction by blast of five houses was caused at the junction of St James’s with New Cross Road. . . . Amongst the many premises partially damaged by blast was Deptford Town Hall. . . .

  Occurring as it did at a very busy time of day, the casualty list was very heavy, including a very large number of dead . . . many bodies being completely dismembered. . . .

  The whole of the rescue services of Deptford (5 HR [heavy rescue] and 7 LR [light rescue] parties) were employed, assisted by 8 HR and 1 LR parties from neighbouring boroughs. . . . Assistance was also rendered by about 100 NFS personnel. At one time no less than five mobile cranes were in action.

  A WVS inquiry point and mobile canteens were in operation.

  The heavy mobile first-aid unit, in charge of Dr Knight, from Barriedale FAP [first-aid post] was called at 12.38 . . . and arrived within a few minutes of that time. . . .

  Early in the incident casualties were conveyed by passers-by to the town hall, where an improvised collecting post for casualties and first-aid point came into being. . . . A number of cases had been dealt with at New Cross Station and the tramway depot, both of which are nearby. . . .

  Two of them were childen who had so impressed people with their unselfish fortitude that the staff had written a letter of praise to the parents. At New Cross Station 8 cases had been treated and . . . the attendant . . . was very proud of himself for having dealt with a severe case of haemorrhage from the carotid artery. . . .

  I then went on to Miller Hospital, Greenwich . . . 63 casualties had been received, of whom 29 had been admitted. . . . The admissions included 3 cases of fractured skull and . . . two cases requiring amputation (thigh and foot respectively). . . .

  The original mortuary having been destroyed, a temporary mortuary was established at the premises of Pearces Signs, to which bodies and fragments of bodies were taken. Help was asked for and received from Lewisham and Bermondsey, who sent their staff to assist. Identification was likely to cause considerable difficulty in view of the extreme degree of mutilation and/or dismemberment of many bodies.

  At one time there were seven first-aid posts in action in New Cross, and the more serious cases were passed on, or transported direct, to no fewer than five hospitals: St John’s, Lewisham, the LCC Hospital, Lewisham, Guy’s Hospital, St Alfege’s Hospital, Greenwich, and the Miller Hospital, Greenwich. The final figures showed 160 people killed, 77 seriously injured and – undoubtedly an underestimate because of many ‘unofficial’ helpers whose records were incomplete – 122 slightly hurt. The number of dead surpassed the total killed by the famous ‘Hendon bomb’ on which so many calculations had been based and made clear that if Hitler’s dream of firing off a hundred rockets a day, instead of the five or six he actually achieved, had been realized, life in London would have become intolerable. As it was, the prevailing secrecy aided rumour. Some people still believe the true death roll was 300 or more, and there were stories locally of people remaining buried for weeks, while one boy was said to have been recovered ‘in a standing position by a wall’ still alive after eighteen days.

  Thanks to the relaxation of censorship, the press carried descriptive accounts of what had happened at New Cross in their Monday morning editions on 27 November 1944, giving no hint of the location or casualty figures, though it could have been deduced that these were heavy. The News Chronicle spoke of 500 rescuers toiling throughout the night with the help of four cranes and reported that ‘30 hours after the bomb had fallen’ – it was not, of course, identified as a V-2 – ‘bodies were still being brou
ght out of the ruins’. The Daily Express story was even more evocative:

  Ambulances stood silently by as rescuers worked with hydraulic cranes. Nearby lay a little pile of children’s fairy stories, nursery rhymes and painting books. Beside them, salvaged intact, were rows of tumblers, bottles of lemon squash, tins of evaporated milk, packets of envelopes and assistants’ invoice books. Price cards were scattered over the road and trodden underfoot.

  The excellent local newspaper, the South London Press, carried a first-hand account from the assistant chief warden of Deptford, identified only as ‘the borough’:

  On the roadway and pavements were bodies, some terribly injured, including some very young children. Yet in all this hell I never heard a murmur. Those spared and comparatively free from injury were all running to help others, soon sizing the terrible situation up and doing what good they could. . . . The control room [of the borough Civil Defence services, in the town hall] itself was full of smoke. It was barely possible to breathe, yet everyone was calm, and the work of restoring some order and putting the vital services into organization proceeded with efficiency.

  There is no record of Lord Cherwell visiting New Cross, and almost certainly he was, on that fatal Saturday, enjoying his usual weekend break at Christ Church, Oxford. Two days before, however, he had written to the Prime Minister to suggest that the rocket, which he had – though this he did not recall – stated to be scientifically impossible, was not proving a very fearsome weapon. With 960,000 acres of London in which it could fall, one’s chances of being killed or injured, on existing data, were, suggested Cherwell, only 1 in 384,000, a calculation which the Deptford disaster made out of date. In that unlucky borough, indeed, the risk of death or wounding was very much higher. All told, Deptford was to suffer nine V-2s, far less than some other places, but no fewer than five caused ‘outstanding incidents’, so that Deptford’s toll of dead and seriously injured, 625 (297 of them killed) far surpassed that of any other borough, and, though nothing that happened later was to match the horror of the Woolworths rocket, the story of its ordeal may conveniently be given here.

  Deptford’s first bad incident, on 2 November, had left 31 people dead; its fourth, on 2 February, killed 24. But far worse was to come, at 3 o‘clock on the morning of Wednesday, 7 March 1945, when a V-2 landed in the courtyard of a group of seven three-storey blocks of tenement flats known as Folkestone Gardens, built forty years before to replace slum-style back-to-back housing. The rocket pitched to earth between two blocks, which were demolished, brought down an air-raid shelter between them, and badly damaged the remaining five blocks. Another 25 two-storey terrace houses in Trundleys Road, which ran past the site, ‘of poor construction . . . with 9” walls in lime mortar, wood floors and slated roofs’, were also, as a Home Security official who visited the incident at 5.30 that morning recorded, wrecked, and the first rough estimate was that ‘total casualties might be in the neighbourhood of 160’, reckoning four occupants in each of the 40 flats destroyed.

  As dawn broke over Folkestone Gardens the ruined flats formed a huge mound of debris, over which, in the light of the searchlights, three huge cranes cast their weird shadows, as twenty rescue squads and a small army of firemen struggled to extract the dead and injured. Folkestone Gardens was apparently regarded as a model incident, for a whole string of VIPs were brought to see operations in progress, including an American admiral (duly greeted by the mayor of Deptford) and ‘Madam Wellington Koo’, representing the Chinese government. Eventually 52 bodies were recovered, and 32 badly injured patients were detained in hospital, making this, in terms of dead, the third-worst incident of the whole campaign so far, surpassed only by the Woolworths incident in November, and another at Islington, in December, to be described shortly.18

  Deptford’s misfortunes helped to inflate the total casualties for the Civil Defence area of which it was part – ‘Group 4’, which was made up of five boroughs – to 526 dead and 1078 seriously injured, caused by 83 V-2s. Its neighbours got off more lightly. Bermondsey, with 7 V-2s, escaped with 14 deaths and 117 serious injuries; Lewisham, with 12 V-2s, had 67 deaths and 233 other serious casualties; Greenwich, hit by 22 rockets, suffered 81 fatal casualties, 198 badly injured; Woolwich, with more rockets, 33, had fewer deaths, 67, and almost the same number of badly wounded, 201.

  To those living in the area these totals must have seemed at the time even larger. This is what one woman, then aged eleven and living in Charlton, remembers of one of the Greenwich V-2s:

  There was an awful explosion and the doors leading from our classroom on to the playground were blown out. All we children just ran into the playground in panic until the teachers quietened us and made us line up in rows. Some children had to go to the first-aid post for attention to cuts. Then I saw my mother. She was covered in soot, where she had been cleaning out the fire. She thought the school had been hit and did not realize she had run past the actual site where the rocket had dropped. She kept saying, ‘The school, the school!’ A man stopped her at the end of the road and said to her, ‘The school is all right. Look! Look!’. . . . My grandmother had pieces of glass in her back. She had been pickling red cabbage and the place looked like a slaughterhouse with red cabbage everywhere. My mother had . . . been sewing a new coat for me by the window and the large doors in that room were found in the road. . . . After the rocket attack my mother, grandmother, young cousin and myself were evacuated to Wrexham in North Wales. We went to the cinema and in the newsreel were pictures of the damage the rocket had done in our road at home.

  Greenwich was the scene of two ‘outstanding incidents’, on Shooters Hill, at 6.30 p.m. on 11 November, when 24 people were killed, and at one o‘clock in the morning of 30 November, when 23 others died in Sunfield Place. Its riverside neighbour, Woolwich, did not feature on the ‘outstanding incident’ list, but was the second-worst hit borough in the country, in terms of the number of rockets landing within its boundaries. They became so frequent that people began to sleep in the shelters again, as one man whose own nights were mainly spent at work at Woolwich Arsenal remembers:

  My father . . . when he was alone during my night shift used to go to the underground shelters at Danson Mead and to take my dog with him. . . . She was a beautiful dog with charming manners and used to go round the bunks to see that the children were tucked in and to kiss them goodnight. This . . . calmed them no end, for, as the mothers pointed out, if Tony [the dog] was not afraid, why should they be? Unfortunately, some people . . . complained to the warden who, much against his wishes, had to order that the dog must not come back the next night, so my father stayed away, too. . . . The next night was bedlam, for the children were crying for the dog . . . the parents were rowing with the warden, [and] the people who had started the trouble . . . found themselves so unpopular that they had to remove themselves to another hole.

  To one woman who travelled up each day from Maidstone to a tall office block near Waterloo, the whole area seemed to be under continuous bombardment:

  We heard the boom . . . and saw the column of smoke rising high into the sky. From my desk I had a wonderful view of the Surrey Hills and many fell between us and the hills. When they fell in the Lewisham-New Cross area, I would pick up the telephone and ring my cousin, who worked there. If the phone rang following an explosion, her boss would say to her, ‘You had better answer. It’s sure to be your cousin to see if you are safe.’

  17

  CHRISTMAS IN ISLINGTON

  Among the damaged buildings was a public house which was crowded at the time of the occurrence and which took fire.

  Report by regional casualty services officer on incident in Islington, 26 December 1944

  Even without the rockets it would have been a miserable Christmas. The war seemed to have been going on for ever. Children were now starting school who had never lived in peacetime, and thousands more had not seen their fathers for four or five years. The replacement of the blackout by the dim-out, on 17 September, had ha
d little effect; such extra light as there was served to show up how shabby everything had become. ‘London really is a frightful spectacle of damage and dirty buildings,’ commented one sympathetic American resident after a walk through a normally fashionable residential area on 8 October. He had no illusions about the state of morale. ‘People are shaking their heads over the approaching winter,’ he confided to his diary on 31 October, having long since learned about the rockets. ‘If London is to be peppered with V-2s it will be a grim experience.’

  By now the Minister of Food had unveiled the contents of what one paper called his ‘Christmas box’: an extra half-pound of sweets for everyone aged up to eighteen in the four-week ration period beginning on 10 December, an extra half-pound of sugar for everyone, an extra 8d. worth of meat for Christmas week only, bringing the ration up to 1s. 10d. (9p) worth, even ‘a few thousand turkeys’, for the very fortunate, and some dates, peanuts and sultanas. The prospect did not do much to raise spirits, lowered by bad weather. ‘Early snow does not mean hard winter,’ the Daily Telegraph assured its readers on 14 November, but it was soon proved wrong. By 10.30 p.m. on the following evening, the normally cheerful Mrs Gwladys Cox in West Hampstead was distinctly despondent as she made her daily diary entry: