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

by Norman Longmate

  Colder than ever! I am writing this lying on my bed, fully dressed. The V-1s and V-2s are so frequent we never know! However, if a rocket bomb did hit this block we should simply disappear, together with all our possessions. We Londoners are certainly going through a time of terrible strain.

  Even those hoping to see a new social order after the war were infected by the universal miasma. George Orwell encapsulated the prevailing pessimism in his weekly column in Tribune, published on 1 December 1944:

  I am no lover of the V-2, especially at this moment when the house still seems to be rocking from a recent explosion, but what depresses me about these things is the way they set people talking about the next war. Every time one goes off I hear gloomy references to ‘next time’ and the reflection: ‘I suppose they’ll be able to shoot them across the Atlantic by that time.’

  The flying bombs had dictated a whole new pattern of life in southern England, in which you avoided loud noises and kept an eye open for the nearest shelter. ‘Dodging the doodlebugs’, as the more flippant referred to it, had in its way been stimulating. There was nothing stimulating about the unavoidable, ever-present rocket. How indeed, when you heard that alarming double bang echo across the sky, should you respond? The publisher Philip Unwin recalls leaving the Haymarket Theatre one evening to find ‘everyone standing about looking shocked and awed’ revealing ‘a sudden consciousness that something horrible had happened’. The then editor of Woman’s Own faced a similar problem while entertaining her ATS sister, when she heard ‘the unmistakable crump of a V-2. . . . We didn’t mention it in case, perhaps, it bothered the other. We just went on talking and had tea.’

  In the week ending at midday on Wednesday, 6 December 1944, 40 rockets landed, the same as the previous week, which had been the worst so far. The casualty figures for November were by a long way the highest since August, with 716 men, women and children killed and 1511 badly injured, though these totals included some flying-bomb victims. The new ‘rocket week’, starting at noon, made a disastrous start, with the first rocket so far in the West End – not, in fact, particularly bad in casualty terms but, because of its location, far more talked about, and causing more widespread apprehension, than much more serious incidents in less well-known areas.

  The ‘Duke Street rocket’, as it became known, landed at 11 p.m. on the corner of Duke Street and Barrett Street, just off Oxford Street, the capital’s main shopping thoroughfare, all along which windows were blown out, scattering such modest Christmas displays as they contained. A local resident, a BBC producer, noted next morning how houses in wealthy Wigmore Street had lost their windows, among them those of that great resort of upper-middle-class ladies up from the country, the Times Book Club. His wife, called out of bed in the small hours to man a WVS incident inquiry point in a ‘school in a side street’, found it ‘rather a grim business . . . one room utilized for the WVS and the room opposite . . . converted into a mortuary’. Among the items brought in for the WVS to care for – its owner no doubt dead or in hospital – was ‘a woman’s shopping bag’ full of ‘odds and ends obviously intended to be Christmas presents’ along with ‘three little Union Jacks, bought . . . in readiness for the peace’.

  The roping off of the approaches to Selfridges just as the Christmas shopping rush was starting spread news of the incident over a wide area, not always received with overmuch regret. ‘Being a woman with a strong hatred of the well-to-do and employing classes, Mrs W. could ill conceal her pleasure that the West End had been hit,’ observed the American OSS official quoted earlier of his maid’s reaction. ‘Mayfair, after all, nearly escaped the flying bombs. To have it immune from V-2 would be more than Mrs W . . . could bear.’ More Americans suffered in the Duke Street incident than from any other rocket. Much of the blast had been taken by an annexe to Selfridges being used as a canteen by US government employees, while a passing taxi had been blown into one of Selfridges’ windows, and some of its GI passengers were never found. All told, 8 Americans were killed and 32 injured; 10 British civilians also died, with seven badly wounded. Among the dead was a woman who had been walking quietly with her husband when the rocket exploded and ‘simply disappeared, whisked from his side’, her body being ‘afterwards found at the back of Selfridges’.

  The Duke Street explosion shook the whole West End. At the famous American forces canteen, Rainbow Corner, in Piccadilly Circus nearly a mile away, it set the chandeliers swinging. In a studio in Broadcasting House, a little nearer, it caused a gramophone needle to jump from its groove as the presenter of the American forces programme closed down with a disc of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. The noise was also heard several miles away, often creating the illusion it came from close at hand. One actor living in Streatham while rehearsing an ENSA production of Yellow Sands found that ‘the whole house shook, the curtains blew in and the plastic sheeting in the windows rattled’, only to find himself greeted next morning by a fellow member of the cast with the remark, ‘We had a V-2 in St John’s Wood last night’ – the same ‘Selfridges’ rocket, they rapidly realized.

  December, having begun badly, got no better. 22 rockets arrived in the week beginning on 6 December, 12 of them reaching London, and the proportions remained roughly the same in the following week, with 20 V-2s between 13 and 20 December, 9 of them in the London region. In the following week, which covered Christmas itself, running from 20 to 27 December, there were 25, though only 6 reached London, and in the five days which rounded off the year, from 27 to 31 December, 21, again with 6 in London.

  The war news, meanwhile, had taken a sharp and totally unexpected turn for the worse. The Nine O‘Clock News on Saturday, 16 December 1944, reported a heavy German counter-attack in the Ardennes area of Belgium, and though an official spokesman described it in Monday’s newspapers as ‘a last throw, like March 1918’, the public was not so sure. The rockets, an American historian has commented, had ‘reinforced Hitler’s “bogey-man” image. No matter how often Germany was bombed they could always come up with a new and nasty surprise, just when everybody thought the war was finally over.’ The Ardennes offensive seemed to confirm this fear and sent spirits, already low, plummeting still further. ‘Did I tell you,’ asked a Bethnal Green Evening Institute worker, in a letter to her soldier husband on 18 December, ‘that poor Miss C. had had her home destroyed by a rocket? She reached home, at Eltham, one evening, to find her house gone and both her parents in hospital. Her mother has an unrecognizable face, from which both eyes have had to be removed, and is practically cut to pieces.’ Social worker Vere Hodgson, in Notting Hill, had an equally melancholy tale to record in her diary the following day: ‘Mrs S. [an office colleague] phoned us details of her bomb. Twelve people were killed. Every slate is off her roof. Her chimney is cracked. . . . Merry Xmas to all.’

  On 26 December, after a lull enforced not by goodwill but by the needs of the battle in Belgium, the Germans returned to their familiar pleasure of trying to kill English civilians, and in Islington that Boxing Day they succeeded with one of their most destructive missiles yet. Islington, as yet ‘ungentrified’, was then a solidly proletarian borough, containing row upon row of small, mainly unmodernized houses in often attractive terraces and squares, just north of the great railway area around Kings Cross. Every group of streets had its ‘local’, and typical of these was the Prince of Wales, on the corner of Mackenzie Road and Holloway Road, which was crowded on that holiday evening, a little island of cheer and jollity on a particularly wretched night; a dense fog, of Dickensian thickness, had been blanketing London on and off for weeks.

  At 9.26 p.m. a rocket burst in the concrete roadway just outside, causing two craters, one 40 feet across and 12 feet deep, the other 10 feet by 4 feet. The impact shattered the gas and water mains, so the main crater was soon flooded, adding to the hazards facing the first wardens and rescue men as they struggled to reach the scene through piles of rubble, hidden by the fog and by the smoke from the several small fires which had broken o
ut. The first reports showed that some 22 or 23 storey houses and shops had been destroyed, and another 20, damaged beyond repair, would have to be cleared. One end of a brick surface shelter, luckily empty – on Boxing Day people were celebrating in their homes or in the pub – had been brought down by the blast, helping to block the road still further. The centre of the devastation, however, presenting a classic problem to the rescue men, was the Prince of Wales itself, for the cellar, normally the safest place in any building, had become a death trap. It had been in use as a bar and crowded with drinkers, nearly all of whom were killed or badly injured as the roof and the debris above crashed in upon them, while to add to the horror fire broke out, so that some of the bodies were charred, when recovered at last.

  The first reports, at half past midnight on the morning of 27 December, spoke only of 8 dead and 81 injured, but by 6 a.m. on Thursday, more than thirty hours after the rocket had landed, the total had risen to 64 killed, 86 seriously injured, 182 lightly injured and 4 still trapped. The publican, his wife and a barmaid, all serving on the ground floor, were carried out with minor injuries, and, the regional casualty services officer learned ‘one lad . . . trapped for over nineteen hours’ was removed to hospital, ‘suffering from multiple minor injuries, but . . . stated to be doing well’. A woman trapped in the burning cellar was less lucky. A doctor had managed, at great risk, ‘to get into the cellar and was able to administer morphia’, but she ‘was subsequently extracted dead’.

  The timing and nature of the incident, as much as its high casualty figures, which finally reached 68 dead and 99 seriously injured, caused it to be remembered with particular indignation. ‘We were surprised because it was normal to have a truce during the Christmas holiday,’ remembers a man, then a boy aged twelve, who lived in the Caledonian Road in the same area.

  Having ruined Boxing Day in Islington, the Germans also marked New Year’s Eve with the borough’s second ‘outstanding incident’, which occurred at 20 minutes to midnight on 31 December in Stroud Green Road and Stapledon Hall Road, Crouch Hill, at the northern end of its area, close to the boundary with Finsbury. This time 15 people were killed and 34 badly injured, and 15 more families started the New Year with their homes destroyed. It was the 382nd rocket to reach the United Kingdom and the last of 1944, which everyone saw vanish without regret. The only ray of hope was that Field Marshal von Rundstedt’s last great offensive was now seen to have failed, but for Londoners this meant that Kammler’s attentions would now be again directed even more vigorously against themselves. During December, including a few flying-bomb casualties, 367 people had been killed – 64 of them children – and 847 – 121 of them children – seriously injured. For their families it must have been a melancholy Christmas, and 1945 seemed to promise little better. James Lees-Milne, on his way home to Chelsea with a friend, observed the curious mixture of celebration and danger typical of the time:

  We walked in the moonlight. At Hyde Park Corner we heard a crash, followed by the roar of a rocket that made our hearts beat. Then we laughed. Just before midnight I left him at Sloane Square station and continued homewards. Crowds were singing in the Square. . . . There were sounds of merriment from lighted windows. They seemed forced to me. There were no church bells.

  The ‘crash’ was that of the missile descending on Crouch Hill, and one woman living in Birmingham who telephoned her parents in Croydon, on the other side of London from Islington, heard ‘over the phone the distant explosion of a V-2 while wishing them “A Happy New Year” ’. Much nearer was Gwladys Cox in West End Lane, NW6, who had spent the last few minutes of 1944 listening to a religious service on the BBC:

  After the watch-night service at St Paul’s, I felt the familiar vibration of a rocket bomb and could swear that during the pealing of the bells I also heard an explosion. Then Big Ben struck midnight and we heard ‘Auld Lang Syne’ sung by wounded servicemen, nurses and doctors, accompanied by the Band of the Welsh Guards, at the Royal Herbert Hospital, Woolwich.

  A few hours later she learned that her ears had not deceived her:

  A disastrous New Year for our old friend Miss G. of Crouch Hill! She sits today shivering in the kitchen, with all the windows in her house blasted, for the second time. . . . The top floor of her house is uninhabitable. It has been freezing all day. . . . So we begin the New Year.

  It was a miserable New Year’s Eve for the Foreign Minister of the Polish government-in-exile, awaiting the liberation of his country. In his diary diplomatic discretion could be forgotten:

  The end of the war is not yet in sight. In autumn it seemed near and it is all the more depressing that the struggle continues, with more slaughter than before. . . . A gloom has descended on the allied camp.

  For Kammler’s men it had been a busy evening. After the successful launching of the missile which killed 15 people in Crouch Hill they fired two more A-4s ‘to wish Londoners a happy New Year’, but one failed to achieve lift-off and the other, having staggered into the air, came down on a nearby German barracks. One Dutchman living in the area, on learning what had happened, opened one of his hoarded bottles of gin to drink at midnight to more such ‘successes’. It was a toast which, as 1945 began, millions of people in southern England would have echoed.

  18

  WORSE THAN THE V-1s

  The V-2 has become far more alarming than the V-1, quite contrary to what I thought at first.

  Chelsea resident in his diary, 3 January 1945

  In the summer of 1944 the belief had been widely held that nothing could be worse than the flying bomb. The rocket proved it wrong. Debating which of these two achievements of German technology was the more unpleasant provided one of the few recreations of the winter and even, in December 1944, occupied George Orwell in Tribune:

  People are complaining of the sudden unexpected wallop with which these things go off. ‘It wouldn’t be so bad if you got a bit of warning,’ is the usual formula. There is even a tendency to talk nostalgically of the days of the V-1. ‘The good old doodlebug did at least give you time to get under the table,’ etc. Whereas, in fact, when the doodlebugs were actually dropping, the usual subject of complaint was the uncomfortable waiting period before they went off. Some people are never satisfied.

  The question is one that still interests those who lived through both menaces. What might be called the pro-V-1 case was put by a man then living and working in Woolwich, with close personal experience of the effects of both weapons:

  Personally I found that the evil you could not see far less trying than the evil you could see coming towards you. . . . With the rocket there was simply nothing that you could do, but with the doodles there was plenty of time to watch its approach and to wonder if all that could be done was done. . . . There was nothing for it but the basic philosophy of the soldier in the First World War . . ... ‘If you don’t hear the bang and are not alive then you can’t worry’, which was the only way to regard something that was utterly beyond your control.

  A Chiswick woman, whose house was damaged by the very first rocket, shared this attitude. ‘There wasn’t that moment of fear before they landed,’ she recalls. A Streatham resident regarded the V-2 as belonging to the same category as a thunderbolt. ‘By the time it had arrived,’ she reflected, ‘you were either dead or it had missed.’ A third woman, living at Abridge near Epping, put the same point more succinctly: ‘No buildup. Just bang or oblivion.’ Technically minded males – the technically minded female was a rare being in 1944 – were sometimes so lost in awe of what one calls the ‘tremendous technical mastery’ demonstrated by the Germans that they almost overlooked the associated danger. ‘One felt one was moving into a strange new age with these things rising 130-140 miles up above the earth,’ recalls a then agricultural scientist living in central London. To him their arrival brought back memories of his childhood in a quarrying area of Wales, with ‘the crack of the blast followed by the rumble of the falling rock face’.

  But these were minority view
s. Most people would have agreed with the conclusion reached by Gwladys Cox in West Hampstead as early as mid-September:

  The rockets, if less frequent, are a worse affliction than the flying bombs, as their entirely silent approach cannot be heralded by sirens and clear weather does not deter them. Travelling faster than sound, they are well-nigh impossible to stop.

  Four months later James Lees-Milne in Chelsea was expressing similar sentiments:

  The V-2 has become far more alarming than the V-1, quite contrary to what I thought at first, because it gives no warning sound. One finds oneself waiting for it and jumps out of one’s skin at the slightest bang or unexpected noise, like a car backfire or even a door slam.

  A weapons-design draughtsman, living in Mottingham, reached the same conclusion, even though the family home, in Lee, had been wrecked by a flying bomb:

  The V-2s were far more frightening than the V-1s. . . . One didn’t know what was happening until it had happened; and so life became a 24-hour-per-24-hour stint of realizing that ‘It can happen now, this instant; but since it hasn’t, perhaps it will when we’ve counted twenty, but it didn’t so let’s forget it. . . .’ And then it happens a mile away and you start all over again. After a while you think you’ve forgotten it, but in fact you’re subconsciously waiting for it all the time.