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

by Norman Longmate

  A fifteen-year-old schoolboy in Dagenham decided that ‘after the takeover by the V-2s’ the flying bombs ‘seemed almost like old friends’, and made an interesting comparison, based on his cinema-going:

  If the V-1s were like the ‘great Big Saw’ always drawing nearer to the heroine in Saturday morning matinees, the V-2s were a bit like being under sniper fire for six months at a stretch. . . . The V-1s were old-fashioned melodrama, the V-2s were a threatening horror from outer space, abstract, unreal.

  A then ten-year-old boy, living in Crayford, Kent, also chooses a metaphor appropriate to his age-group at that time:

  The poor old doodlebugs . . . were somehow familiar. One could watch them chugging comfortably along. The difference was the same one feels about ‘good old steam engines’ and the anonymous new modern locomotives, streamlined and unfamiliar.

  A woman living in Leigh-on-Sea on the Essex coast considered, like many other people, that the V-1s had been almost ‘sporting’ in contrast to their successors, ‘a far more insidious and dirty weapon . . . you had no chance of avoiding’. It was this, and the fact that there was evidently no defence of any kind against the rockets, that was so unnerving, as is explained by a woman who was then a nineteen-year-old in Walthamstow:

  When going about your daily chores you were rocked out of your skin by the sound of these explosions just coming from nowhere. . . . These really did shake our morale and . . . had they continued . . . a large proportion of the population would have lost their sang-froid.

  A then ARP instructor in the City of London acknowledges the difference between one’s superficial calm and inner fear:

  We were often in bed when we would hear this ominous rumbling and the windows would rattle.My wife or I would say something like ‘Oh dear! There is another of those things.’ [But] if they had gone on a little longer I expect I should have been a casualty . . . or taken to the madhouse, because they were really getting me down and I was nearly reaching the state of surrendering, Churchill or no Churchill.

  This was a more widespread reaction than was ever admitted. Dedication to the Prime Minister in the solidly Labour areas which had borne the brunt of every German bombardment had never been quite as solid as the newsreels like to suggest, and public confidence in its leaders reached a new low point that winter. One man then working on war damage repair in the Lambeth and Brixton areas remembers seeing ‘women praying in the street for them to stop the war’, something he had never observed at the height of the blitz or the buzz-bombs. Even hardened servicemen found the new danger hard to bear. One sailor, whose home was in Ilford, experienced ‘a feeling of utter helplessness in the face of this new form of attack’ – even before his own house was damaged by it. This was the reaction, too, of a ‘regular’ artillery officer, in Chiswick when the first V-2 arrived, aware of the success his battery had had against the flying bombs. ‘To say he was frightened was an understatement,’ recalls a woman then living in Lee Green of the response of her husband, newly back from the Middle East, after a rocket had brought down the kitchen plaster on the gooseberry pies she was making. ‘He admitted that Rommel’s guns and army . . . hadn’t scared him so much.’

  Horror of the V-2s affected all ages. One man, already an adult in 1944 and now looking back in his sixties, regards the rocket months, when he was living in Carshalton and working in Southwark, as ‘the most nightmarish part of [my] life. . . . I’m sure many of my age-group will agree that these silent monsters were the most frightful weapon of all.’ Even a V-2 seen in a museum after the war he found ‘absolutely terrifying’ and, he believes, if the Germans had possessed it in 1939 the war would have ended as soon as it had begun, for ‘the public would have demanded a cessation of hostilities’. A then thirteen-year-old, living in Waltham Abbey – then part of the borough of Waltham Holy Cross – and attending school in Chingford, sees in retrospect that this was the moment when he grew up in his attitude to war:

  Until the V-2s came it was all rather fun and just part of everyday life. . . . The V-2s were the first thing in the war to frighten me despite going through the blitz and the buzz-bombs. For the first time I really felt the Germans were not playing fair.

  The flying bombs had prompted many jokes and attracted nicknames. Apart from the derisory ‘flying gas main’, aimed at the government rather than the enemy, of the early days, no nicknames are on record for the rocket, and only one joke, reported from Woodford and supposedly based on the doostep conversation of two Cockney-type housewives. ‘Just fancy, you might be blasted into maternity at any minute,’ one has remarked to the other, who responds: ‘Yus. And you’ll never know who done it.’

  The official renaming of the pilotless aircraft as the flying bomb and its unofficial renaming as the doodlebug had helped to defuse some of the V-1’s terrors, as had the growing public familiarity with its appearance and effects. The rocket, by contrast, seemed all the more horrific the more one learned about it. The government, from the moment its existence was officially admitted, had done its best to remove the veil of secrecy surrounding this new weapon. As has been seen, a reasonably accurate account of its main features had appeared in the press along with Churchill’s statement of 10 November 1944, and a few days later the first ‘artist’s impression’ was published, followed by a remarkably accurate drawing of a launching site in the Illustrated London News, which reached a much wider audience when reproduced in the Daily Express on 4 December. On Saturday, 9 December, the newspapers carried cut-away drawings showing how the rocket was constructed under such captions as ‘The V-2 gives up its secrets’, the fruits of earlier research by Air Intelligence and of the ‘scavenging’ expeditions of RAF officers at the sites of the first incidents. The twentieth rocket, which had broken up in the air into a few large fragments, scattered among the trees at Dagnan Park, Noak Hill, Romford, had proved particularly useful, but eventually the British experts had more than enough pieces for their ‘jigsaws’ and the amount of scrap left behind by many V-2s became an embarrassment. One man remembers how, even after several loads had been removed, portions of rocket casing and mechanism still littered the area surrounding his firm’s head office at Danbury, near Chelmsford, and in the most rocket-plagued areas even schoolboy collectors eventually had their fill of souvenirs. ‘Remains of V-2s were easy to come by,’ remembers a then seventeen-year-old engineering apprentice in Essex, ‘fairly large pieces of engine and exhaust nozzles and glass wool being found round the bombed site,’ and often the combustion chamber lay around for weeks, being too heavy for removal by bicycle. (The tail fins, or perhaps the whole rocket, seen sticking up in the mud off Shoeburyness, visible only at low tide, defeated even the most ardent souvenir hunters.)

  To oberve the signs of a rocket taking off was not, especially for those professionally concerned with counter-measures against the missile, an uncommon experience. A pilot based at RAF Newchurch on the Kent coast found it ‘very frustrating’, when sent against suspected launching sites in Holland to arrive just ‘in time to see these large rockets climbing up and away from us, leaving long trails of white smoke against the dawn sky’. A gunner stationed at Maidstone watched another V-2 ‘like a golden thread climbing high into the sky’ in the distance over Holland, ‘the exhaust trail lit by the early sun’. A wartime soldier, stationed in the Welsh mountains, saw a speck of light far to the east, around Christmas 1944, very different from the star appropriate to the season, for ‘it looped up, reached its zenith and plunged down – a V-2 falling on London’. A soldier serving near the Rhine in the closing stages of the war was intrigued to see ‘many miles in the distance a rocket . . . rising . . . a straight white trail in the sky, which on dispersing became a zigzag line. I remember thinking that it might land on my home’ – though it was more probably aimed at Antwerp.

  On a clear day or night a rocket’s trail might be briefly glimpsed from a hundred miles away or more – indeed, the government’s original, and abortive, plans for a warning system had relied
on such visual identification. In the event, the Royal Observer Corps plotted many such sightings, though to no purpose, by linking the reports from various posts. One ROC member stationed at Cranleigh remembers spending many hours that winter gazing in the direction of Holland for this reason and another Observer, stationed at Rainham in Kent, now realizes that the ‘spiralling vortex trails’ he could see on exceptionally bright moonlight nights before the attack began must have been V-2 test flights over the Baltic. Even ordinary civilians sometimes shared such experiences. A seventeen-year-old apprentice, walking across Mitcham Common on his way to work, found himself studying ‘silhouetted against the dawn glow the gilden stream of a vapour trail rising from below the horizon . . . to the stratosphere’, and the wide reaches of the Thames also favoured such observation, as a man working in the heavy-gun shop at Woolwich Arsenal discovered:

  It was not strictly true to say that the rockets were undetectable, for if one was looking down river at the right time it was possible to see what appeared to be a shooting star climb upwards and you knew that in Robb Wilton’s classic phrase ‘I’ve only got three minutes’. Also at the point of re-entry into the atmosphere if the sky happened to be clear it was possible to see a vapour trail, but most of those claimed . . . were left by high-flying aircraft.

  A few people believe they saw a rocket itself in flight. A man living in Warlingham recalls ‘a Scots caber or telegraph pole hurtling through the sky, not straight like an arrow but turning over and over like a boomerang’. ‘Like a telegraph pole with a vapour trail behind it,’ thought a young man watching from a factory roof in Mitcham. ‘A long black object like a thick telegraph pole with a dull red flame coming from the back,’ agrees an artillery NCO, then stationed in Kent, of the missile he saw approaching the ground. ‘A shooting star falling to earth . . . followed by a flash’ is the description of a man then aged fifteen whose ‘first and only sighting of a V-2’ occurred as he left his youth club in east London.

  More common were claims to have sensed a rocket’s approach, but a Ministry of Home Security report, compiled late in 1944, was sceptical.

  There have been isolated reports, from persons near the site of the incident, of a short ‘swish’ just before the explosion and several reports of a ‘feeling of pressure’ or a premonitory instinct of impending disaster immediately before the explosion. It is possible that this may be due to confusion of time in the memory afterwards.

  The evidence suggests, however, that a few – a very few – people may have reacted in this way, like the wife of a warden in Croydon, who was, he realized, ‘possessed of hearing equivalent to a wild animal’s’, a gift which proved useful when the area’s first V-2 arrived. ‘Suddenly she made a dive under the table. “What the hell is the matter?” I said. She replied: “It sounds like an express train flying through the air.” A split second later I heard a huge explosion.’

  Similar, and more widespread, claims were made for family pets, who had certainly shown a more than human facility to detect flying bombs. A young nurse living in Balham observed that the family cat, Junior, ‘asleep on a chair . . . suddenly leaped up in the air, gave a wail of terror and rushed under the sideboard in the corner of the room’, just before the ‘terrifying explosion’ of the first local V-2, and he was to repeat the performance ‘on two more occasions’. Usually, however, the first sign of a rocket’s arrival was a bright flash, a phenomenon made use of by a Mitcham family, where the son of the house, whose bedroom faced over London, went to bed before his parents. When a flash lit up his room he would bang twice on the floor with a shoe to warn his parents that in a few seconds they were likely to hear the roar of the explosion as the sound wave reached them. A then eleven-year-old has vivid memories of the ‘big, blue flash’ which preceded the destruction of her home in Dalton Lane, Hackney on St Valentine’s Day 1945. ‘There was’, she remembers, ‘no bang, only everything falling on us and my dad saying “Hello, Jack. This is your lot!” ’ Fortunately it wasn’t. The upper half of the house was ‘smashed to nothing’, but the family were all downstairs and unhurt. And some of those very close to an exploding V-2 did not even see the flash. One Walthamstow woman whose husband was working as a welder in a factory building outside which a V-2 landed – he was, he believed, ‘only about fifty feet away’ – ‘did not hear a thing, only saw a white haze and then the debris falling all round him’, memories on which he had ample time to reflect during his subsequent three months in hospital.

  The sound of a rocket detonating rapidly became familiar to millions of people in Greater London and Essex, and a Ministry of Home Security report in December confirmed the interim description compiled in mid-September. The sharp ‘crack’, as the warhead exploded, was, the ministry agreed, followed by ‘a drawn-out rumbling sound, caused by the passage of the missile through the air faster than sound . . . described as “more echoing and more prolonged than a flying bomb, like a peculiar peal of thunder”.’ The report also endorsed what many people had already discovered for themselves – that the ears provided an unreliable guide to locating the point of impact:

  Sounds seems to be no indication of either the distance or of the direction of the explosion. Explosions have been heard distinctly twenty or thirty miles away. At ten miles that has been loud enough to give the impression that the incident is very close, yet to people within half a mile of the incident it has sounded too far away to be of their immediate concern.

  The ministry had also assembled much evidence on the nature of the craters caused by the V-2, some of it obtained, as at least one document hinted, by unwelcome calls to busy officials made in the small hours. However, the duty of garnering every possible scrap of information was not shirked. ‘Craters . . .’, the ministry advised regions with as yet no first-hand knowledge of the V-2, ‘are generally . . . steeply cone-shaped or saucer-shaped. The cone-shaped craters are anything between 20 and 45 feet across and between 6 and 20 feet deep. Those of saucer shape are from 3 to 5 feet deep and from 30 to 45 feet across. . . . The deepest craters seem to be found where the missile has struck the hardest surface, such as a concrete roadway.’ It was such impacts which produced the ‘earthquake’ effect sometimes felt several miles away, and able to bring down buildings over a wide radius. This experience of being physically shaken many people found the most alarming aspect of the whole campaign. ‘The whole building seemed to sway,’ remembers one woman who had been sitting in the Brixton Palladium watching Rebecca. ‘I was very scared and . . . wanted to go home but my sister would not leave and said, ‘It’s down now”.’ ‘I felt the floorboards shudder beneath my feet, the fire shifted and various small things in the room moved or rattled,’ recalls a Croydon woman of a similar occasion. A man then aged fourteen remembers his astonishment when cycling with a friend past a shop in Lee Green when ‘the blind suddenly gave a double flap’, explained seconds later as ‘the long rumbling roar’ of an explosion two miles away ‘caught up with it’. An AFS woman had an even more disconcerting experience at a bus stop in Streatham. ‘The legs of my trousers started to move as though shaken by invisible hands’, while warm air rushed up her legs, from a V-2 which ‘had exploded the other side of the Common’.

  It was not always clear whether, as here, it was blast which was to blame or the tremor of the explosion spreading through the earth. One actor who was walking along Regent Street towards Broadcasting House observed ‘the glass windows in a building just ahead . . . shaking like fury’ while still ‘reflecting the blue of the sky’. A Wandsworth woman treasures the memory of one of the oddest sights of the period, seeing a huge ball of dust and debris blowing over her house in which she could distinguish a cloud of feathers – whether from a ruined mattress or some unfortunate flock of hens she never discovered. As with sound, distance seemed to bear little direct relation to damage outside the immediate vicinity of the explosion. One American noted that the Duke Street rocket had not even knocked off the hat of a friend near enough to it to be ‘conscious .
. . of a sheet of flame’ and to endure ‘for a minute or two following the explosion . . . a rain of minute particles of glass’, although ‘windows in buildings a mile and a half distant were blown out’.

  What it felt like to be on the distant fringes of an explosion is vividly recalled by a man then working in the New Kent Road who was waiting for a train at the Elephant and Castle Station when a V-2 landed in St George’s Circus, nearly a quarter of a mile away:

  I stood on the station leaning over the parapet awaiting my train . . . when this awful tearing draught occurred, the sky lit up by a myriad of colours, a bright mauve being predominant, followed by an explosion that . . . [left] my ears affected for days. The station parapet, a massive stonework affair, literally lifted quite six inches, pushing my hands in the air – then dust, smoke and an acrid smell in the nostrils. I felt shaking in my limbs. It was so silent: no whistle like a bomb, or the throb of a doodle, but this awful draught.

  Of all the manifestations of the rocket, to those not directly harmed by it, the most spectacular was the airburst, which, to Dornberger’s despair, had become such a common sight over the Blizna rocket range. One wartime schoolboy remembers his newspaper round in Tottenham being enlivened by ‘an enormous explosion in the sky . . . like an enormous firework, or a whole boxful of rockets going off together, with all the colours of the rainbow’. An RAF dental officer at Biggin Hill watched ‘a succession of fine curved black lines emerge from behind a cloud at a very great height, fanning out across the blue sky . . . as though a pebble was thrown . . . and the ripples were spreading out’. The writer William Sansom, based in Westminster, described seeing a premature V-2 explosion in even more poetic terms: