When this occurred in daylight, there appeared suddenly and silently – as once in a clear-blue afternoon sky – a white expanding blossom of smoke like a puff of anti-aircraft fire, only larger; and only some seconds afterwards echoing down to earth its resonant, distant thunderclap of sound. At night a rocket-burst occurring far up, without warning, would paint an abrupt orange moon in the high black sky; again silently, suddenly, arriving and expanding and quickly fading, as though up in the night an evil orange eye had winked at man’s frailty.
One of the first rockets to break up in the air disintegrated above the village of Tillingham, near the coast between Bradwell-on-Sea and Burnham-on-Crouch, one hot September afternoon. In the village school, suddenly ‘shaken by a tremendous explosion’, was one ten-year-old boy who, like his classmates, was excited rather than alarmed:
The window above my head shattered and we all rushed out into the playground. High above the village it looked as though a giant handful of silver paper had been thrown into the air as the broken casing of the rocket floated down in the afternoon sun. . . . On arriving home I found that the V-2’s rocket engine had landed in the field opposite our bungalow. Only two or three feet of the six-foot, one-ton engine was visible above the ground. Some weeks later, my cousin with his team of four Suffolk Punches helped to drag the engine to the side of the field where it was later collected by the army.
To be in the middle of an airburst was even more impressive: One night-fighter pilot, travelling in an unarmed transport, an Airspeed Oxford, nearby achieved the unique feat of being shot down by a V-2:
We were flying over Hertfordshire, just north of London, at about 2000 feet. The naked fields rolled peacefully by, and from an almost cloudless sky the comforting sun smiled down on the frost-cracked earth. . . . I was feeling very moved by the promise of spring. . . .
And then, like a sudden blotch in the blue sky, there appeared a small, reddish cloud about half a mile ahead and high above us. . . . At one moment there was nothing and then, in a flash, it was there, complete, ugly and menacing. As we flew on, gazing in atonishment at this phenomenon, smoky tendrils spread outwards and downwards from its billowing heart. . . . This was no cloud; it was a V-2 rocket, exploding prematurely. . . . In a moment it was nearly overhead. Then something big and black smacked down heavily into a ploughed field just ahead of us. The soil spurted up as it went in and all over the field little puffs of earth begun to spring up as smaller fragments of the rocket rained down. . . . The air all around us was filled with assorted ironmongery . . . pieces of casing, cylinders, gear wheels, nuts, bolts and straggling lengths of wire went whizzing past. . . .
At last the air cleared. . . . We . . . turned and circled over the field. Some farm workers were running out to gather souvenirs and one of them made for the most tempting prize, the big casing that we had seen crashing to the earth. He had taken a good grip on the casing, but then he instantly let go of it and started hopping around sucking his fingers.
Welcome though they were, the airbursts deprived the British authorities of the opportunity to acquire a complete V-2, which was essential if the bomb-disposal section of the Royal Engineers were to learn how to deal with any rockets that failed to explode. An almost undamaged V-1 had fallen into British hands during the first ten days of the flying-bomb campaign, but the V-2s proved less accommodating. As one leading expert, Major Hartley, explained, ‘with the outer casings made red hot by atmospheric pressure, any actual or other technical weakness was more likely to result in a premature burst than failure to detonate on arrival’. It was not until the night of Sunday, 11 March 1945, after six months of rocket bombardment, that the first unexploded V-2 was reported, and ‘at first light on the morning of the twelfth,’ Major Hartley recorded, the officer responsible for bomb disposal in the area – the missile had landed in a field at Paglesham in Essex – ‘started to make his reconnaissance’.
The entry hole made by the rocket was impressive, a shaft five and a half feet wide and apparently some eighteen deep. [Major] Gerhold had himself lowered down it and soon discovered minute traces of grey paint adhering to the sides while in the loose soil at the bottom were small fragments of fibre glass and plywood. . . . There could be no reasonable doubt but that an unexploded V-2 warhead had passed that way. . . . From the nature of the entry hole it was evident that a large sized excavation was going to be necessary and . . . no very speedy recovery of the remains of the rocket could be anticipated. From the point of view of the Civil Defence authorities the incident in a field on a remote farm was of no particular urgency. . . . However, as a specimen it was obviously of great interest. A strong excavation party was soon at work.
The sweating soldiers were still digging when the following Sunday, 18 March, news arrived of a second unexploded rocket, at Hutton near Brentwood, also in Major Gerhold’s area, and he immediately set off for it ‘armed with authority to disregard speed restrictions’. Once again, however, it seemed that recovery was likely to be a long job – but this time there was another complication, sightseers:
The second unexploded V-2, like the first, had fallen in a field, but this time it had not penetrated deeply. The warhead was clearly visible and accessible from the surface. This naturally made the site a subject of considerable interest, and shortly after his arrival Gerhold found that representatives of the General Staff, the RAF, the Ministry of Home Security and various other bodies – in his words, ‘all interested parties bar King Farouk’ – had got wind of the affair and were turning up in force. . . . Gerhold did little to enhance his popularity with High Authority by insisting that safety precautions must be observed and the vicinity of the site cleared but . . . as dark fell police and military guards were posted and the area cordoned off.
As mentioned earlier, and as British intelligence had already learned, the rocket was set off by a radio fuse supposed to operate 10 feet from the ground, and the current to operate this and the detonation mechanism it set in train came via ‘a complex electrical component known as the Sterg unit, situated immediately behind the warhead and connected with the assembly in the nose by leads that passed through the main filling’. It was this unit, fortunately fairly accessible, on which Major Gerhold and another officer now got to work:
Together they cleared away the earth from the crushed and tangled mass of wires, scraps of plywood and other debris. It was work that demanded extreme care and concentration. Each wire had to be traced and scrupulously kept clear of its fellows in case a bared metal surface should cause a short circuit and subsequent detonation. At last the whole broken unit was identified and uncovered and all electrical leads connected with it severed. No current could now pass to the firing mechanism.
It was the Germans’ genial practice to include secondary fuses and ‘anti-handling’ devices in many of their bombs, in the hope the bomb disposers would set them off where the original fuse had failed. X-ray photographs were often taken, therefore, of unfamiliar missiles to locate objects that seemed to have no good reason to be present. This was, very sensibly, done at Hutton:
After the short delays necessary to allow the rays from the radioactive source to penetrate the steel and explosive, the resultant film . . . showed nothing to excite suspicion, so the detonating mechanisms were removed by remote control and later the cast main filling of amatol steamed out. This last operation was a little tricky since the sensitive penthrite filling of the exploder-tube was still in position. However, it was safely completed and it was then found possible to extract the booster-charges by unscrewing a collar at the rear of the warhead and letting them slide harmlessly out of the tube.
The VIP sightseers, if they had not by now gone home, were now free to stare as much as they wished. Not so the unfortunate Major Gerhold, for just as he was finishing work at Hutton news arrived of yet another unexploded V-2, also in his area, so that ‘he began to have intimations of persecution’. From a bomb-disposal point of view this was less of a problem, since ‘impact had sp
lit open the warhead so that the shattered amatol filling could be removed by hand’ and ‘the Sterg was still more or less intact and having been disconnected was taken away for research’ – revealing, incidentally, that it still ‘retained a charge’ so that it it could have set off the rocket even on the ground. This third rocket, however, in a built-up area – it actually enjoyed a precise address, 45 Northumberland Avenue, Hornchurch – was far more troublesome to the civilian departments than either of its predecessors. ‘To enable the bomb-disposal personnel to deal with the unexploded section,’ remembers one man then employed by the London Electricity Supply Company to disconnect damaged or vacated houses, ‘meant evacuation of some hundreds of properties . . . and then arranging for supplies to be switched off from the electrical substations’ – a necessary precaution to reduce the risk of fires if the V-2 exploded, or of cables being left bare and ‘live’ to endanger future visitors to the damaged property. He can still remember ‘the tension of the wait . . . with all the various units and public utility companies at a safe distance’.
The first unexploded V-2 to land was the last to be dealt with. It was not till 7 April that the Paglesham rocket was at last dug out and the warhead recovered from a depth of 37 feet. By then any secrets it had to reveal about the rocket had become of academic interest only.
19
ORDEAL IN ESSEX
What the county endured was never widely known.
Essex resident, 1945, recalling the V-2 attacks
Most of the flying-bombs which had not got through to London landed in Kent. For the rockets, with the attack coming not from France but from Holland, Essex fulfilled the same role. But there was an important difference, psychological if not pragmatic: the V-2s were not shot down on to Essex by the British defences but plunged to earth at the end of their flight.
The county, the tenth largest in England, covering nearly a million acres, and the fourth largest in population, with 1,750,000 inhabitants, presented a large target, but the most closely built-up part of it, on the eastern borders of the capital, lay within the London Civil Defence Region. It was not only this which suffered, however. The rockets were spread over the whole county and very evenly distributed in time as well as space, including several exceptionally bad ones, so that four of the five ‘outstanding incidents’ occurring outside London – the exception was the Commer works V-2 at Luton, already described – took place in Essex, which was first hit by a rocket as early as the fourth day of the bombardment, at Magdalen Laver near Harlow, followed within ten days by four more. This pre-eminent place in the table of rockets within its boundaries, London only excepted, Essex never lost. ‘Perhaps you would like me to start with the score,’ wrote a Home Office official breezily, to the senior regional officer at Eastern Region HQ in Cambridge, on 6 December 1944, ‘which is, at present, in extra-metropolitan Essex’, i.e. outside the London Civil Defence Region, ‘91, in metropolitan Essex, 52, total 143.’ However, as he explained, there was always an element of uncertainty about such statistics, owing to the rocket’s annoying habit of paying no attention to local-government boundaries:
The initial explosion which throws off the propulsion unit of the rocket has led to these parts being scattered, in some cases, over a mile or so of country; quite recently we had one which scattered pieces from Labourne End, on the borders of Hertfordshire, right into Group 7. The second incident of this sort, at North Fambridge, where the explosion was rather high, left recognizable and substantial parts over so wide an area that to cover the whole layout gave us exercise comparable with a morning with the beagles!
Surprising as it seems, considering the rocket’s size and effect, establishing precisely where each missile had fallen created in rural areas like much of Essex a perpetual problem:
V-2 arrives a bolt from the blue, completely unheralded. . . . ‘A pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night’ may possibly give indication of the site of the incident . . . but . . . a good deal of luck will be required if accuracy is to be obtained. . . . The extreme difficulty of locating the position of the fall of a rocket . . . has produced what at times has appeared to be a competition between the [Civil Defence] services of neighbouring areas for the privilege of ‘working’ the incident. . . . I can quote a recent incident at Nazeing [four miles south-west of Harlow] where parties from Hertfordshire, from Waltham Holy Cross in the London Civil Defence Region of Essex, as well as the Western Area parties all arrived. On that day an Essex incident was handled by a Hertfordshire incident officer, and use was made of London facilities. . . . The effect . . . was to impress the inhabitants of this rural district considerably.
The Germans never deliberately aimed at the county town of Essex, unlike Norfolk and Suffolk, but to its inhabitants it must have seemed that they were doing so. On 15 October a V-2 landed only six miles away, at Rettendon, forty yards from the village pub, the Bell, which escaped with shattered windows, though two people were slightly hurt. Another followed at Little Waltham, only four miles to the north, in November, landing in a sugar-beet field 200 yards from the village school. Then, just before Christmas, it was the turn of Chelmsford itself, in a particularly tragic incident, at a local war factory, Hoffman’s, at 1.30 in the morning of Tuesday, 19 December 1944, in the middle of the night shift. A local historian described the scene:
Only a quarter of an hour before the V-bomb fell, men, women and girls in the works had been singing Christmas carols to the accompaniment of the local Salvation Army band. There was a festive spirit in the air. The band left and the workers returned to their benches. Then the bomb fell. For a moment all was chaos. Even girders were twisted into fantastic shapes. Fire broke out. The streams of trapped workers were agonizing. . . . To add to the disaster some large barrels of oil caught fire. By the aid of an army searchlight the rescue work went on for many hours, well into the next day.
One of the girls who escaped later gave her account of the disaster:
We were singing when the place was filled with flames. Debris was falling everywhere and all the lights went out. It was terrible. . . . I had been singing ‘You make me happy’. In the confusion I also remembered where I had left my torch. It was still there, although the lathes and all the workshop fittings had been blown all over the place. I grabbed two friends who were working beside me and somehow we scrambled through a gap in the wall.
Many people died in their beds when their houses in Henry Road, adjoining Hoffman’s, were destroyed, and other property was damaged in Rectory Road, Marconi Road and Bishop Road. Apart from the rescue services, ‘several motor food kitchens were on the spot within ten minutes’, one local man noted, and the whole Civil Defence system stood up well to this sudden test. The final death roll was 39, with another 33 seriously injured. The valedictory address given by the Bishop of Chelmsford over the communal grave in the municipal cemetery was long remembered. ‘They died for their country. They died at their post of duty. We honour their memory.’
Chelmsford was to suffer another, but lesser, industrial incident in February, when a rocket landed, on a Friday afternoon when the streets were crowded with shoppers, in a field by a timber merchant’s in Roxwell Road. Some of the workmen were injured, one very badly, but the general feeling was that the town had got off lightly.
By now V-2s were a familiar part of Essex life, having, even before Christmas, come down at places as far apart at Heybridge, Southminster, Danbury, Writtle and Roxwell, though only one, apart from that at Hoffman’s in Chelmsford, had been classed as ‘outstanding’ – at Collier Row, Romford, on the morning of 16 November, when 12 people had been killed and 32 injured, illustrating once again the direct relationship between density of population and casualty figures.
Colchester, the only other large inland town in Essex apart from Chelmsford (if Romford, on the fringes of London, was excluded), escaped the V-2s altogether, though they were audible all around. ‘As the explosion of the projectiles on a still night could be heard for a dista
nce of ten miles’, commented a local historian, ‘the town heard and felt most of them.’ Many of these were airbursts, for Essex was a constant victim of defective missiles. One of the most spectacular exploded over the centre of Brightlingsea, about six miles down the River Colne from Colchester; another blew up close to Clacton, on the coast twelve miles away, and a third, between Fingringhoe and Rowhedge, barely three miles from Colchester, left ‘the countryside . . . peppered with fragments’. Many V-2s landed along the coast, having just ‘made it’ to the enemy shore. One badly damaged two of Clacton’s leading hotels, the Grand and the Towers, on the sea front, only just above high-water mark.
Because nothing but sea lay between the east coast and the launching sites, people living there could often see a rocket being fired. ‘You could see the rocket trails coming up from the other side,’ remembers one keen aircraft spotter who often stood on the front at Clacton looking up into the clear, early-morning sky. ‘Five minutes later you heard the explosion and saw the black column of smoke.’ To one man working on a farm at Beaumont, near Little Clacton, the missiles soaring skyward seemed ‘like a star going straight up into the sky’, while to a journalist living on Mersea Island, at the mouth of the Blackwater Estuary, ‘on a clear day, their vapour trails, twisty as a corkscrew, could be seen tracing a parabolic curve towards England’.
Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s Page 27