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

by Norman Longmate

  Not all the V-2s apparently heading for London reached it. Many must have plummeted down unrecorded into the sea or ploughed up the mud of the foreshore, harming only the eel grass and disturbing only the Brent geese that made the area their home. Two rockets are known to have fallen in or close to Thirslot Creek, an inlet of the Blackwater, and a third’s remains are believed to lie in Southey Creek. These and other ‘shorts’ must have provided an additional hazard for the soldiers hoisted, no doubt with little enthusiasm, in an observation balloon into the chill east-coast breeze to try to provide advance warning that a V-2 was on its way – an attempt, as mentioned earlier, doomed to failure.

  The best-known place in Essex was Southend and here the Germans scored what, if it had been intended, would have qualified as a remarkable bull’s-eye, plunging a rocket straight through the roof of the Pier Pavilion. The police were told ‘that every smallest piece of the rocket had to be carefully collected,’ a then civilian driver with the Southend Constabulary remembers, and eventually these fragments filled to overflowing a 30-foot-long shed behind the Central Police Station ‘known as the “Bomb Mortuary”.’

  Westcliff-on-Sea was Southend’s smaller and quieter neighbour, and its experiences of the rocket are recorded in the regular letters which a couple living there sent to their soldier son, only mentioning it, like good citizens, once it was no longer a secret:

  12 November 1944. You have heard about the rockets now. Several have landed about here – only one did damage in the town.

  26 November 1944. We get quite a lot of rockets about here. They make a noise that can be heard for miles. . . . One fell at Wakering on Wednesday and one in the mud off Westcliff.

  19 March 1945. One fell at Dawes Heath Road, Rayleigh, last week, but they still miss the Southend area pretty well.

  No part of Essex escaped entirely; indeed, as a map makes clear, it was positively peppered with V-2s. The experiences of the rector of Purleigh (a village eight miles east of Chelmsford) who, as its warden, was responsible for his flock’s temporal as well as spiritual welfare, were typical. On 15 December he noted in his log-book; ‘Rocket. Somewhere near; unable to get information by telephone’, but later added: ‘Aerodrome’, a former airfield now used for point-to-points, close to which some council houses received ‘a severe shaking’. A second V-2 followed soon afterwards. ‘We got enough of the blast at the rectory to bring down a bit of ceiling and various bits of glass,’ he recorded. ‘The only injury was to a horse, but the crater would have held a good half-dozen double-decker buses and its contents lay about in a horrible mess over a wide area of meadow.’

  A little later the same clergyman had to endure the interruption of that most innocent of activities, the vicarage tea-party:

  A study circle of clergy to which I belong holds monthly meetings in the houses of its members in turn, on the second Tuesday of the month. On Tuesday, 13 February, thirteen of us met at Great Braxted, where our host was the rector, the Rev. H. Douglas Neison. We had studied our Greek Testament in the morning and heard and discussed a paper in the afternoon and were standing round the dining-room table for our stirrup cup of tea before returning to our various homes when a very sharp bang resounded overhead. Nobody said anything, but we looked at each other, and the language of all eyes said plainly enough, ‘Well, that’s a near one. But we’ve heard the noise, so the thing must be miles away by now.’

  The studious clerics had reckoned, however, without that common Essex phenomenon, the air-break, which left the warhead of a disintegrating missile intact:

  After a short pause, there came the other noise, familiar enough to all of us, of the express train rushing through the tunnel. . . . Then, with another bang and a quake the thing arrived fifty yards away; the windows, glass, sashes and all, melted on to the floor and covered it. . . . Slates sprinkled the ground outside in fragments. We found ourselves looking out through unglazed apertures that had been windows and on to the floor and furniture which the windows now covered . . . and at our host and his sister, whose ruin this was, and at each other, wondering why we were still there. . . . I seized the telephone, perhaps by force of habit, to get through to Report Centre and found it out of order, so, as the house was isolated . . . I judged that it would be more useful to drive straight for Maldon and make sure that the Mobile Unit knew where to go. However Great Braxted wardens had managed to get through. . . . Mr Neison afterwards told me that only three windows had survived and that the cost of his War Damage was £750. The cost to him and his sister of the inconvenience and of cleaning up and straightening out was incalculable. He had been bombed out of his parish in Birmingham to come to this quiet country living.

  The following day, also rudely interrupting teatime, another V-2 landed at Mountnessing, around 5 o’clock on Wednesday, 14 February, plunging to earth only ten yards from the main Chelmsford-to-London road, so that its effects were widely seen and felt, as a local writer recalled:

  The rocket made its crater close to New Cottage, a modern detached house, the residence of Mrs Florence Breedon. Mrs Breedon and her daughter were having tea when the back and one side of the house collapsed beside them. They were blown from their chairs up against the dining-room wall, rooms upstairs just disintegrated and every bit of glass was blown out. Not a plate dish or glass in the house remained unbroken.

  A rescue squad, hastily mustered, rushed into the ruined house, expecting the worse, but the two occupants had no more than a few cuts and bruises. . . .

  Across the road, Mountnessing’s ‘shopping centre’ presented a sorry sight. From the post-office down to the Congregational chapel, every window had gone, every ceiling was down and furniture inside was all at sixes and sevens. The front of the chapel had completely caved in and what was left of the wind organ had been carried outside the building. . . .

  Only three minutes before . . . a loaded Chelmsford-bound bus had passed the spot, while a bus going to Brentwood was almost due. . . . There were a few people standing outside the post-office waiting for it at the time. One of them was Miss Harris, the schoolmistress. They were almost blown off their feet by the force of the explosion. Miss Harris had a few minutes before locked up the school, the damage to which necessitated its being closed for five weeks. . . . Within a radius of 200 yards not a ceiling remained intact. But there was not a single serious casualty.

  The following Sunday, 18 February, a man doing the early-morning milking on a farm at Woodham Ferrers, six miles from Chelmsford, had an even more frightening demonstration of the rocket’s malevolence:

  At 7 a.m. I left the cowshed to take two pails of milk to the dairy and then went over to the pond hole to relieve myself. As I crouched down I saw a flash in the sky. I do not remember anything else until I heard Duke E., the other cowman, calling. . . . I remember I was fighting for my breath but I have no idea how I had come out of the pond hole, which by now was filled with big lumps of clay, and I was now on top of the dungle, which was near the remains of a brick wall a few yards away. All the farm buildings had fallen.

  I got up and a pig ran through my legs with its guts hanging out. It ran up on to the dungle and died. Twenty-one cows were killed and all that was left of one of them was a bit of hide. Two horses were buried in the debris, but were not hurt.

  My C. [my employer] was in bed in the farmhouse when all this happened and he was showered with glass. The telephone was out of order and it took the ambulance about an hour and a half to come. Duke had been trapped under a beam and his leg was like jelly. We were both taken to hospital in Chelmsford but Duke died on the way. I was treated for shock . . . [and] kept in for a week.

  That evening the rector of Purleigh, after his narrow escape the previous Tuesday, was settling down for a peaceful evening by the fire at 8.15 p.m., no doubt glad to be indoors again after evensong:

  It was a thick night after rain. On hearing the explosion I tried to get in touch with Warden Lee of Cock Clarks but found the telephone was not functioning, so I g
ot into the car with Mrs Walwyn and her first aid kit, and my daughter who was home on leave and drove. As we came into Cock Clarks we found the roads a thick mess of glass, mud and telephone wires. The Head Warden was already in the windowless post office telphoning to Sub-Control (probably via Corporation Farm). All Cock Clarks was there, though it was too dark to see who anyone was.

  So many people had turned out to recue one local resident that it soon appeared that within the official ‘incident’ another of a different kind had developed:

  Contrary to all regulations, Mrs Stuart-Jekyll had been extricated from her bed and debris by neighbours in advance of the rescue party, concerning which words appear to have passed . . . but as the neighbours, being men of their hands, had done the job safely and effectively . . . their words were fiercer, or at least more conclusive than the words of the men of the rescue party. When we arrived Mrs Stuart-Jekyll was seated in dignity and comfort in the back of a car which she directed to the house of an acquaintance near Danbury. Mr and Mrs Jordan, in their cottage a few yards beyond Mrs Stuart-Jekyll’s, . . . . had been sitting on either side of the fire when . . . without . . . . any warning or noise of explosion the house just began to collapse about them. The chimney is the pillar of these wooden houses and with some of the uprights it stood firm and saved them from being crushed. . . . Neighbours took them in until they were able soon after to find another cottage. . . . Three houses . . . were wrecked beyond repair. A number of others suffered more or less severely. It seemed a miracle that one was able to include in the Final Report: ‘Casualties: Nil’.

  This was one rural warden’s rocket war, or most of it: Purleigh had yet another rocket two days later, only three-quarters of a mile away, the noisiest yet, since it wrecked some greenhouses as well as a private house. Other residents of rural Essex had further explosions to endure, like the elderly couple living in a thatched cottage, a fact which was to save their lives, along with the absence of a warning, for the shelter, to which they always adjourned when the siren sounded, was at the very edge of the ‘crater in which’, as a local historian described, ‘a couple of Stoke Cottages could easily have been placed side by side’. Stoke Cottage was on the road midway between Writtle and Roxwell and was destroyed at 3.30 in the morning of Wednesday, 7 March 1945, as its sixty-eight-year-old occupant, peacefully asleep alongside his wife, explained:

  As I came to my senses my first fleeting impression was that there had been an earthquake. . . . Everything around us and both of us seemed to be suspended in mid-air. There was a terrific crack, as though all the thunder I had ever heard in my life had been rolled into an awful roar. Then everything around us collapsed.

  But as the cottage was thatched and not slated the whole heap of thatch a couple of feet thick, fell upon us, and instead of killing us protected us from bricks and timber. When my wife and I realized that we were still alive and apparently uninjured, we found we were on the ground floor, having fallen through the bedroom floor, with part of the thatched roof still forming a sort of triangle over us. We started crawling through bits of smashed furniture. We hadn’t the faintest idea where the front or the back of the cottage was. Then, groping, half stunned, through a hole, we found ourselves out in the open at the back of where the cottage had been. The earth seemed to be still quivering from the effects of the explosion.

  It was dark, but we could dimly see some of the fine old trees in the garden snapped and torn as though they had been matchsticks. Then the ambulance came and took us away. . . . The ARP workers quite expected to find us badly hurt but . . . we had no more than a few scratches between us.

  Most of the more heavily developed part of Essex lay within the London Civil Defence Region, but the non-metropolitan parts of the county included the great industrial belt on the Thames, which formed its southern border, and, towards its south-west corner, the town of Romford, whose 36,000 inhabitants made it larger than Chelmsford though a little smaller than Colchester. Romford’s situation made it uncomfortably rocket-prone. No fewer than 22 fell within the borough’s boundaries, including an airburst over Ferguson Avenue, and, as a local resident wrote, ‘Many more were close enough to give that momentary mental shock which, after some months, began to try even the strongest nerves. . . . It was difficult not to dwell on the possibility of one being even at that moment speeding on its way down towards us, like a giant dart with ourselves as the “bull”.’

  The local Civil Defence report centre, having labelled the V-1 ‘fly’, logically but unofficially, recorded rockets as ‘wasps’. The first wasp sting came on 16 September and by the end of the year there had been seven more, which included two on New Year’s Eve itself, and one ‘outstanding incident’, ‘near the junction of Rosedale Road and Collier Row Lane’ – described in the ministry records as ‘Colliers Row, Essex’ – at 7.40 a.m. on 16 November, when 13 people were killed, 32 more admitted to hospital, with 34 houses demolished and 800 more damaged. Romford was hit by two more rockets in January 1945, four in February and, as if Kammler were firing off his stocks in a final burst of defiance, seven in March, one of which landed close to the County High School for Girls, as one of its not over-enthusiastic scholars, then aged fourteen and living in Upminster, still remembers:

  There was a loud bang just as I was leaving for school . . . and I jokingly said to my mother . . . ‘I bet that’s hit my school.’ I walked the short distance to the town centre and caught one of the local buses . . . got off and started to walk down a long road. . . . At the end of the road was a park which I had to cross . . . and as I reached the gateway I had to pick my way through clods of earth and other debris which littered the pavement. There were some workmen there clearing up the mess and one said to me, ‘There’ll be no school for you today, love’. . . .

  As I entered the park I could see the crater, not a very big one, in the far corner, just behind the school’s tennis courts, which were on the boundary of the school grounds and the park. . . . I couldn’t see how badly the school was damaged until I was past the tennis courts. Then I could see that the prefabricated science laboratory, which stood about a hundred yards from the main building, was in a state of collapse like a house of cards. Once inside the main building I could see whole window frames in the corridors leaning inwards, but most of the glass was still in them, as it had been shatter-proofed. After a while, a roll-call was taken and we were allowed briefly into the classrooms to collect our books and possessions. . . . We were dismissed for the Easter holidays two weeks early, which pleased us all. However, our joy was short-lived when we learned we would be returning a week sooner than originally scheduled, so the V-2 only got us one extra week’s holiday.

  Romford continued to attract rockets till the very end of the campaign. It suffered a second ‘outstanding incident’ at Harold Wood in mid-February, when 12 people were killed and 34 injured, and its last two V-2s did not arrive till Monday, 26 March 1945. The first destroyed 16 hourses in the Forest Road area, killing two people; the last, with unintended irony, demolished the so-called Victory Hut, in Noak Hill, but harmed no one.

  Next door to Romford was Hornchurch, where two rows of houses were almost levelled to the ground in mid-December 1944 and it took eight hours to extract the last trapped person from the ruins, but there were no fatal casualties. In another incident, remembered by a woman, then a bright-eyed six-year-old, attending the Ardleigh Green infants’ school, the town was less fortunate:

  I was sitting at my desk . . . when suddenly there was a big bang and the ceiling in our classroom started to collapse. We all scrambled under our desk and crouched there terrified wondering what had happened. Evidently a V-2 had landed on a small factory (Lacrinoid’s) situated behind our school and killed several of the workers.

  I don’t remember anybody in my class being hurt but, as the explosion had burst the water pipes and hot water was streaming down the corridors, we were all hurriedly sent home. It was bitterly cold at the time and I can remember people complaining when
they were clearing up the mess from the shattered windows that they couldn’t tell the difference between lumps of glass and lumps of ice. I went rushing home from school worried that my mother might have been hurt, but when I got home, although every window in the household had been blasted away, my mum was standing in the kitchen with her hat and coat on, doing the washing-up as if nothing had happened.

  Churches and clergy enjoyed no special protection, as many elsewere in Essex could have testified, but the rector of Laindon-cum-Basildon was particularly unlucky, suffering, his brother (whose own experiences in East Ham will be described later) remembers, twice in successive days. The first explosion wrecked his car in its garage in the rectory grounds, while ‘The following day another rocket completely demolished the rectory and . . . my brother and his wife and children had to move to Billericay.’