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

by Norman Longmate

  Rainham was the site of another of Essex’s ‘outstanding incidents’, shortly before midnight on Monday, 15 January 1945, when 14 people were killed and 4 seriously injured. Another, happily less lethal, rocket made her wedding day doubly memorably for a GI bride who was kneeling beside her future husband at the altar rail of a local church when its walls were struck by pieces of a V-2 which had come down 200 yards away and also blew the windows in. The groom reacted, all agreed, with a composure that could have been British, and, though the people and their guests instinctively ducked, the service went on. As the guests left fire engines and ambulances went roaring past, prompting an apt comment from the new husband: ‘Waal, I wanted a war wedding and I guess I’ve got one!’

  Purfleet, a little lower down the river than Rainham, was the scene of one of the lucky escapes which could be set against the all too frequent disasters. A rocket scored a direct hit on the Thames Board Mills, producing all kinds of packaging material for munitions, but though ‘It wrecked the Pump House and the water supply lines’ and ‘did extensive damage to the neighbouring property’, as the firm’s war history recorded, it failed to start a major fire.

  For shopkeepers the rockets added one more burden to a life already governed by regulations and coupons. One wartime WAAF, whose parents owned a children’s outfitting and wool shop in Grays, between Purfleet and Tilbury, remembers how, during a visit home, a ‘tremendous explosion’ sent her sister cycling into town to see what had happened to the family business:

  She managed to ring through to tell us to come quickly. . . . We tore to the shop and found the roof off, plate-glass windows blown indoors and windows hanging on hinges, stock turn to shreds in the windows, splinters of glass and chaos everywhere. . . . My father had to spend the night on the premises as it was completely open and customers came in the next day for wool which had been reserved for them. The bomb had fallen at the rear of the old public library, demolishing many houses in Cromwell Road and killing a few people. . . . Tarpaulins were in great demand. My father nearly had a fight to get one for the shop roof, as children’s clothing and wool was in short supply and rationed to us by suppliers.

  Essex was eventually to be hit by around a third of all the rockets that reached the British Isles, including those which burst in the air above it or fell along its shores. If the ‘London’ part of Essex, stretching from Waltham Holy Cross and Chingford to Barking and Dagenham, was included the total rose to more than 50 per cent. The local journalist who complained in 1945 that ‘what the county endured was never widely known’ was speaking no more than the truth, and many would have echoed the comment of a local NFS commander, prompted by the use of the blanket term ‘southern England’ in published reports: ‘Essex took a devil of a lot of southern England.’ Like Kent in the flying-bomb era, Essex undoubtedly felt that other places had no idea of what, if inadvertently in this case, it was suffering to save London, and, again like Kent, parts of the county for a time did not qualify for Morrison shelters. The lack of warning for anyone removed one old grievance, however, that there were few sirens outside the towns and where they existed, Essex County Standard reporters were regularly told, ‘some districts could hear’ them ‘only when the wind was favourable’. Now everyone was equally badly off.

  Essex’s 378 incidents left 148 people dead and another 431 seriously injured, far ahead of any other county’s toll. Next came Kent, with 64 V-2s, excluding the area within the London Region, which killed 45 people and seriously injured 109, though the county authorities put the total of V-2 incidents higher, at 67. Unlike the flying-bombs, the rockets were concentrated in the north-west corner of the county, but affected people over a much wider area, as one of them, then a sixteen-year-old motor-trade apprentice, who lived in Ashford and worked for the Canterbury Motor Company, discovered:

  I travelled by train, the 7.36 a.m., stopping at Wye, Chilham and Chartham. . . . Trains became increasingly unreliable, one hour late, perhaps two. We stood on the platform, nobody said when the train was coming; sometimes a rumour, ‘Rocket on the line at St Mary Cray.’ . . . Sometimes we heard a V-2 from Canterbury or Ashford; the massive explosion followed by the awful rumble of the rocket’s approach. . . . We never knew its terrible destructive power, we only knew it as a cause for endless delays and cold hours on unlit platforms. The war had lost its glamour!

  A few places were more seriously affected, notably Gravesend, just across the river from the rocket-prone industrial belt of Essex. One place to suffer was the Fort House, once occupied by the future General Gordon of Khartoum fame. A man then teaching at Gordon School, 200 yards from the river and opposite Fort Tilbury, remembers it:

  I was washing up after supper at about 11.00. . . . There was a bang and the window flew wide open. . . . I saw a huge cloud of smoke in the air so I took an axe and went out to see if I could help. When I got to Milton Place the fire brigade was already there. Half of a terrace of the big houses had gone and there was a hole in the road. Later I learned that the V-2 had landed almost in the middle of the road and blown down the old Fort House. . . . Some half-dozen houses were in ruins and I remember seeing high on the wall a fireplace with the fire still burning in the grate.

  A few doors further a fireman and I were stopped by an agitated teenage girl who said her parents were at the top of the house, four storeys up, so the firemen and I climbed over the broken front steps and went up the stairs. The scene was almost comic, as her elderly father was searching in a drawer as if nothing had happened, though his wife was sitting on the bed. ‘It’s all right,’ he growled, ‘I’ll get us down.’. . . . One boy from my own class had gone to bed and woke up in the garden. His mother, sister, her fiance, and brother were all dead. His father had been on night work and he and the boy only were alive.

  Most of Kent’s rockets came down in totally rural surroundings, like the grounds of a nursing home at High Brooms, where an elderly woman was killed by shock. The village of Farningham where, according to a local author, life in the 1940s ‘flowed on much the same . . . as it was done for 1,000 years’, added a proud new entry to its list of battle honours – ‘H.E. 143, Incendiary attacks 12, flying bombs 6’ – ‘Long Range Rockets 1’, which ‘fell into the fields above Sparepenny Lane in February 1945, damaging houses many hundreds of yards away’. Nor was Westerham, where Churchill’s country house, Chartwell, was located, spared, as one farmworker, then aged fifteen recalls:

  I was unloading cabbages from a horse-drawn cart when, without any warning, there was an explosion. The old mare just shook. Having experienced the Battle of Britain, the blitz and the V-1s, she was quite a veteran in her own right. Then, after a brief pause, there came a strange noise . . . increasing in intensity for a few seconds. . . . This was too much for the horse, who took off through an open gate into a small paddock. As she did so, I lost my balance on the cart and fell off backwards. After a trot round the paddock she gave up and stood still.

  No other county had to endure anything like the trials of Essex and Kent. Hertfordshire, with 34 rockets, Norfolk with 29, Suffolk with 13, Surrey with 8 and Sussex with 4 had not a single resident killed, though Bedfordshire, with only 3 V-2s, suffered 19 dead, from the incident at Luton already described. Buckinghamshire was hit by 2 V-2s which seriously injured 3 people, and Cambridgeshire by 1, which caused no casualties. Berkshire’s solitary rocket was the longest ‘overshoot’ of the campaign, for it landed in a small but prosperous Thames-side village 35 miles beyond London and 230 from The Hague, with results recorded in the county archives:

  19 March 1945. Cockpole Green, Wargrave. At 1007 hours the warhead of a Long-Range Rocket (which exploded in the air over Pinkney’s Green) fell and exploded at Cockpole Green causing 2 serious and 10 slight casualties and blast damage to the Four Horseshoe s and Old Thatched Gate public houses, Goulders Farm and five cottages. Portions . . . fell in various parts of Pinkney’s Green, including field near Compton Elms and Littlehole Winter Hill Road. No casualty or damage.


  20

  THE BATTLEFIELDS OF ILFORD

  The shopping centre resembled a battlefield.

  Ilford Guardian reporter, recalling 8 February 1945

  Ilford in 1944 was a place of which, thanks to the photographic suppliers Ilford Ltd, many people had heard – but few had visited. It was a prosperous suburb, largely residential but containing a good deal of light industry. Its population, estimated at 130,000 in 1939, had grown rapidly, and Ilford was now to earn the unwelcome distinction of being hit by more rockets than any other borough in the country. Rockets from The Hague which fell considerably short of their aiming point came down in rural Essex: those which almost ‘made it’ to their target fell in Ilford. Ilford’s 35 rockets placed it just ahead of Woolwich, equidistant from Holland on the other side of the Thames, but well ahead of West Ham, with 27. Its death roll was, however, lower and not one of its 35 featured in the Home Office ‘top 50’ of ‘outstanding incidents’. Its casualties were the result of a steady drizzle of rockets descending on it throughout the whole V-2 period, each killing or injuring its handful of people and damaging its few hundred houses, not of any single spectacular disaster. They were scattered over the whole borough, but some districts suffered more than others, bearing witness to the remarkable degree of grouping that Kammler’s crews were achieving; the extraordinary total of 11 rockets, for example, landed within half a mile of the first incident, in Courtlands Avenue, on 26 October 1945, when 8 people were killed, 15 seriously injured and about 20 more suffered cuts and bruises – very typical of the incidents that were to follow.

  Some of Ilford’s 35 burst on or over open spaces – the local golf course on 4 November, the Peel Institute Sports Ground in January, the grounds of Claybury Hospital in February, allotments in Loxford Lane in March – but most landed in residential areas, and a list of their locations reads like a local street directory, often with the same names recurring. Two rockets came down close to Tunstall Avenue, near the boundary with Dagenham, four around Eastern Avenue, which ran through the very centre of Ilford, and six were distributed along, and very close to, the railway line, including one in the goods yard itself and others close to Ilford, Seven Kings and Goodmayes stations. A council Civil Defence official later suggested, in his unpublished memoirs, an explanation:

  These weapons were directed against the London area in lanes of approximately two miles wide and . . . the rocket was aimed for the centre of the lane, but was liable to go wide . . . up to a distance of one mile either side. . . . Each . . . danger lane . . . was separated from its neighbour by another . . . safe area . . . of some half a mile wide . . . which was almost unscarred by the V-2.

  Ilford as a whole, one man then working for the Borough Council Electricity Supply Department remembers, became known as ‘rocket country’, but, he confirms, within its area some places were more dangerous than others:

  The area around The Drive soon had the nickname of ‘Rocket Alley’. . . . By the end of the attacks 7 had fallen in ‘Rocket Alley’, 3 of them within eighty yards of each other. . . . Working in The Drive area was soon regarded as unhealthy and a rota system was organized so that everyone had their fair share. . . . As I crossed from The Drive into Cranbrook Road away from Rocket Alley, I breathed that much deeper and almost sighed with relief.

  The devastation of Ilford, once begun, continued week in week out without respite. October’s solitary V-2 was followed by 5 in November, a lull – with a notable exception to be mentioned in a moment – in December, 5 more in January and 14 during the peak month, February. On the 24th of that month Ilford’s member of parliament, Major Geoffrey Hutchinson, a barrister, wrote to the Secretary of State for Air to seek a meeting, no doubt to press for further measures to protect his embattled constituents, but with little result: in March alone, Ilford was struck by another 7 V-2s, the very last, like the first, coming down in a totally residential area, the junction of Atherton Road and Clayhall Avenue, just inside the boundary with Woodford. The damage done to house property was enormous, as in many Ilford incidents, which often affected recently built ‘semis’, cheap, practical and convenient, but not designed to stand up to high explosive. In Ley Street, where there were two incidents in ten days in that worst of months, February, with the winter winds and rain seeking out every gap around a door frame or missing tile, 2100 houses required repair; in Kent View Gardens, on 19 February, another 2000; in Breamore Road, on 4 March, 2300; in St Albans Road, two days later, 2565 – a record, or near-record, even for a V-2. At one time, noted the Ilford Guardian, just before the end of the war, 4000 tarpaulins were in use simultaneously, and the sight of them draped, flapping in the breeze, over tileless roofs wherever one looked bore silent witness to Ilford’s ordeal.

  And yet life went on. ‘One heard the explosions, some close enough to shake the building,’ remembers one Ilford man, then aged eleven, who had just started to attend Wanstead High School, ‘but unless one was personally involved they passed off as talking points. . . . One was more involved with V-1s by the mere act of taking shelter from them.’ It was impossible none the less not to be aware that Ilford was under siege. This man remembers a schoolmate being summoned to the secretary’s office after the boys had stared with interest at ‘a great pall of smoke’ visible from the classroom window, who returned to report that ‘he would have to return to his grandparents’ home after school since his own . . . no longer existed’. Another boy was killed and it was announced that his name would appear on the school roll of honour along with others killed in action. Finally, at 8 o’clock in the evening of Saturday, 30 December 1944, it was this informant’s turn to become ‘personally involved’ by a V-2:

  My brother and I had spread our [Christmas] presents all over the top of the Morrison shelter. . . . All of us were seated around the fire in the front room. . . . I remember the dog, Paddy, was suddenly scratching at the door as if trying to get out. . . . Soot started to fall down the chimney into the hearth and there was a blinding flash in front of my face. . . . I heard no explosion. The next thing I remember is lying under the Morrison shelter on my own and seeing blood on the pillow. . . . I got up and went out into the kitchen where my mother was sitting on a stool having some cuts on her shoulder attended to by my brother . . . obviously in . . . pain. They both asked me if I was all right. I felt as though I’d received a blow on the head, but I had not realized until they told me that it was my own blood I had seen. . . .

  Having ascertained that we were all alive and kicking my father [a local post warden] dashed out to the site of the explosion. . . . Plaster from the ceilings lay all over the place in large lumps, small lumps and fine dust. . . . The three of us then got on with the task of clearing up the mess. . . . It took an hour or two. . . . When it was done it was noticeable . . . that the pile outside my own home was considerably larger than elsewhere in Gants Hill Crescent. . . . The full repairs on the house had only been completed for a couple of weeks [after a V-1 in August] and it all seemed a little unfair.

  The ‘unfair’ rocket had in fact landed ‘in Collingwood Gardens, just two roads away, almost opposite the site of the V-1 incident’, killing 7 people and seriously injuring another 23, but, as it had demonstrated in other places, the rocket’s effects in Ilford were often capricious. Around midday, always a time favoured by Kammler’s crews, on Friday, 24 November 1944, as a local Civil Defence official learned, ‘the park-keeper . . . was standing at the back of his lodge’, in South Park, when ‘to his amazement, and without hearing anything whatsoever, his house just disappeared from his view’. He was unhurt, but ‘a soldier who had just returned home on leave’ and happened to be crossing the park, was killed. So, too – as another local man, on the scene shortly after the explosion, learned – was a well-known local figure, ‘Mr R., a part-time chimney sweep [who] delivered green veg. from a handcart’, who vanished without trace, ‘although pieces of his cart were found almost a hundred yards away’. His wife, standing by her front door when
the rocket exploded, ‘was badly injured . . . losing a leg, but survived’. The tale of escapes was completed by that of ‘a baby playing in the front room underneath a grand piano’ in a house in South Park Road. ‘Splintered glass was scattered everywhere, walls cracked and ceilings caved in,’ but the infant crawled out of this unusual shelter unharmed.

  Because of its situation, this incident was talked about more than others even more serious, and another V-2 widely remembered was the ‘Early-Morning Special’, arriving before breakfast during rocket-afflicted February. This damaged an important factory, Plessey Ltd, a day nursery, a public house and many homes, while, the Ilford Guardian reported later, ‘a diversion . . . was caused by a pony which, its stable completely shattered, fled down Ley Street neighing furiously until it was caught and re-harnessed.’ Another public house destroyed, earlier in the bombardment, was the Dick Turpin, the licensee, who was killed, being famous locally for sending a gift each month to ‘regulars’ now in the forces. Others died far from the point of impact, most conspicuously on the worst day of the whole attack, 21 February. ‘A young lady . . . in the street when the rocket fell . . . was later lifted from the crater uninjured,’ the Civil Defence official quoted earlier wrote, while a woman a full half-mile away, and in a downstairs room, was killed when ‘a large paving stone, thrown by the blast, crashed through the roof-top’. The same day that brought these events around Cranley Drive saw a second V-2 near Belgrave Road. An off-duty postman who went out to look for the milkman died, the rocket’s only victim, though 50 others were injured. The milkman himself, thanks to being delayed on his round, escaped.