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

by Norman Longmate

  A rocket landing on a packed theatre or cinema could have caused a disaster of Deptford proportions. This never happened, and the entertainment industry, much affected by the flying bomb, tacitly ignored the V-2s, with in Ilford some extremely narrow escapes in consequence. On Friday, 12 January 1945, Robinson Crusoe, the traditional post-Christmas pantomime, was playing to a packed house of 1500 at the Hippodrome when a V-2 landed on a row of cottages just behind the building. The female lead, Renee Houston, on stage alone, was badly shaken and her co-star, Donald Stewart, was pinned to the ground by beams which had fallen from the roof backstage. At the same moment the water tank burst, deluging the whole cast. The whole scene had overtones of the loss of the Titanic, with water pouring over the footlights into the auditorium as the audience left, while the orchestra played them out. Outside the ‘chorus girls, attired only in their flimsy stage costumes, their greasepaint smeared and blotchy on their faces’, shivered in the cold of a January night, with ‘all their clothes destroyed in their dressing room’, until decorum was restored by the WVS and ambulance drivers wrapping them in blankets. In St Mary’s Cottages and the nearby public houses 17 people died, and 60 others were injured. In the theatre itself no one was killed and when, two days later, the roof and ‘circle’ collapsed, it was empty; the workmen on the site had all left for their dinner.

  Soon afterwards a lunchtime rocket, at 12.45 p.m. on Thursday, 8 February, wrecked the Super Cinema, which was showing Summer Storm, supported by Pass to Romance, but luckily before the performance had started. Most of the seventeen people who had bought tickets escaped injury, but two of the four usherettes already in the auditorium were killed outright and the others seriously injured. With other victims in the street, the adjoining houses and a garage, the final casualty toll was 13 dead, 64 seriously injured, plus another 86 requiring first-aid treatment. Six of the dead, and many of the injured, were women working at the Ilford Manufacturing Company, just across the road from the Super, which was now turning out shirts instead of ball gowns. All these casualties had stayed behind to eat their dinner in supposed safety in the firm’s shelters; 48 more, who had left the premises, escaped.

  Actually passing the cinema was a workmate of the council electrician previously quoted: an ex-sailor, wounded at Dunkirk, he was not easily shaken, but he now ‘visibly trembled’ as he described what had happened after the two men had split up for the dinner break:

  After leaving the Cranbrook Road office he was turning into Ley Street, right outside the front of the Super, when he was hurled from his bike into the foyer. . . . Sitting on the floor amid a pile of debris he gradually became aware of women screaming and made his way into the main body of the building. . . . A cloud of dust and dirt hung in the air but daylight was filtering through the cloud from the now open cinema roof. He soon found a woman crouched against the main wall crying hysterically for help and suffering from face and head wounds. Half dragging, he helped her to the foyer and sat her down. In between sobs she said there were two other cleaners inside. Returning inside he soon found the other two. . . . One lay still on the floor, but the other lay dazed and whimpering and with most of her clothes blown away. Half dragging, half carrying this woman outside, he had pulled down a door curtain to cover her when help arrived, in the shape of two firemen. . . . The third woman was brought out very shortly, alive but injured. . . . Percy, after about five or ten minutes, decided to leave, and going outside, found his cycle with paintwork missing, but otherwise undamaged, and cycled off.

  A member of the staff of the Ilford Guardian happened by pure chance to be on the spot:

  I was walking along the High Road when suddenly the air became filled with flying glass and dust. Masonry fell from the tops of the shops and two people a few yards in front of me were hit and fell moaning to the ground. The shopping centre resembled a battlefield, for people were stretched on the pavements and a number of shop assistants came running out with their faces streaming with blood. . . . I raced round to the Super Cinema and found a tragic scene of destruction. The NFS workshop had been demolished, cars were burning outside a garage, a trolley bus standing near the theatre had its windows smashed, the road was littered with rubble and the roof of the cinema had caved in. . . . The manager, who had been blown full length across the vestibule, had blood trickling down his face. He seemed totally unconscious of his own injuries and was only concerned with the fate of two of the usherettes who were buried in the main hall. They were found dead in their uniforms.

  Twelve days later, on Tuesday, 20 February 1945, again at lunchtime, came what was remembered as the ‘Ilford Ltd rocket’, for it fell behind the factory, smashing the boiler house, so that, as the Ilford Guardian later reported, ‘steam hissed across the road for some minutes, while debris from the houses’ – over twenty were wrecked – ‘piled up to add to the confusion’. Unusually, owing to some misunderstanding, ‘the call for assistance was sent in a little late’, and one Civil Defence member, whose office happened to be near by, was very conscious of what followed:

  Several army ambulances were quickly on the spot and rendered some very valuable assistance, but there was not enough accommodation for the many casualties who required immediate removal to hospital. A Post Office van driver offered assistance and I used his van to send to hospital a small child, who was bleeding profusely from head and face wounds. I asked the mother to hold the child tightly to her breast in order that any vibration of the moving child would not unnecessarily aggravate the injuries. . . .

  Women suffering from ghastly and bloody wounds were sitting or lying about the pavements and in front gardens, some receiving treatment and others waiting. It seemed ages waiting for our own services to arrive. . . . The rescue squad and ambulances did in fact arrive in about 25 minutes, but a delay . . . on these occasions appears to be unending.

  As often happened in ‘industrial’ incidents, there were some unforeseen consequences. One woman living nearby, whose father was ‘blown across the room . . . severely shocked and . . . died six weeks later’, learned how at the same instant an Ilford Ltd employee had been crippled, for he was ‘crossing the laboratory with a large bottle of ammonia’ and ‘had his fingers blown off as the bottle exploded’. He was one of 94 people injured in the incident; another 7 were killed.

  By now even the dead could not rest in peace, for the occasion was marked by a gruesome accident, as the explosion damaged a house from which a funeral was taking place. According to current rumour, the coffin was blown into the road but the proceedings went ahead, although the mourners not merely suffered ‘a terrible shake-up’, as one man on the spot commented, but ‘afterwards had to return to a badly damaged house’.

  This third explosion in the vicinity of Ilford Broadway finally completed the destruction of the battered Hippodrome, inside which the electrician quoted earlier had been at work, helping to connect up a cable serving a crane employed on demolition work. It also brought him his own narrowest escape:

  Suddenly a bright bluish light illuminated the sky. Before I could duck or crouch, I was thrown backwards against the doors and was surrounded by a rushing, roaring sound. The doors checked my fall and I was still on my feet . . . facing an ironmonger’s . . . outside of which was a three-foot-high pile of galvanized buckets and a couple of dustbins. The buckets took off and went sailing in the air in all directions and the dustbins flew across the road among the passing traffic and the plate-glass window of the shop disintegrated into fragments. Several of the boarded-up theatre doors crashed inwards behind me. . . . The sky to my left had darkened and . . . the whole sky was blackened by a sheet of flame, blending into a huge black cloud of smoke and debris in which I could plainly see great chunks of wood and pipes twisting around. . . . I now threw myself . . . into the protection of the entrance corner wall . . . as lumps of debris rained onto the road and the sound gradually subsided.

  His next step was to search for his workmate, whom he found in rubble-strewn darkness, hesitat
ing to feel his way to safety along the wall for fear of brushing against ‘live’ terminals. But, with the help of a cigarette lighter and a policeman sent to look for them, both men eventually got out unscathed and another dinner hour in Ilford resumed its now all too familiar course:

  We cleared our pushbikes of odd debris, said ‘Cheerio!’ and went outside to great activity as Civil Defence personnel and vehicles hurried by and policeman redirected traffic and pedestrians away from the roped-off area. We then went home to lunch and returned to work at two o’clock glad to be alive.

  By the time Ilford’s last rocket had landed, on Tuesday, 27 March, the town had reported 465 serious casualties, a total second only to Deptford’s; of these 117 were dead, 349 badly injured. Undoubtedly the constant bombardment was too much for some people. ‘Morale’, believed the Civil Defence official quoted earlier, ‘was at a very low ebb and many people, temporarily, completely lost their nerves’ when the second V-2 within twenty-four hours landed in the same district, Uphall Road. But, fearful though they might be, the public carried on with their daily round, and there seems no reason to doubt the verdict of the Ilford Guardian, when it could at last tell the grimmest story in the borough’s history, just before the end of the war:

  Looking back one wonders how Ilfordians managed to carry on so splendidly, knowing that any moment might be their last. Certainly the shopping centre round Ilford Broadway did become slightly less crowded than usual, but on the whole housewives and workers alike made no break in their usual routine throughout the five months of constant tension.

  21

  WINTER IN WALTHAMSTOW

  It can be stated that Walthamstow had more than its share of V-2s.

  Civil Defence controller for Walthamstow, 1945

  ‘The air was crystal clear, electric . . . and we hunched our shoulders and tensed our muscles in anticipation of the next rocket.’ That is how a then fifteen-year-old schoolboy, living in Dagenham, remembers one moment in the long winter of 1944-45, while he stood on Becontree Station after three or four V-2s had landed within earshot within a few minutes. For if Ilford was like an exposed salient during the rocket offensive the area around and behind it also formed a distinctly unhealthy sector. The eleven boroughs which belonged to Group 7 of the London Civil Defence Region and made up the north-east corner of London and its immediate suburbs were hit by 199 V-2s all told, far more than any other group, and their casualty figures – 645 dead, 1441 seriously injured – were thirty times as high as the least-affected group in the region. Ilford’s 35 rockets put it well ahead of other places in terms of incidents, but in the number of dead West Ham did even worse, for its 27 V-2s killed 215 people, though its total of seriously injured, 205, was smaller than Ilford’s. Third in the group, with 21 rockets, came Barking, which lost 23 citizens dead and had 172 other serious casualties, and it was followed by Dagenham, which was also very close to the ‘one death per rocket’ formula, with its 19 V-2s, 18 fatal and 127 other serious casualties. Eighteen rockets hit Walthamstow (of which more will be said later) and 15 Waltham Holy Cross, whose low death rate – 7 dead, with 21 badly hurt – reflected the low density of population in this outer suburb. The socially and geographically ‘mixed’ area of Wanstead and Woodford, with 14 rockets, lost 51 dead and 77 hurt; East Ham, with 14 V-2s, had a somewhat similar toll to report: 50 dead and 124 other major casualties. Chigwell, with 13 V-2s, was lucky to escape with 1 person dead and 9 badly injured. Leyton, with 12 V-2s, did far worse: 67 killed and 162 injured. Chingford, with only one fewer rocket, 11, suffered far fewer casualties: 10 dead and 46 others.

  Nowhere in north-east London that winter was out of earshot of a rocket for long, and to the schoolboy living in Dagenham previously quoted the rocket’s ubiquitous character appeared almost to violate a law of nature:

  The V-2s seemed to be more random in distribution, to scatter over a much wider area than the V-1s. Ilford seemed to get particularly clobbered for some reason. This seemed to conflict with the vaguely apprehended World War II convention that indiscriminate destruction should mainly be confined to the shabby areas like Plaistow or Canning Town or the docks. A better class of person generally lived in Ilford or Epping. Even Pitsea in Essex, where my father’s sister lived in a bungalow, was hit. My aunt had a favoured neighbour . . . who was definitely middle class with a nice bungalow with accoutrements which I recognized as belonging to somebody a bit classier than us. Her manners showed breeding too. One night her bungalow received a direct hit from a V-2 and she was killed. Just a big hole where all this order and decency had formerly lived.

  Clearly cursed with an overactive imagination, this boy found the presence of danger frightening rather than stimulating:

  I tried to imagine what it would be like to be hit directly by several tons of rocket travelling above the speed of sound, but I gave up. It all seemed a bit esoteric when set against the humble background of life in Dagenham. . . . Life went on as usual. There was no point in taking shelter. . . . Everything was so normal. One’s scruffy back garden, lessons on the top floor of the South-East Essex Tech., morning assembly, trips on one’s bicycle, National dried egg, scrambled, or fried tomatoes for breakfast. The only difference was you knew that at any minute without warning you might explode . . . all over your familiar mantelshelf, or the classroom or the street you were walking to work.

  The ending of the blackout added to the unreality ot the whole experience:

  An eerie feature of the last phase of the attacks in 1945 was that street lights were once again on in London. I remember walking along a street in East Ham on a visit to my future stepmother’s house, seeing these lamps on for the first time since 1939 with all their suggestion of peace and the war coming to an end and being more than ever conscious of the fact that at any moment I could still get bumped off by a rocket. It’s a bit poignant to have survived through all sorts of . . . lethal high drama and then get pipped on the post.

  This boy was also troubled by a V-2 which landed on a church in a neighbouring borough, St George’s, Barking, in midservice:

  I speculated on the theological significance of this event. Were the congregation perhaps less in touch with God than I had been at moments of crisis? It seemed a pretty abrupt sort of answer to public prayer, anyway.

  Dagenham, a long, roughly axe-shaped borough, with its narrow shaft running alongside Ilford and its blade on that great sounding-board, the Thames, heard many more V-2s than landed within its borders. The roof spotters on the great riverside Ford factory which dominated the borough ‘heard and recorded 579 rockets’, according to its wartime history, though Ford’s itself, as during the flying-bombs, continued to lead a charmed life:

  Although seven crashed in the neighbourhood of the factory none . . . actually hit it, the nearest falling in the river some thirty yards south of the jetty on 15 March 1945. Though muffled by the water, the force of the explosion broke most of the windows in the General Office building. . . . On three occasions the blast from the explosion of . . . rockets which had narrowly missed the factory covered the boiler-room with a blanket of coal dust, so that the operators at work scanning the charts appeared like performers in an old-fashioned nigger minstrel band.

  To the west of Barking, merging with the ‘East End’ proper, lay East Ham and West Ham, in both of which the V-2s constantly intruded into daily life. The Chief Superintendent for ‘K’ Division of the Metropolitan Police, which embraced these and some adjoining boroughs, speedily discovered that Kammler was no respecter of ‘the Met.’ Within a single week, around the end of January, one constable was killed while on duty at Upton Park, Plaistow, in West Ham, 80 bachelor police officers were bombed out of their section house behind East Ham police station, and West Ham police station was damaged – as his own house in Ilford had been – while almost every day he found himself visiting new incidents, many of them industrial, as will be described later.

  Another guardian of public decency, of a different kind, the vicar of S
t George and St Ethelbert, East Ham, also found his activities constantly disrupted, as his wife has recalled:

  One night a V-2 fell in Lonsdale Avenue. My husband immediately went into the house [from the Anderson where they were sleeping] for his overcoat so that he could go to the scene of the disaster, only to find our doors jammed and he had to climb over fences and walls to reach the road. Arriving on the scene, he found only an elderly lady whom he helped to rescue. Another time a V-2 fell in Haldane Road, which was near his church. . . . When daylight came, we saw a magnolia tree in bloom . . . still standing amid the devastation. . . . The next day, Sunday, my husband had to officiate at a wedding. . . . The west window of the church was smashed; the choirboys had cleared some of the broken glass, but the bride had to pick her way up the aisle among the splinters. . . . On the following Friday . . . the rocket burst on the roof of our house. 19 . . . We had all the windows blown out and no windows for many months. . . . The snow lay deep on the ground. The chairs were also damaged by shrapnel. Part of the rocket was hanging over the bed where our daughter was asleep. I remember pulling [it] away with a sense of trepidation. . . . The day following, we were holding a party for children and we tripped over pieces of the rocket that had fallen the previous night.