To the north of West Ham was Leyton, which suffered from two ‘outstanding’ incidents, one just before midnight on 16 February 1945 when 25 people were killed and 10 badly injured in Crownfield Road, and a month later, at 6.38 in the morning of 16 March, when 23 more Leytonians lost their lives in Albert Road, and 18 were badly hurt. The V-2s had a dismal effect upon morale, here as elsewhere, as one woman travelling each day from Woodford Green to work as a ledger clerk at a bank in Leyton High Road while her husband was serving in France, observed. ‘We public were mostly feeling rather depressed and thinking how much longer were we going to live in the tension and fear.’ Still plagued by V-1s as well as rockets, the staff took what precautions they could. ‘Some days we worked in the safe, but were afraid it would jam, so mostly worked at desks. I had frosted glass facing me but had to sit there.’ As an ex-nurse, however, she did take the precaution of providing a first-aid box at her own expense, a prudent precaution as it turned out, for at the end of October the bank was damaged by a rocket in Leyspring Road, about 400 yards away, which killed 6 people and seriously injured another 30, among them the manager of the branch, while the lesser casualties, numbering 118, included herself,20 the glass surrounding them proving as dangerous as she had feared.
A then thirteen-year-old girl attending Chingford County High School, previoiusly quoted, who lived in Waltham Abbey, remembers what happened after their house was badly damaged on 15 January 1945, luckily while she and her sister were sleeping downstairs:
I was blown partly out of bed and hit my head on the door, but not badly. Molly and I got up and went to the Morrison and soon we were asked to look after neighbours’ children; some had been shocked by being trapped in bedrooms when doors jammed with the blast. About eight children joined us, reading comics, sipping soup, drinking tea, all in our Morrison; the following night they all wanted to come back.
No one in the area needed to be told the reason when suddenly called home. One steam-train fireman, ‘working’ the route between Liverpool Street and Chingford, ‘guessed what that meant’ when a relief fireman was waiting to take over from him in mid-shift, at Wood Street Station, Walthamstow. ‘When I arrived home [in Gordon Road, Wanstead] . . . all that was left of my house was the front wall.’
Nowhere in this part of London were the rockets more resented than in Walthamstow, a largely working-class borough which perhaps felt that it had done its fair share of ‘taking it’, if not rather more. Its population of 131,000 was almost exactly the same as Ilford’s, but packed into a much smaller area, and its comparatively heavy casualty list was due to the steady drain of average-sized incidents rather than to any major catastrophe. Walthamstow’s disagreement with the original ‘no publicity’ policy has already been mentioned, but the existence of the V-2s was difficult to keep dark and people protected themselves as best they could. The borough’s mortuary at the Queen’s Road Cemetery proved adequate for all the demands made upon it; the reserve premises, in the car park of Walthamstow Stadium, never had to be opened.
Every one of Walthamstow’s ten ARP districts, however, had to cope with at least one rocket and, like Ilford’s, Walthamstow’s rockets were spread out in time as well as space. After the first, on 14 September in Farnan Avenue, already mentioned, they arrived at frequent intervals, so that life never felt really secure. In November a rocket landed on a Sunday beside allotments, but luckily most of those ‘digging for victory’ had gone home for lunch. Later that month, another V-2 hit a road on the edge of Waltham Forest, causing some casualties but missed, as the ARP controller recorded, ‘the schoolchildren and others returning home to dinner’. At times the missiles seemed to show a malign intelligence in seeking out their victims. One ‘fell in one of the few parts of the Marshes where it could cause damage . . . at the foot of the bank of the Warwick Reservoir . . . and managed to demolish a boathouse’ occupied by a watchman, who was fatally injured. And so it went on, a few missiles landing harmlessly in the adjoining Forest or River Lea Marshes, but most taking their toll of three or four dead and another twenty or so badly injured. To the ARP controller, Alderman Ross Wyld, the ‘type of case in which casual travellers were killed always seemed particularly hard luck’, such as one where, ‘in an area surrounded by Forest . . . the driver of a lorry from Yarmouth and . . . a soldier from Birmingham who was driving an army lorry’ were among the victims. To local residents the deaths of servicemen while on leave also seemed exceptionally hard to hear, like this one recorded by Alderman Wyld:
At teatime on a Tuesday in March . . . ‘E’ District received its first rocket, which fell at the junction of College Road and Grove Road. . . . The crater completely blocked the road and . . . 17 houses were wiped out. Included in the killed was a soldier who had called round to one of the houses to say goodbye to some friends before returning to his unit. . . . An RAF man returning home on leave . . . knew nothing of the death of his wife until he actually arrived at the incident where we were still searching for the body.
Among the memories of one man then aged eleven is the sight of ‘thousands of blue salt packets’ scattered around the junction of Woodford Road and Forest Road after a V-2 had caught a Smith’s Crisps delivery lorry, the ‘salt in the bag’ being then almost the company’s trademark. An outstanding recollection of the Civil Defence workers involved was that of a dog which dashed in excitement out of a wrecked house and promptly fell into the crater. ‘He was found alive and unhurt at the bottom . . . out of which he was unable to climb owing to the steepness of the sides’ and was ‘duly retrieved by NFS ladder’.
The area witnessed a number of airbursts. A then sixteen-year-old, working on bomb-damage repair, witnessed one as he and his workmates were idling away their dinner hour listening to a local evangelist:
‘Holy Joe’, as we unkindly called him, was preaching the Gospel as usual at Child’s Corner, when somebody said ‘Look, leaflets!’, and high in the sky was a vapour trail and hundreds of small shining objects followed by a dull bang. We stood watching these objects getting bigger and bigger and everybody started running. Suddenly we were showered with pieces of metal, the largest about the size of a dustbin. . . . A V-2 had exploded in the air and the warhead had gone on to fall in Walthamstow.
This may have been the rocket that caused some speculation at Civil Defence headquarters as to where it really belonged, as Alderman Wyld recalled:
As we had neither damage nor casualties we were unable to account for this being finally allotted to Walthamstow. We accepted this allocation with a certain amount of philosophy as some two weeks previously we had received large amounts of materials from a mid-air burst . . . allocated to Barking, although we had most of the stuff.
Between the end of the blitz, in May 1941, and the end of the war, in May 1945, Walthamstow suffered damage to 72,000 houses and shops, of which the rockets, although the exact total was censored for security reasons, must have accounted for a high proportion. The borough was credited, however, with only one ‘outstanding incident’, at Blackhorse Lane, at 2.20 p.m. on Monday, 19 February 1945, when the Germans hit a ‘military objective’, Bawn’s factory, with results which Alderman Wyld described:
The whole of their office was demolished and all except one of the office staff were killed outright, including two of the directors. . . . The factory was completely put out of action and 12 houses were also wrecked. Over 500 other houses were reported as damaged. The difficulties of tracing missing persons . . . were considerable and it was not until the early hours of the next morning that we were able to satisfy ourselves that all . . . had been accounted for.
The difficulties of identification were brought home to one man whose business was ruined, a local shopkeeper who had taken up shoe-repairing when cripped by polio:
I arrived just as the area was being roped off at the nearby turnings . . . but when I told the policeman who I was, he let me through. . . . I got to where the shop had been and everything, including heavy machinery, the customers
’ boots and shoes, and stock, was no more. As I looked on the wardens and Civil Defence workers were busy among the rubble of the house next door and one looked up, saw me and said, ‘I thought we had just taken you out of here’, and pointed to a small van [used to remove the dead] but it turned out to be the man in the house. Up to this point I was managing to hold my own, but when he said this my inside was violently upset. . . .
My book recording the shoes in the shop was found 300 yards away unsoiled. . . . For a week or two I was at the site of my shop for the sole purpose of giving to customers a chit signed by me, signifying that the customer had lost a pair of shoes in the premises. Then if they took it to the town hall they were given seven coupons and thirty shillings cash [£1.50] for replacement.
This was to remain Walthamstow’s worst incident, with a final death roll of 18, plus 53 seriously injured and another 150 slightly hurt. When the bombardment finally ended, with two rockets in March, few residents would have disagreed with its Civil Defence controller’s verdict: ‘Walthamstow had more than its share of V-2s.’
22
NOTHING LEFT OF LONDON
In another month there will be nothing left of London.
Statement on German radio attributed to Allied prisoner of war, February 1945
It had been the effect of the anticipated ‘giant rockets’ on central London which had most alarmed the government, but, in the event, even Kammler’s more modest missiles left the West End and the ‘establishment’ quarter of Westminster and Whitehall almost unscathed. The area’s escape was in fact almost uncanny. A rocket in November plunging down towards Victoria, within easy blast distance of Parliament and Downing Street, had burst in the air. The Duke Street V-2, in December, was just inside St Marylebone, though doing some damage in Westminster. And when a rocket did finally land within the confines of the borough – though only just – at 9.30 on the morning of Sunday, 18 March, it arrived at a time when there were few people about and in a relatively ‘rural’ part of it, Speaker’s Corner on the edge of Hyde Park. The explosion smashed windows all round Marble Arch, stripped the trees of their leaves and broke a water main, but killed only two people inside the borough boundaries, a newspaper seller and a child he had tried to protect. A third person died in the incident and nine were seriously hurt, most of these casualties being in the adjoining boroughs of Paddington and St Marylebone, for which Marble Arch formed a ‘frontier post’. This rocket, as Westminster’s wartime historian, the writer William Sansom, commented, could have produced ‘a catastrophe of appalling dimensions’, for that afternoon ‘thousands of people would have been there watching a march past by the National Fire Service’. The government’s ‘no publicity’ policy meant that Speaker’s Corner, the great symbol of free speech, was officially described as ‘a piece of waste ground . . . in southern England’, although the newspapers admitted that the explosion there had ‘blown out the windows of an hotel and a cinema’. Londoners soon learned the true facts. ‘Behind this description’, noted Vere Hodgson in her diary only a week or two later, ‘lies one of the most famous spots in London. . . . The hotel was the Cumberland. The cinema – the Regal.’
The Germans, having already claimed to have levelled most of London flat with the V-1s, now had to destroy it in their propaganda reports all over again. In early December, on the evidence allegedly supplied by captured British sailors, German radio stated that the public were afraid to go to work or stayed at home because their factories were smashed. By the end of the month the German Telegraph Service was asserting that three bridges over the Thames had been destroyed, that the Tower of London had been damaged, and that a high-speed evacuation of the capital was in progress. The truth was the British government’s problem, thanks to its policy of playing down the rocket menace, was that of people returning to London, not of a panic exodus. But Goebbels persevered. ‘The Houses of Parliament have been damaged extensively,’ it was stated in December. ‘There is not a building standing within 500 metres of Leicester Square. Piccadilly Circus has also been devastated.’ In February an anonymous sailor was credited with the opinion that ‘in another month there will be nothing left of London’, a ludicrous statement designed, perhaps, to offer consolation to the inhabitants of ruined Berlin.
One famous building the Germans did succeed in hitting, the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, home of the red-coated Chelsea Pensioners who still provided a rare splash of colour in the drab wartime streets. This, Chelsea’s solitary V-2, landed at 8.50 a.m. on Wednesday, 3 January 1945, on the north-east wing in Light Horse Court, killing two members of the staff and three residents, who had been standing peacefully in the chapel; 19 others were injured. By odd chance the V-2 landed on the same spot as a German bomb dropped in February 1918 and one of the rocket’s victims, the Captain of Invalids, had escaped death on that earlier occasion. The white-haired, fragile residents helped in the rescue work, veterans of far-off campaigns under fire again. ‘Now’, wrote its historian of the famous institution, ‘it had its own honourable scars to set beside those of its In-Pensioners; Wren [the Hospital’s architect] would have been greatly saddened; but he would also have been very proud.’
The Royal Hospital rocket, having also damaged a number of large houses in the elegant adjoining squares and streets, was much talked about, though only one of thirty-three buildings in London classed as ‘hospitals’ affected by a V-2. James Lees-Milne, who lived not far away, noted the after-effects in his diary:
In the afternoon I walked down St Leonard’s Terrace and asked after L. He was in bed, but he and his servants were unhurt. All his windows on both sides of the house were smashed, doors wrenched off, both outer and inner; and partitions and ceilings down. Much of his furniture was destroyed. Yesterday rockets fell like autumn leaves and between dinner and midnight there were six near our house. Miss P. and I were terrified. I put every china ornament away in cupboards.
The impression of people in Chelsea that they were in particular danger was due to its geographical situation. Like Croydon and Hampstead it was shaken, thanks to its location, even by distant explosions, and James Lees-Milne’s riverside home in Cheyne Walk was ideally placed to hear the sounds of battle from the working-class boroughs across the river. Mr Lees-Milne himself noted the same illusion on Saturday, 27 January:
While I was at Charing Cross there was a terrific V-2 explosion. It sounded right in my ear. I learned afterwards that many people in widely scattered parts of London thought the same thing.
Any lingering illusion that somehow with the New Year the bombardment of London would ease up was speedily dispelled. In the week ending 3 January 1945 34 rockets reached the United Kingdom, half as many again as in the preceding three weeks, and between 3 and 10 January the total soared to 62, much the largest number so far, followed by 45 from 10 to 17 January, 46 from 17 to 24 January and 48 from 24 to 31 January, a remarkably steady rate of fire which showed that the firing crews had now settled down into a comfortable routine. In the first week of February the same rate of fire was maintained, with 47 V-2s, and in the second week, from the 7th to the 14th, it rose significantly to 66, nearly ten a day, producing the highest total of serious casualties so far, 1888, of whom a tenth, 188, were killed or missing.
Once again, as in the blitz and the flying-bomb period, the most privileged parts of London got off lightest. The most prestigious of Civil Defence areas was Group 1, the wartime equivalent of postal district W1, though the latter covered a much smaller section of central London around Mayfair, while Group 1 took in, beside Westminster and Chelsea, the mixed but mainly wealthy ‘royal borough’ of Kensington, and two largely proletarian districts, Fulham and Hammersmith. Between them these accounted for only 5 rockets, including the Victoria airburst, and an extraordinarily small casualty list: 39 killed, 112 seriously injured. Fulham had no V-2s or casualties at all, Chelsea only 5 dead and 20 badly injured from its solitary rocket, at the Royal Hospital. Kensington’s V-2, at the less wealthy, northern end of the
borough, killed 2 people and seriously injured 42, among them a woman living close to the point of impact, in Grenfell Road, W11, who that December evening had gone to bed just before 11 p.m:
I went up to bed and, I don’t know why I did this, I took my baby from his cot and put him in the bed with me. Not long after there was a terrible crash and the whole house seemed to crumble around us. . . . Everything went black, all the lights went out, there was water everywhere and gas, also glass. We did not know a lot about it. It took quite a time to get us out as the stairs and front of the house were gone. I was told some time later that there was a large part of the rocket at the front of the house. The gas stove was blown out of the kitchen and landed at the front door. There was one bit of wall left of the kitchen and on that wall was a mirror, not broken, not even cracked. . . . All the houses in the street were a write-off. We had nothing, no clothes and . . . were covered with the black powder from the bomb. . . . One of my neighbours, a woman I had been in the same ward with when our babies was born, was killed. . . . We had no clothes and were given blankets to wrap around ourselves and taken to St Charles Hospital. A young nurse said, ‘In future, I am going to bed with all my clothes on.’
Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s Page 31