Most of the Group 1 casualties were caused in Hammersmith, in a similar incident to the one in Kensington, occurring at 10 o’clock in the evening of Wednesday, 14 February 1945, in Wormholt Road, a heavily built-up area about a mile west of Shepherds Bush. Most of the 29 people killed and 41 wounded were in the block of council flats which the rocket demolished. A woman then working as a rating clerk at Hammersmith Town Hall remembers the silent evidence of the disaster which crossed her desk – money collected from the tenants in the wrecked flats being handed in covered with bloodstains.
The Hammersmith V-2 ushered in the worst ‘rocket week’ so far: in the next seven days 71 V-2s arrived, although the following week, 21-28 February, brought a welcome decline back to the previous average, 45. March, in rocket terms, came in like a lion: 58 in the first week, of which well over half, 36, reached the London Region. The following week, 7—14 March, showed a falling off in aim, but an unwelcome increase in the total numbers landing, to 62, which dropped, in 14-21 March, to 52, and between 21 and 28 March to 46, though these produced, as will be described, some of the worst incidents of the whole campaign.
Those that reached London continued to be very unevenly distributed. Civil Defence Group 2, north of Westminster, consisted of four boroughs, Paddington, St Marylebone, St Pancras and Hampstead. They were hit by 6 V-2s between them, causing 52 deaths and 171 cases of serious injury, although one vulnerable, densely populated borough, Paddington, escaped altogether. St Marylebone’s 10 dead and 7 wounded resulted mainly from the Duke Street incident; some further casualties were caused by the Speaker’s Corner explosion, which ‘belonged’ to Westminster. St Pancras’s 2 V-2s both, however, had disastrous consequences, though only the former, at 4.08 p.m. on Friday, 8 February 1945, at Tavistock Place, in the heart of the capital’s ‘medical quarter’ was classified as ‘outstanding’. In this 31 people were killed, and there were 54 other major casualties, while the Central London Opthalmic Hospital and the Medical School of the Royal Free Hospital were both very badly damaged. St Pancras’s second incident, only a few hundred yards away, just inside the borough boundary with St Marylebone in Whitfield Street, in the late afternoon on Sunday, 25 March, badly damaged one of the great shrines of the Methodist movement, the Whitfield Memorial Chapel in Tottenham Court Road, and left 9 dead and 46 badly hurt. The area, on the edge of Soho, was a mixed one of commercial property, including many small restaurants, residential housing and some small workshops. One woman close to the scene was working in a small factory in Whitfield Street itself; her father was nearby, post warden in charge of the ARP post in the basement of a local cafe.
Everyone screamed and we ran out of the door to see what had happened. When we looked down Whitfield Street we could see smoke and dust and nothing else. I knew my father was down there . . . so I flew up the road. When I got near there were bodies lying about and one was standing facing a wall as though it was stuck there. Someone on the ground had a piece of newspaper stuck on the back of his head that looked as if it had been slapped on to raw meat. I did not think about them and just jumped over things that were in the way. . . . I could not find where the post was and everyone seemed dazed. I saw someone coming up some steps out of the debris and I grabbed them and shook them asking, ‘Where’s my Dad?’ They just said, ‘Don’t know.’ . . . Then another one came out. I was screaming by then and I started shaking and then he clasped me tight and we both cried. It was my Dad.
No place outside their own ‘village’ had a stronger claim on the affections of Londoners than ‘ ‘appy ampstead’, so-named from its traditional Bank Holiday fairs, on the edge of the Heath, the constant resort of walkers and courting couples. Its large amount of open space did not prevent its 3 rockets all landing in more populous parts of the borough, though they killed only 2 people between them – three according to the borough records – and badly injured 74. Hampstead’s first, and worst, rocket landed, like so many others, at teatime, 4.30 p.m., on a winter afternoon, pitching down, the local Civil Defence records agreed, at ‘the junction of LMS and Met. Railway lines, back of 114 Iverson Road between West End Lane and Kilburn High Road’, on Monday 8 January 1945. Kilburn High Road was one of the busiest shopping streets in north London, and one woman, then working in a shoe shop opposite the State cinema, a local landmark, recalls that moment:
There was this ear-splitting noise and we actually saw the small emergency shop windows of our large corner shop disintegrate before our eyes. A large elderly lady standing in our shop doorway waiting for a bus almost collapsed with shock as the glass fell round her feet.
The effects of the Iverson Road rocket were probably magnified by its landing high up, on a railway embankment and, apart from 14 houses destroyed, 152 were badly damaged and another 1600 needed some repair. Besides the 2 people killed and 64 detailed in hospital, 57 people required minor treatment.
The bitterly cold weather added to the misery this rocket produced in Hampstead, for 400 people had to be temporarily accommodated in rest centres, and eventually 110 families needed rehousing. Those able to stay under their own battered and leaking roofs were miserably cold and ‘At the emergency coal dumps’, a local historian reported, ‘members of the Civil Defence services, under the leadership of the controller, worked at filling prams, tin baths, bags and sacks with coal, which the people took back as best they could to their homes.’
Hampstead suffered again at 2.30 a.m. on Friday, 16 March, when 200 houses were damaged by a rocket which also hit a railway embankment, this time in the neighbouring borough of Willesden, but its own second rocket followed close behind, when, in the words of the borough’s wartime history, ‘a little before 6 a.m. the following morning,’ Saturday, 17 March, ‘the swish of a V-2 rocket’ was followed by ‘the now familiar shattering roar in the rear garden of 212 Finchley Road, at the side of the Borough Central Library’. Thanks to the time of day, casualties were few, but nearly 1000 houses were damaged, along with the library, ‘the Council’s Works Depot, the Hampstead Telephone Exchange, the Lighting Station, Warden’s Post No. 16 and the WVS offices’. Five days later, at a more dangerous time, mid-morning, in fact 11.40 on Wednesday, 21 March 1945, another V-2 landed on the second most famous open space in the area, Primrose Hill, just across the boundary in St Pancras, but ‘credited to’ Hampstead. Even on this green hillside some ‘military’ damage was done: a reservoir required repair, and four soldiers had to be taken to hospital. Once again the heights of Hampstead spread the noise far and wide. One woman, engaged that morning in the curiously rural occupation of mushroom-rearing in Camden Town, recalls it as ‘simply stunning and the vibration caused the door fastening to jam’. The crater on Primrose Hill briefly became one of the sights of North London, and prompted the author of Hampstead at War to an uncharacteristic flight of fancy:
Somehow, gazing into the hole made by the explosion, where this metal monster from the sky lay with its body torn open, powerless and futile, one seemed to sense with the acrid smell of cordite invading the nostrils, that this was the end. And so it proved to be.
The area of outer London beyond Hampstead, and stretching out to the edges of the region at Barnet and Cheshunt, was so large that it was subdivided into three subgroups for Civil Defence purposes, which together formed Group 6, containing no fewer than 31 boroughs. Immediately adjoining Hampstead was subgroup 6C, with 10 local authorities whose territory was hit all told by 17 V-2s, which caused 23 deaths and 84 serious injuries. Two places, Bushey and Uxbridge, escaped altogether, Barnet Urban District had only one V-2, which hurt no one, Wembley had one rocket, which inflicted a single death and no serious injuries, and Finchley one which killed 4 people and badly injured 10. Elstree, famous for its film studios, had only one bad injury, and no deaths, from its two rockets, and Ruislip and Northwood, also with two incidents, had no casualties at all. Hendon, also with two rockets, had one fatal casualty, and 18 cases of injury. One of its incidents, on a ‘bitterly cold Sunday morning in January 1945�
��, is remembered by a man then working in a chemist’s shop in Golders Green Road, Edgware:
I was making a drink of coffee on the gas ring in the dispensary . . . when a customer entered. As I passed into the shop to serve him I just turned off the gas and . . . crash!, a V-2 dropped just opposite the shop at the back of the Prince Albert public house, just after opening time. The customer and myself were thrown to the ground and broken glass and stock covered the floor. We both had a miraculous escape from serious injury, only suffering from shock and some nasty cuts to our hands and face; our heads were pitted with minute particles of glass. . . . We were taken to the casualty station at the Hendon Cottage Hospital, where there were already similar cases. . . . I shall always remember the man who, when asked where he was when the incident happened, replied, ‘In the Prince Albert, just got my drink and was waiting for my change, but that was the last I saw of the note or the change and I certainly didn’t have my drink!’ The wry look of disappointment on his face was pathetic.
Willesden, with four rockets, came off comparatively badly for the area, with 5 deaths and 41 people injured, but worst of all was Harrow, also hit by four V-2s, which caused 12 deaths and 14 serious injuries. Over most of the area, however, rockets remained so unfamiliar, that when, in March, one fell in Uppingham Avenue, Stanmore – ‘the worst incident in the area . . . during the war’, one local resident remembers – ‘the police had to put barriers across the road to keep away sightseers’. His own house, 150 yards from the explosion, lost most of its roof, one of many badly damaged:
Some people, and especially my children, were dumbfounded that such a thing had happened to them and right on the doorstep . . . and being so young (seven and nine years old) really could not understand why this happened. The fact they lost some of their playmates doubtless made a greater impression on them. However, there was a silver lining . . . in the form of a mobile canteen. . . . Here they were able to get tea and buns and, what is more, nothing to pay!
Beyond, and to the east, of subgroup 6C lay subgroup A – there seems to have been no subgroup B – containing ten boroughs or urban districts, which attracted 41 rockets, producing a far heavier toll than its neighbour’s 17 missiles: 162 dead and 572 injured. Edmonton had 9 V-2s, with 5 dead and 59 other casualties. Enfield also had 9 incidents, with a total death roll of 21 dead and 151 injured. Cheshunt, with 7 V-2s, had 10 dead and 56 seriously injured, Hornsey and Southgate 4 each – causing 25 dead and 66 other casualties in Hornsey, 30 dead and 53 injured in Southgate – Tottenham 3, with 25 dead and 59 other casualties, and Wood Green 2, producing 15 killed and 40 people admitted to hospital. East Barnet (12 dead, 59 injured), Friern Barnet (3 injured) and Potters Bar (21 dead, 26 injured) suffered one rocket each, illustrating once again how varied the consequences of individual incidents could be.
Many of the casualties in this part of London occurred on a single disastrous day, Saturday, 20 January, when there were three ‘outstanding incidents’. The first came at 11 a.m. at Potters Bar, accounting for all its 21 dead; the second followed two hours later, with all East Barnet’s 12 fatal casualties; and at 8 o’clock that evening one of Tottenham’s three V-2s accounted for 23 of its 25 dead. The East Barnet incident, at Calton Road, occurred at 1315 hours, just as one RASC sergeant was leaving his billet in the area on a weekend pass. The sergeant-major in charge promptly assembled all the troops left in camp and led them to the scene:
Many of the houses were just rubble, dust and smoke was choking, the gas pipes were alight. So we were put into sections of about eight persons, a sergeant in charge of each and the job in hand was to reach anyone trapped or injured. . . . My section was given an easy house and we soon made it to the kitchen because of the concrete floor. There was a pram on its side, all buckled, and, looking inside, well, I will not mention the terrible sight I saw but the mother escaped unhurt. We worked more or less non-stop for approximately nine hours, stopping for a cup of tea supplied by the Salvation Army . . . there with their canteen within half an hour. . . . I did have my weekend pass and when I got home a reaction set in and I had a good cry.
A woman then working as a Lyon’s waitress, and living in Wood Green, remembers the rockets whenever Shrove Tuesday comes round, as do many other people, for this was a day in 1945 when Kammler’s men were particularly busy.21 Just as she and her sister were sitting down to their teatime pancakes on 13 February, ‘there was a sensation and sound as though of an enormous wind. . . . The window blew in; plaster fell from the ceiling; the front door was blown off and what seemed like tons of soot came down the chimney’. For a man in Hornsey the trigger that touches off his memory is the sight of a horse-drawn cart:
A children’s tea-party was in progress and the milkman with his horse and cart was making deliveries. The rocket landed, the party house and three others disappeared and so did the milkman and his cart. His horse was blown over the roof-tops and landed in Frobisher Road, where it lay disfigured and bleeding. The police came and the animal had to be shot there and then to put it out of its misery. The exhaust engine from the rocket was also blown over the roof-tops and landed . . . in Green Lanes, Harringay. . . . I remember seeing this wedged between two houses and it remained there for some time, being a curio and sightseeing piece for the neighbourhood.
Enfield, as mentioned earlier, had more incidents than any of its immediate neighbours and they included one ‘outstanding’ one, at 11 p.m. on 25 March, in Broadfield Square, earning its place in the list less because of the number of dead, 7, than because of the 100 seriously injured. Enfield’s other eight rockets fell in an extraordinary variety of places, including a stud farm and the Garden of Remembrance at the crematorium, while a flour mill and a plywood factory were damaged by the blast from a ‘border’ incident in Chingford. But the main sufferers were private houses and private citizens, including one of Kammler’s youngest victims, a baby only three weeks old.
The final part of ‘Group 6’ – ‘subgroup 6D’ in ministry records – covered eleven western boroughs, including Brentford and Chiswick, whose famous first rocket also proved to be its last. Acton, Feltham and Southall also had no V-2s, Ealing, Sunbury and Yiewsley one each, but causing no casualties, and Twickenham one which produced two cases of serious injury; Staines, also with one incident, did rather worse: 3 dead, 6 injured. Hayes and Harlington (a single borough) had two rockets, with 21 serious injuries, and Heston and Isleworth the same number of rockets, but with much worse consequences, almost all due to its second incident, which will be described later. Its first, on Thursday, 22 February, when a V-2 exploded in a field between the Bath Road and the Great West Road, both heavily developed with factories and houses, showed how often extensive damage went hand in hand with a light casualty list. One person was seriously injured, 27 were slightly hurt, but 1000 properties were damaged. All told, however, the eleven boroughs escaped lightly, with a death roll of 38 and a seriously injured total of 133, caused by ten V-2s.
The blitz had seen the reappearance on the bombed sites of the unassuming flower Rosebay Willowherb, popularly called ‘fireweed’. It seemed for a time that the city’s final ordeal might be commemorated by London Rocket (Sisymbrium irio), an 18-inch-high plant with a pale yellow flower, which had grown in profusion amid the wood ash of the ruined streets after the Great Fire of 1666. But reports that it had been seen again in 1945 proved false, being dismissed by the Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew as a ‘pleasant legend’.
23
DOWN LAMBETH WAY
When you crossed Lambeth Bridge you realized at once that you were on a battlefield.
Writer in National Geographic Magazine, 1945
A gulf far wider than the River Thames separated the postal districts of W1 and SW1, which covered Mayfair and Westminster, from SE1, on the other side of the river, which stretched from the edge of Bermondsey through Southwark into Lambeth. In the central reaches of the capital, during the rocket months, it almost divided two nations. An American vi
sitor described soon afterwards for the National Geographic Magazine the contrast one experienced leaving ‘one of the well-known West End hotels’ in ‘one of those quaint turn-around-on-a-dime taxis’ and travelling southwards through the almost unscarred West End. ‘When you crossed Lambeth Bridge you realized at once that you were on a battlefield. Here it seemed that almost every other row of houses was either smashed or its windows were knocked out.’
Thanks to the popular songwriters, everyone had heard of the Old Kent Road (largely in Southwark), Camberwell and Lambeth Walk, but to the Ministry of Home Security the three boroughs concerned, plus Battersea and Wandsworth, were known less romantically as Group 5. It was hit by 23 rockets, and – being heavily built-up, mainly with small, insubstantial houses and none-too-solid tenement blocks – these caused a far higher than average number of deaths, 245, and serious injuries, 487. Camberwell did worst, with 9 V-2s, 92 dead and 116 other bad casualties; Wandsworth, with 6 incidents, had 46 dead and 127 injured; Lambeth’s 3 rockets caused 44 deaths and 41 cases of injury, Southwark’s 3 also killed 44 people, but injured 145, while Battersea was least affected: 2 rockets, 19 dead, 58 seriously injured. No fewer than 8 rockets caused ‘outstanding’ incidents, 3 in Camberwell, 2 in Southwark and one each in the other three boroughs.
Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s Page 32