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

by Norman Longmate

  Some parts of the transport network seemed marked out for misfortune. Athol Street, close to the docks in Poplar, was already notorious among those based there as London Transport’s ‘most-bombed garage’, a reputation the V-2s helped to maintain, for one blew out the windows of twenty-five buses, at 6 a.m. on a Saturday, though the long-suffering staff got them all away on time. Next day, frustratingly, an airburst destroyed all the repairs so far carried out and still further damaged the roof, while two days later four pieces of yet another rocket plunged into it. Other garages, as far apart as Plumstead, in Woolwich, Swanley, in Kent, and Epping, in Essex, also had to replace damaged roofs and shattered doors and windows. Incidents affecting buses while on the road wore rare, though there was one very serious one, at West Ham on 13 January, when two trolley buses were wrecked and 15 people killed, with another 35 injured. All told, 440 trams, buses or trolley buses needed minor repair, 56 being ‘hospitalized’ to the board’s works at Chiswick for ‘major surgery’.

  Since there was no warning to make possible the closing of the flood gates protecting the underground network, the tubes suffered much less interruption than they had done from the flying-bombs, although the above-ground section was affected on several occasions and four stations were damaged, at Aldersgate (now Barbican in the City), Hounslow West, West Hampstead, and Whitechapel, though there was no serious interruption to the services.

  On the main-line railways travelling conditions actually improved during the winter of 1944. In October previous cuts in services were restored, improved lighting was introduced on both trains and stations and nameplates identifying stations were brought back, and, though all told no fewer than 358 V-2s affected the railways to some extent, only 28 scored direct hits on railway property. The Southern Railway came off worst, with 16 rockets on or near its lines or premises. On 1 November two trains were damaged en route to London Bridge and on the following night a rocket demolished the embankment at Hampton Court, interrupting normal service for two days. On 5 November, the Southern’s historian recorded, ‘the bridge carrying the up main local and South London lines over Southwark Park Road, Bermondsey, was hit and collapsed in the roadway’, and it took ten days to get the trains running to time again. The Deptford rocket later that month also damaged the station and signal boxes, and the dead included two women carriage-cleaners who had gone to Woolworths for their lunch. At Folkestone Gardens, Deptford, in March, another Southern railwayman was killed and three more died later that day in an incident near Charlton Junction. All told, the Southern’s V-1s and V-2s – the casualties from both were bracketed together – killed 63 people on railway property, including some passengers; another 767 were injured.

  The LMS – London, Midland and Scottish Railway – reported only six V-2 incidents, though two caused precisely the type of cumulative trouble the Allies had tried to inflict on the French railway system before D-Day. One rocket damaged 155 coaches and freight wagons at Tilbury, while another soon afterwards knocked out, though only temporarily, the wagon and locomotive workshops at Bow, where they should have been repaired. The Great Western Railway, serving the ‘safe’ side of London, was barely troubled by the V-2s, but they gave to the London and North-Eastern Railway, always notorious for unpunctuality, a topical excuse for its poor timekeeping. With its lines running through the eastern suburbs and East Anglia, the LNER was perpetually plagued by rockets, from November 1944, when one landed in Hornsey goods yard, to late March, when there was a major disaster, to be described later, near Farringdon Street Station. As the company’s historian wryly remarked, ‘the symbol V-2 had long been familiar to the LNER as denoting a certain type of locomotive. From September 1944 until March 1945 it became far too familiar in another sense.’

  How varied the repercussions of a single explosion could be was well illustrated by the rocket which hit the ‘High Meads paint shop, next to the loop line from Victoria Park’, in Bethnal Green. As ‘the paint shop was demolished and . . . telephone wires, signal wires and point rodding went to blazes’, the nearest signalman, very rightly, ‘at once threw all his signals to danger’, halting traffic over a wide area:

  He next telephoned Control [at Stratford] and then went out to inspect the damage. At times he found himself wading through water up to his knees, for water mains and drains had been shattered and heavy rain had recently fallen.

  Within a short space of time the engineers came to put things straight. The track was relaid, the point rodding was repaired and new telephone and signal wires were run. No unnecessary time was wasted in clearing up the mess. In one place a carriage had been thrown right over so that it lay upside down, but it was found to be clear of the line. It was left where it was and the new signal wires were run in at one window, through the compartment and out at the other window. Within two hours trains were running once more over the line.

  Dedicated railwaymen could almost forgive the Germans for the harm done by the V-2s, for one unforeseen consequence of their campaign – the reopening of the stretch of line known affectionately as ‘the Khyber Pass’, a deep cutting just north of Wood Green, on the local line to Enfield, which had for a time been sealed off after being blocked by a large bomb during the blitz. Now this obscure mile or so of track was to achieve railway immortality, after a V-2 had blocked the main line to the north, just south of Wood Green, at 3.30 a.m., on Friday, 12 January 1945. The assistant yard master from King’s Cross, having nobly set out into the ‘cold wind and drizzle’ of that bleak winter night to investigate, returned with the gloomy news that only one line of the usual eight could be used. The answer came in a flash of inspiration: reopen the longabandoned line around Enfield. ‘The Flying Scotsman’, recorded the LNER’s historian reverently, ‘was the first down train to honour the Khyber Pass by its presence’, and by 7.10 p.m. that day the ‘control sheet’ at Kings Cross was able to record a major triumph:

  7.10 p.m. Normal working resumed with 5.35 p.m. Kings Cross to Baldock

  The last V-2 to inflict major industrial damage landed not on the hard-pressed eastern side of London but ten miles due west of Whitehall on the Great West Road, a major highway between large modern factories and rows of archetypal ‘thirties’ houses only recently completed. It landed at 9.39 a.m. on Wednesday, 21 March 1945, scoring a direct hit on the great Packard factory, ‘where’, the local chief warden later wrote, ‘100 men were assembling marine engines. The building was completely wrecked and damage was caused to several other buildings nearby, including Pyrene’s’. In fact no fewer than 13 factories were affected, of which 11 were classed as ‘key points’, ‘probably the largest number’, commented the official compiling that week’s Home Office report on the rocket attacks, ‘during the war’.

  In Hounslow, two miles away, the impact rattled the windows of a junior school: class enjoying a games lesson in the playground, one of them (then a boy aged ten) remembers, displayed a duly Drake-like spirit:

  Everyone suddenly stood still and all was quiet for about five seconds. In the distance we could see the smoke rising and the teacher said that it looked like another rocket, then we carried on with our game.

  A sixteen-year-old draughtsman in the offices of the London Aeroplane Company which also fronted the Great West Road, was similarly brought up short:

  We were about to have a mid-morning cup of tea when there was a tremendous explosion; the ground shook, windows shattered, dust flew, even tracing paper was wrenched from beneath the pins holding it to our drawing boards.

  The Chief Warden for the area later described what followed:

  The first report was soon received at the report and control centre and rescue parties and ambulances, mobile first-aid units and wardens [were] ordered to the scene. . . . Six wardens were on duty at. . . . St Mary’s Crescent, Osterley, in charge of Post Warden Bert M. They were soon on the spot and Post Warden M. started to organize a reconnaissance and set up a control organization. Fire broke out almost at once and the NFS were there in less tha
n no time. The mobile control vehicle kept at the Bridge Road depot was ordered to the scene and District Warden J.W.H., who . . . had had much experience, was instructed to take charge of operations. He set up his control HQ in the control vehicle on the spot and telephone communications were established.

  Within two hours hundreds of people were at work in the ruins of the Packard and Pyrene factories, some of them from neighbouring firms like Firestone Tyres or Sperry’s, the instrument manufacturers, some, like the WVS, who arrived in a mobile caravan-style inquiry point, from adjoining boroughs like Brentford. Within two hours 40 ARP vehicles were in attendance and 25 NFS fire engines and tenders, with so many ambulances and cars available that ‘many slightly injured who could have been attended to on the spot’ were ‘rushed off to West Middlesex Hospital’, now facing its largest influx of emergencies since the very first V-2. No one concerned could have known that this would be the last major incident in West London, but it was by any test an impressive display, a model of incident management. The Great West Road, briefly blocked, was rapidly cleared for single-lane traffic, a ‘director of Gillette’s’, less badly affected than some other firms, ‘came over and invited the ARP workers to go across to their canteen for refreshments’ and the homeless and bereaved gained what comfort they could from a visit by Herbert Morrison’s deputy, Ellen Wilkinson, and – a sure sign of a major incident – from the King and Queen.

  21 March was the first day of spring, and felt like it. The sun shone, all the more welcome after such a wretched winter, and there seemed at long last, the smell of final victory in the air. This made the Great West Road massacre seem all the harder to bear, as one Pyrene office worker tried to convey in a pamphlet sold in aid of the firm’s distress fund:

  Outside, above us, the skies are so bright and peaceful. . . . [It] is just one of the many of the 2,000 days that have elapsed since . . . Germany invaded Poland. . . . The hour is approaching 10 a.m. . . . In our department we are thinking the tea girl must be on her way. . . .

  The earth is opening upon us, a blinding flash accompanied by a terrifying explosion. . . . ‘Get down!’ Stunned, staggered, but still semi-conscious, we fall to our knees, a bloody mess. . . . A girl’s scream echoes through the office above the falling debris. . . . We rise from our knees, stricken and dazed, bloody and bleeding, wondered what has happened. . . . Stunned, we endeavour to tread over the wreckage that was once the Planning Department. . . . I look at young Margie B . . . her face is covered in rich red blood. It must be a horrible dream. . . . As we go further and out into the passage I see a bloody trail and realize this tale is now a terrible reality. We make our way to the First Aid Station and come face to face, unrecognizable . . . with many more more casualties.

  All told, 32 people were killed outright or died later and 500 others were injured, 100 of them badly; 662 houses were damaged, as well as the 13 factories already mentioned. The Pyrene factory was out of action for a week, the longest period of lost production of any of the affected companies, though it was Packard’s, where a major fire broke out, whose employees suffered most. Among the victims was one man who had consoled his wife, when they heard V-2s exploding in the distance, ‘If one comes here you won’t know anything about it. . .”. That’, she now reflects, ‘is what happened to him.’ When his body was at last found, two days later, it was burnt beyond recognition, but having contracted frostbite thirty years before when serving in the Dardanelles he still wore ‘a pad of cotton wool in his socks’, and this homely precaution now enabled him to be identified. But the censorship deprived her, like the relations of other rocket vitims, of seeing a fitting account of his death in the local press. ‘They didn’t‘, his wife remembers, ‘say where, just that he died of enemy action.’

  25

  WHAT CAN’T BE CURED

  What can’t be cured must be endured.

  The Prime Minister to the Ministry of Home Security, 1 March 1945

  During the winter of 1944 – 45, the British government’s counter-measures did have some effect, for in November at least two consignments of missiles had to be returned to Nordhausen after being damaged in transit by ‘machine-gun fire’. Dornberger’s main difficulties, however, came from the Russians. Having earlier been driven out of Blizna by the Red Army, by the end of the year the development team’s fall-back position at Heidekraut had also become endangered by the Russian advance, as Dornberger observed:

  At the end of December I was paying the last of many visits to Heidekraut. I had discussed evacuation with the officer commanding the Training and Experimental Unit. . . . He was to go first to the woods south of Wolgast. His target area would then be selected somewhere in the broad, uninhabited region of the Tuchel moors. . . . It was then afternoon and the last rocket was to be launched after dark. The sky had cleared. Stars shone brightly as the chilly winter dusk came on. It was nearly eleven before the glow of the ignition flame reddened the sky. The rocket began its journey. The gas jet, which alone was visible, described its dazzling arc. I watched from the running-board of a carriage of our special train at the little station of Lindenbusch, deep in the great Tuchel forest. The ‘all-burnt’ came at the appointed time. Through my binoculars I could see clearly against the dark sky the small, bright point of light of the white-hot graphite vanes. . . . I could still see the dim point of light after two minutes, three minutes, four minutes. . . . Not until 4 minutes and 32 seconds had passed did it disappear into the haze of the earth’s atmosphere. . . . We [had] learned from reports in neutral newspapers that in England the rocket had been seen at the end of its flight, as a red-hot sphere. . . . I had found the explanation.

  This proved to be the very last A-4 fired for research or practice purposes:

  In the middle of January 1945 Heidekraut had to be evacuated. In deep snow the long-range rocket Training and Experimental Unit, with all its vehicles and equipment, moved to the Wolgast woods, which they left in the middle of February without having managed to launch a single rocket. Their last move was to the neighbourhood of Rethen on the Weser, where their aim ran north along the coast of Schleswig-Holstein. But even here no more rockets were launched. Practice shots by the troops with the A-4 were finally abolished.

  Although Dornberger continued to resent Kammler’s insistence on giving priority to the operational formations at the expense of the research echelon, the proportion of failures was remarkably small. In December 12.3 per cent of rockets were rejected on final inspection and a further 7 per cent, which had been passed, misfired. In January, with the pressure on to fire every possible projectile, Group North, with London as its target, had 16.5 per cent of A-4s rejected and 12.2 per cent misfired; in February the figures were 5 per cent and 10.4 per cent, still within the acceptable limits, and 85 per cent of rockets produced were being launched at London.

  The British government, at the receiving end of both the bombardment and public discontent, were encountering far worse technical problems. Hopes of being able to provide even a brief public warning were fast fading. A report on 25 September 1944, based on the data gathered by the radar and sound and visual observation teams, had confirmed that on three occasions in the past five days no warning would have been given at all, while only one warning in sixteen from these areas would have been followed by an incident in London and only one in six elsewhere, the rest being false alarms. Nor, it was clear, was it going to be possible to disrupt the rocket’s guidance system. The Crossbow Committee’s seventeenth report on 22 November 1944, covering the period from 1 September to 20 November – i.e. the opening of the attack and the first 210 V-2s – had a melancholy tale to tell:

  The projectile . . . cannot . . . be intercepted by any existing methods of air defence. . . . All efforts to interfere with its radio control mechanism have so far proved fruitless. . . . Nor is the rocket vulnerable in the production stage. The plans for its manufacture have clearly been devised with an eye to security against bombing. The production of the component parts has been wi
dely dispersed over German-occupied Europe, whilst the final assembly is carried out in a few carefully protected factories. The only assembly plant about which we have conclusive information is situated underground at Nordhausen in Thuringia. . . . The depth and design of the underground tunnels are such as to make a successful attack most difficult.

  As for the future, the outlook was even bleaker:

  Given time, there can be little doubt that the effectiveness of the existing A-4 rocket could be appreciably increased. Moreover, it is possible that larger rockets with longer-range or heavier warheads are already in course of development by the Germans.

  By the end of the year about 350 rockets had arrived and on 11 January 1945 R. V. Jones submitted a detailed analysis of their accuracy to the Chiefs of Staff. The fall of shot showed, he explained, ‘a lopsided dispersion’ with a ‘long tail stretching through Essex to he North Sea’, due, he believed, to a small ‘error in velocity’ of ‘about 0.8 per cent’ and a rather larger ‘error in elevation’ of ‘about 8°’. In other words, the rocket was not going quite as fast as the Germans had calculated and was not being fired at precisely the right angle to reach its supposed aiming point, which Dr Jones believed to be Wapping, on the north bank of the Thames just down-river from Tower Bridge. There was also, thought Dr Jones, a ‘probable error in bearing’, i.e. the direction in which the rocket was fired, of 1.5 per cent, sufficient, at this distance, to explain the dispersal of shots, combined with the rocket’s tendency to fall slightly short, over the area between – though Dr Jones did not name those unfortunate places – Ilford and Deptford. The Germans, he suggested, had chosen their aiming point knowing that many missiles would fall around rather than on it, and even a small increase in accuracy would have serious consequences for central London.