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

by Norman Longmate

  I am not at all convinced that they are exerting themselves as they should, or as they would be forced to do if the bombs were falling in the Whitehall area. I am not at all satisfied with the efforts the Air Ministry are making in this matter.

  The following day Ismay tried again, repeating the Chiefs of Staff’s arguments and pointing out that they had been accepted by the Defence Committee on 26 January and again on 26 February. That same 1 March, however, another note arrived, from Herbert Morrison:

  Nearly every 24 hours bring further loss of life and homes and sleep to the war-weary inhabitants of the areas experiencing their fifth year of bombardment. Members of Parliament are receiving complaints and there is a growing murmur that ‘It’s time the government did something about it’, with a suggestion that the government is indifferent to the loss of life and suffering. People cannot help contrasting the spectacular advance now being made into Germany against the seemingly static position of our troops in the north of Holland. To the layman it seems that our line in the north need advance only slightly to overrun or cut off the firing points. Instead of this comforting prospect, we are having to consider some reopening of evacuation arrangements, a measure which, when it becomes known to the troops in the front line, is bound to cause them additional anxiety about the safety of their wives and children at home.

  Churchill, practising his own ‘Action this day’ philosophy, replied immediately:

  I would be glad if you would go yourself and discuss the matter with the Chiefs of Staff. I have put pressure upon them and I am satisfied that they will do all that is possible. I will also discuss the matter with Field Marshal Montgomery and General Eisenhower when I see them tomorrow and the next day. No one feels it more than I do, with my poor constituents bearing the brunt, but ‘What can’t be cured, must be endured’.

  What Churchill said at his meeting with the Allied commanders is not on record, but from the Chiefs of Staff on 7 March Herbert Morrison received little consolation. Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke assured him that a land attack in the Arnhem area and a seaborne assault on the Dutch coast had both been considered but turned down, while Air Chief Marshal Portal said that as soon as the RAF cut one railway route serving The Hague the Germans opened another and that the Central Works, because of its site, would be almost impossible to knock out by bombing. Morrison could only repeat that both the police and the Regional Commissioner for London shared his concern abut morale, which, he argued, could only be adversely affected by the growing emphasis on night launchings, since ‘perhaps the chief cause of anxiety was the feeling that no night was free from the danger of domestic disaster, if not serious personal injury’.

  Meanwhile, under pressure from all sides to do something, Sir Archibald Sinclair had made the public case for the RAF’s inability to stop the nuisance in the middle of a far-ranging speech on the Air Estimates on 6 March 1945:

  The government are deeply conscious of the strain to which these attacks are subjecting many thousands of our fellow countrymen. The loss of life and homes, the injuries and the human suffering which they inflict are grievous. . . . No practical means of abating these attacks has been neglected by the Royal Air Force, but the launching site of a V-2 is small and hard to identify. Any space of ground – hard or artifically hardened – 23 feet by 23 feet, will serve as a launching site for the rocket. . . . We may know that certain areas near or in a particular town or village in Holland are being used for launching. To send some squadrons of Bomber Command to obliterate that town or village would destroy the lives and homes of hundreds, or even thousands, of our Dutch allies, who are already suffering terribly; but the men who operate the rockets would emerge from their deep shelters when the bombardment was over, and either carry on their nefarious work elsewhere, or perhaps clear a space, and continue to operate from the same devastated town. By attacks on storage sites, on supply routes, motor transport parks and lines of communication, we are reducing the scale of attack far below what the Germans hoped to achieve; but . . . the only way to silence this form of long-range artillery is the physical occupation of the sites from which these weapons are fired.

  Sinclair did not say, as he did not yet know, that events had just strikingly vindicated the Air Ministry’s reluctance to intensify attacks on The Hague. On Saturday, 3 March 1945, 57 Mitchells and Bostons of the Second Tactical Air Force, which Supreme Headquarters had been loath to see diverted from their normal ground-support role, had been sent to make the heaviest attack yet on the Haagsche Bosch. The result, it was learned in London on 8 March, the day after Sinclair’s speech, had been a disaster and later further details emerged. The nearest bombs to the wooded area believed to be housing the rocket units had, it appeared, landed 500 yards away, while the surrounding streets of Bezuidenhout occupied by Dutch civilians, had been plastered with 69 tons of bombs, some of which had caused major fires. These had been left to rage unchecked, leaving many people to burn to death; the Germans had refused to let the fire brigade enter the area, declaring that ‘the stupid Dutch have to learn what it is like’. What it had been like, it now emerged, was Hamburg or Dresden on a smaller scale, and on 14 March 1945 the Foreign Minister of the Netherlands’ government in exile, which had hitherto loyally supported the British government’s policy of bombing The Hague, went to dictate, more in sorrow than in anger, a formal protest. An earlier attack by Typhoons on the same area in the second half of February, he pointed out, had been totally unsuccessful, with no damage done to the V-2s stored there, since the bombs had fallen wide. Meanwhile worthwhile targets, in the shape of the railway lines leading to The Hague carrying the Germans’ supplies of liquid oxygen and alcohol, had been left untouched. But this lesson had not been learned and the result, on the fatal Saturday of 3 March, had been a disaster, with 800 Dutch civilians killed by their allies, and 100,000 homes,26 ruined by bombs or fire, having to be evacuated. ‘The temper of the civilian population’, summed up this senior Dutch minister, ‘has become violently antially as a result of this bombardment.’

  Even if the scale of the disaster had been exaggerated it had clearly been far worse than any V-2 incident in London, and the affected area remained for years afterwards an open space on which no one ventured to build. As soon as the basic facts were realized, a major inquest was launched in London, although the true reasons for the fiasco were never finally established. The Dutch charitably attributed it to the stiff north-west breeze which had pushed the bombers, or their cargo, off course, but the rumour was current in the Allied air forces that a bombardier in a leading aircraft had held his map upside down and that those behind, bombing when he did, had aimed at the very area they had been briefed to avoid. That the map-reading had been inept and the bombing altitude too high seemed indisputable, and the resulting criticism came at a bad time for the RAF, already under a cloud since the devastation of Dresden three weeks earlier. On 18 March the Prime Minister sent to General Ismay, for the Chiefs of Staff, with a copy to Sir Archibald Sinclair, one of his sharpest memos of the war:

  This complaint reflects upon the Air Ministry and Royal Air Force in two ways. First, it shows how feeble have been our efforts to interfere with the rockets, and, secondly, the extraordinary bad aiming which has led to this slaughter of Dutchmen. The matter requires a thorough explanation. . . . I will bring the matter before the Cabinet.

  The embattled Secretary of State for Air did his best. In his reply to Churchill on 26 March Sir Archibald Sinclair admitted that the mission had been a disaster. An internal investigation had been launched on 8 March, but, he pointed out, ‘The Germans are deliberately placing their launching and storage sites in and near built-up areas in occupied Holland. A railway interdiction plan would not necessarily avoid losses in Dutch civilian life.’ The Chiefs of Staff, replying on 28 March, also mingled apology with self-justification. There had, they acknowledged, been a fault in the way the crews concerned had been briefed, but many earlier operations, such as Spitfires dive-bombing the launchin
g sites, had been a success. They, the Chiefs of Staff, had always advised against the use of heavy bombers and the decision to use medium bombers – which had actually caused the trouble – had been taken by the Defence Committee, not themselves.

  The danger to Dutch civilians has always been inherent in the use of aircraft against the rocket area of The Hague. . . . If the risk of damage [sic] to Dutch civilians is unacceptable for political reasons, we can only suggest that our air attacks should be confined to harassing the railways at a safe distance from centres of Dutch population and that the consequent increase in the rocket attacks on the United Kingdom (which may at most be only slight and may at best be prevented by the course of land operations) should be accepted.

  The subject clearly rankled with the Prime Minister and when, in opening a large-scale RAF exhibition at Dorland Hall, Lower Regent Street, Sir Archibald Sinclair claimed credit for ‘the frustrating attacks by the RAF on V weapons’, this was too much for Churchill. The text of the speech appeared in The Times on the same day, 28 March, that the Chiefs of Staff’s memo arrived, and Churchill’s response was immediate. ‘You have no grounds to claim that the RAF frustrated the attacks by the V weapons,’ it began, and went on to say that, so far as the flying-bombs were concerned, ‘the RAF took their part, but in my opinion their efforts rank definitely below that of the AA artillery and still further below the achievements of the army’. The real sting lay in the tail:

  As to V-2, nothing has been done or can be done by the RAF. I thought it a pity to mar the glories of the Battle of Britain by trying to claim overweening credit in this business of the V weapons. It only leads to scoffing comments by very large bodies of people.

  26

  A ROUTINE JOB

  At 1900 hrs the incident had settled down into a routine job.

  Report of incident officer on incident at Usk Road, Battersea, 1600 hours, 27 January 1945

  ‘The public continue to praise the Services, in which they have complete faith.’ With this sentence one Ministry of Home Security official ended the draft of his report on ‘Lessons from Recent Raids – Long-Range Rockets’ in December 1944, and it was a verdict which almost all of those who had suffered personally from the rocket would have endorsed. The picture he painted was indeed reassuring in almost every respect. Although, owing to the lack of warning, fewer people now used shelters, ‘Anderson and Morrison shelters have again stood up well,’ the same report concluded. ‘Several Anderson shelters within a few feet of craters, and even on their very lips, have remained practically undamaged, though their earth coverings have usually been blasted away.’ There were similar cases of people brought out unharmed from Morrisons after the shelter had been totally submerged in the ruins of their home. The picture for surface shelters, always less popular, was not so satisfactory:

  Reinforced brick communal shelters have also stood up satisfactorily as far as their main structure is concerned, but there has been damage to internal fittings. Bunks have been wrenched away from the walls, smashed and twisted. . . . Where any of the few remaining unreinforced brick shelters have been involved, there have been cases of collapse on their sites from earth tremor.

  Overall, however, even a surface shelter increased one’s chance of survival, and especially of escaping injury from flying missiles and falling masonry; it also gave protection against a new, specifically V-2, danger. ‘There have’, mentioned the report quoted earlier, ‘been several cases of injury from burns and these have been ascribed to liquid oxygen, or hydrogen peroxide, containers of which are found in the missile.’

  The report made much of the problem of locating the precise spot where a rocket had fallen, especially in rural areas, but even in towns finding the precise point of impact was not always easy. Westminster, its historian recorded, made wardens’ posts ‘responsible for sending in Vicinity Reports based on the sound of clattering glass’, a somewhat rough-and-ready guide, as windows might be broken a mile and half from the explosion. ‘Border’ incidents were a constant trial, both in town and country, a classic example occurring after the ministry’s interim report just quoted, at one in the morning of Thursday, 15 March 1945, when a V-2, with no regard for local authority boundaries, landed on a group of houses in Crystal Palace Park Road ‘just feet inside Beckenham’s borders’, but causing casualties and damage in Lewisham and Penge. The result, a local historian admitted, could have been tragic:

  No message was sent to Beckenham Control for ambulances or resuce parties while the search went on to establish whether the incident was in the borough. Fortunately Lewisham showed greater initiative and despatched eight ambulances and a heavy rescue squad to the scene without worrying too much about boundary lines. . . . Until 3.30 a.m. Lewisham controlled operations when responsibility was transferred to Beckenham.

  Untrained and often over-enthusiastic helpers had always been a source of vexation to the professionals, and it had not lessened with experience:

  Everybody in the vicinity, as soon as the dazedness has been shaken off, is immediately anxious to help, and generally succeeds in adding to the chaos. Much harm may be done until order is restored; and the later an incident officer arrives on the scene, the harder is his job of undoing what has been done before his arrival.

  The incident officers were the elite of the Civil Defence service, usually senior wardens of long experience who had been on a special training course. In Ilford, the local newspaper reported, the incident officer ‘became known simply as “the man with the blue hat” and to him everyone turned in trouble’. In theory at least the black and white chequered flag which flew over his command post marked out a calm, still centre in the middle of storm and chaos, where frayed nerves were soothed, raised tempers lowered, and decisions on which lives might depend were taken promptly but carefully. One of his lesser jobs was that of a superior traffic warden, a profession not yet invented. The ministry report quoted an example:

  At one incident in a main road, which was blocked during the early stages, there were 11 rescue parties, 21 ambulances, 5 cranes with their debris lorries, and two mortuary vans, as well as the NFS pumps and towing vehicles, mobile canteens and cars. Here the incident officer at once arranged for the clearance of roads round the incident so as to let vehicles circulate and get away without backing.

  The incident officer now often had at his disposal a facility unknown earlier in the war, an incident-control van, ‘providing’, according to the official intention, ‘a mobile office which contains everything the incident officer wants, and which can be sited at the best spot regardless of damage’. Control vans were often linked by field telephone to the nearest warden’s post or private home with a line still intact, and another innovation, in response to the huge V-2 crater, was the use of two incident officers, one on either side of the obstruction. The technique was tried out at the Woolworths incident in New Cross and in Walthamstow where, as the local controller recorded, ‘the crater completely filled the road and the water main continued to spout for a long period, with the result that the whole of the roadway was flooded’. In Walthamstow this division of responsibility became a regular practice, but elsewhere the ministry knew of one occasion where a crater formed ‘two culs-de-sac’, leaving ‘the Medical Officer with serious casualties on one side awaiting ambulances which . . . were waiting on the other’.

  Everyone’s ambition was to ‘close’ an incident rapidly, with casualties removed, roads cleared and – above all – everyone who might have been involved accounted for. The record in Ilford was half an hour but this was exceptional and major incidents were often kept ‘open’ for days, or reopened when someone was discovered to be missing. The V-2s added enormously to the difficulty of listing actual and putative casualties, since people were so often caught in the street, and local records were out of date.

  Many evacuated persons have returned and some have left without informing the wardens. People seem to be less willing to notify the wardens of their movements now that a numb
er of wardens’ posts are closed. They will not trouble to go to a more distant post.

  The sheer scale of the area affected by every V-2 also vastly increased the wardens’ problems:

  The difficulties of tracing and identifying persons who might, or might not, have been on the scene . . . are increased because the numbers are greater. This particularly applies to passers-by and passengers in public-service vehicles which have been involved. Casualties have occurred amongst passengers in railway trains when identification and recording have been difficult. . . . At one incident, which occurred at about 5 p.m. on a Sunday, in a residential area, many of the houses involved contained one or more visitors. This complicated the reconnaissance problem enormously. . . . At another, after 40 hours of work the incident was closed, but on the third day additional human remains were found and it had to be reopened. . . . Despite all the difficulties, the time taken to account for everybody who might be concerned has generally been most creditably short.