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

by Norman Longmate

  Only occasionally did the newspapers give a real indication of the ordeal through which the London area was passing. The usual communique resembled the one which appeared in the London Evening Standard on Wednesday, 14 February 1945:

  During the period from dawn yesterday to seven o’clock this morning there was enemy air activity against southern England. Damage and casualties have been reported.

  A brief reference to three ‘recent’ incidents was included, though whether they involved a flying bomb or rocket was not revealed. More disturbing was a short item on an inside page:

  She Vanished When V-Bomb Fell

  When an application was made at a Southern England coroner’s court today to presume the death by enemy action of Miss Mary Grenoff (18) of Harvey-road, Hornsey, it was stated that she had not been seen or heard of since a V-bomb dropped near a station she was passing early in November. A witness described her as having been ‘the happiest girl living’.

  Such events, distressing to all concerned, were far from rare. After the Woolworths incident in New Cross there were said to have been no fewer than eleven people finally unaccounted for, a source of unhappiness to their families and of trouble and concern to the Registrar of Deaths, the probate courts and the insurance companies. For wholly understandable reasons, little publicity and no honours were given to the unsung heroes of the mortuary service who tried to piece bodies together for identification. The oustanding work in this field was done by a borough which rarely made the headlines, Hackney, and the innocuous title of the paper which it submitted to the Ministry of Home Security in the spring of 1945, ‘The Work of the Incident Inquiry Team’, gave little indication of the horrors it contained. They make distressing reading, so that some readers may prefer to pass over the remainder of the present chapter.

  The Hackney paper began by stating that it ‘should explode the bogey of the oft-heard expression “There are too many white hats”’ – i.e. officials from borough control – ’at incidents’, and went on to describe the three-stage technique the borough had perfected. Stage 1, completing a case card for every suspected occupant of a damaged building, was straightforward enough, but Stage 2, establishing what had happened to any of these potential casualties not accounted for, set the aptly named assistant inquiry officers a formidable task:

  Special attention must be given to snatches of conversation by persons who profess to have witnessed the occurrence at close range since this is invariably the earliest source of information of the presence in the vicinity of passers-by . . . and is of vital importance because, in the absence of such information, the unidentifiable remains of an unsuspected passer-by might be credited as the remains of a person who is, in fact, still trapped under the debris.

  But it was Stage 3, establishing identification where the normal routines had failed, which would, the author of the Hackney scheme acknowledged, require ‘laborious and unrelenting effort’:

  It involves the inquiry officers in work both morbid and gruesome and entails the responsibility of pursuing inquiries with relatives under conditions of pathos and mental strain. Such inquiries must be pursued sympathetically and tactfully but with unswerving purpose if the incident is to be brought to a successful conclusion. . . . One single case of mistaken identity will upset the whole balance of an incident and can result in hours of unnecessary labour. . . . Surprising as it may seem, there have been numerous occasions where parents have failed to identify the bodies of sons and daughters, even where the mutilation is not great, and also occasions where parents have claimed to identify the body of a son or daughter which has subsequently been established to be that of a totally different person.

  Cases where ‘badly mutilated and dismembered remains’ were ‘recovered without particles of clothing by which the relatives can establish identification’ were likely to prove particularly upsetting. Hackney advised against showing ‘gruesome remains’ in such circumstances, since ‘it is doubtful whether any useful purpose could be served’. Occasionally, however, it was ‘possible . . . to set up portions of the remains suitable for viewing by relatives who have been suitably primed as to the nature of the unpleasant task to be performed’.

  The Hackney Report gave a detailed account of the followup work after one typical incident, involving the destruction of four flats and four three-storey houses, at 6.55 p.m. one Sunday in February, only the names being altered. By the following morning, apart from others already identified, the mortuary contained ‘three male bodies, none in a fit state for identification, also various remains which it said were female’. A detailed search on site ‘yielded only small pieces of clothing’, making it clear ‘that at least one person had been literally blown to pieces’. Meanwhile ‘inquiries were being made for four lads, but no inquiry was outstanding for any female’.

  This was the starting-point for a classic investigation which, like so many detective stories, began with a false trail. One missing woman, a Mrs Gridling, was said by a warden to have been taken to hospital, but a friend failed to find her there and it turned out that the patient was ‘not the person in question, but another of the same name from a different address’. Where, then, was the other Mrs Gridling?

  Further enquiries revealed that Mrs A. Gridling was in the habit of taking her dog for a walk on the Green during the evening and, being a woman of fixed habits, should have been crossing the road to her house at the time of the occurrence. It was learned that a dog had been seen wandering aimlessly about and was now being taken care of by a person who knew the dog belonging to Mrs A. Gridling. The dog was examined and found to have its coat and ears impregnated with powdered plaster and since it had been established that the dog was always on a lead when out walking and no lead was on it when found it was obvious that the dog had escaped from beneath the debris. The search for its owner was therefore diverted to the debris of her house and the body was subsequently recovered from it.

  Already, therefore, the team had discovered a previously unsuspected body, but this created a new mystery. Whose supposedly female body was it that lay unclaimed in the mortuary? Meanwhile the mortuary seemed to be missing another body, for the case cards recorded ‘two young babies (5 months old) having been recovered dead and subsequently identified by relatives’, while the mortuary only contained one. The woman who had identified it had to be called in again and stated that the body she had seen at the incident site was not the one now shown to her. Once again the incident was reopened, and the body of little Collin Smith, lying where he had died, was ‘recovered within ten minutes of these details being passed on to the rescue officer’.

  Everyone now concentrated their efforts on finding out what had happened to the ‘four missing lads . . . all between 12 and 15 years of age’, two of them brothers. The prospects seemed umpromising. One of the ‘sets of remains’ in the mortuary was headless, another was thought to be female, and the other two consisted of such remains as ‘a shoulder and neck with one ear and some back hair attached’, although the neck was ‘encircled by the remains of a collar and tie’. Even the ‘clothing recovered was in such small fragments that it was difficult to tell what it had originally been’, while there was a disagreement between the bereaved families and between the parents of the two missing brothers about the ownership of a leather belt. A further complication was that one father was ‘a former rescue worker’ who ‘had, on account of his experience, had a nervous breakdown’ and was an unreliable witness. In a macabre scene all three fathers were brought together at the mortuary to try to decide which mutilated teenager was which, and, though the results were inconclusive, tentative identifications of three of the boys were agreed. There remained the supposed female body, whose sex had been assumed ‘because of the shape of the hands and because a piece of scalp had long hair’, but the parents of the boy still unaccounted for now ‘said that he had very long hair – in fact other boys used to laugh at him for it’. They were unable, however, to identify the only surviving scraps of clothing
, and ‘it was obviously impossible to ask the parents to see what was in the mortuary’.

  Members of the team undertook the gruesome job of trying to find some conclusive means of identifying the lad.32 . . . [One] member [of the inquiry team] took a piece of scalp and thoroughly cleaned it in spirit, which, incidentally, made it quite a different colour from what it had been when covered with dirt and scorchmarks. One portion of neck and shoulder had a piece of shirt, collar and tie on it and these were taken and washed. A finger on which the nail was unusual was found and a sketch made of it showing the malformation of the nail.

  The parents were then again visited . . . but they would not commit themselves and it became evident that . . . the parents . . . dreaded having to identify their son, as that would put his death beyond all doubt. They were shown the pieces of shirt, collar and tie, but they were sure these were nothing like those their son was wearing. . . . To the inquiry team, however, it seemed too strange a coincidence that a lad should be missing [and] that these remains should belong to someone about whom no enquiries had been made. . . . Accordingly one of them went round to have another friendly chat with the parents and he elicited the fact that the shirt and the tie that the boy had been wearing had been purchased only on the previous Saturday. . . . He therefore took them in a car to the shop from which the shirt and tie had been purchased and here the shop assistant definitely identified the pieces produced as being of the shirt and tie which he had sold to the woman on the previous Saturday. . . . Mrs Kraft was still not satisfied and a further visit to the mortuary was arranged so that she could view the actual remains. . . . Accordingly the shoulders and neck were set up to resemble a body lying face downwards with only the neck and shoulder exposed and the head swathed in bandages and sunk in a pillow. . . . Mrs Kraft . . . immediately gave signs of recognition by collapsing with the cry ‘My Georgie!’ and so brought to a conclusion the work of the incident inquiry team on this particular incident.

  The Ministry of Home Security showed little appreciation of Hackney’s pioneering work and the paper was now passed around the ministry, collecting observations as it went in the traditional Whitehall fashion. ‘I think there is every possibility of this set-up becoming a little “inhuman”,’ wrote one official. ‘Efforts on the part of a determined team might well cause quite unnecessary grief and added horror to bereaved people.’ ‘I can’t agree that Hackney’s attempts . . . are in the least inhuman,’ riposted another. ‘The subject is a gruesome one and that can’t be helped.’ Everyone agreed – as Hackney had itself generously proposed – that it would be desirable ‘to leave out the name of the borough as other LA [local authorities] are sometimes jealous of any particular borough being apparently singled out’, and it was finally decided only to ‘issue the first 2½ pages, slightly amended’— a feeble, foolish decision which robbed the document of its whole value by omitting the detailed examples, which showed the system in action, so that Hackney’s enterprising work in this delicate field has hitherto gone unrecorded.

  28

  DAMAGE WAS CAUSED

  Attacks on this country with long-range rockets have continued throughout the past week, causing further damage in various parts of southern England.

  Ministry of Home Security Operations Bulletin No. 242, 21 February 1945

  ‘My immediate thought was that we were having an earthquake.’ That is the dominant recollection of one woman, then aged nineteen, of what she still remembers as ‘the night of the rocket’, in October 1944, when her home at South Norwood fell about her ears. Precisely how many houses were destroyed or damaged by the V-2s is almost impossible to determine, since until November 1944 their very existence was a secret and after that date the damage caused by the two secret weapons was bracketed together. The Minister of Reconstruction, Lord Woolton, publicly stated on 22 September 1944 that since June 130,000 houses in London alone had been destroyed and another 720,000 had needed repair, but nearly all these totals must have been due to the V-1s. By March 1945 an additional 600,000 houses had been destroyed or damaged, and as only 80 flying-bombs reached London in this period almost all of these properties must have suffered from the V-2s, the number totally destroyed or having to be pulled down being at least 20,000. Many houses were affected several times and some families became expert in coping with the consequences of nearby explosions. One Sidcup woman had become proficient, she remembers, at putting back the Essex boarding forming the ceiling after every distant flying-bomb impact, but the V-2 nearer at hand proved too much for her new skill. And one could be too clever, as a Silvertown man discovered:

  Window frames persistently jumped out at the slightest blast until I eventually plugged the walls and fixed ours solidly with long screws. . . . One day, just as I was congratulating myself about our window frames ‘staying put’, a rocket dropped at the back. Everybody’s frames jumped inwards as usual but . . . ours pulled the whole back wall down with a crash. The consequence was that our house received more damage from blast than other houses much nearer to the exploding rocket.

  Almost worse than being on the spot was to return to find one’s house in ruins or knocked about. One woman remembers how her apprehension grew as she travelled home from her job in central London after hearing that familiar double bang:

  I was not reassured when I saw numerous wives had come to meet their husbands at East Finchley tube station. However, I was thankful on turning into our road to see that our house was still standing. . . . Most of the boarded-up windows were out again, three or four tiles had dropped from the kitchen wall, things had been dislodged and there was plenty of dust around. We found out the next day, which was a pouring wet one, that our roof had been affected too and we were kept busy mopping up and standing pails and basins at strategic points.

  A telephone was still a comparative rarity in 1944, but people possessing one now put it to a new use: telephoning their empty house after hearing a rocket explosion to see if the bell rang. A dead silence indicating ‘line out of order’ made one fear the worst. But even the ringing tone was no guarantee of having escaped. A woman who received it on telephoning her home in Forest Hill from her office recalls her disillusionment on getting back to it:

  I was thankful to see the house standing but every window had gone and the water tank in the loft was leaking water down the stairs. All the tiles were off the roof and our poor black spaniel, Scamp, was sitting on the stairs looking terrified. The houses opposite looked untouched but actually they were like a film set, because the back rooms and walls had disappeared. . . . Our roof was covered with tarpaulins before dark, with tiles tied to the corners to keep them on but, during the night, a gale blew and it poured with rain. Hour after hour we heard the rattle of the tiles tied to the tarpaulin being pulled along the roof.

  In addition to the ‘military’ damage, already described, which the rockets did to factories, docks and other transport facilities, they earned a rich dividend for the Germans in the diversion of the building industry’s efforts to non-productive areas. During 1944, 20 per cent of all building work, excluding the large number of small firms consisting solely of working partners, involved demolishing ruined property, clearing debris and repairing damaged homes – more than was devoted to military construction and twice as much as was going into building or extending factories or warehouses. In 1945, most of which was in peacetime, damage repair became by a long way the largest single item, accounting for nearly 40 per cent of the building industry’s output. Including V-1 damage, at least one family in every four or five in London suffered some physical inconvenience from secret-weapon damage, often having to endure a leaking roof, constant draughts and the perpetual irritant of flapping, opaque glass-substitute fabric in the window frames through one of the worst winters of the century. Even in this generally miserable time there were lighter moments. In a small house in Bethnal Green there was great hilarity when the lodger, in a room covered with dirt and debris, politely asked his landlady where he could put his
cigarette ash. In Ilford one woman remembers eyeing the small sandbags used to anchor the tarpaulin over their tileless roof. ‘How tempting it was to look out of your open window and see a sandbag dangling there. How I would dearly love to have snipped the bag and let the sand slither out!’ The same respectable suburban street, now tarpaulin-bedecked, blossomed at ground level with hitherto hidden, almost unmentionable, appliances:

  The day after the rocket dropped all our houses were inspected for emergency repairs and most of us had to have new wash-basins and WC pans as the blast had cracked them. What a funny sight it was to see rows of WC pans on both sides of the road and all the surrounding roads.

  Nothing could compensate for losing one’s home, and many people still mourn the loss of some especially treasured possession. A scientist then working on armament research at Woolwich recalls his wife’s fury when a rocket smashed ‘some pieces of our dinner service, which we had used without any breakages since our marriage in 1940’. A Sidcup woman still has a Bible given her by a niece, the sole subject worth recovering after her home was destroyed. And wartime shortages meant that securing a replacement for some ruined article was a triumph, as a woman bombed out in Harrow remembers. She and her husband had been rapidly rehoused in Pinner in a property formerly occupied by Italian prisoners of war: