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

by Norman Longmate

  We had finished our lunch and were on ‘stand-easy’, which was normal after a complete scrubbing of the station floors. All appliances cleaned up and everything freshened up and ready for . . . another week of routines and incidents. I was talking to one of my mates on the first floor when there was a terrific double bang, near enough to shake the whole building. In no time I was down the pole and on the pump, the bells were still ringing as we left the station, their ringing to be taken up by the deeper clanging of our fire bells as we sped towards the dense cloud of reddish brown dust, so thick it was hard to see through it. We stopped a few yards down Middlesex Street, the glass and bricks thick underfoot. . . .

  We jumped from the pump and it was a case of each member of the crew of five working on his own, locating and rescuing trapped victims. Shovels could not be used, debris had to be moved piece by piece, brick by brick. My first job came within a few yards of where we stopped our pump. A red Brooke Bond van lay on its side; the horse had gone but the driver was trapped under the van. By this time quite a number of men were around, and shouting to them to lift the van, I crawled under and dragged him free. He was injured and with willing hands was laid near the van. He was worried about his wallet with the day’s taking in it, which was in his overcoat under the van seat. I went back and got his coat and wallet, placing his wallet in his hand and making a pillow of his coat. A doctor came along and said ‘OK, fireman, I’ll look after him.’ . . .

  Moving on, I met a number of people and some of our crew. They said they were looking for a girl, missing from a shop or office demolished by the rocket. I believe by that time all others had been accounted for. What had been blocks of flats and shops and offices were now a smoking heap of rubble.

  Pieces of timber and large pieces of concrete were passed hand to hand and placed in a space already searched. Occasionally we came to a spot where we could scrape bricks and dust away fairly easily. It was on one of these occasions that I thought I could feel a cushion through a hole I had made, but soon realized that it was human hair I was holding. Calling for help, I was relieved when the other members of our crew came and soon enlarged the hole enough to show the girl’s head. A doctor and stretcher were called for and both were there within a minute. The doctor asked me to hold her head back whilst he looked at her eyes and examined her head, which was severely gashed. He shook his head and we finished getting her body free and on to the stretcher. We spent the rest of the time on this incident putting out a few minor fires that were still smouldering among the debris. I remember looking up at what had been the inside wall of a third-floor flat and seeing not only the fire grate still intact but the ashes of a fire still glowing red and smoking.

  An officer of the LCC heavy rescue service has equally vivid memories of what became known as ‘the Petticoat Lane incident’. First came the strange sight of ‘men and women . . . running out into the street minus their clothes’ because ‘the public baths had been partly demolished’. Then, as darkness fell and a fog descended, the searchlight unit was called in, producing another incongruous spectacle:

  During the evening it had been snowing heavily. . . . The fierce glare of the searchlight lit up every corner of the snow-covered debris and thousands of twittering starlings, no doubt thinking it was sunlight, were circling amid the falling snowflakes around and around overhead, their wings silver in the rays of the light.

  Stepney averaged during the V-2 campaign roughly one missile a month, so that one could never feel free of danger. The fireman whose experiences at Goulston Street have just been quoted became, one spring-like morning in 1945, a casualty himself:

  I came off duty one fine sunny morning at 0900 hours. . . . Having a whole day to myself I decided to walk along Commercial Road towards Stepney Station to buy myself a sponge roll and a few things to take on duty next morning. . . . A few hundred yards along on my return journey to Whitechapel, I was passing a bombed-out shop, the windows of which had been barricaded with corrugated-iron sheets. The sun was shining and people were going about their normal daily routines. . . . A double-decker bus was discharging passengers about fifty yards ahead of me . . . when I suddenly found myself on the ground, buried by the corrugated-iron sheets from the shop front. All was dark and dusty. . . . I managed to get to my feet. My fireman’s cap was still on my head, the swiss roll still in my hand and, like the rest of me, was as black as the ace of spades with dust and soot from the damaged shop.

  I realized that a V-2 had fallen, yet I had not heard a thing, and, to my surprise, had not even been scratched. Looking along the road I saw the bus on its side, with people being assisted from it. Somebody in the pub shouted something about his mate bleeding. . . . My ears were gaining their normal sense of hearing and the bells I thought were ringing in my head were actually those of the pump from my own station arriving to help in the rescue work. . . .

  Next morning I was back on duty at 0900 hours and at tea-break, about 10.45, agreed to have a quick game of darts, but when I tried adding up my score I found that I could not count properly. . . . The ‘old man’ [in charge of the station] . . . sent me to my doctor who said I was suffering a severe nerve shake-up and promptly put me on the sick list for one week. Actually I was fit again within a few days, but the extra days off gave me a good chance to catch up on some much-needed rest.

  Hackney, in the north-eastern part of Group 3, was hit by 10 V-2s, which killed 51 people and seriously injured 58, largely in two ‘outstanding incidents’, in Canley Road in the early hours of Thursday, 7 December, and in Woodland Street exactly four weeks later, around teatime on 4 January. Islington, with 8 rockets, suffered far more casualties, 161 dead and 133 badly hurt, thanks to four ‘outstanding incidents’. The first was at Grovedale Road, on 5 November; the rest were concentrated in a three-week period about Christmas, which included the ‘pub bombing’ at Mackenzie Road already described,36 a serious residential incident at Stroud Green Road, just before midnight on New Year’s Eve, and another at Salterton Road at 6 a.m. on 13 January. Poplar had 9 V-2s, leaving 51 dead and 51 seriously injured, with an ‘outstanding incident’ early on in the campaign, at 8.30 p.m. on 24 November in McCullum Road, already mentioned and another near its end, around midday on 7 March in Ide Street, in each of which nearly half the total casualty list occurred.

  Throughout this period the steady drain of ‘minor’ incidents, in which perhaps a dozen people were killed or injured, continued, contributing to the perpetual cloud of grim anticipation which hung over the whole East End and of more prosperous suburbs further out. The evening-institute teacher previously quoted, travelling daily between rocket-free Earls Court and rocket-plagued Bethnal Green, was deeply conscious of how localized the nuisance was, as she made clear to her husband in a letter in early February:

  I am surprised at your ignorance of the present rocket situation. . . . They are still coming over but in a very restricted area. Almost everyone I know in the eastern suburbs, Ilford and Epping Forest way, has been blasted two or three times in the past month. One Sunday the district was positively plastered, and they all came to work looking like ghosts. The papers are so quiet about it that no one seems to be particularly concerned. . . . How incredible it is that this business should be still going on, with the Russians almost at the gates of Berlin!

  Nor, at last, was it only the Russians who were advancing. On 16 January 1945 the British and American armies containing von Rundstedt’s pre-Christmas thrust into the Ardennes joined hands; the German counter-offensive had finally failed. On 5 March the Western Allies reached the Rhine, crossing it in strength on the 23rd. The Germans in Holland still held grimly on, firing off V-2s in undiminished numbers in what the woman just quoted considered ‘the last display of spite before the surrender’. In the week ending at noon on 7 March 1945, 58 V-2s arrived, 36 of which reached London. From 7 to 14 March, and again from 14 to 21 March, 62 reached the United Kingdom; in the following week, the 29th of the offensive and the 249th in the Ministry of Ho
me Security’s wartime records, there were 46.

  These final shots included some of the most deadly of the whole campaign, producing no fewer than eight ‘outstanding’ incidents, two of which, at Folkestone Gardens, Deptford, on 7 March, and the Great West Road at Heston, on 21 March, have already been described.37 Four of the others, at West Ham, Poplar, Leyton and Enfield, attracted little attention outside their immediate localities. Two more of Kammler’s closing salvoes were to demonstrate that, whatever might be happening to the German armies elsewhere, Abteilung 485 was still very much in action.

  Neither of the borough of Finsbury’s two earlier rockets had prepared it for its third and worst, which dived down out of a bright, clear sky at 11.10 a.m. on the morning of Thursday, 8 March 1945, into Smithfield Market in the Farringdon Road, close to the City and to the newspaper precinct of Fleet Street. It provided a climax to the Germans’ campaign against the daily commercial life of London, just as its disastrous successor in Stepney, to be described in a moment, provided a classic example of how to kill people in their beds.

  The shock of the Smithfield rocket echoed over London, reminding everyone in earshot that the war was far from over yet. A woman living in West Hampstead remarked to the locksmith busy in her house that ‘it was probably south London’, a tactless observation, for it turned out he lived in Catford. Much nearer to the scene was a man who had been entrusted with the collection of one and a quarter million pounds in banknotes from the Bank of England for his own bank at Poultry in the City:

  Driving along Farringdon Street . . . we heard a terrific explosion. I immediately stopped the vehicle and, at that moment, the petrol tank exploded and the van was a mass of flames. I was badly burnt on the face and the hands. My colleague, fortunately, escaped from the other side with a scratch. I managed to stagger across a short pavement, but fell into a space about thirty feet down. I then realized I had a serious injury to my right foot. After a short time I was found and taken to Bart’s Hospital. After some hours, a temporary wooden splint was fixed to my leg but by the next day I was in a ward with my leg in heavy plaster. The doctors on duty in the ward informed me that I had a third-degree Potts’ fracture and called me ‘the man with the million’.

  This man had had a miraculous escape, for, as the Midland Bank’s own wartime history recorded, his van was ‘only twenty-five yards from the point of impact’. No fewer than three of its branches were affected by the explosion, and first-aiders from its head office were called in to ‘assist the medical staff at St Bartholomew’s Hospital’, overwhelmed by the flow of casualties. In the last major ‘shopping’ incident, at Deptford, saucepans had drawn a crowd. This time, an LCC heavy rescue officer learned on his arrival, ‘as luck would have it, a consignment of rabbits had come on sale and the information had spread around the neighbourhood like wildfire’, so ‘the market was . . . thronged with women shoppers, many of them accompanied by their children’.

  For a long time, so many people were buried, the situation was obscure. Admiral Evans, on the scene within an hour, was told it was impossible even to guess at the number of casualties. When he came back at 6 p.m. with his senior colleague, Sir Ernest Gowers, and the ARP controller and Medical Officer of Health for the City, with the Lord Mayor of London – for many of the casualties and much of the damage had occurred within the City – the figures were still unknown. It was several days before the final toll was assessed, at 110 dead, 123 seriously injured and 243 with lesser injuries.

  Two hours after the incident, ‘Barts’, with 300 patients choking its casualty department, had to ask for further cases to be sent elsewhere – the Royal Free, Great Ormond Street, the Homeopathic Hospital and University College all received some – but many of those requiring treatment were soon afterwards allowed to go home. Four surgical teams at Bart’s had worked at full stretch, with only short breaks, until noon on 9 March, more than twenty-four hours after the first victims were wheeled in, the cases giving most anxiety, it was found, being penetrating wounds of the abdomen and major compound fractures of the longer bones. The Royal Free, meanwhile, was keeping a special watch on patients who had been buried, to see if they revealed symptoms of ‘crush syndrome’, to forestall which bicarbonate of soda was, where possible, administered while they were still trapped.

  It was not for some time that the reason for the enormously high casualty figures – apart from the obvious factors of time of day and the large number of people about – was established. The V-2 had, the official report explained, ‘penetrated two-storey shop and fishmarket buildings at NE junction of Charterhouse and Farringdon Road and detonated at a lower level than the roadway of Farringdon Road’, and thus brought down ‘the concrete and iron vaulted floor, also the lattice-framed roof of the single-storey fishmarket’. In other words, a huge and exceptionally heavy mass of rubble had poured down from ground level on to the floor below, and then into the goods yards of the railway running beneath it. The result was a volcano-like cauldron of brick, stone, steel and timber, and the rescue teams had to begin work by adding to the destruction, pulling down the still-standing remains of the eleven shops on the Farringdon and Charterhouse Roads frontage ‘to allow skips of the mobile crane being operated over the cleared spaces into the railway siding area’, where railway trucks were used to take away the debris. The rescue work brought its own dangers, for, as the twisted steel girders were cut by oxyacetylene equipment to give access to the rubble below, they were liable to ‘skid’ and start a new landslide in a hitherto stable part of the ruins. Another problem was unique to this incident. ‘The smell of decomposing fish, etc., was very bad,’ it was reported the morning after the incident, ‘and . . . as it would increase during the day and would interfere with the working of the personnel, Mr Upton was asked to get the Medical Officer of Health of Finsbury to take action to spray the debris.’

  As usual at ‘shopping’ incidents, determining who was missing was a major undertaking in itself. ‘A very much overworked WVS inquiry point operated in a local public house,’ the casualty services officer reported, ‘until the Holborn Heavy Mobile Unit vacated Pearces’ Restaurant, which was then taken over by the WVS. It was still here at full pressure on the 10th instant.’

  Surely, everyone at the Ministry of Home Security must have thought, with victory clearly only weeks away there could be no worse incident than Smithfield. In fact one of the Germans’ very last rockets was now to cause the second-largest number of deaths, 134, of the whole campaign, though the number of seriously injured, 49, was substantially smaller than at Smithfield. The site this time was an estate of five-storey flats, known as Hughes Mansions, in Vallance Road, Stepney, the time 7.21 in the morning of Tuesday, 27 March 1945. The missile scored a direct hit, on the very centre of the three block estate, forming a crater 30 feet by 10 feet and totally demolishing the adjoining central block. The one immediately to the east was almost destroyed, the one to the west very badly damaged. This was essentially a ‘domestic’ incident, but on a huge scale, presenting its own perils, to victims and rescuers alike, as the regional casualty services officer noted in his report three days later:

  Much of the work, especially in the eastern block, was being carried out under conditions of considerable danger where overhanging walls and copings were likely to fall at any time. . . . Several of the personnel were attended to at the mobile unit for minor injuries, including two or three who had evidently got into a pocket of coal gas.

  As often happened when old apartment blocks collapsed, small pockets of space remained in which the former occupants were buried and as late as 5.15 that afternoon ‘trapped persons’, a visitor from regionl headquarters reported, ‘were still being recovered alive from voids in the debris’, the last not being retrieved until 10 p.m. Thereafter attention turned to ‘the removal of compact debris’ in which there was no hope of finding anyone still breathing.

  Hughes Mansions provided the London Civil Defence Service with its last great test, and it emerg
ed with its battle honours undimmed. By midday that Tuesday five cranes were on the spot, and others on their way, and 16 heavy rescue parties, 11 light rescue parties and 75 NFS men at work amid the rubble. Among the hundreds of veteran helpers was the Whitechapel fireman quoted earlier, and his recollections provide the last eye witness account of a major incident during the Second World War.

  We at Whitechapel Fire Station had almost finished breakfast when we heard the usual double report, the lights momentarily dimmed and we realized that a V-2 had dropped somewhere near. Still eating, we rushed to our machines and were getting our gear on when the bells went down and we heard the address of the incident, Hughes Mansions, Vallance Road. As we stopped near what had been a large block of flats we were met by many people, some trying to find relatives or friends, others demented and just running around wildly. I remember one chap covered in blood running down the road carrying what had once been a whole, live baby, calling his wife, and some people grabbing him and leading him away.

  The V-2 had dropped in the middle of the block and the inside walls . . . had been sheered away by the blast. Beds, people and furniture had all dropped into a large mound at the base of the standing walls.

  The usual procedure had to be followed, tearing at the rubble to free trapped victims, lending first aid to the injured, lowering from floors where stairs had gone. Nearly all persons had been accounted for and I was edging along a mound of rubble when I heard a voice calling ‘Fireman’. I looked but could see nobody. Suddenly I heard the voice again, ‘Can you see me, fireman, I’m down here near your feet . . ..’