The later history of those on the Allied side most involved with the V-2 is less dramatic. Duncan Sandys went on to hold a series of senior posts, including those of Minister of Aviation and Minister of Defence and now, as Lord Duncan-Sandys, is retired. R. V. Jones became Professor of Natural Philosophy [i.e. science] at Aberdeen University, and, though now also retired, has become well known as an authority on wartime intelligence. Lord Cherwell, who died of heart disease in 1957, aged seventy-one, served again as Churchill’s scientific adviser in his first post-war government. He had remained sceptical of the rocket’s value to the end of the war, long after its destructive potential had been demonstrated. This all too characteristic inability to change his mind, however overwhelming the evidence, had been witnessed by General Pile while lunching at Chequers in November 1944.
We discussed the V-2 rocket during the meal and Churchill got in several humorous digs at Lindemann, who kept on repeating that it was a stupid sort of weapon. The PM said it was becoming a very accurate weapon, and, obviously, he had not forgotten that Lindemann had said that it could not be produced as an effective weapon of war.
In a memo to Churchill a month later, on 5 December, Cherwell reaffirmed his sceptical view of the missile’s future:
Although rockets may play a considerable tactical role as long-range barrage artillery behind the lines at twenty, thirty or even fifty miles, I am very doubtful of their strategic value. It seems likely that it will always be possible to deliver the same quantity of explosive much more economically and accurately from aircraft than from rockets and without anything like the same limitations of range.
To this view Cherwell clung with unshakeable peristence and on 6 April 1945, with the last V-2 already fired, he again wrote to the Prime Minister on the subject, this time comparing the V-2 unfavourably to the flying bomb:
V-2 has the merit against V-1 that it can be fired without any launching site other than a flat bit of road or hard surface a dozen yards square and that it cannot be shot down in flight. There is not much difference in accuracy between the two weapons and as the V-2 costs at least ten times as much as the V-1, it scarcely seems as economic proposition. The comparison with a bomber, of course, is still more unfavourable.
R. V. Jones showed greater prescience. In September 1944 he wrote for the United States Air Force – who were far quicker than the British government to grasp the V-2’s long-term significance – an article attributed only to ‘a British source’:
There can be no doubt that with the A-4 the rocket has come to stay. . . . Reviewing . . . reasonable extrapolation from present practice, a two-stage rocket of about 150 tons starting weight could deliver a one-ton warhead to nearly 3,000 miles range, with a probable error of 10 miles in range and three miles in line. This might be a feasible weapon for delivering a uranium bomb, should such a bomb become practicable. . . . At the moment such a rocket could not be intercepted, but by the time it becomes a serious possibility it may itself be a target for smaller defence rockets fitted with predictors and homing devices. . . . The long range rocket can be developed much further. In the light of this fact, we must watch.
The legacy of the rocket in the shape of bereavement and grief, serious wounds and minor scars has already been mentioned. Apart from them most evidence of the V-2’s existence has now vanished. All that are left are souvenirs, a source of interest rather than alarm. One wartime schoolboy still has in his garden shed in Tottenham the piece of rocket casing which nearly ended his life forty years ago, when it landed where he had been standing just before the milkman, whom he had been helping before school, pushed him under his cart – ‘one of the last of the push type with two large wheels and a small one in front’. In Kent a wartime fireman still cherishes part of the very last V-2 to fall; at Bramerton, near Norwich, a portion of one of the very first now revolves harmlessly as a weather vane. The most enduring of such relics were the combustion chambers that formerly littered the fields of East Anglia, one of which was described by a Suffolk newspaper in February 1984. ‘Rabbits had used it as a burrow and pheasants had nested in it’, before a local farmer moved it to his home and ‘planted flowers in it to brighten up his drive’; it is now in the local aviation museum, near Bungay. The V-2, so feared in its day, is now everywhere a museum piece. One can be seen in the Imperial War Museum and another, with its casing cut away to show the fantastically complicated network of pipes inside, in the Science Museum in South Kensington. Elsewhere it survives only in the memory of people now well on into middle age. In The Hague older residents may still point out open spaces which mark the spot where a misfired rocket plunged back to earth, while a few people in Hackney can even now identify the spot on the famous Marshes where a rocket landed, creating a crater that was, most fittingly, used as the site for a huge bonfire on VE night.
Information about the V-2s is surprisingly hard to come by. Churchill’s hint in April 1945 that telling their story had a low priority proved amply justified. In his own war memoirs they are mentioned very cursorily, in the official war histories they receive far less space than the conventional raids or the flying-bombs, and in Air Chief Marshal Hill’s official report on the secret-weapon campaign, published in October 1948, they are given only 10 paragraphs out of 247, although Hill himself admits that the rocket ‘was in some ways a more disturbing menace than the flying-bomb’. Local authorities which wished to publish full details of V-2 incidents in their war histories, even after the war was over, were forbidden to do so, and many local libraries and record offices lack even the scantiest information about local incidents, while possessing a mass of documents on earlier events. It is as though the whole subject, where British scientists fell so far behind their German rivals, and British ministers and commanders proved totally unable to protect their citizens, was too painful and embarrassing to be properly documented. Only with the release of the files in the Public Record Office has it become possible to study the V-2’s effects comprehensively, and even here there are tantalizing . . . . gaps.
The Germans have felt no such inhibitions as their former enemies. A mass of records about the development of the V-2 have survived and been used by previous writers, and von Braun himself, in collaboration with an American writer, published a massive History of Rocketry and Space Travel in 1966, which, very typically, takes for granted that, having invented it, the Germans were right to try out the missile in action. There is no hint of guilt in the authors’ comment that the missiles ‘were responsible for more than 2,500 deaths and great property damage’, and they make clear that the offensive was abandoned only when it appeared that the V-2 ‘clearly was going to neither influence the war’s outcome nor delay its end’. Dornberger, in his time an honourable soldier, raises the moral implications of using such an innately indiscriminate weapon only to dismiss them:
The operational use of the A-4 at an imperfect state of development will . . . be called pointless, brutal and inhuman, but, if so, all long-range artillery and bombing must accept the same condemnation. The dispersion of the V-2 in relation to its range was always less than that of bombs and big guns.
His only regret was that he had not been able to make more, and better, rockets sooner and thereby enable Hitler to defeat and enslave his most persistent enemy:
We were well aware that operational employment of the A-4 in the autumn of 1944 could not of itself win the war. But what might have happened if from two years earlier, say summer 1942, for years on end, by day and night, more and more long-range rockets with everincreasing range, accuracy and effect had fallen on England? . . . The use of the V-2 may be aptly summed up in the two words: ‘too late’. Lack of foresight in high places and failure to understand the technical background were to blame.
But was the V-2 even in its relatively primitive stage of development so unsatisfactory a weapon? On this there seems to be a curious unanimity between those who have studied the subject in both countries. Lord Cherwell, for example, in his note of 6 April 1945
already quoted, made the point that ‘a Mosquito, which is comparable in price with one or at most two V-2s, can drop about 250 tons of bombs in its life, with at least a hundred times greater accuracy, on any target within 600 miles’. David Irving, author of the standard (and excellent) account of the rocket’s development, who is certainly no uncritical admirer of Cherwell – his book’s very title, The Mare’s Nest, immortalizes Cherwell’s most notorious error of . . . . judgement – also thinks the argument of price decisive. ‘No A-4 rocket’, he comments, truthfully enough, ‘could . . . have cost much less than £12,000 by the time it was delivered to the launching troops; this was certainly not the cheapest way of delivering 1,620 pounds of conventional explosive . . . to a maximum range of 200 miles.’ Albert Speer, no mean authority on munitions manufacture, was equally sceptical, looking back twenty-five years later, of the rocket’s economic viability:
From the end of July 1943 our tremendous industrial capacity was diverted to the huge missile later known as the V-2. . . . Hitler wanted to have nine hundred of these produced monthly. The whole notion was absurd. The fleets of enemy bombers in 1944 were dropping an average of three thousand tons of bombs a day over a span of several months. And Hitler wanted to retaliate with thirty rockets that would have carried twenty-four tons of explosives to England daily. That was equivalent to the bomb load of only twelve Flying Fortresses. I not only went along with this decision on Hitler’s part but also supported it. That was probably one of my most serious mistakes.
The argument that the V-2 was unviable because of its cost had, however, been answered by R. V. Jones in his paper, already quoted, circulated in 1944, when only a few missiles had arrived:
The protagonists for the development of very long range rockets would probably have, in Britain at any rate, to meet the criticism that it would not be worth the effort expended. The A-4 has already shown us that our enemies are not restrained by such considerations and have thereby made themselves leaders in a technique which sooner or later will be regarded as one of the masterpieces of human endeavours.
The truth is that in war the normal rules of finance cease to apply. When it comes to weapons, nations can always afford what they want, as Germany, which so many experts had proclaimed bankrupt and unable to sustain a long war, had already amply demonstrated, and as the Allies had shown when shouldering the staggering cost of producing the first atomic bombs. Nor was the suggestion that the V-2 was less cost-effective than the German equivalent of a Mosquito or a Flying Fortress valid, for the reason Cherwell and Speer preferred to ignore: that the rocket always got through, while – as the British bombing offensive confirmed – the defence was more powerful than the offensive in the case of manned aircraft. A V-2 which landed in Stepney or Ilford was infinitely more useful than a bomber which ended, as any German manned bomber was likely to do by 1944, in the Channel. The history of the flying bomb underlined this truth. It had been unbelievably cheap, at £125, a fantastic military bargain, which cost not a single German life, until it became almost as vulnerable to the RAF as the Heinkels and Junkers of the Luftwaffe in its heyday. The rocket was – all moral considerations set aside, as they were by the Germans —a superb weapon, an immense leap forward in warfare, because it was totally unbeatable. As time, experience and further research increased its power and accuracy, it could have become a war-winning one.
What, then, did the rockets achieve, apart from providing the necessary first step into a new world of military technology? The official British historian, using enemy as well as domestic sources, put the total launched at 1403, of which 288 went astray or exploded en route, 61 landed offshore and 1054 exploded on the mainland, 517 of these in London, 537 in eleven other counties. As mentioned earlier, they killed 2754 people and seriously injured 6523, a total of 9277 major casualties; they did a great deal of militarily significant damage; and they caused a great deal more destruction to other property at a time when the building industry was already badly stretched. In attacking morale, that target which so many champions of air power had proclaimed as even more important than weakening the enemy’s industrial potential, the rocket was incomparably the most effective weapon so far devised: the low ebb to which spirits in southern England sank during that last and, as it seemed, unnecessary winter of the war is evident again and again in the reminiscences of the time. And all this excludes what the V-2s achieved in Belgium, which suffered proportionately far more than England: 1214 V-2s fell in the Antwerp area alone, one of them killing 242 servicemen and 250 civilians in a single direct hit on a cinema, the largest death roll caused by any missile of the whole European war.
‘If we had had this rocket in 1939, we would never have had this war,’ Hitler told Dornberger in 1943, apologizing for his previous lack of faith in the V-2. He may well have been right; sufficient reason by itself – when the horrifying alternative, a Nazi-dominated world, is considered – for giving the rocket its belated due as not merely a masterpiece of scientific and engineering brilliance but as the most formidable and fearful weapon of its time.
Where the V-2s landed in London
The map on p. 384 shows the London Civil Defence Region as it was in September 1944. The map shows all the boroughs within the Region, identified by numbers, to which the key is given above. The number of V-2s which landed in each borough is given in bold type to the right of its name.
Where the V-2s landed outside London
The map on p. 385 shows all the counties in which V-2s landed, the county names and boundaries being those which existed in September 1944. The number of V-2s in each county, excluding any which landed in any part of it included in the London Civil Defence Region, is shown below its name.
SOURCES
This book is based upon material drawn from the following sources: published books and pamphlets, contemporary and subsequent newspaper and magazine articles and reports, a wide range of official documents in the Public Record Office and elsewhere (from statements prepared for publication to minutes and memoranda which were then highly secret), diaries and letters written at the time, and contributions specially written for me following a public appeal in the press for recollections of the V-1s and V-2s. The place of publication of books is London unless otherwise stated. Where the source of a quotation is obvious from the text (e.g. if a particular issue of a specific newspaper is named) this information is not repeated in the ‘Detailed references’ section below. In making use of official documents it should be noted that more than one copy may exist, under different file references. Where a single file (such as PREM 3/111, which proved particularly useful) contains a great many relevant documents I have given the written folio number, the later numbers being the more recent. I used two documents constantly. ‘Report of Attacks on this Country by . . . Long-Range Rockets . . . to March 29th 1945’ in File Air 20/3439 includes a list of casualties for each borough in London, and each affected county outside London, and, at Appendix ‘B’ a list of ‘outstanding incidents’. File HO 202/10 contains a series of weekly reports numbered from 221 to 250, giving the total number of incidents with notes about items of special interest. Wherever no other source is indicated it can be assumed that the figures in the text came from these documents. File HO 191/198 contains lists of incidents, giving precise time and map reference, a summary of damage caused and other essential facts, for incidents 1—26, 91—123 and 124—160. These have provided additional information given in the text for the periods covered and are not separately identified below.
Books, pamphlets and articles
After the Battle, no. 6, ‘The V Weapons’, Battle of Britain Prints International, London E15, 1974
‘Air Raids on Norfolk’, in Britannia, no. 29, February 1947
Angell, Joseph Warner, ‘Guided Missiles Could Have Won’, in Atlantic Monthly (Boston, Mass., USA), vol. 189, January 1952
Arct, Bohdan, Poles against the V-Weapons, Interpress Publications, Warsaw, 1972
Ascoli, David, A Village in Chelse
a, William Luscombe, 1974
Babington Smith, Constance, Evidence in Camera. The Story of Photographic Intelligence in World War II, Chatto & Windus, 1958
Baker, H. A., The Memoirs of H. A. Baker, 46 years in the Royal Arsenal, vol. 1 (typescript), Imperial War Museum
Baker, R. B., The Year of the Buzz Bomb, Exposition Press, New York, 1952
Banger, Joan, Norwich at War, Albion Books, Norwich, 1974
Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s Page 44