Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s (29 page)

The second unexploded V-2, like the first, had fallen in a field, but this time it had not penetrated deeply. The warhead was clearly visible and accessible from the surface. This naturally made the site a subject of considerable interest, and shortly after his arrival Gerhold found that representatives of the General Staff, the RAF, the Ministry of Home Security and various other bodies – in his words, ‘all interested parties bar King Farouk’ – had got wind of the affair and were turning up in force. . . . Gerhold did little to enhance his popularity with High Authority by insisting that safety precautions must be observed and the vicinity of the site cleared but . . . as dark fell police and military guards were posted and the area cordoned off.

As mentioned earlier, and as British intelligence had already learned, the rocket was set off by a radio fuse supposed to operate 10 feet from the ground, and the current to operate this and the detonation mechanism it set in train came via ‘a complex electrical component known as the
Sterg
unit, situated immediately behind the warhead and connected with the assembly in the nose by leads that passed through the main filling’. It was this unit, fortunately fairly accessible, on which Major Gerhold and another officer now got to work:

Together they cleared away the earth from the crushed and tangled mass of wires, scraps of plywood and other debris. It was work that demanded extreme care and concentration. Each wire had to be traced and scrupulously kept clear of its fellows in case a bared metal surface should cause a short circuit and subsequent detonation. At last the whole broken unit was identified and uncovered and all electrical leads connected with it severed. No current could now pass to the firing mechanism.

It was the Germans’ genial practice to include secondary fuses and ‘anti-handling’ devices in many of their bombs, in the hope the bomb disposers would set them off where the original fuse had failed. X-ray photographs were often taken, therefore, of unfamiliar missiles to locate objects that seemed to have no good reason to be present. This was, very sensibly, done at Hutton:

After the short delays necessary to allow the rays from the radioactive source to penetrate the steel and explosive, the resultant film . . . showed nothing to excite suspicion, so the detonating mechanisms were removed by remote control and later the cast main filling of amatol steamed out. This last operation was a little tricky since the sensitive penthrite filling of the exploder-tube was still in position. However, it was safely completed and it was then found possible to extract the booster-charges by unscrewing a collar at the rear of the warhead and letting them slide harmlessly out of the tube.

The VIP sightseers, if they had not by now gone home, were now free to stare as much as they wished. Not so the unfortunate Major Gerhold, for just as he was finishing work at Hutton news arrived of yet another unexploded V-2, also in his area, so that ‘he began to have intimations of persecution’. From a bomb-disposal point of view this was less of a problem, since ‘impact had split open the warhead so that the shattered amatol filling could be removed by hand’ and ‘the
Sterg
was still more or less intact and having been disconnected was taken away for research’ – revealing, incidentally, that it still ‘retained a charge’ so that it it could have set off the rocket even on the ground. This third rocket, however, in a built-up area – it actually enjoyed a precise address, 45 Northumberland Avenue, Hornchurch – was far more troublesome to the civilian departments than either of its predecessors. ‘To enable the bomb-disposal personnel to deal with the unexploded section,’ remembers one man then employed by the London Electricity Supply Company to disconnect damaged or vacated houses, ‘meant evacuation of some hundreds of properties . . . and then arranging for supplies to be switched off from the electrical substations’ – a necessary precaution to reduce the risk of fires if the V-2 exploded, or of cables being left bare and ‘live’ to endanger future visitors to the damaged property. He can still remember ‘the tension of the wait . . . with all the various units and public utility companies at a safe distance’.

The first unexploded V-2 to land was the last to be dealt with. It was not till 7 April that the Paglesham rocket was at last dug out and the warhead recovered from a depth of 37 feet. By then any secrets it had to reveal about the rocket had become of academic interest only.

What the county endured was never widely known.

Essex resident, 1945, recalling the V-2 attacks

Most of the flying-bombs which had not got through to London landed in Kent. For the rockets, with the attack coming not from France but from Holland, Essex fulfilled the same role. But there was an important difference, psychological if not pragmatic: the V-2s were not shot down on to Essex by the British defences but plunged to earth at the end of their flight.

The county, the tenth largest in England, covering nearly a million acres, and the fourth largest in population, with 1,750,000 inhabitants, presented a large target, but the most closely built-up part of it, on the eastern borders of the capital, lay within the London Civil Defence Region. It was not only this which suffered, however. The rockets were spread over the whole county and very evenly distributed in time as well as space, including several exceptionally bad ones, so that four of the five ‘outstanding incidents’ occurring outside London – the exception was the Commer works V-2 at Luton, already described – took place in Essex, which was first hit by a rocket as early as the fourth day of the bombardment, at Magdalen Laver near Harlow, followed within ten days by four more. This pre-eminent place in the table of rockets within its boundaries, London only excepted, Essex never lost. ‘Perhaps you would like me to start with the score,’ wrote a Home Office official breezily, to the senior regional officer at Eastern Region HQ in Cambridge, on 6 December 1944, ‘which is, at present, in extra-metropolitan Essex’,
i.e.
outside the London Civil Defence Region, ‘91, in metropolitan Essex, 52, total 143.’ However, as he explained, there was always an element of uncertainty about such statistics, owing to the rocket’s annoying habit of paying no attention to local-government boundaries:

The initial explosion which throws off the propulsion unit of the rocket has led to these parts being scattered, in some cases, over a mile or so of country; quite recently we had one which scattered pieces from Labourne End, on the borders of Hertfordshire, right into Group 7. The second incident of this sort, at North Fambridge, where the explosion was rather high, left recognizable and substantial parts over so wide an area that to cover the whole layout gave us exercise comparable with a morning with the beagles!

Surprising as it seems, considering the rocket’s size and effect, establishing precisely where each missile had fallen created in rural areas like much of Essex a perpetual problem:

V-2 arrives a bolt from the blue, completely unheralded. . . . ‘A pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night’ may possibly give indication of the site of the incident . . . but . . . a good deal of luck will be required if accuracy is to be obtained. . . . The extreme difficulty of locating the position of the fall of a rocket . . . has produced what at times has appeared to be a competition between the [Civil Defence] services of neighbouring areas for the privilege of ‘working’ the incident. . . . I can quote a recent incident at Nazeing [four miles south-west of Harlow] where parties from Hertfordshire, from Waltham Holy Cross in the London Civil Defence Region of Essex, as well as the Western Area parties all arrived. On that day an Essex incident was handled by a Hertfordshire incident officer, and use was made of London facilities. . . . The effect . . . was to impress the inhabitants of this rural district considerably.

The Germans never deliberately aimed at the county town of Essex, unlike Norfolk and Suffolk, but to its inhabitants it must have seemed that they were doing so. On 15 October a V-2 landed only six miles away, at Rettendon, forty yards from the village pub, the Bell, which escaped with shattered windows, though two people were slightly hurt. Another followed at Little Waltham, only four miles to the north, in November, landing in a sugar-beet field 200 yards from the village school. Then, just before Christmas, it was the turn of Chelmsford itself, in a particularly tragic incident, at a local war factory, Hoffman’s, at 1.30 in the morning of Tuesday, 19 December 1944, in the middle of the night shift. A local historian described the scene:

Only a quarter of an hour before the V-bomb fell, men, women and girls in the works had been singing Christmas carols to the accompaniment of the local Salvation Army band. There was a festive spirit in the air. The band left and the workers returned to their benches. Then the bomb fell. For a moment all was chaos. Even girders were twisted into fantastic shapes. Fire broke out. The streams of trapped workers were agonizing. . . . To add to the disaster some large barrels of oil caught fire. By the aid of an army searchlight the rescue work went on for many hours, well into the next day.

One of the girls who escaped later gave her account of the disaster:

We were singing when the place was filled with flames. Debris was falling everywhere and all the lights went out. It was terrible. . . . I had been singing ‘You make me happy’. In the confusion I also remembered where I had left my torch. It was still there, although the lathes and all the workshop fittings had been blown all over the place. I grabbed two friends who were working beside me and somehow we scrambled through a gap in the wall.

Many people died in their beds when their houses in Henry Road, adjoining Hoffman’s, were destroyed, and other property was damaged in Rectory Road, Marconi Road and Bishop Road. Apart from the rescue services, ‘several motor food kitchens were on the spot within ten minutes’, one local man noted, and the whole Civil Defence system stood up well to this sudden test. The final death roll was 39, with another 33 seriously injured. The valedictory address given by the Bishop of Chelmsford over the communal grave in the municipal cemetery was long remembered. ‘They died for their country. They died at their post of duty. We honour their memory.’

Chelmsford was to suffer another, but lesser, industrial incident in February, when a rocket landed, on a Friday afternoon when the streets were crowded with shoppers, in a field by a timber merchant’s in Roxwell Road. Some of the workmen were injured, one very badly, but the general feeling was that the town had got off lightly.

By now V-2s were a familiar part of Essex life, having, even before Christmas, come down at places as far apart at Heybridge, Southminster, Danbury, Writtle and Roxwell, though only one, apart from that at Hoffman’s in Chelmsford, had been classed as ‘outstanding’ – at Collier Row, Romford, on the morning of 16 November, when 12 people had been killed and 32 injured, illustrating once again the direct relationship between density of population and casualty figures.

Colchester, the only other large inland town in Essex apart from Chelmsford (if Romford, on the fringes of London, was excluded), escaped the V-2s altogether, though they were audible all around. ‘As the explosion of the projectiles on a still night could be heard for a distance of ten miles’, commented a local historian, ‘the town heard and felt most of them.’ Many of these were airbursts, for Essex was a constant victim of defective missiles. One of the most spectacular exploded over the centre of Brightlingsea, about six miles down the River Colne from Colchester; another blew up close to Clacton, on the coast twelve miles away, and a third, between Fingringhoe and Rowhedge, barely three miles from Colchester, left ‘the countryside . . . peppered with fragments’. Many V-2s landed along the coast, having just ‘made it’ to the enemy shore. One badly damaged two of Clacton’s leading hotels, the Grand and the Towers, on the sea front, only just above high-water mark.

Because nothing but sea lay between the east coast and the launching sites, people living there could often see a rocket being fired. ‘You could see the rocket trails coming up from the other side,’ remembers one keen aircraft spotter who often stood on the front at Clacton looking up into the clear, early-morning sky. ‘Five minutes later you heard the explosion and saw the black column of smoke.’ To one man working on a farm at Beaumont, near Little Clacton, the missiles soaring skyward seemed ‘like a star going straight up into the sky’, while to a journalist living on Mersea Island, at the mouth of the Blackwater Estuary, ‘on a clear day, their vapour trails, twisty as a corkscrew, could be seen tracing a parabolic curve towards England’.

Not all the V-2s apparently heading for London reached it. Many must have plummeted down unrecorded into the sea or ploughed up the mud of the foreshore, harming only the eel grass and disturbing only the Brent geese that made the area their home. Two rockets are known to have fallen in or close to Thirslot Creek, an inlet of the Blackwater, and a third’s remains are believed to lie in Southey Creek. These and other ‘shorts’ must have provided an additional hazard for the soldiers hoisted, no doubt with little enthusiasm, in an observation balloon into the chill east-coast breeze to try to provide advance warning that a V-2 was on its way – an attempt, as mentioned earlier, doomed to failure.

The best-known place in Essex was Southend and here the Germans scored what, if it had been intended, would have qualified as a remarkable bull’s-eye, plunging a rocket straight through the roof of the Pier Pavilion. The police were told ‘that every smallest piece of the rocket had to be carefully collected,’ a then civilian driver with the Southend Constabulary remembers, and eventually these fragments filled to overflowing a 30-foot-long shed behind the Central Police Station ‘known as the “Bomb Mortuary”.’

Westcliff-on-Sea was Southend’s smaller and quieter neighbour, and its experiences of the rocket are recorded in the regular letters which a couple living there sent to their soldier son, only mentioning it, like good citizens, once it was no longer a secret:

12 November 1944. You have heard about the rockets now. Several have landed about here – only one did damage in the town.

26 November 1944. We get quite a lot of rockets about here. They make a noise that can be heard for miles. . . . One fell at Wakering on Wednesday and one in the mud off Westcliff.

19 March 1945. One fell at Dawes Heath Road, Rayleigh, last week, but they still miss the Southend area pretty well.

No part of Essex escaped entirely; indeed, as a map makes clear, it was positively peppered with V-2s. The experiences of the rector of Purleigh (a village eight miles east of Chelmsford) who, as its warden, was responsible for his flock’s temporal as well as spiritual welfare, were typical. On 15 December he noted in his log-book; ‘Rocket. Somewhere near; unable to get information by telephone’, but later added: ‘Aerodrome’, a former airfield now used for point-to-points, close to which some council houses received ‘a severe shaking’. A second V-2 followed soon afterwards. ‘We got enough of the blast at the rectory to bring down a bit of ceiling and various bits of glass,’ he recorded. ‘The only injury was to a horse, but the crater would have held a good half-dozen double-decker buses and its contents lay about in a horrible mess over a wide area of meadow.’

A little later the same clergyman had to endure the interruption of that most innocent of activities, the vicarage tea-party:

A study circle of clergy to which I belong holds monthly meetings in the houses of its members in turn, on the second Tuesday of the month. On Tuesday, 13 February, thirteen of us met at Great Braxted, where our host was the rector, the Rev. H. Douglas Neison. We had studied our Greek Testament in the morning and heard and discussed a paper in the afternoon and were standing round the dining-room table for our stirrup cup of tea before returning to our various homes when a very sharp bang resounded overhead. Nobody said anything, but we looked at each other, and the language of all eyes said plainly enough, ‘Well, that’s a near one. But we’ve heard the noise, so the thing must be miles away by now.’

The studious clerics had reckoned, however, without that common Essex phenomenon, the air-break, which left the warhead of a disintegrating missile intact:

After a short pause, there came the other noise, familiar enough to all of us, of the express train rushing through the tunnel. . . . Then, with another bang and a quake the thing arrived fifty yards away; the windows, glass, sashes and all, melted on to the floor and covered it. . . . Slates sprinkled the ground outside in fragments. We found ourselves looking out through unglazed apertures that had been windows and on to the floor and furniture which the windows now covered . . . and at our host and his sister, whose ruin this was, and at each other, wondering why we were still there. . . . I seized the telephone, perhaps by force of habit, to get through to Report Centre and found it out of order, so, as the house was isolated . . . I judged that it would be more useful to drive straight for Maldon and make sure that the Mobile Unit knew where to go. However Great Braxted wardens had managed to get through. . . . Mr Neison afterwards told me that only three windows had survived and that the cost of his War Damage was £750. The cost to him and his sister of the inconvenience and of cleaning up and straightening out was incalculable. He had been bombed out of his parish in Birmingham to come to this quiet country living.

The following day, also rudely interrupting teatime, another V-2 landed at Mountnessing, around 5 o’clock on Wednesday, 14 February, plunging to earth only ten yards from the main Chelmsford-to-London road, so that its effects were widely seen and felt, as a local writer recalled:

The rocket made its crater close to New Cottage, a modern detached house, the residence of Mrs Florence Breedon. Mrs Breedon and her daughter were having tea when the back and one side of the house collapsed beside them. They were blown from their chairs up against the dining-room wall, rooms upstairs just disintegrated and every bit of glass was blown out. Not a plate dish or glass in the house remained unbroken.