Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s (33 page)

The area witnessed a number of airbursts. A then sixteen-year-old, working on bomb-damage repair, witnessed one as he and his workmates were idling away their dinner hour listening to a local evangelist:

‘Holy Joe’, as we unkindly called him, was preaching the Gospel as usual at Child’s Corner, when somebody said ‘Look, leaflets!’, and high in the sky was a vapour trail and hundreds of small shining objects followed by a dull bang. We stood watching these objects getting bigger and bigger and everybody started running. Suddenly we were showered with pieces of metal, the largest about the size of a dustbin. . . . A V-2 had exploded in the air and the warhead had gone on to fall in Walthamstow.

This may have been the rocket that caused some speculation at Civil Defence headquarters as to where it really belonged, as Alderman Wyld recalled:

As we had neither damage nor casualties we were unable to account for this being finally allotted to Walthamstow. We accepted this allocation with a certain amount of philosophy as some two weeks previously we had received large amounts of materials from a mid-air burst . . . allocated to Barking, although we had most of the stuff.

Between the end of the blitz, in May 1941, and the end of the war, in May 1945, Walthamstow suffered damage to 72,000 houses and shops, of which the rockets, although the exact total was censored for security reasons, must have accounted for a high proportion. The borough was credited, however, with only one ‘outstanding incident’, at Blackhorse Lane, at 2.20 p.m. on Monday, 19 February 1945, when the Germans hit a ‘military objective’, Bawn’s factory, with results which Alderman Wyld described:

The whole of their office was demolished and all except one of the office staff were killed outright, including two of the directors. . . . The factory was completely put out of action and 12 houses were also wrecked. Over 500 other houses were reported as damaged. The difficulties of tracing missing persons . . . were considerable and it was not until the early hours of the next morning that we were able to satisfy ourselves that all . . . had been accounted for.

The difficulties of identification were brought home to one man whose business was ruined, a local shopkeeper who had taken up shoe-repairing when cripped by polio:

I arrived just as the area was being roped off at the nearby turnings . . . but when I told the policeman who I was, he let me through. . . . I got to where the shop had been and everything, including heavy machinery, the customers’ boots and shoes, and stock, was no more. As I looked on the wardens and Civil Defence workers were busy among the rubble of the house next door and one looked up, saw me and said, ‘I thought we had just taken you out of here’, and pointed to a small van [used to remove the dead] but it turned out to be the man in the house. Up to this point I was managing to hold my own, but when he said this my inside was violently upset. . . .

My book recording the shoes in the shop was found 300 yards away unsoiled. . . . For a week or two I was at the site of my shop for the sole purpose of giving to customers a chit signed by me, signifying that the customer had lost a pair of shoes in the premises. Then if they took it to the town hall they were given seven coupons and thirty shillings cash [£1.50] for replacement.

This was to remain Walthamstow’s worst incident, with a final death roll of 18, plus 53 seriously injured and another 150 slightly hurt. When the bombardment finally ended, with two rockets in March, few residents would have disagreed with its Civil Defence controller’s verdict: ‘Walthamstow had more than its share of V-2s.’

In another month there will be nothing left of London.

Statement on German radio attributed to Allied prisoner of war, February 1945

It had been the effect of the anticipated ‘giant rockets’ on central London which had most alarmed the government, but, in the event, even Kammler’s more modest missiles left the West End and the ‘establishment’ quarter of Westminster and Whitehall almost unscathed. The area’s escape was in fact almost uncanny. A rocket in November plunging down towards Victoria, within easy blast distance of Parliament and Downing Street, had burst in the air. The Duke Street V-2, in December, was just inside St Marylebone, though doing some damage in Westminster. And when a rocket did finally land within the confines of the borough – though only just – at 9.30 on the morning of Sunday, 18 March, it arrived at a time when there were few people about and in a relatively ‘rural’ part of it, Speaker’s Corner on the edge of Hyde Park. The explosion smashed windows all round Marble Arch, stripped the trees of their leaves and broke a water main, but killed only two people inside the borough boundaries, a newspaper seller and a child he had tried to protect. A third person died in the incident and nine were seriously hurt, most of these casualties being in the adjoining boroughs of Paddington and St Marylebone, for which Marble Arch formed a ‘frontier post’. This rocket, as Westminster’s wartime historian, the writer William Sansom, commented, could have produced ‘a catastrophe of appalling dimensions’, for that afternoon ‘thousands of people would have been there watching a march past by the National Fire Service’. The government’s ‘no publicity’ policy meant that Speaker’s Corner, the great symbol of free speech, was officially described as ‘a piece of waste ground . . . in southern England’, although the newspapers admitted that the explosion there had ‘blown out the windows of an hotel and a cinema’. Londoners soon learned the true facts. ‘Behind this description’, noted Vere Hodgson in her diary only a week or two later, ‘lies one of the most famous spots in London. . . . The hotel was the Cumberland. The cinema – the Regal.’

The Germans, having already claimed to have levelled most of London flat with the V-1s, now had to destroy it in their propaganda reports all over again. In early December, on the evidence allegedly supplied by captured British sailors, German radio stated that the public were afraid to go to work or stayed at home because their factories were smashed. By the end of the month the German Telegraph Service was asserting that three bridges over the Thames had been destroyed, that the Tower of London had been damaged, and that a high-speed evacuation of the capital was in progress. The truth was the British government’s problem, thanks to its policy of playing down the rocket menace, was that of people returning to London, not of a panic exodus. But Goebbels persevered. ‘The Houses of Parliament have been damaged extensively,’ it was stated in December. ‘There is not a building standing within 500 metres of Leicester Square. Piccadilly Circus has also been devastated.’ In February an anonymous sailor was credited with the opinion that ‘in another month there will be nothing left of London’, a ludicrous statement designed, perhaps, to offer consolation to the inhabitants of ruined Berlin.

One famous building the Germans did succeed in hitting, the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, home of the red-coated Chelsea Pensioners who still provided a rare splash of colour in the drab wartime streets. This, Chelsea’s solitary V-2, landed at 8.50 a.m. on Wednesday, 3 January 1945, on the north-east wing in Light Horse Court, killing two members of the staff and three residents, who had been standing peacefully in the chapel; 19 others were injured. By odd chance the V-2 landed on the same spot as a German bomb dropped in February 1918 and one of the rocket’s victims, the Captain of Invalids, had escaped death on that earlier occasion. The white-haired, fragile residents helped in the rescue work, veterans of far-off campaigns under fire again. ‘Now’, wrote its historian of the famous institution, ‘it had its own honourable scars to set beside those of its In-Pensioners; Wren [the Hospital’s architect] would have been greatly saddened; but he would also have been very proud.’

The Royal Hospital rocket, having also damaged a number of large houses in the elegant adjoining squares and streets, was much talked about, though only one of thirty-three buildings in London classed as ‘hospitals’ affected by a V-2. James Lees-Milne, who lived not far away, noted the after-effects in his diary:

In the afternoon I walked down St Leonard’s Terrace and asked after L. He was in bed, but he and his servants were unhurt. All his windows on both sides of the house were smashed, doors wrenched off, both outer and inner; and partitions and ceilings down. Much of his furniture was destroyed. Yesterday rockets fell like autumn leaves and between dinner and midnight there were six near our house. Miss P. and I were terrified. I put every china ornament away in cupboards.

The impression of people in Chelsea that they were in particular danger was due to its geographical situation. Like Croydon and Hampstead it was shaken, thanks to its location, even by distant explosions, and James Lees-Milne’s riverside home in Cheyne Walk was ideally placed to hear the sounds of battle from the working-class boroughs across the river. Mr Lees-Milne himself noted the same illusion on Saturday, 27 January:

While I was at Charing Cross there was a terrific V-2 explosion. It sounded right in my ear. I learned afterwards that many people in widely scattered parts of London thought the same thing.

Any lingering illusion that somehow with the New Year the bombardment of London would ease up was speedily dispelled. In the week ending 3 January 1945 34 rockets reached the United Kingdom, half as many again as in the preceding three weeks, and between 3 and 10 January the total soared to 62, much the largest number so far, followed by 45 from 10 to 17 January, 46 from 17 to 24 January and 48 from 24 to 31 January, a remarkably steady rate of fire which showed that the firing crews had now settled down into a comfortable routine. In the first week of February the same rate of fire was maintained, with 47 V-2s, and in the second week, from the 7th to the 14th, it rose significantly to 66, nearly ten a day, producing the highest total of serious casualties so far, 1888, of whom a tenth, 188, were killed or missing.

Once again, as in the blitz and the flying-bomb period, the most privileged parts of London got off lightest. The most prestigious of Civil Defence areas was Group 1, the wartime equivalent of postal district W1, though the latter covered a much smaller section of central London around Mayfair, while Group 1 took in, beside Westminster and Chelsea, the mixed but mainly wealthy ‘royal borough’ of Kensington, and two largely proletarian districts, Fulham and Hammersmith. Between them these accounted for only 5 rockets, including the Victoria airburst, and an extraordinarily small casualty list: 39 killed, 112 seriously injured. Fulham had no V-2s or casualties at all, Chelsea only 5 dead and 20 badly injured from its solitary rocket, at the Royal Hospital. Kensington’s V-2, at the less wealthy, northern end of the borough, killed 2 people and seriously injured 42, among them a woman living close to the point of impact, in Grenfell Road, W11, who that December evening had gone to bed just before 11 p.m:

I went up to bed and, I don’t know why I did this, I took my baby from his cot and put him in the bed with me. Not long after there was a terrible crash and the whole house seemed to crumble around us. . . . Everything went black, all the lights went out, there was water everywhere and gas, also glass. We did not know a lot about it. It took quite a time to get us out as the stairs and front of the house were gone. I was told some time later that there was a large part of the rocket at the front of the house. The gas stove was blown out of the kitchen and landed at the front door. There was one bit of wall left of the kitchen and on that wall was a mirror, not broken, not even cracked. . . . All the houses in the street were a write-off. We had nothing, no clothes and . . . were covered with the black powder from the bomb. . . . One of my neighbours, a woman I had been in the same ward with when our babies was born, was killed. . . . We had no clothes and were given blankets to wrap around ourselves and taken to St Charles Hospital. A young nurse said, ‘In future, I am going to bed with
all
my clothes on.’

Most of the Group 1 casualties were caused in Hammersmith, in a similar incident to the one in Kensington, occurring at 10 o’clock in the evening of Wednesday, 14 February 1945, in Wormholt Road, a heavily built-up area about a mile west of Shepherds Bush. Most of the 29 people killed and 41 wounded were in the block of council flats which the rocket demolished. A woman then working as a rating clerk at Hammersmith Town Hall remembers the silent evidence of the disaster which crossed her desk – money collected from the tenants in the wrecked flats being handed in covered with bloodstains.

The Hammersmith V-2 ushered in the worst ‘rocket week’ so far: in the next seven days 71 V-2s arrived, although the following week, 21-28 February, brought a welcome decline back to the previous average, 45. March, in rocket terms, came in like a lion: 58 in the first week, of which well over half, 36, reached the London Region. The following week, 7—14 March, showed a falling off in aim, but an unwelcome increase in the total numbers landing, to 62, which dropped, in 14-21 March, to 52, and between 21 and 28 March to 46, though these produced, as will be described, some of the worst incidents of the whole campaign.

Those that reached London continued to be very unevenly distributed. Civil Defence Group 2, north of Westminster, consisted of four boroughs, Paddington, St Marylebone, St Pancras and Hampstead. They were hit by 6 V-2s between them, causing 52 deaths and 171 cases of serious injury, although one vulnerable, densely populated borough, Paddington, escaped altogether. St Marylebone’s 10 dead and 7 wounded resulted mainly from the Duke Street incident; some further casualties were caused by the Speaker’s Corner explosion, which ‘belonged’ to Westminster. St Pancras’s 2 V-2s both, however, had disastrous consequences, though only the former, at 4.08 p.m. on Friday, 8 February 1945, at Tavistock Place, in the heart of the capital’s ‘medical quarter’ was classified as ‘outstanding’. In this 31 people were killed, and there were 54 other major casualties, while the Central London Opthalmic Hospital and the Medical School of the Royal Free Hospital were both very badly damaged. St Pancras’s second incident, only a few hundred yards away, just inside the borough boundary with St Marylebone in Whitfield Street, in the late afternoon on Sunday, 25 March, badly damaged one of the great shrines of the Methodist movement, the Whitfield Memorial Chapel in Tottenham Court Road, and left 9 dead and 46 badly hurt. The area, on the edge of Soho, was a mixed one of commercial property, including many small restaurants, residential housing and some small workshops. One woman close to the scene was working in a small factory in Whitfield Street itself; her father was nearby, post warden in charge of the ARP post in the basement of a local cafe.

Everyone screamed and we ran out of the door to see what had happened. When we looked down Whitfield Street we could see smoke and dust and nothing else. I knew my father was down there . . . so I flew up the road. When I got near there were bodies lying about and one was standing facing a wall as though it was stuck there. Someone on the ground had a piece of newspaper stuck on the back of his head that looked as if it had been slapped on to raw meat. I did not think about them and just jumped over things that were in the way. . . . I could not find where the post was and everyone seemed dazed. I saw someone coming up some steps out of the debris and I grabbed them and shook them asking, ‘Where’s my Dad?’ They just said, ‘Don’t know.’ . . . Then another one came out. I was screaming by then and I started shaking and then he clasped me tight and we both cried. It was my Dad.

No place outside their own ‘village’ had a stronger claim on the affections of Londoners than ‘ ‘appy ampstead’, so-named from its traditional Bank Holiday fairs, on the edge of the Heath, the constant resort of walkers and courting couples. Its large amount of open space did not prevent its 3 rockets all landing in more populous parts of the borough, though they killed only 2 people between them – three according to the borough records – and badly injured 74. Hampstead’s first, and worst, rocket landed, like so many others, at teatime, 4.30 p.m., on a winter afternoon, pitching down, the local Civil Defence records agreed, at ‘the junction of LMS and Met. Railway lines, back of 114 Iverson Road between West End Lane and Kilburn High Road’, on Monday 8 January 1945. Kilburn High Road was one of the busiest shopping streets in north London, and one woman, then working in a shoe shop opposite the State cinema, a local landmark, recalls that moment:

There was this ear-splitting noise and we actually saw the small emergency shop windows of our large corner shop disintegrate before our eyes. A large elderly lady standing in our shop doorway waiting for a bus almost collapsed with shock as the glass fell round her feet.

The effects of the Iverson Road rocket were probably magnified by its landing high up, on a railway embankment and, apart from 14 houses destroyed, 152 were badly damaged and another 1600 needed some repair. Besides the 2 people killed and 64 detailed in hospital, 57 people required minor treatment.

The bitterly cold weather added to the misery this rocket produced in Hampstead, for 400 people had to be temporarily accommodated in rest centres, and eventually 110 families needed rehousing. Those able to stay under their own battered and leaking roofs were miserably cold and ‘At the emergency coal dumps’, a local historian reported, ‘members of the Civil Defence services, under the leadership of the controller, worked at filling prams, tin baths, bags and sacks with coal, which the people took back as best they could to their homes.’