Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s (34 page)

Hampstead suffered again at 2.30 a.m. on Friday, 16 March, when 200 houses were damaged by a rocket which also hit a railway embankment, this time in the neighbouring borough of Willesden, but its own second rocket followed close behind, when, in the words of the borough’s wartime history, ‘a little before 6 a.m. the following morning,’ Saturday, 17 March, ‘the swish of a V-2 rocket’ was followed by ‘the now familiar shattering roar in the rear garden of 212 Finchley Road, at the side of the Borough Central Library’. Thanks to the time of day, casualties were few, but nearly 1000 houses were damaged, along with the library, ‘the Council’s Works Depot, the Hampstead Telephone Exchange, the Lighting Station, Warden’s Post No. 16 and the WVS offices’. Five days later, at a more dangerous time, mid-morning, in fact 11.40 on Wednesday, 21 March 1945, another V-2 landed on the second most famous open space in the area, Primrose Hill, just across the boundary in St Pancras, but ‘credited to’ Hampstead. Even on this green hillside some ‘military’ damage was done: a reservoir required repair, and four soldiers had to be taken to hospital. Once again the heights of Hampstead spread the noise far and wide. One woman, engaged that morning in the curiously rural occupation of mushroom-rearing in Camden Town, recalls it as ‘simply stunning and the vibration caused the door fastening to jam’. The crater on Primrose Hill briefly became one of the sights of North London, and prompted the author of
Hampstead at War
to an uncharacteristic flight of fancy:

Somehow, gazing into the hole made by the explosion, where this metal monster from the sky lay with its body torn open, powerless and futile, one seemed to sense with the acrid smell of cordite invading the nostrils, that this was the end. And so it proved to be.

The area of outer London beyond Hampstead, and stretching out to the edges of the region at Barnet and Cheshunt, was so large that it was subdivided into three subgroups for Civil Defence purposes, which together formed Group 6, containing no fewer than 31 boroughs. Immediately adjoining Hampstead was subgroup 6C, with 10 local authorities whose territory was hit all told by 17 V-2s, which caused 23 deaths and 84 serious injuries. Two places, Bushey and Uxbridge, escaped altogether, Barnet Urban District had only one V-2, which hurt no one, Wembley had one rocket, which inflicted a single death and no serious injuries, and Finchley one which killed 4 people and badly injured 10. Elstree, famous for its film studios, had only one bad injury, and no deaths, from its two rockets, and Ruislip and Northwood, also with two incidents, had no casualties at all. Hendon, also with two rockets, had one fatal casualty, and 18 cases of injury. One of its incidents, on a ‘bitterly cold Sunday morning in January 1945’, is remembered by a man then working in a chemist’s shop in Golders Green Road, Edgware:

I was making a drink of coffee on the gas ring in the dispensary . . . when a customer entered. As I passed into the shop to serve him I just turned off the gas and . . . crash!, a V-2 dropped just opposite the shop at the back of the Prince Albert public house, just after opening time. The customer and myself were thrown to the ground and broken glass and stock covered the floor. We both had a miraculous escape from serious injury, only suffering from shock and some nasty cuts to our hands and face; our heads were pitted with minute particles of glass. . . . We were taken to the casualty station at the Hendon Cottage Hospital, where there were already similar cases. . . . I shall always remember the man who, when asked where he was when the incident happened, replied, ‘In the Prince Albert, just got my drink and was waiting for my change, but that was the last I saw of the note or the change and I certainly didn’t have my drink!’ The wry look of disappointment on his face was pathetic.

Willesden, with four rockets, came off comparatively badly for the area, with 5 deaths and 41 people injured, but worst of all was Harrow, also hit by four V-2s, which caused 12 deaths and 14 serious injuries. Over most of the area, however, rockets remained so unfamiliar, that when, in March, one fell in Uppingham Avenue, Stanmore – ‘the worst incident in the area . . . during the war’, one local resident remembers – ‘the police had to put barriers across the road to keep away sightseers’. His own house, 150 yards from the explosion, lost most of its roof, one of many badly damaged:

Some people, and especially my children, were dumbfounded that such a thing had happened to them and right on the doorstep . . . and being so young (seven and nine years old) really could not understand why this happened. The fact they lost some of their playmates doubtless made a greater impression on them. However, there was a silver lining . . . in the form of a mobile canteen. . . . Here they were able to get tea and buns and, what is more, nothing to pay!

Beyond, and to the east, of subgroup 6C lay subgroup A – there seems to have been no subgroup B – containing ten boroughs or urban districts, which attracted 41 rockets, producing a far heavier toll than its neighbour’s 17 missiles: 162 dead and 572 injured. Edmonton had 9 V-2s, with 5 dead and 59 other casualties. Enfield also had 9 incidents, with a total death roll of 21 dead and 151 injured. Cheshunt, with 7 V-2s, had 10 dead and 56 seriously injured, Hornsey and Southgate 4 each – causing 25 dead and 66 other casualties in Hornsey, 30 dead and 53 injured in Southgate – Tottenham 3, with 25 dead and 59 other casualties, and Wood Green 2, producing 15 killed and 40 people admitted to hospital. East Barnet (12 dead, 59 injured), Friern Barnet (3 injured) and Potters Bar (21 dead, 26 injured) suffered one rocket each, illustrating once again how varied the consequences of individual incidents could be.

Many of the casualties in this part of London occurred on a single disastrous day, Saturday, 20 January, when there were three ‘outstanding incidents’. The first came at 11 a.m. at Potters Bar, accounting for all its 21 dead; the second followed two hours later, with all East Barnet’s 12 fatal casualties; and at 8 o’clock that evening one of Tottenham’s three V-2s accounted for 23 of its 25 dead. The East Barnet incident, at Calton Road, occurred at 1315 hours, just as one RASC sergeant was leaving his billet in the area on a weekend pass. The sergeant-major in charge promptly assembled all the troops left in camp and led them to the scene:

Many of the houses were just rubble, dust and smoke was choking, the gas pipes were alight. So we were put into sections of about eight persons, a sergeant in charge of each and the job in hand was to reach anyone trapped or injured. . . . My section was given an easy house and we soon made it to the kitchen because of the concrete floor. There was a pram on its side, all buckled, and, looking inside, well, I will not mention the terrible sight I saw but the mother escaped unhurt. We worked more or less non-stop for approximately nine hours, stopping for a cup of tea supplied by the Salvation Army . . . there with their canteen within half an hour. . . . I did have my weekend pass and when I got home a reaction set in and I had a good cry.

A woman then working as a Lyon’s waitress, and living in Wood Green, remembers the rockets whenever Shrove Tuesday comes round, as do many other people, for this was a day in 1945 when Kammler’s men were particularly busy.
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Just as she and her sister were sitting down to their teatime pancakes on 13 February, ‘there was a sensation and sound as though of an enormous wind. . . . The window blew in; plaster fell from the ceiling; the front door was blown off and what seemed like tons of soot came down the chimney’. For a man in Hornsey the trigger that touches off his memory is the sight of a horse-drawn cart:

A children’s tea-party was in progress and the milkman with his horse and cart was making deliveries. The rocket landed, the party house and three others disappeared and so did the milkman and his cart. His horse was blown over the roof-tops and landed in Frobisher Road, where it lay disfigured and bleeding. The police came and the animal had to be shot there and then to put it out of its misery. The exhaust engine from the rocket was also blown over the roof-tops and landed . . . in Green Lanes, Harringay. . . . I remember seeing this wedged between two houses and it remained there for some time, being a curio and sightseeing piece for the neighbourhood.

Enfield, as mentioned earlier, had more incidents than any of its immediate neighbours and they included one ‘outstanding’ one, at 11 p.m. on 25 March, in Broadfield Square, earning its place in the list less because of the number of dead, 7, than because of the 100 seriously injured. Enfield’s other eight rockets fell in an extraordinary variety of places, including a stud farm and the Garden of Remembrance at the crematorium, while a flour mill and a plywood factory were damaged by the blast from a ‘border’ incident in Chingford. But the main sufferers were private houses and private citizens, including one of Kammler’s youngest victims, a baby only three weeks old.

The final part of ‘Group 6’ – ‘subgroup 6D’ in ministry records – covered eleven western boroughs, including Brentford and Chiswick, whose famous first rocket also proved to be its last. Acton, Feltham and Southall also had no V-2s, Ealing, Sunbury and Yiewsley one each, but causing no casualties, and Twickenham one which produced two cases of serious injury; Staines, also with one incident, did rather worse: 3 dead, 6 injured. Hayes and Harlington (a single borough) had two rockets, with 21 serious injuries, and Heston and Isleworth the same number of rockets, but with much worse consequences, almost all due to its second incident, which will be described later. Its first, on Thursday, 22 February, when a V-2 exploded in a field between the Bath Road and the Great West Road, both heavily developed with factories and houses, showed how often extensive damage went hand in hand with a light casualty list. One person was seriously injured, 27 were slightly hurt, but 1000 properties were damaged. All told, however, the eleven boroughs escaped lightly, with a death roll of 38 and a seriously injured total of 133, caused by ten V-2s.

The blitz had seen the reappearance on the bombed sites of the unassuming flower Rosebay Willowherb, popularly called ‘fireweed’. It seemed for a time that the city’s final ordeal might be commemorated by London Rocket (Sisymbrium irio), an 18-inch-high plant with a pale yellow flower, which had grown in profusion amid the wood ash of the ruined streets after the Great Fire of 1666. But reports that it had been seen again in 1945 proved false, being dismissed by the Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew as a ‘pleasant legend’.

When you crossed Lambeth Bridge you realized at once that you were on a battlefield.

Writer in
National Geographic Magazine
, 1945

A gulf far wider than the River Thames separated the postal districts of W1 and SW1, which covered Mayfair and Westminster, from SE1, on the other side of the river, which stretched from the edge of Bermondsey through Southwark into Lambeth. In the central reaches of the capital, during the rocket months, it almost divided two nations. An American visitor described soon afterwards for the
National Geographic Magazine
the contrast one experienced leaving ‘one of the well-known West End hotels’ in ‘one of those quaint turn-around-on-a-dime taxis’ and travelling southwards through the almost unscarred West End. ‘When you crossed Lambeth Bridge you realized at once that you were on a battlefield. Here it seemed that almost every other row of houses was either smashed or its windows were knocked out.’

Thanks to the popular songwriters, everyone had heard of the Old Kent Road (largely in Southwark), Camberwell and Lambeth Walk, but to the Ministry of Home Security the three boroughs concerned, plus Battersea and Wandsworth, were known less romantically as Group 5. It was hit by 23 rockets, and – being heavily built-up, mainly with small, insubstantial houses and none-too-solid tenement blocks – these caused a far higher than average number of deaths, 245, and serious injuries, 487. Camberwell did worst, with 9 V-2s, 92 dead and 116 other bad casualties; Wandsworth, with 6 incidents, had 46 dead and 127 injured; Lambeth’s 3 rockets caused 44 deaths and 41 cases of injury, Southwark’s 3 also killed 44 people, but injured 145, while Battersea was least affected: 2 rockets, 19 dead, 58 seriously injured. No fewer than 8 rockets caused ‘outstanding’ incidents, 3 in Camberwell, 2 in Southwark and one each in the other three boroughs.

The worst incident in the area, already mentioned as having caused alarm across the river in Chelsea, occurred on 4 January, when a block of flats, the Surrey Lodge dwellings in the Westminster Bridge Road, was destroyed, with the loss of 41 lives; 26 other occupants ended up in hospital. The public baths near Surrey Lodge which Lambeth provided for its bathless citizens had been put out of action by an earlier V-2, but it proved ‘possible to utilize the superintendent’s office and the committee room for use as the incident officer’s post and incident inquiry point respectively’, and ‘tea for casualties and CD personnel was brewed in the ticket office’.

Camberwell’s worst incidents were at Friern Road, on 1 November, with 24 deaths; Varcoe Road, on 6 December, with 20 more dead; and Trafalgar Avenue, on 14 February, with 18 lives lost. In Southwark, 14 people were killed in Great Dover Street at teatime on 14 December and another 30 at around the same time in the Borough High Street, on 22 January. The effects of Battersea’s most troublesome rocket, which landed in Usk Road at 4 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, 27 January 1945, are described later.
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Wandsworth’s sharpest ordeal occurred at 8.31 on a Sunday morning, 19 November, in Hazelhurst Road, Tooting, where the ruins of the eighteen two-storey houses demolished outright were hurled into the exceptionally large crater, 20 feet deep, and searching this, with Heavy Rescue Parties brought in from Southwark and Battersea, went on all night, the final casualty roll being 33 killed. According to local legend, among those presumed dead was a milkman who vanished, along with his horse and van.

Another major, though not officially ‘outstanding’, incident, occurred at Poynders Road, Clapham, at 10.45 a.m. on Friday, 26 January. No one was killed, though there were 67 casualties, 25 of them serious, largely handled by the South London Hospital, and the sister in charge, when the chief casualty officer visited her later, was ‘very appreciative of the expedition with which the casualties arrived and with the first-aid treatment administered’. The rescue men had also rapidly retrieved four trapped casualties:

Two of the women were extricated fairly quickly. . . . The third woman . . . was pinned down by collapsed woodwork across the lower part of one leg. She was in no pain and was concerned more by the fate of her little dog than by her own condition. She was freed by about 1300 hours. The man . . . though not so deep down, was worse off, for he was lying on his face partly covered with live debris and pinned by the legs. However, he was able to breathe without much difficulty and was quite talkative. . . . He was in some pain and Dr L. administered a small dose of morphia which worked wonders. He was finally freed at about 13.45 hours.

Wandsworth’s next bad incident, in Nutwell Street, a small road off Tooting High Street, not far from Tooting Broadway and the site of the earlier incident at Hazelhurst Road, was officially described as ‘a most distressing one both from the point of view of casualties and damage to property’. There were in fact 8 dead, 41 cases of serious injury and 138 minor casualties, with about 60 hourses wrecked beyond repair, including – the first time, it is believed, this had happened – four of the prefab ‘Portal’ houses recently put up to cope with the anticipated housing shortage. The rocket scored a direct hit on these houses and ‘blew them to fragments’; the Germans clearly agreed with Churchill that post-war reconstruction, which to the public mind the Portal plans typified, was premature. A feature of the incident was the flood of VIPs, not merely the regional ‘outdoor’ commissioner, Admiral Evans, but his bureaucratic colleague, Sir Ernest Gowers, famous as the author of
Plain Words
, and the Soviet Ambassador, who was perhaps surprised at the casual and goodnatured British way of doing things. With ambulances scarce at first, the injured were ferried to hospital on fire brigade appliances, while when ‘a large number of civilians and members of the armed forces “invaded” the scene of the incident . . . the rescue leader . . . successfully persuaded these would-be helpers to leave the job of rescue work to the CD and the NFS’.

South of Lambeth and its equally working-class neighbours were the leafy, middle-class suburbs of Group 9, which covered a far larger area but escaped with only 12 V-2s. Nine of its 16 boroughs – Wimbledon, Sutton and Cheam, Surbiton, Mitcham, Merton and Morden, Malden and Coombe, Epsom and Ewell, Carshalton, Beddington – had no incidents at all. Barnes had one, which caused no casualties, Esher one, producing 3 serious injuries, Coulsdon one, causing 1 death and 4 serious injuries, Kingston one, with 4 deaths and 39 other casualties. Richmond, scene of the Chrysler factory incident in September, did distinctly worse, with 2 V-2s, causing 10 deaths and 7 cases of major injury; Banstead’s 2 incidents, by contrast, caused 3 deaths and 24 patients hospitalized. Croydon, the worst-hit place in the country during the flying-bomb attack, was struck by 4 V-2s, causing 9 deaths, and, like Hampstead, its geographical location made other people’s rockets particularly audible there, the high ground behind seeming to act as a reflector. The borough librarian, who later wrote its wartime history, was well aware of what he called its ‘disconcerting’ situation:

The sound of bombs which fell on adjoining districts could be heard up to a distance of twenty miles. Some passed right over the town: the effect being an instantaneous lightning-like flash of white light. . . . Its explosion on contact was tremendous in open spaces and in enclosed ones was an immense whip-like crash and after this there followed a sound like the rumbling of a heavy train. The sound of the explosion thrown from hill to hill had an enveloping and stunning effect.

Croydon’s first, and worst, rocket, descended on a night of rain and darkness – Friday, 20 October 1944 – into a most inappropriately named road, Sunnybank. It proved hard to find the crater, from which rescue work normally proceeded outwards, and, with the telephone wires cut, it was some time before it was fully under way, while the weather made matters worse so that ‘Dr S. and his [mobile casualty] unit . . . attended the injured under a ground sheet held over him and his patients to keep out the rain’.

When the whole search was completed it was learned that six people had been killed. . . . 14 seriously injured were taken to hospital and the First Aid Posts gave treatment to 31 with minor hurts. . . . 59 people had to go to the Rest Centre in Suffolk Road. The WVS had immediately set up an enquiry point and a mobile canteen arrived to serve food and drinks. Mobile baths had also done good service.

To those involved matters appeared rather different from what this tidy narrative suggested. Among them was a man living at 70 Sunnybank, who had just got home from the joinery works in West Norwood where he helped to build pontoon bridges, and was sitting quietly with his older daughters, Freda, aged nineteen, and Daphne, fifteen, while upstairs his wife bathed four-year-old Edna:

The wife placed a rice pudding on the table for ‘afters’. I sat back in my armchair waiting for the pudding to cool down, listening to the radio and talking to my children and a young friend of Freda’s, a lad of about eighteen known as Fred, a neighbour of ours. . . . Without any warning or sound I blacked out. When I partly gathered myself up I found the coal fire was spread all over the floor. . . . I was down on my knees picking up live coal and throwing it back in the fireplace. I felt no pain and still heard nothing. My eldest girl Freda and her friend had gone. It seemed a long time, then I heard the young man next door put his head in the opening where the window was and ask if we were all right. I remember scrambling through brick rubble and woodwork in the dark and finding my other girl, Daphne, who was also dazed and cut about the head. . . . After looking at the damage across the road, still not knowing what had happened, I began to realize this was serious. At this point I came across a Mr S. wandering about. He lived close by and had just said goodnight to a young woman who was at the front door of one of the Victorian houses, which had completely gone.

Then I began to hear. The first thing I heard was Mr S. saying ‘Where’s my bloody hat?’ I had never heard him swear before. . . . Then we heard screaming. In the confusion I managed to hear my wife who was upstairs in the bathroom with the baby, Edna. Everything was thrown up the stairs, banisters, smashed front door and brick rubble. I scrambled up to the wife who was now in a pretty bad state. . . . Her nerves were completely shattered. . . . To get my wife downstairs was like mountain climbing. There was nothing to hold on to, the stairs were covered in bricks and rubbish. We made our way, climbing over heaps of debris, to Mr W.’s house, that was about 200 yards past the damage

At such a moment it was hard to take in what had happened, but, as soon as one had done so, there always seemed urgent tasks to be done:

After getting my wife and baby and Daphne settled with a ‘cuppa’ I had to go back to find her false teeth. On the way back I met a young lad, Brian, who worked with me. . . . We went through my house and started to look for a needle in a haystack – that was Brian’s description. But, going outside of the back door, which was now missing [we found] the teeth had fallen straight down by the side of the wall, as if they had been put there. I went up and down the road several times, to get insurance papers, ration books and the wife’s handbag.

By now the place was lit up with floodlights and swarmed with police and other helpers. I discovered what we thought was some old bedding was a young lady and Ken’s sister had been standing by, until someone came to the rescue. I was still unable to think clearly but managed to keep on my feet. Then a warden told me to get going and get cleaned up. . . . We were taken from Mr W.’s home to Portland Road School. By the time we got to the school everybody that was mobile was nicely cleaned up. This was about 10.30. . . . The glass was taken out of my head and my hand bandaged. We were taken to South Norwood Church at South Norwood Hill for the night.

Meanwhile this informant’s eldest daughter, Freda, had become separated from her father, in the confusing way that often happened when a rocket had fallen:

There was suddenly without warning a tremendous thud, when we were plunged into darkness and things began flying through the air and vibrating. . . . When we came to our senses I remember getting through the door of the sitting room, out into the hall, where we were stepping over pieces of wood from the stair rails and doors and bits of window frame. I can recall putting my head on the stair banister that remained and having a good howl; and an air-raid warden who appeared on the scene and comforted me. Fred and I then picked our way through the rubble in the street, which was quite deep, and made our way round to his home. . . . His folk were OK but someone spotted that our hands were bleeding and we were advised to go to the first-aid post at Portland Road School. . . . We were seen by doctors and nurses, who cut away our hair and picked out pieces of glass from our wounds, treated them and then bandaged us, Fred having, I believe, five stitches in his head. . . . I then rejoined [the rest of the family] and we spent the night at the rest centre off Norwood High Street, which wasn’t very comfortable, owing to shock, and clothes being full of grit, plus [my] head, which had just been washed at the time of the rocket and was now full of plaster. I remember leaving the rest centre at first light and making our way back to the shattered home, which was minus tiles, windows and doors. We arrived back at Sunnybank about 5 a.m. to find faithful old Fred, bandaged head and all, standing guard outside what remained of our home.

Much was made in all the official reports of how efficiently the post-raid services operated. Whether they always functioned so smoothly may be doubted, if the experience of one woman’s husband, summoned back, as mentioned earlier
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, from his army unit, are any guide: