Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s (38 page)

Sinclair did not say, as he did not yet know, that events had just strikingly vindicated the Air Ministry’s reluctance to intensify attacks on The Hague. On Saturday, 3 March 1945, 57 Mitchells and Bostons of the Second Tactical Air Force, which Supreme Headquarters had been loath to see diverted from their normal ground-support role, had been sent to make the heaviest attack yet on the Haagsche Bosch. The result, it was learned in London on 8 March, the day after Sinclair’s speech, had been a disaster and later further details emerged. The nearest bombs to the wooded area believed to be housing the rocket units had, it appeared, landed 500 yards away, while the surrounding streets of Bezuidenhout occupied by Dutch civilians, had been plastered with 69 tons of bombs, some of which had caused major fires. These had been left to rage unchecked, leaving many people to burn to death; the Germans had refused to let the fire brigade enter the area, declaring that ‘the stupid Dutch have to learn what it is like’. What it had been like, it now emerged, was Hamburg or Dresden on a smaller scale, and on 14 March 1945 the Foreign Minister of the Netherlands’ government in exile, which had hitherto loyally supported the British government’s policy of bombing The Hague, went to dictate, more in sorrow than in anger, a formal protest. An earlier attack by Typhoons on the same area in the second half of February, he pointed out, had been totally unsuccessful, with no damage done to the V-2s stored there, since the bombs had fallen wide. Meanwhile worthwhile targets, in the shape of the railway lines leading to The Hague carrying the Germans’ supplies of liquid oxygen and alcohol, had been left untouched. But this lesson had not been learned and the result, on the fatal Saturday of 3 March, had been a disaster, with 800 Dutch civilians killed by their allies, and 100,000 homes,
²⁶
ruined by bombs or fire, having to be evacuated. ‘The temper of the civilian population’, summed up this senior Dutch minister, ‘has become violently antially as a result of this bombardment.’

Even if the scale of the disaster
had
been exaggerated it had clearly been far worse than any V-2 incident in London, and the affected area remained for years afterwards an open space on which no one ventured to build. As soon as the basic facts were realized, a major inquest was launched in London, although the true reasons for the fiasco were never finally established. The Dutch charitably attributed it to the stiff north-west breeze which had pushed the bombers, or their cargo, off course, but the rumour was current in the Allied air forces that a bombardier in a leading aircraft had held his map upside down and that those behind, bombing when he did, had aimed at the very area they had been briefed to avoid. That the map-reading had been inept and the bombing altitude too high seemed indisputable, and the resulting criticism came at a bad time for the RAF, already under a cloud since the devastation of Dresden three weeks earlier. On 18 March the Prime Minister sent to General Ismay, for the Chiefs of Staff, with a copy to Sir Archibald Sinclair, one of his sharpest memos of the war:

This complaint reflects upon the Air Ministry and Royal Air Force in two ways. First, it shows how feeble have been our efforts to interfere with the rockets, and, secondly, the extraordinary bad aiming which has led to this slaughter of Dutchmen. The matter requires a thorough explanation. . . . I will bring the matter before the Cabinet.

The embattled Secretary of State for Air did his best. In his reply to Churchill on 26 March Sir Archibald Sinclair admitted that the mission had been a disaster. An internal investigation had been launched on 8 March, but, he pointed out, ‘The Germans are deliberately placing their launching and storage sites in and near built-up areas in occupied Holland. A railway interdiction plan would not necessarily avoid losses in Dutch civilian life.’ The Chiefs of Staff, replying on 28 March, also mingled apology with self-justification. There had, they acknowledged, been a fault in the way the crews concerned had been briefed, but many earlier operations, such as Spitfires dive-bombing the launching sites, had been a success. They, the Chiefs of Staff, had always advised against the use of heavy bombers and the decision to use medium bombers – which had actually caused the trouble – had been taken by the Defence Committee, not themselves.

The danger to Dutch civilians has always been inherent in the use of aircraft against the rocket area of The Hague. . . . If the risk of damage [sic] to Dutch civilians is unacceptable for political reasons, we can only suggest that our air attacks should be confined to harassing the railways at a safe distance from centres of Dutch population and that the consequent increase in the rocket attacks on the United Kingdom (which may at most be only slight and may at best be prevented by the course of land operations) should be accepted.

The subject clearly rankled with the Prime Minister and when, in opening a large-scale RAF exhibition at Dorland Hall, Lower Regent Street, Sir Archibald Sinclair claimed credit for ‘the frustrating attacks by the RAF on V weapons’, this was too much for Churchill. The text of the speech appeared in
The Times
on the same day, 28 March, that the Chiefs of Staff’s memo arrived, and Churchill’s response was immediate. ‘You have no grounds to claim that the RAF frustrated the attacks by the V weapons,’ it began, and went on to say that, so far as the flying-bombs were concerned, ‘the RAF took their part, but in my opinion their efforts rank definitely below that of the AA artillery and still further below the achievements of the army’. The real sting lay in the tail:

As to V-2, nothing has been done or can be done by the RAF. I thought it a pity to mar the glories of the Battle of Britain by trying to claim overweening credit in this business of the V weapons. It only leads to scoffing comments by very large bodies of people.

At 1900 hrs the incident had settled down into a routine job.

Report of incident officer on incident at Usk Road, Battersea, 1600 hours, 27 January 1945

‘The public continue to praise the Services, in which they have complete faith.’ With this sentence one Ministry of Home Security official ended the draft of his report on ‘Lessons from Recent Raids – Long-Range Rockets’ in December 1944, and it was a verdict which almost all of those who had suffered personally from the rocket would have endorsed. The picture he painted was indeed reassuring in almost every respect. Although, owing to the lack of warning, fewer people now used shelters, ‘Anderson and Morrison shelters have again stood up well,’ the same report concluded. ‘Several Anderson shelters within a few feet of craters, and even on their very lips, have remained practically undamaged, though their earth coverings have usually been blasted away.’ There were similar cases of people brought out unharmed from Morrisons after the shelter had been totally submerged in the ruins of their home. The picture for surface shelters, always less popular, was not so satisfactory:

Reinforced brick communal shelters have also stood up satisfactorily as far as their main structure is concerned, but there has been damage to internal fittings. Bunks have been wrenched away from the walls, smashed and twisted. . . . Where any of the few remaining unreinforced brick shelters have been involved, there have been cases of collapse on their sites from earth tremor.

Overall, however, even a surface shelter increased one’s chance of survival, and especially of escaping injury from flying missiles and falling masonry; it also gave protection against a new, specifically V-2, danger. ‘There have’, mentioned the report quoted earlier, ‘been several cases of injury from burns and these have been ascribed to liquid oxygen, or hydrogen peroxide, containers of which are found in the missile.’

The report made much of the problem of locating the precise spot where a rocket had fallen, especially in rural areas, but even in towns finding the precise point of impact was not always easy. Westminster, its historian recorded, made wardens’ posts ‘responsible for sending in Vicinity Reports based on the sound of clattering glass’, a somewhat rough-and-ready guide, as windows might be broken a mile and half from the explosion. ‘Border’ incidents were a constant trial, both in town and country, a classic example occurring after the ministry’s interim report just quoted, at one in the morning of Thursday, 15 March 1945, when a V-2, with no regard for local authority boundaries, landed on a group of houses in Crystal Palace Park Road ‘just feet inside Beckenham’s borders’, but causing casualties and damage in Lewisham and Penge. The result, a local historian admitted, could have been tragic:

No message was sent to Beckenham Control for ambulances or resuce parties while the search went on to establish whether the incident was in the borough. Fortunately Lewisham showed greater initiative and despatched eight ambulances and a heavy rescue squad to the scene without worrying too much about boundary lines. . . . Until 3.30 a.m. Lewisham controlled operations when responsibility was transferred to Beckenham.

Untrained and often over-enthusiastic helpers had always been a source of vexation to the professionals, and it had not lessened with experience:

Everybody in the vicinity, as soon as the dazedness has been shaken off, is immediately anxious to help, and generally succeeds in adding to the chaos. Much harm may be done until order is restored; and the later an incident officer arrives on the scene, the harder is his job of undoing what has been done before his arrival.

The incident officers were the elite of the Civil Defence service, usually senior wardens of long experience who had been on a special training course. In Ilford, the local newspaper reported, the incident officer ‘became known simply as “the man with the blue hat” and to him everyone turned in trouble’. In theory at least the black and white chequered flag which flew over his command post marked out a calm, still centre in the middle of storm and chaos, where frayed nerves were soothed, raised tempers lowered, and decisions on which lives might depend were taken promptly but carefully. One of his lesser jobs was that of a superior traffic warden, a profession not yet invented. The ministry report quoted an example:

At one incident in a main road, which was blocked during the early stages, there were 11 rescue parties, 21 ambulances, 5 cranes with their debris lorries, and two mortuary vans, as well as the NFS pumps and towing vehicles, mobile canteens and cars. Here the incident officer at once arranged for the clearance of roads round the incident so as to let vehicles circulate and get away without backing.

The incident officer now often had at his disposal a facility unknown earlier in the war, an incident-control van, ‘providing’, according to the official intention, ‘a mobile office which contains everything the incident officer wants, and which can be sited at the best spot regardless of damage’. Control vans were often linked by field telephone to the nearest warden’s post or private home with a line still intact, and another innovation, in response to the huge V-2 crater, was the use of two incident officers, one on either side of the obstruction. The technique was tried out at the Woolworths incident in New Cross and in Walthamstow where, as the local controller recorded, ‘the crater completely filled the road and the water main continued to spout for a long period, with the result that the whole of the roadway was flooded’. In Walthamstow this division of responsibility became a regular practice, but elsewhere the ministry knew of one occasion where a crater formed ‘two
culs-de-sac
’, leaving ‘the Medical Officer with serious casualties on one side awaiting ambulances which . . . were waiting on the other’.

Everyone’s ambition was to ‘close’ an incident rapidly, with casualties removed, roads cleared and – above all – everyone who might have been involved accounted for. The record in Ilford was half an hour but this was exceptional and major incidents were often kept ‘open’ for days, or reopened when someone was discovered to be missing. The V-2s added enormously to the difficulty of listing actual and putative casualties, since people were so often caught in the street, and local records were out of date.

Many evacuated persons have returned and some have left without informing the wardens. People seem to be less willing to notify the wardens of their movements now that a number of wardens’ posts are closed. They will not trouble to go to a more distant post.

The sheer scale of the area affected by every V-2 also vastly increased the wardens’ problems:

The difficulties of tracing and identifying persons who might, or might not, have been on the scene . . . are increased because the numbers are greater. This particularly applies to passers-by and passengers in public-service vehicles which have been involved. Casualties have occurred amongst passengers in railway trains when identification and recording have been difficult. . . . At one incident, which occurred at about 5 p.m. on a Sunday, in a residential area, many of the houses involved contained one or more visitors. This complicated the reconnaissance problem enormously. . . . At another, after 40 hours of work the incident was closed, but on the third day additional human remains were found and it had to be reopened. . . . Despite all the difficulties, the time taken to account for everybody who might be concerned has generally been most creditably short.

The work of the rescue services was assisted by the introduction during the V-2 period of a number of new pieces of equipment or techniques, some costing nothing. A useful innovation was the practice of chalking a large ‘S’ on the door of every wrecked or abandoned house to indicate that it had been searched. Methods of locating buried casualties were also improved. The
Gravesend Reporter
described how at the Milton Place incident in November ‘Microphones were placed around the rubble . . . to listen for buried victims’, who were instructed over ‘powerful loudspeakers from the control van . . . to tap the rubble so that their general position could be ascertained.’ About the value of the most newsworthy arrival on the Civil Defence scene, however, the Ministry of Home Security were cautious:

Trained dogs belonging to the Ministry of Aircraft Production have been tried at these incidents. They were not trained specifically for this purpose but have been very useful in indicating the presence of casualties, dead or alive, under the debris. Their usefulness increases with experience, and others are being trained.

It is essential that they work under their trainers, who understand them thoroughly. Each dog has its individual way of working and of indicating the presence of casualties. The best results have been obtained when dogs have worked in pairs. The trail of one can then confirm that of the other, or they may scent the same casualty from different angles. . . .

There have been several incidents when information of the whereabouts of trapped casualties has been vague or faulty, in which the dogs have saved hours of labour and delay by pointing to the casualties, sometimes under four or five feet of debris. They can also get through comparatively small spaces into voids. . . .

But they must be regarded as an aid to reconnaissance and not a substitute for it. A positive indication, if followed up, may save life, but a negative one should never be taken as conclusive.

This carefully balanced conclusion, so typical of the Civil Service mind, those who used dogs would have endorsed. In Walthamstow, the local controller found, ‘dogs . . . from time to time proved very helpful in indicating casualties hidden below debris . . . although they were not by any means infallible’. They proved useful, however, when given a trial run at Blackhorse Road in December, when 10 dead bodies and 100 other casualties had to be recovered from 2000 damaged houses. At Iverson Road, Hampstead, in January the dogs found nothing when a missing woman was searched for and it was eventually human, not canine, ears which located her eight hours after she had been trapped. The presence of a dog certainly added a new element to a familiar scene, as in South Norwood, for Croydon’s ‘Sunnybank’ incident:

In the glare of floodlights, silence was called for as the dog, in the hush, nosed his way over and into the ruins now dripping in the rain, becoming intensely excited when near a live casualty. It was an eerie experience.

At the Lewisham/Beckenham ‘border’ incident in March, mentioned earlier, the debris of a row of four-storey Victorian houses proved ‘too tightly packed’ for the dogs to push their way in, and one warden present ‘confided that the dogs in Lewisham had never proved any good’. At Hazelhurst Road, Wandsworth, a dog ‘was successful in locating one trapped dead casualty’ but not the other thirty people still missing nine hours after the explosion. Dogs were also easily diverted by the presence of animal casualties, as the district rescue officer for Wandsworth in February discovered:

The rescue dogs were employed in Usk Road, but owing to the amount of livestock (cats, dogs, rabbits, chickens and horses) kept on the premises the value of the dogs was destroyed. Wherever they indicated bodies, cats, dogs, rabbits, chickens and horses were found.

Of all the changes in coping with incidents that occurred during the V-2 period the most valuable was that of abundant light, made possible by the ending of the blackout. The ministry recommended making the fullest use of this new facility:

One borough owns a battery of searchlights, with its own power unit, presented by the US Navy, and this has often been lent to neighbouring authorities. AA and RAF searchlights have been used and have greatly helped work. The best results have been obtained by projecting the beam against a blank wall and working by the reflected light. This avoids deep shadows.

Army searchlight crews – the only part of Ack-Ack Command actually employed against the V-2s – welcomed this break in their normally boring routine. One wartime ATS member recalls how her unit in mid-January 1945 found themselves in Beckenham, responsible, like the other six sites in their troop (which was itself one of four in 432 Battery), for providing an incident light within a two-mile radius of their base.

There was always a great demand to go on the incident team. We had . . . a large 150 searchlight projector and . . . the incident light, which was a small 90 searchlight projector, mounted on a lorry. . . . The team consisted of a man to drive the lorry . . . a No 5 who looked after the carbons on the searchlight, a No 9 who looked after the running of the generator . . . and a No 1 who was NCO in charge of the team and saw to packing the lorry with haversack rations, waterproofs, first-aid kit, etc., so we were quite self-sufficient. . . . We prepared for action every evening one hour before nightfall. We would get word over the RT set of the location and had to report to the incident officer on arrival. . . . All we had to do was turn on the motor, switch on the searchlight and put it out of focus, so it gave a greater area of light, then illuminate the debris.

Cranes, because nearly every V-2 incident caused great damage, had also become a familiar sight, but the ministry had reservations about them:

Cranes have proved very valuable but . . . should be used with discretion. . . . There is a danger that their presence may distract rescue parties from what should be a technical rescue job, following careful reconnaissance, into filling skips and clearing debris. Cranes, by speeding the removal of debris from the site, should be regarded as an aid to scientific rescue work, and not a substitute for it; in any case, the risk of unsuspected persons, such as passers-by, having been trapped, makes careful handling of debris essential. There is still a tendency for too many people – some of them visiting officials – to stand about on debris.