Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s (40 page)

I shall never forget that sight of chaos and ruin where so short a time before there had been the peaceful, orderly routine of a neighbourhood breakfasting and starting off to shop and school. Nor shall I soon forget the quiet, earnest way the women of the WVS went to work to help broken families find their way back to something like a normal life again. . . . You were suddenly aware of the threads of human life that trailed off in all directions. ‘My husband is coming home on leave in a day or two . . ..’ ‘The boy is in school and he must be told.’. . . A child’s pet dog could not be found. Patiently, and with quiet understanding, the women of the WVS worked to put to rights the lives of these victims of the battle of London.

During the period . . . to seven o‘clock this morning there was enemy air activity against southern England. Damage and casualties have been reported.

Evening Standard, 14 February 1945

The German promise, back in November 1944, that the V-2 would bring ‘horrible and sudden death’ to the people of southern England
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was amply fulfilled. By the end of the campaign, 2754 civilians had lost their lives and another 6523 had been seriously injured, plus an unrecorded number of servicemen and women. The numbers requiring first-aid treatment are uncertain, but if the experience of Wandsworth is typical, where 271 people became ‘minor’ casualties against 123 ‘serious’ cases, the total of lesser casualties for the whole country must have been about 14,400, making the total casualty list, including killed and all categories of injured, just under 24,000. This was substantially less than the numbers who suffered from the blitz or flying bombs, since the attack was shorter and on a smaller scale, but in terms of killed or seriously injured the rocket was the most ‘cost-effective’ of the three. Each ton of supposedly aimed bombs caused on average 0.82 fatal casualties and 0.98 serious injuries, each flying bomb 1.06 and 3.08 respectively, while each V-2 killed 2.61 people and badly hurt another 6.18 – demonstrating, incidentally, that this type of indiscriminate bombardment, which posed no risk to the aggressor, was more efficient in undermining morale, if this were related to casualties caused, than conventional bombing. The figures confirmed, too, that risk depended overwhelmingly on location. Just under 50 per cent of the V-2s reached the London Civil Defence Region but they caused 90 per cent of the casualties.

Who died because of the rockets? The case of a Bermondsey family, who moved back there after returning from Northampton, to which they had evacuated themselves when bombed out in 1941, was typical. The daughter of the house, married and then living in Wembley, recalls the circumstances:

When my father’s employer heard of the suggested move he almost went on his knees to him, not to bring the family back to London. . . . My mother was terrified about coming back, but was more terrified of my father so in February [1944] they moved back again. . . . In June the V-1s started to come over and . . . when I visited her she said how frightened she was when one or the other was away from home and if they had to die hoped it would be all together. . . . I did not visit again until November and learned that my Marine brothers were safe back in England after . . . the D-Day landing and there was a chance of Christmas leave, so we decided to pool our rations and make a cake and pudding in case we could have a family Christmas. In the afternoon my sister Louie arrived with her two small sons and told us she would have to leave her father-in-law’s house as she had trouble with him while her husband was away [in the navy]. It was decided she would share a large room with my mother until other arrangements could be made and she moved in with them on 2 December. At 2.30 a.m. on Wednesday, 6 December, a V-2 hit the house and my mother got her wish; they all died together: Mum, aged 48, Dad, 49, [my sisters] Louie, 25, Florrie, 17, Joyce, 16, Doris, 7, [my brothers] James, 14, and Bernard, 12, and Louie’s two sons, Frankie, 3, and David, two months. We buried ten coffins in Camberwell New Cemetery, 13 December, and till the day I die I will not forget the armless, legless, headless bodies that once were my family.

The regular refrain in the exceedingly uncommunicative communiques issued by the Ministry of Information, which reported that ‘casualties were caused’, gave little hint of the long wake of tragedy that every such incident left behind it. One woman then teaching at Higham’s Park, Hackney, remembers a typical case, that of a pupil who, on going home for dinner, learned ‘that his home was destroyed and a parent killed. The next day that little lad sat for “the scholarship” ’ to decide his whole academic future. A Walthamstow man recalls another of von Braun and Kammler’s achievements. The sole survivor of one family, lying blinded in hospital, learned that her ‘sister’ and ‘parents’ were dead – and for the first time that she had been adopted: ‘a very deep double shock’.

Blindness, though the papers never mentioned it, was a common consequence of being close to an exploding V-2. A woman dug out alive, as described earlier, from the Holborn V-2 incident in November 1944, encountered another case:

In the bed next to mine was a young mother who had been blinded by a bomb and her two-month-old baby, with a broken arm. Her husband was also in the hospital, but her biggest grief was that she was unable to go to the funeral of her four-year-old son who had been killed. Also in my ward was a 23-year-old girl who had lost both hands. . . . She could not wash herself, nor comb her hair, go to the toilet alone or even wipe her nose, or wipe away the occasional tear which she understandably shed. Her mother had died from the shock of her injuries.

Frequently those injured had no recollection of the actual moment of the explosion, like a Hounslow woman who had been enjoying her morning tea-break in the Pyrene factory in March 1945:

I was knocked unconscious but came to as the rescue squad got me out. My right arm was badly damaged. I remember saying to someone, ‘It isn’t fair’. As I was able to walk, I was put into a private car and sent to West Middlesex Hospital, Isleworth. . . . I remember sitting outside the hospital for a time and an air-raid warden came and popped a tablet in my mouth. We were put into bed – clean sheets with all our dirt. Now and again I lost consciousness and when at last the sister came to give me my injections it was 4 p.m. I had lain there all that time, so you can tell the number of casualties there must have been. I was very ill with shock and injuries to my right arm and stayed in hospital about three and a half weeks.

‘For a few moments there was a deadly quiet, a solemn hush, as though the world had come to an end. Then, when I realized I was still alive, I pulled myself out of the debris.’ That is the outstanding memory of one woman who became one of those seriously injured by the V-2 which, as described later,
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landed in the early afternoon of Friday, 10 November 1944, on Goulston Street, Stepney.

It was two days before my son’s sixth birthday. We had carefully hidden his presents ready for Sunday. My son was at school, my father at work and my mother resting in bed . . . when suddenly, without any warning, the street door, the scullery door, the mirror that was above the fireplace, were all lying on top of me. . . . I could hear people screaming. . . . I called to my mother, who at that moment couldn’t speak. She had lost her voice with shock. I then managed to get to the bedroom to her and we were able to reach the street, although, even to this day, I don’t know how. Then we saw people dead and injured being brought out, horses from Brooke Bond tea warehouse lying dead. . . . I stood talking to a neighbour who had been split wide open from her left shoulder to right breast. How she was able to stand I will never understand, although she died on reaching hospital. I had a few small wounds but rather a big hole in my right leg, which was so deep that the doctors were unable to stitch it together, so put a plaster cast on to help pull it closer. The lady who sold tickets at Goulston Street baths was blinded, the baths damaged and I was told some American servicemen were killed. My father was working for the Americans in a goods station near Aldgate. On hearing the bomb and finding out where it had landed, he dashed home. . . . He reached us just as I was being helped into the ambulance. . . . My father went to school to see how my son was. The windows at the school had been blown out so the teacher let my parents bring him to the London Hospital, where I was sitting in a wheelchair waiting for the doctor. For a moment he didn’t seem to recognize me. What with the blood and soot I was smothered in I must have looked like a being from another world.

The test of ‘serious injury’ was being kept in hospital overnight, but many V-2 casualties faced months of treatment and convalescence. The Holborn V-2 victim quoted earlier, taken first to the adjacent Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, was, on the following Tuesday – she had been hurt on Saturday morning – moved with her airman husband who had ‘both legs in plaster, both arms in splints and his head and neck . . . swathed in bandages’ to ‘Bart’s evacuation hospital in Hill End, St Albans’. This she found a former ‘mental hospital and . . . a rather dreary place, very crowded with ordinary patients and bomb casualties’, and though she was allowed to leave within a few weeks her husband faced a twelve-month stay in hospital.

Being ‘slightly injured’ did not always seem like that at the time, as a woman making woollen garments for the forces in a factory at Leyton could testify. Her particular rocket landed ten minutes before knocking-off time:

I remember saying to a girl on the next machine, ‘I hope my date turns up tonight. He’s a GI and I could do with a pair of nylons or a bar of candy.’ All of a sudden there was an almighty explosion and I felt a terrible pain in my back. There was silence for a time, then I could hear girls screaming. The next thing I remember was one of the men picking me up and carrying me through the glass and debris. We had caught the full blast. It had fallen on a row of houses opposite. I remember a lorry taking us injured girls to the Connaught Hospital, where it was full of injured people, mostly women and children, from the houses. When I came out of my daze, I realized I had a big hole in my left calf which was pouring with blood and a nurse put a bowl under my foot to catch the blood. I heard someone say, ‘She’s got glass in her back’, and the next thing I knew I was lying on a table. There was a doctor there and nurses and other injured people and then to my horror someone was just ripping all my clothes off, which were soaked with blood. To me at nineteen years of age that seemed almost as bad as the injury. I had to lie down on my front while the doctor stitched me up. My back was gashed by glass. . . . I have never felt so much pain in my life. They had to do it without freezing it or anything. A nurse gave me her hand to grip, but the tears just rolled out of my eyes. I said to the doctor, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to cry, but I can’t help it.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry. . . . You’re being a brave girl. . . . Now we’ll do your leg, but that won’t hurt quite so much because that’s not quite as bad as your back.’ That over, I had an injection and was put in a wheelchair and taken to a rest centre next to the hospital, where the bombed-out people were, until someone collected me to take me home. They gave me an old pair of shoes and a blanket and there I stayed until my uncle came and got me about two o’clock in the morning. I was off work for about a month, and although I still have my scars to remind me, I consider myself very lucky to be alive.

Some of the injured did not appear in the official statistics at all, like an ex-nurse, mentioned earlier, who was working in a bank in High Road, Leytonstone, on the morning of 27 October 1944.
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A Friday about 10 a.m. we were all getting on with the day’s work. Quite a few customers in the bank also. There was a terrific ‘crack’ and the thud of explosion, falling glass and breaking outside and inside. I was working, sitting at my ledger under the window. The next thing I recall was sitting on a heap of rubble, with dirt on my head and face, crying. The only thing in my mind was, ‘Was my face disfigured?’ . . . The young man [the junior member of the staff, aged eighteen] came and pulled me up and said ‘You’re quite all right. It is red ink on your hands and face and on the ledger. We’ve real trouble! The manager is badly hurt.’

Blood spouting on the front of my nice mauve dress. . . . I got the first-aid box and sat ‘sir’ in his office, stopped the haemorrhage by pressure on the artery, then packed the glass and wound with wads of cotton wool and bandaged in position. Nobody else was hurt but the whole place was a shambles. I then took the manager outside and found a private car doing hospital journeys with mobile victims. . . . We went to Whipps Cross Hospital and found the Casualty Room. Casualties were being wheeled in on stretchers and we just sat with many others about an hour . . . when I found my boss getting weaker. So I went into a ward and spoke to a doctor attending a victim and begged him to see my boss, saying, ‘I’m a nurse and it’s urgent. He’ll be dead if not [seen].’ . . . We sat patiently and smoked, we may have had a cup of tea, I can’t really recall, [being] just horrified at the number of casualties still being brought in. Eventually I went in again and saw the doctor, pleaded for him to see the boss . . . and he did. Then I found a bus and went back to the bank.

The inspectors from head office were there and men from the local builders repairing front door,
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An ex-policeman customer asked if I’d had my head looked at. It was full of glass powdered and had cut and bled. . . . I gave Mrs S. [a colleague] a laugh. She thought I was delirious as I went to the lavatory and told her, ‘I had to take my knickers off because I felt glass sticking in me where I’d sat’. She and I both heard a shower of glass on the rubble in there as I shook them out. Then they sent me home for the weekend to get over the shock. . . . My neighbour next door was surprised to see me home about 3 o‘clock and I made her literally clean my head up. [She was] terrified of blood, but there was nobody else to do it. Then I had a hot bath and found powdered glass stuck to my skin and lodged in my bra. . . . I got to bed and had an attack of ague. The bed rocked and shook. I was so cold and felt so ill. After about three weeks my voice went to a husky whisper – very tiring, as I needed to be heard as ledger-keeper. I saw the doctor and he gave me two weeks’ leave. The voice was better but ‘gin-husky’ like Tallulah Bankhead, the actress. It has never returned.