Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s (43 page)

Neither of the borough of Finsbury’s two earlier rockets had prepared it for its third and worst, which dived down out of a bright, clear sky at 11.10 a.m. on the morning of Thursday, 8 March 1945, into Smithfield Market in the Farringdon Road, close to the City and to the newspaper precinct of Fleet Street. It provided a climax to the Germans’ campaign against the daily commercial life of London, just as its disastrous successor in Stepney, to be described in a moment, provided a classic example of how to kill people in their beds.

The shock of the Smithfield rocket echoed over London, reminding everyone in earshot that the war was far from over yet. A woman living in West Hampstead remarked to the locksmith busy in her house that ‘it was probably south London’, a tactless observation, for it turned out he lived in Catford. Much nearer to the scene was a man who had been entrusted with the collection of one and a quarter million pounds in banknotes from the Bank of England for his own bank at Poultry in the City:

Driving along Farringdon Street . . . we heard a terrific explosion. I immediately stopped the vehicle and, at that moment, the petrol tank exploded and the van was a mass of flames. I was badly burnt on the face and the hands. My colleague, fortunately, escaped from the other side with a scratch. I managed to stagger across a short pavement, but fell into a space about thirty feet down. I then realized I had a serious injury to my right foot. After a short time I was found and taken to Bart’s Hospital. After some hours, a temporary wooden splint was fixed to my leg but by the next day I was in a ward with my leg in heavy plaster. The doctors on duty in the ward informed me that I had a third-degree Potts’ fracture and called me ‘the man with the million’.

This man had had a miraculous escape, for, as the Midland Bank’s own wartime history recorded, his van was ‘only twenty-five yards from the point of impact’. No fewer than three of its branches were affected by the explosion, and first-aiders from its head office were called in to ‘assist the medical staff at St Bartholomew’s Hospital’, overwhelmed by the flow of casualties. In the last major ‘shopping’ incident, at Deptford, saucepans had drawn a crowd. This time, an LCC heavy rescue officer learned on his arrival, ‘as luck would have it, a consignment of rabbits had come on sale and the information had spread around the neighbourhood like wildfire’, so ‘the market was . . . thronged with women shoppers, many of them accompanied by their children’.

For a long time, so many people were buried, the situation was obscure. Admiral Evans, on the scene within an hour, was told it was impossible even to guess at the number of casualties. When he came back at 6 p.m. with his senior colleague, Sir Ernest Gowers, and the ARP controller and Medical Officer of Health for the City, with the Lord Mayor of London – for many of the casualties and much of the damage had occurred within the City – the figures were still unknown. It was several days before the final toll was assessed, at 110 dead, 123 seriously injured and 243 with lesser injuries.

Two hours after the incident, ‘Barts’, with 300 patients choking its casualty department, had to ask for further cases to be sent elsewhere – the Royal Free, Great Ormond Street, the Homeopathic Hospital and University College all received some – but many of those requiring treatment were soon afterwards allowed to go home. Four surgical teams at Bart’s had worked at full stretch, with only short breaks, until noon on 9 March, more than twenty-four hours after the first victims were wheeled in, the cases giving most anxiety, it was found, being penetrating wounds of the abdomen and major compound fractures of the longer bones. The Royal Free, meanwhile, was keeping a special watch on patients who had been buried, to see if they revealed symptoms of ‘crush syndrome’, to forestall which bicarbonate of soda was, where possible, administered while they were still trapped.

It was not for some time that the reason for the enormously high casualty figures – apart from the obvious factors of time of day and the large number of people about – was established. The V-2 had, the official report explained, ‘penetrated two-storey shop and fishmarket buildings at NE junction of Charterhouse and Farringdon Road and detonated at a lower level than the roadway of Farringdon Road’, and thus brought down ‘the concrete and iron vaulted floor, also the lattice-framed roof of the single-storey fishmarket’. In other words, a huge and exceptionally heavy mass of rubble had poured down from ground level on to the floor below, and then into the goods yards of the railway running beneath it. The result was a volcano-like cauldron of brick, stone, steel and timber, and the rescue teams had to begin work by adding to the destruction, pulling down the still-standing remains of the eleven shops on the Farringdon and Charterhouse Roads frontage ‘to allow skips of the mobile crane being operated over the cleared spaces into the railway siding area’, where railway trucks were used to take away the debris. The rescue work brought its own dangers, for, as the twisted steel girders were cut by oxyacetylene equipment to give access to the rubble below, they were liable to ‘skid’ and start a new landslide in a hitherto stable part of the ruins. Another problem was unique to this incident. ‘The smell of decomposing fish, etc., was very bad,’ it was reported the morning after the incident, ‘and . . . as it would increase during the day and would interfere with the working of the personnel, Mr Upton was asked to get the Medical Officer of Health of Finsbury to take action to spray the debris.’

As usual at ‘shopping’ incidents, determining who was missing was a major undertaking in itself. ‘A very much overworked WVS inquiry point operated in a local public house,’ the casualty services officer reported, ‘until the Holborn Heavy Mobile Unit vacated Pearces’ Restaurant, which was then taken over by the WVS. It was still here at full pressure on the 10th instant.’

Surely, everyone at the Ministry of Home Security must have thought, with victory clearly only weeks away there could be no worse incident than Smithfield. In fact one of the Germans’ very last rockets was now to cause the second-largest number of deaths, 134, of the whole campaign, though the number of seriously injured, 49, was substantially smaller than at Smithfield. The site this time was an estate of five-storey flats, known as Hughes Mansions, in Vallance Road, Stepney, the time 7.21 in the morning of Tuesday, 27 March 1945. The missile scored a direct hit, on the very centre of the three block estate, forming a crater 30 feet by 10 feet and totally demolishing the adjoining central block. The one immediately to the east was almost destroyed, the one to the west very badly damaged. This was essentially a ‘domestic’ incident, but on a huge scale, presenting its own perils, to victims and rescuers alike, as the regional casualty services officer noted in his report three days later:

Much of the work, especially in the eastern block, was being carried out under conditions of considerable danger where overhanging walls and copings were likely to fall at any time. . . . Several of the personnel were attended to at the mobile unit for minor injuries, including two or three who had evidently got into a pocket of coal gas.

As often happened when old apartment blocks collapsed, small pockets of space remained in which the former occupants were buried and as late as 5.15 that afternoon ‘trapped persons’, a visitor from regionl headquarters reported, ‘were still being recovered alive from voids in the debris’, the last not being retrieved until 10 p.m. Thereafter attention turned to ‘the removal of compact debris’ in which there was no hope of finding anyone still breathing.

Hughes Mansions provided the London Civil Defence Service with its last great test, and it emerged with its battle honours undimmed. By midday that Tuesday five cranes were on the spot, and others on their way, and 16 heavy rescue parties, 11 light rescue parties and 75 NFS men at work amid the rubble. Among the hundreds of veteran helpers was the Whitechapel fireman quoted earlier, and his recollections provide the last eye witness account of a major incident during the Second World War.

We at Whitechapel Fire Station had almost finished breakfast when we heard the usual double report, the lights momentarily dimmed and we realized that a V-2 had dropped somewhere near. Still eating, we rushed to our machines and were getting our gear on when the bells went down and we heard the address of the incident, Hughes Mansions, Vallance Road. As we stopped near what had been a large block of flats we were met by many people, some trying to find relatives or friends, others demented and just running around wildly. I remember one chap covered in blood running down the road carrying what had once been a whole, live baby, calling his wife, and some people grabbing him and leading him away.

The V-2 had dropped in the middle of the block and the inside walls . . . had been sheered away by the blast. Beds, people and furniture had all dropped into a large mound at the base of the standing walls.

The usual procedure had to be followed, tearing at the rubble to free trapped victims, lending first aid to the injured, lowering from floors where stairs had gone. Nearly all persons had been accounted for and I was edging along a mound of rubble when I heard a voice calling ‘Fireman’. I looked but could see nobody. Suddenly I heard the voice again, ‘Can you see me, fireman, I’m down here near your feet . . ..’

Bending down, I noticed a slit between the bricks and I could just see someone trapped behind the wall. There appeared no way of reaching whoever it was from my position, so answering, ‘I can see you, I am coming round the other side’, I made my way around the wall until I could hear the call again. Getting between broken walls and timbers I eventually saw a bed standing on its end, trapped by a fallen staircase and squashed against a wall, The occupant was an old lady, still tucked in, but unable to move.

I managed to pull her, in her blankets, clear of the bed but could not manage to get her over the debris. By this time help arrived in the form of one of our crew. Fireman Z., whose hobby was weightlifting. Saying ‘Let me have her!’, he picked her up by the shoulders and with myself at the feet we got her out on to the rubble where a stretcher was waiting. She would not be shifted until she had taken my hand and said ‘Thank you, son, God bless you!’

Operations at Vallance Road, described by the regional official reporting on them after his fifth and final visit as ‘one of the most difficult that have had to be dealt with’, were still in progress when Rocket No. 1115, Kammler’s final throw, landed thirteen miles south-east of Stepney, in a residential area of Orpington, not wholly unlike Staveley Road, Chiswick, in character, at 4.37 p.m. on 27 March. Numbers 61 and 63 Kynaston Road, built in the 1930s, were destroyed, and another fifteen properties, there and in the adjoining Court Road, badly damaged. About seventy people were injured, but many had lucky escapes. A then fourteen-year-old girl, so close – at 51 Kynaston Road – that she did not hear the explosion, suffered nothing worse than having a door blown down on top of her, and in Court Road one resident got away with a severe, impressively bandaged, bump on the head, from a similar cause. One of his daughters, entertaining a WAAF friend to tea in the same house, had a severed artery and lost a lot of blood; the WAAF beside her was almost unhurt.

For the very last time, people over a wide area faced the agonizing uncertainty of wondering if it was their road, and their home, which had been hit. Another daughter of the family just mentioned was sitting with a friend at the Embassy Cinema, Petts Wood, ‘weeping our way through the
Constant Nymph’
, when a message on the cinema screen summoned her from her seat and she was given instructions to meet her father at Orpington Station. Their house was uninhabitable and he wanted to prepare her for the shock. Having just missed a train, the two women ran along the track to Orpington ‘completing the journey in only fifteen minutes’, a notable achievement, and, having heard the news, ‘went to the scene and saw it by moonlight . . . damaged furniture, glass shattered, all the fish in the garden pond dead, and a neighbour’s pyjama trousers flying from a chimney’. She was, though she could not know it, the last person to undertake such a vigil by her ruined home, which three months later had been repaired. For another family in Court Road, however, their former life could never be regained. One of the occupants of number 86 was killed, the only fatal victim of this final rocket, dying, as so many had feared, from ‘the last bullet’ on the eve of victory.

No further attacks have been made on this country with long-range rockets.

Home Security Operations Bulletin No. 248, for the week ending Wednesday 4 April 1945

On Wednesday, 28 March 1945, while the last bodies were still being dug out of the ruins of Hughes Mansions in Stepney, not a single V-2 arrived. That day Mrs Gwladys Cox returned to her flat in West Hampstead from a holiday in the Lake District to find that it had suffered from the last rocket in the area, in the Finchley Road on 17 March.
³⁸
‘The porter had boarded up the shattered window,’ she noted, ‘but having been obliged to leave all the others open a few inches, to ease possible blast, the whole place was covered in a layer of black dust.’ On Thursday the 29th, although no one yet knew this, the last flying bomb landed in Kent, and on Good Friday, 30 March, a ‘fine and mild’ day, Mrs Cox began the Easter weekend with a modest outing:

After tea, we took a walk along the Finchley Road and saw the bomb damage to the public library. The building had been cut clean in half, and there is a huge crater, like that of a small volcano, in the adjoining gardens. There was a notice posted up in the library gate as to the latest V Bomb casualties [for the whole of London]. On the 28th inst. . . . no less than 119 people were killed.

It was the most peaceful weekend since September, and to add to the feeling of returning normality spring seemed to have arrived along with the last rocket. On 9 April Vere Hodgson in Notting Hill confided almost incredulously to her diary: ‘No more bombs for more than a week. No one knows what it means to us to go to bed in peace and not . . . wonder if we shall wake up in pieces, or with the roof collapsing on our heads, unless they have lived with it.’ ‘As you have probably heard, there has continued to be complete quiet over London,’ wrote the East End evening-institute lecturer previously quoted, to her husband on 10 April. Next day it was the same story. ‘No bombs!’ recorded Vere Hodgson joyously. ‘The trees are fresh and green. We are fanning [out] over Holland, but the Germans are still fighting.’ Soon, she thought, ‘they will declare the end of the war. But it came for us here when the last bomb dropped.’

The siege of the capital had been lifted by the advance of the Allied armies. In late February, thanks to the Russians, Peenemünde was evacuated and 4000 technical staff and their equipment moved to Bleicheröde, 12 miles from Nordhausen, where it was planned to set up a new experimental establishment underground. Kammler, with his usual ferocious energy, planned to build another ten miles of galleries under the mountains, plus a large liquid oxygen plant, and static testing rigs were built into a quarry. This was in its way Kammler’s finest hour, as Dornberger recognized, with something approaching admiration:

He dashed to and fro between the Dutch and Rhineland fronts and Thuringia and Berlin. He was on the move day and night. Conferences were called for one o‘clock in the morning somewhere in the Harz mountains, or we would meet at midnight somewhere on the autobahn and then, after a brief exchange of views, drive back to work again. We were prey to terrific nervous tension. Irritable and overworked as we were, we didn’t mince words. Kammler, if he got impatient and wanted to drive on, would wake the slumbering officers of his suite with a burst from his tommy-gun. ‘No need for
them
to sleep! I can’t either!’ . . . Kammler still believed that he alone, with his Army Corps and the weapons over which he had absolute authority, could prevent the imminent collapse, postpone a decision and even turn the scales. The transporters still moved without respite to the operational area. Convoys of motor vehicles bridged the gaps in the railways. Kammler’s supply columns, equipped with infra-red devices that enabled them to see in the dark, rumbled along the Dutch highways. When the only railway supply line to The Hague V-2 launching base had been blown up by Dutch resistance groups and the local commander was short of men to protect it, Kammler took over with reserve and training units brought overnight from Germany, together with improvised contingents of the launching troops. He managed to hold the line clear.

Almost to the end the Central Works were still turning out more rockets. In January 1945 690 rolled off the production line, in February 617, in March 362. Kammler was ordered to abandon the battle with ample stocks still in hand, being instructed on 27 March, when in danger of being outflanked and captured, to withdraw his men to Germany. On 3 April Kammler ordered that the training and experimental unit be disbanded and converted into an ordinary infantry battalion to strengthen his 5th Army Corps, which on 5 April was formally entrusted with the defence of the Nordhausen area, now the sole surviving enclave for rocket production and testing, and here this ‘frenzied warrior’, as Dornberger described him, hoped to prevent the American and Russian armies joining forces. Events proved too much, however, even for his iron will. He was not, as he wished, given the opportunity to fight to the last man, and the rocket units, having killed so many civilians themselves, survived to go home and boast of their achievements to their compatriots.

Fighting to the last man, at least if he were cast for that role, made no appeal to von Braun. He was already planning to surrender to the Americans and hoping to buy privileged treatment for himself by betraying his country’s secrets to them. According to a sycophantic American biographer, who wrote an admiring life of her hero for American schoolchildren, ‘Werner’s heart pounded in admiration and love’ for his pretty young cousin who ‘looked like a Dresden doll’, but he cheerfully abandoned her to the Russians to make good his own escape, having established his parents in a comfortable spot where ‘there had been no bombings and food was plentiful’. Ever a man to get his priorities right, von Braun now appropriated the surviving stocks of rocket fuel, in the absence of petrol, and fled in style in a chauffeur-driven, alcohol-powered car, until his exhausted driver fell asleep at the wheel.
³⁹
The same malign providence that a year earlier had saved Hitler from death now protected his devoted servant: von Braun awoke in hospital with an injured arm and shoulder, but suffered no permanent harm, though his already imposing figure became even more conspicuous than ever with his left arm stiffly extended in a plaster cast. While the soldiers who had fired the rocket were left to face the advancing enemy, von Braun and Dornberger, accompanied by ‘450 old Peenemunde executives’, left Bleicherode on 6 April for Oberjoch, near Oberammergau in the Lower Alps, escorted by Security Service men who, they feared, were keeping them safe for use ‘as hostages in armistice negotiations’ or, even more alarmingly, had orders to prevent them ‘from falling into enemy hands’. On the journey, tons of films, drawings and documents were hidden for safety in an abandoned mine in the Harz mountains, and the entrance blasted shut, so that, if they proved to have backed the wrong horse they could return to resume work on the more advanced and destructive missiles von Braun was already designing. While in Deptford and Finsbury, Heston and Stepney, hundreds of families were still mourning their recent dead, and many more mutilated survivors were beginning to come to terms with a life of blindness or disablement, the scientists directly responsible settled cosily down in their rural retreat to await capture, as Dornberger described:

All development work had stopped. We lay on the terrace of our quarters and let the sun beat down on us. We gave ourselves up to our thoughts, argued about our more important projects and slowly achieved detachment from the march of events. Above us towered the snow-covered Allgäu Mountains, their peaks glittering in the sunlight under the clear blue sky. Far below us it was already spring. The hill pastures were a bright green. Even on our high mountain pass the first flowers were thrusting buds through the melting snow. It was so infinitely peaceful here!

The British press carried no report that the V-2s had ceased to arrive, though those with access to the weekly Ministry of Home Security Operations bulletins learned from No. 248, for the seven days ending on Wednesday, 4 April, that ‘no further attacks have been made on this country with long-range rockets’. A week later, instead of Bulletin No. 249 there came an even more encouraging message: ‘It has been decided that, in existing circumstances, the Ministry of Home Security will not issue “Nil” Operations Bulletins.’

It had been two months after the first V-2 landed before the news was made public. It was a month after the last before the British people were allowed to learn that their final and most bitter ordeal was over; no one wanted to risk a repeat of the ‘Battle of London’ fiasco. At last, on 26 April, the day after the Russian and American forces had joined hands on the Elbe, the matter was raised in the House of Commons by the MP for Ilford, no doubt with prior government approval:

Mr Geoffrey Hutchinson
asked the Prime Minister whether he is now able to make any statement with regard to the enemy rocket attacks.

The Prime Minister
(Mr Churchill): Yes, sir. They have ceased.

Mr Hutchinson:
While thanking my right honourable friend for his reply, may I ask him whether he can give an assurance to the House that there is no prospect that they are likely to be resumed?

The Prime Minister:
It is my duty to record facts rather than indulge in prophecy, but I have recorded certain facts with a very considerable air of optimism, which I trust will not be brought into mockery by events.

Mr Rhorne
[Labour MP for West Ham, Plaistow divison]: Should we not offer congratulations to the Royal Air Force for stopping these rocket attacks?

The Prime Minister:
We must offer them to the Royal Air Force for what they did, we must offer them to the anti-aircraft gunners for what they did, but we must not forget it was the British Armies that took the sites.

The RAF’s performance against the rockets was in fact, as indicated earlier, a sensitive subject, and Churchill’s reply to his next questioner showed little desire to discuss the V-2s further:

Capt. Gammans
[Conservative MP for Hornsey] asked the Prime Minister when he expects to be in a position to make a comprehensive statement on the V-2 activities against London and Southern England.

The Prime Minister:
Later on an account of this ordeal so valiantly borne – of which the brunt fell on London in an almost overwhelming degree – should certainly be prepared.

Capt. Gammans:
Can my right honourable friend say when he is likely to be in a position to make a fuller report on these rockets?

The Prime Minister:
I have got to make a fuller report on all sorts of things in the near future and I am not sure the rockets will stand in a very high priority.

During the next few days the advancing American armies occupied Nordhausen, liberated its slave labourers and seized its arsenal of finished and partly finished rockets – they filled 300 large railway wagons – for shipment to the United States. Enough parts were captured to make 75 V-2s, and the Americans wanted to remove everything before leaving the area to the Russians, as it was in their occupation zone.

The scientists and soldiers assembled at Oberjoch, where von Braun and Dornberger were comfortably billeted in a holiday hotel, followed on the radio the news of their country’s deepening defeat and when, on Tuesday, 1 May, listeners were asked to stand by for an important announcement, they cheered, believing that the Führer was about to produce another ‘miracle weapon’ to turn the tide at the eleventh hour. Instead they learned of his death, causing even the most optimistic to recognize that the war was irretrievably lost, and Dornberger gathered his key colleagues round him and piously informed them that ‘It is our obligation to place our rocket knowledge in the right hands.’ What this meant was that they thought the Americans would be a softer touch than the Russians and von Braun’s brother, Magnus, who had been brought along because he spoke good English, was sent out to try to find an American to whom they could surrender. Almost at once he encountered a Pfc (private first class) with an antitank company whom he tactfully addressed as ‘Herr Officer!’ and within hours the cream of Germany’s scientists were safe in US hands, installed, as befitted their station, in rooms ‘with views of mountain peaks’ surrounded by ‘lawns and flowers’ at Garmisch-Partenkirchen. For them the war ended that day, 2 May, and von Braun realized that once again his instinct as one of nature’s survivors had triumphed. While all over Europe families sought missing relatives, mourned their dead or struggled to rebuild their shattered lives, ‘Werner’, his admiring biographer later learned, ‘was amazed at his first American breakfast of fried eggs, bacon, toast with real butter, and genuine coffee.’ Already his rehabilitation was beginning. ‘One soldier spoke his mind: “He looks too fat and jolly to have launched anything more deadly than a kite”.’

But the scientists were not out of the wood yet. The Americans, having suffered nothing from the rockets, were indulgent; with their allies it was different. The British people, Dornberger heard, planned to give him ‘a fair trial and hanging’, but they were not consulted. Soon after the formal end of the war, on Tuesday 8 May 1945, the Americans, treating their prisoners not as mass murderers but as honoured guests, brought their wives and children to Landshut near Munich, where they were cared for even better than their husbands and fathers until the whole lot were shipped to the United States. While GI brides in England were publicly demonstrating to demand a passage to join their husbands, who had fought against Hitler, Hitler’s dedicated scientists were found priority transport; by September 1945 von Braun was in Boston under contract to the US government, ready to start work in his old profession on the material brought from Germany. Along with him were a hundred other scientists identified by the Americans as key men. But the British were not quite shut out. En route von Braun was interrogated by Sir Alwyn Crow of the Ministry of Supply and other British scientists who had doubted the rocket’s practicality.