Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s (22 page)

Only two rockets were definitely known to have broken up in the air, though others might have done so, the report writer suggested, but about its arrival on the ground there was now all too much evidence:

Two loud reports are commonly heard . . . presumably associated with the ‘shell-wave’ due to the arrival of the projectile and with the detonation. . . . Other sounds of long duration, rumbling or crackling, may also be heard and are presumably due to air disturbances in the wake of the projectile. The rocket is infrequently seen with the unaided eye, particularly at night, when it is usually described as glowing red or orange. . . . Several persons claim to have seen the projectile. They describe it as long and narrow (‘about the size of a Spitfire without wings’) and travelling very fast . . . nearly east to west. The explosion is usually described as giving a reddish flash and a large plume of black smoke.

By now others had suffered the same experience as some of the residents of Staveley Road, Chiswick, in not hearing the explosion which had wrecked their homes. The Civil Defence controller of Walthamstow later offered an explanation:

This so-called ‘zone of silence’ was a marked feature of rocket incidents, persons within a range of even up to 250 or 300 yards not hearing the explosion although they would, of course, feel the earth tremor when the rocket burst on the ground. The zone of silence was apparently caused by the terrific speed of the out-rush of the blast driving the air before it and in . . . a practical vacuum, no sound could travel.

The silence was not always total. One woman who lived almost opposite a house which suffered a direct hit recalls a noise ‘like a heavy sigh, or a rapid intake of breath’, while other reported a sudden pressure in the ears. As the bombardment went on, such experiences became daily more common. After lunch on Friday, 15 September, another rocket landed in the water, this time in the Thames Estuary at All Hallows in Kent, and there were five more on the 16th and another five on the 17th, until Kammler reached his quarter-century just before 7 o’clock in the evening of 17 September, nine days almost to the minute since his first successful strike. Rocket number 25, in Adelaide Road, Brockley, in south-east London, was one of the worst so far, with 14 dead and 41 badly injured, illustrating once again the capricious nature of the missile, for 14 of the first 25 had caused no casualties at all and many had done no worse damage than set a corn-rick on fire or destroy a patch of brambles. On 18 September – marked by a solitary rocket which scored a direct hit on a church at West Norwood – the Cabinet decided to postpone a decision about publicity until 24 September.

It had previously been agreed that once the Germans publicly claimed to be bombarding London with rockets some form of ‘official statement’ would have to be made, and the Germans now put out what the Chief Censor considered a ‘fishing report’ on Berlin radio to the effect that an unspecified secret weapon had destroyed Euston Station. It was agreed, however, that this hardly qualified, and a meeting of ministers where Admiral Thompson represented his minister, Brendan Bracken, decided that their lips should stay sealed.

Mr Herbert Morrison pointed out that the rockets were causing no panic nor any real anxiety among the population. And I reported that editors were in full agreement with the policy of silence. It was therefore decided to ignore the German report and that I should inform editors that they were to continue to report nothing about the rockets. . . . Our policy of complete silence mystified the enemy, who could not be sure even that his rockets were landing in England.

One reason for the government’s decision was the expectation that the whole nuisance would soon be over, for on 17 September Operation Market Garden had been launched, to secure a bridgehead at Arnhem and thus, it was hoped, end the war by a quick thrust into Germany itself. At the very least Holland might be liberated and the known launching sites be overrun. No lack of information existed about their general area, for the Dutch hated the Germans with a loathing second only to that the Poles felt for ‘the master race’, and information poured in from informants in The Hague. The trouble was that, by the time the bombers arrived, the birds had flown, while, even when their location was known, identifying the sites from the air was extremely difficult. Storage sites were an easier target and on 14 and 17 September Bomber Command dropped around 200 tons of bombs on suspect estates, at Raaphorst and Eikenhorst, in the suburb of Wassenaar, reserving a third, Ter Horst, for later attention. Holland was within range, too, of the fighters of ADGB, which flew constant ‘interdiction’ patrols, firing on any vehicles and troops they spotted. This effort produced no visible (or indeed any real) results and efforts to locate the rockets when fired had little more success. Special teams were formed to try to spot the flash as a rocket was fired, and to fix its position by sound-ranging equipment. The 10th Survey Regiment, Royal Artillery, was sent to Belgium as part of a new formation, 105 Mobile Air Reporting Unit, stationed at Malines near Brussels, while the 11th Survey Regiment was established near Canterbury, as a form of long stop, but neither proved able to provide even the minute or so’s warning essential if anyone was to get into shelter in time.

On 25 September 1944, by now aware that the great gamble at Arnhem had failed, the Chiefs of Staff formally reported to the Cabinet on the rocket menace. The V-2’s normal maximum range, they advised, seemed to be 200 miles, and this could probably be extended without any basic change to 240 miles, increasing the need to occupy the whole of Holland. But they still opposed any public announcement, since once the subject could be mentioned at all ‘we should have difficulty in restraining the press from publishing information of value to the enemy, such as we experienced in regard to flying-bomb incidents’.

At a separate Cabinet meeting later that day the Minister of Information endorsed this policy and Stafford Cripps, a ‘prorocketeer’ in the past, agreed they should take their cue of silence from the Germans. Herbert Morrison dissented, arguing that a public statement was overdue, but he was overruled, and the only action decided on was to ask the US Chiefs of Staff to discourage any reference to the explosions in London in the American press.

The policy of secrecy resulted in the emergence in the capital of ‘three nations’: those who knew about the rockets, those who guessed the truth, and those who, conscious that they had been told about conventional raids and the flying bombs, assumed that no announcement about the V-2s meant that none had yet arrived. To the first category belonged those like the American OSS official who had accepted his taxi-driver’s story of a ‘bomber crashing’ to explain away the mysterious explosion on 8 September. By the following Tuesday he was reporting ‘all sorts of rumours . . . at Buck’s club’ and acknowledging that ‘it was an eerie sensation to know that such explosions are happening and to have them ignored’. By next morning a better-informed colleague had taken pity on him and told him that ‘the recent explosions were caused by 1100-pound rocket bombs that plummeted out of the sky from heights estimated to approach fifteen miles’. The barrister’s wife in West Hampstead who had correctly guessed the cause of the ‘Friday night explosion’ learned the following day that it had occurred in Chiswick, only to be misled that afternoon by another informant who explained that it ‘came from the explosion of the power station there’ – a nonexistent institution. By Tuesday, 12 September, however, the same helpful friend to whom her husband had applied for information on the Friday, an assistant postmaster in an East End borough, was able to provide an up-to-date bulletin. “Some enemy weapon, V-2,’ he said, ‘had demolished some thirty houses in Dagenham this morning.” Such a weapon’, the diarist commented, nicely confusing the truth, ‘would account for the blowing up of the Chiswick power house.’

The Dagenham rocket, the seventh in the series, which seriously injured 14 people and slightly hurt another 70, though happily it killed no one, was much talked about in the area: it had landed on a school for crippled children, in Marston Avenue, doing considerable damage and starting a fire. It also meant for one small boy one of the most frustrating experiences of the war:

At about 8 o‘clock in the morning I had got up and made my parents a pot of tea in bed when [in fact at 0819 hours] there was a loud bang and clouds of smoke rising from across the roof tops about half a mile away. Since there had been no siren or aeroplane or flying-bomb engine noise my parents dismissed it as a gas main explosion. Soon after I walked down our street to meet the milkman when I saw a large piece of metal in the gutter. It was similar to the metal used in aeroplane fuselage and was hot to touch. Another boy joined me but as we were discussing the ‘spoils’ an air-raid warden came up on his bike and claimed it for ‘the authorities’ and eventually cycled off with it under his arm.

There was, this informant recalls, ‘an air of mystery at first about what had happened’, and an electrician in Ilford was told that the explanation for the explosion in the neighbouring borough was that ‘some secret war work in Fords had blown up’, leaving – just the sort of nice, circumstantial touch in which rumour-mongers delighted – ‘a very large crater which would hold quite easily two double-decker buses’. Frustratingly, too, some of those ‘in the know’ found less well-informed people eager to mislead them. The West Hampstead woman quoted earlier recorded in her diary for Thursday, 14 September, the conflicting information pressed upon her, following the Farnan Avenue incident:

Our peace has been short-lived. We now exist under another cloud, V-2 rockets. There was another loud explosion this morning. The barber at the club told Ralph some enemy missile had hit Walthamstow and done considerable damage. So Ralph range up Mr T., who very much knew all about it as one of his post offices had been hit. . . .

While out this morning, I ran into Miss D., who assured me that the explosions we were having came from guns across the Channel.

Such explanations were given little credence in fly-bombed Croydon. ‘Explosions now believed by public to be either long-range shells or rockets,’ noted one seventeen-year-old schoolboy in his diary that week. But at Clapham, not far away, it was still possible to remain in blissful ignorance. ‘My wife explained there had been lots of these explosions,’ recalls a then RAF electrician, puzzled by the constant bangs while they sat in the ‘pictures’. ‘The rumour was that the army and the ARP were blowing up dangerous buildings damaged during the V-1 raids.’

Aware of the marked improvement in morale which had followed the first full statement about the flying-bombs, Herbert Morrison was probably right in arguing that, whatever its military merits, his colleagues’ insistence on tacitly denying the rockets’ existence was having an adverse effect on the public. Although, as will be described, spirits were to sink even lower later in the winter, they began to decline significantly during the late autumn, with Arnhem a failure and the near certainty that the war would drag on into another year. Even Civil Defence workers were not immune, either from ignorance or sagging morale, as one woman then working as a ‘control’ telephonist at Welling in Kent recalls:

No one told us what they were. We were left guessing and yet they were the most devastating thing that had come our way. We were all terrified and nervy. The weather was very foggy at this early stage, which added to the nightmare. People started talking about poison gas as they had in 1939.

The prevailing gloom is vividly remembered by a woman then working as a student nurse in a North London hospital, where the staff could only judge what was happening by the broken victims they treated of a weapon which officially did not exist:

The stories that filtered into the hospital left a picture of Highgate Hill and Hampstead looking like the white cliffs of Dover, with nothing between them and us in Holloway. I had a particular fear of being left suspended in a bed overhanging a gaping hole.

When they did realize the truth there was a grim satisfaction for Londoners in seeing visitors from other parts of the country wake up to it too, as a wartime resident of Woolwich observed:

Some of the repair men coming into London thought that it was lineshooting when they heard of explosions caused by rockets . . . but they were not in London long before they were convinced of the truth. . . . A joke that went the rounds was that one man on the train, having refused to believe that such a thing was possible, arrived at the terminus at the same time as a rocket. . . . so turned round and took the next train back.

Even more frustrating was to be the bearer of a truthful ‘bomb story’ that no one would believe. ‘We were all very sceptical of what she said,’ remembers one woman who worked in a City bank of a colleague who arrived hotfoot from Chiswick with news of the first V-2, ‘particularly when she stated it had brought a great deal of ice with it.’ A Mottingham man remembers the story of a large hole containing ‘parts of a German machine ALL COVERED IN ICE’ being ‘dismissed as the best rumour yet’, no doubt inspired by the famous First World War story about the Russians with snow on their boots. In fact, of course, the liquid oxygen the rocket carried, at temperatures of up to minus 200°C,
did
often vaporize on landing if not consumed during the flight.

The ‘gas main’ story had a long run – so long that some credulous people are said to have applied to local gas companies for compensation for their damaged homes, and a few now believe, wrongly, that it was broadcast by the BBC. Within a few weeks, however, as explosions multiplied, ‘flying gas mains’ became an ‘in joke’ among Londoners. Among the men working on armoured fighting vehicles in Park Royal, one of them remembers, any explosion became greeted by a reference to ‘another Chiswick gas main’, while a man living in Streatham Hill recalls that when a distant bang interrupted a lunchtime drinking session in the garden of the Horse and Groom, general laughter greeted the observation that ‘another gasworks had gone up and it was surprising that there was any gas left for cooking’. Even children’s faith in the official ‘cover story’, much favoured by parents, rapidly weakened. A then sixteen-year-old schoolgirl in Raynes Park finally decided ‘that there were not that many gas mains’, while a fourteen-year-old in Brockley had reasoned out a similar conclusion. ‘After all, the gas mains had behaved themselves perfectly for many years so why should they suddenly take to exploding without warning?’ Eventually even the censor seems to have decided the story had worn thin. A man from Tooting Bec recalls a cartoon showing the manager of a gasworks remarking to a visitor: ‘I suppose they’ll be saying that explosion was yet another gasworks gone up in smoke.’ Behind his back the plant could be seen through a window to be on fire.