Hitler's Rockets: The Story of the V-2s (30 page)

A rescue squad, hastily mustered, rushed into the ruined house, expecting the worse, but the two occupants had no more than a few cuts and bruises. . . .

Across the road, Mountnessing’s ‘shopping centre’ presented a sorry sight. From the post-office down to the Congregational chapel, every window had gone, every ceiling was down and furniture inside was all at sixes and sevens. The front of the chapel had completely caved in and what was left of the wind organ had been carried outside the building. . . .

Only three minutes before . . . a loaded Chelmsford-bound bus had passed the spot, while a bus going to Brentwood was almost due. . . . There were a few people standing outside the post-office waiting for it at the time. One of them was Miss Harris, the schoolmistress. They were almost blown off their feet by the force of the explosion. Miss Harris had a few minutes before locked up the school, the damage to which necessitated its being closed for five weeks. . . . Within a radius of 200 yards not a ceiling remained intact. But there was not a single serious casualty.

The following Sunday, 18 February, a man doing the early-morning milking on a farm at Woodham Ferrers, six miles from Chelmsford, had an even more frightening demonstration of the rocket’s malevolence:

At 7 a.m. I left the cowshed to take two pails of milk to the dairy and then went over to the pond hole to relieve myself. As I crouched down I saw a flash in the sky. I do not remember anything else until I heard Duke E., the other cowman, calling. . . . I remember I was fighting for my breath but I have no idea how I had come out of the pond hole, which by now was filled with big lumps of clay, and I was now on top of the dungle, which was near the remains of a brick wall a few yards away. All the farm buildings had fallen.

I got up and a pig ran through my legs with its guts hanging out. It ran up on to the dungle and died. Twenty-one cows were killed and all that was left of one of them was a bit of hide. Two horses were buried in the debris, but were not hurt.

My C. [my employer] was in bed in the farmhouse when all this happened and he was showered with glass. The telephone was out of order and it took the ambulance about an hour and a half to come. Duke had been trapped under a beam and his leg was like jelly. We were both taken to hospital in Chelmsford but Duke died on the way. I was treated for shock . . . [and] kept in for a week.

That evening the rector of Purleigh, after his narrow escape the previous Tuesday, was settling down for a peaceful evening by the fire at 8.15 p.m., no doubt glad to be indoors again after evensong:

It was a thick night after rain. On hearing the explosion I tried to get in touch with Warden Lee of Cock Clarks but found the telephone was not functioning, so I got into the car with Mrs Walwyn and her first aid kit, and my daughter who was home on leave and drove. As we came into Cock Clarks we found the roads a thick mess of glass, mud and telephone wires. The Head Warden was already in the windowless post office telphoning to Sub-Control (probably via Corporation Farm). All Cock Clarks was there, though it was too dark to see who anyone was.

So many people had turned out to recue one local resident that it soon appeared that within the official ‘incident’ another of a different kind had developed:

Contrary to all regulations, Mrs Stuart-Jekyll had been extricated from her bed and debris by neighbours in advance of the rescue party, concerning which words appear to have passed . . . but as the neighbours, being men of their hands, had done the job safely and effectively . . . their words were fiercer, or at least more conclusive than the words of the men of the rescue party. When we arrived Mrs Stuart-Jekyll was seated in dignity and comfort in the back of a car which she directed to the house of an acquaintance near Danbury. Mr and Mrs Jordan, in their cottage a few yards beyond Mrs Stuart-Jekyll’s, . . . . had been sitting on either side of the fire when . . . without . . . . any warning or noise of explosion the house just began to collapse about them. The chimney is the pillar of these wooden houses and with some of the uprights it stood firm and saved them from being crushed. . . . Neighbours took them in until they were able soon after to find another cottage. . . . Three houses . . . were wrecked beyond repair. A number of others suffered more or less severely. It seemed a miracle that one was able to include in the Final Report: ‘Casualties: Nil’.

This was one rural warden’s rocket war, or most of it: Purleigh had yet another rocket two days later, only three-quarters of a mile away, the noisiest yet, since it wrecked some greenhouses as well as a private house. Other residents of rural Essex had further explosions to endure, like the elderly couple living in a thatched cottage, a fact which was to save their lives, along with the absence of a warning, for the shelter, to which they always adjourned when the siren sounded, was at the very edge of the ‘crater in which’, as a local historian described, ‘a couple of Stoke Cottages could easily have been placed side by side’. Stoke Cottage was on the road midway between Writtle and Roxwell and was destroyed at 3.30 in the morning of Wednesday, 7 March 1945, as its sixty-eight-year-old occupant, peacefully asleep alongside his wife, explained:

As I came to my senses my first fleeting impression was that there had been an earthquake. . . . Everything around us and both of us seemed to be suspended in mid-air. There was a terrific crack, as though all the thunder I had ever heard in my life had been rolled into an awful roar. Then everything around us collapsed.

But as the cottage was thatched and not slated the whole heap of thatch a couple of feet thick, fell upon us, and instead of killing us protected us from bricks and timber. When my wife and I realized that we were still alive and apparently uninjured, we found we were on the ground floor, having fallen through the bedroom floor, with part of the thatched roof still forming a sort of triangle over us. We started crawling through bits of smashed furniture. We hadn’t the faintest idea where the front or the back of the cottage was. Then, groping, half stunned, through a hole, we found ourselves out in the open at the back of where the cottage had been. The earth seemed to be still quivering from the effects of the explosion.

It was dark, but we could dimly see some of the fine old trees in the garden snapped and torn as though they had been matchsticks. Then the ambulance came and took us away. . . . The ARP workers quite expected to find us badly hurt but . . . we had no more than a few scratches between us.

Most of the more heavily developed part of Essex lay within the London Civil Defence Region, but the non-metropolitan parts of the county included the great industrial belt on the Thames, which formed its southern border, and, towards its south-west corner, the town of Romford, whose 36,000 inhabitants made it larger than Chelmsford though a little smaller than Colchester. Romford’s situation made it uncomfortably rocket-prone. No fewer than 22 fell within the borough’s boundaries, including an airburst over Ferguson Avenue, and, as a local resident wrote, ‘Many more were close enough to give that momentary mental shock which, after some months, began to try even the strongest nerves. . . . It was difficult not to dwell on the possibility of one being even at that moment speeding on its way down towards us, like a giant dart with ourselves as the “bull”.’

The local Civil Defence report centre, having labelled the V-1 ‘fly’, logically but unofficially, recorded rockets as ‘wasps’. The first wasp sting came on 16 September and by the end of the year there had been seven more, which included two on New Year’s Eve itself, and one ‘outstanding incident’, ‘near the junction of Rosedale Road and Collier Row Lane’ – described in the ministry records as ‘Colliers Row, Essex’ – at 7.40 a.m. on 16 November, when 13 people were killed, 32 more admitted to hospital, with 34 houses demolished and 800 more damaged. Romford was hit by two more rockets in January 1945, four in February and, as if Kammler were firing off his stocks in a final burst of defiance, seven in March, one of which landed close to the County High School for Girls, as one of its not over-enthusiastic scholars, then aged fourteen and living in Upminster, still remembers:

There was a loud bang just as I was leaving for school . . . and I jokingly said to my mother . . . ‘I bet that’s hit my school.’ I walked the short distance to the town centre and caught one of the local buses . . . got off and started to walk down a long road. . . . At the end of the road was a park which I had to cross . . . and as I reached the gateway I had to pick my way through clods of earth and other debris which littered the pavement. There were some workmen there clearing up the mess and one said to me, ‘There’ll be no school for you today, love’. . . .

As I entered the park I could see the crater, not a very big one, in the far corner, just behind the school’s tennis courts, which were on the boundary of the school grounds and the park. . . . I couldn’t see how badly the school was damaged until I was past the tennis courts. Then I could see that the prefabricated science laboratory, which stood about a hundred yards from the main building, was in a state of collapse like a house of cards. Once inside the main building I could see whole window frames in the corridors leaning inwards, but most of the glass was still in them, as it had been shatter-proofed. After a while, a roll-call was taken and we were allowed briefly into the classrooms to collect our books and possessions. . . . We were dismissed for the Easter holidays two weeks early, which pleased us all. However, our joy was short-lived when we learned we would be returning a week sooner than originally scheduled, so the V-2 only got us one extra week’s holiday.

Romford continued to attract rockets till the very end of the campaign. It suffered a second ‘outstanding incident’ at Harold Wood in mid-February, when 12 people were killed and 34 injured, and its last two V-2s did not arrive till Monday, 26 March 1945. The first destroyed 16 hourses in the Forest Road area, killing two people; the last, with unintended irony, demolished the so-called Victory Hut, in Noak Hill, but harmed no one.

Next door to Romford was Hornchurch, where two rows of houses were almost levelled to the ground in mid-December 1944 and it took eight hours to extract the last trapped person from the ruins, but there were no fatal casualties. In another incident, remembered by a woman, then a bright-eyed six-year-old, attending the Ardleigh Green infants’ school, the town was less fortunate:

I was sitting at my desk . . . when suddenly there was a big bang and the ceiling in our classroom started to collapse. We all scrambled under our desk and crouched there terrified wondering what had happened. Evidently a V-2 had landed on a small factory (Lacrinoid’s) situated behind our school and killed several of the workers.

I don’t remember anybody in my class being hurt but, as the explosion had burst the water pipes and hot water was streaming down the corridors, we were all hurriedly sent home. It was bitterly cold at the time and I can remember people complaining when they were clearing up the mess from the shattered windows that they couldn’t tell the difference between lumps of glass and lumps of ice. I went rushing home from school worried that my mother might have been hurt, but when I got home, although every window in the household had been blasted away, my mum was standing in the kitchen with her hat and coat on, doing the washing-up as if nothing had happened.

Churches and clergy enjoyed no special protection, as many elsewere in Essex could have testified, but the rector of Laindon-cum-Basildon was particularly unlucky, suffering, his brother (whose own experiences in East Ham will be described later) remembers, twice in successive days. The first explosion wrecked his car in its garage in the rectory grounds, while ‘The following day another rocket completely demolished the rectory and . . . my brother and his wife and children had to move to Billericay.’

Rainham was the site of another of Essex’s ‘outstanding incidents’, shortly before midnight on Monday, 15 January 1945, when 14 people were killed and 4 seriously injured. Another, happily less lethal, rocket made her wedding day doubly memorably for a GI bride who was kneeling beside her future husband at the altar rail of a local church when its walls were struck by pieces of a V-2 which had come down 200 yards away and also blew the windows in. The groom reacted, all agreed, with a composure that could have been British, and, though the people and their guests instinctively ducked, the service went on. As the guests left fire engines and ambulances went roaring past, prompting an apt comment from the new husband: ‘Waal, I wanted a war wedding and I guess I’ve got one!’

Purfleet, a little lower down the river than Rainham, was the scene of one of the lucky escapes which could be set against the all too frequent disasters. A rocket scored a direct hit on the Thames Board Mills, producing all kinds of packaging material for munitions, but though ‘It wrecked the Pump House and the water supply lines’ and ‘did extensive damage to the neighbouring property’, as the firm’s war history recorded, it failed to start a major fire.

For shopkeepers the rockets added one more burden to a life already governed by regulations and coupons. One wartime WAAF, whose parents owned a children’s outfitting and wool shop in Grays, between Purfleet and Tilbury, remembers how, during a visit home, a ‘tremendous explosion’ sent her sister cycling into town to see what had happened to the family business:

She managed to ring through to tell us to come quickly. . . . We tore to the shop and found the roof off, plate-glass windows blown indoors and windows hanging on hinges, stock turn to shreds in the windows, splinters of glass and chaos everywhere. . . . My father had to spend the night on the premises as it was completely open and customers came in the next day for wool which had been reserved for them. The bomb had fallen at the rear of the old public library, demolishing many houses in Cromwell Road and killing a few people. . . . Tarpaulins were in great demand. My father nearly had a fight to get one for the shop roof, as children’s clothing and wool was in short supply and rationed to us by suppliers.