The first V-2 rockets

On the morning of 8 September 1944 an A4 ballistic missile lifted off from a wood near the Belgian municipality of Gouvy in the Ardennes – the weapon that German propaganda called the V-2, the second “vengeance weapon” (Vergeltungswaffe). Its target was Paris, liberated a fortnight earlier. After about five minutes of flight the rocket came down on Maisons-Alfort on the outskirts of Paris, on houses in the rue des Ormes and rue des Sapins. According to French accounts six people were killed and 36 injured; some English-language sources place the point of impact somewhat closer to the city, near the Porte d’Italie. It was the first ballistic missile in history to reach its target in combat.

That evening two rockets were fired at London from the outskirts of The Hague, from the Wassenaar area. At 6.43 p.m. the first fell on Staveley Road in Chiswick, a district in the west of the city. The explosion blasted a deep crater in the road, destroyed several houses and damaged dozens more. Three people were killed: 63-year-old Ada Harrison, three-year-old Rosemary Clarke and Sapper Bernard Browning of the Royal Engineers, who happened to be on leave; about twenty were injured. A dozen or so seconds later the second rocket fell in Parndon Wood near Epping in Essex, harming no one.

War chronologies record under 8 September the first successful combat use of the V-2: two rockets fired at London and one at Paris, and the death of a woman in Chiswick. This is broadly accurate, but two details need refining. The first rocket that day was aimed at Paris, not London – and it was the first of all to reach its target, since two earlier attempts to bombard Paris on 6–7 September had, according to the sources, ended in failure just after launch. And it was not only a woman who died in Chiswick: alongside Ada Harrison, a three-year-old girl and a soldier were killed.

A rocket from Peenemünde

The A4 was an army project. Rockets had been built for the army since the early 1930s by a team under General Walter Dornberger, whose technical director was Wernher von Braun, and from 1937 the team worked at the research centre at Peenemünde on the island of Usedom. The first successful launch took place on 3 October 1942. The rocket was 14 metres long and weighed some 12.5 tonnes at launch, nearly two-thirds of which was fuel – ethyl alcohol mixed with water, and liquid oxygen. It carried a warhead with just under a tonne of amatol, climbed to an altitude of about 80–90 kilometres and, after a few minutes of flight, came down at several times the speed of sound. Its range was about 320 kilometres, and its accuracy – a dispersion of a dozen or so kilometres – meant it could hit only large areas, in other words cities.

After the RAF raid on Peenemünde in August 1943 – Operation Hydra – production was moved underground, into tunnels in the Kohnstein in the Harz mountains, and testing partly to an SS training ground near the village of Blizna in the General Government. There the intelligence service of the Home Army (AK) tracked launches and collected rocket debris for many months. In May 1944 Home Army soldiers secured an almost complete rocket that had come down by the Bug river, and on the night of 25/26 July its most important parts, together with reports, were flown to Brindisi aboard an aircraft that had landed on a field airstrip near Tarnów as part of the third Operation Most (Wildhorn III) (PL). The remains of another rocket, which fell in Sweden near Bäckebo on 13 June 1944, were handed over to the British by the Swedes. As a result, by the summer of 1944 London knew what kind of weapon it would face – although it still overestimated the warhead and wrongly believed the rocket was radio-guided.

In October 1943 the Army Ordnance Office ordered 12,000 rockets from the Mittelwerk company, whose underground factory was built and operated by concentration camp prisoners – first from the Dora sub-camp of Buchenwald and, from the autumn of 1944, from the independent Mittelbau-Dora camp. According to the Mittelbau-Dora Memorial, at least 20,000 of the complex’s roughly 60,000 prisoners died or were murdered – from exhaustion, hunger and disease in the unheated tunnels, in executions for alleged sabotage and during the evacuation of the camp. Historians agree that the production of the V-2 cost more lives than its use in combat.

Who fired them

The rockets were originally to be launched from enormous concrete bunkers in northern France, at Watten and Wizernes in the Pas-de-Calais, but from 1943 Allied aircraft bombed these so effectively under Operation Crossbow that the Germans opted for mobile launchers. The rocket travelled on a special trailer, the so-called Meillerwagen, which at a chosen spot – a forest road, a park, the edge of a housing estate – was raised to the vertical, and the missile was set on a small launch table. Once fuelled and fired, the column quickly drove off. A battery needed no permanent structures that could be spotted from the air and bombed.

Formally, the use of the V-2 came under General Erich Heinemann’s LXV Army Corps for special employment, which also directed the V-1 bombardment. After the 20 July plot, however, Heinrich Himmler took over command of the Replacement Army and, with it, influence over the rocket programme, and in August 1944 effective control of the military use of the rockets was given to SS General Hans Kammler, who had until then been responsible for building concentration camps and underground factories. Dornberger was removed from operational command and dealt with supplying the units. At the end of August Adolf Hitler ordered the bombardment to begin as soon as possible.

Two groups did the firing: the northern group, based on Artillery Battalion 485, and the southern group, with Battalion 836 and the training and test Battery 444. Under the original plans the batteries were to bombard London from northern France and Flanders, but the Allies, who in the first days of September liberated Antwerp and most of Belgium, pushed them back from the coast before they could take up positions there; the southern group withdrew into the Ardennes, towards the border of the Reich. That is why Paris became the first target, and why the only stretch of coast from which London could still be reached turned out to be the western Netherlands – the area around The Hague. Its parks and woods, as well as streets in its suburbs, were turned into launch sites for half a year; the people of The Hague saw and heard rockets being fired every day, and those that failed just after launch fell on their homes.

“Flying gas mains”

The rockets began falling on London just when the city had come to believe that the worst was over. The Allies were overrunning the V-1 launch sites in France, the government had announced the easing of the blackout, and on 7 September – the day before the explosion in Chiswick – Duncan Sandys, who headed the government committee on rocket weapons, told journalists that apart from a few last shots the Battle of London was over. His words referred to the flying bombs, but the press read them as the end of the threat from the air.

The explosion in Staveley Road was unlike anything London had known. There was no warning siren and no engine drone as with the V-1: the rocket arrived faster than sound, so the explosion came first and only then the roar of its flight – the double thunderclap that witnesses remembered. The War Cabinet decided to keep silent. It did not want to cause panic or tell the Germans where their missiles were falling and whether they were hitting their targets. The explosions in Chiswick, and in other districts over the following days, were officially or semi-officially attributed to gas explosions in damaged mains. Londoners soon realised what was happening and coined the ironic name “flying gas mains”.

The silence lasted two months. Only when a Wehrmacht communiqué announced on 8 November that the V-2 was being used against London – after Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda had been promising a new “vengeance weapon” for months – did Prime Minister Winston Churchill inform the House of Commons on 10 November that England had been the target of German rockets for several weeks. In British intelligence documents the rocket was code-named “Big Ben”.

Six months of bombardment

At first the bombardment was sparse – a few rockets a day – and its course depended on the situation at the front. In mid-September Battery 444 fired on London for several days from the island of Walcheren in Zeeland. When the Allies launched the airborne landings at Arnhem on 17 September, the northern group briefly left the area around The Hague; in the second half of the month some rockets were fired from Friesland at Norwich, and they began falling on London again from the beginning of October. In October Hitler named two main targets: London and Antwerp, whose port, now captured by the British, was to become the Allies’ main supply port. From then on the Belgian city received more rockets than any other.

According to figures cited in the literature, the Germans fired some 3,170 V-2 rockets at Allied targets: about 1,610 at Antwerp and nearly 1,360 at London, as well as at Liège, Norwich, Lille, Paris and other cities, and in March 1945 at the railway bridge at Remagen. Many failed or fell far from their targets; slightly more than five hundred landed within the London Civil Defence Region. British figures give 2,754 killed and 6,523 injured in London. In the Antwerp area, according to Belgian figures, V-1s and V-2s killed some 1,700 people.

The most tragic hits came in the last months of the war. On 25 November 1944 a rocket destroyed the Woolworths store in New Cross, London, packed with shoppers – 168 people were killed. On 16 December in Antwerp a V-2 struck the Rex cinema during a screening, killing 567 people, among them nearly three hundred Allied soldiers. On 27 March 1945 a rocket destroyed the Hughes Mansions block of flats in Stepney, killing 134 residents, most of them East End Jews. The same day the last V-2 to fall on England killed 34-year-old Ivy Millichamp in Orpington; she is regarded as the last civilian victim of German attacks on Britain. A few days later the last batteries withdrew from the Netherlands.

The total number of people killed by V-2 rockets is estimated at several thousand; according to a 2011 BBC documentary, it was about 9,000 civilians and military personnel. By comparison, at least a dozen or more thousand prisoners died in the slave-labour production of this weapon, and according to estimates by the Mittelbau-Dora Memorial no fewer than 20,000 people died across the whole complex.

A weapon with no defence

Against the V-1 the British had fighters, anti-aircraft batteries and barrage balloons, which in the summer of 1944 were bringing down an ever-greater share of the flying bombs. Against the V-2 they had nothing. The rocket fell from an altitude of tens of kilometres a few minutes after launch, and radar detected it only in flight, when it was too late to warn the population. For a time attempts were made to jam its supposed radio guidance, although most rockets did not use radio. The commander of Anti-Aircraft Command, General Frederick Pile, proposed firing a barrage of shells into the calculated path of an incoming rocket, but the idea was not put into practice before the end of the war.

That left attacking the launchers and their support. RAF fighter-bombers hunted transport columns, fuel dumps and launch sites over the Netherlands, but the mobile batteries were hard to spot. Attempts to strike their hiding places in densely built-up The Hague cost the lives of Dutch civilians: on 3 March 1945, owing to an error in target marking, bombers hit the Bezuidenhout district instead of the Haagse Bos woods, killing more than 500 people. According to British historians, a ruse proved more effective: German agents turned by British intelligence under the “Double Cross” system sent false reports suggesting that the rockets were overshooting their target, which led the Germans to shorten their range; as a result many missiles fell in less densely populated Kent.

In the end it was not air power but ground forces that ended the bombardment. Launches against London and Antwerp ceased only at the end of March 1945, when the Allies were crossing the Rhine and the last batteries, at risk of being cut off in the western Netherlands, were withdrawn to Germany.

Place in the war

Militarily, the V-2 changed nothing. It did not halt the Allies on the Western Front, did not close the port of Antwerp and did not break London’s morale. A rocket carried roughly as much explosive as a single heavy aerial bomb, and each cost many times more than a V-1. In the view of many historians, including British analysts immediately after the war, the money, raw materials and labour swallowed by the rocket programme – among them the work of thousands of engineers and tens of thousands of prisoners – would have served the Reich better in producing fighters or anti-aircraft weapons. For Hitler and Goebbels, however, it was above all a weapon of revenge and the promise of a miracle that would reverse a lost war – one of the Wunderwaffen with which propaganda fed the Germans until the last months.

The significance of the V-2 proved greater after the war than during it. It was the first long-range ballistic missile and the first man-made object to cross the conventional boundary of space. Under Operation Paperclip the Americans brought von Braun, Dornberger and more than a hundred specialists from Peenemünde to the United States, while the Soviet Union employed others and built its first ballistic missile on the model of the A4. Out of this experience grew both intercontinental missiles with nuclear warheads and the rockets that carried men to the Moon. The victims of Chiswick, Antwerp and the tunnels of Mittelbau-Dora remained in the shadow of this story; at the 1947 Dora trial it was mainly SS men and kapos who were tried, and most of the programme’s engineers never answered for the use of slave labour.