Flying bombs over London

At the beginning of July 1944 the German flying-bomb offensive was already in its third week. Since the night of 12/13 June, when the first V-1s took off from launch sites in northern France, dozens had been falling every day on London and the counties of south-east England, and on the worst days more than a hundred. War chronologies record under 2 July that V-1s continue to wreak havoc in south-east England, destroying homes and killing people. This describes not a single event on that day but a state of affairs – and as such it is accurate. The first weeks of July brought fresh casualties, the second great evacuation of London, a report by the Prime Minister to Parliament and the reorganisation of the British defences to fight a new enemy.

The Fieseler Fi 103, which Hitler’s propaganda called the first “retaliation weapon” (Vergeltungswaffe), was a pilotless aircraft with a pulse-jet engine and a warhead weighing about 850 kilograms. It could not be aimed at a specific target: an autopilot held its course, and a simple counter cut off the fuel after a set distance, whereupon the missile dived wherever it happened to be. The target was London as a whole. The British called the V-1 the buzz bomb or doodlebug, and quickly learned to dread the moment when the characteristic drone of its engine stopped – it meant an explosion would follow within a dozen or so seconds.

Casualties at the turn of June and July

Most of the missiles fell on the southern and south-eastern districts and suburbs of London, over which they flew – Croydon suffered worst. But flying bombs also struck the centre itself. On 30 June, at lunchtime, a V-1 exploded in the Aldwych in front of Bush House; according to various tallies, between 46 and 48 people were killed, most of them office workers and passers-by. Early that same morning in Kent a missile – hit beforehand, according to local accounts, by anti-aircraft fire from the North Downs – clipped a tree and fell on Weald House in the village of Crockham Hill, where the London County Council had set up a nursery for children evacuated from the city. Twenty-two of the 30 children were killed, all of them under five, as well as eight of the eleven nurses and staff. It was the largest single loss of civilian life in Kent during the entire war.

At 7.47 a.m. on 3 July a missile fell on Sloane Court East in the London district of Chelsea, where soldiers of the American 130th Chemical Company were billeted in quarters on Turks Row. The number of victims is uncertain: a memorial plaque names 74 American servicemen and three civilians, while other tallies speak of at least 66 soldiers and nine civilians. It was the deadliest V-1 explosion for the Americans and – after the hit on the Guards Chapel on 18 June – the second-worst disaster of the campaign in London by number of dead. Because of censorship the press reported it only in general terms.

Such was everyday life in those weeks: a single missile could flatten several houses in a terrace and shatter windows for hundreds of metres around. People once again slept in Underground stations, as in the days of the Blitz of 1940–1941, and Herbert Morrison, the Minister of Home Security, warned the Cabinet that weary Londoners were bearing round-the-clock bombardment worse than the night raids of the past.

Rivulet, the third evacuation

In the spring of 1944 officials had been preparing for the return to London of children evacuated in earlier years. The flying bombs wrecked those plans. At the beginning of July the last great evacuation of the war began, under the code name Rivulet – following Operation Pied Piper of September 1939, carried out as part of Britain’s preparations for war, and the wave of departures during the Blitz. This time those taken out of London and the threatened towns of south-east England were above all unaccompanied children, mothers with small children, pregnant women, and elderly and disabled people – sent to the western counties, the Midlands and the north of the country. According to British studies, the government organised the departure of some 100,000 unaccompanied children that summer, and counting mothers, the elderly and those who left on their own initiative, more than a million people left London and its surroundings between July and September.

Londoners themselves understood, however, that leaving offered no certainty – the tragedy at Crockham Hill had shown that a missile, shot down or straying, could also fall on the countryside to which children had been sent. The evacuation formally ended on 7 September 1944, when the launch sites in the Pas-de-Calais were already in Allied hands, although the government went on discouraging people from returning for a long time afterwards.

Churchill before the House of Commons

In the first days of the bombardment the government tried to say little about it, so as not to give the Germans information on its effects. On 6 July, however, Winston Churchill gave the House of Commons a full statement. He spoke of the intelligence warnings of 1943, of the raid on Peenemünde – Operation Hydra – and of the bombing of a hundred launch sites in France; by his account some 50,000 tons of bombs had so far been dropped on targets connected with flying bombs and rockets in France and Germany. He also gave figures that have passed into the history of the campaign: up to that morning the Germans had launched 2,754 flying bombs, which had killed 2,752 people; about 8,000 injured had been detained in hospital, not counting the lightly hurt treated at first-aid posts. He announced that penicillin, until then reserved for the armed forces, would be available to all those injured by flying bombs.

He called the missile a weapon “literally and essentially indiscriminate in its nature, purpose and effect”. He promised that children would be evacuated if their parents wished, and that mothers with small children and pregnant women would receive full help from the state. London MPs pressed him about the elderly, about mothers of older children and about the shortage of workers to patch roofs – repairs, as the Prime Minister himself admitted, were not keeping pace with the damage. When asked about reprisals, Churchill replied that he did not intend to comment on the matter.

Behind closed doors he was considering them seriously. That same day, in a minute to General Hastings Ismay, his chief of staff, he directed – as the surviving document shows – that the use of poison gas against Germany be considered “very seriously”, and brushed aside moral objections as absurd in this matter. At the end of July the Chiefs of Staff replied with an unfavourable opinion – they judged that gas would not decide the war but would provoke German retaliation – and the Prime Minister did not pursue the matter.

Doodlebug Alley

The missiles came in over the English Channel and crossed the coast in Kent and Sussex, from where they still had several dozen kilometres to go to London. Local people called this belt of villages, orchards and hop gardens Doodlebug Alley. It was here that the real defensive battle was fought, and here that many of the missiles fell – those shot down by fighters and guns, and those that simply ran out of fuel. The defence was organised by Air Marshal Roderic Hill, commander of the home air defence fighters (Air Defence of Great Britain), together with General Frederick Pile of Anti-Aircraft Command. The June plan provided for three belts: fighters over the sea and over Kent, guns on the North Downs, and a balloon barrage on the approaches to the capital.

Only the fastest aircraft were suited to the chase, because the V-1 flew at some 600 kilometres per hour at a height of a few hundred metres. The most effective was the Hawker Tempest; alongside it flew Mark XIV Spitfires, Mustangs and, at night, Mosquitoes. Pilots fired at close range, at the risk of the exploding warhead destroying their own aircraft too; some learned to tip the missile with a wingtip to throw it off balance. Polish squadrons also took part in the chases. In July the first British jet fighters, the Gloster Meteors of No. 616 Squadron, were committed to the battle; they flew their first operational sorties at the end of the month, but did not destroy their first missiles until 4 August.

The first weeks exposed the weakness of the plan. Fighters and guns got in each other’s way, and the gunners on the North Downs, in a densely built-up area, had too little time to aim. According to Basil Collier, the British official historian of home defence, on 13–14 July Hill and Pile decided, with their superiors’ consent, to move the heavy and light guns right down to the sea, to the stretch of coast from around Beachy Head to Dover. Moving hundreds of guns, men and stocks of ammunition took several days and was completed on 17 July. On the coast the guns could fire out over the water without endangering the inhabitants, and the fighters were given a free zone over the land. The guns had new fire-control radars and American shells with proximity fuzes, which exploded near the target without a direct hit. In their very first week in the new positions, according to British figures, they shot down 17 per cent of the missiles entering their zone, and in August the majority.

Bombs on depots and the game over the aiming point

At the same time Operation Crossbow continued – the bombing of the launch sites, depots and factories of the V-weapons. According to British tallies, in July and August 1944 it absorbed more than a quarter of the bomb tonnage dropped by the strategic air forces, at the expense of attacks on German industry, which caused disputes among the commanders. Many raids hit sites that had already been abandoned, since the new, light launch ramps were easy to hide in copses and orchards. Attacks on missile depots proved more effective: on the nights of 4/5 and 7/8 July Lancasters of Bomber Command attacked underground storage sites in former quarries at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent on the Oise, using heavy Tallboy bombs among others; the second of these raids cost heavy losses to night fighters. Meanwhile the Luftwaffe began launching V-1s from Heinkel He 111 bombers flying over the sea – in July missiles launched in this way fell on Southampton, among other places.

A quiet intelligence game was also being played. The Germans asked their agents in England to report the places and times at which the missiles fell. All of these agents – among them Juan Pujol (“Garbo”) and Roman Czerniawski (“Brutus”) – were in fact working for the British. Their reports were prepared so as to point mainly to hits in north-west London and to leave out the times of the explosions; the Germans were meant to conclude that the missiles were overshooting the target and to shorten their range. The War Cabinet was unwilling to approve a move that shifted casualties from some districts to others, so the decision to start the deception was taken by a civil defence official, Sir Findlater Stewart, on his own responsibility, and Churchill approved it later. How effective it was remains disputed: the mean point of impact did indeed shift south-eastwards, towards the suburbs, but some historians attribute this rather to the fire of the defences.

Place in the war

The flying bombs did not change the course of the war, but in the summer of 1944 they were the most painful experience of it for the British since the Blitz – and this at a moment when, after the Normandy landings, the worst had seemed to be over. The exhaustion of Londoners, the forced evacuation and the enormous number of damaged homes – by mid-August, after two months of bombardment, they already ran into hundreds of thousands, and according to some tallies close to a million buildings – weighed on the state in the fifth year of the war. At the same time the V-1 offensive cost Germany a great deal: the production of thousands of missiles, and materials and manpower that were lacking elsewhere; and its aim – breaking the will of the British or forcing a halt to the invasion – proved unattainable.

The defences, reorganised on new principles in mid-July, were destroying most of the incoming missiles by August. The real end of the campaign over London, however, came only with the capture of the Pas-de-Calais coast by Allied troops at the turn of August and September. After that V-1s were still launched from aircraft over the North Sea and from sites in the Netherlands, and in the autumn most of them fell on Antwerp. From 8 September V-2 rockets, against which there was no defence, began to fall on London. According to British tallies, some 2,400 flying bombs fell on the London Civil Defence Region. Across Britain flying bombs killed 6,184 people and seriously injured almost 18,000, the great majority in London; there were also victims in Kent, Sussex and other counties.