The last months of the V-2

By mid-March 1945 the war in Europe was entering its final phase. The Western armies stood on the Rhine and had already seized the bridge at Remagen, the Red Army on the Oder was preparing to advance on Berlin, and the Germans were losing one industrial region after another. Even so, German rockets were still exploding in London and Antwerp, day after day and without warning. War chronologies record under 15 March that V-2 missiles were still falling on England and Belgium, and rightly so: the bombardment, which had begun in September 1944 with the first rockets fired at Paris and London, went on for almost two more weeks. It ended not because the Allies had found an answer to the weapon, but because the ground forces cut the launchers off from their targets.

The “vengeance” weapon in the last winter of the war

The V-2 – originally the Aggregat 4, the ballistic missile developed by the team of Wernher von Braun and Walter Dornberger – was by 1945 a weapon of no practical military significance, but it was still a danger to civilians. Its warhead carried roughly a tonne of explosive, the rocket came down at several times the speed of sound, and the air defences had no means of intercepting it. Its targets were no longer factories or airfields but great cities: London, which was to be punished for the bombing of Germany, and Antwerp, whose port had been the main supply port of the Allied armies since it was opened to shipping at the end of November 1944.

From the autumn of 1944 the rocket units came under SS-Gruppenführer Hans Kammler, an SS engineer who had earlier built concentration camps and from 1943 had directed the transfer of rocket production to underground tunnels. At the beginning of 1945 he concentrated in his own hands the command of all the “V” weapons, which were placed directly under Heinrich Himmler – although, as historians of the programme stress, he could no longer change either the scale of production or the situation at the front. The rockets were brought by rail from the underground Mittelwerk factory in the Harz mountains, near Nordhausen, across Germany to the Netherlands, where they were fuelled and fired from mobile sites.

London was targeted by batteries positioned in and around The Hague – in the Haagse Bos woods, in the parks of Scheveningen, at the Duindigt racecourse and in Wassenaar. The Hague lay about 320 kilometres from London, almost at the limit of the rocket’s range, but it was the only place from which the city could still be reached. Antwerp and other targets in Belgium were fired on from deeper inside the eastern Netherlands and from western Germany. The rockets were hidden among trees and in streets between houses, and launches often took place in broad daylight, in full view of the inhabitants of Dutch towns, for whom every failed launch – and there were many – meant the risk of a rocket falling on their own neighbourhood.

London and Antwerp in March

The winter of 1944–1945 brought the heaviest period of the bombardment. In November, when he first admitted in the House of Commons that rockets were falling on England, Winston Churchill had held out the prospect that the launch sites would soon be overrun. Instead the front in the Netherlands came to a halt after the failure at Arnhem, and the Germans were able to fire from around The Hague all winter. The most tragic hit of this period in London came on 25 November 1944, when a rocket destroyed the Woolworths store in New Cross, killing 168 people.

March brought no relief. In the late morning of 8 March 1945 a rocket fell on the northern edge of Smithfield meat market in the City of London, at Charterhouse Street and Farringdon Road. The blast destroyed market buildings, damaged the railway tunnel beneath them and, according to British tallies, killed more than a hundred people – the most commonly cited figure is 110. After each such strike civil defence rescuers spent hours, sometimes days, digging the buried out of the rubble. Rockets also fell on the suburbs and on the counties around the capital, especially Kent and Essex, where many of them landed far from their target. British counter-intelligence meanwhile kept up a deception in which turned German agents reported supposed hits in the centre, suggesting that the rockets were overshooting. The Germans therefore shortened their aim, and more than half the rockets aimed at London fell short of the boundary of the London civil defence region.

In Belgium the main victim of the bombardment was Antwerp. V-2 rockets and V-1 flying bombs fell on the city and its surroundings at the same time, and the anti-aircraft defences – British and American batteries grouped under a command known as “Antwerp X” – could fight only the latter. The greatest tragedy was the rocket that struck the Rex cinema during a screening on 16 December 1944, killing 567 people, among them nearly three hundred Allied soldiers. Despite the bombardment the port kept working – dockers and soldiers unloaded ships under fire – and the losses in cargo handling proved smaller than the German command had counted on. Individual rockets also hit Liège, Hasselt and other Belgian towns.

The defences powerless

There was no active defence against the V-2. Radar could detect a rocket in flight, but it could be neither shot down nor warned of. All the Allies could do was attack what happened before launch: the rail transports, the stores of fuel and liquid oxygen, the firing sites. Throughout the winter RAF fighter-bombers – mainly Spitfires – dived on targets spotted around The Hague, but the mobile batteries were easy to move, and every bomb dropped in a densely built-up city threatened the lives of Dutch civilians.

That threat was realised in the worst possible way on 3 March 1945. RAF medium bombers were to attack suspected rocket stores in the Haagse Bos, but an error in plotting the target led them to bomb the neighbouring residential district instead. The bombing of Bezuidenhout killed more than 500 residents (at least 531 according to more recent research) and left thousands homeless, yet it had no effect whatever on the bombardment of London: rockets went on rising from around The Hague in the days that followed.

For months the commander of Britain’s anti-aircraft defences, General Frederick Pile, had been working on a plan to fire a barrage of shells from guns deployed in London into the calculated path of an incoming rocket. By March the radars could already predict the point of impact with considerable accuracy, and on 26 March Pile was instructed to work out the odds in detail together with the scientists. The report drawn up three days later rated them modestly: by its reckoning, even several thousand shells gave only a slight chance of bringing down a single rocket. The attempt was never made. As Pile later put it, “Monty beat us to it” – the bombardment ended with the advance of the ground forces.

The last two weeks

At the same time the Germans used the V-2 against a tactical target for the first and only time. After the Americans had seized the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen, Hitler demanded its destruction by every possible means. On 17 March batteries near Hellendoorn in the eastern Netherlands fired eleven rockets at the bridge. None hit it – the closest fell several hundred metres from the crossing, and one as far away as Cologne – but several struck the small town of Remagen, killing at least six American soldiers. The bridge collapsed the same day for other reasons.

At the beginning of March the Germans also resumed the bombardment of London with flying bombs. From 3 March modified, extended-range V-1s, fired from ground launchers in the western Netherlands, were again crossing over England, although most of them were shot down by fighters and anti-aircraft guns. According to British records, the last flying bomb of this type reached England on 29 March; the last V-1s were fired at Antwerp a day later.

The heaviest blow came at the very end. Early on the morning of 27 March 1945 a rocket hit Hughes Mansions, a working-class block of flats on Vallance Road in Stepney, in London’s East End. It killed 134 residents, most of them East End Jews. That afternoon the last V-2 to fall on England struck Kynaston Road in Orpington, Kent; it killed 34-year-old Ivy Millichamp, regarded as the last civilian victim of German attacks on Britain. Rockets were still falling in Belgium, but within a few days the bombardment stopped there too.

What brought the campaign to an end was not bombs or guns but the successes of the armies on the ground. In the last ten days of March the Allies crossed the Rhine at Oppenheim, Rees and Wesel and pushed into Germany, threatening to cut off the units stationed in the western Netherlands from the Reich. The batteries around The Hague were accordingly withdrawn eastwards, and at the end of the month the German rocket units ceased fire: there was no longer anywhere in the Netherlands from which a rocket could reach London.

The balance sheet

According to figures cited in the literature, the Germans fired about 3,170 V-2 rockets at Allied targets. About 1,660 of them were aimed at Belgium, including about 1,610 at Antwerp and the rest at Liège, Hasselt and other towns. About 1,400 were directed at Britain – nearly 1,360 at London and several dozen at Norwich – and in addition several dozen at Lille, Paris and other French towns, and a dozen or so at Maastricht in the Netherlands. British figures give 2,754 killed and 6,523 injured in London, an average of two deaths for every rocket fired towards the capital. In the Antwerp area, according to Belgian tallies, V-1s and V-2s killed more than 1,700 people and injured about 4,500; thousands of buildings were destroyed or damaged.

Behind these figures lies another, heavier reckoning. The rockets were built in the underground Mittelwerk factory by prisoners of the Mittelbau-Dora camp – Russians, Poles, Frenchmen and people of many other nationalities, working in inhuman conditions in the tunnels beneath the Kohnstein hill. According to estimates by the Mittelbau-Dora Memorial, no fewer than 20,000 of the roughly 60,000 prisoners died in the complex as a whole. Producing the V-2 thus cost more human lives than using it. In March 1945 the tunnels were still working and thousands of prisoners were dying of exhaustion; the camp would not be liberated by American troops until April.

Its place in the war

The V-2 campaign was the final chord of the German air war against Britain, which had begun with the Blitz in 1940 and continued in the summer of 1944 with the V-1 flying bombs. Militarily it changed nothing: it did not stop supplies through Antwerp, it did not break the morale of Londoners and it did not delay the Allied advance. A post-war analysis by the British War Office described the rocket as a “super-gun”, conceived more to impress the highest circles of the Reich than as part of a considered strategic plan. The programme also swallowed enormous resources – comparable, according to the American historian Michael Neufeld, to the cost of the American atomic bomb project – which Germany could have devoted to fighters or anti-aircraft weapons.

The rocket’s significance lay elsewhere. It was the first ballistic missile used in war and a harbinger of the weapon that, combined with a nuclear warhead, was to dominate the strategy of the great powers after 1945. As the war drew to a close, von Braun’s team, evacuated in February 1945 from Peenemünde to Thuringia, looked for a way to surrender to the Americans; after the capitulation many of its members went to the United States under Operation Paperclip, while others worked for the Soviet Union. Those careers – and the triumphs of post-war spaceflight – had been paid for in advance by the prisoners of Dora and by the people of London, Antwerp and The Hague, the last of whom died in March 1945, a few weeks before the end of the war in Europe.