V-1s over Manchester

Before dawn on Sunday 24 December 1944, flying bombs appeared over the counties of northern England. The people of Manchester and the surrounding industrial towns had until then known them only from the newspapers and from the stories of relatives in London: since June 1944 V-1s had been falling on the capital and the south-eastern counties, while the north of the country was considered safe. That night, however, the Luftwaffe sent several dozen bombers out over the North Sea, and they launched missiles aimed at Manchester. It was the first and only flying-bomb attack on northern England.

War chronologies record under this date: “Manchester attacked by V-1 flying bombs”. The date is correct, and the entry needs only one clarification. Manchester was the target the Germans aimed at, but not the place where the missiles landed: according to British civil defence records, only one of them fell within the Manchester civil defence district, and most of the casualties were in neighbouring Oldham and Tottington and in places scattered across several counties.

Missiles from under the Heinkels’ wings

Flying bombs – the Fieseler Fi 103 pilotless aircraft – were at first launched from ground ramps in northern France. When the Allies, after landing in Normandy, overran the Pas-de-Calais in the summer of 1944, these sites were lost, and the missile’s range of about 250 kilometres did not allow it to reach England from deep inside the Netherlands or Germany. The Luftwaffe, however, had a second solution, tried out during the test phase: a missile slung under the wing of a Heinkel He 111 bomber could be launched in the air, over the sea, a few dozen kilometres off the British coast.

From July 1944 air-launched missiles fell on London and Southampton; this was the work of III Gruppe of the bomber wing KG 3, operating from airfields in the Netherlands. In the autumn, after those bases were lost, the unit was moved to northern Germany and redesignated I Gruppe of Kampfgeschwader 53, and soon the wing’s other Gruppen were also converted to the task. Specially adapted Heinkel He 111 H-22s were used. The crews took off at night and flew over the sea at a height of a few dozen metres, at most a hundred and fifty or so, to avoid British radar; at a designated point they climbed, launched the missile and immediately turned for home. It was a dangerous method: the heavy missile under the wing worsened the handling of an already obsolete aircraft, and flying just above the waves led to accidents. According to figures cited in the literature, some 1,200 missiles were launched in this way between July 1944 and January 1945; their accuracy was even worse than that of ground-launched missiles, because the launch point over the sea could be fixed only approximately.

Most of these attacks were aimed at London. The Christmas Eve raid departed from this pattern: instead of heading south, the Heinkels flew west towards the coasts of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, and the missiles were set for industrial Manchester, more than 100 kilometres inland.

Christmas Eve morning

According to accounts based on British civil defence reports and Luftwaffe documents, the missiles were launched between 5 and 6 a.m. on 24 December, about 40 miles (some 65 kilometres) off the east coast, along a stretch between Hornsea in Yorkshire and Mablethorpe in Lincolnshire. Each Heinkel carried one missile, so several dozen KG 53 aircraft took part in the raid. Of the 45 missiles launched – a figure repeated in most tallies – 14 fell into the sea immediately after launch or on the way to the coast, and about 30 (31 according to some tallies) crossed the coastline. The flight over England lasted a few dozen minutes; the missiles passed over a darkened Yorkshire and the Peak District, and observers reported the characteristic rasping sound of pulse-jet engines, hitherto known only in the south.

The scatter was enormous. One missile fell at 5.40 a.m. on farmland between Beighton and Holbrook, a few kilometres south-east of Sheffield – no one was killed, but according to local accounts the blast damaged some 150 buildings in the area. Others exploded on the Pennine moors, around Buxton, in Macclesfield Forest, near Edgworth and Sowerby, and at Oswaldtwistle in Lancashire. Several strayed far off course: one fell near Chester, one as far away as County Durham, and one in Northamptonshire. According to the most frequently cited tally, seven missiles reached the built-up area of today’s Greater Manchester, including at Stockport, Worsley and Radcliffe. Only one exploded within the civil defence district of Manchester itself – in the suburb of Didsbury.

Oldham and Tottington

The most tragic outcome was the missile that fell on Abbey Hills Road in Oldham, a textile town north-east of Manchester. The explosion destroyed a row of houses whose occupants were still asleep before the holiday. According to most accounts 27 people were killed and many others injured; some studies give a higher death toll, including those who later died in hospital.

The second scene of tragedy was Chapel Street in Tottington near Bury. There the missile destroyed a row of stone workers’ cottages; six people were killed (seven in some tallies). Today a memorial garden stands on the site of the explosion.

In all, the attack cost the lives of 42 people – the figure given by most studies; other tallies, adding up the victims in Oldham and elsewhere, give 44. There were 109 injured, 51 of them seriously. Compared with the raids on Manchester in December 1940, which claimed several hundred lives, these were small losses, but for the north of England, convinced that the worst was behind it, the Christmas Eve attack came as a shock – all the greater because it came without warning, on a holiday, a week before the end of a year in which people were already speaking openly of imminent victory.

Mosquitoes over the sea

The British defences were poorly prepared for such an attack. The Diver system, built in the summer of 1944 to combat flying bombs, concentrated anti-aircraft guns, barrage balloons and fighters on the approaches to London and, from the autumn, when the missiles began arriving from the sea, also on the coasts of Essex and Suffolk; further north the defences were much weaker, and over land there was practically nothing to stop missiles flying north-west at night. The only real chance was to catch the carrier aircraft before they launched their loads. RAF de Havilland Mosquito night fighters, guided by radar, patrolled over the sea that night. According to British and German records, one Heinkel was shot down over the North Sea, and another, badly damaged, crashed while making an emergency landing at Leck in Schleswig; one member of its crew was killed.

Why the Germans chose Manchester, and Christmas Eve, is not known for certain. The literature mentions several possible reasons: a wish to show that the “vengeance weapon” could reach every corner of Britain, not just London; an attempt to force the British to disperse their anti-aircraft defences; and finally the propaganda effect at a time when the German offensive in the Ardennes was under way and the Reich’s propaganda was seizing on any success that might sustain belief in a reversal of the war’s fortunes. None of these interpretations is unambiguously confirmed by a surviving order; all that is certain is that the attack was an act of terror, since a missile of such accuracy could not be used against a specific factory or railway junction.

The last act of the flying bombs

The Christmas Eve attack was not repeated. The Luftwaffe continued to launch missiles from aircraft for several more weeks, but only towards London; in January 1945, owing to a lack of fuel, mounting losses and the impossibility of assessing results, KG 53’s operations were halted. The wing itself suffered heavy losses in this campaign – according to figures cited in the literature, several dozen aircraft and their crews, most of them in accidents during night flights just above the sea rather than to enemy fire. In March 1945 the Germans resumed a brief bombardment of London with extended-range missiles launched from ramps in the Netherlands; the last V-1 fell on England at the end of March. Far more dangerous at that time were the V-2 rockets, against which there was no defence at all.

In the balance sheet of the air war over Britain the Christmas Eve attack on Manchester is a minor episode: a few dozen victims, compared with more than 6,000 killed by flying bombs in the London area alone. Its significance lay elsewhere. It showed that even in the last winter of the war, with the Allies standing at the borders of the Reich, Germany could strike any town in England, and it reminded the people of the north that the war had not ended with the blackout and the Blitz of 1940. In Oldham, which lost 27 of its inhabitants in an instant, the memory of that Christmas Eve morning of 1944 lives on to this day.