V-2s over England

On Friday 10 November 1944 Prime Minister Winston Churchill rose in the House of Commons with a short statement that London had been waiting for for two months. “For the last few weeks,” he said, according to Hansard, “the enemy has been using his new weapon, the long-range rocket, and a number have landed at widely scattered points in this country.” With that the government admitted officially for the first time what the inhabitants of the capital’s eastern and southern districts had long known: that the explosions which since 8 September had been demolishing houses without any warning were not gas explosions but strikes by V-2 rockets.

Popular war chronologies record under 10 November that V-2 rockets were continuing to fall on Britain at a rate of about eight a day. The entry conveys the scale of the bombardment but needs two qualifications. First, the figure is an approximation: tallies of launches compiled from British civil defence reports and German battery records indicate that in November an average of six to eight rockets a day were fired at England from around The Hague, on some days more than ten and on others only one; nor did all of them arrive. Second, the most important event of the day was not the rate of fire itself but the Prime Minister’s statement, which ended the period of official silence.

Two months of “gas mains”

The first rocket to fall on London, on Staveley Road in Chiswick on 8 September, killed three people. The authorities issued no statement. Explosions in the following weeks were attributed – officially or semi-officially – to burst gas pipes, and the censored press could not write about a new weapon. Londoners soon saw through the explanation and began to speak wryly of “flying gas mains”. The rumour spread all the more easily because only the day before Chiswick Duncan Sandys, chairman of the government committee on rocket weapons, had announced that the Battle of London – meaning the battle against the V-1 flying bombs – was practically over, and the government had announced the easing of the blackout.

The government’s silence was deliberate. Churchill explained to the House that any mention might give the enemy valuable information – above all about where the rockets were falling and whether they were hitting their target. The Germans had no air reconnaissance over England, and their information about the effects of the bombardment came largely from the press and from agents, many of whom were in fact double agents controlled by British intelligence. Official silence gave London an advantage: the enemy did not know whether his rockets were falling on the centre of the city or on the fields of Essex.

What changed the situation was German propaganda. On Wednesday 8 November a communiqué of the Wehrmacht High Command announced for the first time that London had for some time been under fire from a new weapon, the “V-2”, and Joseph Goebbels’s ministry put out colourful descriptions of supposed devastation. After that announcement continued silence made little sense.

The Prime Minister’s statement

Churchill’s statement was short and carefully balanced. He reminded the House that he had warned it of German preparations for a rocket attack in February and again on 6 July. He admitted that rockets had been falling on England for some weeks but assured members that the casualties and damage had so far “not been heavy”, and expressed sympathy with the victims. He gave a few technical facts: the warhead contained roughly as much explosive as a flying bomb but penetrated deeper, so that it did more damage to everything close to the crater, while its blast reached less far; the rocket climbed to 60–70 miles and travelled faster than sound, so that “in present circumstances” no effective warning could be given to the public.

Churchill also mentioned that some of the rockets had been fired from the island of Walcheren, which was now in Allied hands – the fighting for it, begun with the landing of 1 November, had ended two days earlier as part of the Battle of the Scheldt. Other launching areas, he said, would in due course be overrun by the advancing armies, though he cautioned that the Germans might increase the range of their rockets or move the launchers further east. He described the Wehrmacht communiqué as a reflection of what the German government wished its own people to believe, and the whole campaign as another attempt to break the morale of the civilian population in the vain hope of averting defeat. He asked the House, the press and the public not to give the enemy information he had not obtained by other means. When the MP William Thorne asked whether it was possible to discover where “these torpedo bombs” were being launched from, he replied only that a great deal of attention was being given to the matter.

The statement did not change the censorship rules: the press still could not report where and when a rocket had fallen. But it did at last allow the thing to be called by its name. The bombardment itself, meanwhile, went on – according to tallies based on British reports, on the same day a rocket destroyed a block of flats in Stepney, killing 23 people, and another fell near the railway station at Hornsey, killing eight.

The batteries around The Hague

In November London was being fired on by the northern group, whose batteries – mainly Training and Experimental Battery 444 and the 2nd Battery of Artillery Detachment 485 – were deployed in and around The Hague: in the parks and woods of Scheveningen, in the Haagse Bos wood, at the Duindigt racecourse and in suburban Wassenaar. The Hague lay about 320 kilometres from London, almost at the limit of the rocket’s range. The rockets were brought in by rail and truck and hidden at night in parks and in streets between houses, and launches often took place in broad daylight, within sight of the city’s inhabitants. From the autumn the whole operation was directed on behalf of the SS by Hans Kammler, for whom Heinrich Himmler had obtained from Hitler control of the rocket weapon, taken away from the army.

The southern group, deployed in the Hunsrück hills in the west of the Reich, was meanwhile firing at Antwerp. In October Adolf Hitler had designated only two targets: London and the Belgian port, which since its liberation in September was to become the Allies’ main supply port. According to the same tallies, more rockets were fired at Antwerp and its surroundings in November than at London, joined by hundreds of V-1 flying bombs. The port, still closed to shipping as long as the Scheldt estuary was in German hands, was due to open to traffic at the end of the month.

A weapon without a defence

Admitting the existence of the rockets also meant admitting that there was no defence against them. Against the V-1 the British air defences had learned in the summer of 1944 to bring down most of their targets – with fighters, guns and barrage balloons. A rocket that after a few minutes’ flight fell from a height of dozens of kilometres at several times the speed of sound was beyond the reach of any weapon of the time. Radars and sound-ranging stations in Kent recorded launches and impacts, which made it possible to locate the launch area but not to warn the public. The explosion was the first signal; the roar of the incoming rocket was heard only afterwards.

What remained was to strike at the rear. RAF fighters and fighter-bombers – mainly Spitfires of Fighter Command squadrons – patrolled the area around The Hague, attacking transport columns, railway lines, depots and suspected launch sites. But the mobile batteries changed positions easily, and their hiding places lay in a densely populated city, where every missed attack killed Dutch civilians. Raids on German liquid-oxygen plants and fuel depots also had limited effect. British intelligence historians credit deception with some success: double agents of the “Double Cross” system sent the Germans reports suggesting that the rockets were overshooting the centre, which led the crews to shorten their range and shifted the points of impact towards the less populated suburbs and the counties around London.

The November toll

In the weeks that followed the bombardment did not slacken. On 25 November, during the lunchtime shopping hour, a rocket fell on the Woolworths store in New Cross in south-east London; 168 people were killed, among them many women and children as well as the passengers of a passing bus. It was the worst disaster caused by a single rocket in Britain. According to tallies based on British civil defence reports, in November alone V-2s killed several hundred people in England.

By the end of the bombardment on 27 March 1945 the Germans had fired about 1,400 rockets at Britain – almost all at London, a few dozen at Norwich. British figures give 2,754 killed and 6,523 seriously injured in London; studies giving a total for the whole country speak of 2,700–2,900 dead, meaning an average of about two deaths for every rocket fired. Antwerp, at which more than 1,600 rockets were aimed, suffered comparable losses.

Place in the war

The statement of 10 November closed the brief period in which London had tried to treat the rockets as a military secret, and opened the last chapter of the German “war of reprisal”. For the people of the capital a sixth wartime winter was beginning, all the more depressing because in the autumn it had seemed that the worst was over. Yet the V-2 could not change the course of the war: the rocket’s payload was small, its accuracy poor, and the combined payload of all the rockets fired at England – some 1,400 tonnes of explosive – was less than the tonnage of a single large Allied raid on a German city in the autumn of 1944. It neither broke London’s morale nor closed Antwerp.

For Wernher von Braun and his team it was also the first campaign in history with ballistic missiles – a weapon which after the war, combined with a nuclear warhead, would transform the strategy of the great powers. The bombardment of England ended in the spring of 1945 not because of air defence but because the Allied armies, after crossing the Rhine, cut off the last batteries in the western Netherlands and forced them to withdraw. Before that, on 3 March 1945, a raid on the launch sites in the Haagse Bos missed its target and destroyed the Bezuidenhout district, killing more than 500 inhabitants of The Hague.