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By Root 1663 0

and sisters. ‘It was 6.30 a.m. on Friday, 13 October 1944. We were all lying in bed, when we heard the flying bomb come over. We knew it could drop anywhere as we could hear it flying over the house. We were terrified. I was sharing a bed with my four brothers and we all huddled together under the bedclothes.’ His father was abroad, serving in the British Army, which was at that time attacking and shutting down launch sites in northern France in the aftermath of the Normandy invasion. (This did not end the attacks, however, as some V-1s were launched from modified Heinkel He-111 bombers after the fall of the northern France launch sites.) ‘The bomb missed the house,’ recalled Smith, ‘but it dropped 120 yards away, in Russell Gardens. The force of the bomb caused the roof and ceilings of our house to fall in and the windows were also blown out by the blast. Despite the bomb, my mum still sent me to school.’ They were a tough generation, and the Smith family was fortunate; in all, more than 24,000 Britons were casualties of the Führer’s vicious ‘secret weapon’, with 5,475 of them dying. One of the most nerve-wracking aspects of the campaign for Britons was the way that the attacks came round the clock, allowing for no respite. Whereas the Luftwaffe had long since confined its attacks to night-time, when its bombers could be cloaked in darkness and hidden from RAF fighters, the pilotless bombs came all through the day and night. At one point during the initial assault in July and August 1944 10,000 homes were damaged every day. By late August over 1.5 million children had been evacuated from the south-east.

The huge ground-space that the V-1 could devastate – a single flying bomb might damage an area covering a quarter of a square mile – made it a particularly dangerous weapon, although the defenders quickly adapted. Between June and September 1944, for example, 3,912 were brought down by anti-aircraft fire, RAF fighters and barrage balloons. It soon became clear that Hitler, who had hoped that V-1s might destroy British morale and force the Government to sue for peace, was wrong about the weapon’s potential. He therefore placed hopes in the V-2, which had been devised at the Peenemünde research centre in Pomerania and which comprised ground-breaking rocket technology. It was a supersonic ballistic missile, flying faster than the speed of sound, so the first thing its victims heard was the detonation. No air-raid sirens could be sounded or warnings given, which added to the terror, and there was no possibility of interception because it flew at 3,600mph, ten times faster than the Spitfire.

The gyroscopically stabilized fin guided this huge, 13-ton machine for distances of up to 220 miles. It was originally intended to be loaded with poison gas, and only had its 1-ton high-explosive warhead attached later. Its astonishing speed came from a mixture of alcohol and liquid oxygen being pumped into the motor by two centrifugal pumps driven by turbines and heated to 2,700 Celsius. It could fly at a maximum height of 100,000 feet. The V-2 was enormous: 46 feet high, with a diameter of over 5 feet in the middle, and 12 feet down by the fins, it was by far the biggest weapon of its kind. Launched from an upright position from vehicles that simply drove off after firing, it did not even have launch-pad installations – as most V-1s needed – that the Allies could bomb and overrun. (Both V-weapons can be seen today at the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth, London.)

With production at full capacity in the autumn of 1944, Hitler hoped that London could be bombed into submission before the Allies could reach Germany and destroy the Third Reich. Yet it was largely his own fault that the V-2 came on stream so late. If he had given high priority to it in 1942, its teething problems might have been sorted out in time to mass-produce it in 1943 rather than 1944.59 Of course increased rocket production would have had to take the place of some other weapon programmes, be they for warplanes, tanks or submarines. There were a high proportion of misfires,