The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [293]
It was at 6.40 p.m. on 8 September 1944 that the first V-2 landed on Britain, fired only five minutes earlier after being unloaded from a converted lorry in a suburban road in The Hague. Staveley Road in Chiswick, west London, was another such quiet residential street before the warhead exploded there, killing three people and injuring six. Where once six suburban houses had stood, there was now only an immense crater. In the beginning, in order to prevent panic, the authorities made no announcement about the V-2, encouraging people to believe that the loud explosion heard across west London had been a ‘gasworks explosion’, but by November it became clear that the Government had to be more honest about the new threat.
Over the five months of the campaign, a total of 1,359 rockets were fired at England, killing 2,754 people and injuring 6,523. In reply to German propaganda claims that London was being ‘devastated’, Winston Churchill told the House of Commons on 10 November 1944 that ‘The damage and casualties have not so far been heavy. There is no need to exaggerate the danger.’ Yet when a single rocket hit the Woolworth’s store in New Cross, south-east London, on 25 November, 160 people were killed and a further 200 injured, and four rockets landing on Croydon, Surrey, on 29 December had rendered as many as 2,000 houses uninhabitable.
‘Things were still falling out of the sky,’ recalled a young girl who survived the New Cross blast,
bits of things and bits of people. A horse’s head was lying in the gutter. There was a pram hood all twisted and bent and there was a little baby’s hand still in its woolly sleeve. Outside the pub there was a crumpled bus, still with rows of people sitting inside, all covered in dust and dead. Where Woolworth’s had been, there was nothing, just an enormous gap covered by clouds of dust. No building, just piles of rubble and bricks, and underneath it all, people screaming.
Over eighty days, 2,300 V-2s destroyed 25,000 homes and killed 5,000 Britons. Antwerp was also heavily hit by V-2s, with more than 30,000 casualties inflicted there. The Germans even had a plan to launch V-2s against America, fired from converted U-boats. The last V-2 rocket to land on Britain was fired from The Hague just like the first; it landed on a block of flats in Whitechapel at 7.21 p.m. on 27 March 1945, killing 134 people. There was no possible defence from them, and they penetrated deep shelters too. As well as killing people when they landed, the V-2s also killed people while they were being made. It is estimated that up to 20,000 people died in the horrific slave-labour conditions while manufacturing the rockets. Life in the factories, which were scattered over the Reich, was appalling: starvation, disease, maltreatment and accidents were rife.
Although the V-weapon flying bombs and rockets were to cause thousands of casualties in Britain, and many more in Holland and Belgium, they could not have changed the balance of the struggle even if they had caused ten times that amount of devastation, because Hitler did not begin firing them until a week after D-Day. By that time the Americans, British and Canadians were ashore and there was no prospect of their coming to terms with Hitler, pretty much however successful the V-weapon campaign. The concentration of technological research, money, raw materials, skilled labour, slave labourers’ lives and general effort that went into creating the V-weapons was thus in no way justified by their results. Good for rhetoric, but short on results, Vengeance weaponry turned out to be yet another error of the Führer’s strategic judgement.
17
Eastern Approaches
August 1943–May 1945
We no longer fought for Hitler, or National Socialism, or for the Third Reich, or even our fiancées or mothers or families trapped in bomb-ravaged towns. We fought from simple fear. We fought for ourselves, so that we didn’t die in