Our Land at War

by Duff Hart-Davis

  Every possible effort was made to prevent the weapons reaching their destination: the facility at Peenemünde had been heavily bombed, and as Churchill revealed to the House of Commons on 6 July, more than a hundred launch sites along the French coast had been destroyed by Allied bombers. In England, barrage balloons were moderately effective, but on the leading edges of their wings the V-1s had cable-cutters which could sever tethering wires. At first the only British fighter fast enough to overhaul them at low level was the Hawker Tempest, recently brought into service; but if a Mosquito, Spitfire or Mustang dived on one from above, it had a chance of making a kill. Skilled pilots perfected a technique of flipping a doodlebug over by flying alongside, wing tip to wing tip, then pulling slightly ahead, so that the fighter’s airflow unbalanced it and sent it into an uncontrolled dive. Of 1846 flying bombs destroyed by aircraft, Tempest pilots claimed 638, Mosquitos 428 and Spitfires 303.

  The main defence against the intruders was the deployment of anti-aircraft guns in ever-increasing numbers, ranged in lines from the North Downs to the south coast, across the Thames Estuary, and in other lines up the coasts of East Anglia, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. Because of their speed, doodlebugs were difficult targets, but successive technical refinements in fire-control systems and the introduction of radar sights quickly improved the gunners’ kill rate: from 17 per cent of incoming bombs shot down in the first week of their deployment, the rate rose to 74 per cent in the last week of August, during which eighty-two were downed in a single day.

  Tommy Lascelles witnessed the early difficulties. Out and about with the King and Queen in Surrey on the morning of 12 July, he escorted them first to East Grinstead, where he found ‘a very nasty mess in the main street of the town’, on which a doodlebug had landed at breakfast time. ‘There were only three casualties,’ he reported, ‘but the devastation was considerable.’

  The appearance, as from the skies, of the King and Queen naturally had an immense effect [on morale]; they spent some time, every minute of which, from every point of view, was worth its weight in gold, talking to all and sundry.

  Then, as the royal party visited an anti-aircraft battery at Lingfield, they had a fine view of a doodlebug heading for London.

  The klaxon sounded the alarm, and in a few seconds every gun in the battery had opened up at a target about 7,000 yards’ distance. Soon we could see the flying bomb approaching, at fantastic speed – the experts said not less than 450 mph – and it passed almost over our heads at an altitude of, I suppose, about 2,000 feet, looking incredibly sinister, like a cur-dog with its ears back and teeth showing.

  The guns made beautiful and concentrated patterns of shell-bursts right in its path, but always just fifty yards behind its tail. It went on to London unscathed, flying with uncanny accuracy through the intervals between the balloons echeloned some three miles behind us. This happened four or five times during the afternoon … It gave one a feeling of physical sickness to see the devilish things flashing over the English countryside, to plunge into the bowels of poor, defenceless London.

  The General conducting the royal party was disappointed with the performance of the battery, which had shot down three out of five birds the previous day; and he suspected that the ATS girls operating the target-tracking radar were overexcited by the presence of Their Majesties; but Lascelles saw how difficult it was to set the correct lead, and reflected that it had taken him many years to ‘achieve much the same art of adjustment when confronted with driven partridges’.

  Hitler’s target was London; but Kent, which lay beneath the flight path from launch ramps to the capital, came under such pressure that it was soon known as ‘Doodlebug Alley’. After the first bewildering surprise – what were these things? Planes with their tails on fire? Where were they coming from?’ – people became inured to continual bombardment. On 22 June they saw the intruders plainly as they came in ones and twos, with the flames from their exhausts showing brightly against a backcloth of cloud. On 24 June a V-1, shot up by a fighter, crashed on Bartley Farm near Sneddon, killing six people. Soon a local log, kept at Edenbridge in the heart of the Eden Valley, reported: ‘Too many coming over to keep count of, some high, some low.’ Three days later the engine on one of the bombs cut out over the town, but it glided clear, went into a spin and crashed in a nearby wood.

  Dora Basset, teaching at Frant primary school, was terrified when she heard a tell-tale engine go silent overhead. She told the children to get under their tables and crouched under her own desk. ‘I peered at all the little white faces,’ she remembered, ‘and said a prayer: “Dear God, if this is the end of us all, please let the parents know I did my best to save their children.”’ No explosion came: the bomb made a harmless landing in allotments outside Tunbridge Wells. Guildford had a lucky escape on 28 June, when a V-1 fell and exploded in the middle of Stoke recreation ground: a short distance either side, and it would have killed dozens of people in the busy streets.

  The night of 18 July was particularly bad. There were fourteen alerts in Kent, as more and more V-1s roared over. A few hit the cables of barrage balloons and exploded; others were attacked and downed by fighters, but most got through. On 28 July new tactics were tried: the balloons were hauled down, and rockets were fired into the doodlebugs’ path – but nothing, it seemed, could stop them. By the end of July they were appearing over Kent in waves, three or four abreast, and the daily average was ninety-five. The deafening noise of anti-aircraft guns intensified people’s fear. On the night of Sunday, 6 August the bombs came six at a time, every half-hour, but then the rate slackened slightly, and the total for a week was only 450.

  Luck played a huge part. One morning an eleven-year-old boy was walking his dog near Farnham when he saw a doodlebug coming straight at him:

  Then it stopped and dived into a farmyard half a mile in front. I ran there, the dog ran in front. The farmer had just brought the cattle to the yard, and it landed in the middle. It flattened everything, sheds, haystacks, walls, house. I walked through a mountain of chopped-up cattle and debris. The family was underneath but I didn’t know. I walked away again before anyone came.

  In contrast, another doodlebug landed on a school in Godalming at 8 a.m., when only the caretaker was present. He was slightly injured – but if the bomb had crashed an hour later, when the children were present, there would have been a massacre. Occasionally a misguided V-1 did more good than harm – for instance by exploding in a stream near Maidstone and blasting out a perfect duck pond. Boys scavenging for metal, which they were encouraged to collect for the munitions industry, found that the remains of a bomb rusted very quickly, as if it had been made of inferior materials.

  Morale in the South East was further depressed by the weather. The storms which had caused the postponement of Overlord continued through most of June, and the summer turned out to be one of the dullest and coldest that farmers had ever known. The hay crop was disastrous, and in some places the hours of sunshine during the month were the fewest since records began. ‘At dawn on midsummer day,’ The Farmers’ Weekly reported, ‘central and southern England were in the grip of a frost keen enough to ruin tomato crops.’

  A map of V-1 landings in Kent looked much the same as the chart of conventional bombs: dots recorded a dense scatter of impacts everywhere – but they showed an intense concentration just off the coast opposite Folkestone, Hythe, Dymchurch and New Romney. There the strengthened anti-aircraft batteries did their job and shot down a thousand into the sea. Of the 8000 V-1s launched at England, 2400 came down in Kent, killing 152 people and injuring 1761; Sussex was not far behind; but those that reached the capital killed more than 5000 people and injured nearly 18,000.

  Debate raged about whether or not the Government was right to order the doodlebugs to be shot down beyond the boundaries of London, thereby increasing the risk for civilians outside the metropolis; but for the majority of people, the answer was ‘Yes’. It was the only sensible way to reduce the carnage caused by Hi
tler’s foul weapon. The slaughter died down only when Allied bombers managed to knock out the launch sites.

  The horror of strikes was graphically described by Molly Lefebure, who saw any number of mangled corpses working throughout the war as secretary to the Home Office pathologist Professor Keith Simpson. She had to admit that bombs – the ‘devilish things’ – were rather graceful. One that she saw was ‘a delicate shade of bluey-green, with a beautiful long plume of vivid scarlet and orange flame spurting out behind it’, and she herself once seemed to be pursued by a doodlebug, which went round in three complete circuits before crashing. Soon she developed a savage contempt for this ‘form of death … completely lacking the human touch, deriving from those master-minds that invented mobile gas-chambers for killing Jewish children, and human soap-factories … A rather ridiculous little airplane, buzzing across the sky, drooling and lurching like a besotted bumble bee, finally to cut off into silence and plunge in a top-heavy, helpless dive on to streets and houses and people, sending everything and everybody up in fragments, with a bang!’

  Few sights can have been more harrowing than one she saw: the body of a lorry driver killed by a flying bomb that landed close in front of his vehicle. The windscreen had been shattered in his face, ‘and his throat was cut from ear to ear, as decisively as if he had been a fanatical suicide’. During another attack, in the middle of conducting a post-mortem Simpson took cover under the slab on which the body was lying, and as Molly remarked, ‘the sight of one who hoped to live crouching under a corpse was rather striking’.

  London was always most at risk, but hundreds of the flying bombs went astray and landed harmlessly in fields or woods – like one which shaved a bus going over the top of Nashleigh Hill, outside Chesham, some thirty miles beyond its target. The driver saw it coming at him and zigzagged wildly about the road in desperate attempts to escape from its path: the weapon skimmed over his roof and plunged into soft ground on the far side of a field, causing little damage. People waiting for the bus at the bottom of the hill congratulated the passengers on their good fortune. Another V-1 came down in the park of West Wycombe House, thirty-five miles west of London, shaking the house, blowing out two windows of the west drawing room and causing part of the decorated ceiling to collapse.

  When the German launch crews were driven further up the coast of France, the approach tracks changed, and even the countryside of Hertfordshire, well north of London, was not immune. In the summer of 1944 the Basham family, who had been bombed out of their home in Hackney three years earlier, were living in a caravan and a tent about twenty yards from an old keeper’s cottage near Brickendon. Around the site a few oak trees had been left as a screen when the rest of the wood was felled. Staying with the Bashams were two young cousins, a girl of eight and a boy of four, brought down from London to give them a respite from the flying bombs.

  One summer afternoon fifteen-year-old Ben Basham went outside to watch doodlebugs crossing the wooded valley to the south on their way to London. With flames spurting from their tails, they made a stirring sight – but suddenly he realized that one of them had deviated from its course and was heading directly for him. When the engine cut, the bomb dived straight towards the cottage. Ben yelled a warning. His mother ran out of the caravan with the children and threw herself down on them beside Ben and his sister. His father was standing near the house, too shocked to move.

  At the last moment a wing of the V-1 caught one of the oaks, and the contact tipped it down into the space between cottage and caravan. Both were completely wrecked by the explosion. Ben, his mother, his sister and two cousins, although only fifteen yards from the edge of the crater, were miraculously unharmed; but Ben, lurching to his feet in a cloud of dust and falling leaves, at first thought he was dead and in some afterlife – until out of the swirling mist came his dog, Pablo, and then his father, who had been blown into a ditch but was intact.

  The family in the cottage were not so lucky. Mrs Dench, the mother, was killed and her daughter was badly injured. A baby, in a pram, protected by the chimney breast, was unhurt, but Grandfather Dench suffered a broken leg.

  The Bashams were given shelter by a friendly farming family called Pateman, who built them a makeshift house made of straw bales and tarpaulins, and they lived in it for weeks, cooking and eating in a barn. Rats and mice rustled between the bales as they slept, and bats flitted above them as they ate; but they were so grateful for the kindness they received that afterwards Ben looked back on those troubled times ‘almost with affection’.

  Fighter aircraft, barrage balloons and anti-aircraft batteries offered partial defence against V-1s, but there was a more subtle weapon which also had some effect, and that was deception.

  The aim was to deflect the flying bombs by transmitting false information about where they were landing. Because Garbo had told the Germans he was based in London, he could not fail to report the strikes – but what he could do was falsify the points of impact. If he slightly exaggerated the number of hits in the north and west of the capital, and said less about those in the south and east, he might encourage the Germans to believe that they were overshooting (which they already were), and lead them to shorten their range, so that the bombs would come down in less crowded areas.

  The idea was accepted by the Chiefs of Staff, but initially rejected by the Cabinet, who believed it would be immoral to deflect the V-1s into other areas and onto other people. In August, however, the Chiefs won the argument, and Garbo was authorized to go ahead.

  Soon he was forced to expand his coverage to include reports on Hitler’s second revenge weapon, the V-2 – the world’s first ballistic missile. On 8 September 1944 a thunderous explosion in Chiswick killed only three people but destroyed several houses in Staveley Road. The detonation caused panic, because at first no one knew what had caused it. The V-2 had travelled through the stratosphere at 3000 mph, reached a height of fifty miles above the earth, and arrived without warning. Only after its warhead had detonated did the roar of its rocket engine catch up with it, and the double crack of it breaking the sound barrier was heard all over London.

  Of more than 1300 strikes over the next few months, the worst was on the Woolworth’s store in New Cross Road, Deptford, in the middle of the afternoon on 25 November 1944, which killed 168 people and put another 120 in hospital. Altogether some 2700 civilians were killed by V-2s in London, and 6500 were injured. The Germans’ other main target was Antwerp, where 1700 Belgian civilians lost their lives in rocket explosions.

  Since there was no possibility of intercepting the missiles in the air, and since the Germans were firing them from mobile launchers, which they kept moving, the only defence against them was disinformation. Proceeding with the utmost caution, Garbo and his notional sub-agents gradually managed to shift the mean point of impact (MPI) away from Charing Cross, where the Germans believed it was. As Masterman reported, ‘Over a period of some months we contrived to encourage the enemy steadily to diminish his range: thus in the four weeks from 20 January to 17 February 1945 the real MPI moved eastwards about two miles a week and ended well beyond the boundary of the London region.’ The last two rockets to reach England fell on 27 March 1945, one of them killing a woman in her house at Orpington, in Kent, twelve miles south-east of Charing Cross.

  Twenty-Five

  Unfinished Business

  For we that fight till the world is free,

  We are not easy in victory.

  We have known each other too long, my brother,

  And fought each other, the world and we.

  G. K. Chesterton, A Song of Defeat

  All through the summer of 1944 the sky over the south of England seemed to be permanently full of aircraft, as British and American bomber squadrons pressed home their raids on Germany, night and day. The poet, editor and publisher John Lehmann, staying at his mother’s house in Buckinghamshire (part of which had been turned into a Red Cross hospital), described how

  as sunset darkened into
twilight on cloudless nights, slowly great armadas of bombers rose over the horizon and the tops of the chestnut trees, and their clustering formations, heading for the Continent, filled the sky for hours on end with their steady whine and roar … It was an awe-inspiring spectacle, this gigantic concentration of death-dealing power moving off to the kill.

  Away from the eastern side of the country, in contrast, the land had suddenly emptied. Many thousands of soldiers had disappeared to fight on Overlord, taking their tanks, Bren-gun carriers, field guns, landing craft, lorries, jeeps, ammunition, explosives and other impedimenta with them. At the end of May there had been 640,000 American field force personnel in England. By the end of September the number had fallen to 33,000. Former GI camps stood empty and abandoned: no longer could children cadge gum and chocolate, or hitch rides in passing vehicles. What they could do, though, was to forage profitably on the huge dumps of canned food that the Americans had left behind. Also abandoned were hundreds of dogs, which the soldiers had somehow appropriated but could not take to war.

  Over the next months the total of service personnel in England fluctuated sharply as wounded GIs came back from the battlefields – 65,000 of them in June and July alone – and reinforcements from America poured into ports on the south coast, to spend a few days or weeks in transit before moving on to the battlefields in France. Camps and depots had to be reopened, and training areas repossessed. This time, the main concentration of US forces was in Wiltshire and Hampshire; but most of the newly arrived units stayed only a short time before pushing on to join the fight for Europe.

  Away from all the military installations, the landscape had altered greatly during the war. One man with a clear view of the changes was the itinerant Professor Gangulee, who described the campaign for growing wheat as ‘a phenomenal success’, and noted that by the close of 1942 six million new acres had been ‘brought under the plough’. Nineteen forty-three was another record year: the Government set a target of 960,000 extra acres to be ploughed, but in the event farmers managed 1,376,000. Of the huge new area now under corn, nearly half had been derelict before the war, and, overall, better management had led to heavier yields per acre: both 1942 and 1943 yielded bumper harvests.