The 80th anniversary of the first V-2 rocket to hit London

It’s 6:42pm on a damp Friday evening in suburban Chiswick when, without warning, what people thought was a gas mains exploded, killing three people and injuring 19 more. It wasn’t a gas mains though – but the first ever V-2 rocket fired at London, and this coming Sunday marks the 80th anniversary of the start of the V-2 attacks on London.

At a time when people were used to the sound of bombs falling and the familiar whine of V-1 rockets, the V2 was a silent terror. Travelling faster than the speed of sound, it arrived without any warning until it hit the ground.

Although some later reports say that the sound of the rocket hitting Chiswick was heard in central London, interviews with people living in the area on the first anniversary of the attack all generally say the sound was almost small, which is why they initially thought it had been a gas mains explosion and not enemy action.

The people in the area soon suspected something unusual had happened when military experts from the RAF as well as the British and US Armies turned up to inspect the site — a huge 20-foot wide crater in the ground that had wreaked eight houses and damaged 50 more.

In fact, by sheer good fortune it could have been worse, but the V-2 missile landed on the corner of a street with a large playing ground next to it, so there were fewer houses to be damaged.

The corner had just three houses on one side, and the missile landed in the middle of the road outside 5 Staveley Road. A Home Office report at the time suggested that the damage could have been worse if it hadn’t been for the empty field, allowing the shockwave to dissipate.

V1 AND V2 DAMAGE, 1944-45 Image: IWM (HU 66194)

Still, it killed three people — three year old Rosemary Clarke from 1 Staveley Road, Ada Harrison aged 68 at 3 Staveley Road and Pte. Bernard Browning, who was on leave, and on his way to meet his girlfriend.

He was buried in the local cemetery, and as he was on active service when he was killed, he was given a war grave.

It took a long time to repair the damage, and a year later, one local resident, Marian Lamonty, told the Daily News that she had been living in one room for the past year waiting for repairs to take place. Eventually, the repairs were completed, and after the war, the playing field was largely filled in by the Staveley Road Secondary Modern Boys School, which later merged with Chiswick Community School in 1968.

However, it closed, and the site was redeveloped as housing.

Today, the road looks like any other suburban street, lined with large semi-detached houses with front gardens, but there’s a gap between two houses.

It’s not, as you might have suspected, where the missile hit the ground, but it is an electricity substation that’s always been an empty plot of land. By coincidence, it’s just a few metres from where the missile landed in the road, so in 2004, a memorial was added here to remember those who died in that first V-2 attack.

A plaque telling the history of the attack was added later.

A confusion is the street sign next to the memorial, saying Fitzroy Crescent, when we’re standing on Staveley Road. As it happens, Fitzroy Crescent is a new road built nearby where the school used to be. When the houses next to the memorial were built as part of that development, for some weird reason, they adopted Fitzroy Crescent as their address, even though they’re not on Fitzroy Crescent.

Two other rockets hit London on the same evening, in Kew and Epping, but neither caused any casualties.

However, over the short time that the V-2 was in use, it’s estimated to have killed 2,754 people in London, plus many more across mainland Europe — but also something like 20,000 Nazi slave labourers were to die in factories being forced to manufacture the rockets.

The last V-2 to land in the UK was just a few months later, on 27th March 1945, having consumed almost as much effort in Germany as the Americans expended on the Manhatten Project to build a nuclear bomb.

Apart from the memorial in Chiswick, there’s also a recovered test V-2 missile in the Science Museum. It’s in the Making the Modern World room on the ground floor.

To mark the anniversary of the first V-2 rocket attack, on Sunday 8th September, three British runners (Dmitri Macmillen, Andrew Macmillen and Andy Lewis) will be running a 37-mile route across London to raise money for Ukraine.

Along their route, the runners will be stopping at sites hit during World War II in the Blitz, and later by V1 and V2 rockets. There they will commemorate the victims of these attacks and highlight the parallels between the aerial bombardment Ukrainians are facing today from the Russian Federation, and that which Londoners faced in the
1940s from Nazi Germany.

They will start at 9:30am at the Staveley Road memorial.

You can support the runners here.