If you know the area you will realise that this is quite a way from New Cross. We lived at 84, Cranbrook Road, on the corner of Clandon Street. I was born on but I vividly remember many wartime incidents including the New Cross V2. “ …Up to 6 am today 2,752 people have been killed by flying bombs and up to 8,000 have been injured…The number of flying bombs launched up to 6 am today was 2,754…A very high proportion of the casualties have fallen upon London…London will never be conquered and we will never fail.“ V2 Rocket: a world-first missile The death and destruction caused by the V1s and public disquiet forced Prime Minister Winston Churchill to make a statement to Parliament, on 6 July 1944: When he returned, his house was in ruins and his wife was dead © IWM D21210Īround a quarter of V1s crashed before reaching their targets, and over half of the rest were shot down by fighter aircraft and anti-aircraft guns or brought down by massed barrage balloons.ĭespite these successes, thousands of citizens were killed or injured. He had been out for a walk while his wife prepared Sunday lunch. An elderly man sits with his dog on a pile of rubble that was once his home following a devastating V1 attack on Upper Norwood. There were over 9,000 V1 attacks on London alone over the following months, fired from coastal sites in Occupied Europe. In retaliation and in a last-ditch attempt to win the war, Adolf Hitler ordered the ‘long-range bombardment of England’.ĭozens of towns and villages in the southeast, East Anglia and the northwest were hit. Life goes on as normal as milkmen deliver the morning round among the destruction caused by a V1 attack in Upper Norwood, London © IWM D21231. Germany was losing the war and was seriously weakened by fighting on different fronts, including a brutal campaign against Britain’s ally the Soviet Union. The first V1 strike on London was on 13 June, a week after D-Day (6 June 1944), the Allies’ mammoth and successful amphibious assault to liberate Nazi-occupied north-west Europe. 6 people were killed and 42 injured © Roffster First came the V1 flying bomb, known in Germany as vergeltungswaffe, meaning ‘vengeance weapon’, and in Britain as the ‘doodlebug’ or ‘buzz bomb’.īlue plaque commemorating the first V1 bombing of London, Railway Bridge, Grove Road, Bow, London. The British had received intelligence reports about secret weapons but had largely dismissed them as German disinformation. Germany had been developing rocket technology at Peenemünde Army Research Centre since the 1930s. Lying horizontally, the rockets are marked B & C. Such images provided the Allies with the first hard evidence of the existence of German rocket technology. The history behind the V1 Flying Bomb This RAF reconnaissance photograph of a rocket test site at Peenemünde Army Research Centre on the Baltic Sea, Germany, was taken 23 June 1943. It was one of the worst losses of civilian life on British soil during the Second World War. Meanwhile, 123 passers-by were injured, many seriously. Of the victims, 33 were children, including babies in prams. Neighbouring shops and houses were reduced to rubble while choking dust and smoke filled the air.ġ68 people were killed outright: some of them in the neighbouring Co-op and some at their desks in nearby offices. Streets were ankle-deep in glass and blood-stained survivors lay on the pavements or staggered around in a daze or hysterics. The colossal blast threw people in the air, overturned lorries, and caused vehicles to burst into flames. The aftermath resembled battlefield carnage. On 25 November 1944 at 12.26 pm on a busy shopping Saturday, a German V2 rocket bomb made a direct hit on a crowded Woolworths store in London’s New Cross.
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