From Doodlebugs to Devon - by Sarah Shaw

From Doodlebugs to Devon cover (author's photo)

Sarah Shaw's latest book "From Doodlebugs to Devon" is subtitled "one war...one woman...one year..." and is very much a personal journey for the author, for the "one woman" mentioned in the title happens to be Sarah's mother, Yvonne Shaw, whose letters to her husband form the basis of this book.

I have to declare an interest in this book now because during the various Covid lockdowns and the periods in between, I assisted Sarah in a very small way by checking and verifying the various BC4 Bomb Census reports for some of the V-1 and V-2 incidents that are referred to in this book, both in Yvonne's letters and in the narrative that the author skilfully weaves around them, which help provide context to the letters and help the reader get a real idea of what was happening in the wider world of the British "Home Front" at this later stage of the Second World War.

Yvonne Shaw and her four-year-old son, Oliver begin the period covered in this book living in Foxley Lodge, a Victorian detached house in the outer London suburb of Purley, to the south of Croydon and at that time, still in the county of Surrey. Yvonne is almost 33 and her husband Clem, is an army officer stationed in Scotland. His work is something of a mystery to Yvonne but we soon learn in the author's narrative that he is actually working with the Home Guard in Scotland.

The first letter to him we read is dated 1st April 1944 and apart from mention of an air raid late in the preceding month (one of the last such raids by manned Luftwaffe aircraft), most of these early letters cover the relatively mundane life of a young wife with a husband serving in the armed forces, somewhat struggling to make ends meet and finding life in wartime London fairly boring.

It is when the Doodlebugs mentioned in the book title start falling that the tone of the letters suddenly change. As most people know, "Doodlebug" was one of the nicknames given by the British people to the V-1, the first of Hitler's so-called "Vengeance Weapons", a pilotless aircraft as they were somewhat quaintly called initially by the British Civil Defence service, before they were given the name of "FLY" for "Flying Bomb", which is essentially what these weapons were - an early form of cruise missile.

Croydon was to become the most "Doodlebugged" borough in London. This was not due to any particular singling out of the citizens of the south London suburbs but more due to subterfuge on the part of the British, who had double agents on the ground whom the Germans were convinced were providing them with accurate information regarding the fall of shot of the V-1s. Whereas in fact most of them were initially falling as intended on the central area of the capital, false information fed to them by one agent in particular, Juan Pujol Garcia, better known as Agent Garbo, persuaded the Germans to adjust the targeting of these devices downwards, so that they would fall on what in 1944, were the much more lightly populated areas of outer suburban London, rather than the densely packed inner London.

It was a terrible decision by the authorities to have to take, for whichever option ensured that people would die. In the end, it was just about numbers and sadly, Croydon became the recipient of 141 these weapons. 

Yvonne's growing anxiety is reflected in her letters to Clem and she reports some very close calls nearby which although they do not directly impact the family home, happen to be far too close for comfort and it is clear from the tone of her writing that the mental strain is growing, as well as concern for the well-being of young Oliver.

As a result of this and a phone call from her uncle in Exmouth, Yvonne and Oliver decamp to Devon, at first staying with her Uncle Dudley and family but later moving to Budleigh Salterton and enduring something of an odyssey of moves and re-locations to various parts of that delightful seaside town, although doubtless in 1944, it was somewhat different to the Budleigh Salterton that I am quite familiar with today.

The letters home, which sometimes cover seemingly quite mundane matters, actually provide an interesting window of this important period of British history and the author's accompanying commentary and explanations, provide a fascinating context.

The book ends with a chapter which tells us about the family from 1945-1973, which sadly doesn't provide us with a particularly happy ending to the story - but there will be no further spoilers from this reviewer!

Sarah Shaw has produced a delightful social history of wartime Britain which I would thoroughly recommend to you.

Available from www.amazon.co.uk

RRP: £11.99

softback, pp 227 (also available as an e-book)

Book Review: Streatham's 41

Cover of Streatham's 41 (author's image)

In mid-June 1944, Londoners could perhaps have been forgiven for thinking that the days of attacks on them from the air were a thing of the past but on 13 June, a new threat to their safety appeared in the form of the V-1, the first of Hitler’s Vergeltungswaffen or “Vengeance Weapons”. In excess of 2,400 of these early cruise missiles were to fall upon London in a campaign that was to last until early September 1944, in which the various neighbourhoods of south and southeast London bore the brunt,

The original edition of this account was written by Kenneth Bryant, Senior District Air Raid Warden of the Metropolitan Borough of Wandsworth and appeared in 1946 as a basic record of the forty-one flying bombs that fell upon the south London suburb of Streatham. In 2019 an updated and expanded edition was produced by the Streatham Society to mark the 75th anniversary of the campaign and which has recently been re-issued once again.

This attractive A4 softback booklet provides a detailed analysis of each of “Streatham’s 41” flying bombs, each one accompanied by a map, as well as personal accounts from those affected by each incident and where available, contemporary photographs of the aftermath of each bomb.

In addition, there are useful and informative chapters on the organisation of the ARP (Air Raid Precautions), later the Civil Defence Service in general and in particular within the Borough of Wandsworth. There is also a brief history and timeline of the V-1 offensive and the counter-measures put in place, as well as an interesting chapter covering the human cost of the campaign and financial cost of rebuilding in Streatham, most notably the “pre-fabs” that sprung up across London as a temporary solution to re-housing those who had been rendered homeless.

There is also a chapter on the design of the V-1, which leads to my only minor gripe with the book, in so far that the authors describe the propulsion system as a ram jet, whereas in fact the V-1s were propelled by a pulse jet system, which gave rise to the peculiar rasping sound made by the engine.

Overall though, this is an excellent local history publication which should be of interest to Home Front historians as well as those with a love of our capital city’s history.

Streatham's 41: The V-1 Flying Bomb Offensive as experienced in Streatham

Author: Kenneth Bryant (updated edition prepared by John W Brown)

Published by The Streatham Society (www.streathamsociety.org.uk)

RRP £11.00

Softback, pp 90

D is for Doodlebugs and Divers

The devastation caused by a V-1. This is Shirley Way, Croydon (author's collection)

Seventy years ago exactly, London and the southeast of England was in the midst of another German air offensive. Unlike the First Blitz of 1940/41 and the subsequent, smaller incursions of the Baedecker Raids and the Little Blitz that had petered out earlier in 1944, these attacks were all the more sinister because they were the aircraft involved, and aircraft they surely were, carried no pilot nor any other aircrew, hence the early use of the 'robot' name.

 

Perhaps the Vergeltungswaffe Eins, or V-1s, as they were more correctly known, acquired more nicknames than any other German weapon during the Second World War. At first, the Civil Defence services rather coyly referred to them as 'Pilotless Aircraft' or 'PACs', later re-naming them 'Fly Bombs' or 'FLY' as abbreviated in the Incident Logs themselves. The RAF pilots sent up to intercept them in their Spitfires, Tempests, Mustangs or more rarely, the new Gloster Meteor jet fighters, referred to them as 'Divers' and indeed, their patrols soon became officially known as Anti Diver Patrols. To the long suffering British public as well as the many overseas servicemen and women in the south of England, they became known as 'Buzz Bombs', 'Doodlebugs' or 'Doodles', although some ruder citizens were known to refer to them as 'Farting Furies' due to the distinctive rasping sound made by their pulse-jet engines.

We have examined the V-1s in some detail in an earlier edition of this blog, so rather than repeat things too much, perhaps now is a good time to examine to raw statistics behind the first of Hitler's vengeance weapons.

St Mark's Church, Greenwich South Street (Greenwich Heritage Centre)

The V-1, although a sophisticated piece of technology by 1944 standards, was a remarkably cheap weapon to construct. The contract with Volkswagen, the main suppliers of the Flying Bomb, allowed an average cost of £125 per bomb and indeed the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough estimated after the war, that a British factory, awarded a large scale contract, could have built a similar weapon at a cost of £115 each. When this is compared to the usual quoted price for a Lancaster bomber of around £15,000 plus the cost of training and paying it's crew and supporting ground crew, this appears to be a real bargain basement weapon.

It was estimated that some 9,250 V-1s were launched at targets in Britain, mainly from their fixed, ramp sites in the Pas de Calais area, although some were air launched from converted Heinkel III bombers. These fixed launching sites ensured that most V-1s, far from 'doodling', tended to remain on a fixed course, the only imponderable being how far along this course would the engine cut out. British civilians who lived beneath these fixed routes, especially nearer the coast, tended to be wary, though quite sanguine about the constant stream of Doodlebugs roaring overhead. Those nearer to the intended target of London, became heartily sick of them and very soon certain areas of London, mainly the south and southeastern suburbs, began to resemble a battlefield, with damage far more concentrated than that caused by the earlier Blitz of 1940/41.

Unlike the V-2 rockets which were to follow, effective countermeasures could be taken against the V-1. The British Government set into motion Operation Diver, which entailed moving around 2,500 anti-aircraft guns from their London sites to a coastal ribbon along the Kent and Sussex coasts where the guns could fire at the incoming V-1s without fear of shooting them down over a built up area. The guns ranged from the 'heavy' batteries using the excellent 3.7 inch gun, to the 'light' units equipped with the 40mm Bofors. All were equipped with proximity fuses and assisted by gun laying radars. At first the results were modest, with only 17% of bombs destroyed in the first week of operation. This quickly rose to around 60% by August 1944 and on one day towards the end of the month, an incredible 82% of all V-1s intercepted were shot down by the anti-aircraft guns. Overall, the guns were thought to be responsible for shooting down 1,460 Doodlebugs.

RAF Spitfire toppling a V-1 over Kent (IWM)

Inland of the guns was next deployed a 'layer' of barrage balloons, designed to entangle the onrushing 'Divers' in their steel tethering cables. The balloons were rather less successful than the anti-aircraft guns in bringing down the V-1s, but were still credited with downing around 231.

Further inland still, any surviving divers that made it through, were then fair game for the RAF fighters. Many will have seen the iconic image of a Spitfire seemingly toppling a V-1 by flying alongside it and tipping it's wingtips overs but many were actually shot down rather than toppled. This was no mean feat; flying behind a fast flying one tonne warhead required a special kind of courage. The main RAF aircraft employed on these Anti_Diver duties was the Tempest, which was also the most successful, being credited with 638 'victories' over the V-1s. The next most successful was the Mosquito with 428, then the Griffon engined Spitfire Mk XIV with 303, the Mustang with 232 and all other piston engined types combined 158. An oft-quoted myth is that the new Gloster Meteor jet was responsible for turning the tide against the Robots. This was not so; the Meteors were new into service and like all new aircraft prone to teething troubles, not the least of which was a tendency for their cannon armament to jam at the most important time. Because of this, the Meteors were responsible for the downing of only 13 V-1s, but it was an important chapter in the dawning of the jet age. In total, the fighters were responsible for bringing down 1,772 V-1s.

Perhaps less known than these obvious countermeasures was the part played by deception of British agents. The now celebrated 'Agent Garbo', real name Juan Pujol was thought by the Germans to be working for them and was requested by his German controllers to provide accurate data on the impacts of the V-1s on London. Unknown to the Germans, Pujol was a dedicated anti-Nazi, a loathing formed during the Spanish Civil War and had deliberately set himself up as a double agent to feed the Germans false intelligence with the express aim of harming their war effort. Pujol therefore fed back information which downplayed the impacts to the south of the capital whilst concentration on those impacts to the north and west of London, therefore giving the impression that the V-1s were consistently overshooting their targets. The Germans were unable by this time to perform aerial reconnaissance over London to check the results and so largely believed Pujol's reports and adjusted the ranges of the V-1s accordingly.

Croydon was London's most 'Fly Bombed' borough. This is Zion Road, Thornton Heath (author's collection)

One unwitting downside of this was that the south and south east London boroughs became even more heavily bombed than before and a 'league table' of the most heavily bombed London boroughs reads as follows:

Croydon - 141

Wandsworth - 122

Lewisham - 114

Camberwell - 80

Woolwich - 77

Greenwich - 73

Lambeth - 71

Beckenham - 70

Orpington - 63

West Ham - 58

As can be seen from the above, the only borough in the 'Top Ten' was West Ham, with 58 impacts. The remainder of the league table also showed a distinct bias of impacts to the south of the Thames. Outside London, the story was a similar one. The county of Kent bore the brunt with 1,444 impacts, with Sussex next on 888, with Essex coming in third on 412. There were impacts elsewhere in the country, although these northern V-1s were of the air launched variety rather than those coming from France.

Lest we forget (author's photo)

The monetary cost to the Allies was staggering and it can be argued that this aspect was the most successful for the Germans. It was estimated by the British Government that the cost to the British taxpayer (and to a lesser extent, the American) was in the region of £48 million (at 1944 prices), this was in aircraft and airmen lost, bombs dropped on the V-1 production sites and launching ramps, shells fired and balloons lost, the clearance of damage and lost production. Add to this the estimated (by the Ministry of Health) cost of £25 million  for replacing or repairing lost or damaged housing, then the sum is indeed incredible. Compared to this, the German cost was estimated by the Air Ministry to be in the region of £12.6 million for constructing the launch sites, training the launching crews and the capital outlay for building the missiles.

However, compared with the human cost, the financial outlay is unimportant; it was estimated that some 6,184 civilians and 2,917 Allied servicemen and women were killed in the V-1 campaign, with a further 20,000 seriously injured. This then, was the true cost of the 'Robot war' which was to largely fizzle out when the launch sites were overrun by the Allied armies by early September 1944.

Air launched V-1s continued to be launched right through until late March 1945, although these were mainly only of 'nuisance value' compared to the onslaught of V-2 rockets which was to commence in September 1944 and against which there were no effective countermeasures.

Published Sources:

The Doodlebugs - Norman Longmate, Hutchinson 1981

Most Secret War - RV Jones, Hamish Hamilton 1978

Doodlebugs, Buzz Bombs and Robots

13th June 1944: The Allies had been ashore in Normandy for six days; the invasion of Europe was under way and the Germans were being inexorably pushed back yard by yard out of the territory they had invaded some four years previously and although the Allies were not to know it at the time, the European war had less than a year to run its course.

London at this time was a city licking its wounds. The great raids of 1940/41 were now but a memory but large swathes of the capital were still in ruins and would remain in this state for many years to come – in some cases until the 1960s and 70s and although the raids of the ‘Baby Blitz’ had been nowhere near as intense, they too had rendered large areas of the city uninhabitable. So the news of the invasion had been greeted with cautious optimism by Londoners, perhaps the end was in sight and perhaps there would be no more bombs.

It was not to be; at 04:25 the Grove Road railway bridge at Bow, in London’s East End was struck by a large explosion. The bridge and the railway track were badly damaged, several houses were badly damaged and six people were killed. Moments before the explosion, eyewitnesses had heard what vaguely sounded like a crashing aircraft and had found remnants of what looked like a small aeroplane amongst the wreckage but could find no trace of a pilot. There was no pilot, for what had caused the explosion had been the first of Hitler’s Vergeltungswaffe or Vengeance Weapons. Officially known as the Fieseler Fi103, these weapons were effectively the first form of cruise missile and were launched from fixed ramp sites in the Pas de Calais area of France and had been developed by the Luftwaffe at the Peenemunde site where the second of the Vengeance Weapons, the terrifying V-2 rocket was also under development. Thanks to the bravery of agents on the ground and also the actions of the RAF’s reconnaissance pilots, the site had been bombed by the RAF and the programme set back by six months or so but the bomb that fell on Grove Road was amongst five launched that night; in fact the first one had landed in Kent shortly before the one that fell in Bow but after this first wave of attacks, nothing happened for two more days, as if these first bombs were finding the range.

The Civil Defence records for these first incidents describe them as ‘PAC’ or Pilotless Aircraft, soon afterwards the description changes to ‘FLY’ for Fly-Bomb and this is what the majority of Londoners called them – Flying Bomb, although the media soon christened them ‘Buzz Bombs’ or ‘Doodlebugs’, whilst some ruder citizens called them Farting Furies due to the distinctive rasping sound made by the pulse jet engine.

The V-1 was a sophisticated piece of engineering, which was powered by a pulse jet engine capable of giving a speed of 400 mph and was guided by a gyrocompass autopilot system and designed to ensure that the engine would cut out when it reached its target – usually London – by an odometer which was powered by a small anemometer in the nose. Londoners would soon learn to rush for cover when the engine cut out and the brief eerie silence which followed was the only chance people on the ground had to avoid death at the hands of the 850 kg Amatol warhead in the ‘Robots’, which was another popular name in the media for the new weapons.

Despite what in 1944, was the futuristic nature of the V-1, they could be defended against. The capital’s anti-aircraft guns were quickly redeployed from the parks and open spaces in and around London to the south coast of England and the Thames Estuary, so as to intercept them as they crossed the coast. The new proximity shells and the radar guidance of the guns were extremely effective in bringing down the robots – on average, one shell in every hundred fired brought down a buzz bomb. The defences were arranged in layers; for any V-1s that evaded the guns, the next layer was the balloon barrage, which had also been moved from London. These large balloons were tethered with thick steel cables which could tear the wings from a low flying aircraft but in the case of the V-1s were largely ineffective; the leading edges of the wings of the doodlebugs had been fitted with cable cutters and fewer than three hundred were thought to have been brought down this way. The next line of defence was the aircraft of RAF Fighter Command. The later marks of Spitfire, the new Hawker Tempest and the even newer Gloster Meteor jet fighters were more than capable of keeping up with the V-1s, although it took considerable nerve to fly behind a flying bomb with a near one tonne warhead and then to pump cannon shells into it for the resulting explosion could quite easily take the attacker with it as well. Some pilots preferred to fly alongside the V-1 and disrupt the air flow beneath the wings by placing the wing of the fighter beneath the wing of the robot without touching it, thus throwing the gyro stabilizer into confusion and causing the weapon to pancake into the ground. This manoeuvre also required considerable skill and courage but the ‘anti-diver’ patrols, combined with the anti-aircraft guns and balloons, as well as the false information about the fall of the missiles fed to Germany by double agents, most notably Juan Pujol, aka Garbo, all managed to ensure that about 7,500 of the almost 10,000 launched at London never reached their target.

Despite all these counter measure, bombs still got through and the worst incident was to occur on the first weekend of the attacks. It was Sunday June 18th and the regular service in the Guards Chapel in Birdcage Walk was under way and at 11:20 Colonel Edward Hay was reading the lesson at the lectern when at that instant, the chapel was obliterated in a massive explosion. A V-1 had struck with a direct hit and Hay, along with 121 others was killed instantly. The Guards Chapel was in ruins; in places the rubble was ten feet thick and it took two days to dig out all of the victims; 141 others were seriously injured but miraculously, the Bishop of Maidstone who had been conducting the service was totally unhurt. The portico of the ruined chapel which had sheltered the bishop and which was the only part of the building to survive, forms part of today’s rebuilt Guards Chapel which contains a Book of Remembrance for those lost in the disaster. Another shocking incident in Central London came a few days later on the 30th June, when Adastral House, home of the Air Ministry in the Aldwych suffered a V-1 strike; 48 people were killed, mainly office workers and the photograph of the immediate aftermath, shown above, shows an ominous mushroom cloud rising above Fleet Street as Londoners hurry about their business.

Incident after incident followed with depressing regularity and it became imperative for the invading armies in France to overrun the Pas de Calais in order to bring the attacks to an end. By the end of September 1944, this had been achieved and the last of the regular V-1 attacks was over. Over 6,000 civilians had been killed in London alone with a further 17,000 injured. Although the fixed launch sites had been overrun, V-1s were still launched from converted Heinkel 111 bombers, mainly at Antwerp, which was hit by a further 2,448 missiles between October 1944 and March 1945. The V-1s had finished with London but worse, much worse was to come in the form of the V-2 rockets, the first of which was to fall in Chiswick on 8th September 1944.

Although these rockets were to fall on England until late March 1945, the final enemy activity of the Second World War on British soil occurred from an air launched V-1, which fell harmlessly in open countryside in Datchworth, Hertfordshire on 29th March 1945, barely six weeks before the end of the war in Europe.

Published Sources:

The Doodlebugs - Norman Longmate, Hutchinson 1981
War Diaries 1939-45 Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke - ed Alex Danchev & Daniel Todman, Wiedenfeld & Nicolson 2001
Westminster in War - William Sansom, Faber & Faber 1957