Nazi V2 attack on my great grandparents!!

[Chris Dodkin]

Had my mum & dad over on holiday recently, and one evening during the vacation dad started telling 'war stories' from his childhood.

He told a great story about how he was evacuated into London during the war, to stay at his grandparents house in Eltham.

He went on to say how he had stayed there through the Blitz, but was eventually evacuated back out of London for his own safety.

He then told us how his grandparents house was later damaged by a German V2 rocket attack, with the front being blown in by the blast, with his grandparents still inside (both survived).

Sounded like a great story, but I'd never heard it before, so I did a little research online, and found this chap who has built a google map of the V2 sites in London

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=108088877885353953763.00045e8ff5d5ea3507b5e&ll=51.501477,-0.054245&spn=0.149602,0.439453&z=11&source=embed

When I looked up the address from the UK Census for his Grandparents house on the Google Map, I could see that a V2 landed close to the house as he had described.

What's more amazing was when I changed the Google maps view to Satellite Image - I could now see the actual V2 crater, still visible in the landscape - It's never been built on!

I then flew over the area using Google Earth, and took this shot of the area, and put in a drop-pin for the house, and a market for the V2 crater.

Told him on the phone today, he's really excited to see it!

Isn't technology amazing - after all these years I can send him a picture of something that happened to his grandparent's neighborhood in WW2.

Google Earth picture attached:

 

[Tim Pindar]

Great story.

How are you able to know that's where the V2 landed, and do you know what was there before? Houses? They seem to have built on the area in between.

 

[Chris Dodkin]

Well, the V2 google map shows the location where it hit, it puts a locator symbol on the google map.

No idea what was there at the time. Crater would have been around 20m wide, and blast radius some considerable area larger than that.

The area in between has been built on in the last 10 years with new housing

 

[Hamish Gill]

Did you see the programme about the blitz where they tested bombs on a mockup street... The blast radius was shocking, it was a really fasinating bit of tv, and actualy quite sensitivly put together with lots of really life accounts that were often quite moving. Well worth a watch!

 

[Chris Dodkin]

Will have to look for that online can you remember which channel it was on?

 

[Hamish Gill]

4, I'm pretty certain. it had Tony Robinson presenting it and he's a channel 4 type person isn't he?

 

[Pete Askew]

It always amazes me how much physical evidence there is around of the impact of WWII still. Of course we see the old home defence installation beside road etc and bomb craters are there if you look (we used to jump motorbikes out of them on a farm in Battle when I was a teenager). As you know, I live half of my time very near to Berlin. In the backstreets you can still see many buildings ravaged by bullet holes, especially around windows. In Potsdam where, like Berlin, there is a lot of renovation work going on since the fall of the DDR, an unexploded bomb is found every few months. Earlier this summer the apartment buildings close to mine had to be evacuated as the'y found yet another unexploded 500 lb bomb nearby. Last summer they had to evacuate one of the hopspitals (except for intensive care) as they found a large bomb in the cellar that no one had noticed before!

In some ways this is a useful reminder to us all about the horror of war. These days we see sanitized views of war in far off places and forget how recently it was close to home. Fewer and fewer of those close to us were actually involved (both of my parents, one who founght in the war, and one who repaired the Stirling bombers of the RAF, are now dead) and TV etc become the only evidence of the impact it had on everyday lives. The one programme I wish would be repeated is the the World at War from the late sisties / early seventies (I can still hear the music in my mind and if I hear it, it brings back the solemnity and horror of the images it showed). I really think it should become a part of school sylabusses as I still recall the shock of the scenes from Birkenau - Auschwitz. The pictures that Vic has presented are have deep resonance but even more so if it also conjures up memories of piles of corpses as well and the haunting footage from thos programmes on TV. What it must be like if you were there (in one way or another) I cannot imagine.

 

[Vic Shaw]

This is actually not too far from where I work, I shall take a drive up there and check it out.It's quite shocking when you realise just the whole scale of the bombings. I live in a end of terrace house now thanks to the Luftwaffe and also have a sloping floor in the front room.

Pete, I thought Berlin was such a great place to see for me. I remember our 1st mornings outing. It had been snowing and we left the Mitte district to walk into the city center. We walked past The Berlin Cathedral and Museum Island and opposite Museum Island is a red 3 story building that had been left from WWii, It was so pocked marked with bullet, cannon and shell holes it was just amazing and really gave me a sense of what it would have been like with the Russians on one side of the water and the Germans on the other.

 

[Pete Askew]

I know. It's even more amazing when you see some pictures from after the fall of Berlin. Someone once descriped it as like a mouth full of broken teeth. Often just the facades were left with nothing behind. When I was laying a network cable from our apartment across the yard into my office / studio we had to lift the brick 'pavin'. Under it was a layer about an inch thick of ash and broken roof tile from the damage received during the bombings. Luckily, no unexploded bombs though!!

 

[George Hazelton]

As Pete Askew wrote:

"The one programme I wish would be repeated is the the World at War from the late sisties / early seventies (I can still hear the music in my mind and if I hear it, it brings back the solemnity and horror of the images it showed). I really think it should become a part of school sylabusses as I still recall the shock of the scenes from Birkenau - Auschwitz. The pictures that Vic has presented are have deep resonance but even more so if it also conjures up memories of piles of corpses as well and the haunting footage from thos programmes on TV. What it must be like if you were there (in one way or another) I cannot imagine."

Here in the US there is little physical evidence of WWII, save in Hawaii, and witnesses to the cataclysm are fewer every year. Too many young people seem unaware of what happened. I recall some 25 years ago talking with a bright, personable high school senior who was totally unaware of the Holocaust! It seems that his history courses, such as they were, had never gotten past the end of the 19th century! "The World at War" is a wonderful series, I wish it would be again aired in this country.

World War I or the European War is even more distant and ignored, although it may have been the informing event of the past century. Certainly it mechanized slaughter on a scale only hinted at by the US Civil War and if the Holocaust is excluded perhaps not exceeded by WWII.

May I recommend to you folk across the pond To End All Wars by Adam Hochschild? It details dissent in Great Britain before and during the European War and gives a view which we in the US don't usually see. I'd like to see a similar work dealing with the US, since President Wilson brought us to a virtual police state in which dissenters were imprisoned, for example, Eugene V. Debs, Socialist candidate for President of the US. Seems eeriely prescient of recent events here in the states.

 

[Pete Askew]

I know. It's even more amazing when you see some pictures from after the fall of Berlin. Someone once descriped it as like a mouth full of broken teeth. Often just the facades were left with nothing behind. When I was laying a network cable from our apartment across the yard into my office / studio we had to lift the brick 'paving'. Under it was a layer about an inch thick of ash and broken roof tile from the damage received during the bombings. Luckily, no unexploded bombs though!!

As an update, earlier this year an unexploded 500lb bomb was discovered just up the road from our apartment. There's still a lot of unexploded ordinance around the area and any building work or civil works are undertaken with great care, especially in the former 'East'. So in Europe it should not be so hard to forget but it is slipping away and I fear that the televised action of recent conflict far away and computer games 'recreating' war as a pastime make it worse: we forget the horror. That is in part why I am so admiring of Tom and his colleagues. OK, I know at least some of them just get a kick out of dressing up and playing soldiers, but the tours and shows bring the stories and memories back and can make people think further and find out more about those terrible times in the past and hint at what horrors others are living through today.

 

[Chris Dodkin]

Just spoke to my Dad today on the phone and he told me that he's been contacted by a journalist, writing a book on the Cuban Missile crisis, which will be 50 years ago next year (when the book is due to be published).

Dad is going to give him the background to the RAF preparations for a nuclear strike on Russia at the height of the stand-off, from his perspective a one of the V-Bomber crew sitting in QRA ready to roll.

At this point - 99.9% of the British public still have no idea how close to WW3 we came during those days - so it should make an interesting book, and hopefully shine a light on the incredibly risky policies, actioned in our names, during the cold war.

From what I understand - we were saved from a nuclear conflict by the actions of individuals, rather than government, during those dark hours - scary stuff.

Here's another look at the old man checking out his Victor Bomber from the gantry - visiting Arizona during joint exercises with the US in 1965 - just before I was born.

As he said on the phone today - the people in-charge back then, are pretty much all gone - so the only people left who remember what happened, are the young men and women who were in the armed forces at the sharp end.

Glad that their memories will finally see the light of day - so that others can learn from them.

 

[Pete Askew]

I know it's a long way off, but you'll have to let us know what the book is when it's published. I only wish I could believe that we (or at least those who acquire power) had the capacity to learn from past mistakes. There's little evidence we can!

 

[Chris Dodkin]

Pete - the first book on the Crisis, covering the land based nuclear missiles is already out.

Launch Pad UK: Britain and the Cuban Missile Crisis by Jim Wilson.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Launch-Pad-UK-Britain-Missile/dp/1844157997/ref=wl_it_dp_o?ie=UTF8&coliid=I22Y0JXI6HNLNR&colid=3EX19QXONMPDJ

For most British people the weekend of 27/28 October 1962 could so very easily have been their last weekend on earth, yet astonishingly the fact that Britain's nuclear deterrent forces went to an unprecedented level of readiness was kept secret from the public. Thor nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles stood on a round-the-clock wartime state of alert ready to be fired, these were the 'other' missiles of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which made Britain, in effect, America's launch pad. During the height of the crisis both RAF Bomber Command and the US Strategic Air Command were poised at the highest states of readiness. Both were ordered to a level of war readiness unparalleled throughout the whole of the forty years of Cold War.
There is evidence to suggest that had the US needed to launch an air strike against Russian missiles in Cuba, President Kennedy might have been willing to absorb a Soviet nuclear assault on a NATO ally without retaliation, if it would have avoided escalation to World War Three.

It is sobering to those who lived through that period that, the British Ambassador to Cuba commented: 'If it was a nuclear war we were headed for, Cuba was perhaps a better place to be than Britain!'

Dad says it's a good read.