Hitler's Vengeance - the V1
Written by Pam Preedy.
Question: What is the connection between a wartime event on the outskirts of Downe village and the Apollo moon landings in 1969?
By 1943 the tide of war was turning and Germany was on the defensive. On 6th June 1944 the Allies launched their much prepared, but secret, D-Day landings on Normandy beaches. A week later, on the 13th June Germany began sending over the V1 ‘Doodlebugs’ from Northern France. The vergeltungswaffen or vengeance weapon was intended to frighten England into submission. my mother (1916-1997) said you were safe while you could hear the engine, but when the pilotless ram-jet “aircraft” ran out of fuel and the engine stopped you knew it would quickly fall to the ground and explode. You dived for cover.
One of several launch sites for those deadly weapons was Ligescourt in the Somme department of Northern France, about 14 miles from Abbeville. the weapons could not be targeted accurately, so the Germans pointed them in the direction of London, 150 miles away. Also nicknamed the buzz bomb by the British, the V1 missile was a pilotless aircraft made of plywood and sheet steel, powered by a primitive jet engine and packed with about 1,000 lbs of high explosive.
Each V1 contained three detonators to ensure it would blow up as it hit the ground. ON 29th June 1944 a V1 struck a barrage balloon cable and crashed into a cornfield half a mile south-east of Downe village (Kent), without exploding. While nose-diving into the grounem the warhead detached and ended up in an upright position. A few yards away the rest of the missile was lying on the ground.
Geoff Greensmith was the son of the owner of the Nightingale Cafe on the Biggin Hill Airfield. He witnessed what happened next. He and his friends went to watch the bomb disposal soldiers making the bomb safe. the soldiers then left the site,m leaving the remains guarded by a soldier or policeman. The boys were curious. The guard agreed to let them have a look. They could see right into the mechanism and described the two compressed air tanks as two balls of wool and the pulse jet flappers as small Venetian blinds.
It was probably the first unexploded V1 to be examined. After extensive examination in England, this V1 was crated to the US for further technical examination and started the American interest in German rocketry, eventually resulting in the Saturn rocket and the Apollo moon landings in 1969. As the Allied forces gradually fought their way into France the number of launch sites decreased, until they were firing the V2s from the Netherlands. The attacks stopped only a month before the war in Europe ended, when the last launch site in the Netherlands was overrun on 29th March 1945.
Our pilots developed strategies to intercept and down the V1s before they could do too much damage: there is evidence that the pilots would intercept the weapons and wing-tip to wing-tip either tip the weapon which would crash or crate air turbulence which would divert the weapons to crash before they could damage urban areas. They could not use this strategy against the V2s which flew from the Netherlands, in an arc at the speed of sound reaching their destination in six minutes.
The V1s and later the V2s had done great damage. Bromley and its surrounds suffered, as did many towns on the south-east.
More than 10,000 V1’s were fired at London and South East England, with 215 sticking the Bromley area. Before the end of the war a further 1,115 of the most advance V2 ballistic rockets were also fired at England, with 42 hitting targets in the Bromley area, including the Crooked Billet near Petts Wood.
| Bromley | Beckenham* | Chislehurst | Orpington | ||||
| V1 | V2 | V1 | V2 | V1 | V2 | V1 | V2 |
| 37 | 6 | 70 | 5 | 45 | 17 | 63 | 14 |
| * including West Wickham and Hayes | |||||||
