WWII V2 Rocket Attacks – Welcome
At 16:13hrs on 14th January 1945 a V2 rocket with serial number 21250 launched at 16:08hrs by Battery 444 in the Den Haag area of the Netherlands scored a direct hit on number 8 Panmure Road, Sydenham south-east London, 186 feet south-west from the junction with Sydenham Hill Road. Four properties were demolished together with another four partially demolished. (Information courtesy of John Pridge)
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Fourteen people were killed and around 80 people were injured of which at least 2 subsequently died of their injuries. It was claimed that the crater created by the Rocket was so big that some of the houses in Panmure Road collapsed back into it. Although we have heard from somebody who moved into Panmure Road sometime in the 1950’s who casts doubt on this from what he remembers of the back gardens.
Fortunately for us official photographs do exist and we now have photocopies of those. Upon checking with The National Archives regarding the position of using copies of the documents in document HO 192/728 we received the following reply:
You may transcribe and publish the text of written material from The National Archives without charge.
The reproduction of direct images of documents from The National Archives on an open non-commercial website in perpetuity costs a one-off fee of £40.00 + £8.00 VAT. This fee covers the uploading of between one and twenty document images.
These images must be protected from download at high resolution. You can do this by watermarking, or by keeping the resolution to a level whereby the documents are legible for information and research, but are not of sufficient quality for commercial publication.
In total we have copies of 8 photographs and 2 drawings. The quality after scanning photocopies probably means that resolution should not be a problem. Therefore it is just a situation of deciding whether to pay the £48.00 or not.
Regardless the scale of death, injury and damage was high. From the Bomb Damage Report the impact produced a deep 27 feet wide crater that produced an earthquake effect that could be felt a few miles away. From the evidence we see in the photographs this does not seem surprising.
11 Responses to “V2 Rocket Attacks – Welcome”
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I have contributed my family’s experiences to your site. I would like copies of photographs showing damage to 4a Panmure Road. I thought I have seen them on-line but can’t find them again. Do you think the National Archives will send me copies?
Regards,
Lawrence Garland
As stated above the National Archives Documents in HO192/728 does contain photographs. When I ordered a copy of all the documents contained in HO192/728 in July 2012 the total cost of paper copies came to £12.65 for a total of 18 A3 sheets.
Hello. This is a great site but can it be searched by town please?
Good idea we will try and upload a searchable list of all strikes as soon as possible.
In the meantime you can do a search on towns on each months list of strikes e.g. September 1944 and entering the town name in the “seach” box
my grandson asked me about interesting things that happened to me as a child and i told him about the experience (i was born in 1938) of V2 rockets, anderson shelters etc. during wwII. i know that there was a crater not far from us in coney hall, on hayes common. trying to get a location map to show him how near it was from our house on sylvan way. at one time there was an area map showing other drops but unable to locate it. so great to have a computer to research. a.f.
A map of all the V2’s reported in The Ministry of Home Security document AIR 20/4126 can be found on this page:
https://www.wrsonline.co.uk/big-ben-rocket-strikes/1944-v2-rocket-attacks-map/
Zoom into the area you wish to see.
Newstead Rd. I have been informed that there was a V2 crash on the site of St Winifreds school which was a prefab site in the 1960s. However I cannot see it on your site and wonder if I was misinformed.
Certainly no V2 strike was recorded but if you check the Flyingbombsandrockets website page here you can see a V1 strike was recorded at Newstead Road on 5 August 1944 but no mention of the school.
There is never any mention of the V2 rocket that exploded in the air in early November 1944 over Sydenham High School, Westwood Hill SE26. I was in the school at the time and wrote about it in my memoirs recorded in BBC Archives http://bombsight.org/bombs/38177/ Fortunately there were no casualties as most of the debris landed in the hockey field at the back of the school. 10 minutes later and we would all have been outside during our recreation time.
Elizabeth Gay.
How about Incident number 0138 @ 10:03 on Thursday 2 November 1944 recorded as “Airburst over Sydenham Station”
I am editing the love letters of my parents, father (Carl D. Ward) in the American Army and mother a British citizen lived at “Brook House, Causeway Dunmow”. In her letters to my father she describes being on “fire watch” every 7-8 days, all night long looking for bombs, fires etc. in the neighborhood. There were many close calls but no family or immediate neighbors who lost lives, though homes were demolished and my grandparents, Maude and Walter Elliott took them in. My mother’s name was Halcyone Margaret Elliott, known as Bobbie b/c of her bobbed hair. She was born in 1918 and moved to the US in 1946. Any information is welcome. Our parents never mentioned any of the war and the letters only surfaced after their deaths.