Triumph and Tragedy (The Second World War) by Winston S. Churchill Page B

Wandsworth, Lewisham, Camberwell, Woolwich and Greenwich, Beckenham, Lambeth, Orpington, Coulsdon and Purley, West Ham, Chislehurst, and Mitcham. 1 About three-quarters of a million houses were damaged, twenty-three thousand of them beyond repair. But although London was the worst sufferer the casualties and the damage spread well outside its bounds. Parts of Sussex and Kent, popularly known as “Bomb Alley” because they lay on the line of route, paid a heavy toll; and bombs, although all were aimed at Tower Bridge, fell far and wide over the countryside from Hampshire to Suffolk. One landed near my home at Westerham, killing, by a cruel mischance, twenty-two homeless children and five grown-ups collected in a refuge made for them in the woods.
    Our Intelligence had accurately foretold six months before how the missiles would perform, but we had not found it easy to prepare fighter and gun defences of adequate quality. Hitler had in fact believed, from trials he had witnessed of a captured Spitfire against a flying bomb, that our fighters would be useless. Our timely warning enabled us to disappoint him, but only by a narrow margin. Our fastest fighters, specially stripped and vigorously boosted, Triumph and Tragedy
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    could barely overtake the speediest missiles. Many bombs did not fly as fast as their makers intended, but even so it was often difficult for our fighters to catch them in time. To make things worse, the enemy fired the bombs in salvoes, in the hope of saturating our defences. Our normal procedure of “scrambling” was too slow, and so the fighters had to fly standing patrols, finding and chasing their quarry with the help of instructions and running commentaries from radar stations and observer corps posts on the ground. The flying bombs were much smaller than normal aircraft, and so they were difficult either to see or to hit. There were poor chances of a “kill” from much more than three hundred yards; but it was dangerous to open fire from less than two hundred yards, because the exploding bomb might destroy the attacking fighter.
    The red flame of their exhausts made the bombs easier to see in the dark, and during the first two nights our anti-aircraft batteries in London fired on them and claimed to have brought many down. This tended to serve the enemy’s purpose, since some of the missiles might otherwise have fallen in open country beyond the capital.
    Firing in the Metropolitan area was therefore stopped, and by June 21 the guns had moved to the advanced line on the North Downs. Many of the bombs flew at heights which we at first thought would be awkward for the guns, rather too low for the heavies and too high for the others; but fortunately it proved possible to use the heavies against lower targets than we had previously thought. We had realised of course that some bombs would escape both fighters and guns, and these we tried to parry by a vast balloon barrage deployed to the south and southeast of London. In the course of the campaign the barrage did in fact catch 232 bombs, each of which would almost inevitably have fallen somewhere in the London area.

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    Nor had we been content with defensive measures. The original “ski sites,” ninety-six in number, from which the bombs were to have been launched in France had been heavily attacked by our bombers from December 1943
    onwards and substantially eliminated. 2 But, despite all our efforts, the enemy had succeeded in launching the assault from new and less pretentious sites, and bombs were penetrating our defences in numbers which, although far smaller than the enemy had originally hoped, were presenting us with many problems. For the first week of the bombardment, I kept the control in my own hands. But on June 20 I passed it to an Inter-Service Committee under Duncan Sandys which was known by the code name of
    “Crossbow.”
    Prime Minister to
    22 June 44
    Home Secretary,