“It’s something that’s often glossed over, but shouldn’t be,” says Doug Millard, space historian and curator of space technology at London’s Science Museum, where a V2 takes pride of place in the main exhibition hall. However, a far grimmer statistic is that many more, at least 20,000, died constructing the V2s themselves.
More than 1,300 V2s were fired at England and, as allied forces advanced, hundreds more were targeted at Belgium and France.Īlthough there is no exact figure, estimates suggest that several thousand people were killed by the missile – 2,724 in Britain alone. “It was a terror weapon, you didn’t hear it arriving, it was just there… bang!” “Suddenly there was a large bang in a road nearby and a great cloud of debris was thrown up in the air, and that was a V2 rocket,” he says.
Having seen a rocket launch, Dad was fortunate enough to escape a V2’s return to Earth when he was waiting for another train at Queen’s Park underground station in north London. V stood for ‘vergeltungswaffen', or 'retaliatory weapon', and were a last-ditch attempt by the Germans to reverse the course of the war. It took just five minutes from launch to landing. However, unlike aircraft or the V2’s predecessor the V1 flying bomb, this was a new type of weapon, crashing and exploding without warning in target cities, such as London, Norwich, Paris, Lille and Antwerp.
