Then something else happened. In June of that year pilotless jet planes carrying a bomb known as the V1, alias doodlebug, alias flying bomb, alias buzz bomb, alias robot bomb, began to appear in the skies above London. They were recognised by the sharp buzzing of the engine followed by sudden silence, as the engine cut out and the bomb fell to earth. They came in daylight, with infrequent intervals between them, and were perhaps the hardest to bear. “One listens fascinated to the Doodle Bugs passing over,” one contemporary wrote, “holding one’s breath, praying that they will travel on … The atmosphere in London has changed. Back into the Big Blitz. Apprehension is in the air. Buses half empty in the evening. Marked absence of people on the streets. Thousands have left, and many go early to the shelters.” The novelist Anthony Powell was on fire duty and watched the V1s travelling through the air to their unknown targets, “with a curious shuddering jerky movement … a shower of sparks emitted from the tail.” He saw them as “dragons” and “In imagination one smelt brimstone,” so that the city under threat becomes once more a place of fantasy and myth. Almost two and a half thousand flying bombs fell upon the capital within ten months-“droning
Just as the frequency of the flying bombs began to diminish, in the early autumn of 1944, Vengeance Two-the V2-was targeted upon the capital. For the first time in the history of warfare, a city came under attack from longdistance rockets which travelled at approximately three thousand miles per hour. No warning could be sounded; no counter-attack launched. The first one hit Chiswick and the explosion could be heard at Westminster about seven miles away. Their power was so great that “whole streets were flattened as they landed.” One resident of Islington recorded: “I thought the end of the world had come.” That phrase has been repeated before in the history of London, at moments of crisis or terrible conflagration. Almost a thousand rockets were aimed at the capital, with a half reaching their targets. There were open spaces where streets had been. One rocket hit Smithfield Market, and another a department store in New Cross; the Royal Hospital in Chelsea was struck. “Are we never to be free of damage or death?” one Londoner complained. “Surely five years is long enough for any town to have to suffer?”
It was the coldest winter for many years, and the bombs continued to fall. Illness was in the air, as it has been throughout London’s troubled history, along with rumours of epidemics and mounting deaths. Yet there was also a certain insouciance abroad; the V2s were so unpredictable and random that they revived the gambling spirit of Londoners who now retired to bed without knowing if they were necessarily going to rise on the following morning.
And then, suddenly, it was all over. At the end of March 1945 a rocket fell upon Stepney, and another on Whitefield’s Tabernacle on the Tottenham Court Road. But then the raids ceased; the rocket-launching sites had been captured. The skies had cleared. The Battle of London was finally won. Almost 30,000 Londoners had been killed, and more than 100,000 houses utterly destroyed; a third of the City of London had been razed.
On 8 May 1945 there were the usual celebrations for victory in Europe, VE Day, although by no means as garish or as hysterical as those of 1918. The participants were more weary, after five years of intermittent bombing and death, than their predecessors on the same streets twenty-seven years before; and the war against Japan was continuing (VJ Day was 15 August 1945). Yet something had happened to London, too. In the phrase of the period the “stuffing” had been “knocked out of it,” the metaphor suggesting a thinner and more depleted reality. Certainly it had lost much of its energy and bravura; it had become as shabby as its inhabitants and, like them, it would take time to recover.
