World Battlefronts: The Last V-Bomb?

The Easter holidays brought a prayerful hope to Britons: that they had seen and felt and heard the last of the Germans' devilish V-bombs. For three days and nights, up to this week, not a single buzz-bomb (V1) or rocket bomb (V2) had fallen on Britain.

Londoners felt like celebrating; this might at least be the beginning of the end of nine months of the Things. But they were warned to caution. Reports that the Germans were evacuating their rocket bases in The Netherlands, if true, might mean that the enemy would send over a final shower. Besides, V-1 could still be launched at England from planes operating at night from Germany itself. The despairing Nazis might even load up their obsolete bombers with explosives and guide them by radio to crash in England.

Among the still cautious Britons were those who had managed to survive a V-bomb strike, and those who had been lucky enough to be 200 yards or more away when a giant V-2 let loose. They would never forget the brilliant white flash of the explosion, the torn bodies of the dead and the numbed, blackened faces of the injured. V-2 had given no warning to those it killed or maimed, but those who had been on the fringes of its blast would never forget its sounds.

First came a whiplike crack. The rocket, traveling faster than sound, set up a compression wave which bounced from the point of strike and hit the ear a split second before the terrific crump as the explosive let go—just time enough to flex a forearm across the face against the inevitable gale of glass and rubble fragments. Then, after V-2 had arrived, survivors heard the slower sound of its coming: an ear-filling roar which gradually diminished, finally losing itself in the sky.

Britons would long remember the Germans by their V-bombs. Many remembered the last published casualty totals: in February, 483 British civilians killed, 1,152 injured (last August's toll of 1,103 killed was still the V-bomb high mark).