Wartime voices

Following the Allied landings in Normandy on 6 June 1944, the war in Europe was reaching its final phase, but the summer of 1944 was to see another devastating bombing campaign - the V-1s or Doodlebugs.

V-1s were small, pilotless aircraft just over 25 feet long and with a wing-span of 16 feet. Their size and speed made them almost impossible to intercept. The first arrived in London on 13 June 1944 and over the next 11 weeks they came across - sometimes at a rate of one every 20 minutes. Wandsworth was the hardest hit of all the London boroughs with 124 V-1s crashing within its boundaries.

"I saw this plane coming and all out of the back of the plane were these flames coming out, and I thought it was a German plane being shot down. I thought they'd caught it you see. I tore up in the bedroom and told my mum and dad. I said 'We've shot down a German plane' and then the noise of the motor stopped. It was just dead silence. It seemed an eternity, but it wasn't really. And then there was this crash where it went down. After that of course they came at regular intervals and every time you laid there and, as selfish as it seemed, you're laying there saying, 'Please God, let it go over', despite the fact you knew some other poor soul was going to get it."
Winifred Salisbury  

"21 July 1944. My mother and my father and myself went down to the shelter leaving my sister and my brother in law in our house. They were newly married and he was on leave. At quarter past four that morning there was a Doodlebug which we heard, but until my father emerged we didn't know where it was. And when he came back he was, well, like a madman, berserk, you know, nearly out of his mind, because the whole corner had gone. Our house was almost matchwood, really, two houses. Well two houses and all the rest were damaged. The V-1 fell in the garden but it was almost the same as landing on the house."
Olive Chinchen

"We heard this thing 'boom, boom, boom', so we went out into the garden to see where it was going. As we got to the bottom of the path it went 'boom, boom, BOOMP'. Now when it did that, you couldn't see it. You knew you had to do something about it. So we dashed in and flopped down to the cellars, which had been reinforced. It saved my life because this bomb landed about 20 feet from the house. It blew in all the front of the house. Scooped it - as if a big wave had scooped it up - and buried us under all the debris in the cellar. Everything went terribly black... There was this kind of BANG then everything went absolutely quiet - the only time in my life I have had absolute quiet.

"In a few moments some hands leant down and pulled us out through a hole which happened to be about in the middle of the living room. As they pulled us up and out, I was conscious that I was looking at the carpet that had been on the floor, but it was upside down. We subsequently found that under the carpet was the furniture upside down. The blast had swept in and turned the whole room upside down."
Alan Phillips

"Half past one, Monday morning, a Doodlebug dropped in Gordon Road . The house wasn't a direct hit, but it was badly blasted. Imagine. The clothes that were there landed up over the railway all in the trees, what was in the wardrobe was covered in glass... All that was standing was just the dividing wall with all the fireplaces there."
Margaret Clark

"When I came near to all I could see was a great mound of dirt like a small hill. At the edge stood a policeman and I went up to him and cried because I didn't know where my house was."
Mary Smith