On the morning of the 22nd July 1944 Hitler sent a V1 flying bomb, the fore-runner of the cruise missile, from a launch site in the Pas de Calais aimed at London. As it cruised across the Kent countryside with its deadly payload attempts to shoot it down failed. It continued on its way until around 3.41 pm. My mother heavily pregnant with me was beginning to prepare the tea-time meal of liver and bacon when it finally started its descent. The engine cut out and it plummeted to earth and exploded loudly but harmlessly at the end of Worsley Bridge Road not far from our house. It had fallen just short of London landing in Kentish fields which still existed just to the south of the London County Council’s Bellingham Council estate. The bomb landed in a field used as a sports ground by the Hong Kong and Shangai Bank – a bank born of empire in 1865 – which like many other banks bought fields just outside London to use as sports grounds for their staff on half-days (Wednesday afternoon) and Saturdays. That the bomb fell short of heavily populated areas of London was a success perhaps for the counter espionage tactic of feeding misleading information back to the Germans. The Germans believed their ‘agents’ who reported that the flying bombs were overshooting their London targets: this caused them to pull back the range so that many fell in more open countryside to the south of the capital. Nevertheless a glance at the records shows 67 V1 bombs landing on Beckenham alone during the period from June 1944 until the end of August 1944. These unpredictable daylight attacks from pilotless high speed pulse jet missiles must have been terrifying after a period when conventional German air attacks had been reduced to a minimum by the superiority of the allied air forces.
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