Target London… the desperate race to stop the V2s

Robert Harris reveals how a little- known wartime episode pitting WAAF officers with slide rules against the might of the Nazi rocket programme inspired his brilliant new thriller

JUST five minutes after its launch from occupied Holland, having travelled some 200 miles at supersonic speeds, the first V2 to reach England struck suburban west London with a terrifying doublebang that heralded the dawn of a deadly new age. It was the evening of Friday, September 8, 1944, and the crack as it broke the sound barrier echoed across the capital, swiftly followed by a massive whump as the four- ton projectile, a quarter of which was its explosive charge, ploughed into Staveley Road, Chiswick, at 2,000mph.

Talking, by coincidence, 76 years to the day after that first horrifying strike on London, bestselling thriller writer Robert Harris takes up the story: “It demolished several houses but killed just three people, thank God, an elderly woman, a toddler and a young soldier who was on his way to see his girlfriend and just happened to be passing. The double- bang was heard right across London and they knew immediately what it was as they’d been expecting it.

“The government knew the Germans would now fire a lot of them at London but it was all kept very secret. People were told a gas main had exploded. It became a grim joke, Hitler’s new secret weapon: flying gas mains!”

Even after five exhausting years, the advent of the first ballistic missile – an astonishing feat of engineering that signalled the start of the space age – raised a terrifying new chapter in warfare. The subsequent six- month Nazi “vengeance” campaign would cost more than 2,400 lives.

“A lot of eyewitnesses said it was the most frightening thing of all,” explains Harris, 63, whose books mix detailed research with glorious leaps of imagination.

“You couldn’t shelter, you couldn’t get out of the way. It came in so quickly, it was invisible to the naked eye. People said they felt the air was suddenly sucked away by the pressure wave and a moment later there was a huge explosion. It was a bit like a terrorist attack now – suddenly and from nowhere. People were exhausted and suddenly they had this to contend with.”

DDESTRUCTION: Scene of the rocket strike on Chiswick, west London, that heralded the start of the V2 campaign also appears in the book, along with Henrich Himmler). His fate, we come to learn, is inextricably entwined with that of Kay.

“My rule was what each person did in one chapter had to impact the other. It became like a love story or a relationship between two people who had never met,” Harris explains. “They draw inevitably closer together on a path towards one another.”

Surprisingly, the real- life bid to thwart the V2s doesn’t feature in official wartime histories of British intelligence or the Royal Air Force. But Harris’s new book will undoubtedly help set the historical record straight.

The former political journalist and columnist became a full- time writer after the worldwide success of his first novel, Fatherland, which imagined a German victory in the Second World War. Since then, hit books have included Pompeii, Enigma, Conclave and Munich.

Typically, V2 is a stunning achievement; a gripping page- turner that remains highly