Free Triumph and Tragedy (The Second World War) by Winston S. Churchill

through to the London area. The “record bag” was on August 28, when ninety-four bombs approached our coast and all but four were destroyed. The balloons caught two, the fighters twenty-three, and the guns sixty-five. The VI had been mastered.
    The Germans, who keenly watched the performance of our guns from across the Channel, were completely bewildered by the success of our artillery. They had still not solved the mystery when their launching-sites were overwhelmed in the first week of September by the victorious and rapid advance of the British and Canadian armies from Normandy to Antwerp. The success of the armies released London and its defenders from the intense strain of the previous three months and on September 6 Mr. Herbert Morrison, Home Secretary and Minister of Home Security, was able to announce: “The Battle of London is won.”
    Although the Germans thereafter irritated us from time to time with flying bombs launched from aircraft, and with a few long-range bombs from Holland, the threat was thenceforward insignificant. In all about eight thousand bombs were launched against London, and about two thousand four hundred got through. 4 Our total civilian casualties were 6184 killed and 17,981 seriously injured.
    These figures do not tell the whole story. Many people, though wounded, did not have to stay in hospital, and their sufferings have gone unrecorded.

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    Our Intelligence had played a vital part. The size and performance of the weapon, and the intended scale of attack, were known to us in excellent time. This enabled our fighters to be made ready. The launching sites and the storage caverns were found, enabling our bombers to delay the attack and mitigate its violence. Every known means of getting information was employed, and it was pieced together with great skill. To all our sources, many of whom worked amid deadly danger, and some of whom will be for ever unknown to us, I pay my tribute.
    But good Intelligence alone would have been useless.
    Fighters, bombers, guns, balloons, scientists, Civil Defence, and all the organisation that lay behind them, had each played their parts to the full. It was a great and concerted defence, made absolute by the victory of our armies in France.
    A second threat drew near. This was the long-range rocket, or V2, with which we had been so preoccupied twelve months before. The Germans however had found it difficult to perfect, and in the meantime it had been overtaken by the flying bomb. But almost as soon as the bombs began to hit us the signs appeared that a rocket assault was also approaching. The weight of the rocket and its warhead became subjects of high dispute. Certain early but doubtful intelligence reports had suggested warheads of five to ten tons, and these were seized upon by those of our experts who believed on other grounds that such weights were reasonable. Some believed that the rocket would weigh eighty tons, with a ten-ton warhead. Lord Cherwell, now strongly vindicated in his stand for the flying bomb in June Triumph and Tragedy
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    1943, 5 even before there were any indications of it from Intelligence, was very doubtful whether we should ever see the rocket in operation at all, and certainly not the monster of eighty tons. Between the extremes there were a few Intelligence reports which suggested a much lighter rocket than eighty tons; but, with all the controversy, anxiety remained acute.
    We knew that work was continuing at Peenemünde, and sparse reports from the Continent renewed our concern about the scale and imminence of the attack. On July 18
    Dr. Jones informed the Crossbow Committee that there might well be a thousand rockets already in existence. On July 24 Sandys reported to the Cabinet: Although we have as yet no reliable information about the movement of projectiles westwards from Germany, it would be unwise to assume from this negative evidence that a rocket attack is not imminent.
    In a Minute to me the