Send More Shrouds: The V1 Attack on the Guards' Chapel 1944

by Jan Gore

Overview

On Sunday 18 June 1944 the congregation assembled for morning service in the Guards’ Chapel in Wellington Barracks, St James’s Park, central London. The service started at 11 am. Lord Hay had read the first lesson, and the ‘Te Deum’ was about to begin, when the noise of a V1 was heard. The engine cut out. There was a brief silence, ‘an intensive blue flash’ and an explosion – and the roof collapsed, burying the congregation in ten feet of rubble.

This was the most deadly V1 attack of the Second World War, and Jan Gore’s painstakingly researched, graphic and moving account of the bombing and the aftermath tells the whole story. In vivid detail she describes the rescue effort which went on, day and night, for two days, and she records the names, circumstances and lives of each of the victims, and explains why they happened to be there.

Her minutely detailed reconstruction of this tragic episode in the V1 campaign against London commemorates the dead and wounded, and it gives us today an absorbing insight into the wartime experience of all those whose lives were affected by it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781473851481
Publisher:	Pen & Sword Books Limited
Publication date:	01/31/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Jan Gore is a researcher, writer and lecturer who has compiled biographies of the civilians who died during the Second World War in Bournemouth and Exmouth as well as in the Guards Chapel in London in 1944\. In the past she has worked for GCHQ, Chatham House and has been a civil servant and librarian. She now lectures in French at Kingston University. She has recently been involved in assisting with a book about the Dorset artist and illustrator Rena Gardiner, and in working on an archive of her material at Cotehele.

Table of Contents

List of Plates vii

Acknowledgements ix

Preface xi

1 'An Intensive Blue Flash' 1

2 Doodlebug Summer 11

3 The Aftermath 33

4 The Rescue Process 59

5 'A Microcosm of Society': Biographies of the Civilian Victims 67

6 'Recently, on Active Service': Biographies of the Military Victims 109

7 The Guards' Chapel and the Survivors 147

8 Rebuilding the Chapel 161

Epilogue 167

Appendix: Those Who Died 173

Bibliography 179

Indices 181

Index of Dead and Injured 181

General Index 184

Editorial Reviews

This book is so much more than a biography of victims – worthy though such a volume would have been. The author has done an excellent job in describing the impact of the V1 campaign on those involved and the legacy of one particular attack. The work is made that much more impressive though its’ extensive coverage of how the allies became aware of the V1 programme, how they attempted to nullify the implicit threat and, the nature of the response when individual flying bombs hit their target.

Walking the Battlefields