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Staveley Road is a road in the Grove Park district of Chiswick in the London Borough of Hounslow. It was the site of the first successful V-2 missile attack against Britain.

History

Staveley Road was built between 1927 and 1931 as part of the Chiswick Park Estate.

September 1944 explosion

On Friday 8 September 1944, a V-2 launched from Wassenaar in Holland, by 485 Artillerie Abteilung at 6.37pm,^[1] landed in Staveley Road near the junction with Burlington Lane, killing three people (including a three-year-old girl), and injuring nineteen.^[2] The crater was thirty feet across. Earlier that day at 8.39am, a V2 had hit Maisons-Alfort in France, where six people were killed; the V2 had been launched from Petites-Tailles, near Houffalize, in south-east Belgium by Lehr und Versuchsbatterie 444.^[3]

Eleven houses were completely destroyed, and another fifteen had to be extensively rebuilt. The area at the time had been partly evacuated. The explosion could be heard six miles away in central London. Within an hour of the explosion, government officials were arriving at the scene.

The explosion has been shown in the 2015 production Hitler's Space Rocket,^[4] produced with ZDF of Germany, and in the 1965 film Operation Crossbow.

British knowledge of the V-2

General Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma discreetly mentioned to General Ludwig Crüwell about the V-2, when being bugged by MI19, so disclosing the rocket's propensity on 22 March 1943 - this was the first occasion that the British knew. Fritz Lustig, father of Radio 4's Robin Lustig, was one of the translators.

RV Jones received most of his information on the V2 from the French spy Jeannie Rousseau.

The general public was not notified about the existence of V-2 rockets until 10 November 1944.