Battle Stations
V-1 and V-2
The V-1 flying bomb
The first of Hitler's so-called 'revenge weapons' (Vergeltungswaffe) and the ancestor of today's cruise missiles, the V-1 was developed on the Baltic island of Peenemünde by the German air force.
Armed with a 1,875lb/850kg bomb, it had the virtue of dispensing with both radio control and pilot. The V-1 was guided by a gyroscopic automatic pilot monitored by magnetic compass. Its dive on its target, which was at a measured distance, was determined by the revolutions of a small propeller.
It was driven by a pulse jet patented in 1907 by the Frenchman Victor de Karavodine. This in turn had been proposed in 1919 as the power plant for a pilotless aircraft by another Frenchman, René Lorin.
The V-1 was relatively cheap and was mobile to the extent that it could be launched from simple catapult ramps or from aircraft. The latter method was a particularly hazardous procedure undertaken late in the war.
The V-1's original elaborate concrete and steel launching structures on the coast of north-west Europe were wrecked by Allied bombing. Thereafter, they did good service as decoys for further Allied attacks, diverting attention away from secondary sites. Built by slave labour in underground factories, the V-1 was relatively secure from attack until launched.
The V-1 offensive began on 12 June 1944, six days after D-day, and lasted until 20 March 1945, shortly before the end of the war. It was originally planned to launch some 500 V-1s a day, but the Germans never reached this target, thanks to Allied bombing of V-1 development and launching sites. The flying bombs – known familiarly as 'doodlebugs' and 'buzz bombs' – posed awkward problems for Britain's air defence, stretching fighters to their maximum speed and flying just a little too high for light guns and a little too low for heavier pieces.
Of the 10,492 V-1s sent against England, only about 7,500 brought the defences into play, the rest having ditched in the sea during their journey west. The majority of those that successfully penetrated British defences were launched at the beginning of the offensive. Very few hit military targets. Of the approximately 4,000 that were brought down, 231 hit balloon cables, while fighters and anti-aircraft guns (the latter equipped with American-supplied proximity fuses), sited on England's south coast, claimed an equal share of the rest.
The
V-2
Like the V-1, the V-2 was an attempt by Germany to offset the failure of her long-range bomber programme. It was developed at Peenemünde, like the V-1, but by the German army. The V-2 programme – spearheaded by Dr Wernher von Braun and a brilliant team of scientists – was delayed by the Allied bombing of Peenemünde in August 1943.
The V-2 (known in development to the Germans as the A4) was a more formidable threat than the V-1. Its one-tonne warhead was carried by a 46ft/14m rocket weighing over 12 tonnes. The rocket motor ran on alcohol and liquid oxygen, and hydrogen oxide powered the turbine fuel pumps. Its speed reached 3,600mph and its trajectory 100,000ft/30,500m.
The V-2's automatic gyroscopic guidance system was highly advanced, the electric torque motor that drove the rocket's gyros being the smallest of its kind yet made. The V-2 could be launched from a transporter on almost any level piece of ground. As it rose vertically, its initial guidance was provided by the graphite veins controlled by the rocket's hydraulic servos. In-flight guidance came from the electro-servo control of the aerodynamic tabs on the fins – all instructed by the autopilot.
Like the V-1, the V-2 was immune to electronic countermeasures. It was, moreover, invulnerable to anti-aircraft guns and fighters, plunging to earth from an altitude of 60–70 miles at up to four times the speed of sound. The only effective defence against the V-2 was to destroy the trains and transporters carrying the rockets and their fuel. The main assembly plant, located underground in the Harz mountains near Nordhausen, was never bombed.
The first rocket to hit England fell on Chiswick, West London, on 8 September 1944, killing three people and injuring another 10. It had been launched only minutes before from The Hague in Holland. Accuracy was impossible for the V-2, but London was a huge target.
The V-2 campaign reached a climax in February 1945, when 232 hit southern England. In all, 1,115 fell, 517 in the London area. The last two exploded on 27 March 1945. In all, they killed 2,754 people and injured about 6,500. The Belgian city of Antwerp was hit by 1,265 V-2s during the campaign.
The V-2 had little or no impact on the military course of the war. The warhead was too small and the cost of each missile – approximately 20 times more than a V-1 – too great to bring an effective return on the programme. Each V-2 killed an average of two people, the V-1 only one – hardly the holocaust envisaged by Adolf Hitler.
The development of the 'revenge weapons' also had a distorting effect on the German war economy, draining resources from fighter and submarine production and radar development. About 200,000 people were eventually employed on the V-2, producing a total of about 6,000.
The defeat of Germany in 1945 was not the end of the story. Von Braun and many of his team, together with much equipment, were taken to the US where the V-2 underwent further testing and improvement at White Sands, New Mexico. Here were laid the foundations of the Apollo moon rocket programme.
