The V-1 (German: Vergeltungswaffe 1) was the first guided missile used in war and the forerunner of today's cruise missile. The V-1 was developed at Peenemünde by the German Luftwaffe during the Second World War. Between June 1944 and March 29, 1945, it was fired at targets in southeastern England and Belgium, London and Antwerp. V-1s were launched from "ski-jump" launch sites along the French (Pas-de-Calais) and Dutch coasts until the sites were overrun by Allied forces. The underground V-1 storage depots at Saint-Leu-d'Esserent, Nucourt and Rilly La Montange, as well as the launch sites, were bombed during Operation Crossbow.Design and development

The V-1 was designed by Robert Lussar of the Fieseler company and Fritz Gosslau from the Argus engine works, with a fuselage constructed mainly of welded sheet steel and wings built similarly or of plywood. The simple Pulse jet engine pulsed 50 times per second[2], and the characteristic buzzing sound gave rise to the colloquial names "buzz bomb" or "doodlebug" (after an Australian insect).

It is a common myth that the V-1's pulsejet engine needed a minimum airspeed of 150 mph (241.4 km/h) for operation as it is commonly confused with the Lorin ram jet. The V1's Argus Schmidt pulse jet, also known as a resonant jet, could operate at zero airspeed due to the nature of its intake vane system and accoustically tuned resonant combustion chamber. Film footage of the V1 always shows the distinctive pulsating jet exhaust of a fully running engine before the catapult system is triggered. The engine would always be started first whilst the craft was stationary on the ramp. The low static thrust of the jet engine and very high stall speed of the wings meant that the craft could not take off under its own power in a practically short distance, and thus required a catapult launch or an airlaunch from a modified bomber. Take off speed was commonly attained by launching from a ground ramp, using a chemical or steam catapult which accelerated the V-1 to 200 mph, or from a moving aircraft such as the Heinkel He-111.

The V1's pulse jet engine was also tested on a variety of craft, including an experimental attack boat known as the "Tornado". The unsuccessful prototype was a version of a sprengboot , where a boat loaded with explosives was steered towards a target ship and the pilot would leap out the back at the last moment. The Tornado was assembled from surplus seaplane hulls connected in catamaran fashion with a small pilot cabin on the cross beams. The Tornado prototype was a noisy underperformer and was abandoned in favour of more conventional piston engined craft.

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Guidance system

The V-1 guidance system used a simple autopilot to regulate height and speed. A weighted pendulum system provided fore-and-aft attitude measurement to control pitch (damped by a gyromagnetic compass, which it also stabilized). There was a more sophisticated interaction between yaw, roll, and other sensors: a gyromagnetic compass (set by swinging in a hangar before launch) gave feedback to control each of pitch and roll, but it was angled away from the horizontal so that controlling these degrees of freedom interacted: the gyroscope stayed trued up by feedback from the magnetic field, and from the fore and aft pendulum. This interaction meant that rudder control was enough without a separate banking mechanism.

A countdown timer driven by a vane anemometer) on the nose found when target range has been reached, accurately enough for area bombing. Before launch the counter was set to a value that would reach zero upon arrival at the target in the prevailing wind conditions. As the missile flew, the airflow turned the propeller and every 30 rotations of the propeller counted down one number on the counter. This counter triggered the arming of the warhead after about 38 miles[3]. When the count reached zero, a solenoid attached to a small guillotine was activated, cutting the air hose from the servo to the rear elevator and allowing a spring to fully depress the elevator causing the V-1 to dive[4]. While this was originally intended to be a power dive, in practice the dive caused the fuel flow to cease, which stopped the engine. The sudden silence after the buzzing alerted listeners that the V-1 would impact soon.

With the counter determining how far the missile would fly; it was only necessary to launch the V1 with the ramp in the rough direction and the autopilot controlled the rest.

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Operation and effectiveness

The first test flight of the V-1 was in late 1941 or early 1942 at Peenemünde.

A myth arose that early guidance and stabilisation problems were resolved by a daring test flight by Hanna Reitsch in a V-1 modified for manned operation. The myth entered popular consciousness from Hanna's fictional exploits in the George Peppard film Operation Crossbow.

Hanna's first flights in the modified V1 Fieseler Reichenberg were late in the war when she was asked to work out why test pilots were unable to land it and had died in landing attempts. Her discovery after simulated landing attempts at high altitude where there might be air space to recover, was that the craft had an extremely high stall speed and the previous pilots with little high speed experience had attempted their approaches much too slow. Her recomendations of much higher landing speeds were then introduced in training new Reichenberg volunteer pilots. The Reichenbergs air-launched rather than fired from the catapult ramp as erroneously portrayed in "Operation Crossbow".The conventional unpiloted V1 launch sites could theoretically launch about 15 bombs per day, although this was never consistently achieved; the record was 18 in one day. Only a quarter hit their targets due to a combination of defensive measures (see Countermeasures below), mechanical unreliability and guidance errors. Once the Allies had captured or destroyed the sites that were the principal launch points of V-1s aimed at England, the Germans switched to missile launches aimed at strategic points in the Low Countries, primarily the port of Antwerp.

The earliest experimental versions of the V-1 were air-launched. Most operational V-1s were launched from static sites on land, but from July 1944 to January 1945 the Luftwaffe launched approximately 1,176 from modified Heinkel He 111 H-22s flying with the Luftwaffe's 3rd Bomber Wing or Kampfgeschwader 3 (the so-named "Blitz Wing") flying over the North Sea. Research after the war estimated a 40% failure rate of air-launched V-1s, and the He-111s used in this role were extremely vulnerable to night fighter attack, as the launch lit up the area around the aircraft for several seconds.

Late in the war several air-launched piloted V-1s, known as Reichenbergs, were built, but never used in combat. There were plans, not carried into practice, to use the Arado Ar 234 jet bomber to launch V-1s either by towing them aloft or by launching them from a "piggy back" position atop the aircraft.

Almost 30,000 V-1s were made. Approximately 10,000 were fired at England; 2,419 reached London, killing about 6,184 people and injuring 17,981.[5] The greatest density of hits were received by Croydon, on the SE fringe of London.
ntelligence reportsThe codename Flak Zielgerät 76 - "Flak aiming apparatus" helped to hide the nature of the device, and it was some time before references to FZG 76 were linked to the V83 pilotless aircraft (an experimental V-1) that had crashed on Bornholm in the Baltic and to reports from agents of a flying bomb capable of being used against London. Initially British experts were skeptical of the V-1 because they had considered only solid fuel rockets, which could not attain the stated range of 130 miles (209 km). However they later considered other types of engine, and by the time German scientists had achieved the needed accuracy to deploy the V-1 as a weapon, British intelligence had a very accurate assessment of it. British Intelligence also used the Double Cross System to provide false impact reports to Germany.
Countermeasures

The British defence against the German long range weapons was Operation Crossbow. Anti-aircraft guns were redeployed in several movements: first in mid-June 1944 from positions on the North Downs to the south coast of England, then a cordon closing the Thames Estuary to attacks from the east. In September 1944, a new linear defence line was formed on the coast of East Anglia, and finally in December there was a further layout along the Lincolnshire-Yorkshire coast. The deployments were prompted by changes to the approach tracks of the V-1 as launch sites were overrun by the Allies' advance.

On the first night of sustained bombardment, the anti-aircraft crews around Croydon were jubilant - suddenly they were downing unprecedented numbers of German bombers; most of their targets burst into flames and fell when their engines cut out. There was great disappointment when the truth was announced. Anti-aircraft gunners soon found that such small fast-moving targets were, in fact, very difficult to hit. The cruising altitude of the V-1, between 2,000 and 3,000 feet (600 to 900 m), was just above the effective range of light anti-aircraft guns, and just below the optimum engagement height of heavier guns. The altitude and speed were more than the rate of traverse of the standard British QF 3.7 inch mobile gun could cope with, and faster-traversing static gun emplacements had to be built at great cost. The development of centimetric gun-laying radars based on the cavity magnetron and of the proximity fuse helped defend against the V-1's high speed and small size. In 1944, Bell Labs started delivery of an anti-aircraft predictor fire-control system based around an analog computer, just in time for the Allied invasion of Europe.

Eventually some 2,000 barrage balloons were deployed, in the hope that V-1s would be destroyed when they struck the balloons' tethering cables. The leading edges of the V-1's wings were fitted with cable cutters, and fewer than 300 V-1s are known to have been brought down by barrage balloons[6].

Fighters were mobilized to intercept the V-1, but most fighter aircraft were too slow to catch a V-1 unless they had a height advantage, allowing them to gain speed by diving. Solid machine gun bullets had little effect on the V-1's sheet steel structure, and if an explosive cannon shell detonated the warhead, the explosion could destroy the attacking fighter. The first interception of a V-1, by F/L JG Musgrave of No. 605 Squadron RAF, took place on the night of 14/15 June 1944.

The V-1 also lacked the primary points of vulnerability of conventional aircraft: pilot, life-support, and a complex engine. Hits to the pilot, oxygen system, or complex reciprocating engines of a piloted aircraft by a bullet or small shell fragment can destroy its fighting capability, but the V-1's Argus pulsejet provided sufficient thrust for flight even if damaged. The only vulnerable point of the Argus was the valve array at the front of the engine. The V-1's only one-shot stop points were the two bomb detonators and the line from the fuel tank, three very small targets buried inside the fuselage. A direct hit on the warhead by an explosive shell from a fighter's cannon, or a very close anti-aircraft shell explosion, were the most effective forms of gunfire.When V-1 attacks began in mid-June of 1944, there were fewer than 30 Tempests, the only aircraft with the low-altitude speed needed to be effective against the V-1; they were assigned to No. 150 Wing RAF. Early attempts to intercept and destroy V-1s often failed, but improved techniques soon emerged. These included the hair-raising method of using the airflow over an interceptor's wing to raise one wing of the Doodlebug, by sliding the wingtip to within six inches (15 cm) of the lower surface of the V-1's wing. If properly executed, this manoeuvre would tip the V-1's wing up, overriding the gyros and sending the V-1 into an out-of-control dive. At least three V-1s were destroyed this way.

The Tempest wing was built up to over 100 aircraft by September; P-51 Mustangs and Griffon-engined Spitfire XIVs were tuned to make them almost fast enough, and during the short summer nights the Tempests shared defensive duty with de Havilland Mosquitoes. There was no need for radar — at night the V-1's engine could be heard from 16 km (10 miles) or more away, and the exhaust plume was visible from a long distance. Wing Commander Roland Beamont had the 20 mm cannons on his Tempest harmonised at 300 yards (275 m) (i.e. set to fire at the same spot 300 yards ahead). This was so successful that all other aircraft in 150 Wing were thus modified.

In daylight, V-1 chases were chaotic and often unsuccessful until a special defence zone was declared between London and the coast, in which only the fastest fighters were permitted. Between June and 5 September 1944, the handful of 150 Wing Tempests shot down 638 flying bombs, with No. 3 Squadron RAF alone claiming 305. One Tempest pilot, Squadron Leader Joseph Berry of No. 501 (Tempest) Squadron, shot down 59 V-1s, and Wing Commander Roland Beamont destroyed 31.

Next most successful were the Mosquito (428), Spitfire XIV (303), and Mustang (232). All other types combined added 158. Even though it was not fully operational, the jet-powered Gloster Meteor was rushed into service with No. 616 Squadron RAF to fight the V-1s. It had ample speed but its cannons were prone to jamming, and it shot down only 13 V-1s.[citation needed]

In mid-1944 the V-1 threat was drastically reduced by the arrival of two electronic aids for anti-aircraft guns requested by AA Command, both developed in the USA by the MIT Rad Lab after the British John Randall and Harry Boot had invented the cavity magnetron and provided it to them free of charge: radar-based automatic gunlaying (using the SCR-584 and other radars), and the proximity fuse.

These electronic aids arrived in quantity from June 1944, just as the guns reached their firing positions on the coast. Seventeen percent of all flying bombs entering the coastal 'gun belt' were destroyed by guns in their first week on the coast. This rose to 60% by 23 August and 74% in the last week of the month, when on one day 82% were shot down. The rate improved from one V-1 destroyed for every 2,500 shells fired initially, to one for every 100. This still did not stem the problem, however, and the threat was not properly contained until the launch sites could be captured by infantry.

By September 1944, the V-1 threat to England ended when all launch sites were overrun by the advancing Allied Armies. 4,261 V-1s had been destroyed by fighters, anti-aircraft fire and barrage balloons.
Japanese versions

In 1943, an Argus pulse jet engine was shipped to Japan by German submarine. The Aeronautical Institute of Tokyo Imperial University and the Kawanishi Aircraft Company conducted a joint study of the feasibility of mounting a similar engine on a piloted plane. The resulting design was based on the Fieseler Fi-103 Reichenberg (Fi103R, a piloted V-1), and was named Baika ("ume blossom").

Baika never left the design stage but technical drawings and notes suggest that two versions were under consideration: an air-launch version with the engine mounted under the fuselage, and a ground-launch version that could take off without a ramp.

Intelligence reports of the new "Baika" weapon are rumored to be the source of the name given to the Yokosuka MXY-7, a rocket-propelled suicide plane better known as the "Baka Bomb". However, as baka means "fool" in Japanese, and the MXY-7 was officially designated the "Ohka" ("Cherry Blossom"), the true origin is unknown.[citation needed] The MXY-7 was usually carried by the G4M2e version of the Mitsubishi G4M "Betty" naval bomber, then the pilot lit the solid-fuel rockets and guided his flying bomb into a ship. During the Boeing B-29 firebomb attacks on Japanese cities, the Baka was deployed against American bombers.

Another Japanese Fi 103 version was the Mizuno Shinryu, a proposed rocket-powered kamikaze aircraft design, but it was not built.
Post-war
France

The French produced copies of the V-1 for use as target drones. These were called the CT-10 and were smaller than the V-1 with twin tail surfaces. The CT 10 could be ground launched using a rocket booster or from an aircraft. Some CT 10s were sold to the UK and USA.
Soviet Union

The Soviet Union captured V-1s when they overran the Blizna test range in Poland. The 10Kh was their copy of the V-1, later called Izdeliye 10. Initial tests began in March 1945 at a test range in Tashkent with further launches from ground sites and from aircraft of improved versions continuing into the late 1940s. The inaccuracy of the guidance system compared to new methods such as beam-riding and TV guidance saw development end in the early 1950s. The Soviets also worked on a piloted attack aircraft based on the Argus pulse jet engine of the V-1 which began as a German project, the Junkers EF 126 Lilli [2] , in the latter stages of the war. The Soviet development of the Lilli ended in 1946 after a crash that killed the test pilot.
United States

The U.S. Navy conducted experiments to mount V-1s on submarines. This was called the KGW-1 Loon, which was an adaptation of the U.S. Army's JB-2 Doodle Bug. The JB-2, built by Republic Aviation (airframe) and Ford Motor Company (pulsejet engine), was reverse-engineered by inspecting V-1 wreckage found in England and was first flight-tested less than four months after the first V-1 attack. While the first flights were from Eglin AAF, Florida, extensive testing was also done at Wendover Army Air Field in Utah, launching only a few hundred feet from the sheds where delivery methods for the first atomic bombs were being developed under Project Alberta. The JB-2 was intended as a weapon in the planned invasion of Japan, but Japan surrendered and the invasion did not take place. Following the war, testing at Wendover continued, including comparison tests between the original German missile and the American copy. Later, preliminary design work was done on a small atomic warhead to be fitted to the JB-2, but it was never built. The US briefly considered using the Loon in the Korean War against North Korean targets.

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V-2 rocket
The V-2 Rocket (German: Vergeltungswaffe 2) was the first ballistic missile and first man-made object launched into space, the progenitor of all modern rockets and a direct predecessor of the Saturn V moon rocket. Over 3,000 V-2s were launched as military rockets by the German Wehrmacht against Allied targets in World War II. As many as 20,000 died constructing V-2s and 7,000 died from the attacks themselves.
Developmental history
Following successes at Kummersdorf with the first two Aggregate series rockets, Wernher von Braun and Walter Riedel began thinking of a much larger rocket in the summer of 1936[6] based on a projected 25-metric-ton-thrust engine. After the A-4 project was postponed after unfavorable aerodynamic stability testing of the A-3 in July 1936, von Braun specified the A-4 performance in 1937,[9] and A-4 design and construction was ordered c1938/1939. During September 28-30 1939, Der Tag der Weisheit (English: the day of wisdom) conference met at Peenemünde to initiate the funding of university research to solve rocket problems.[11] By late 1941, the Army Research Center at Peenemünde possessed the technologies essential to the success of the A-4. The three key technologies for the A-4 were large liquid-fuel rocket engines, supersonic aerodynamics, and guidance and control.[3] In early September 1943, von Braun promised the Long-Range Bombardment Commission[12] that the A-4 development was 'practically complete/concluded',[13] but even by the middle of 1944, a complete A-4 parts list was still unavailable.[14] A production line was nearly ready at Peenemünde when the Operation Hydra attack caused the Germans to move production to the Mittelwerk in the Kohnstein.
Hitler's views
In his study of V2 Roy Irons: The price of vengeance found that at first "It was recognised by Hitler that the rocket was neither sufficiently accurate, destructive or plentiful. The Führer had horrified Dornberger in 1939 with his polite and unimpressed observation of the shattering power of the rocket motor. He was too astute, perhaps too conscious of his dignity, to be impressed by mere noise. Perhaps what impressed him was the foolish enthusiasm of others. In October 1942, before the catastrophic defeat at Stalingrad, he recognised both the failings of the rocket, and the burning enthusiasm of its promoters. By July 1943 the positions of 1939 were reversed; now Hitler needed to show that the war was still winnable, needed to keep his soldiers and people's belief in the victory, which had so slowly and narrowly slipped from his grasp. The film of the launch was decisive - but it might be guessed that the master of manipulation was really observing, not the film, but the ardent credulity in the faces of the others during the showing. What he discerned there was what had been missing in 1918 - a definite hope on the horizon, which would so enthuse and reinvigorate his knights and his pawns that they would willingly play their grandmaster's game to the bitter end.
Technical details
At launch the A-4 propelled itself for up to 65 seconds on its own power, and a program motor controlled the pitch to the specified angle at engine shutdown, from which the rocket continued on a free-fall (ballistic) trajectory. The fuel and oxidizer pumps were steam turbines, and the steam was produced by concentrated hydrogen peroxide with potassium permanganate catalyst. Both the alcohol and oxygen tanks were an aluminium-magnesium alloy.[16]

The combustion burner reached a temperature of 2500−2700 °C. The alcohol-water fuel was pumped along the double wall of the main combustion burner. This cooled the chamber and heated the fuel (regenerative cooling). The fuel was then pumped into the main burner chamber through 1,224 nozzles, which assured the correct mixture of alcohol and oxygen at all times. Small holes also permitted some alcohol to escape directly into the combustion chamber, forming a boundary layer that further protected the wall of the chamber, especially at the neck where the chamber was narrowest. This boundary layer ignited in contact with the atmosphere, accounting for the long, diffuse exhaust plume. (Later, post-V2 engine designs not employing the boundary layer show a translucent plume with shock diamonds.)

The V-2 was guided by four external rudders on the tail fins, and four internal graphite vanes at the exit of the motor. The LEV-3 guidance system consisted of two free gyroscopes (a horizon and a verticant) for lateral stabilization, and a gyroscopic accelerometer connected to an electrolytic integrator (engine cut-off occurred when a thin coating of silver was electrochemically eroded off of a poorly conducting base). Some later V-2s used "guide beams" (radio signals transmitted from the ground) to navigate towards the target, but the first models used a simple analog computer that adjusted the azimuth for the rocket, and the flying distance was controlled by the moment of engine cut-off, "Brennschluss", ground controlled by a Doppler system or by different types of on-board integrating accelerometers. The rocket stopped accelerating and soon reached the top of the (approximately parabolic) flight curve.

The painting of the operational V-2s was mostly a camouflage ragged pattern with several variations, but at the end of the war a plain olive green rocket also appeared. During tests, the rocket was painted in a characteristic black-and-white chessboard pattern, which aided in determining if the rocket was spinning around its longitudinal axis.

The rocket reached a height of 80 km (50 miles) before shutting of engine.
Production
Initially the production process occurred at Peenemünde. From January 1944 to April 1945 about 6,000 V-2 rockets were built at Mittelbau-Dora. 20,000 forced labor workers died there, more than were killed by the missiles themselves.

The original idea for use of slave workers was Hans Kammler's.
Launch sites
Initial plans for launch from massive underground blockhouses at Éperlecques La Coupole were dropped in favor of mobile launching. An entire convoy for the missile, men, equipment and fuel required about 30 trucks. The missile was delivered to a staging area on a Vidalwagen (made by Vidal) and the local crews installed the warhead. Launch teams then transferred the missile to a Meillerwagen (made by Meiller) and towed it to the launch site. There it was erected onto the launch table, fuelled, armed, gyros were set and the rocket was fired. From arrival at a site to firing took about 90 minutes. The crew could leave the firing site within 30 minutes.

This was very successful, and an average of ten V-2s were launched per day, by far the most large rockets of a single type. After the war, estimates showed that up to 100 V-2s could be launched per day with these trailers, given sufficient supply of the rockets.[18]

The missile could be launched practically anywhere, roads running through forests being a particular favorite. The system was so mobile and small that not one Meillerwagen was caught in action by Allied aircraft.Initial plans for launch from massive underground blockhouses at Éperlecques La Coupole were dropped in favor of mobile launching. An entire convoy for the missile, men, equipment and fuel required about 30 trucks. The missile was delivered to a staging area on a Vidalwagen (made by Vidal) and the local crews installed the warhead. Launch teams then transferred the missile to a Meillerwagen (made by Meiller) and towed it to the launch site. There it was erected onto the launch table, fuelled, armed, gyros were set and the rocket was fired. From arrival at a site to firing took about 90 minutes. The crew could leave the firing site within 30 minutes.

This was very successful, and an average of ten V-2s were launched per day, by far the most large rockets of a single type. After the war, estimates showed that up to 100 V-2s could be launched per day with these trailers, given sufficient supply of the rockets.[18]

The missile could be launched practically anywhere, roads running through forests being a particular favorite. The system was so mobile and small that not one Meillerwagen was caught in action by Allied aircraft.
Operational history
The first unit to reach operational status was Batterie 444. On September 2, 1944 they formed up to launch attacks on Paris, recently liberated, and eventually set up near Houffalize in Belgium. The next day the 485th moved to The Hague for operations against London. Several launch attempts over the next few days failed, but on 8 September both groups fired successfully.Hundreds more were launched that blew up in mid-flight, and never made it into allied statistics. (Final development of the V-2 during the war was in fact to remedy this problem)

The final two exploded on (or near) their targets on 27 March 1945. The last British civilian killed was Mrs Ivy Millichamp, 34, in her home in Elm Grove, Orpington. An estimated 2,754 civilians were killed in London by V-2 attacks with another 6,523 injured [20]. This understates the potential of the V-2, since many rockets were mis-directed and exploded harmlessly. Accurately targeted missiles were often devastating, causing large numbers of deaths - about 160 in one explosion in a Woolworth's department store in New Cross, south-east London and 567 deaths in a cinema in Antwerp - and significant damage in the critically important Antwerp docks.
Silence
Because the V-2 traveled supersonically, it reached its target in silence. To a civilian population inured to the idea that they might soon be blown up if they heard an enemy bomber or V-1 flying bomb, this new mode of attack was disconcerting.

It also meant that when the attacks on London began in September 1944, the British government could keep them secret. Explosions could be attributed to other causes or to no particular cause. In this way the Germans were unable to be sure that their weapons were reaching England. The Germans themselves finally announced the V-2 on 8 November 1944 and only then, on 10 November 1944, did Winston Churchill inform Parliament, and the world, that England had been under rocket attack "for the last few weeks".
Countermeasures
Like the V-1, the V-2 was immune to electronic countermeasures. Unlike the V-1, the V-2's speed and trajectory made it invulnerable to anti-aircraft guns and fighters, as it dropped from an altitude of 100–110 km (60–70 miles) at up to four times the speed of sound. A plan was proposed whereby the missile would be detected by radar, its terminal trajectory calculated, and the area along that trajectory saturated by large-caliber anti-aircraft guns. The plan was dropped after operations research indicated that the likely number of malfunctioning artillery shells falling to the ground would do more damage than the V-2 itself.[21]

The only defences against the V-2 campaign were to destroy the launch infrastructure—expensive in terms of bomber resources and casualties—or to cause the Germans to "aim" at the wrong place through disinformation. The British were able to convince the Germans to direct V-1s and V-2s aimed at London to less populated areas east of the city. This was done by sending false impact reports via the German espionage network in Britain, which was controlled by the British (the Double Cross System).

There is a record of one V-2, fortuitously observed at launch from a passing American B-24 Liberator, being shot down by .50 caliber machine-gun fire.[22]

Ultimately the most successful countermeasure was the Allied advance that forced the launchers back beyond range.

On 3 March 1945 the allies attempted to destroy V-2s and launching equipment near The Hague by a large-scale bombardment, but due to navigational errors the Bezuidenhout quarter was destroyed, killing 500 Dutch civilians.
Assessment
Despite being one of the most advanced weapons in WWII, the V-2 was militarily ineffective. As it lacked a proximity fuze, so it could not be set for airburst; it buried itself in the target area before or just as the warhead detonated. This reduced its effectiveness. Furthermore its guidance systems were too primitive to hit specific targets, and its costs were approximately equivalent to four-engined bombers, which were more accurate (though only in a relative sense), had longer ranges, carried many more warheads, and were reusable. Moreover, it diverted resources from other, more effective programmes. Nevertheless, it had a considerable psychological effect as, unlike bombing planes or the V1 Flying Bomb, which made a characteristic buzzing sound, the V-2 travelled faster than the speed of sound, with no warning before impact and no possibility of defense.

The cost of the V-2 program was approximately US$2 billion in 1944 dollars (approximately US$21 billion in 2005 dollars); and 6048 were built, 3225 launched (US$620,000 each in 2005 dollars). In fact the program can be seen as the German "Manhattan Project", which cost US$2 billion in 1944 dollars (approximately US$20 billion in 2004 dollars). To put the German effort to mass produce the V-2 in perspective, its cost was at the time estimated to be about 1,000,000 Reichsmark per rocket. This was about the same as four Tiger Tanks or eight Panzer Pzkfw IV tanks. For the 6000 V-2s built, Germany could have built up to 48,000 tanks. However, such comparisons of the opportunity cost of deploying the V2 versus other weapons systems need to consider the realities that Nazi Germany faced and the psychology of the senior Nazi leadership. For example, by late 1944 Nazi Germany did not have the fuel or qualified manpower to field an additional 48,000 tanks. The production of the fuel for one V-2 required 30 tons of potatoes. Sometimes as Germany lacked enough explosives to put in the V-2, concrete was used and sometimes the Germans put in V-2s photographic propaganda of German citizens who had died in allied bombing. With the war all but lost, regardless of the factory output of conventional weapons, the Nazis resorted to V-weapons as a tenuous last hope to influence the war militarily (hence Antwerp as V-2 target), as an extension of their desire to "punish" their foes and most importantly to give hope to their supporters with their miracle weapon[23]. In short, the V-weapons were important to the Nazis even though they were civilian terror weapons with dubious military value.

The V-2's undeniable value, despite its overall ineffectiveness, was in its novelty as a weapon which set the stage for the next 50 years of ballistic military rocketry, culminating with ICBMs during the Cold War.
Unfulfilled plans
A submarine-towed launch platform was tested successfully, effectively making it the prototype for submarine-launched ballistic missiles. The project codename was Prüfstand XII (Test stand XII), sometimes called the rocket U-boat. If deployed, it would have allowed a U-boat to launch V-2 missiles against United States cities, though only with considerable effort (and likely limited effect)[8].

Twelve dismantled V-2 rockets were shipped to the Japanese. These left Bordeaux in August 1944 on transport U-boats U-219 and U-195 reaching Djakarta in December 1944. A civilian V-2 expert was a VIP passenger on the U-234 bound for Japan in May 1945 when the war ended in Europe. The fate of these V-2 rockets is unknown.

Near the end of the war, German scientists were working on chemical and possibly biological weapons to use in the V-2 program. By this stage, the Germans had produced munitions containing nerve agents sarin, soman and tabun.
Post-war V-2 usage
At the end of the war, a race between the United States and the USSR to retrieve as many V-2 rockets and staff as possible began.[24] Three hundred trainloads of V-2s and parts were captured and shipped to the United States, and 126 of the principal designers, including both Wernher von Braun and Walter Dornberger were in American hands. In fact, Von Braun and his team made the conscious decision to surrender to the United States military to ensure they were not captured by the advancing Russians.

In the midst of this, in Operation Backfire in October 1945 the British assembled a small number of V-2 missiles and launched three of them from a site in northern Germany. The engineers involved had already agreed to move to the US when the test firings were complete. The Backfire report remains the most extensive technical documentation of the rocket, including all support procedures, tailored vehicles and fuel composition. In his book My Father's Son, Canadian author Farley Mowat, then a member of the Canadian Army, claims to have obtained a V-2 rocket in 1945 and shipped it back to Canada, where it is alleged to have ended up in the National Exhibition grounds in Toronto.Operation Paperclip recruited German engineers to the U.S., and Special Mission V-2 transported V-2 parts to White Sands Proving Grounds, from which programs with animals in space and the Bumper rocket were conducted.

The USSR also captured a number of V-2s and staff, letting them set up in Germany for a time. The first work contracts were signed in the summer of 1945. In 1946 they were obliged to move to Kapustin Yar in the USSR, where Groettrup headed up a group of just under 250 engineers. The first Soviet missile was the R-1, an exact copy of the V-2. Most of the German team was sent home after that project, but some remained to do research until as late as 1951. Unbeknownst to the Germans, work immediately began on larger missiles, the R-2 and R-5, based on extension of the V-2 technology.

Post-war V-2s launched in secret from Peenemünde may have been responsible for a curious phenomenon known as Ghost rockets, unexplained objects crossing the skies over Sweden and Finland.

Efektivno al mnogo skupo i neprecizno. Inace "Tomahawk" je praunuk V 1, samo malko "pametniji"

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Ako nije problem mogo bi nesto i na Srpskom u kratkim crtama da napises za svako predstavljanje.

Bravo, Miccko!