I had no idea V1s were air launched.
 

Just seen it on a FB comment and that took me to a paperback on the subject.

I saw them in the night sky, and one was displayed in Colchester - if you had 3d to go behind the canvas.

Yep, Heinkel's dropped them, see link, they also tried a flame thrower in the tail of the 111 to dissuade fighter attacks but abandoned it after they found it worked the opposite, pilots attacking assumed they had set it on fire so pressed home the attacks.


https://1000aircraftphotos.com/Contr...Bill/11860.htm

http://ww2today.com/24-december-1944...over-north-sea

Air launching couldn't have done much for the targeting accuracy. But I suppose at that late stage in the war it was just a case of fire and forget.

The Germans had more success with their air launched glider bombs which were wire guided from the parent He 111.

In the book Target London (which some kind soul had recommended on this forum) some astonishing figures were given.
32,000 V1s were made. 10,492 were launched against our capital. 4,261 were shot down by AA, fighters or collided with barrage balloons.
17,981 (mostly civilians) were injured and 6,181 killed.
No less than 1,402 V2 rockets were launched against the UK. There was no defence possible against these.
The damage caused by both these weapons was staggering. 107,000 homes destroyed and over 1.5 million damaged.
The figures given almost beggars belief.

Still far less than the bombing damage in Germany and deaths in firestorms.

True, Sallyann1234 but the data I submitted was about only the V1 & V2 and then in answer to your question. I didn't mention the conventional bombing by the Luftwaffe.

North Weald was in at the beginning and end of the V-1 campaign:

On 16 June 1944 the USAAF base at Boreham reported that an ‘unusual missile’ had come down near that airfield. F/Lt Cripwell from 6210 Bomb Disposal Flight at RAF North Weald took a squad of men to investigate. Several pieces of debris were collected and taken to Boreham for examination by intelligence officers. This V-1 impact was only three days after the first launch in operational service.

A V-1 Flying Bomb was shot down by F/Lt Jimmie Shottick of 501 Squadron flying a Hawker Tempest V out of Hunsdon on 26 March 1945. It was the final V-1 destroyed by Fighter Command and crashed to earth near North Weald. It had been released from a Heinkel He 111 bomber over the North Sea.

What a nonsensical post, given that the London blitz alone destroyed some 2 million homes and killed ~32,000.

This thread is about the V1.

V-1 was more significant than its reputation.
 

Indeed, we often see the V-1 portrayed as a somewhat crude example of Nazi technology -- hence the "Doodlebug" nickname.

However, by shortly after D-Day the Allies had come into possession of several intact examples, and took them to the US for study and reverse engineering. With some tweaks to guidance this became the JB-2 Loon. Almost 1400 were built, the plan being to launch these onto Japan at a rate of 500 a day, likely air launched from B-29's. Another more famous program resulted in the War ending before any were actually used.

However, the V-1, now as the Loon, was the early "air-launched cruise missile". A very significant bit of kit indeed.

I watched a TV program about the V2 the other night. Apparently the number of slave laborers who died building the V2 out numbered the number of British killed by the weapon by something like a factor of 5...
It wasn't mentioned in this program, but I understand that the German civilians also suffered from the V2 - the diversion of a large portion of the potato crop to creation of alcohol fuel for the V2 contributed greatly to the mass starvation of the German populace in the later stages of the war.

Putting to one side, for a moment, the appalling loss of life, on both sides, of the aerial bombing campaigns, there's the question of the effectiveness of the German missiles. On Blossy's figures, the V1s caused roughly 6 deaths per sortie. That is, I would have thought, lower than the average deaths per sortie of the Allied bombing campaign. Civilian deaths were not the primary objective of the bombing campaigns, but they might work as a rough proxy for all the desired outcomes (chiefly loss of industrial capacity and damage to morale).
How do the cost calculations work? Each V1 was a total loss on its first and only mission, whereas bombing aircraft were reusable--up to maybe 30 missions. How did airframe costs compare? There is also the loss of highly trained (and very brave) aircrew--I don't know quite how you figure that in, or how you offset it against the deaths of slave labourers building the missiles.
The economics of destruction and suffering is a horrible thing to contemplate, but presumably it's worth knowing whether the missiles were in fact effective weapons. Intuitively, one would expect the costs (of all kinds) of the V2 exceeded the damage caused by a good measure, but does anyone know about the V1?

There are far worse stats. The most startling [for me] was to discover that 75% of all the men who went to sea in a german submarine during WW2 died in a submarine. That's a shockingly high number, made more so by the way that the British generally view the "U-boat war" as being largely won by Germany.

PDR

The last but one V2 landed in my great grandmother's back garden. The impact blew all the windows in and half the tiles off the roof but the warhead didn't go off so the house stayed upright. Five years later there were still a couple of holes in the ground with bits of the combustion chamber. Because the warhead hadn't gone off the surrounding trees were unaffected.

Rumour has it that the warhead was down far too deep and dangerous to recover safely so they left it there.

I must wander around there one day and tell the present owners, who paid something like £485.000 for the property, my concerns.

I am sure I read somewhere the the Germans spent more on the "V" weapons then the Allies spent on the Manhattan Project...

My Dutch born mother was in The Netherlands during the war. She had a scar on her forehead and told us young boys it was caused by a V2 rocket. Of course I assumed she meant that the rocket had hit her on the head. Well, not quite!

It seems that the town she was in - Utrecht I think - was used for launching the V2s at night and they were very noisy and so woke everyone up. They could also hear when they went wrong, which a lot of them did. In that case they could land on the civilian areas. That is what happened on this night - the rocket landed 200m down the road and as my mother was trying to dive under the bed the door frame blew in and hit her on the head. Nowhere near as dramatic a story!

At the small but very well laid out museum at Headcorn they have a 'V1' with a cockpit for a very brave pilot.

Apparently Hanna Reitsch was a part of a group of test pilots that flew a manned version of the V!. They discovered gyroscopic precession on the autopilot when it was launched. A lock on the controls until the pulse jet was stable solved that.

Both my parents had close shaves with V weapons...

Father's school survived a near miss during assembly, although the windows smashed...
Mother had a V2 land nearby...
That and the aerial mine that took out the church 100yds down the road from my Father, make me wonder how lucky I am to be here!

Err, I make that about ONE person per V1....
10,492 launched at UK of which 4,261 destroyed en route by fighters, AA and balloons, which leaves approx 6,000 reaching their destination.
Deaths 6,181 from 6,000 V1's = 1 death and 3 wounded (injured more appropriate to non hostile actions in my belief)

V2's estimated some 1,400 launched at UK with some 2,700 deaths or approx 2 per V2. Obviously this is too simplistic for reality, even now, play a recording of a V1 droning, then silence and a roomful of elderly people will instantly recall what happened when they heard one and was unnerving as you had to hope the motor wouldn't cut out by you... but on some other poor sod.
The V2 you had no warning of, just a huge explosion, debris everywhere and shocked people stumbling around hardly aware of where they were or what they were doing.

I suppose quite appropriate that we're talking of this 75 years on...

You are, of course, quite right. :* In mitigation, I plead late night posting, and although it may be true that in vino veritas, it is definitely a threat to arithmetic.
As you rightly point out, deaths are a poor measure of effectiveness (as well as being distasteful to think about). Perhaps a better measure of the effectiveness of the weapon was the cost of delivering a certain weight of explosives to the target.

We had a thick, heavy, solid oak dining room table which we used to hide under when we heard a V1 coming. The silence and then the bang and we would rush out to see where it had landed.

Sometimes we would run out before the bang.

I lived in Tonbridge, Kent during the war and saw quite a few Doodlebugs. Some landed within a mile or so of our street Most seemed quite low and very noisy. My most vivid memory was seeing a Hawker Tempest firing at a Doodlebug at a height of around 2000 ft and directly above Tonbridge railway yards. The Tempest was about 200 yards directly behind the Doodlebug and fired its cannons. The was a huge explosion as the Doodlebug blew up in mid-air and the Tempest flew through the flame, smoke and wreckage a second or so later. It had absolutely no chance of avoiding the maelstrom but obviously survived.

One night a V2 rocket landed in a field close to Judd School at Tonbridge. The explosion woke me up. There was some damage to the school. In the morning, I picked up a tiny piece of shrapnel from the crater and proudly took it home to our house in Deakin Leas, Tonbridge. It was highly magnetic. My family migrated to Australia in 1947. About 20 years later I visited relatives at Deakin Leas and my uncle disappeared into the garage for a moment and came out with this tiny lump of shrapnel which I must have left there from war days. It was still magnetic. It is now in a box in my study in Melbourne, Australia and still magnetic. Perhaps its supersonic flight in 1944 caused the metal to become magnetic?

Giles take on the effects on Londoners of the V1 campaign.

'It's ridiculous to say these new flying bombs have affected people in any way!'


https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....d65a6d4fde.jpg

One of the last v1s
 

This V1 was probably air launched given the lateness in the war March 1945 and its crash site in the fen near Somersham, Cambridgeshire.

I was in bed when we heard this weird sound totally different from the Merllins we were used to being surrounded by 3 Group aerodromes. My Father immediately said "That's a Doodlebug", we all went quiet and listened, fortunately the noise slowly diminished and we slowly relaxed. I think we heard it cut out and a final thump. However in its journey it must have over flown every house in the Isle of Ely!!!!https://www.pprune.org/images/infopop/icons/icon7.gifhttps://www.pprune.org/images/infopop/icons/icon7.gif
Next morning we learnt it exploded harmlessly in a field seven miles westish

When doing the tour of NASA at Cape Canaveral a few years ago, the tour guide was just a bit too complimentary for my liking about Werner von Braun, who devised both the V1 and V2, and was subsequently signed up by the US rocket/space/NASA programmes, and worked at The Cape. Not just him but various German former colleagues as well (apparently they all conversed among one another in staccato German during Cape launches). So I asked him in front of everyone else how the US would have felt if Osama Bin Laden and his team had been welcomed to Britain and given a substantial and well paid government job. Americans in the group then asked about the detail of the events.

I think they were a bit shocked. Guide moved us on quickly back into the bus and kept well clear of me for the rest of the trip. I wonder if it had been raised there before. Incidentally, the whole trip there highly recommended.

How did Von Braun escape the Nuremberg Trials ?

All the V-1's that landed in UK after October 1944 were air launched, as all the land based launch sites within range of UK had been overrun by the advancing Allied armies by end of October '44.
My aunt narrowly missed getting killed by the last V-1 to land west of the centre of London, in March '45, when it landed on the ordanance depot in Greenford. Other than singed eyebrows, she was unharmed, while her friend who was standing next to her, turned around and bent down to take cover and ended up with a hot molten piece of shrapnel in her arse. My aunt still laughed at her friends misfortune even when re-telling the story to me a few years before she passed away in 2017.

My father said of his cohort who joined Bomber Command (Halifaxes) together with him, the loss rate by the end of their FIRST tour (fortunately his only one) had been the same.

The air launched V-1's from the North Sea also led to the introduction (as a trial!) of the first AEW aircraft, although the concept had been discussed for some years before. I believe the introduction of the RAF Wellington which flew these sorties even pre-dated the USN introduction of the Avenger in the Pacific, but as it was a secret unit its history was 'overlooked'.

WHBM, you might be interested to know that the Atlanta, Georgia High School from which I graduated in 1967 (gulp!) counted Wernher von Braun's daughter among its student body. Miss von B., who was two years my junior, was lovely and hyper-intelligent; she was, in fact, her class Valedictorian in 1969. Her proud father was to give the commencement address that year. Our school had a strict (and I mean STRICT!) prohibition against the consumption of alcoholic beverages. The single exception was Communion wine.

The day prior to Graduation, Miss von B. was spied by a faculty member actively drinking at a bar not far from campus. She was expelled the next morning and, to the best of my knowledge, never received a diploma. Her father was absent from the proceedings that day.

Perhaps he was too busy counting backwards from 10....

- Ed

https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....4e523b5d0b.jpg

Von Braun's reputation was carefully crafted by the US Government during something referred to as 'Operation Paperclip' - he wasn't exactly alone, roughly 1,600 German scientists and engineers were brought to the US in the immediate aftermath of the war. There has always been some controversy about his involvement in the Nazi party - the accepted story is that he viewed it as a necessary evil - he would have rather worked on rockets for peaceful purposes but that wasn't an option, although some claim he was an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazi party, only changing his tune when it was obvious that Germany was going to lose. BTW, I didn't think Von Braun had major involvement in the V-1, only the V-2.

That being said, why would Von Braun be any more responsible than any other German weapons designers? They were doing their job as they saw it - just like the people who designed the Spitfire or Lancaster, or the Rolls engines that powered them? Sure, the V2 was used as a terror weapon, but so was the Lancaster. When you start charging the people who design or manufacture the weapons of war with war crimes, you open up a pretty nasty can of worms. Comparisons to Bin Laden are rather unfair - Bin Laden would be more comparable to Hitler.

Personally, I view Von Braun as a brilliant rocket scientist and a bit of a personal hero for the work he (and his cohorts) did on the US Space program, but accept he had a seriously flawed background. Personally, I find his apparent indifference to the slave labor and working conditions at the Mittelwerk underground V-2 production facility more disturbing that his decision to perform what he stated he considered his patriotic duty in developing the A-4 (it was Hitler that renamed it V-2).

tdracer: concur!

- Ed

There is a very interesting book, Operation Paperclip (in a box somewhere after house move), which details the scurrilous way German engineers, scientists and doctors were spirited to the US after the war, wholly illegally. In particular some of the doctors had been closely involved in some of the nastiest experiments on live prisoners from concentration camps

There was of course the famous incident just before the premiere of the film about Von Braun in Leicester Square in 1960.
The big film poster outside of course had the title " I AIM AT THE STARS " in large letters
To which some wag had added:


" Yes, but sometimes I hit London"

Here you go, Peter G-W! That song and the countdown was my inspiration for my post #32 above. Like Freiherr vonBraun, Harvard/M.I.T. Mathematics Professor and music composer Tom Lehrer was a true genius. I wonder if Wernher had a sense of humo(u)r equal to Dr. Lehrer....


- Ed :D

IS!
He's still with us at age 91.