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V-1, V-2: Hitler's vengeance on London
V-1, Hitler's Vengeance on London is the full story of the year Hitler's guided missiles fell on London. Based on eyewitness accounts from both sides, which includes previously classified information. This book was originally published V for Vengeance. W. Kimber, 1981.
- GenresHistory
203 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1982
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9 people want to read
About the author
David Johnson
662 books28 followersThere is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads data base. For the author of the Tucker series, see https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
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October 6, 2021
In one of the last meetings with my faculty advisor before graduating from college, he said something I have since learned is a fairly common bit of valedictory advice given to students about to head out into the world: “Everything of value that I learned in life I learned after I graduated.” What it means is that college can teach you how to think, but after that it is up to you to use it wisely. He also said that if I were looking for a guiding principle to live my life by, I could do a lot worse than the words of the ancient Greek lawgiver Solon: “I grow old learning something new every day.”
And so, my Goodreads reviews reflect the path I have taken: heavy on history, with a leavening of other interests such as science, languages, travel, and some occasional fiction. Each book can serve as a stepping stone to something else: a new subject, a new interest, an elaboration of an existing idea, or a tangent that may lead far down a rabbit hole, perhaps to be rewarded with insight or understanding.
A few months ago I read James Burke’s Circles, a fairly lighthearted excursion through scientific progress. For instance, Isambard Kingdom Brunel built the SS Great Eastern, at the time the largest ship in the world, which was eventually used in 1866 in a failed attempt to lay the first transatlantic telegraph cable. The idea for it came from Samuel Morse, who in an 1844 demonstration of the telegraph had sent signals across New York harbor using an insulated copper cable. Morse also provided the information to his neighbor, Sam Colt, who tried and failed to interest the Navy in a new electrically operated underwater mine, but then went on to make his fortune selling pistols during the Mexican-American war.
In one of Burke’s chapters he briefly mentions something from World War II that I had never heard of, the M9 combat director, which was used with great success during the V-1 attacks on London between June and September 1944. It was a primitive analog computer which tracked the incoming missile, calculated its future position, and automatically aimed and fired anti-aircraft guns. All the human handlers needed to do was keep the guns supplied with ammunition. When engaged by the M9 the number of shells needed to bring down a V-1 dropped from 2500 to less than 100.
This obscure bit of history sounded interesting to me, so I looked for something that could tell me more about this part of the war. I found it in David Johnson’s 1982 book, V-1 V-2: Hitler’s Vengeance on London.
The German army began developing rocket technology in the early 1930s, even before Hitler came to power, because rockets were not restricted by the Versailles treaty. By 1932 they had their first test vehicle, the A-1 (for Aggregat, meaning prototype) and Werner von Braun had been hired as the project’s deputy director. Everything about rockets was new and untried, and they struggled for years to develop the technology. Eventually, by World War II they had the A-4, but Hitler knew nothing about rockets and Albert Speer told the developers they were in danger of having their program canceled. They flew to Hitler’s headquarters and gave a carefully scripted presentation with models and film of one of the only successful flights, and Hitler, already doped up and increasingly detached from reality, saw the rockets as a way to renew the Blitz of 1940 and pummel Britain into surrender.
By this time the Luftwaffe had been reduced to a minor role as Allied fighters and bombers dominated the skies over Europe, and Hermann Goering saw in rockets an opportunity to compete with the army’s program. In only nine months his engineers created a working design, officially known as the FZG 76 (Flakzielgerät (Anti-Aircraft Target Device)) 76 to disguise its true purpose, and known to history as the V-1.
The V-1s were built by Volkswagen in a facility near Hamburg. Initially carrying a 1900 lb warhead, later models increased this to 2100 lbs of an even more powerful explosive. Allied intelligence knew the Germans were about to attack with rockets, but had little information about what kind and where they would be launched from. They scoured western France and Belgium looking for large launch sites without realizing that the Germans could fire the V-1s from simple, easily assembled ramps.
There were multiple delays getting the rockets ready, and Volkswagen never fully solved the reliability problems. Finally, at 3:30 a.m. on 13 June 1944 the first ten were fired; four crashed immediately after launch, two went down in the English Channel, three hit England but wide of the aiming point of London, and only one hit the city, killing three people and knocking out a railroad bridge.
Once the attacks began the Germans were able to quickly ramp up the numbers of missiles fired. Seventy-three had hit London by the 16th of June and soon the total hit five hundred, causing great devastation and loss of life. “Each Flying Bomb had an efficient system of sensitive fuses and pressure switches which detonated the warhead at first contact, before the machine could drive itself into the earth. When the 1,900 lbs of high explosives went off right on the surface of a roadway, the blast cut down everything within reach. Solid walls crumbled – often, even individual bricks in a wall were reduced to pebble-sized bits. Windows a quarter of a mile away cracked from the force of the explosion.” (p. 57)
One of the Buzz Bomb’s most distinctive features was that its engine cut out in the last few seconds of flight. Evelyn Waugh, in his novel The End of the Battle captured the intensity of those terrifying moments, as silence descended and people wondered if this was the one with their name on it. However,
The British analyzed the attacks and soon developed countermeasures which greatly reduced the effectiveness of the V-1s. In addition to air patrols constantly searching for launch sites, they had planes patrolling the Channel, vectored toward the missiles as soon as they were detected by radar. If a V-1 made it over English soil, large numbers of anti-aircraft guns had been moved from around the country and concentrated along the southern coast; behind the guns were a line of hundreds of barrage balloons, and behind them, as a last defense before the city, were additional aircraft, Spitfires, Hurricanes, and Tempests, the fastest planes available, stripped of everything but guns and fuel. The V-1s varied in the speed depending on their manufacturing quality, but many flew at 400 miles per hour, which was just barely within the intercept parameters of the planes if they started their pursuit from close enough.
“At the end of June, the Control Room at Stanmore, Middlesex, was plotting an average of 100 bombs per day on its great map of England. The defenders were getting a large percentage of them – fighters were bringing down about thirty per day; balloons accounted for between eight and ten – and some were overflying the capital. But an average of fifty Flying Bombs were hitting London every twenty-four hours.” (p. 63)
The top V-1 ‘ace’ was Squadron Leader Joseph Berry, who flew a Tempest V. Berry’s final score was 61 1/3 kills, of which 57 were shot down at night, 4 1/3 in the daytime. The one-third was a kill shared between him, anti-aircraft guns, and a balloon.
Two additional developments aided greatly in bringing down the rockets: proximity shells and the M9. Proximity shells were themselves a top secret development and in short supply but were rushed to England to join the battle. The M9 was linked to an SCR-584 radar and could control a battery of four 90mm anti-aircraft guns. V-1s still got through to London almost every day, but now the vast majority were being shot down before they reached their target.
As the Allies got the V-1 threat under control, the V-2 was finally ready for use. The first one struck on 8 September and was initially a mystery to the people of London because it was supersonic and hit with no advance warning. The military and government officials knew it was a new type of missile, but did not tell the people for two months, leading to a great deal of speculation about what was happening, including that gas explosions were to blame. It was not until 8 November that the government finally revealed that England was under attack from a new type of weapon.
Although London and southeast England bore the brunt of the attacks, they were not the only targets. Both V-1s and V-2s were also launched in large numbers against targets in France, Belgium, and Holland.
As with the V-1, reliability of the V-2 was terrible, with many blowing up on the launch pad or soon after taking off. For those that hit, however, the results were devastating. “Everything within a radius of a quarter mile or more was reduced to an unstable hulk, the combined effect of the four-ton missile, empty of fuel, hitting at supersonic speeds, along with the one-ton warhead’s concussion.” (p. 158) A single missile could destroy an entire street of houses and do significant damage to everything on streets nearby.
The only defense against the V-2 was to stop them from being launched, but the missiles and their associated launch equipment were mobile and hard to spot. Otherwise, the only alternative was to advance the invasion of Europe until London was out of range, but that was a slow process as the Allies outran their supply lines in late 1944 and then had to reorganize after the Battle of the Bulge. The last V-2 strike was not until March 27th 1945, and on that day, the very end of battle and near the end of the war, one hit a block of flats in London killing 134 and injuring 49. Sporadic V-1 attacks had continued along with the V-2s, especially after the Germans developed a lighter weight version of the missile with longer range, and its last attack was not until March 29th.
It is often said that the V-1 and V-2 attacks were failures. They caused the Germans to divert large quantities of resources which could have been better used for other things. Albert Speer wanted to cancel both programs to increase production of the Me-262 jet fighters, but for Hitler the rockets were Germany’s last offensive weapons and he would not consider it. The missiles did not lengthen the war or change its outcome, but they nevertheless had a big psychological impact and would spur post-war research by both East and West into ballistic weapons development.
From mid-June to early September 1944, 2149 V-1s hit London, disrupting rail and transportation and causing a significant drop in war material production. They also left over 8000 dead and injured; German casualties were 185 killed from premature explosions and allied air attacks on launch facilities. Between 8 September 1944 and 27 March 1945 517 V-2s struck London, and another 378 fell short of the city and hit Essex. A total of 1054 came down across southern England. In London alone over 2700 were killed; German casualties were 51 dead and 117 wounded.
The V-1 and V-2 attacks are a well known part of World War II, but this book does a good job examining the battles in detail, showing the technology, the strategy, and the results. It is a good addition for anyone wanting to know more about this aspect of the war.
And so, my Goodreads reviews reflect the path I have taken: heavy on history, with a leavening of other interests such as science, languages, travel, and some occasional fiction. Each book can serve as a stepping stone to something else: a new subject, a new interest, an elaboration of an existing idea, or a tangent that may lead far down a rabbit hole, perhaps to be rewarded with insight or understanding.
A few months ago I read James Burke’s Circles, a fairly lighthearted excursion through scientific progress. For instance, Isambard Kingdom Brunel built the SS Great Eastern, at the time the largest ship in the world, which was eventually used in 1866 in a failed attempt to lay the first transatlantic telegraph cable. The idea for it came from Samuel Morse, who in an 1844 demonstration of the telegraph had sent signals across New York harbor using an insulated copper cable. Morse also provided the information to his neighbor, Sam Colt, who tried and failed to interest the Navy in a new electrically operated underwater mine, but then went on to make his fortune selling pistols during the Mexican-American war.
In one of Burke’s chapters he briefly mentions something from World War II that I had never heard of, the M9 combat director, which was used with great success during the V-1 attacks on London between June and September 1944. It was a primitive analog computer which tracked the incoming missile, calculated its future position, and automatically aimed and fired anti-aircraft guns. All the human handlers needed to do was keep the guns supplied with ammunition. When engaged by the M9 the number of shells needed to bring down a V-1 dropped from 2500 to less than 100.
This obscure bit of history sounded interesting to me, so I looked for something that could tell me more about this part of the war. I found it in David Johnson’s 1982 book, V-1 V-2: Hitler’s Vengeance on London.
The German army began developing rocket technology in the early 1930s, even before Hitler came to power, because rockets were not restricted by the Versailles treaty. By 1932 they had their first test vehicle, the A-1 (for Aggregat, meaning prototype) and Werner von Braun had been hired as the project’s deputy director. Everything about rockets was new and untried, and they struggled for years to develop the technology. Eventually, by World War II they had the A-4, but Hitler knew nothing about rockets and Albert Speer told the developers they were in danger of having their program canceled. They flew to Hitler’s headquarters and gave a carefully scripted presentation with models and film of one of the only successful flights, and Hitler, already doped up and increasingly detached from reality, saw the rockets as a way to renew the Blitz of 1940 and pummel Britain into surrender.
By this time the Luftwaffe had been reduced to a minor role as Allied fighters and bombers dominated the skies over Europe, and Hermann Goering saw in rockets an opportunity to compete with the army’s program. In only nine months his engineers created a working design, officially known as the FZG 76 (Flakzielgerät (Anti-Aircraft Target Device)) 76 to disguise its true purpose, and known to history as the V-1.
The V-1s were built by Volkswagen in a facility near Hamburg. Initially carrying a 1900 lb warhead, later models increased this to 2100 lbs of an even more powerful explosive. Allied intelligence knew the Germans were about to attack with rockets, but had little information about what kind and where they would be launched from. They scoured western France and Belgium looking for large launch sites without realizing that the Germans could fire the V-1s from simple, easily assembled ramps.
There were multiple delays getting the rockets ready, and Volkswagen never fully solved the reliability problems. Finally, at 3:30 a.m. on 13 June 1944 the first ten were fired; four crashed immediately after launch, two went down in the English Channel, three hit England but wide of the aiming point of London, and only one hit the city, killing three people and knocking out a railroad bridge.
Once the attacks began the Germans were able to quickly ramp up the numbers of missiles fired. Seventy-three had hit London by the 16th of June and soon the total hit five hundred, causing great devastation and loss of life. “Each Flying Bomb had an efficient system of sensitive fuses and pressure switches which detonated the warhead at first contact, before the machine could drive itself into the earth. When the 1,900 lbs of high explosives went off right on the surface of a roadway, the blast cut down everything within reach. Solid walls crumbled – often, even individual bricks in a wall were reduced to pebble-sized bits. Windows a quarter of a mile away cracked from the force of the explosion.” (p. 57)
One of the Buzz Bomb’s most distinctive features was that its engine cut out in the last few seconds of flight. Evelyn Waugh, in his novel The End of the Battle captured the intensity of those terrifying moments, as silence descended and people wondered if this was the one with their name on it. However,
This ‘cutting out’ was accidental; the Flying Bomb was meant to come to earth in a power dive. But one thing that the designers of the FZG 76 overlooked was a defect in its fuel system. When the [aiming] device tilted the bomb toward the earth, all the fuel ran to one end of the tank – the end away from the fuel pump. The pump began sucking air and the engine, cut off from its fuel supply, stopped running. Very quickly people in London and southern England would learn to use the engine’s ‘cutting out’ to their own advantage. Between the time the engine died and the bomb hit the ground, an average of from five to fifteen seconds had passed – ample time to get under some sort of cover. This malfunction in the Flying Bomb undoubtedly saved thousands of lives. (p. 54)
The British analyzed the attacks and soon developed countermeasures which greatly reduced the effectiveness of the V-1s. In addition to air patrols constantly searching for launch sites, they had planes patrolling the Channel, vectored toward the missiles as soon as they were detected by radar. If a V-1 made it over English soil, large numbers of anti-aircraft guns had been moved from around the country and concentrated along the southern coast; behind the guns were a line of hundreds of barrage balloons, and behind them, as a last defense before the city, were additional aircraft, Spitfires, Hurricanes, and Tempests, the fastest planes available, stripped of everything but guns and fuel. The V-1s varied in the speed depending on their manufacturing quality, but many flew at 400 miles per hour, which was just barely within the intercept parameters of the planes if they started their pursuit from close enough.
“At the end of June, the Control Room at Stanmore, Middlesex, was plotting an average of 100 bombs per day on its great map of England. The defenders were getting a large percentage of them – fighters were bringing down about thirty per day; balloons accounted for between eight and ten – and some were overflying the capital. But an average of fifty Flying Bombs were hitting London every twenty-four hours.” (p. 63)
The top V-1 ‘ace’ was Squadron Leader Joseph Berry, who flew a Tempest V. Berry’s final score was 61 1/3 kills, of which 57 were shot down at night, 4 1/3 in the daytime. The one-third was a kill shared between him, anti-aircraft guns, and a balloon.
Two additional developments aided greatly in bringing down the rockets: proximity shells and the M9. Proximity shells were themselves a top secret development and in short supply but were rushed to England to join the battle. The M9 was linked to an SCR-584 radar and could control a battery of four 90mm anti-aircraft guns. V-1s still got through to London almost every day, but now the vast majority were being shot down before they reached their target.
As the Allies got the V-1 threat under control, the V-2 was finally ready for use. The first one struck on 8 September and was initially a mystery to the people of London because it was supersonic and hit with no advance warning. The military and government officials knew it was a new type of missile, but did not tell the people for two months, leading to a great deal of speculation about what was happening, including that gas explosions were to blame. It was not until 8 November that the government finally revealed that England was under attack from a new type of weapon.
Although London and southeast England bore the brunt of the attacks, they were not the only targets. Both V-1s and V-2s were also launched in large numbers against targets in France, Belgium, and Holland.
As with the V-1, reliability of the V-2 was terrible, with many blowing up on the launch pad or soon after taking off. For those that hit, however, the results were devastating. “Everything within a radius of a quarter mile or more was reduced to an unstable hulk, the combined effect of the four-ton missile, empty of fuel, hitting at supersonic speeds, along with the one-ton warhead’s concussion.” (p. 158) A single missile could destroy an entire street of houses and do significant damage to everything on streets nearby.
The only defense against the V-2 was to stop them from being launched, but the missiles and their associated launch equipment were mobile and hard to spot. Otherwise, the only alternative was to advance the invasion of Europe until London was out of range, but that was a slow process as the Allies outran their supply lines in late 1944 and then had to reorganize after the Battle of the Bulge. The last V-2 strike was not until March 27th 1945, and on that day, the very end of battle and near the end of the war, one hit a block of flats in London killing 134 and injuring 49. Sporadic V-1 attacks had continued along with the V-2s, especially after the Germans developed a lighter weight version of the missile with longer range, and its last attack was not until March 29th.
It is often said that the V-1 and V-2 attacks were failures. They caused the Germans to divert large quantities of resources which could have been better used for other things. Albert Speer wanted to cancel both programs to increase production of the Me-262 jet fighters, but for Hitler the rockets were Germany’s last offensive weapons and he would not consider it. The missiles did not lengthen the war or change its outcome, but they nevertheless had a big psychological impact and would spur post-war research by both East and West into ballistic weapons development.
From mid-June to early September 1944, 2149 V-1s hit London, disrupting rail and transportation and causing a significant drop in war material production. They also left over 8000 dead and injured; German casualties were 185 killed from premature explosions and allied air attacks on launch facilities. Between 8 September 1944 and 27 March 1945 517 V-2s struck London, and another 378 fell short of the city and hit Essex. A total of 1054 came down across southern England. In London alone over 2700 were killed; German casualties were 51 dead and 117 wounded.
The V-1 and V-2 attacks are a well known part of World War II, but this book does a good job examining the battles in detail, showing the technology, the strategy, and the results. It is a good addition for anyone wanting to know more about this aspect of the war.
October 19, 2021
I picked up this book at an estate sale hoping to learn more of the technical details of the earliest rockets (the German V-2's launched during WWII). There are a few schematics in this book and short discussion of the operation of the rockets, but it is mostly war stories of strategy and tactics in the use of the "Flying Bombs." It is well-written and a fast read, though it's not exactly what I was hoping for.
July 19, 2013
A little on the light side
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews