During the first two weeks, more than one hundred thousand London homes were damaged or destroyed. V-1s in those sixteen months caused more than twenty thousand casualties.
Winston Churchill’s personal assistant, Frederick Lindemann, had mocked the V-1 bombings, declaring, “The mountain hath groaned and given forth a mouse!”
But the First Viscount Cherwell, opinionated and arrogant, had been dead wrong in advising the prime minister that the Germans were unable to build such advanced rocket-powered weapons.
Almost ten months earlier, Allied intelligence, using 3-D viewers on overlapping aerial reconn photographs, had pinpointed Peenemünde Army Research Center—Wernher von Braun’s rocket development facility on the northern peninsula of a small Baltic island.
OPERATION HYDRA bombed it on the night of 17/18 August 1943, killing V-2 scientists and destroying enough of the facility to delay the V-2 rocket tests for almost two months. The V-2 was designed to have far greater capabilities than the V-1.
Nazi Germany, undaunted, continued its V-1 and V-2 development programs at Peenemünde and deep in Poland.
Then OPERATION CROSSBOW, the bombing of vergeltungswaffen launch sites, commenced on 5 December 1943. U.S. Ninth Air Force B-26s struck Ligescourt before bad weather stopped the sorties for nearly three weeks. Finally, on Christmas Eve, almost seven hundred B-24 and B-17 aircraft attacked twenty-four other launch sites in France with fifteen hundred tons of bombs.
And on 8 June 1944—D-day Plus Two—Allied aircraft shot up a fuel convoy, burning three-quarters of a million liters of missile fuel, and took out Axis trains bearing additional missiles.
As the Allies advanced in OVERLORD, launch sites were abandoned without firing a single shot.
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The V-1 had failed to cause the destruction Adolf Hitler demanded. But for the fortunes of war, it could have. And, albeit too late to stop OVERLORD, it did succeed in terrorizing England.
Nicknamed “Doodlebug” and “Buzz Bomb” because of the unique sound made by its pulse-jet engine, the bomb would fly to just shy of target, then the engine went quiet—and after terrifying moments of silence it would explode.
On D-day Plus Eight, General Dwight Eisenhower ordered his deputy—Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, who had been his commander of Allied Air Forces in the Mediterrean—that the V-1 targets were “to take precedence over everything except the urgent requirements” of OVERLORD.
The Allies used a thousand heavy and light antiaircraft guns, as well as employed fighter aircraft, to shoot them down. During daylight, some pilots would match speed with the V-1 and, going wing to wing, tip the V-1, causing it to crash after knocking out its gyroscope.
When the Allies captured the V-1 manufacturing facilities, they found a number of variants of the Fieseler 103.
One was a would-be kamikaze missile, with rudimentary controls designed for a suicide pilot.
Another—assigned the military designation of Fi-103D-1—was specifically designed to carry a warhead of nerve gas.
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