Second World War
V2 rocket: Hitler’s eerie weapon of retaliation is unearthed in England
Documents and missiles were brought to the United States after the war.
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The V2 almost reached space before crashing back to earth with its deadly warhead. A missile was found in south-east England that did not reach London.
The V2 rocket – also called Unit 4 – is one of the scariest weapons of the Third Reich. It was the first ballistic missile in military history. The missile carried a one-ton warhead and was launched from mobile launchers. Once in the air, she couldn’t be stopped. It fell on its target at over five times the speed of sound. The victims were clueless, the death that befell them was faster than the sound.
Now the remains of such a V2 rocket are being dug up in a field in south-east England. The rockets were launched first from France and then from Holland on London. This crashed and did not reach its destination. Technical defects were the order of the day with the rocket. The relic of war is being excavated by the brothers Colin and Sean Welch. They specialize in locating the sites of so-called “weapons of retaliation”.
They usually find places where a type V1 flying bomb has been hit. The V1 could be described as the forerunner of the cruise missile. She was shot down from catapults. When the rockets, equipped with a simple humming pulse jet engine, approached, they were so slow that they were shot down by fast fighters.
10 pictures Photo series V2 – Hitler’s eerie weapon of retaliation
10 images
Explosion in the arable land
More than 800 kilograms of metal remained from the V2 in south-east England, including a large part of the combustion chamber. It struck around midnight on the night of February 14, 1945. The Nazis fired these missiles almost until the end of the war. The force of the impact drove the weapon deep into the field. “Although the rocket moves at several times the speed of sound, the detonation did not occur in the supersonic range,” said Colin Welch to “Live Science”. “The missile went at least 1.5 meters into the ground before it really detonated.”
Hitler wanted to react to the Allied bombing war over Germany in 1943 with the V weapons. The last resources of the Reich were drawn together for the missile program. The production facilities were built under the leadership of the SS. The first V1 hit London on June 13, 1944 and the first V2 on September 7, 1944.
Bad planning by the Nazis
Although the weapons were technical marvels, the strategy showed that the war was lost. There was no longer any question of regaining air superiority and sending our own groups of bombers to Britain. The fast missiles only made use of a defensive loophole, but were not very efficient. The slow and simply built V1s could easily be shot down once they were caught by radar. The V2 could not be fought, but it only brought a ton of explosives to the target. A single B-24 Liberator bomber carried 3.6 tons of explosives to the target. And the bomber could be used several times, the elaborate missile was a one-way weapon.
In addition, it could not be controlled during the flight. An adjustment on the final approach did not take place. The accuracy of the target was correspondingly poor. The V2 was able to hit a metropolitan area like London as long as there were no problems with the technology. But you couldn’t even target huge buildings like Parliament or a train station.
But the weapon spread fear among the population. The V2 rocket attacks on London killed around 9,000 civilians and military personnel, and up to 30,000 together with the V1. The V2 was produced by SS forced laborers – more people died in the underground assembly halls than in London.
Suffering and death of the slave laborers
For the Third Reich, the weapon was a failure. It devoured tremendous resources and ultimately only had psychological effects. Armaments Minister Speer said in custody that it was his greatest mistake to approve the program.
Today it is assumed that the rocket builders around Werner von Braun knew about the inadequacies of the rocket as a weapon. But they kept quiet about the problems in order to be able to finance their dream of a powerful rocket. The game worked out for the researchers and rocket enthusiasts. Werner von Braun offered his expertise to the Western Allies immediately after the war. He was never held responsible for the victims who died in the factories for his project.
During the Cold War, both Russians and Americans succeeded in reducing the missile’s inaccuracy and increasing its range. These weapons were far removed from today’s accuracy of less than a meter, but equipped with nuclear warheads, the strength of the explosion should compensate for this shortcoming. Werner von Braun later became an American national hero. In 1960 he was appointed director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, his rockets brought the Americans to the moon.
Rocket in literature
Thomas Pytchon’s novel “The Ends of the Parable” alludes to the trajectory of the rocket. In 1974 the major work was to receive the Pulitzer Prize, but the award committee did not want to support the jury’s decision because of the alleged obscenity of the novel, and the prize was not awarded that year. In 2020 “V2” by bestselling author Robert Harris was released. Ironically, his work refers to the fact that the parabolic orbit of the V2 wasn’t that flawless.
The novel depicts an episode at the end of the war. Since the Allies could not intercept the V2 in flight, they wanted to switch off the mobile connection stations and the associated crews. For this purpose, the flight path of the rocket was targeted and the launch site was determined from the flight path data, which was then attacked by fighter bombers.
Had the parabolic orbit that carried the missiles to the edge of space before falling back had been flawless, the process would have succeeded. But the effort was in vain. Von Braun’s rocket never flew perfectly, it shook and shook itself on its path. That is why it could not hit the targets exactly and, conversely, it was not possible to determine the starting point exactly.
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