The V2 – Weapon of Vengeance

Shortly before 7pm on Friday 8th September 1944, a huge explosion ripped through Staveley Road in Chiswick, London, killing a 63 year-old woman, a 3 year-old girl and a 28 year-old soldier from the Royal Engineers, who was home on leave. A short time later, 25 miles away in Epping, a similar blast reduced a number of buildings to rubble.

Not wanting to cause panic among the general population, the government revealed the cause to be faulty gas mains. But they were fooling no-one. This was clearly a new, super-advanced German weapon, the like of which had never been seen before.

Just over a week earlier, on 29 August, the Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler, had given the go-ahead for the Wehrmacht to proceed with the next phase of the Vergeltungswaffe programme. Following the Allied landings at Normandy on 6 June, the first of these ‘Vengeance’ or ‘V’ weapons, the V1 flying bomb – nicknamed the ‘doodlebug’ – had plagued the skies above southern England. These unmanned rockets were relatively crude. They had to be launched from fixed sites in Holland and Belgium, were pointed towards the target, and once their fuel ran out, they would crash to the ground and explode. The indiscriminate nature of the weapon led to hundreds of casualties, striking fear and terror into the general public – exactly as they were supposed to do.

But there was something markedly different about this new weapon that had caused such massive damage in Chiswick on that September evening. The devastation was on another scale to the V1.

What made the ‘V2’ a more formidable weapon was that it could be fired from mobile launch sites, had a simple guidance system making it more accurate, and carried a much higher payload than the V1, resulting in craters measuring 20 metres wide by 8 metres deep. Importantly, it could also travel at supersonic speeds. This meant the missile would strike before anyone unfortunate enough to be caught in the blast had even heard it approaching. All this made them impossible to stop.

Over the next few months, as the Allies advanced towards Germany, hundreds more V2s were launched against London, Liege and the port of Antwerp, as the Germans fought desperately against what was an inevitable defeat. But these weapons had been developed too late to have any real impact on what happened on the battlefield. They had become ‘Vengeance’ weapons, used more out of revenge for Allied bombing raids, and to create fear and terror amongst the civilian population, than for any real tactical purpose.

The V2 was developed at the Army Research Centre at Peenemünde on the German Baltic Coast, led by the aerospace engineer and Nazi party member, Wernher von Braun. The site employed a team of expert scientists and hundreds of slave workers, mainly prisoners from Poland and Eastern Europe. It had laboratories, workshops, various launch testing stands, a wind tunnel, a railway line, air raid bunkers and huge accommodation blocks.

As the war progressed Allied intelligence became aware of what was happening at Peenemünde. In August 1943, Operation Hydra, a huge RAF bombing raid was undertaken against the facility. Although not entirely successful, the raid caused the programme to be delayed by two months and forced the Germans to move production of the rockets to a new site in Mittelwerk, Central Germany. For this, the Allies paid a heavy price. Forty of the planes that had taken off on the mission were shot down, resulting in the deaths of 245 airmen. Nearly 700 slave labourers were also to perish on the ground. Three more bombing raids, including a huge daylight attack by the United States Air Force in August 1944, did little to stop the programme.

The mobility of the V2s was a huge problem for the Allies. The launch sites could only be determined once the rockets were in the air. By that time it was way too late to stop them. Should the Dutch resistance or Allied agents get lucky and find them before launch, it was a race against time to get the information to Allied command to organise an airstrike, before the V2s were blasted into the sky.

In the end it was all relative. The reality was that although the V2s caused major destruction to mainly civilian targets, they did nothing to change what was happening on the battlefield. Squeezed by the Russians in the east, and the British, Canadians and Americans in the west, a German defeat was only a matter of time and on 27 March 1945, the last of the V2s struck in Orpington, Kent, killing a 34 year old woman. In total, approximately 5,000 people were killed by V2 rocket attacks.

As the war drew to a close, it became clear the Soviets and the West would become future adversaries. The unlikely alliance that had existed between them had served its purpose now that Nazi Germany had been defeated. With the advent of the nuclear age, the expertise of the Nazi scientists who had developed the rocket systems at Peenemünde would take precedence over bringing them to justice for their part in the Nazi regime. Operation Paperclip, a secret US intelligence programme, sought to spirit away these experts and employ them within their own fledgling rocket projects. It was through Paperclip that the head of the Peenemünde facility, Wernher von Braun, was taken to America, his Nazi past conveniently forgotten. He would go on to become a senior engineering programme manager for NASA, working on the Apollo missions.

The V2 rocket was the world’s first long-range ballistic missile and the first man-made object to enter space, when a successful vertical launch was carried out in June, 1944. It was the forerunner to the guided weapons systems and space rockets that were to shortly follow. Had the Nazis been able to develop a nuclear warhead for it, then the outcome of World War Two would undoubtedly have been very different.