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And now,the rest of the story,

German V-2 attacks on Britain

"The Germans have stepped up the barrage of V-2 rockets against England." (January 5, 1945)(click to listen)

On September 6, 1944, the Germans unleashed a deadly new weapon against the Allies when it fired a V-2 ballistic missile against Paris.

Developed by the brilliant German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, the V-2 was years ahead of rockets being produced in other nations at the time. It traveled at 3,600 mph, was capable of delivering a warhead a distance of more than 200 miles, and was the first rocket to enter the fringes of space. The V stood for Vergeltung--the German word for "vengeance"--and was an expression of Nazi vindictiveness over the Allied bombardment of Germany.

Two days after a V-2 struck Paris, the first of more than 1,000 V-2s was fired against Britain. There was no defense against the V-2: It could not be intercepted, and it traveled faster than the speed of sound, thus giving little warning of its approach. With a warhead weighing more than 1,600 pounds, each V-2 rocket killed an average of five people, though in some cases as many as 100 people perished in a single attack. In addition to England, and particularly London, V-2s were launched against Belgium and Allied troops.

The V-2s took many lives but came too late to influence the outcome of the war. In the spring of 1945, von Braun and 400 members of his research team surrendered to U.S. troops. American forces quickly seized more than 300 train-car loads of spare V-2 parts, and the German scientists were taken to the United States, where they resumed their rocketry work. The Soviets also snatched up V-2 rockets and a few of von Braun's engineers.

Von Braun would later become director of NASA's George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. His work culminated in the successful development of the giant Saturn booster rockets that took 27 Americans to the moon between 1968 and 1972.

Von Braun and the other team members credited American Paul Goddard with most of the breakthroughs which they utilized. Goddard could not interest the US Army in rocketry.

Eisenhaer said that if the Germans had been ready to launch barrages of V1s and V2s in June of 1944, D-Day could not have succeeded. It was Hitler who dragged his feet in providing early funding to the rocket programs, the scientific work had been done long before.

If Hitler had funded the programs years earlier, the rockets could have been used on Russian and British infrastructure targets such as ports and railyards.

For that matter, the same can be said about jet fighters. The Nazis could have been utilizing jets and rockets in 1941, if Hiter had funded their programs earlier. Imagine the Nazis with V1s, V2s and ME-262 jet fighters in 1941!

Fascinating. The V-1, a pulse jet "cruise missile", was built in large numbers, and was dirt cheap. I had no idea Germany built that many V-2 missiles (1,100). As a tactical weapon, it was pretty poor if it killed just five people per launch.

The Germans attempted transfer of V-2s to the Japanese (via U-boats), as the end loomed in Europe, in hopes that the Japanese could blast the US fleet with a nuclear-tipped V-2. The U-boats involved made the trip, only to arrive after the Japanese no longer had control of the SE Asian port (this wasn't a port on the Japanese home islands).

Another plan which never left the drawing board was the A9/A10 proposal. The A10 would have been a powerful booster, much more powerful than the V-2, and the A9 its manned warhead. After reentry, and when the A9 was in terminal approach, the idea was for the human pilot to bail out and be recovered by U-boat.

The reason for the human pilot was the lack of sufficiently sophisticated guidance at that time.

The proposed target? New York City.