The V2 program was a failure. The rockets were cool, but without guidance or a nuke, they had no significance. It cost the equivalent of the Manhattan Project, and it’s effect of explosives delivered equaled a grand total of 3 of the thousand plane raids that Bomber Command and the 8th Air Force delivered several times a week by late in the war.
And it has the distinction of killing more of it’s own workers than victims.
The German mentality screwed them again. Tinkering with gadgets and whizzy things that would really matter 10-15 years after the war and ignoring important things right in front of them.
Glad they did it their own Teutonic way.
Ukraine ping
DR: [And it has the distinction of killing more of it’s own workers than victims.]
I’d argue that the V-2 wasn’t so much a failure as Germany wasn’t wealthy enough to pay for it. A V-2 cost 50K RM, or about $12.5K dollars, had a 1 ton warhead. A B-17 cost $250K, lasted 4 sorties before being shot down, on average, and a payload of 2 tons.
A B-17 cost $250K to deposit 8 tons of bombs, before being destroyed. 8 V-2’s costing $100K would deposit the same 8 tons at 40% the cost without risking any pilots. It would have been a reasonable proposition if Hitler hadn’t decided to fight all the major powers simultaneously, while also slaughtering populations in the Russian empire that earnestly looked forward to German rule.
Parenthetically, the V-1, at 1/10 the cost of the V-2, while delivering almost the same warhead, was even more competitive. The problem was, again, primitive guidance systems and resource constraints from fighting multiple powerful adversaries, each mobilized to the utmost.
Hitler never expected the US to raise military spending from 1% to 40%. That was a political feat achieved only this one time in the nation’s history, and may not ever be achieved again.