Dan Snow's History Hit - Hitler's V1 & V2 Rockets

Episode Date: September 3, 2024

As the world closed in on the Third Reich in the final chapter of World War Two, a desperate Adolf Hitler turned to his so-called 'Revenge Weapons' for salvation; cutting-edge armaments specifically designed to terrorise civilian populations and break their morale. His hope was that breaking the spirit of the Allies would reverse the course of a war that Germany was clearly losing.Joining us is historian Murray Barber, author of 'V2: The A4 Rocket from Peenemünde to Redstone'. Murray tells us all about the most infamous of these weapons, the fearsome V1 and V2 rockets - did they actually have any impact on the course of the war, and how did they shape events later in the 20th century?Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off for 3 months using code ‘DANSNOW’.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. It's the early evening on the 8th of September, 1944, and we are in Chiswick, a pretty residential suburb of London, very near where I grew up. It's an idyllic, leafy neighbourhood, but war is never far away. The residents are no stranger to it. The Second World War has been raging for years. They know family, friends, loved ones who have been caught up in it, who've lost lives. Air raids, wardens patrol the streets,

making sure there's no light escaping through chinks in blackout blinds and windows. Bomb shelters are dotted around. Sirens regularly blare to warn of incoming German attacks. For years, since 1940, the Germans have brought the war to London. First in enormous bombing raids, or what we call the Blitz in 1914-41, and more recently by a new state-of-the-art weapon, the V1 flying bomb, one of Hitler's so-called vengeance weapons. Nicknamed the Doodlebug, it was pilotless, it made a distinctive buzzing noise, and it was a weapon that induced great fear in the people of southern England.

That buzzing sound meant there was a warhead over you with 1,800 pounds of explosives in it. And if you heard that buzzing stop, that meant the engine stopped and it would tip into a dive and it was going to be hurtling to the earth at hundreds of miles per hour. These doodlebugs were bad for civilian morale. We know that from government research at the time. But now an even more fearsome weapon

was about to make an appearance. On this evening in late 1944, as Allies were finally sweeping across Western Europe towards Germany, there were hopes that victory was in sight. Suddenly, an enormous explosion tore through Stavely Road in Chiswick. With no warning at all, 11 houses were vaporised and a crater 20 feet across appeared in the earth.

Thankfully, only three people were killed, one of them sadly a soldier home on leave thinking he was safe. 17 others were wounded. No one heard the distinctive buzzing noise. it couldn't have been a V1, it couldn't have been a conventional bomb as no planes had flown over, so what had hit them? The answer was one of the most remarkable weapons ever created to that point in history. It was another vengeance weapon. This was London's introduction to the V2,

a phenomenally expensive, state-of-the-art ballistic missile that would put fear into the hearts of Londoners for the next eight months. This episode of Dan Snow's History is the story of the V2 rocket. It's 47 foot long, it's nearly 30,000 pounds in weight, delivering a 1,600 pound pound payload and they travel at over 3 400 miles an hour it was the first man-made object to enter space it was so fast that it could not be shot down by planes or anti-aircraft guns there was no effective defense against this rocket once it was airborne it traveled faster than the speed of sound, which meant that its arrival was preceded by complete silence. The people it killed never heard it or saw it coming.

It was the product of a massive effort, comparable to the Manhattan Project in the United States, a massive effort in Nazi Germany. It was assembled by thousands of slave labourers in camps all over occupied Europe. It's thought that 10,000 of them died in the construction of this weapon. We're going to talk about why and how it was built and whether it worked.

Did it actually succeed in moving the dial in the Second World War? Did it fulfil Hitler's desperate wish to reverse the course of a war that Germany was so obviously already losing? We're also going to talk about its afterlife, the legacy of the V2 rocket and those in charge of designing it, and how they influenced some of the most important events of the 20th century, from intercontinental ballistic missiles

and mutually assured destruction to the moon landings. With us is the brilliant historian Murray Barber, author of V2, the A4 rocket from Peter Mooner to Redstone. He is an expert on Hitler's V2 vengeance weapons. Enjoy. T-minus 10. Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Murray, did this obsession with wonder weapons, with war-winning weapons,

did it come all the way from the top? Was this at the behest of Adolf Hitler? I think at the beginning of World War II, it probably wasn't really in his mind. It was something that developed as the war started to develop very, very poorly for the Germans, especially after the failures in the Russian campaign. And that's when the notion of wonder weapons really did start to really resonate with the hierarchy. I mean, one of the big problems with Hitler, of course, and there weren't many, was that he had a very, very poor understanding of the engineering aspects of any of the wonder weapons.

Yeah, I would say it started to come through really strongly as things went badly for Germany. And these are weapons that are not designed to win battles in the field. They're weapons that are designed to what? Destroy the morale of the enemy by causing such astonishing damage that they lose the will to fight on. Yeah, precisely so. And if we're talking specifically about the B weapons, the Germans had four that they were thinking of using. Two, of course, were actually pressed into action, they being also the B-1, otherwise known as the Fisler Fi-103, or the Doodlebug, as it was known to the Londoners.

The B-2 rocket, of course, which is of a particular interest to myself. The B-3, which was a long-barreled cannon device that was set up in northern France to destroy London. And the fourth and final one, the V-4, that was a rocket known as the Rhine Messenger. It was a solid-fuel rocket. Again, it was meant to destroy London, and it was supposed to fire salvos of 24 rockets, so it would have been quite horrible, but apparently that was abandoned quite early on. So the big interest is the V1 and the V2. We'll come to the V2 in a second, but let's quickly talk about the V1. My dad was almost blown up by a V1. Seems incredible to say

all these years later on. It landed in his local town and someone was killed. He hid in a fireplace with his mum. What kind of weapons were those? They were not fired out of a gun or a rocket. So tell me about those. No, they weren't. We can think of them as a sort of rudimentary cruise missile. And they were actually fired on a ramp system. V-1 had a warhead of 830 kilograms. Its range of 238 miles was very, very similar to the V-2.

So it was powered by a pulse jet engine. The problem with it is that from the air, it was very, very easy to spot the launching sites, the ski sites, as the RAF referred to them. And so it was easy to attack and destroy them. Yeah, you're right. They were a terrible weapon. In fact, I have some statistics here. I mean, certainly in total, we're talking around about 6,184 people being killed in total during the entire V weapon campaign. And high value of that number will be deaths caused by the V1. cars solved the shockwave that was caused by the warhead, which would explode on contact with the ground.

And of course, you're talking about a weapon hitting the ground at relatively low speeds, especially when you compare it with, say, the supersonic speeds that the V2 would hit the ground. And that would mean that the blast from the V1 was far more severe with the V2, but blast was to a degree deflected if it was to hit, say, for example, soft ground. It would penetrate into the ground and then detonate. So the V1 in that respect was a more terrible weapon because of the phenomenal blast damage

that it could cause. And are these V1s being aimed, broadly speaking? How targeted can they be? Well, the aiming was very, very simple, really. You simply had to arrange for the launch ramp to be correctly orientated towards London. The only other thing you then had to consider was some sort of simple rudimentary timing mechanism so that after it traveled for a certain distance, it would fall onto the intended target. I believe the Germans had a small propeller blade installed in the front of the B-1,

and after it'd done a certain number of revolutions, the engine would automatically cut off, and then the B-1 would fall to the ground. That was what everybody said. You knew it was going to land. You heard the engine cut off, and you knew one was in the vicinity. Terrifying. Indeed. Let's move on to the V2.

This is a different epoch in terms of weapon system. Yeah, absolutely. Completely different. And the cost of producing the V2 in comparison to the V1 was exceptionally high because there was so much research and development that had to take place with the thing. But basically, the V2 rocket stood approximately 14 meters tall, about 46 feet. It carried a one-ton warhead, not too dissimilar to the V-1 in point of fact, the overall weight of the thing being about 12 and a half tons. But I think the most extraordinary thing about the V-2 was that it was the first man-made object to enter space,

because at the top of its maximum ascent, it was in the order of, I think, 62 or 64 miles above the Earth's surface. The rocket thereafter can really be considered to be no more than a rather elaborate artillery shell. artillery shell. And of course, famously, scientists like Wernher von Braun went on after the war to be involved with the American space program and also defense systems as well. This is the first, by some definitions or by your definition, is it the first man-made object to enter space? Yes, that is correct. And that occurred in October 1942 with the very, very first successful launch of the V2, which I should mention at that particular time, the rocket was known as the A4. Yes. And of course, that launch took place from the research centre of Peenemunde in North Germany beside the Baltic Sea. So you've got this rocket engine. It can reach speeds of 3,500 miles per hour.

It goes into space. Why go to all this trouble? What's the point of creating this astonishing weapon? Well, that is a good question. Well, it was really being driven by two personalities. One was a fellow called General Dornberger, who was part of an ordnance branch of the army, and they were really, really pushing the development of long-range weapons. This came

about because of the Versailles Treaty, which outlawed the Germans from a whole range of military weapons and development of armies and navies and air force etc but rather bizarrely that that treaty of uh yeah 1919 it did not mention rocketry and so that was a reason why the germans are so interested because they could actually develop rocketry without actually coming into trouble with former international allies you're listening to dan snow History. We're talking about the V2. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into

the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. and rockets are good because you can't intercept them right they're going too fast no absolutely impossible absolutely impossible the rockets duration i thought the top ahead

was in the order around about eight minutes to cover that sort of 230-odd miles, gaining, as I mentioned earlier, an altitude of 60 miles. For the first five seconds or so of the launch, the rocket would travel vertically, and then it would start to lean over towards the target. Now, when the Germans were setting up the rocket to launch, they had to set it up very, very carefully on a special launching platform, and they had to align things very, very specifically directly towards the intended target. Now, the rocket, having reached a certain altitude, the engine would cut off, and the rocket, as I mentioned earlier, would fall like an artillery shell.

So the control that the Germans had on the B-2 was an accelerometer. So once the rocket had reached a certain speed, the engine would switch off and the rocket then fall in a parabolic curve. Up until then, it had been two straight lines, a straight line from the launch pad and then a straight line towards the intended target. One of the big, big problems that the Germans had was very, very accurate cartography. Because if you can imagine, you're over 230 miles away from your target. How do you go about orientating that rocket so accurately that it's going to fall in the center of London? accurately that it's going to fall in the centre of London. So they were very, very hamstrung by the fact that they did not have the kind of cartography that we have such easy access to

today. Gosh, so it wasn't technical shortcomings that limited the V2's effectiveness. It was the fact they didn't have enough detailed cartography of London. So they could have dropped many more of these on London. They had the technology to do so. They just didn't have their information to do so. Well, they always had supply problems. I mean, Hitler, of course,

wanted London completely razed by all of the big weapons. But to produce such a large number of weapons was really impossible to actually completely level London. You know, when you consider the tons of bombs that would be dropped by a bomber command attack on one of the big German cities in the Ruhr,

for example, then you compare that with the meagre one-ton warhead on, say, the B-2, and the fact that if the Germans were lucky, they'd perhaps be able to launch 25, perhaps 30 in one day. So the hope of completely levelling London was just ridiculous. Interesting. Yes, we forget that the sophistication of the rocket is not matched by a gigantic stride forward in terms of the explosive yield. It's a relatively normal bomb, a relatively normal warhead, but on top of this astonishing bit of kit.

Yeah, absolutely. Now, having said what I've just said, the Germans did develop a radio beam system, a guiding radio beam, which was known as Leitstrahl. And that would have increased the accuracy of the weapon enormously. But rather bizarrely, the only unit that was able to use this very sophisticated system, the Leidstrahl, was an SS firing unit known as the 500. And the soldiers that were actually operating the rocket in this SS unit were not of the same caliber as the other troops that were using the rockets that were in the employ

of the German army. Unfortunately for London, this very sophisticated weapon was given to the least sophisticated members of the German military against London. And that was a dreadful mistake. And that came about because the SS became heavily involved with the rocket, following Heinrich Himmler's interest in the rocket in the days when it became known that this was going to be a very, very exciting weapon, especially from a propaganda point of view. So a kind of bureaucratic land grab cost the Germans there. Tell me about the

impact on London or on Britain. Well, certainly from the point of view of propaganda, the V1 was the one because it did terrify people. With the V1, however, it gave you an option of being able to hide and to find shelter. And if you heard the engine cutting out, then you knew you just had to hit the deck as quickly as you possibly can and just cover your ears because it was going to land fairly near. Whereas with the V2, it just appeared as a bolt straight out of the blue. There was absolutely no warning at all that could be given to the public because any warning systems that were developed by the Allies just couldn't possibly have worked with the general public,

given that you only talk about eight minutes from launch to contact in London. There's no way that you could really have an effective warning system for the public. So the V1 really was frightening in as much as it just came from absolutely nowhere. And you may have heard this extraordinary story that in the early days of the B-2 campaign, the first one was September 8th, 1944, the official word was that these were gas main explosions. Because at that particular time, the government really didn't know quite how to handle the news of these B-2s coming down, because at the same time, they didn't want to give away information to the germans as to whether rockets were falling unlike with the v2 with the v1s i beg your pardon the germans spy network that was operating in london have been very severely compromised by british intelligence and so they are able to give misleading information back to the German high command about the fall of the V-1s. With the V-2s, no, the Germans were fairly confident that the range was correct.

They were quite happy with the range that the rocket had. Their problem, of course, was angle deviation because of the lack of decent cartography. So approximately how many V-2s strike London in 1944 and 1945? Regarding the V1, in total, 3,225 rockets were fired at London, of which 2,347 actually struck London. The ones that didn't make it were either intercepted by an aircraft in fighter command or brought down by anti-aircraft or struck barrage balloons on the in-flight. And the cost, the total development cost when divided up into that number of V1s,

the cost break was something like 5,090 Reichsmarks. Whereas with the V2, in total, 9,551 were made, 517 hit London, and the unit cost, including development, was 100,000 Reichmarks. So that's, what, 20 times greater? It's a huge increase in in cost the actual cost of making the v2 forgetting the development for a few moments uh worked out at something in the order of about nearly 18 000 us dollars back in those days which incidentally it was approximately the cost of a heimkel He-111 bomber. So a V-2 rocket, its actual production cost,

figuring development, was the same as a Heinkel bomber. 6,184 casualties in total across both the V-1 and the V-2. In total, I have a note here that 23,000 people died at the sharp end of all the V weapons. Of course, don't forget that these V weapons were used not only against London, but they were also used most notably against Antwerp, and that was to try and stop the Allies from making use of the harbour installations and facilities there in Belgium. Were these weapons value for money?

Did they have any impact on the course of the war? for money? Did they have any impact on the course of the war? Oh, well, forgetting the cost, I think the downside for the Germans was that they were having to employ some 20,000 people at Peter Munder to develop the V2 rocket alone. And then you consider the infrastructure that they had to build up for both the V1 and especially the V2 in production. That was actually swallowing up huge numbers of people, not only scientists, but also, of course, soldiers. been used elsewhere, perhaps to have not necessarily won the war, but certainly to extend it. And possibly, who knows, maybe there may have been a stalemate situation in Europe and perhaps Hitler might have been able to serve for some sort of armistice. I really don't know.

So what you're saying is the V Project didn't just fall short of Hitler's hopes that it might win the war. It actually sped up his eventual defeat because it was an inefficient use of resources. Very, very definitely. And quite possibly other weapon systems, most notably the Me 262 jet fighter, that aircraft had been fully supported from the very, very start of development. fully supported from the very, very start of development. Maybe if you can imagine the American Air Force being ravaged by Me 262s, of course that did happen, but imagine that at a much higher scale. Yeah, the Me 262 could have been a very, very effective way of ultimately

simply delaying the outcome of World War II. Because at the end of the day, there's no way that Hitler, no matter what weapons he had in of the day, there's no way that Hitler, no matter what weapons he had in the German war, there's no way that he could attack factories in Milwaukee. There's no way that you can stop the industrial strength of America sat in Berlin. No way. And then is the final great and extraordinary irony that the main beneficiaries of the program would be the

Western allies, particularly the USA. Well, yeah, absolutely. After the war, there was something of a mad scramble by the allies to get their hands on the technology, and especially the scientists. Curiously, the scientists were in quite a hurry themselves to hand themselves into the allies. They did not want to fall into the hands of the Soviets. As the war came to a close, the scientists, they realized that Britain had no money and very, very conservative in attitude. They are not the people to speak to about rocket development. of course, did have the money and had the resolution to fully develop rocketry, of course, was the Americans. Now, again, the interest was not space travel. The interest, of course, was that the V-2, modified and made a great deal larger, could carry a nuclear weapon. And nuclear weapons dropping from the sky,

well, that is a terrific deterrent. And with the advent of the Cold War and the paranoia in America regarding the Soviets, and of course ultimately their atomic program, yeah, that was the big, big interest, really, and that was putting nuclear weapons on top of rockets.

So tell me, the rockets that we see going into space in the 50s and 60s, the rockets that nuclear warheads are attached to, intercontinental ballistic missiles, what do these owe to the V2 project? Well, quite a lot. Perhaps the most significant development following the end of the war was the development of the Redstone rocket, because in essence, that was just like a gigantic V2. It too used alcohol and liquid oxygen. And it's curious to think that, yes, Europe was being ravaged by V2s, London, of course, Hensworth, as I mentioned. Yeah, but there's some irony, though, that during the Cold War,

the Redstone was deployed in defence against the Soviets. And Wernher von Braun, who you mentioned, his team of scientists, are they literally working on those US rocket projects? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Very, very much so. Towards the end of the war, there was a program to try and capture, detain, whatever, the scientists. And ultimately, the Americans sifted through the scientists that they had,

and they put together paperclip files on the scientists they wanted to have in the United States. In fact, this actually became known as Operation Paperclip. And von Braun and all the leading scientists from Peter Munder found themselves working for the Americans. And a lot of V2s, of course, were captured following the end of the war. And these were transported back to the United

States where all sorts of very interesting experiments were done with these early rockets, including some interesting experiments regarding astronomy and the study of the sun, and also sending, for the first time, living creatures up into space. I think the very, very first living creatures that were sent into space were things like fruit flies and mice, creatures like that. But they also experimented, the Americans, with V2s carrying primates. The experiments would have been more successful if in one instant they'd actually got to the capsule in good time before the heat of the desert actually killed the poor primate inside the capsule. But that would have been quite a feather in the cap to actually

say that they had sent into space a living creature and brought it back safely. They were denied that, but it was obviously a step towards ultimately sending a man into space. All as a result of this Nazi German weapon produced by Wernher von Braun using slave labour as part of the Third Reich's network of labour camps. I mean, it's just an extraordinary irony, isn't it? This great civilian achievement of the 20th century, getting into space, is all built off the back of this V2 program.

Absolutely. I mean, of the scientific revolutions that have taken place, I mean, really and truly, the V2 should sit on a pedestal. It's such a remarkable achievement, but it all came about because of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. And so today, for example, in Germany, there's no real interest whatsoever in the technology and the fantastic appliance of science to this wonderful, extraordinary device. extraordinary device. They, of course, remember the terrible tragedy of World War II and the fact that I believe for every V2 that was manufactured, six slave workers would lose their lives in the most appalling and most dreadful conditions, in particular at a facility known as Camp Dora. Nordhausen, there's the famous Harps Mountains, the Germans built into the Harps Mountains underground factories where weapons like the B-2 and B-1 and other machines could be built safe from the bombs of Bomber Command made on Idamunda in the summer of 1943, when

it became apparent to the British intelligence that something very significant was happening at Idamunda. And they may not have known the precise details as to exactly what was going on, but there was enough worrying information for the likes of Professor R.V. Jones, who is a science advisor to Churchill and the War Cabinet, that something must be done to stem whatever developments we're taking face at the end of Monday. Well, I mean, thank you so much for coming on and talking to me all about it on this anniversary of the deployment of the V2.

Thank you so much. Oh, you're very welcome. I hope it's been of use to you.