![]() The German designers, led by Nazi party member Wernher von Braun, had developed a guidance system that could operate independently of ground controllers. ![]() The technology they discovered changed much of what they knew about rocketry. Most ended up in the hands of the Americans or the Soviets. No wonder that, following Germany’s defeat, the Allies scrambled to capture intact examples. Its fuel pump was able to deliver a mix of liquid oxygen and alcohol fuel at a rate fast enough to allow the V-2 to become the first human-built object capable of leaving the Earth’s atmosphere and reaching the edge of space. The engine’s design had solved one of the key problems that others had struggled with. But in the years following the German defeat in 1945 the V-2 inspired the development of large liquid-propellant rocket engines, the very same technology that would go on to power nuclear missiles, send probes out into the solar system and satellites into orbit, and eventually launch the vehicles which would put humans into space and onto the surface of the moon. Its peacetime uses have been frequently overlooked, unsurprisingly considering the deadly reason for which it was first built. But despite its brutal origins and blunt inefficiency the V-2 was a breakthrough technologically. “More people died making them in Nazi labour camps, than were killed in the attacks,” Neufeld points out. More than 6,000 were built but only about 3,500 were launched against the Allies and only 2,000 hit their targets. “They were inefficient, inaccurate and expensive,” adds Neufeld, also author of The Rocket and The Reich. For Germany had not just invented a destructive weapon, it had invented the world’s first military missile, the first rocket to travel outside the Earth’s atmosphere and therefore the world’s first spacecraft. Yet while many people know of the role they played in terrorising the people of London and western Europe in 1944, very few know of the part the V-2 would go on to play after the war. V-2s were a terrifying psychological weapon, but they were nothing more than a footnote to the Second World War.” ![]() “Neither the V-2 nor the V-1 could deliver the destructive force of a fully-laden four-engined bomber. “One of the great myths about the V-2 was that had it come earlier in the war it could have led to German victory,” says Michael Neufeld, historian of the German rocket programme and senior curator of the V-2 exhibit at the Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. Yet while Londoners were rightly terrified of Germany’s new weapon it was never going to change the course of the war. “You had no idea where they were going to fall, and unlike the doodlebugs there was no warning sound. V-2s were certainly destructive, displacing 3,000 tonnes of material when they struck and creating a 20 metre-wide crater.Īlf Grainger was nine at the time and recalls the first V-2s striking on a drizzly September evening in Chiswick, west London. On Septemit was launched on London and Paris in a desperate attempt by Germany to turn the tide of the Second World War following the Allied successes in the aftermath of D-Day. The V-2 missile (or Vengeance Weapon 2 as designated by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister) was even more powerful and devastating. Londoners had reluctantly become used to the pulsing buzz of the Nazi V-1 flying bombs, or doodlebugs, throughout the summer of 1944, but as it drew to a close, a new weapon was about to be directed against the capital and other European cities.
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