Jetrader - Autumn 2015 - 51

over. Having no ailerons, the hapless V-1
would roll over and plunge to the ground.
Many of the launch sites in France were
bombed beyond repair, and other sites
were overrun as the Allied ground forces
drove the Germans eastward out of the
country. The last V-1 launch from France
occurred on 2 Sept. 1944 (about three
months after D-Day), but then more V-1s
were launched from German-occupied
Belgium and Holland before those countries were liberated.

A rare bird: The piloted version of the V 1, with ailerons for maneuvering and no guidance system
in the nose, on display at La Coupole Museum, Pas-de-Calais, France. Photo by Christian Kleis.

Were the V-1s Effective?
Although the V-1s could never have won
the war, they were effective in the sense
that for a time, vast numbers of the Allied
bombing raids that might otherwise have
been sent into Germany were instead bombing the V-1 launch sites and their delivery
convoys and storage facilities in France,
Holland and Belgium. In Hitler's view, any
Allied bomb dropped there was a bomb not
dropped on Germany. Moreover, all but one
unit of British fighter aircraft were pulled
back from the continent to deal with the
V-1s over England, and a quarter million
Brits operated radar installations and antiaircraft guns in England.
After a few weeks of continual day and
night air raid warnings and disruptive explosions everywhere around London, more than
a million people had left the city.
Before the end, and including about
1,600 V-1s that were "air launched" from
Heinkel 111 bombers, about 10,500 V-1s
were fired against Britain. Of those,
3,000 crashed on launching or fell into
the channel, and 4,000 were shot down
by anti-aircraft fire or by fighter aircraft,
but that still left 3,500 that managed
to get through to England, with 2,500
reaching London, where they caused about
6,200 fatalities.
After being driven from France, and
beyond striking distance to London,
German forces launched about 11,900 V-1s
against the port city of Antwerp, as well
as Liège and Brussels to slow down the
Allied advances towards Germany, causing another 4,700 fatalities. All combined,
about 22,400 V-1s were launched, resulting
in 10,900 fatalities. Although many buildings were destroyed and a few "lucky hits"
killed more than 100 people in one strike,
on average, there was less than one person
killed per bomb launched. Another 10,000

A JB-2 Loon on display at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum. Photo by ISTAT member Fred Klein.

V-1s were destroyed by aerial bombardments or captured on the ground.
The sad irony was that about 20,000
slave laborers were worked to their deaths
at the V-1 production factories in Germany,
outnumbering the fatalities in London
and elsewhere.

Piloted Variants
To improve target-hitting accuracy, about
175 special V-1s were manufactured with
ailerons and a rudimentary cockpit with
flight controls so that volunteer suicidal
pilots could evade the fighters and guide
the flying bombs to high-value targets with
pin-point accuracy. These V-1s were to be
released from Heinkel bombers because no
pilot could have survived the G forces of
the catapult launch. Although there was no
shortage of willing pilots, Hitler eventually
decided that suicide missions were not in
keeping with Germany's warrior traditions.

Shameless Copies:
The JB-2 Loon
As the V-1s were raining down on London
in the summer and autumn of 1944, some
did not explode, and some ran out of fuel
and simply glided to earth. In July, some
of them had been gathered up and sent
to the U.S. to be reverse engineered and

designated JB-2 for Jet Bomb number 2.
Republic Aviation was tasked with making
the JB-2s, with Ford Motor Company producing the pulsejets. (The Russians also
made copies from those they captured.)
Initially the plan was to ship some of them
to Europe and fire them off into Germany
as an ironic sort of "round trip." As it was,
the RAF and the U.S. 8th Air Force were daily
raining thousands of tons of bombs onto
Germany, so a few hundred one-ton JB-2s
were not going to make much of a contribution. The fallback plan then became
to use thousands of JB-2s as part of the
arsenal being assembled for the intended
invasion of Japan in 1945. In total, only
about 1,400 JB-2s were manufactured, and
none flew in combat.

Sources

Thousands of books have been written about all
aspects of World War II, and most include references to the V-1 and V-2 weapons. The following
publications (and many others) provide details
about their design, manufacture and deployment.
The Battle of the V-Weapons, by Basil Collier, William
Morrow & Company, 1965.
The Flying Bomb, by Richard A. Young, Sky Books Press,
1978.
Impact, the History of Germany's V-Weapons in World War
II, by Benjamin King & Timothy Kutts, Sarpedon
Press, 1998.
V-1 Flying Bomb, Hitler's Infamous "Doodlebug," by
Steven J. Zaloga. Osprey Publishing Ltd, 2005.

Jetrader * Autumn 2015 51

Jetrader - Autumn 2015

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