The World’s First Cruise Missile
Today’s cruise missiles, such as the American Tomahawk, are capable of carrying powerful warheads to their targets with pinpoint accuracy. They fly at extremely low altitudes, self-navigate, and correct their course as they go. Their granddaddy was the Nazis’ Vergeltungswaffe 1 (“Vengeance Weapon 1”), better known as the V-1 flying bomb, or the “buzz bomb” because of the buzzing sound it made.
Early in WWII, Nazi airplanes ruled the skies, and the unprecedented ferocity and destructiveness of the Luftwaffe’s bombers terrorized Germany’s opponents. That German aerial ascendancy got its first check in the Battle of Britain, in 1940. From then on, the balance of the war in the air gradually tipped, and Germany was subjected to a steadily intensifying bombing campaign from aircraft based in Britain. While German cities were gradually being reduced to rubble, the Luftwaffe found itself in the humiliating position of being unable to return the favor.
If German bombers could not make it to Britain, then maybe the answer was cut out the middleman, and send bombs to Britain without bombers. In 1942, the Luftwaffe approved the development of an inexpensive flying bomb, capable of reaching Britain. The result was the V-1. It was an early unguided cruise missile, 27 feet long, with a stubby 17 foot wingspan, and carrying a warhead filled with 1900 pounds of explosives. It was powered by a pulse jet engine that launched the V-1 at speeds of up to 393 m.p.h., and had a range of 150 miles.
Guidance was pretty simple: V-1s were placed on ramps pointing to the target and launched. A magnetic compass controlled the heading, an internal gyroscope maintained stability, and a barometric altimeter was used to control altitude. Distance was measured with a vane anemometer – a rotating wind speed measuring device. The anemometer drove a counter, and when the counter hit a preset mark corresponding to the distance to the target, it triggered a mechanism which cut off power to the engine, causing the flying bomb to tip over and dive.
On June 13th, 1944, the first of thousands of V-1s was launched against London. It was crude, and highly inaccurate by today’s pinpoint standards. Indeed, so great was the V-1’s margin of error, that it was useless to aim it any specific target. Instead, the flying bomb was a plain terror weapon, launched at area targets such as the sprawling metropolis of London. There, it was hoped that wherever the bomb landed, it would hit something and cause damage. It was terrifying to civilians below, and the buzzing drone of the V-1’s pulse jet was nerve wracking. Even scarier was when the buzzing stopped, because it meant that the motor had cutoff and the bomb had begun its dive on whatever lay below.
Significant resources were poured into warding off the V-1s. Defensive measures included rings of antiaircraft guns, thickets of barrage balloons trailing cables to snag the flying bombs’ wings, and squadrons of fighter aircraft to shoot them down or tip them over with their wings. Many bombing sorties were also flown against suspected V-1 launch sites. The menace to London finally ended only after Allied armies in Northern France overran the last V-1 launch sites within the weapon’s 150 mile range. The Germans then shifted them to other targets under Allied control, such the vital port city of Amsterdam.