Why the V1 Flying Bomb couldn't turn the tide of WW2
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- čas přidán 8. 03. 2022
- The V1 Flying Bomb, also known as a 'buzz bomb' or 'doodlebug', was one of the most fear-inducing terror weapons of the Second World War. In the face of relentless Allied bombing of German cities, Hitler created its 'revenge weapons' (Vergeltungswaffen) in an attempt to terrorise British civilians and undermine morale. Nazi propaganda hailed the V1 as a 'wonder weapon' (Wunderwaffe) that might turn the tide of the war.
But alongside the civilians killed and wounded by the V-1 are the forgotten victims of the vengeance weapons, the people who made them. Inside the Harz mountains in Germany, tens of thousands of slave labourers from Mittelbau-Dora and its many sub-camps lost their lives across the V weapons production process. The V-1 is not only a symbol of Nazi attempts to fight the Second World War in innovative ways but of their greatest crime - the Holocaust.
The connection between the V-1 as a weapon of war and as a part of the Holocaust is a key theme of IWM’s new Second World War and Holocaust Galleries opening at IWM London on the 20th of October 2021. The project will see IWM London become the first museum in the world to house dedicated Second World War and Holocaust Galleries under the same roof. Our V-1 flying bomb will be suspended between the two galleries, presenting a striking symbol of how the Holocaust and the Second World War are interconnected.
This is the updated version of a video released in September 2021.
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My beloved late Grandfather told me a story of when he was young; he was pushing a heavy wheelbarrow around when a doodle bug came over with its distinctive sound. When he stopped to look for it, the sound cut-out. He grabbed a nearby passer-by and pushed her under the wheel barrow before taking cover himself. The doodle bug flew overhead and detonated with an almighty explosion not too far away. It was an extremely close call for him.
im glad your grandfather lived to tell the tale, although im not sure if hiding under a wheelbarrow would've done much if it had landed fetally close to him
@@lcdream4213 You do what you can.
@@lcdream4213 might have stopped flying shrapnel which could’ve taken someone’s head off. So overall it’s a pretty good move. Much better than nothing that’s for sure.
@@cameronleach5902 i agree
@@lcdream4213 It was a move of desperation I believe.
Sad part is, I would love to get more details of the story but now that he has passed (so suddenly too), all I’m able to provide is what little I remember.
My Grandmother was working as a nurse in London at the time of the 'Doodlebug' blitz, she said that they were more terrifying than either the bombers, or the V2 because you never knew when the engine was going to stop. With the V2, there was no warning whatsoever, so you'd be dead before you knew it, and with the bombers at least they usually only came at night when people were in the shelters.
My parents rated the V-1 as being less terrifying than being bombed mainly because the fear of being de-alived went on for a matter of minutes rather than hours.
Of course I knew about the V-1 but not about the slave death factories in the Harz Mountains. Thank you for integrating that inhumane human aspect into the history of what, too often, focuses purely on the technical /tactical.
Not only the V-1 Program, but the V-2 Program as well
Then you’re everything but German. We learn only the inhumane and leave the tech out of it.
All sorts of stuff was made that way in Germany. An me 163 was found to have pebbles in the seems of the fuel tanks. And the glue was contaminated with urine as the prisoners were sabotaging the equipment they were being forced to build.
Speaking of death factories, too often people fail to neglect the death rained on Europe from the skies by the US and the UK. In my country, Holland,.10.000 native dutch people were killed by the Allied bombing campaign. Around 20 city cores were destroyed under the pretense of trying to hit industrial targets. In my city, Breda, around 50 children were killed by an english raid to kill a general.
6 000 000 / 5 / 365 / 24 / 60 = ?
Doodlebug is an old English name for the common Cockchafer or "Maybug" which make the same sound when in flight. The furthest V1 to fall inland occurred on farmland in Leicestershire. I have a photograph of my grandfather who was a local Police Officer standing in the crater.
The furthest V1 was in Lancashire air launched from Heinkel 1-11 in North Sea
Several v-1s were air launched from over the north sea targeting Manchester with most landing around what is now greater Manchester and southern Lancashire causing fatalities. One actually fell on a suburb of Sheffield not far from where I live but luckily didn't kill anyone.
I read a long time ago that British counter intelligence were feeding back false information on targets destroyed using double agents. The aim was to nudge the targetting technicians into making erroneous range calculations. Some say it worked, but landing so far away from high density targets seems so apt. Almost poetic, whilst tragic for the poor forced labourers.
Correction --- before it,s launch the V1s range was set . When it reached that preset range the elevator deflected to put it into a dive . An unintended consiquence of going into the dive was that the engine cut out . When the germans realised that was happening they did modifications to the motor so it did not cutout when going into the dive .
Quite so. It's disappointing that the Imperial War Museums should get such a fact wrong.
>>When it reached that preset range the elevator deflected to put it into a dive
@@alexmuenster2102 And now you know better. While loath to recommend Wikipedia there is an accurate and well-sourced description of this under the guidance system section of the V-1 entry.
"When the count reached zero, two detonating bolts were fired. Two spoilers on the elevator were released, the linkage between the elevator and servo was jammed, and a guillotine device cut off the control hoses to the rudder servo, setting the rudder in neutral. These actions put the V-1 into a steep dive.[30][31] While this was originally intended to be a power dive, in practice the dive caused the fuel flow to cease, which stopped the engine. The sudden silence after the buzzing alerted listeners of the impending impact.[12][19][32][33]"
Yup. Folks always get this wrong.
AFAIK wing tipping was stopped due to the possibility of the bomb exploding.
A former Tempest pilot mentions this in a video.
Shooting the V1s down from behind was the method used, but could be fatal for the pilot
The 'wing tipping' did not involve actual contact with the V1. Disturbing the airflow over one of the V1's wings was enough to cause a roll beyond the recovery capability of the device's rudimentary gyro control system.
@@gnosticbrian3980
Yes, I know.
But that wasn't the issue.
According to WG Roland Beamont when a V1 exploded in front of the attacking aircraft (often a Tempest) the attacking plane would come out of the fireball inverted, due to the partial vacuum caused by the warhead exploding! Pilots who forgot to close their left air vent also got a burnt arm! Beamont also pioneered the wing tipping technique. Ref "The Secret War" BBC Book pages 161-2
@@markdavis2475 thanks for sharing!
@@gnosticbrian3980 you still had to get dangerous close to the v1 for that to happen. Any sudden variation in air pressures could send you careening into the bomb
My Grandad was serving in the army working on the railways in London during WW2. He was a train driver working with the Royal Engineers trying to keep the trains running and all supplies etc moving whilst all this was going on. I can remember my Grandmother (his wife) telling me all about it and what it was like during the Blitz when I was a kid. She told me about the blackouts and seeing the sky glowing red with the light of all the fires and the brilliant white searchlights sweeping the skies.
I find it difficult to imagine what living like that must of been like. It must have been very frightening for them all but they just carried on as normal.
Micro aggressions are threats now.
Michel Hollard deserved to be mentioned by name. He and his network were the first to locate, identify and figure out what these sites were for. Enabling British bombing raids to delay and decrease the scale of the attacks, and counter measures to be devised.
Cudous for shining a light of the victims at the production lines.
We lived in Portman Buildings adjacent to the railway goods yards at the north end of Marylebone station. One day in 1942 or so, we were hanging out the washing on the roof when we heard one of the bloody things approaching with the inevitable engine cut out. We reached the street just as it exploded a couple of hundred yards away. It blew in all the windows and wrecked the chimnies. I can still remember seeing cabbages rolling around in the street from the green grocer's shop in Broadley Terrace. They were terrifying but I cannot agree that they were worse than the blitz.
It would have been 1944 . . .
The whole 'engine cut then went into a dive' misconception is still going strong.
My Great Grandfathers house was destroyed by a doodle bug. He had forgotten my grandmother and had to rush back to get her. Thankfully almost like a superhero, he was able to rescue her.
One of the main reasons was the double agent Garbo, whose network fed information to Berlin. His network reported the V1s landed past London, so future V1s were aimed shorter and so fell short of their target. The buzzing was created by the pulse-jet engine design.
you should of said Garbo fed FALSE information back to berlin
@@tesmith47 'false' is implicit in that his reports were all wrong, is obvious in context, and it's 'have' not 'of' as 'should've' is a contraction of 'should have'.
Didn`t know this story is still alive(:-)
British counter intelligence used several "turned" enemy agents to report inaccurate fall of shot co-ordinates and the Germans re-targetted V1s which subsequently fell on less populated locations.
My father was a REME radar operator on an AA gunsite defending London - in one big logistical redeployment most such units were moved over a 24 hour period down nearer the south coast. This placed the guns in a layered defensive belt and allowed them to engage the V1s as soon as they entered southern English airspace coming in over the channel.
Mum who grew up & lived in Fulham during the war said the V1's were terrifying, the engine noise would make you shudder but if overhead, you knew you were safe, Mum was seriously wounded by a V1, the things used to take out entire city blocks.
An off course V1 hit 3 blocks from my mum's house in Rotterdam (probably meant for Antwerp) took out the entire block.
900kg of Amatol made an impressive bang but was a V1 enough to take down an entire city block? I did a study of V weapon strike spots around me in London SE1 and the only really major (city block sized) post war rebuilding needed resulted from a V2 - not V1, strike.
Thanks to all who shared war stories of their grandparents here .so we can understand them well .
Love n peace from Lahore Pakistan
Excellent program, thank you very much!
My grandad was. P51-D Mustang pilot for the last couple of years off he war. He mentioned very little to his grandkids (my generation) but he did say she shot some of these down and diving down on to them to catch up to them.
John McGlynn
My dad was in the royal artillery throughout the war in anti aircraft raid defences eventually ending up in Belgium and Germany in 1945.He was scheduled to cross as part of D day invasion but was held back in UK to shoot down V1's as they came over SE England .They clearly got on top of the threat as they were able to be reassigned and push into Germany in their bren gun carriers and secure victory over the forces of evil.
Around June 1944 the new gun laying radar and predictor fire control, and proximity fused shells began arriving in the UK anti-aircraft artillery defences. Within a few months the successful hit rate went from under 20% to over 80%. By the end of the year there were days with up to 100% rates. The Air Force role in destroying V-1s is deservedly well known but, in terms of numbers, artillery did the heavy lifting in the defence of the UK and, later, Antwerp and Brussels.
"Forces of evil". Lol.
@@christophe9602 What is so funny about that expression?
The Germans invented the first cruise missile!
@person Agreed. Similarly there are people claiming the Germans used the first tailless swept-wing military aircraft. They know nothing about the RSF's Westland Pterodactyl of the 1930s.
& the first ICBM, When the first V2 hit London, Von Braun said it was success but it landed on the wrong planet.
@@Wolfsschanze99 ICBM means intercontinental ballistic missile. The v2 wasn't intercontinental. It's range wasn't enough to reach London from Germany. But it was a major technical achievement. And resulted in the death and misery of thousands of slave labourers (probably causing more suffering to the builders than to those whom it was aimed at)
@@Wolfsschanze99 - You know what ICBM means? London isn't on a different continent to Germany. ;-)
They also invented the first jet powered plane
I can remember watching the world at war with my Dad and Uncle and when the doodle bugs engine cut out they both looked up by instinct. I learnt so much from them. I also come from Bow about or less than a mile from where the first one dropped, there is now a blue plaque on the rebuilt bridge
The V-1 was something the average person could grasp. It also was liable to be shot down. So, it was too little, too late. As a comparison, the RAF raid on Koln(Cologne) delivered the equivalent of 1,565 V-1's...over fifteen hundred in one raid. So, the German capacity could never deliver the 'shock and awe' able to cripple a city. In the event, the Germans mostly abandoned London for attacks on Antwerp, the crucial port. The key thing: the V-1 was relatively diminutive and didn't reflect a war-winning technology. Most of the 'doodle bugs' were pursued by fighters across the sky, often being neutralized.
However, the V1s came at almost any time and mostly during daylight hours where it caused maximum disruption. This causes people to quit their jobs in cities as they can't do anything, it's the helplessness of it all, you can take shelter in bunkers during a raid but can't take shelter every time you hear a buzzing sound.
yet now they are in all the decent arsenals. Like you said, too little, too late ;)
only 400 v-1 were shot down by fighter aircraft
London was out of range as a target as the Allies advanced across northern France, Belgium and Holland. Antwerp was major supply port for us in late 1944/early 1945.
@@Treblaine of course starting Firestorms at night is more heroic,Winstons and Harris Morale-Bombing campaign was veeery different than the germans V1 campaign!!
My wife was staying with her Granny,when their house and next door were struck by a V1 in Sept 1944.Her sister was badly injured and the people next door were sadly killed.
You guys should put out more videos!
Fascinating video. Thank you
great doc as usual
My Great Grandpa Erich actually worked in the Factory at Peenemünde where the V1 was built. As far as i know he didn‘t work on the Bombs but was there when they built them.
Then the Americans got hold ofthe chief engineer of the V1 and V2 ,Werner Von Braun and instead of putting him on trial for crimes against humanity, he became the central figure in the US space programme
And we end up having satellites and end up being on the moon.
Also, the bombing of London began when a German bomber accidentally missed an oil depot and hit a chicken coop on a farm near London. Churchill used that as an excuse to send Lancaster's to bomb Berlin on 5 separate bombing missions to provoke Germany to bomb London so as to create a reason for US to enter the war. That is why the weapons are called Vengeance weapons. The fire bombing of German cities like Dresden did not begin until 1944.
Many Germans who would otherwise have been tried and likely executed for war crimes were given new lives, careers and honours by USA following Operation Paperclip
The Americans also let off the Japanese scientists from Unit 731
@@tubthump Thought they didn't do with racial reasons in the time.
I understood that the engine cut out isn't what caused it to dive, it was the dive that caused the cut out and this was later fixed to enable the V1 to remain under power in the dive making it more destructive?
The V2s were not _'almost'_ impossible to defend against, they were outright impossible to defend against.
Even today ballistic missiles are essentially impossible to defend against!
Actually Antiballistic missile missiles have existed since the early 1960’s… The nuclear armed Nike Zeus was one deployed example.
The Patriot and Iron Dome systems are currently deployed versions.
More fiction. There were no anti-missiles during the Second World War. What was available in the 1960s does not matter@@allangibson8494
My Mum told me you didn't really bother about the "Doodlebugs" until the engine stopped. That's when you ducked and covered. You did not mention why the tipping of the wings worked. The V-1 (Fi 103) had no ailerons for roll control. They could not recover from this and they crashed. Also, it wasn't just the engine cutting out that made them dive. A mechanism locked the elevators down so the Buzz Bomb had to dive and crasjh.
The National War Museum in Brussels also has a V1 on display. It hangs from the ceiling, being eternally chased by a Spitfire..... The introduction of proximity fuses for AA shells were a huge improvement. The AA gunners went from 10% to 80% hit rate on V1's overnight. But, the original fuses were so sensitive, they sometimes shot down seagulls.
The other big advance was radar tracking guns. The US made over 2,000 SCR584 radar-mounted anti-aircraft guns. These used radar and mechanical computers to calculate the heading, range, and distance to align a 90mm AA gun on a target. They weren't great on ships (which rolled), nor against maneuvering fighters but the were perfect for buzz bombs flying at a lowish fixed altitude at a constant speed. You can find footage of the guns literally putting a line of black puffs directly in front of incoming V1s.
@@BW022The radar guided guns and proximity fuses resulted in an average of five shells being fired per kamikaze shot down in the Pacific.
I heard that the earliest British jet fighter was used against the V1. I believe it was the Meteor they used. Incidentally, I have to say it was an act of stupidity on the part of the Nazis to use slave labor to make these weapons. For one thing labor that is badly treated and worked to death is a waste of a resource. Labor forces are vital for any nation during a time of war; if they're sick and dying they're not going to be able to work, and when they're gone you're not going to get them back. Laborers can be as vital as soldiers during a time of war and not easily replaced. It is very clear that the Nazis did not understand this. Something else to keep in mind, slave laborers might try to do sabotage as well. The slaves for the V2 rockets were known to urinate on the electronics, perhaps saving many lives in the process; many V2 rockets never even got off the ground or reached their targets.
You say that like it’s a bad thing
@@tinycockjock1967 a bad thing for the Nazis yes
Pros of having slave labor: You don't need to pays them with fair wages, you don't need to think about their need, if one slave labor died there is twice the manpower to replace it either from POW or invaded civilians, slave labor mostly consisted of Allied POW, and criminals which is bad idea to give them guns and trust them with security and national defense
not sure how much proof there is for that and how much is propaganda, we should take most of these with a grain of salt
The early V1’s had no electronics - the fight controls were all mechanical and pneumatic.
The some of last air launched generation had radio location beacon capacity.
love these type of videos
So basically, the v1 and v2 rockets are devastating to everybody. To not only the people who are being bombed by them, but also to the people who are forced to make them. The best word to describe this situation is deplorable. That’s all I can think of, honestly. :/
Just as deplorable as the allied air raids on innocent civilians.
@@ericvosselmans5657 oh, that was a different story that’s for sure. But you’re right, besides there’s even a debate over whether the allied air raids achieve long term goals to the end of a war. And this is a fact, the allied air raids killed a hundred thousand people compared to two atomic bombs killing in total of like 80, 000 people. So, yeah, that really is something.
@@josephsarra4320 Actually, the air raids killed closer to a million. Sadly, In Tokyo alone, firebombing of a paper city killed over 100.000 in march 1945.
All sides do terrible things in a war. I hoped people learned from it, but Ukraine is escalating out of control.
Peace to the world
Not to the British war effort. The rockets were too imprecise to hit anything critical like railway junctions, supply depots or factories. Moreover, Intelligence was often able to prevent refinement of rocket targeting.
@@josephsarra4320 not that different. Tokyo (wooden city) was burnt to the ground. 2 Nukes on 2 hugely populated cities with little military importance. And vietnam was more or less the same story... Yemen is similar; US sells weapons to the Sauds because of oil. In Syria they supported terrorism, because of oil - when Assad suddenly had to go, because he wants to help Russia out in the region, like Iran. Iran, the country that used to be Persia, until the 'allies' started messing around with it. The history of the west is full of plot-holes... And war is about a few people making millions at the cost of thousands, millions of lives. Just look at afghanistan. The only winners there are the likes of Lockheed Martin... No WMD in Iraq, but plenty of oil (too bad Iran sort of took control after the chaos the US created). Eyes wide shut.
It was the Americans who called them buzz bombs, we called them doodlebugs. I used to hear them going over at night as I lay there in the dark. I thought the V2 was more of a terror weapon since one did not hear it coming so one had no warning. The first thing I knew was the flash followed by the huge bang and the glass of the window opposite where I was sitting, came flying across the room.
my grandmother used to tell me stories about seeing these in london when she was a school girl. she said everybody was rushed inside and kids would play a game where they would guess how many seconds there would be before an explosion
Hearsay is unreliable
Thanks for telling the story of those who were forced to make those; that's much lesser known in the UK so I appreciate it
amazing channel..
What this short doc does not tell is that during the RAF raid on Peenemunde they also destroyed a good number of the residential area, good at first, bad later due the Allies stopped recieving any intel from the site for at least a considerable amount of time. This due the fact that a good % of who had been till then providing them information about what was happening at the site, were themselves part of the complex workforce and died during the bombing. Sure that is one of the cost of an ongoing war but should not be forgotten.
The motor wasn't supposed to cut out but go into a powered dive, the problem was the carburettor, said to have been designed by Prof. Porsche.
If they had developed them in time for 1940 it would have been a different story. The first cruise missiles.
The V1 did not have a carburettor as such. There were nine atomizing nozzles in front of the air inlet valve system which mixed fuel and air before entering the combustion chamber. The fuel tank was pressurised by compressed air.
There was a small propeller on the front of the V1. It was set to put the contraption into a dive after a pre-determined number of rotations. In a dive, the fuel pick up, at the back of the tank, was exposed and stopped delivering fuel causing the engine to cut.
The V1 was designed by Robert Lusser at the Gerhard Fieseler Werke (GFW) in Kassel. The engine was designed by Fritz Gosslau an engineer with Argus Motoren. Porsche's jet engine design never found its way onto a flying bomb before the end of the war.
It was the sudden pitch down of the elevators that caused the fuel to rise away from the pickup point due to negative G's
unfortunately FI 176 had no carburettors,but hey downgrading porsche is always a good thing!!
I remember visiting Mittelbau-Dora some time ago, it was unbelievable to see under what conditions those poor people had to build these weapons.
I`m sure you did not visit Kenia (:-)
The part about "We were in a Morrison shelter." Looked it up and that is horrifying. Imagine climbing in one of those during a bombing, it's like getting in your own coffin.
I spent the earliest part of my life sleeping in a Morrison shelter under the kitchen table, with my infant gas mask alongside me. The gas mask had a little duck-like snout with slits, unlike adult masks, because infants cannot exhale consciously. As a small boy after the war I used that mask to play space men from Mars.
My father, who lived in London, was evacuated to Lincolnshire as a small boy during the war and knew what V1's sounded like. One night, he woke the people he was billeted with to tell them that he could hear one. They said it couldn't have been a V1 as they didn't come that far north of London. Next thing, it crashed several hundred yards away taking the roof off the. Fortunately, no one was killed. He also said everybody in the street where he lived in London would freeze when they heard one, praying the engine wouldn't stop as it approached.
I appreciate the focus on the slave labourers and the impact on them as I feel this is not mentioned enough, great work!
@@finitatem "a little"
@@omgpixhe’s the type to excuse horrible acts by trying to find smallest similarities
Almost always people get this wrong.
The V1 did not fall to the Earth when its engine cut out. The elevators deflected to pitch the weapon into a dive. As a consequence the engine cut out. The engine cutting out was a flaw, and when the Germans found out that this was happening they changed the design so that it was powered all the way to impact.
The book and BBC tv series The Secret War is my source for this.
It was the Polish Home Army intelligence that provided information and even some plans of V-1 rockets developed on the Baltic Coast to the British.
My mother was in London at this time as a nurse. She told me how horrible it was to hear the pulse engine stop!
Hello IWM you have a photo in your archives from Anzio where the description reads 1940, this would be incorrect and needs changed to 1944. Kind Regards
Wow, hearing that ladys experience of being inside a morrison shelter was really cool, when i heard it i was expecting it to be some kind of garden built air raid shelter of some type. Looking up the morrison shelter puts that story in a whole new light. Crazy what people of that era went through and survived.
Thank you.
My granda was badly injured by one of those bombs
FWIW, if the radar operators could get a good track on a V-2, the AAA gunners could fill the air in its path with shrapnel, giving them about a 1 in 60 chance to shoot it down. Better than nothing, but still a very tough job.
yes but not one v-2 was shot down!
@@patrickmulroney9452 - I've looked into this a bit further. It turns out that the 1 in 60 figure was from a plan that was on the verge of being put into practice when the Allied advance in Western Europe put a stop to the launches. However, two V-2 rockets *were* shot down : one by a Spitfire that caught it just after launch; and a second by the left waist gunner of a B-24 Liberator.
From a broader perspective, it's fortunate that Hitler saw his V-weapons as a way to wreak vengeance on Britain's civilian population. If the attacks had begun a few weeks earlier and targeted the seaports from which the invasion would come, the result could have been devastating. A single V1 hitting an ammunition ship could have destroyed or damaged every ship in that harbor, delaying the invasion for a year.
What are the statistical odds of that happening? You need to hit the right ship in the right place at the right time. Since the germans lacked accurate intel they'd be basically rolling the dice. A theoretical possibility but not very likely.
@@florinivan6907 what he said. The v1 was aimed at London (the largest city in Europe). Because hitting anything smaller was impossible. Even hitting a city size target wasn't a given.
@@florinivan6907 isenhower said if the v-1s were ready before d-day there would not be a d-day
@@florinivan6907 yes but if you are launching a 200 aday you will hit the right targets!
😂
My grandmother was a girl during the blitz, she practically never talked about it but she always talked about the ‘buzz bombs’ and it was when the buzzing stops you knew to duck
24th December 1944 one of these bloody things came down across the road from our house landing in the Tudhoe Cricket Field, County Durham. It is believed to have landed the furthest North in the Country, having been launched by Jerry out over the North Sea.
The engine didn't cut out causing the dive. The dive was initiated first, when a preset counter driven by the small propeller on the nose. Several systems caused the dive, including an elevator depressor and locking bolt, spoilers on the wings, and a tail fin lock. This initial dive caused the remaining fuel in the tank to slosh, starving the engine of fuel momentarily, which was enough to stop it.
It is documented that the maximum airspeed was about 415 mph, but this degraded during the flight, because of the engine shutters gradually destroying themselves, leaving a final speed of about 350 to 390 mph, depending upon flight distance.
The V1 also had altitude and directional guidance, and a pitot tube to monitor airspeed, along with air pressure regulated fuel flow, allowing it to fly up to about 10,000 feet, but they were normally flown at between about 2,000 to 4,000 feet ASL, partly to reduce long range radar detection. Elevator and tail fin control, along with fuel flow, were driven from two high pressure compressed air tanks toward the tail, under the front of the Argos engine.
Some V1's carried radio transmitters which were turned on towards the end of the flight, to aid in assessing final position before detonation.
All in all, it was quite a sophisticated weapon for its time, although it killed more slave labourers than enemy civilians. It had a strong psychological effect on civilians in the main target areas of England and the Netherlands. Essentially, it was the world's first cruise missile.
Hello !
Could you take a picture of the rocket engine from the inside, please? very interesting how it works inside. There are drawings of his device on the Internet, but there are too few good photos of the original. Can you take these photos?
The thing that no documentary on both V programs mentions is that if Hitler had not spent the billions of Marks developing these marginally successful weapons( the very expensive V2, and the easily defeated V1) , Germany would have faired much better in the war.
Specifically, the ME 262 program, and more money in developing a reliable 4 engined high altitude bomber.
In addition, did you know that the Tiger tank total combat ready production was about 1350 units.. The allies produced over 50,000 Shermans. I'm thinking that Hitler was not the sharpest knife 8n the drawer.
Them things were absolutely terrifying.!!!My grandad used to tell me about them.
....Almost 1 1/2 tons of explosive.
Does anybody know the wing angle of incidence? Some drawings show 0 degrees but my plastic kit has around 5 degrees.
Its amazing how sound traveled much faster back then.
If they could hit a target other then a city could have been a game changer
It's crazy that Germany was actually able to launch an attack on the British soil.. That too in London.. I had no idea about this crazy part of history...
Really? All parts of the UK were bombed during WW2, not just London, in fact other cities suffered far worse than London. The Germans bombed the UK during WW1 as well, dropping bombs from Zeppelins.
@@Jabber-ig3iw 🤯 i had no idea of this history. I always thought Germany never got close to attack..
@@mdabdullah4379 where are you from abdullah?
If you heard the sound suddenly get louder before it stopped, the bomb was now in powered descent straight down towards you, along with the unspent fuel. The motor cut out from negative-g fuel starvation after the timer abruptly threw the machine into a powered nosedive.
I've watched hundreds of ww2 docs but never see anything about v-1s thanks for this
Eisenhower believed that the V1 been targeted at English ports DDay would have been delayed or cancelled. They were in accurate but at the sorter range they not only would have been more accurate but the ports were packed with troops ships and supplies; it would have been much more difficult to shoot down due to the shorter flight distance and time and very little over land exposure to AA. Hitlers constand belief in revenge rather than tactics and stradegy were part of his own doom.
My parents and grandparents generation had resolve, I don’t think today’s generation would be anywhere near as tough. The war was definitely awful for Britain but it united the population like we haven’t seen since. Too bad that today’s leaders haven’t learnt from history.
Very dramatic opening words but the first V1 arrived at Grove Road at 0425. Although it was mid-June, the bad weather that had delayed D-Day the week before was still hanging around and sunrise was still an hour and a half away, so anyone not in their bed would have seen possibly just a small white flame from the exhaust, until it went bang of course. They would not have been able to describe it beyond that. Nevertheless, the effect on Londoners over the following months was indeed horrible. I recall a documentary on work to analyse the pattern of fall of the V1s, the results of which were kept secret since the apparent hot spots might induce people to seek out 'safer' areas. Of course those hot spots were to be expected from a random series of events and actually gave no indication of reduced risk in adjacent areas. Trying to educate the wider public in the niceties of probability theory would have been counterproductive.
It's pretty bright at 4:30am in June
@@gamma_dablam Is that because of double summer time, or despite it?
The first cruise missile. It was ahead of its time.
1:17 thats legit a fighter plane POV intercepting the V1 rocket mid-flight and we can't do that in Battlefield 5 smh
All this, and much more besides, is one of the reasons I don’t have a problem with Dresden or Hamburg. Different times, different solutions.
One horrendous war crime does not justify another.
@@Cailus3542 Different times. You cannot judge from this safe distance. Pacifism does not work. Ask Mr. You know who in Russia.
@@Cailus3542 Germany had to be stopped; nothing else mattered in the final analysis.
Is it a preliminary cruise missiles prototype
if you want to see one up close, go to Greencastle Indiana. They have one up on a pedestal on the southwest corner of the Putnam county courthouse! That's right, Greencastle has a Buzz Bomb.
Thank you for this great video and of course for the brilliant idea to connect the V-1 to the Holocaust. History is often misunderstood: people see it as just a bunch of events, dates and leaders. But in reality they are all interconnected, sometimes in a peculiar way.
It has been fascinating reading all the comments and took me straight back to my schooldays. My first recollection is standing at the front gate of my house in Thornton Heath one night and seeing the flames of these evil weapons and thinking that we were shooting down enemy bombers. The next day all the barrage balloons disappeared from the streets to be relocated near the coast. No longer did the sirens sound as the bombardment was continuous sometimes at 20 minute intervals. Once again schooling ceased but unlike in 1939 we were not evacuated. Lord Haw Haw would tell us each evening on the radio which area was to be aimed for. My Uncle home on leave from France said he would be glad to be back fighting the Germans. One never knew if, when the engine stopped whether the flying bomb would dive to the ground or continue to glide. I can recall cycling home and hearing the roar of the engine, jumping off my bicycle and hurrying to the Anderson shelter for safety and into my Mother's arms. Afterwards we went out to retrieve the bicycle which had travelled many yards after my hasty demounting.
Soon after the last bombs had fallen our local newspaper The Croydon Advertiser published a special edition called Croydon Courageous showing where each bomb had fallen and stating that our Borough had suffered more than any other London Borough. Most homes suffered damage of some sort fortunately ours was limited to broken windows and doors being blown off their hinges.
As a result of this experience it is possible to appreciate what the people of the Ukraine are suffering which is akin to the V2 bombardment we suffered.
Once our forces had reached Belgium and Holland we returned to our beds and slept peacefully once more.
Dont worry, it will always stick in my mind. I'm going to keep that heritage and tell it down- even if I never saw it myself. visited both Mittelbau-Dora and Buchenwald, they both had to do with V-Weapons. Many Buchenwald inmates got transferred to Dora. I'm really happy with what they did to that Camp- since after the war, the Americans blew up the entrances and tunnel systems within the mountains- and it got dug back up in '95 and turned into part of the museum. a lot of the inmate survivors banded together and proposed they should do that- so a new tunnel has been made to connect the old shafts to the outside world again. I've seen a lot of things there. And when i visited a Dutch war museum, i saw yet another facette and view of things, something german Museums cant really convey. It's truly great to see all of the sides of history.
Dad was a Lanc pilot officer in the RCAF during the war. We have a picture of him in his shorts sitting astride a captured buzz-bomb as if he's going for a ride.
We are still talking about it 80 years later.
It was effective!
my uncle seen them when he was in Birmingham hospital for head wounds. He said they would fall on anything schools anything. They had no target.
It is fascinating to see the V1 and the V2 in the IWM London.
Amazing story
My grandmother was a great woman, my grandfather was great man.
My paternal grandfather was cycling home when one over head cut out, he dived for cover forgetting he'd scored a couple of eggs and put in his pocket along with his baccy. So lost his eggs and tobacco.
Literally the first cruise missile
Question: you cite the launching of V-1s against London and Antwerp. Were any launched against Paris, at the time of the Allied invasion? I would assume not, because it was too inaccurate for tactical use against an advancing army, and would be unsafe for use against the city of Paris itself when the Germans still occupied it. But, I only ask because I recently read an account of life in Paris in 1944 in which the writer claimed that they often heard the sound of V-1 engines at that time. Of course, the V-1s were launched from France, but inly on the northern coast, soo too far from Paris to be at all audible, and then only in a northerly direction -- yes?
If Little Adolf had The Bomb, the V1 could have.
The motor cut out when the V1 dived - because it tipped the motor fuel inlet out of the fuel in the tank.
The dive was triggered by a pin being pulled out of the horizontal tail by a counter measuring the number of rotations of the propeller on the nose.
The V1 could've been far more effective if it actively seeked out targets instead of landing in the general area around it. Radio interception was well-known by this point and aircraft had radio compasses that could point them in the direction of known radio frequencies. It wouldn't have taken much to make the V1 into a radio seeking cruise missile to destroy Allied communications, and I'm sure German high command would've jumped at the idea had someone pitched it to them.
It was considered the first cruise missile and the German technology was a head of their time however the overwhelming military forces of the Allied defeated the Germany in the most brutal way.
German technology was not ahead of its time, it was of its time. Likewise, the British and American deployed several pioneering breakthrough technologies (radar, proximity fuses, codebreaking, nuclear arms, to name a few) unavailable to others.
@@danielguy3581 if the Germans had the same resources and people, they would have achieved much more than the british and americans combined)))) It's my personal opinion
@@danielguy3581Germans were only 70 million, British and Americans 45 + 133 million. This is not counting the fact that 10 million German soldiers served on the eastern front from 1941 to 1945. Approximately 5-8.5 million German soldiers died on the eastern front. A significant part of the German workforce served in the army, so the Germans began to use slave labor from concentration camps))
@@danielguy3581 178 million Americans, Brits and 190 million Russians/Soviet vs 70 million Germans)))
The V-1 was the world's first operational cruise missile used in combat and all subsequent designs derive from it. Germany was defeated by overwhelming brute force @@ellimeajool9223
Whoever did the infographic for the map with land in blue and water in green ought to be sacked
Correction - a program that I was watching the other day stated that when the V1 had travelled it's pre programmed distance, an explosive caused the elevator to move down, this caused negative G which moved the remaining fuel to the top of the tank, away from the fuel pipe therefore starving the engine so it went out.
The bravest man in History. Who's people remain ungrateful to this day
It was a case of too little and too late. It did not have precision to hit really important targets, only targeted people. The British people are brave, and through suffering from it, did not terrorize as Hitler thought. Also it was somewhat slow, and could be intercepted by British fighters. The best way to neutralize it was to fly alongside it, slip a wing under the bomb's wing and turn away, a British pilot who did that, flying a Hawker Tempest, destroyed over 60 bombs.
Can you please use or include metric in your videos please?
Back in the day i was in the v rocket production plant.
The place was crawling with enemy. Sniper elite 2 mission 2
its always difficult for a burgeoning technology to be immediately effective. had the v1 been doctrinally used differently and developed into a mobile launched system, the outcome of their use couldve been quite different. but, it was too late for it to change germanys fortunes as far as winning the war.
It was indeed developed as a mobile system.
V1s were launched in flight from bombers.
There was even trials to launch from u boats. Laughably they wanted to launch v2s from the decks of u boats against America. Not realistic in the slightest.
There's no way I can think of that either v weapon (nor the v3) could have won Germany the war. Even if they had 100 times as many.
The only way the vengeance weapons could alter the outcome of the war. Was in the heads of the nazi high court and those few who believed their propoganda. Thank god.
@@raypurchase801 and they were _still_ bloody inaccurate.
The FZG-76 needed a "ski ramp" for launching; no mobility there. And they were still bloody inaccurate. Hell, the United States developed a similar primitive cruise missile in WW1 called the Bug.
Germany lost the war in 1941 when it invaded the Soviet Union. The declaration of war against the United States made their defeat inevitable.
... There's a "what if?" for you: what if Germany hadn't declared war on the US? A vast majority of Americans were fixated on "Remember Pearl Harbor!" including Admiral King. The war production board would have made the UK an unwanted stepchild, forced to live off the scraps of the Pacific War. There would be no Atlantic Fleet to help escort convoys. It's possible that escort carriers and escort destroyers might not have been developed, or developed much later. The possibilities are awe inspiring.
The reason for V1 inaccuracy was the "Double Cross" espionage system used by the British. By '44, Luftwaffe reconnaissance aircraft found it impossible to fly over London in daylight. So German agents were tasked with reporting where the V1s fell, but virtually every agent had been captured and turned. British Intelligence instructed the agents to radio back a position which was a few miles north of the actual landing point. As a result, the Germans adjusted their aim and the V1s fell in an area to the south of London, with a less-dense population.
9:27 The V2 was not a guided missile as such. It used inertial guidance to follow a trajectory.
Meh - it was in between: some variants - Wikipedia claims 20% of those flown - used 'Guide Beams' for targetting and there was a ground controlled radio thrust motor cutoff variant too.
@@HiekerMJ Remains of a radio guided V2 were found in Sweden, I think, which led the allies to believe it was radio guided, but that V2 was actually being used to test the guidance system for the Wasserfall ground to air missile. For a while the allies flew radio jamming aircraft before it was realised production V2's weren't radio guided.
An ICBM, surely. Or, in the WW2 context, a BM.
@@alastairbarkley6572 Yep, Id go for "BM" !
No mention of the importance of RV Jones and the important part he played in countering the V weapons
The V2 Test Site was in the Upper Austrian Town of Redl Zipf. My Mommy and her Bro and my Pa and his Mom called it the "Zipfer Stier" The Bull form Zipf.The Sound was terrible!10 Miles away....a roaring bad noise....The Kids are born 1933 1934 1935 and 1938.All are gone in Peace....2015 2016 2010 2012....
President Kennedy stunned the scientific community when he declared that the US would land a man on the moon and safely
return him to the earth in that (the 1960s') decade - The Physicists, Chemists, Mathematicians, many fields of engineers all looked at each other ( I was there) in disbelief that such an undertaken could possibility could be accomplished in that short time frame. However, the US had one great advantage in having captured Von Braun from Germany in 1945 as he had enormous experience in Rocketry gained from designing the V2 and V1 which killed thousands of innocent civilians. He was also a member of the Nazi party but the US view was we (the US ) need him so let's forget putting him on trial and regard him as a good guy and now a US citizen and maybe can accomplish the President's goal - Bob Hope said it best in one of his specials " I would like to congratulate NASA for getting us to the moon and back - but I can't speak German ! Politics strikes again!!
If it had appeared a year earlier, things might have been rather different. But that's just another 'wot-if'.