A Day in History: The First "Vergeltungswaffe" hits London!

[Martin Antonenko]

On June 13, 1944 the Germans shoot from launchers in the occupied northern French department of Pas-de-Calais ...



... the first ten cruise missiles in history of the type "Fieseler FI-103" - also called "Vergeltungswaffe 1" (V 1) for propaganda reasons - to the British capital London:








Only four of these still very prone to failure weapons reach the British Isles ...



... the remaining six crash over the Channel.


One Fi 103 strikes in Gravesend, in Cuckfield, at the railway bridge on Grove Road in London ...



... and in Sevenoaks.

The "V-1" is a failure in terms of its hoped-for war-decisive effect!

7488 cruise missiles were fired at the British Isles, another 1402 exploded at launch.

3957 (= 52.8 percent) could be shot down by the British, in 1847 by fighter planes (mostly "Hawker Tempests" and "Mosquitos"), in 1878 the anti-aircraft aircraft caught and 232 fell victim to blocking balloons ...:



2419 hit the Greater London area and detonated ...:







On the same day, a test copy of the first medium-range missile in history launched in Peenemünde on the Baltic Sea strikes, the "A-4" - also known as the "Vergeltungswaffe 2" (V-2) ...





... with the serial number 4089 on a test flight in a completely undesirable place - namely at Bäckebo in Småland in neutral southern Sweden!



It was a test flight and the plan was to use a self-destruct mechanism ...



... to blow up the missile over the Baltic Sea - but the mechanism had failed!

The Swedes - and also Western Allied Secret Services! - are of course very interested in the legacies of the rocket, which are now being recovered in a southern Swedish forest ...:







The most secret armaments project of the Nazis is no longer secret ...!

 

[Blind Pew]

The dreaded 'Doodlebugs' as they were called here. They had the desired effect to a high degree in that they certainly caused terror amongst the population. Obviously with the technology being in its infancy many went wrong.
Despite their losses, many did the job despite the best efforts of the RAF.

This thread is an excellent example of the fact that when it only became a matter of time before the Allies and the Soviets declared victory, the race was on to capture Nazi technology.

 

[Chris Oldfield]

I can vividly remember one of my Dad's WW2 stories, when stationed in Antwerp in the winter of 1944-45 he watched a V2 being launched from a park in the city.
Neither the Wehrmacht nor the Brits & Canadians had enough troops to hold the entire city, so the V2s could be driven into the park on their Meillerwagen tranporters & prepared for launch in about 20-30 minutes, fired & the transporters driven away before the Allies had chance to react.
Dad said it was one of the scariest things he'd ever seen in his life, almost as scary as his first trip in an aircraft - a Sunderland flying boat taking off from a lake in West Africa

 

[Chris Oldfield]

Many of the V-1s fired at central London actually fell in the Croydon area, due to a fault with their guidance & range system which caused the motor to cut out early. For a few years I lived in Croydon, & there are still areas to the south of the town in the Wallington area where the land is not fit for more residential building, due to the fact that there is a lot of subsidence there caused by V-1 cratering being filled with unstable building rubble which still degrades & moves.