One day during World War II, an inexplicable flash of gas began in London. A little later, it was necessary to admit that it was not gas, but a new type of weapon – the German ballistic missile “V-2”, which was impossible to defend against in those years. One hit could kill hundreds of people at once, and almost always – civilians. It was a human tragedy, but from a military point of view, the creations of engineer von Braun simply disarmed Germany. About how the Germans bombed London with missiles and how the British tried to fight it – in the material of “Gazeta.Ru”.
Cotton gas
The autumn of 1944 was greeted by the people of Great Britain in high spirits. The hardships of wartime and the death notices from the front had not gone away, but the terrible bombing of London in 1940 was behind them and could not be resumed, since the Luftwaffe had suffered enormous losses and was trying with its last strength (often unsuccessfully) to protect the German skies from Allied aircraft. On the continent, Anglo-American-French troops had liberated almost all of France, in Italy the Germans were in deep defense north of Rome, the USSR had just driven the Germans out of Belarus and taken Romania and Bulgaria out of the war.
So Friday evening, September 6, was relatively quiet in London. At 18:42, this calm was broken by an unexpectedly loud explosion, coming from the Chiswick area, but audible throughout the city ???(According to some surveys, residents of the area, on the contrary, described the sound as “quite quiet”, but to a person with healthy hearing, the detonation of a ton of ammonia within a kilometer of a radius cannot seem quiet)???. There was no air raid alarm, but smoke was rising above the houses, and firefighters were on their way to the scene of the explosion.
The blast completely destroyed 11 houses on Staveley Road, leaving a 10-metre-wide crater in the middle of the road. Three people were killed: three-year-old Rosemary Clarke, 68-year-old Ada Harrison and Sapper Private Bernard Browning, who was on leave and heading to meet his girlfriend.
Since no one saw or heard any enemy planes, residents decided that an accident was to blame – most likely a gas pipeline had exploded.
Neighbours became suspicious when the site of the blast was investigated by experts from the Royal Air Force, but the government soon confirmed that it had been a gas explosion.
In the following weeks, sudden gas explosion syndrome was recorded all over London and the surrounding area. The British did not believe the government and joked that “the gas pipeline flew in to us again in the evening.” This continued until November, when Germany itself admitted to using a new “wonder weapon” – the V-2 ballistic missile.
The rocket was flying and fell into a swamp
In fact, the British government was aware of the German rocket program and learned about the V-2 long before it was first used. There was nothing unique or innovative about the idea: ballistic missiles had been proposed before the war by everyone who was seriously involved in such research, including the Soviet scientist Sergei Korolev. Moreover, von Braun never hid the fact that he borrowed key components of the V-2, including the turbopump for fuel delivery and the gyroscope for navigation, from experimental products of the mid-1930s created by the American Robert Goddard.
However, of all the great powers, only Germany took missiles seriously. This was facilitated by the engineer and artillery officer Walter Dornberger. The military is naturally conservative and is not inclined to trust the “smart guys” who are trying to sell them another wonder gun. Dornberger, who was one of the officers, acted as the producer of the missile program and managed to convince the Wehrmacht to allocate von Braun funding and a research complex. The artillery engineer also shaped the appearance of the future “V-2”, specifying its characteristics in the technical specifications: one ton of payload, a range of about 300 km, a maximum deviation from the target of 3-5 km, the ability to be transported using trucks and suitability for mass production. Years later, Dornberger, already living in the United States, would propose a concept for protection against ballistic missiles, which was implemented in the Wizard programs and the Nike-Zeus complex. In other words, von Braun was very lucky to have such a productive comrade.
Interestingly, the first V-2s reached Great Britain before the “gas explosion epidemic.” Although the program for their development was top secret, Western intelligence found a way to them. One of the test sites was located near the Polish city of Blizna. Since November 1943, the Polish insurgent Home Army had been stealing fragments of crashed missiles, and in May, a stroke of luck occurred: one of the V-2s fell into a swamp and remained intact. The Poles pulled it out and contacted the British, who planned a special operation: at night, a plane took off from Italy, flew at low altitude, and landed on an abandoned airfield in Poland right under the noses of the Germans.
The partisans dragged key parts of the dismantled V-2 rocket on board and two days later they were already in London.
However, studying the details yielded nothing in terms of finding a countermeasure. It became clear that the missile (early versions) flies according to the program after launch, relying on the inertial navigation system, and is immune to any external influences such as radio interference. After the first test launches, V-2s began to rain down on Great Britain and the countries of Western Europe liberated from the Nazis regularly, and it seemed that nothing could be done about it: neither shoot them down, nor even declare an air raid alarm in time.
Earlier, in the spring of 1944, the Germans had already found a way to make life miserable for Londoners: they began using V-1 missiles, which are considered cruise missiles by modern classification. They flew faster than an aircraft on average and were a difficult target, but methods of countering them were quickly found. Anti-aircraft batteries were placed along their flight path and barrage balloons were raised, and radars recorded the V-1s as they approached and guided high-speed Hawker Tempest interceptors and Gloster Meteor jets to them (in total, they managed to shoot down about a thousand units). By August 1944, British air defense was shooting down about 80% of the missiles, and the damage from the few that got through was reduced by a timely air raid alarm.
There was no direct counteraction to the V-2 using the technologies of those years. At best, it was possible to destroy their production plants and launch sites, but the Germans made sure that this was as difficult as possible. In total, 3,172 V-2s were launched by the end of the war, 1,358 of which were aimed at London and 1,610 at liberated Antwerp, a key port on the Belgian coast through which supplies could be delivered to the Allies.
Weapons of Terror
In both cities, the missile's main victims were civilians – the probable deviation of several kilometers allowed the missile to be aimed only with the accuracy of the city. In total, 2,754 people were killed by the V-2 in London, which is an average of two per launch. Sometimes the hit was especially devastating. For example, on November 25, 1944, a missile completely destroyed the Woolworth's department store in south-east London, killing 160 people and seriously injuring 108. In Antwerp on December 16, 1944, a V-2 destroyed the crowded Cine Rex cinema and set a record – 567 fatalities.
Almost all of the V-2s ever fired were intended to terrorize civilians: Hitler was obsessed with the idea of avenging Britain for the bombing of German cities (he did not take into account the Luftwaffe's bombing of London in 1940). However, the Germans once launched a series of rockets at a tactical target: on March 7, 1945, American troops took control of the Ludendorff Bridge over the Rhine, and the Nazis used 11 V-2s in an attempt to destroy it. They might have succeeded, but they ran into a problem: later rockets used Leitstrahl, a device for guiding by radio beams at the initial stage of the trajectory, which greatly improved accuracy. However, it was aimed at the bombing of Antwerp, and there was no easy way to repurpose it for another purpose.
Given the massive damage to London's civilian infrastructure, the British nevertheless attempted to develop a missile defense system. General Frederick Alfred Pyle proposed installing thousands of anti-aircraft guns in the missile's target area and linking them to radar operators. They would calculate the missile's trajectory and tell the gunners where to shoot to intercept it.
It was believed that to shoot down one V-2 it would be necessary to fire 320 thousand large-caliber shells.
The idea was abandoned immediately – even if 2% of the shells fell back to the ground and exploded there, the damage would be immeasurably greater than that from the missile itself.
Then the idea was reworked and it was proposed to launch only a few hundred shells at a rocket, but with a more advanced fuse. In 1945, as an experiment, a huge number of anti-aircraft guns were installed in London's Hyde Park, but tests were never conducted: it was realized that the radars of those years did not allow determining the trajectory of rockets with sufficient accuracy and speed, and therefore needed to be improved. However, they did not have time to develop the system: the Germans ran out of launch pads earlier.
However, one method did allow indirect combat against von Braun's creations – through espionage. British counterintelligence had complete control over the German network of agents in the country and could feed them any disinformation. Therefore, after a series of V-2 hits on the center of London, the British began to adjust their fire, but with an error – they reported that the explosion occurred 15-30 km from the city, that is, that the rocket had overshot. The Germans made adjustments to the control system, and when the V-2s began to fall outside London or on its outskirts, spies reported colossal destruction in the center. As a result, the county of Kent began to suffer, but the sights were knocked off the densely populated capital.
The famous theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, who worked at the Air Force Research Center during World War II, expressed a surprisingly cynical opinion of the German rocket in his autobiography. “…those of us who were seriously involved in the war were very grateful to Wernher von Braun. We knew that each V-2 cost as much as a good fighter plane. We knew that the German troops at the front desperately needed planes, and that the V-2 rockets did us no military harm. From our point of view, the V-2 program was about as good as if Hitler had adopted a policy of unilateral disarmament.
Nowadays, ballistic (and cruise) missiles of developed countries have become much more accurate than the V-2. Modern navigation systems allow hitting targets with a deviation of up to ten meters. Perhaps, if such technology had existed in the first half of the 1940s, it would have reduced the number of civilian casualties. Or, on the contrary, the Nazis would have chosen places with the largest concentration of people and fired at them precisely for fun.
