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V-2 rocket: the story on HearLore | HearLore
V-2 rocket
The first successful test flight of the V-2 rocket occurred on the 3rd of October 1942, reaching an altitude of 84 miles. On that day, Walter Dornberger declared in a meeting at Peenemünde that the project was practically complete, yet the weapon would not see combat for another two years. This rocket, designated Aggregat-4 by its creators, was the world's first practical modern ballistic missile and the first artificial object to travel into space when the vertical launch MW 18014 reached 100 kilometers on the 20th of June 1944. Unlike the V-1 flying bomb that preceded it, the V-2 traveled at supersonic speeds, impacting without audible warning and proving unstoppable to contemporary defenses. The psychological terror it inflicted was unique because it dropped from an altitude of 60 miles at up to three times the speed of sound, arriving before the sound of its own engine could be heard. This silence made the weapon a ghost, striking cities like London and Antwerp with no chance for evacuation or interception.
The development of this machine began in the late 1920s when a young Wernher von Braun bought a copy of Hermann Oberth's book The Rocket into Interplanetary Spaces. A Rocket Rumble fad initiated by Fritz von Opel and Max Valier in 1928 had inspired the teenage von Braun to construct and launch his own homemade toy rocket car on a crowded sidewalk, an act that led to him being taken in for questioning by local police before being released to his father. By 1930, von Braun attended the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg, where he assisted Oberth in liquid-fueled rocket motor tests. When the Nazi Party gained power, an artillery captain named Walter Dornberger arranged an Ordnance Department research grant for von Braun, allowing him to work next to Dornberger's existing solid-fuel rocket test site at Kummersdorf. His thesis, Construction, Theoretical, and Experimental Solution to the Problem of the Liquid Propellant Rocket, was dated the 16th of April 1934 and kept classified by the German Army until 1960. By the end of 1934, his group had launched multiple rockets, two of which reached heights of 2.2 and 3.5 kilometers respectively.
The path to the V-2 was paved by the work of American physicist Robert H. Goddard, whose research was closely studied by German engineers before 1939. Von Braun used Goddard's plans from various journals and incorporated them into the building of the Aggregate series of rockets. In the summer of 1936, Braun and Walter Riedel began thinking of a much larger rocket based on a projected 25-ton thrust engine. Dornberger specified military requirements that included a 1-ton payload, a range of 172 miles with a dispersion of 2 or 3 miles, and transportability using road vehicles. After the A-4 project was postponed due to unfavorable aerodynamic stability testing of the A-3 in July 1936, Braun specified the A-4 performance in 1937. Following an extensive series of test firings of the A-5 scale test model, A-4 design and construction was ordered in 1938 and 1939. Although Adolf Hitler was not particularly impressed when shown tests of rocket motors in 1939, a conference on 28 to the 30th of September 1939 known as The Day of Wisdom initiated the funding of university research to solve rocket problems. By late 1941, the Army Research Center at Peenemünde possessed the technologies essential to the success of the A-4, including large liquid-fuel rocket engines, supersonic aerodynamics, gyroscopic guidance, and rudders in jet control.
When did the first successful test flight of the V-2 rocket occur?
The first successful test flight of the V-2 rocket occurred on the 3rd of October 1942. This flight reached an altitude of 84 miles and marked the completion of the project by Walter Dornberger at Peenemünde.
Who designed the V-2 rocket and when did their work begin?
Wernher von Braun designed the V-2 rocket after reading Hermann Oberth's book The Rocket into Interplanetary Spaces in the late 1920s. His formal work on liquid-fueled rockets began in 1930 at the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg under Oberth's supervision.
What fuel mixture did the V-2 rocket use for propulsion?
The V-2 rocket used a fuel mixture of 75% ethanol and 25% water known as B-Stoff. Liquid oxygen or LOX known as A-Stoff served as the oxidizer, while concentrated hydrogen peroxide or T-Stoff powered the steam turbine that drove the fuel pumps.
How many civilians were killed by V-2 attacks in London during the war?
An estimated 2,754 civilians were killed in London by V-2 attacks with another 6,523 injured. The largest single loss of life occurred on the 16th of December 1944 when the Cine Rex cinema was struck leaving 567 dead and 291 injured.
When did the V-2 rocket first travel into space?
The V-2 rocket became the first artificial object to travel into space on the 20th of June 1944. This vertical launch designated MW 18014 reached an altitude of 100 kilometers which defines the edge of space.
What happened to the V-2 rocket engineers after World War II ended?
After the war ended, 126 principal designers including Wernher von Braun and Walter Dornberger were captured by the United States under Operation Paperclip. These engineers were relocated to the United States, the USSR, France, and the United Kingdom to further develop rocket technology for military and civilian purposes.
The A-4 used a 75% ethanol and 25% water mixture, known as B-Stoff, for fuel and liquid oxygen, or LOX, known as A-Stoff, for oxidizer. The water reduced the flame temperature, acted as a coolant by turning to steam, augmented thrust, tended to produce a smoother burn, and reduced thermal stress. The fuel and oxidizer pumps were driven by a steam turbine, fueled by the decomposition of concentrated hydrogen peroxide, or T-Stoff, facilitated by a sodium permanganate catalyst, or Z-Stoff. Both the alcohol and oxygen tanks were made of an aluminum-magnesium alloy. The turbopump, rotating at 4,000 rpm, forced the fuel mixture and oxygen into the combustion chamber at 125 liters per second, where they were ignited by a spinning electrical igniter. The engine produced 8 tons of thrust during the preliminary stage while the fuel was gravity-fed, before increasing to 25 tons as the turbopump pressurized the fuel, lifting the 13.5-ton rocket. Combustion gases exited the chamber at 2,000 meters per second, and a speed of 1,500 meters per second. The oxygen to fuel mixture was 1.0 to 0.85 at 25 tons of thrust; as ambient pressure decreased with flight altitude, thrust increased to 29 tons.
Dr. Thiel's 25-ton rocket motor design relied on pump feeding, as opposed to earlier pressure-fed designs. The motor used centrifugal injection and used both regenerative cooling and film cooling. Film cooling admitted alcohol into the combustion chamber and exhaust nozzle under slight pressure through four rings of small perforations. The mushroom-shaped injection head was removed from the combustion chamber to a mixing chamber, the combustion chamber was made more spherical while being shortened from 6 to 1-foot in length, and the connection to the nozzle was made cone shaped. The resultant 1.5-ton chamber operated at a combustion pressure of 100 atmospheres. Thiel's 1.5-ton chamber was then scaled up to a 4.5-ton motor by arranging three injection heads above the combustion chamber. By 1939, eighteen injection heads in two concentric circles at the head of the 1.5-inch thick sheet-steel chamber were used to make the 25-ton motor. The warhead was a source of trouble, using amatol 60/40 detonated by an electric contact fuze. The warhead weighed 1,000 kilograms and contained 900 kilograms of explosive, an explosive percentage by weight of 93%, a very high portion compared to other types of munitions.
A protective layer of glass wool was used for the fuel tanks to prevent the A-4 from forming ice, a problem which plagued other early ballistic missiles such as the balloon tank-design SM-65 Atlas which entered US service in 1959. The tanks held 9,750 liters of ethyl alcohol and 3,800 liters of oxygen. The V-2 was guided by four external rudders on the tail fins and four internal graphite vanes in the jet stream at the exit of the motor. These 8 control surfaces were controlled by Helmut Hölzer's analog computer, the Mischgerät, via electrical-hydraulic servomotors, based on electrical signals from the gyros. The Siemens Vertikant LEV-3 guidance system consisted of two free gyroscopes for lateral stabilization, coupled with a PIGA accelerometer, or the Walter Wolman radio control system, to control engine cutoff at a specified velocity. The flying distance was controlled by the timing of the engine cutoff, Brennschluss, ground-controlled by a Doppler system or by different types of on-board integrating accelerometers. Just before engine cutoff, thrust was reduced to eight tons, in an effort to avoid any water hammer problems a rapid cutoff could cause.
The Factory of Slaves
On the 27th of March 1942, Dornberger proposed production plans and the building of a launching site on the Channel coast. In December, Speer ordered Major Thom and Dr. Steinhoff to reconnoitre the site near Watten. Assembly rooms were established at Peenemünde and in the Friedrichshafen facilities of Zeppelin Works. In 1943, a third factory, Raxwerke, was added. On the 22nd of December 1942, Hitler signed the order for mass production, when Albert Speer assumed final technical data would be ready by July 1943. However, many issues still remained to be solved even by the autumn of 1943. On the 8th of January 1943, Dornberger and von Braun met with Speer. Speer stated, As head of the Todt organisation I will take it on myself to start at once with the building of the launching site on the Channel coast, and established an A-4 production committee under Degenkolb. On the 26th of May 1943, the Long-Range Bombardment Commission, chaired by AEG director Petersen, met at Peenemünde to review the V-1 and V-2 automatic long-range weapons. Both weapons had reached the final stage of development, and the commission decided to recommend to Hitler that both weapons be mass-produced.
A production line was nearly ready at Peenemünde when the Operation Hydra attack occurred on the 17th of August 1943. The main targets of the attack included the test stands, the development works, the Pre-Production Works, the settlement where the scientists and technicians lived, the Trassenheide camp, and the harbor sector. According to Dornberger, Serious damage to the works, contrary to first impressions, was surprisingly small. Work resumed after a delay of four to six weeks, and because of camouflage to mimic complete destruction, there were no more raids during the next nine months. The raid resulted in 735 lives lost, with heavy losses at Trassenheide, while 178 were killed in the settlement, including Dr. Thiel, his family, and Chief Engineer Walther. The Germans eventually moved production to the underground Mittelwerk in the Kohnstein where V-1 and V-2 weapons were built with the use of forced labour. After September 1944, this would average a production rate of 600 to 700 per month, eventually producing 5,789 verifiable Mittelwerk models, plus 150 to 200 previous test models built at Peenemunde. Production ended at the start of April 1945 as American forces approached.
The V-2s were constructed at the Mittelwerk site by prisoners from Mittelbau-Dora, a concentration camp where 20,000 prisoners died. SS General Hans Kammler, who as an engineer had constructed several concentration camps including Auschwitz, had a reputation for brutality and had originated the idea of using concentration camp prisoners as slave laborers for the rocket program. More people died manufacturing the V-2 than were killed by its deployment. The V-2 consumed a third of Germany's fuel alcohol production and major portions of other critical technologies. Due to a lack of explosives, some warheads were simply filled with concrete, using the kinetic energy alone for destruction, and sometimes the warhead contained photographic propaganda of German citizens who had died in Allied bombings. Alcohol consumption issues hampered testing on several occasions due to technicians stealing and consuming the alcohol, which was palatable enough to drink. Initial attempts at preventing the theft of alcohol included adding a pink dye to the fuel to make it less appealing, but this failed when it was found that the dye could easily be filtered out of the alcohol using potatoes. A purgative was added to the fuel, but technicians continued to consume it, resulting in launch tests being delayed due to the effects of the purgative. Finally, methanol was mixed into the fuel to make it toxic, resulting in one man suffering from vision loss and at least one death.
The Ghost in the Sky
Combat operations commenced in September 1944, when training Batterie 444 deployed. On the 2nd of September 1944, the SS Werfer-Abteilung 500 was formed, and by October, the SS under the command of SS Lt. Gen Hans Kammler, took operational control of all units. Hitler's hope that the Port of Antwerp dock gates would be hit and the port put out of action was not achieved. The largest loss of life by a single rocket attack during the war came on the 16th of December 1944, when the roof of the crowded Cine Rex was struck, leaving 567 dead and 291 injured. An estimated 2,754 civilians were killed in London by V-2 attacks with another 6,523 injured, which is two people killed per V-2 rocket. The death toll in London did not meet the Nazis' full expectations, during early usage, as they had not yet perfected the accuracy of the V-2, with many rockets being misdirected and exploding harmlessly. Accuracy increased during the war, particularly for batteries where the radio guide beam system was used. Missile strikes that did hit targets could cause large numbers of deaths; 160 were killed and 108 seriously injured in one explosion at 12:26 pm on the 25th of November 1944, at a Woolworth's department store in New Cross, south-east London.
The British government, concerned about spreading panic or giving away vital intelligence to German forces, initially attempted to conceal the cause of the explosions by making no official announcement, and euphemistically blaming them on defective gas mains. The public did not believe this explanation and therefore began referring to the V-2s as flying gas mains. The Germans themselves finally announced the V-2 on the 8th of November 1944 and only then, on the 10th of November 1944, did Winston Churchill inform Parliament, and the world, that England had been under rocket attack for the last few weeks. British intelligence also helped impede the effectiveness of the Nazi weapon, sending false reports via their Double-Cross System implying that the rockets were over-shooting their London target by 10 miles. This tactic worked; more than half of the V-2s aimed at London landed short of the London Civil Defence Region. Most landed on less-heavily populated areas in Kent due to erroneous recalibration. For the remainder of the war, British intelligence maintained the ruse by repeatedly sending bogus reports implying that these failed rockets were striking the British capital with heavy loss of life.
The final two rockets exploded on the 27th of March 1945. One of these was the last V-2 to kill a British civilian and the final civilian casualty of the war on British soil: Ivy Millichamp, aged 34, killed in her home in Kynaston Road, Orpington in Kent. A scientific reconstruction performed in 2010 demonstrated that the V-2 creates a crater 10 meters wide and 10 meters deep, ejecting approximately 3,000 tons of material into the air. The V-2 did not affect the outcome of the war, but it resulted in the development of the intercontinental ballistic missiles of the Cold War, which were also used for space exploration. A post-war analysis by the British War Office was scathing: the V-2 specification was conceived not for the carrying out of any deeply laid strategic plan for the bombardment of England or any other country, or indeed with any clearly defined application in view. It was merely conceived as a super gun, which would impress those in the highest places.
The Race for the Rocketeers
At the end of the war, a competition began between the United States and the USSR to retrieve as many V-2 rockets and staff as possible. Three hundred rail-car loads of V-2s and parts were captured and shipped to the United States and 126 of the principal designers, including Wernher von Braun and Walter Dornberger, were captives of the Americans. Von Braun, his brother Magnus von Braun, and seven others decided to surrender to the United States military under Operation Paperclip to ensure they were not captured by the advancing Soviets or shot dead by the Nazis to prevent their capture. After the Nazi defeat, German engineers were relocated to the United States, the USSR, France and the United Kingdom where they further developed the V-2 rocket for military and civilian purposes. The V-2 rocket also laid the foundation for the liquid fuel missiles and space launchers used later.
In the United States, Operation Paperclip recruited German engineers and Special Mission V-2 transported the captured V-2 parts to the United States. At the close of the Second World War, more than 300 rail cars filled with V-2 engines, fuselages, propellant tanks, gyroscopes, and associated equipment were brought to the railyards in Las Cruces, New Mexico, so they could be placed on trucks and driven to the White Sands Proving Grounds, also in New Mexico. In addition to V-2 hardware, the U.S. Government delivered German mechanization equations for the V-2 guidance, navigation, and control systems, as well as for advanced development concept vehicles, to U.S. defence contractors for analysis. During the 1950s, some of these documents were useful to U.S. contractors in developing direction cosine matrix transformations and other inertial navigation architecture concepts that were applied to early U.S. programs, such as the Atlas and Minuteman guidance systems as well as the Navy's Subs Inertial Navigation System. A committee was formed with military and civilian scientists to review payload proposals for the reassembled V-2 rockets. By January 1946, the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps invited civilian scientists and engineers to participate in developing a space research program using the V-2. This resulted in an eclectic array of experiments that flew on V-2s and helped prepare for American manned space exploration. Devices were sent aloft to sample the air at all levels to determine atmospheric pressures and to see what gases were present. Other instruments measured the level of cosmic radiation. Only 68 percent of the V-2 trials were considered successful. On the 29th of May 1947, a Modified V-2 had an error in its guidance, and landed near Juarez, Mexico, causing an international incident.
The USSR captured a number of V-2s and staff, letting them stay in Germany for a time. The first work contracts were signed in the middle of 1945. During October 1946, as part of Operation Osoaviakhim, they were obliged to relocate to Branch 1 of NII-88 on Gorodomlya Island in Lake Seliger where Helmut Gröttrup directed a group of 150 engineers. In October 1947, a group of German scientists supported the USSR in launching rebuilt V-2s in Kapustin Yar. The German team was indirectly overseen by Sergei Korolev, one of the leaders of the Soviet rocketry program. The first Soviet missile was the R-1, a duplicate of the V-2 manufactured completely in the USSR, which was launched first during October 1948. From 1947 until the end of 1950, the German team elaborated concepts and improvements for extended payload and range for the projects G-1, G-2 and G-4. The German team had to remain on Gorodomlya island until as late as 1952 and 1953. In parallel, Soviet work emphasized larger missiles, the R-2 and R-5, based on further developing the V-2 technology with using ideas of the German concept studies. Details of Soviet achievements were unknown to the German team and completely underestimated by Western intelligence until, in November 1957, the satellite Sputnik 1 was launched successfully to orbit by the Sputnik rocket based on R-7, the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile.
The First View from Space
The V-2 rocket became retroactively the first artificial object to travel into space with the vertical launch of MW 18014 on the 20th of June 1944. This launch reached an altitude of 100 kilometers, the threshold selected to define the edge of space. The first photo of Earth from space was taken from V-2 No. 13 launched by US scientists on the 24th of October 1946. This image captured the curvature of the planet and the blackness of space, marking a pivotal moment in human history. The U.S. Navy attempted to launch a German V-2 rocket at sea, with one test launch from the aircraft carrier USS Midway performed on the 6th of September 1947 as part of the Navy's Operation Sandy. The test launch was a partial success; the V-2 went off the pad but splashed down in the ocean only some 100 miles from the carrier. The launch setup on the Midway's deck is notable in that it used foldaway arms to prevent the missile from falling over. The arms pulled away just after the engine ignited, releasing the missile. The PGM-11 Redstone rocket is a direct descendant of the V-2.
In France, between May and September of 1946, CEPA, the forerunner to today's French space agency CNES, undertook the recruitment of approximately thirty German engineers, who had previous experience working on rocket programs for Nazi Germany at the Peenemünde Army Research Center. Much like their counterparts in the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union, France's objective was to acquire and advance the rocket technology developed by Germany during World War II. The initial initiative, known as the Super V-2 program, had plans for four rocket variants capable of achieving ranges of up to 200 kilometers and carrying warheads weighing up to 1,000 kilograms. However, this program was canceled in 1948. From 1950 to 1969, the research done on the Super V-2 program was repurposed to develop the Véronique sounding rocket, which became the first liquid-fuel research rocket in Western Europe and was ultimately capable of carrying a 100-kilogram payload to an altitude of 150 kilometers. The Véronique program then led to the Diamant rocket and the Ariane rocket family.
During October 1945, the Allied Operation Backfire assembled a small number of V-2 missiles and launched three of them from a site in northern Germany. The engineers involved had already agreed to relocate to the US when the test firings were complete. The Backfire report, published in January 1946, contains extensive technical documentation of the rocket, including all support procedures, tailored vehicles and fuel composition. In 1946, the British Interplanetary Society proposed an enlarged man-carrying version of the V-2, named Megaroc. It could have enabled sub-orbital spaceflight similar to, but at least a decade earlier than, the Mercury-Redstone flights of 1961. The first Chinese Dongfeng missile, the DF-1, was a licensed copy of the Soviet R-2, this design was produced during the 1960s. At least 20 V-2s still existed during 2014, with examples preserved in museums across Australia, the Netherlands, Poland, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The Cost of Silence
The German V-weapons cost, as a conservative estimate, around 1.5 billion Reichsmarks, the equivalent of about 500 million wartime US dollars. Given the relatively smaller size of the German economy, this represented an industrial effort equivalent to but slightly less than that of the U.S. Manhattan Project that produced the atomic bomb. Approximately 6,000 V-2s were built, for which the Reich paid 1.5 billion Reichsmarks, equating to a unit cost of around 250,000 Reichsmarks. However, this excluded the cost of the warhead, guidance system, and needed infrastructure. Around 3,200 were launched. The psychological effect of the V-2 is disputed. The V-2, traveling faster than the speed of sound, gave no warning before impact. There was no effective defence and no risk of pilot or crew casualties. An example of the impression it made is in the reaction of American pilot and future nuclear strategist and Congressional aide William Liscum Borden, who in November 1944 while returning from a nighttime air mission over Holland saw a V-2 in flight on its way to strike London: It resembled a meteor, streaming red sparks and whizzing past us as though the aircraft were motionless. I became convinced that it was only a matter of time until rockets would expose the United States to direct, transoceanic attack. However, historian Michael J. Neufeld writes that the missile was unimpressive, arguing that the lack of noise meant it created less terror than the V-1, and the lack of effective defences means that the Allies expended much fewer resources in trying to counter it. Outside of a few areas most targeted for attacks, the missile was little more than a nuisance.
With the war all but lost, regardless of the factory output of conventional weapons, the Nazis resorted to V-weapons as a tenuous last hope to influence the war militarily, as an extension of their desire to punish their foes and most importantly to give hope to their sympathizers with their miracle weapon. A post-war analysis by the British War Office was scathing: the V-2 specification was conceived not for the carrying out of any deeply laid strategic plan for the bombardment of England or any other country, or indeed with any clearly defined application in view. It was merely conceived as a super gun, which would impress those in the highest places. Hitler, in July 1944, and Speer, in January 1945, made speeches alluding to the scheme of submarine-towed launch platforms, though Germany did not possess the capability to fulfill these threats. According to decrypted messages from the Japanese embassy in Germany, twelve dismantled V-2 rockets were shipped to Japan. These left Bordeaux in August 1944 on the transport U-boats U-195 and U-511, which reached Jakarta in December 1944. A civilian V-2 expert was a passenger on U-511, bound for Japan in May 1945 when the war ended in Europe. The fate of these V-2 rockets is unknown. At the end of the war, a competition began between the United States and the USSR to retrieve as many V-2 rockets and staff as possible. Three hundred rail-car loads of V-2s and parts were captured and shipped to the United States and 126 of the principal designers, including Wernher von Braun and Walter Dornberger, were captives of the Americans.