The first V-1 flying bombs

In the early hours of 13 June 1944, a week after the Allied landings in Normandy, the first operational Fieseler Fi 103 missiles were launched from sites in northern France – pilotless flying bombs with a warhead of about 850 kilograms, driven by a noisy pulse-jet engine. Only four reached England. The first came down at dawn near Swanscombe in Kent; a few minutes later another hit the railway bridge on Grove Road in the London district of Bethnal Green, killing six people. So began a campaign that lasted until March 1945, in which the Germans fired more than 10,000 flying bombs at Britain.

Popular war chronologies record under 13 June that the Germans began their V-1 flying-bomb attack on England, in Hitler’s eyes a kind of revenge for the invasion; that Hitler believed Germany would win thanks to this “secret weapon”; and that the V-1 attacks would continue until October, when the Allies captured the last launch site. Under 22 June they add that V-1s were still falling on England, especially London, sometimes with terrible losses. Both entries concern the same phenomenon. They need correcting on three points, however. The first salvo of 13 June was a failure, and the offensive proper began only on the night of 15/16 June. The weapon was not created in response to the invasion: the Germans had been developing it for years, and the Normandy landings merely dictated the hurried date of the first launch. Finally, the bombardment did not end in October: no missiles were fired from France after the beginning of September 1944, but bombs launched from aircraft, and later from sites in the Netherlands, went on falling on England until the end of March 1945.

The Luftwaffe’s flying bomb

The missile that the British soon nicknamed the buzz bomb or doodlebug was a Luftwaffe weapon, not an army one. It was designed by Robert Lusser of the Fieseler company and Fritz Gosslau of the Argus works, which supplied the engine. The first unpowered flight took place in October 1942 and the first powered flight in December, at the Luftwaffe test centre at Peenemünde, next door to the range where General Walter Dornberger’s army team was testing the A4 rocket. The two programmes competed for money, materials and Hitler’s favour. The rocket, whose first successful launch took place in October 1942, was technically more daring, but the flying bomb cost a fraction of the price: according to post-war calculations a V-1 took about 350 man-hours to build, and its cost was a few per cent of a rocket’s. In July 1943 Hitler, delighted by a film of the rocket tests, put his faith in the A4, but the flying bomb was not abandoned – together the two weapons were to bring the Reich “retaliation” for the bombing of German cities.

The British knew of this work quite early. In the spring of 1943 an investigation codenamed Bodyline was led by Duncan Sandys, son-in-law of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and in August Bomber Command raided Peenemünde in Operation Hydra. In the autumn air reconnaissance spotted dozens of launch sites in the Pas-de-Calais and neighbouring Picardy, with storage buildings of a distinctive shape resembling skis laid on their side – the British called them ski sites. From 5 December 1943 Allied aircraft bombed them as part of Operation Crossbow; over the following months they dropped tens of thousands of tons of bombs on them and damaged most of the roughly one hundred sites identified. The Germans responded by changing their method: instead of elaborate installations that were easy to spot from the air, they began building simplified, well-camouflaged sites that could be made ready in a few days. These were the launchers used in June 1944.

The missiles were to be launched by a special Luftwaffe anti-aircraft regiment – Colonel Max Wachtel’s Flakregiment 155 (W), which from late 1943 was subordinate to General Erich Heinemann’s LXV Army Corps for special tasks. The “anti-aircraft regiment” label was a cover, and Wachtel himself – according to British accounts – went by an assumed name in France. The regiment had four battalions, but series production of the missiles got properly under way only in the spring of 1944, and the equipment reached the units in the last weeks of May.

A failed first salvo

The Normandy landings caught Wachtel’s regiment in the middle of its preparations. The high command pressed for the bombardment of London to begin at once, although many sites were not yet ready and the missiles, catapults and fuel were arriving in haste over railways wrecked by Allied bombing. On the night of 12/13 June only a handful of launchers in the Pas-de-Calais were ready to fire. According to Basil Collier, the British official historian of home defence, the Germans launched ten missiles; some crashed immediately after launch or fell into the sea, and four reached the English coast. Other accounts give slightly different figures – a few missiles more or fewer, split between the night of 12/13 June and the morning of 13 June – but all agree that four reached England.

The first of them fell at about 4.20 a.m. on a field near Swanscombe on the Thames, harming no one. A few minutes later a missile struck the railway bridge on Grove Road in Bethnal Green in east London. The explosion wrecked the tracks and several houses; six people were killed and several dozen injured. The other two came down in rural areas of Sussex and Kent. At first the defenders were not sure what they were dealing with – observers reported aircraft flying straight and low with a flame at the tail, which then suddenly fell silent and dived. It was soon understood that this was the long-awaited weapon whose launch sites had been bombed since December.

After this failure the Germans spent two days replenishing stocks and repairing sites. The real offensive began on the night of 15/16 June: according to Collier, more than 240 missiles were launched within twenty-four hours, of which – according to British tallies – 144 crossed the coast and 73 fell on the London area. From then on Wachtel’s regiment fired day and night, at its peak more than a hundred missiles a day. On 16 June the Wehrmacht High Command communiqué announced that southern England and London were being bombarded with “new weapons of the greatest explosive power”. The propaganda of Joseph Goebbels quickly named the new weapon Vergeltungswaffe 1 – “retaliation weapon no. 1” – and this is the origin of the abbreviation V-1.

The chronologies’ phrase about “revenge for the invasion” thus reflects the mood of German propaganda rather than the origins of the weapon: it was meant above all as retaliation for the Allied bombing of German cities, and the invasion merely hastened its use. Hitler’s faith in a “wonder weapon”, on the other hand, was real. On 17 June, at a field headquarters at Margival near Soissons, he met Field Marshals Gerd von Rundstedt and Erwin Rommel, who were demanding freedom of action in Normandy. According to those present, Hitler rejected their arguments and assured them that the flying bombs would break British resistance. The generals proposed that the missiles be aimed instead at the ports of southern England through which supplies flowed to the troops in Normandy; Hitler insisted on London.

London under the flying bombs

The nominal aiming point was Tower Bridge, but a V-1 could not be aimed at a particular target. A gyroscopic autopilot held the course, and a simple counter driven by a small propeller in the nose cut off the fuel after a set distance; the missile then dived and exploded wherever it happened to be. The scatter ran to well over ten kilometres. It was thus a terror weapon aimed at a great city as a whole. Most of the hits fell on the southern and south-eastern districts and suburbs over which the missiles approached – Croydon suffered worst of all.

Londoners soon learned to recognise the distinctive drone of the engine and to dread the moment it cut out: it meant the missile would fall within a dozen or so seconds. Bombardment by day and night, whatever the weather, was more wearing than the night raids of the Blitz of 1940–1941. The worst tragedies came on Sunday 18 June. During the morning service at the Guards Chapel in Wellington Barracks, a few hundred metres from Buckingham Palace, a missile hit the roof, which collapsed on the congregation. 121 people were killed – soldiers and civilians, among them Guards officers and their families – and 141 injured. It was the deadliest single V-1 explosion of the entire campaign.

The note found in chronologies under 22 June – about missiles still falling on England, especially London, “sometimes with terrible losses” – refers to no single event, but captures well the state of affairs in the second week of the offensive. Dozens of missiles fell on the city every day, destroying homes, hospitals and schools. On 30 June, at lunchtime, a V-1 exploded in the Aldwych in central London, in front of Bush House, near the offices of the Air Ministry; according to various tallies 46 to 48 people were killed, many of them young office workers out on their break. On 6 July Churchill told the House of Commons that up to that day the Germans had launched 2,754 flying bombs, which had killed 2,752 people.

The authorities, who in the first days had tried not to reveal the scale of the bombardment, soon returned to the methods of the Blitz. People again slept in Underground stations. At the beginning of July an organised evacuation of children, mothers with small children and the elderly began; together with private departures, British accounts estimate that more than a million people left London in the summer of 1944. The Minister of Home Security, Herbert Morrison, who was responsible for civil defence, warned the War Cabinet that Londoners, worn out by the ceaseless bombardment, were bearing it worse than the raids of 1940–1941.

Guns, fighters and balloons

The defence against the flying bombs, codenamed Diver, had been prepared in the winter of 1943–1944 by Air Marshal Roderic Hill, commander of Britain’s air defences, together with General Frederick Pile, the head of Anti-Aircraft Command. The plan provided for three zones: over the sea and over Kent and Sussex the missiles were to be intercepted by fighters, a belt of anti-aircraft guns waited on the North Downs, and a balloon barrage guarded the approaches to London. The V-1, however, was a difficult target. It flew at a height of a few hundred metres at about 550–600 kilometres an hour – too fast for most fighters and too low for the heavy guns, whose crews could not traverse their barrels quickly enough.

Only the fastest aircraft were suitable for the chase: the Hawker Tempest, the latest Griffon-engined versions of the Spitfire, the Mustang III and, at night, the Mosquito. The first missile was shot down by a Mosquito crew on the night of 14/15 June. Pilots also learned to bring down V-1s without firing – they slid a wingtip under the missile’s wing and tipped it over until the gyroscope lost its balance. From July the first British jets, Gloster Meteors, joined the chase. Among the defending units were the Polish fighter squadrons Nos. 306, 315 and 316, flying Mustangs; according to the unit’s history, No. 315 Squadron alone shot down 53 missiles, and according to Polish tallies all the Polish squadrons together accounted for nearly 190.

The anti-aircraft guns began to score only after they were redeployed. In mid-July Hill and Pile moved more than a thousand guns from the North Downs to the coast, where they could fire out to sea without exposing local people to shell splinters or falling missiles, while the fighters were given a pursuit zone over land. New American gun-laying radars and shells with proximity fuzes meant that by the end of August the guns were destroying most of the missiles that came within their range. The balloon barrage south of London eventually grew to more than a thousand balloons. According to British figures, of about 7,500 missiles observed by the defences, fighters destroyed 1,847, the guns 1,878 and the balloons 232.

Double agents and the aiming point

The defenders had one more, invisible weapon. The Germans asked their agents in Britain to report where the missiles were falling. All of these agents had long been controlled by British counter-intelligence and the Twenty Committee (PL), which had recently, in Operation Fortitude, misled the Germans about the place of the invasion. The most important were the Spaniard Juan Pujol (“Garbo”) and the Polish air force officer Roman Czerniawski (“Brutus”). After a brief dispute within the government it was decided that they would report genuine hits, but selected so as to suggest that the missiles were overshooting the centre and falling in the north-western districts. The Germans, trying to correct for this, would shorten the range, shifting the points of impact to the less densely populated southern suburbs and Kent. The decision was morally fraught – in practice it meant steering destruction onto some districts at the expense of others – and the War Cabinet hesitated for a long time. In the end it was put into effect.

Wachtel also had data from radio transmitters fitted to some of the missiles, which showed that the V-1s were if anything falling short. According to British histories of intelligence, however, he trusted the agents and did not correct his aim as much as he should have. How effective the deception was is disputed: some historians believe it spared central London many hits, while others point out that the scatter of the missiles was enormous in any case.

Until October – and beyond

The V-1 offensive forced the Allies to shift their forces. In the second half of June the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight Eisenhower, gave attacks on the launch sites and missile depots priority over all other targets except the urgent needs of the battle in Normandy. All summer hundreds of bombers that could have been attacking German synthetic-fuel plants or supporting the troops at the front flew over the Pas-de-Calais. The strategic air commanders, led by General Carl Spaatz, regarded this as a costly diversion from their main task, and the small, well-hidden sites proved hard to hit. The bombardment was stopped not by bombs but by the ground forces, which broke out of Normandy in August 1944 and drove north.

The last battalion of Wachtel’s regiment left its sites in France at the end of August, and by the beginning of September the Pas-de-Calais coast was in Allied hands. The oft-repeated statement that the attacks lasted until October, when the Allies captured the last launch site, is therefore inaccurate in both directions. Ground launches from France ended earlier, at the turn of August and September. At the same time the bombardment of England went on much longer: from July 1944 to January 1945 Luftwaffe Heinkel He 111 bombers air-launched about 1,200 missiles over the North Sea, and in March 1945 the Germans were still firing extended-range missiles from sites in the Netherlands. The last V-1 fell on England at the end of March 1945. From October 1944, however, the main victims of the flying bombs were Antwerp and Brussels – Allied ports and supply hubs.

Place in the war

According to British official figures the Germans fired more than 10,000 V-1s at Britain. About 2,400 fell within the London Civil Defence Region. According to British tallies the flying bombs killed 6,184 people in all and seriously injured almost 18,000 – the vast majority in London. They destroyed or damaged more than a million homes. It was the last great attempt to break British society from the air and – like the Blitz – it failed. Hitler’s hopes that the “retaliation weapon” would force the British into concessions or turn the tide of the war in the West proved illusory: the V-1 had no effect on the fighting in Normandy, and its chief victims were civilians.

The flying bomb nevertheless had a significance that went beyond 1944. It was the first cruise missile used on a large scale – cheap, mass-produced and fired from hidden launchers – and it foreshadowed the weaponry of the second half of the 20th century. Its production, like that of the A4 rocket, of which Hitler ordered 12,000, relied on the forced labour of concentration camp prisoners, including in the underground Mittelwerk factory. A few months after the first V-1s, on 8 September 1944, the first V-2 rockets fell on London, and against them there was no defence at all. In the summer of 1944, though, London lived above all under the drone of the flying bombs, and the image of a missile whose engine suddenly falls silent above the rooftops became one of the most enduring memories of the British home front.