On September 8, 1944, the first German long-range ballistic missile V-2 (from the German V-2 - Vergeltungswaffe-2, a weapon of retaliation) fell on London. She got into a residential area, leaving after the explosion a funnel with a diameter of about 10 meters. As a result of the rocket explosion, three people were killed, another 22 people received various injuries. The day before, the Germans launched a missile with a warhead at Paris. These were the first combat launches of Hitler's new "miracle weapon".
Earlier, on June 13, 1944, the Germans for the first time massively used V-1 shells (cruise missiles) to strike London. However, unlike traditional bombers and its predecessor, the V-1 projectile, the V-2 was a fundamentally new type of weapon - the world's first ballistic missile. The flight time of the V-2 to the target was no more than 5 minutes, and the warning systems of the allies simply did not have time to react to it. This weapon was the last and most desperate attempt by Nazi Germany to turn the tide of World War II in its favor.
The first missile launches, also known as A-4 (Aggregat-4), were supposed to begin in the spring of 1942. However, on April 18, 1942, the first prototype rocket, designated A-4 V-1, exploded right on the launch pad during preheating of the engine. The subsequent decrease in appropriations for the implementation of this project postponed the start of comprehensive testing of new weapons for the summer months. An attempt was made to launch the second prototype of the A-4 V-2 rocket on June 13, 1942. The inspector general of the Luftwaffe, Erhard Milch, and the Minister of Armaments and Ammunition of Germany, Albert Speer, came to see the launch of the rocket. This attempt also ended in failure. At the 94th second of the rocket's flight, due to the failure of the control system, it fell 1.5 kilometers from the launch point. Two months later, the third prototype A-4 V-3 also failed to reach the required range. Only the fourth launch of the A-4 V-4 prototype, which took place on October 3, 1942, was considered successful. The rocket flew 192 kilometers at an altitude of 96 kilometers and exploded 4 kilometers from the intended target. After this launch, the missile tests went more and more successfully, until the end of 1943, 31 V-2 missile launches were carried out.
To some extent, the launch of the prototype rocket on October 3, 1942 was decisive. If it ended in failure, the program could be closed, and the team of its developers simply disbanded. If this happened, it is not known in what year and in what decade mankind managed to open its way into space. Perhaps the closure of this project would have had an impact on the course of the entire Second World War, since the enormous funds and forces that Nazi Germany spent on its missile "miracle weapon" could be redirected to other goals and programs.
After the war, Albert Speer called the entire V-2 missile program a ridiculous undertaking. “By supporting this idea of Hitler, I made one of my most serious mistakes. It would be much more productive to focus all efforts on the release of defensive surface-to-air missiles. Such missiles were created back in 1942 under the code name "Wasserfall" (Waterfall). Since we could produce up to 900 large offensive missiles every month, we could well produce several thousand smaller and less expensive anti-aircraft missiles that would protect our industry from enemy bombing,”Albert Speer recalled after the war.
The V-2 long-range ballistic missile with a free vertical launch was designed to engage area targets at predetermined coordinates. The rocket was equipped with a liquid-propellant engine with a turbopump supply of two-component fuel. The rocket controls were gas and aerodynamic rudders. The type of missile control is autonomous with partial radio control in a Cartesian coordinate system. Autonomous control method - stabilization and programmed control.
Technologically, the V-2 rocket was divided into 4 main parts: the warhead, the instrument compartment, the fuel compartment and the tail compartment. The fuel compartment occupied the central part of the rocket. The fuel (75% aqueous solution of ethyl alcohol) was in the front tank, the oxidizer (liquid oxygen) was in the lower tank. The division of the rocket into 4 main parts was chosen based on the conditions of its transportation. The warhead (the mass of the explosive at the head of the rocket was about 800 kg) was located in the conical head compartment. A shock impulse fuse was located in the upper part of this compartment. Four stabilizers were attached to the tail section of the rocket with flange joints. Inside each stabilizer there was a shaft, an electric motor, a chain drive of the aerodynamic rudder, as well as a steering gear for deflecting the gas rudder. Each V-2 ballistic missile consisted of more than 30 thousand individual parts, and the length of the electrical wires used in it exceeded 35 kilometers.
The main units of the liquid-propellant rocket engine of the V-2 ballistic missile were a combustion chamber, a steam-gas generator, a turbopump unit, tanks with hydrogen peroxide and sodium products, a battery of 7 compressed air cylinders. The rocket engine provided a thrust of about 30 tons in a rarefied space and about 25 tons at sea level. The rocket combustion chamber was pear-shaped and consisted of an outer and an inner shell. The controls of the V-2 ballistic missile were aerodynamic rudders and electric steering gears of gas rudders. To compensate for the side drift of the rocket, a radio control system was used. Two special ground-based transmitters emitted signals in the firing plane, and the receiver antennas were located on the tail stabilizers of the ballistic missile.
The launch mass of the rocket was 12,500 kg, while the mass of the unloaded rocket with a warhead was only 4,000 kg. The practical firing range was 250 kilometers, the maximum - 320 kilometers. At the same time, the rocket speed at the end of the engine operation was about 1450 m / s. The mass of the rocket warhead was 1000 kg, of which 800 kg were ammotol explosives (a mixture of ammonium nitrate and TNT).
For 18 months of serial production in Germany, 5946 V-2 missiles were assembled. Until April 1945, when the last ballistic missile launch sites were in the hands of the Allied forces, the Nazis managed to launch 3172 of their ballistic missiles. The main targets of the strikes were London (1358 missiles were fired) and Antwerp (1610 missiles), which became an important supply base for the Allied forces in Europe. At the same time, the reliability of V-2 ballistic missiles throughout the entire operation was low. More than a thousand rockets exploded either at the start or already at different stages of the flight. Many of them deviated significantly from the course and fell in uninhabited places without causing any harm. Despite this, several hits from V-2 missiles resulted in huge human casualties. The largest number of deaths came from a rocket that hit the crowded Rex cinema in Antwerp, killing 567 people. Another V-2 hit the Woolworth department store in London, killing 280 shoppers and store employees.
In general, the effect of the German weapon of retaliation was insignificant. In Great Britain, 2,772 people (almost all of them civilians) died from V-2 ballistic missiles, in Belgium - 1,736 people, in France and Holland - several hundred more. 11 V-2 rockets were fired by the Germans at the captured German city of Remagen by the allies, the number of victims as a result of this shelling is unknown. In general, we can say that the "miracle weapon" of the Third Reich killed several times fewer people than the number of prisoners of the underground plant-concentration camp "Mittelbau-Dora" who died during its production. It is believed that in this concentration camp, about 60 thousand prisoners and prisoners of war who worked in difficult conditions and practically did not rise to the surface (mainly Russians, Poles and French) were engaged in the construction of V-1 projectiles and V-2 ballistic missiles. More than 20 thousand prisoners of this concentration camp have died or were killed.
According to the American side, the program for the creation and production of V-2 ballistic missiles cost Germany a truly "cosmic" amount equivalent to $ 50 billion, that is, it cost 1.5 times more than the Americans spent on the "Manhattan Project" and the creation of nuclear weapons. In this case, the effect of the V-2, in fact, turned out to be zero. This missile did not have any effect on the course of hostilities and could not delay the collapse of the Hitler regime for a single day. Launching 900 V-2 ballistic missiles a month required from the German industry 13 thousand tons of liquid oxygen, 4 thousand tons of ethyl alcohol, 2 thousand tons of methanol, 1.5 thousand tons of explosives, 500 tons of hydrogen peroxide and a huge amount of other components. Moreover, for the mass production of missiles, it was necessary to urgently build new enterprises for the production of various materials, blanks and semi-finished products; many such factories were made underground.
Having failed to fulfill its main purpose, the V-2 ballistic missile never became a weapon of retaliation, but it opened the way for mankind to the stars. It was this German rocket that became the first artificial object in history that managed to make a suborbital space flight. In the first half of 1944, in Germany, in order to fine-tune the design of the rocket, a number of vertical launches of V-2 missiles were carried out with a slightly increased (up to 67 seconds) engine operating time. At the same time, the height of the missiles reached 188 kilometers. Thus, the V-2 rocket became the first man-made object in the history of mankind that managed to overcome the Karman line, as the height above sea level is called, which is conventionally taken as the boundary between the earth's atmosphere and space.
Doug Millard, a historian of space exploration and curator of the London Museum of Space Technology, believes that it was with the launch of trophy and later upgraded V-2 rockets that both Soviet and American rocket programs began. Even the first Chinese ballistic missiles, the Dongfeng-1, also began their albeit with the Soviet R-2 missiles, which were created on the basis of the design of the German V-2. According to the historian, all the first advances in space exploration, including landing on the moon, were made on the basis of V-2 technology.
Thus, it is easy to note a direct connection between the V-2 ballistic missile, which was created with the help of the slave labor of prisoners of war and prisoners and was launched at targets from the territory of Nazi-occupied Europe and the first American space flights. Millard notes that V-2 technology later allowed the Americans to land on the moon. “Was it possible to land a man on the moon without resorting to the help of Hitler's weapons? Most likely, yes, however, it would take significantly longer. As with many other innovations, the war was able to seriously spur work on rocket technology, accelerating the onset of the space age,”says Millard.
The fundamental principles that underlie modern rocketry have not undergone significant changes in more than 70 years since the end of World War II. The design of rocket engines remains similar, most of them still use liquid propellants, and there is still room for gyroscopes in the on-board missile control systems. All this was first introduced on the German V-2 rocket.
Underground concentration camp "Mittelbau-Dora":
