The V-2 Missile V-2: WORLD'S FIRST BALLISTIC MISSILE V-2, or Vengeance Weapon 2 (Vergeltungswaffe zwei), was the name Nazi propagandists gave to the first ballistic missile used to strike distant targets. German Army Ordnance had been developing rocketry since the 1930s, aiming to create a long-range missile and exploring the use of rocket-powered aircraft. The liquid-propellant V-2 missile was first flown successfully from Peenemï¿½nde, Germany, on the Baltic Sea in October 1942. Late in World War II, Germany launched almost 3,000 V-2s against England, France, and Belgium. After the war, the United States and the Soviet Union used captured V-2s as a basis for developing their own large rockets. Our top 9 inventions and technical innovations of WWII. - Page 2 of 2 Our top 9 inventions and technical innovations of WWII. SHARE: Facebook Twitter 6. Radar Both the Allies and Axis powers used radar in World War II, and many important aspects of this conflict were greatly influenced by this revolutionary new technology.

The technology of radio-based detection and tracking evolved independently in a number of nations during the mid 1930s. At the outbreak of war in September 1939, both Great Britain and Germany had functioning systems. In Great Britain it was called RDF, Range and Direction Finding, while in Germany the name Funkmessgerät (radio measuring device) was used. By the time of the Battle of Britain in mid-1940, the Royal Air Force (RAF) had fully integrated RDF as part of the national air defence. By contrast, The German Funkmessgerät, was neglected, partly due to Adolf Hitler’s prejudice against defensive measures, and failings by the Luftwaffe in coherently incorporating the new technology. After the Fall of France, it was realised in Great Britain that the manufacturing capabilities of the United States were vital to success in the war; thus, although America was not yet a belligerent, Prime Minister Winston Churchill directed that the technology secrets of Great Britain be shared in exchange for the needed capabilities. In the summer of 1940, the Tizard Mission visited the United States. 7.

The V-2 the world’s first long-range guided ballistic missile The V-2 (German: Vergeltungswaffe 2, “Retribution Weapon 2”), technical name Aggregat-4 (A4), was the world’s first long-range[4] guided ballistic missile. The missile with liquid-propellant rocket engine was developed during the Second World War in Germany as a “vengeance weapon”, designed to attack Allied cities as retaliation for the Allied bombings against German cities. The V-2 rocket was also the first man-made object to cross the boundary of space. Beginning in September 1944, over 3,000 V-2s were launched by the German Wehrmacht against Allied targets during the war, firstly London and later Antwerp and Liège. According to a 2011 BBC documentary, the attacks resulted in the deaths of an estimated 9,000 civilians and military personnel, while 12,000 forced laborers and concentration camp prisoners were killed producing the weapons.

As Germany collapsed, teams from the Allied forces—the U.S., Great Britain and the Soviet Union—raced to capture key German manufacturing sites and examples of German guided missiles, rocket and jet powered aircraft, and nuclear experiments. Wernher von Braun and over 100 key V-2 personnel surrendered to the Americans. Through a lengthy sequence of events, a significant portion of the original V-2 team ended up working for the US Army at the Redstone Arsenal. The US also captured enough V-2 hardware to build approximately 80 of the missiles. The Soviets gained possession of the V-2 manufacturing facilities after the war and proceeded to re-establish V-2 production and move it to the Soviet Union. 8. Jet engine “Whittle is one of the great engineers of the century, perhaps the greatest if judged by the scale of the consequences of his invention”. From A Wrack Behind by Lord Kings Norton Frank Whittle filed his first patent for the jet engine in January 1930, after working on the idea of combining gas turbines and jet propulsion as a cadet at the RAF College, Cranwell. Surprisingly, the Air Ministry showed no official interest in the patent, and allowed international publication.

By 1936, Whittle had received enough private backing to start Power Jets, the company that would develop his ideas. Leading aviation companies started their own research in this area, but only Whittle’s design actually worked. With the threat of war, Government support arrived as gas turbines could give the Allies superiority in the air. The rapid development of the engine was the paramount consideration. The first aircraft to fly powered by a Whittle gas turbine was the Gloster E28/39, which had its maiden flight at Cranwell in 1941. However, engine development was too slow and, to accelerate the process, Roxbee created the Gas Turbine Collaboration Committee. This consisted of all the companies working on jet engine projects at the time, including Frank Whittle’s company Power Jets, and was a forum in which they shared their design work and test data. Whittle was against the idea at first, but as he recollected in his book, Jet – The story of a pioneer: “…we later became enthusiastic supporters, and I am firmly convinced that Britain owes much of its technical superiority in this field to the Gas Turbine Collaboration Committee.

There were many intrinsic difficulties in the proposal, but somehow or other, under the skilful chairmanship of Roxbee Cox, a good deal of thin ice was skated over very successfully.” Roxbee later said that this was one of the most thrilling periods of his life and the formation of the GTCC proved to be a major milestone in the development of the jet engine. Indeed, it continued to meet for many years after the war ended. Successful though GTCC was, progress was still not yet fast enough for the war effort, and in July 1941 Roxbee initiated the programme to share the jet engine with the USA. Surprisingly, the aircraft industry in the USA had not yet realised the potential of the jet engine but they learned fast, and soon the unparalleled industrial might of the USA was being applied to the revolutionary concept. 9. The first computer – Colossus Colossus was the name of a series of computers developed for British codebreakers in 1943-1945 to help in the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher. Colossus is thus regarded as the world’s first programmable, electronic, digital computer, although it was programmed by plugs and switches and not by a stored program.

Colossus was designed by the engineer Tommy Flowers to solve a problem posed by mathematician Max Newman at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park. Alan Turing’s use of probability in cryptanalysis contributed to its design. It has sometimes been erroneously stated that Turing designed Colossus to aid the Cryptanalysis of the Enigma. Turing’s machine that helped decode Enigma was the electromechanical Bombe, not Colossus. The prototype, Colossus Mark 1, was shown to be working in December 1943 and was operational at Bletchley Park on 5 February 1944. An improved Colossus Mark 2 that used shift registers to quintuple the processing speed, first worked on 1 June 1944, just in time for the Normandy Landings on D-Day. Ten Colossi were in use by the end of the war and an eleventh was being commissioned. Bletchley Park’s use of these machines allowed the Allies to obtain a vast amount of high-level military intelligence from teleprinter messages between the German High Command (OKW) and their army commands throughout occupied Europe.

The destruction of almost all of the Colossus hardware and blueprints, as part of the effort to maintain a project secrecy that was kept up into the 1970s, deprived most of those involved with Colossus of credit for their pioneering advancements in electronic digital computing during their lifetimes. A functioning replica of a Colossus computer was completed in 2007 and is on display at The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park –> V-2 rocket - YouTube V-2 rocket Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. The interactive transcript could not be loaded. Loading... Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Published on Aug 7, 2014 The V-2 (German: Vergeltungswaffe 2, "Vengeance Weapon 2"), technical name Aggregat-4 (A4), was the world's first long-range ballistic missile.

The liquid-propellant rocket was developed during the Second World War in Germany as a "vengeance weapon", designed to attack Allied cities as a form of retaliation for the ever-increasing Allied bomber effort against German cities. The V-2 rocket was also the first man-made object to enter the fringes of space. Beginning in September 1944, over 3,000 V-2s were launched by the German Wehrmacht against Allied targets during the war, mostly London and later Antwerp and Liège. According to a BBC documentary in 2011, the attacks resulted in the deaths of an estimated 9,000 civilians and military personnel, while 12,000 forced laborers and concentration camp prisoners were killed producing the weapons. This video is targeted to blind users. Attribution: Article text available under CC-BY-SA Creative Commons image source in video Category See the Nazi rockets that targeted cities at the end of WWII A captured V-2 is paraded through Paris.

Image: Keystone-France\Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images The world’s first long-range guided ballistic missile was built by Nazi Germany under the foreboding name Vergeltungswaffe 2 (Retribution Weapon 2). With a design spearheaded by Wernher von Braun, the V-2 was not prepared and deployed in force until late in World War II, when Hitler was desperate for a new super weapon to boost fading morale. The 45-foot-tall rockets were designed to reach speeds of over 3,500 miles per hour and hit preset targets up to 200 miles away with the help of gyroscopes, accelerometers and stabilizing fins. The first V-2 was launched in September 1944, and was followed by over 3,100 more over the following months. The vast majority were targeted at Antwerp and London, which suffered over 1,700 and 2,700 civilian deaths, respectively. In one instance a single V-2 struck an Antwerp cinema and killed 567. The last German V-2 was launched on March 27, 1945, around a month before the German surrender.

The unused V-2s became precious prizes for the United States and the USSR. The designers of the V-2, including Wernher von Braun, went to work building rockets for the beginnings of the American space program. 1944 A battery of V-2 rockets is prepared for firing. Image: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images c. 1940 A V-2 rocket is prepared for launch. Image: Keystone-France\Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images A V-2 rocket is transported in Allemagne. Image: Keystone-France\Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images 1945 A V-2 rocket ready for launching at Cuxhaven in Lower Saxony. Image: Fox Photos/Getty Images A V-2 is prepared for launch. Image: Fox Photos/Getty Images A V-2 is prepared at a test site. Image: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images 1944 A V-2 rocket is prepared for launch in Cuxhaven, Germany. Image: Boyer/Roger Viollet/Getty Images A V-2 rocket is launched from a test site on Germany's Baltic coast.

Image: ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images March 8, 1945 The aftermath of a V-2 rocket explosion in Farringdon Market that killed 380 people. Image: Picture Post/Getty Images The aftermath of a V-2 strike in London. Image: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images March 9, 1945 Farringdon Market the day after the V-2 strike. Image: Topical Press Agency/Getty Images March 8, 1945 A rescue worker uses a sniffer dog to search for casualties in the ruins of Farringdon Market. Image: Haywood Magee/Francis Reiss/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images April 22, 1945 Houses are cleared away in Essex after a V-2 explosion damaged and destroyed dozens of houses and killed nine people. Image: Flt. Lt. S D Devon/ IWM via Getty Images Sept. 10, 1945 A V-2 rocket arrives in Trafalgar Square, London, to take part in the London National Savings Week campaign.

Image: Fred Morley/Fox Photos/Getty Images 1945 A V-2 on display in Holland. Image: Past Pix/SSPL/Getty Images V-2 segments at a German munitions factory captured by Allied forces. Image: ullstein bild/ullstein bild/Getty Images September 1945 A V-2 rocket on display in Reims, France. Image: Tony Vaccaro/Getty Images A V-2 on display in Trafalgar Square, London. Image: Hulton Archive/Getty Images A V-2 rocket stands on display alongside Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square. Image: Keystone/Getty Images Visit Premier Exhibitions at 417 5th Avenue to see the past become present again at "Retronaut's New York." This pop-up exhibition of extraordinary, digitally restored photographs captures New York City at the turn of the 20th century. It's only open until May 15, so be sure to get down there before it’s gone.

Share this story V2 A4 Rocket Launch - Wernher von Braun in Anaglyph 3D - YouTube V2 A4 Rocket Launch - Wernher von Braun in Anaglyph 3D Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Published on Jan 16, 2016 The V-2 (German: Vergeltungswaffe 2, "Retribution Weapon 2"), technical name Aggregat-4 (A-4), was the world's first long-range[4] guided ballistic missile. The missile with a liquid-propellant rocket engine was developed during the Second World War in Germany as a "vengeance weapon", designed to attack Allied cities as retaliation for the Allied bombings against German cities.

The V-2 rocket also became the first artificial object to cross the boundary of space with the vertical launch of V-177 on 20 June 1944.[5] Beginning in September 1944, over 3,000 V-2s were launched by the German Wehrmacht against Allied targets during the war, first London and later Antwerp and Liège. According to a 2011 BBC documentary, the attacks resulted in the deaths of an estimated 9,000 civilians and military personnel, while 12,000 forced laborers and concentration camp prisoners were killed producing the weapons.[6] As Germany collapsed, teams from the Allied forces—the U.S., Great Britain and the Soviet Union—raced to capture key German manufacturing sites, guided missiles, rockets and jet powered aircraft. Wernher von Braun and over 100 key V-2 personnel surrendered to the Americans. Through a lengthy sequence of events, a significant portion of the original V-2 team ended up working for the US Army at the Redstone Arsenal. The US also captured enough V-2 hardware to build approximately 80 of the missiles.

The Soviets gained possession of the V-2 manufacturing facilities after the war and proceeded to re-establish V-2 production and move it to the Soviet Union. The Redstone team, led by von Braun, was transferred to NASA on its formation in October 1958. For NASA, this new Marshall Spaceflight Center (MSFC) helped design a series of rockets in the Saturn family. Category 6 Nazi Super Weapons That Actually Saw Service in WWII 6 Nazi Super Weapons That Actually Saw Service in WWII SHARE: Facebook Twitter During WWII, the Nazi Germans were developing a wide range of superweapons that would turn the tide and ensure ultimate victory. Most of them never made it off the drawing boards and only a few saw active service but a number of them laid the foundation for weapons that are still being used today. We start off with the most famous trio, the V weapons. V1 – The First Cruise Missile V1 made ready for launch (Bundesarchiv) It is safe to say that the V rockets were an obsession of Der Fuhrer.

He was so wrapped up in the creation of these rockets, that many felt this compulsion caused the Luftwaffe’s compromised state in 1944, since the development of the V rocket diverted precious resources that could have been used for repair parts and new planes. Yet despite these accusations one can see the rationale behind improving these unguided killing machines. During the last year of the war, over 5,000 V1 rockets were fired into London and the surrounding areas from launch sites in Holland and France. At times, over a hundred a day fell on Britain’s island nation. In some ways the launch of these rockets might have been seen as a response to D-Day, since the first V1 rocket was launched on June 13, 1944, seven days after the Normandy Landings. Despite the large onslaught from these deadly weapons, the V rocket suffered from two fatal flaws. One was that they could go only as far as fuel would allow them to; if they ran out of fuel before reaching their targets they would land wherever they fell. The other flaw was that there was no way to actually aim these rockets or make corrections if calculations were off.

V2 – The First Ballistic Missile A V2 rocket taking off – (Bundesarchiv) While all the major powers fielded short-range rockets, only Nazi Germany put serious effort into the development of long-range, liquid-fueled rockets. The result was the V-2, a 14-ton, vertically launched missile with a range of 200 miles and a top speed of 3,500 miles per hour. The V-2 was one of two long-range weapons deployed by the Germans, the other being the V-1 flying bomb. Both the V-1 and the V-2 were launched in the thousands, mainly against London and the port city of Antwerp in Belgium. V3 – The Nazi Super Gun The prototype V-3 cannon at Laatzig, Germany (now Poland) in 1942 – (Bundesarchiv) The V-3 (Revenge weapon 3) was a German supergun which worked on the multi-charge principle whereby secondary propellant charges are fired to add speed to a projectile.

From two large bunkers in the Pas-de-Calais region of northern France, the weapon was planned to be used to bombard London, but they wrecked beyond repair by Allied bombing raids before they were completed. Two smaller but similar guns were used to bombard Luxembourg from December 1944 to February 1945 during the battle of the Bulge. Continues on Page 2 Wernher von Braun's V-2 Rocket | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian Wernher von Braun's V-2 Rocket Although the Nazi "vengeance weapon" was a wartime failure, it ushered in the space age Wernher von Braun would come to personify NASA's space exploration program. (NASA / Science Faction / Corbis) Smithsonian Magazine | Subscribe August 2011 In 1960, Columbia Pictures released a movie about NASA rocket scientist Wernher von Braun called I Aim at the Stars. Comedian Mort Sahl suggested a subtitle: But Sometimes I Hit London. From This Story The V-2 rocket—looming over visitors like a Tyrannosaurus rex—represents the most evolved menace of its era.

(Eric Long / NASM / SI) Wernher von Braun would come to personify NASA's space exploration program. (NASA / Science Faction / Corbis) The Space Race Von Braun, born in Wirsitz, Germany, in 1912, had been interested in the nascent science of rocketry since his teen years. In 1928, while he was in high school, he joined an organization of fellow enthusiasts called Verein für Raumschiffahrt (Society for Space Travel), which conducted experiments with liquid fuel rockets. By the time Germany was at war for the second time in a generation, von Braun had become a member of the Nazi Party and was the technical chief of the rocket-development facility at Peenemünde on the Baltic Coast. There he oversaw the design of the V-2, the first long-range ballistic missile developed for warfare. The “V” in V-2 stood for Vergeltungswaffe (vengeance weapon). Traveling at 3,500 miles per hour and packing a 2,200-pound warhead, the missile had a range of 200 miles.

The German high command hoped the weapon would strike terror in the British and weaken their resolve. But though the successful first test flight of the rocket took place in October 1942, operational combat firings—more than 3,000 in all—didn’t begin until September 1944, by which time the British people had already withstood four years of conventional bombing. England wasn’t the only target. “There were actually more V-2 rockets fired at Belgium than at England,” says Michael Neufeld, curator of the V-2 on view at the National Air and Space Museum and author of Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War. “In fact, the single most destructive attack came when a V-2 fell on a cinema in Antwerp, killing 561 moviegoers.” The Air and Space Museum’s V-2 was assembled from parts of several actual rockets. Looking up at it is not unlike looking up at a skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex: each is a genuine artifact representing the most highly evolved menaces of their eras.

When the war ended in 1945, von Braun understood that both the United States and the Soviet Union had a powerful desire to obtain the knowledge he and his fellow scientists had acquired in developing the V-2. Von Braun and most of his Peenemünde colleagues surrendered to the U.S. military; he would eventually become director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. There he helped design the Saturn V (in this case, the V stood for the Roman numeral five, not vengeance), the rocket that launched U.S. astronauts toward the moon. During the war the Nazi regime transferred thousands of prisoners to the Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp to help build the V-2 factory and assemble the rockets. At least 10,000 died from illness, beatings or starvation. This grim knowledge was left out of von Braun biographies authorized by the U.S. Army and NASA. “The media went along,” says Neufeld, “because they didn’t want to undercut U.S. competition with the Soviet Union.” Von Braun always denied any direct role in prisoner abuses and claimed he’d have been shot if he’d objected to those he witnessed. But some survivors testified to his active involvement.

For many years the V-2 exhibit omitted any mention of the workers who perished. But in 1990, Neufeld’s colleague David DeVorkin created a whole new exhibit, including photographs and text, to tell the complete story. The assembled rocket wears the black-and-white paint used on test missiles at Peenemünde instead of the camouflage colors used when the V-2 was deployed on mobile launchers. Museum officials in the 1970s wanted to underscore the rocket’s place in the history of space exploration and de-emphasize its role as a Nazi weapon. Single Page Previous Page 1 of 2 Next 1 2 Like this article? V-2 Missile V-2 Missile A V-2 missile on display in the Space Race gallery at the National Mall building. Display Status: This object is on display in the Space Race exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. SummaryLong Description Collection Item Summary: The German V-2 rocket was the world's first large-scale liquid-propellant rocket vehicle, the first long-range ballistic missile, and the ancestor of today's large rockets and launch vehicles.

Called the A-4 (Aggregat 4) by German Army Ordnance, the rocket was dubbed V-2, or Vergeltungswaffe Zwei ("Vengeance Weapon Two"), by the Nazi Propaganda Ministry when its existence was publicly announced in November 1944, two months after first deployment as a weapon. Launched from mobile platforms, the missile had a maximum range of about 320 km (200 miles) and a one-ton warhead. At least 10,000 concentration camp workers died in the process of manufacturing it. The U.S. Air Force officially transferred this V-2 to the Smithsonian on May 1, 1949. The National Air Museum moved it to its storage facility in Maryland in 1954 and, as the National Air and Space Museum, restored it in 1975-1976 for exhibition in its new Mall building.

Collection Item Long Description: The V-2 rocket, developed and used by the Germans during World War II, was the world's first large-scale liquid-propellant rocket vehicle, the first modern long-range ballistic missile, and the ancestor of today's large-scale liquid-fuel rockets and launch vehicles. Called the A-4 (Aggregat 4) by German Army Ordnance, the rocket was dubbed V-2, or Vergeltungswaffe Zwei ("Vengeance Weapon Two"), by Dr. Josef Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry when its existence was publicly announced in November 1944, two months after it was first deployed as a weapon. The Smithsonian Institution's V-2 was acquired in 1946 from the U.S. Army Air Forces, and was officially transferred on 1 May 1949 by what was now the U.S. Air Force. It was moved to the National Air Museum's storage facility in Suitland, Maryland in 1954, and was restored in 1975-76 for exhibition in the new National Air and Space Museum building.

Construction The V-2 is cylindrical, tapering down towards the base, with four clipped rectangular fins, and tapering down toward the top with an ogival warhead ending in a sharp pointed nose. The design of the clipped fins was influenced by the need to ship a military missile through standard European rail tunnels. Overall, the rocket was shaped for supersonic flight, based on wind tunnel tests. The "dimpled" appearance of the rocket's skin, as is very evident in the Museum's specimen, is partly the result of spot welding, which, when cooled, especially around panels in place near ribs or stringers, contracted or shrunk unevenly, although the rocket's skin was also damaged by years of rough handling. The Museum's artifact has a combustion chamber, but lacks plumbing and many internal components such as the guidance and control systems. The tanks were removed to lessen the weight supported by the fins. Liquid oxygen (lox) served as the oxidizer (the substance providing the oxygen for combustion) while an 75% alcohol/water mixture was the fuel (the substance to be burned). The water additive helped cool the motor, which developed maximum operating temperatures of about 4,900 F.

The rocket was mainly constructed of thin sheet steel, welded, riveted, and braced around a wooden framework in some sections. The nose cap was a fuse for detonating the explosive, 1,650 lbs of amatol, upon impact. Underneath the warhead was the instrument section, divided into four quadrants devoted to guidance and control, radio, and electrical systems. The center section of the rocket was two half shells containing the aluminum-magnesium alloy propellant tanks, the lox tank below and the larger fuel tank above. The lox tank was insulated with glass wool to keep the super-cold lox at its desired temperature and also to prevent overheating from leftover propellants. The tail section contained the motor and adjoining turbopump, steam-generator, and associated plumbing. The motor, comprising the combustion chamber and nozzle, was made of steel, while the pumps were of steel with aluminum-silicon alloy impellers and housings. The tanks for the hydrogen peroxide and potassium permanganate catalyst for driving the turbopumps were coated inside and out with an aluminum bronze alloy for corrosion protection.

History The V-2 (A-4) evolved from secret experimental tests made between 1932 and 1934 by the German Army on smaller lox-alcohol liquid-fuel rockets, designated A-1 and A-2, of 300 kg (660 lbs.) thrust at the Army's Kummersdorf artillery range, south of Berlin. Two A-2s were successfully flown in December 1934, from Borkum Island in the North Sea. These were followed by the1,500 kg (3,300 lb.) thrust A-3, designed and built in 1935-1937, and the A-4 which was proposed in 1936 as a projected 25 metric-ton thrust (56,000 lb.) scale-up of the A-3. The A-4 was designed in detail in 1939-1941.

The A-5, a redesign of the A-3 launched from 1938 to 1943, was also very important, as it was the test-bed for guidance systems after the failure of the four A-3 launches in 1937. It was. The moving spirits of the A-4's development were Dr. Wernher von Braun, Technical Director of the Peenemünde Army center from its inception until the end, and Captain (later Brigadier General) Walter R. Dornberger, who became involved in the Army's rocket development in 1931, and was the military head of the program from 1936 to 1943. During the last 18 months of the war he was responsible for training, supplying and servicing the operational V-2 rocket units. In April, 1937, the rocket group of then about 90 men moved to a much larger, secret research facility built at the relatively remote site of Peenemünde on the island of Usedom, off the Baltic coast of Pomerania. Besides the A-4, other missiles, such as the Wasserfall, were developed here.

A-4 development took place at Peenemünde-Ost (Peenemünde East). The Luftwaffe (Air Force) occupied Peenemünde West. The estimated cost of establishing Peenemünde-Ost was about RM 300 million (Reichmarks), or $70 million US (for 1990s dollars, multiply by about a factor of 10). By 1942, the personnel of Peenemünde-East had grown to a work force of about 5,000 which included engineers, technicians, scientists and all other personnel. In addition there were thousands of construction workers building the new A-4 Production Plant south of the test center; by 1943 this number included three thousand mostly East European forced laborers working construction. In addition, in the summer of 1943, 1300 SS concentration-camp workers who were to become the core of the production-line workforce were brought to Peenemünde and housed in the factory buildings. Gen.

Dornberger and Arthur Rudolph, the chief engineer of the factory, were among those responsible for deciding to exploit concentration-camp labor in the rocket program; Wernher von Braun was aware of these decisions and found himself increasingly involved in the management of camp labor as time went on. The first non-flight vehicles were finished and tested in 1940-41, and the first flight vehicles were completed in 1942. After two failed launches in June and August 1942, on 3 October 1942 Peenemünde launched its first successful A-4, the V4, or fourth test vehicle (the first was destroyed in a ground test before it was ever launched). This rocket attained an altitude of 60 miles and range of 125 miles in a 296 second flight, coming within 2.5 miles of its target and reaching a top speed of 3,300 mph. On 22 November 1942, Hitler ordered the mass production of the missile, and exactly one month later, Armaments Minister Speer founded the Special Committee A-4 to accelerate the process so that production might begin in summer 1943.

Production required a large number of drawings to be prepared and special tools designed and built. Other A-4 factories were to be located at the Zeppelin Works in Friedrichshafen, and the Raxwerke near Wiener Neustadt, Austria. After the damaging Royal Air Force bombing of the facility during the night of 17-18 August 1943, A-4 manufacturing was shifted to the underground plant of Mittelwerk at Nordhausen, in the Harz Mountains. Undoubtedly, the Museum's V-2 was also made there. After the RAF raid, smaller scale improvement developments were still carried out at Peenemünde. (Altogether, about 250 developmental V-4s were made at Peenemünde.) The initial cost of producing an A-4 rocket was 100,000 Reichmarks (warhead and guidance equipment not included); the average cost was later reduced to 75,110 RM. At Peenemünde, each A-4 took from 10,000-20,000 man-hours to produce, while at Mittelwerk the figure dropped to approximately 7,500.

The rockets were made at Mittelwerk by 2,000 civilian technicians and approximately 10,000 prisoner laborers who lived in nearby barracks camp known as Dora, which became the main camp of Konzentrationslager Mittelbau in October 1944. The Dora prisoners lived in terrible conditions, especially during the first few months when the barracks had not been built, and prisoners were forced to live underground, and in the last few months of the war, when the food supply worsened and many prisoners from Auschwitz and other eastern camps were dumped into Mittelbau-Dora. Of the approximately 20,000 deaths in Mittelbau-Dora, about half can be ascribed to the V-2 program. The V-1, a competing development launched by the Luftwaffe, was an air-breathing pulsejet-powered missile which inflicted a considerable amount of physical and psychological damage on Britain, Belgium and France. The V-2 was to be an even more decisive terror weapon, but the rocket was neither accurate, reliable, nor cost effective. On 7 September 1944 the first two operational rockets were fired against Paris, but both failed due to premature cutoffs.

The first successful launch was made at 8:30 a.m. on 8 September and struck close to the Porte d'Italie. At 6:43 p.m. the same day, the missile was deployed against England and hit Chiswick, a suburb about six miles west of central London. In both operations the rockets were launched from the Hague-Wassenaar area of occupied Holland. Upon its introduction into the war, the weapon now became known as the V-2. During February-March, 1945, the heaviest period of rocket bombardment, the weekly average fired against England amounted to 60. Figures vary in different sources, but during the remainder of the war 3,200 to 3,600 were sent towards Allied targets. In the U.K. they were mostly directed toward London; secondary targets were Southampton and Bristol. Out of these numbers, by one estimate, 1,115 reached the United Kingdom while 1,775 hit Continental targets. Of the latter, most were fired against Belgium, 1,610 striking Antwerp; between 80-100 against Liège, and a number against Brussels.

Nineteen rockets hit Paris during its few days of V-2 bombardment. About 25% of the total rockets launched against the U.K. and Continental targets failed due to air bursts. About 600 V-2's were launched for training and experimental purposes. Figures also differ as to the number of casualties and amount of property damage caused by the V-2, but the total number killed is variously estimated at about 5,500 ,while the number of seriously wounded is given as 6,500. The total number of houses and other buildings destroyed by both the V-1 and V-2 weapons, including greater London, Antwerp, and Liège, amounted to about 33,700. The V-2 was designed for use against cities and the only known pin-point tactical application was when 11 were fired against the Ludendorf Bridge at Remagen, Germany, during March 1945 in a German attempt to prevent the Allies from continuing to use the bridge after it had been inadvertantly seized by American troops on 7 March. A couple of missiles came remarkably close but did not hit the bridge.

The last V-2 fired in combat took place on 29 March 1945. Following the war, in an effort to acquire the know how of this clearly revolutionary new technology, the U.S. and other Allies scrambled to capture as much V-2 hardware, documents, and V-2 technicians as they could. This included the British, French and Soviets. The British, under Operation Backfire, succeeded in examining and experimentally test launching, with the assistance of German technicians, three V-2 rockets. The Backfire launches took place in the British zone of occupation, at a former Krupp armament proving ground at Altenwalde, near Cuxhaven, Germany, on the North Sea coast. The launches were made on 2, 3, and 15 October 1945. The last launch was known as Operation Clitterhouse and included foreign (U.S., French, and Soviet) observers. The data acquired from all the launches and contained in five illustrated manuals was shared with the U.S. The French obtained the services of Wolfgang Pilz and other V-2 researchers who helped them build their first liquid-fuel missiles.

The French Veronique sounding rocket, which outwardly resembled the V-2, also resulted from these efforts. On 5 May 1945, the Soviets captured Peenemünde, though it was largely destroyed or stripped of useful material by the evacuating Germans. The Soviets did, however, seize invaluable material from Nordhausen, which they occupied on 5 July, and set up rocket institutes in the region and reconstructed a number of V-2s in the repair facility of the Mittelwerk at Kleinbodungen. The top ranking man recruited by the Soviets was Helmut Gröttrup, an expert from Peenemünde in guidance and control. In October 1946, thousands of German engineers, scientists, technicians, and their families were forcibly deported to the USSR, among them several hundred members and their families from the East German rocket institutes. The Soviets already had considerable experience since the 1930s in the design and construction of liquid-fuel rockets, but like the Americans and others, they lacked experience in handling liquid-fuel rockets of the size of the V-2.

The Russians launched their first reconstructed V-2 on 30 October 1947 at Kapustin Yar, 75 miles east of Stalingrad (now Volgograd). They sought to greatly improve upon basic V-2 technology and from the later 1940's to early 1950's constructed several V-2 derivative engines. They also created about ten or more derivative V-2 rockets which included the R-1 (also designated 1R), V-1A (1VA), V-1C, V-1B (1VB), V-1E (1VE), V-1D (1VD), R-2 (2R), V-2A (2VA), and V-2B/C. The majority of the vehicles appear to have been essentially re-built V-2s using similar or much modified engines powered by the same lox-alcohol propellant, though they had successively elongated propellant tanks for "stretched" bodies and larger nose cones.

The first successful R-1 launch took place on 17 September 1948, called by the Russians their first "national rocket," although still looking identical to the V-2 with a Meilerwagen as part of the handling equipment. In addition to affording design and handling experience, these rockets were used for upper atmospheric research and were thus called "geophysical rockets." The Soviets also launched numerous animals including rabbits and dogs for biological studies, with eventual space flight in mind. By the mid-1950s, the Soviets graduated to an entirely different generation of rockets but had clearly learned a great deal from their V-2 experience. It is relevant to note that the first two rockets given to their allies at the time, the Chinese, in 1956, were R-1s followed in 1958 by R-2s, both models obsolete V-2 derivative vehicles known in the West as the SS-1 (Scunner) and SS-2 (Sibling). The Chinese first launched their R-2, using a different fuel, on 5 November 1960 and called it the Dong Feng 1 (East Wind 1).

The launch site was at Jiuquan, in the Gobi desert, in Gansu province, 1,000 miles west of Beijing. This was the beginning of the Chinese long-range missile and space launch vehicle development. The Americans similarly planned to acquire V-2 technology almost as soon as it appeared. On 15 November 1944, a little more than two months after the first V-2s were fired against Paris and London, the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps awarded the General Electric Company a contract to prepare captured V-2's for flight tests and to develop missiles based upon German designs, with the overall name of Project Hermes. Upon the brief occupation of Mittelwerk by the U.S. Army in May1945, before the Soviet Army moved in, parts for about 100 V-2s were shipped to the U.S., including presumably the two that were eventually turned over to the Smithsonian. During that period, the Americans were also fortunate in the surrender of Wernher von Braun and his key team members. Under Operation Paperclip (originally Operation Overcast), a total of 118 of these men were eventually sent to the U.S.

where they were to greatly contribute to the development of ballistic missiles and later space program launch vehicles. Under Hermes, the U.S. used them to gain knowledge and experience in handling large-scale liquid-fuel rockets as well as conduct upper-atmospheric research experiments. To coordinate the experiments, a V-2 Upper Atmosphere Research Panel was established on 16 January 1947. On 15 March 1946 the static firing of a V-2 took place at the White Sands Proving Grounds, New Mexico, followed on 16 April with the first captured V-2 launch. The first successful land recovery of a V-2 nosecone by parachute was accomplished in February 1947. Altogether, there were 67 flights of V-2's at White Sands as well as at the Long Range Proving Ground, Cape Canaveral, Florida (later, U.S. Air Force Eastern Test Range and Kennedy Space Center). On 17 December 1946, a single stage V-2 reached a record altitude of 116 miles, the highest ever reached alone by this vehicle.

The last captured V-2 flight was made at White Sands on 28 June 1951. In Project Bumper, which comprised eight rounds, the V-2 also served to test the feasibility of a two-stage liquid-fuel rocket. The second stage was the smaller, American-made WAC-Corporal. On 24 February 1949, a V-2/WAC-Corporal rocket reached an altitude of 244 miles and speed of 5,150 miles per hour. The altitude record stood for many years and was perhaps first broken on 20 September 1956 when the first the U.S. Army's three-stage Jupiter-C test missile attained an altitude of 680 miles. On 24 July 1950 Bumper No. 8 was the first rocket successfully launched from Cape Canaveral. In this case the two-stage rocket was fired for velocity in a hypersonic aerodynamics test.

Among other notable V-2 flights were: a launch on 24 October 1946 in which motion picture cameras took films of Earth from a 65 mile altitude and covered 40,000 square miles; a series of flights, starting on 20 February 1947, known as Project Blossom, in which containers with fruit flies and various types of seeds were carried to test the effects of cosmic rays, the canisters with these life forms recovered by parachute; a U.S. Navy-sponsored flight up to 100 miles on 7 March 1947 in which the first photographs of Earth were taken at this height; a shipboard launch (under the name of Operation Sandy) from the U.S. aircraft carrier Midway, in the Atlantic, on 6 September 1947; and attempts to the carry live Air Force Aero Medical Laboratory monkeys, Albert I and II, on 18 June 1948 and 14 June 1949, to test the effects of acceleration and weightlessness. (Albert I who was anesthetized in preparation for the flight unfortunately died before the liftoff due to breathing problems.

Albert II survived the flight to 83 miles and withstood peak forces of 5.5 g during acceleration as well as the brief period zero-gravity, but the parachute on the return capsule was defective and the high-speed descent of the capsule was fatal. Two other monkeys met the same fate.) Acquisition The Museum's specimen and another V-2 (now in La Coupole, in Wizernes, France) were part of the almost 1,400 enemy and Allied war time artifacts that were especially collected for the then National Air Museum under the direction of General of the Army Henry H. Arnold, Commanding General of the Army Air Forces, as "outstanding examples of aircraft and components" from World War II. The Air Force made the official transfer on 1 May 1949. In the meantime, the V-2s and the other artifacts were stored in a former plant of the Douglas Aircraft Company at Park Ridge, Illinois, at the present site of O'Hare International Airport, northwest of Chicago. The actual history of the Army Air Forces' acquisition of both V-2s may never be known due to the loss of relevant documents. From an available photo of this specimen at Park Ridge, ca.

1948, showing the rocket in its combat camouflage colors, the vehicle was clearly an operational round, although as a result of the restoration of 1975-76, it now carries the black-and-white test-flight scheme similar to the one used on the rocket's first successful flight of 3 October 1942. The alternate black and white patterns of the fins aided tracking and determining the rocket's attitude during test launches. The "Woman in the Moon" logo of the original A-4/V4 was not painted on the NASM artifact, however. Because of the enormous logistical problems and limited manpower available to handle all the Park Ridge material, not until late November 1954 did the V-2s travel by train from Chicago to Washington, D.C. They were then trucked to the Museum's storage facility at Suitland, Maryland, by February 1955. It was not until 1975 that the better of the two rockets underwent restoration, entailing 2,000 man-hours of work in preparation for the new National Air and Space Museum, which opened for the Bicentennial celebration on 1 July 1976.

However, the display rocket lacked key parts. The thrust ring, graphite exhaust vanes, servo motors, potentiometers, chain and sprocket drive for the movements of the air rudders, and other tail section components, were provided by the Royal Air Force Museum at Hendon, England, while the launch stand (A19761038000) came from NASA Marshall Space Flight Center at Huntsville, Alabama. A section of one of the fins of the Museum's V-2 is purposely removed to permit viewing of the chain and sprocket drive. The V-2 was normally carried into combat on a rocket trailer and hauled and erected into its upright vertical firing position by a Meilerwagen. There was also an array of related ground support vehicles which included a heavily armored fire control vehicle that ran on tank tracks, a tractor-pulled liquid oxygen transporter, and alcohol tankers. The Museum does not possess a Meilerwagen nor other V-2 support equipment in its collections. The V-2 on display at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum represents one of about twenty-one known examples of this rocket worldwide.

Other extant V-2 rockets are at the following locations: Australian Army Headquarters, Holsworthy, New South Wales Australian War Memorial, Canberra

Question: What was the name of the world's first long-range ballistic misisle, developed by the Nazis in 1944?
Answer: V-2