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V-2
V-2
V-2
Credit: © Mark Wade
The V-2 ballistic missile (known to its designers as the A4) was the world's first operational liquid fuel rocket. It represented an enormous quantum leap in technology, financed by Nazi Germany in a huge development program that cost at least $ 2 billion in 1944 dollars. 6,084 V-2 missiles were built, 95% of them by 20,000 slave laborers in the last seven months of World War II at a unit price of $ 17,877. As many as 3,225 were launched in combat, primarily against Antwerp and London, and a further 1,000 to 1,750 were fired in tests and training. Despite the scale of this effort, the inaccurate missile did not change the course of the war and proved to be an enormous waste of resources. The British, Americans, and Russians launched a further 86 captured German V-2's in 1945-1952. Personnel and technology from the V-2 program formed the starting point for post-war rocketry development in America, Russia, and France. The A1, A2, A3, and A5 were steps in the development of the missile. Later versions - the A6 through A12 - were planned to take the Third Reich to the planets.

AKA: A4;Vergeltungswaffen-2. Status: Retired 1952. First Launch: 1943-04-03. Last Launch: 1952-09-19. Number: 1983 . Thrust: 264.90 kN (59,552 lbf). Gross mass: 12,805 kg (28,230 lb). Unfuelled mass: 4,008 kg (8,836 lb). Specific impulse: 239 s. Specific impulse sea level: 203 s. Burn time: 68 s. Height: 14.00 m (45.00 ft). Diameter: 1.65 m (5.41 ft). Span: 3.56 m (11.67 ft). Apogee: 200 km (120 mi).

The V-2 and the atomic bomb both were world-shifting technological quantum leaps. Both were developed in enormous haste; used the first technical solutions that worked; consumed a considerable portion of the country's war budget; and were only available in the last months of the war. Unlike the atomic bomb, the V-2 was not a war-changing weapon, and the resources devoted to it undoubtedly hurt rather than helped the German war effort. At war's end the Allies seized tons of documents, hundreds of experts, and dozens of V-2 missiles.

The V-2 - Not Ready for Production

When Wernher von Braun was recruited to assist Walter Dornberger in the development of liquid fuel rockets for the German Army in August 1932, only the tiniest baby steps toward development of rocket motors had been taken by the German Society for Spaceship Flight (VfR). The VfR had fired only the most rudimentary of pressure-fed water-cooled combustion chambers, generating only 60 kgf at a specific impulse of 173 seconds. After 28 months of development, Von Braun was able to demonstrate the A2, a small rocket generating 300 kgf to the German Army. But this design of December 1934 still used a primitive cooling method - the combustion chamber and rocket nozzle were immersed in the fuel tank. After another three years, in December 1937, Von Braun launched the A3, which was supposed to be a subscale prototype for the A4 war rocket. The A3 had a thrust of 1500 kgf, but still used the same cooling method and had a specific impulse of only 195 seconds. The A3 was a miserable failure - it was clear that the control system and aerodynamics were completely wrong. Detailed design of the A4 was postponed until aerodynamics and control systems could be worked out in a new subscale design, the A5.

Development of the rocket engine for the A4 was also bedeviled with difficulties. The A4 would need an engine of 25 tonnes thrust. Eventually, through a seven-year process of trial and error, a fuel-cooled rocket engine of 1.5 tonnes thrust and a specific impulse of 215 seconds was perfected. But all attempts to scale this engine up to the thrust required for the A4 met insurmountable combustion instability problems. Finally an interim solution was found to produce engines for test A4 missiles found. This involved clustering 18 of the 1.5 tonne combustion chambers and feeding their exhaust into a common 'mixing chamber'. In fact this immensely complex 'interim' design had to be pressed into production.

Development of the aerodynamics and control systems for the V-2 took hundreds of tests of the A5 - in wind tunnels, air-drops, and powered flights. This was also a grueling trial and error process, for there was little theory and no practical experience in supersonic aerodynamics. A missile had to be controlled when rising vertically at near zero speed, where aerodynamic surfaces would be ineffective. Then it had to remain controllable and stable at subsonic, transonic, and supersonic speeds up to Mach 4. It was not until mid-1942, ten years after development had started, that the first test A4 was launched. But at least the long development process using the A5 had produced workable aerodynamic and control solutions.

The turbopumps to feed the propellants to the engines proved relatively easy - to von Braun's surprise, high-volume low-weight pumps were already well developed for fire engines. The other structural elements were well within the allowable mass for the required performance. Ed Heinemann of Douglas Aircraft supervised design of a single-stage-to-orbit launch vehicle in 1946, and related the following story of a 1961 meeting with von Braun:

…I went to see Wernher von Braun in Huntsville, Alabama, on a different matter…In the discussion that followed …. Wernher [was asked] why he used a 26 percent structural weight fraction ratio on the V-2.

"Well," von Braun said, "I built the structure strong enough to hold together, and frankly, it just came out that way."

The final area of completely new technology was the guidance system. How could a missile with a range of 320 km be guided accurately to its target? It seemed only a radio beam guidance system could provide the necessary accuracy, but the V-2 developers had to take a back seat to development of such systems for the German bomber and interceptor forces. Therefore they settled for a control system that oriented the missile along a pre-determined path in a vertical plane pointed at the target. The system used accumulating accelerometers to determine when the missile had reached the correct velocity and then cut off the engine. It was thought that this would provide sufficient accuracy, although operations would indicate otherwise...

Hitler delayed the decision to put the V-2 into production for three years, from 1939 to 1942. Dornberger, the Wehrmacht's head of the program, laments this delay repeatedly in his memoirs. He claimed that his rocket team could have fielded a weapon that would have changed the course of the war if it had been in production earlier. However, given the difficulties in the development of the V-2, this seems doubtful. Even with the 1942 go-ahead, the V-2 was nowhere near a production design. Getting it into production concurrently with development was a nearly insurmountable problem - 65,000 changes were made to the initial production drawings. Tests of the first production missiles began in early 1944. Mysterious in-flight disintegrations of the missiles resulted in an 80% failure rate. These were found to have multiple causes, and the last of the several fixes to the missile was not introduced in the production line until November 1944. By then 61% of all the V-2's that ever would be built had already been shipped out.

The V-2 - Production

Prototype V-2's were built at the Peenemuende launch and development center. The original production plans called for the V-2 to be built at factories at Peenemuende, the Zeppelinwerke at Friedrichshafen, the Raxwerke at Wiener Neustadt, and at seven combined production-launch bunkers in Pas-de-Calais and Cherbourg. 12,000 were to be built at a peak rate of 900 per month. On 17 August 1943 Peenemuende was massively bombed. In the following weeks raids were also made (coincidentally) against all of the other planned production sites. The Germans erroneously concluded that their V-2 production infrastructure had been compromised. They decided to move final assembly of the V-2 to underground facilities at Nordhausen (Mittelwerk) and Ebensee (Projekt Zement). Work at three of the combined production-launch bunkers in France also continued (Watten and Wizernes in Pas de Calais and Sottevast in Normandy). But only Mittelwerk produced missiles before the end of the war.

Prior to August 17, 41 rockets had been built at Peenemuende. The bombing created delays, but V-2's continued to be built at Peenemuende well into 1944, peaking at fifty missiles in September 1943. The best estimate is that around 322 V-2's were built at Peenemuende.

Primary production and operation of the V-2 was run by the dreaded SS. Final assembly was accomplished by slave laborers housed in the Dora concentration camp next to the Mittelwerk underground factory at Nordhausen. Official production records in the German Museum show that 5,797 missiles were built there by war's end.

Firing History

At Peenemuende 32 V-2's were launched prior to the bombing of July 1943. Another 139 were tested from there by the end of 1944. Production sample and training firings were moved to Heidelager, in Poland, in November 1943. A total of 215 are documented as having been fired from there. These firing units had to move away from the Russian advance to Heidekraut in August 1944, and a further 246 documented missiles were fired from that location.

V-2 operational units are said variously to have launched between 2,970 and 3,280 missiles between September 1944 and April 1945. In his memoirs, Dornberger says that 4,300 V-2's were fired in all, which is 500 in excess of the documented firings. However leading V-2 researcher Tracy Dungan has successfully reconciled production and launch figures. The key is a statement by the General Manager of Mittelwerk indicating there were 2,350 built but unfired V-2's at the end of the war. The factory was in fact building the missiles much more rapidly than the firing units could launch them. Dungan's reconciliation is as follows:

Dungan notes:

In view of production and launch serial number records the 2,100 rounds in field storage would comprise mainly abandoned, damaged or new delivery rockets. Towards mid-March 1945 Mittelwerk shipped about 20 rounds per day and the interval between manufacture and launching had extended from some 5 days in September 1944 to some 12 days in March 1945. Accordingly some 250 new deliveries would be in the pipeline awaiting pre-launch testing. A further 250 or so rounds could be accounted for by the overall average rate of return of defective rounds to MW. This implies that, allowing for the 515 V-2's abandoned during the Soviet advance, about 1,000 V-2's were lost in the field due to the Western Allies' advance from the Normandy beachhead. Rockets were also in storage waiting for the bunker-launched (Watten-Wizernes) offensive to begin. I have numerous reports of shot up rail shipments, one stating at least 40 rockets were destroyed in on case. I would say at least 200 were destroyed by allied aircraft.

V-2 Reliability and Accuracy

What was the reliability and accuracy of the V-2? Dornberger's memoirs proudly note the improvement as fixes were made to solve the in-flight explosion problems. V-2 missile reliability as tested increased from 30% in January 1944 to 70% immediately before combat firings began in September 1944. Dornberger claims it reached nearly 100% after the final technical fix was introduced into production in December 1944. Some authors credit combat missiles with a reliability of 80% to 90%, quite remarkable considering that they were inherently fragile, built underground by slave labor, and transported in incredibly difficult conditions to the launch sites. No total tally exists, but detailed figures for certain months and places show losses all along the distribution chain. Of 6,001 missiles submitted for final inspection, 231 were missiles previously rejected and reworked (4%). Unit records for December 1944 to February 1945 show 12% of the missiles received by the units were rejected on the spot as unsuitable for firing. Of the launches made in the same months, 10% were observed as launch failures within sight of the launch units themselves. British post-war studies would seem to indicate that another 12% landed in the sea or remote areas of the British land mass and were not recorded as impacts. This indicates that at least one third of the V-2's either never launched due to quality problems or crashed within 100 km of the launch point.

  • What was the accuracy of the V-2? This question reduces to one of philosophy - if a missile misses the aim point by half the range, does that shot count against the missile's accuracy calculation or is it a failure, counted in the reliability calculation? Tests of prototype V-2's in 1943 indicated a 4.5 km CEP (circular error probable - the radius within which 50% of the shots impact). 100% of the shots fell within 18 km of the target. A radio beam guidance update system was introduced in December 1944, which in tests produced a 2 km CEP. In reality, in the campaign against Britain, 518 rockets were recorded as falling in the Greater London Air Defence Zone of 1225 fired, implying an average CEP of 12 km.

    Part of this lack of accuracy was attributable to a skillful British disinformation campaign. Nazi agents in Britain were the only source of information to the Germans as to where the missiles actually hit. Most of these agents had been turned by British intelligence and were sending back false reports as to the impact points of the rockets. These false reports indicated that the missiles were going long and impacting beyond London. As a result of corrections due to this false information, the German average impact point moving farther and farther east as the campaign went on. The average impact point for the entire campaign ended up on the eastern edge of the Greater London Air Defence Zone.

    Had accurate post-attack reports been available to the Germans, the CEP would have been more like 6 km, reinforcing Dornberger's claim that by the end of the campaign the missile was close to achieving its tested accuracy. Without the British disinformation campaign, the number of the Allied victims of the V-2 would have been more than doubled, demonstrating the effectiveness of that operation. However even at its best accuracy made the V-2 was hugely cost-ineffective. Its primary purpose could only be psychological, and in that it suffered in comparison to the V-1. Although the V-2 was ineffective as a weapon of war, the tremendous investment by the Nazis proved a gift to the Allies. The V-2 development and production program, as a proportion of gross national product, ranked with the American's Manhattan atom bomb program. After the war captured German V-2's were launched by the British, Americans, and Russians. Personnel and technology from the V-2 formed the basis for subsequent rocketry developments throughout the world.

    V-2 Technical Data

    Development Cost $: 2,000.000 million in 1944 dollars. Flyaway Unit Cost 1985$: 0.018 million in 1943 dollars. Total Production Built: 5789.

    Stage Data - V-2