V-1 flying bomb

Men who knew what they were talking about were given responsibility for areas of production, Speer also explained how, to beat the air attacks, he had resorted to taking factories underground.

That was how he had built Hitler's so-called vengeance weapons, the deadly V-2 supersonic rocket and the V-1, or doodlebug.

He even told the Americans where they could find the records of what he had done during the war, including his personal reports to Hitler, which were stored in a safe in Munich.

He gave them the keys and combination to the safe, enabling Nitze to dispatch someone immediately.

kinds of missiles.

The V-1 rocket, which was a pilotless aircraft, quite similar to cruise missiles, which were developed in the 70s and 80s, and then today's drones.

They didn't have the capacity for very thorough pinpoint guidance from afar that is available today, but they were quite lethal.

And both the V-1 and the V-2 rocket, which was an early ballistic missile, The V-1 was to a degree a guided missile.

It was guided to the target.

The V-2 was very much like today's ballistic missiles.

She entered combat in May of 1943.

Her crews hit railroad marshaling yards, fuel depots, airfields, coastal gun positions, V-1 launch sites in the Pas-de-Calais, and bridges over rivers that German logistics depended on.

The full inventory of targets the 9th Air Force was working its way through as the Allies prepared for the invasion and then drove inland after Normandy.

The name Flakbeet came early in her operational life.

[typewriter] [explosion]

V-1, the flying bomb, the robot bomb, the buzz bomb.

bomb.You're a passenger on a bus, and this is the end of your last trip.

You're the man on the street, and you do what you can.

The Nazis never even tried to build one.

For starters, the V-1 rocket is four meters long.

Yeah, I mean,

Himmelschirmer means sky stormer, basically, which I guess it would do if you had a V-1 rocket on your back.

You would storm across the sky in a great big parabola, and then you would land really badly fast, and that would be it.

Really more

No, there's actually a name for this in psych, the clustering illusion.

Our brains are bad at randomness, you know? They, during World War II, Londoners were convinced that V1 flying bombs, the doodlebugs, were targeting specific neighborhoods.

They had elaborate theories, and then a statistician mapped hundreds of impacts and showed the patterns was consistent with random chance.

The bombs weren't aiming.

It was caused actually by mankind's first ever spaceship, and that was, of course, the V-2 rocket.

At this late stage of the war, a new weapon has entered the arena, one that bears little relation to its predecessor, the V-1.

The V-1 is essentially a pilotless aircraft.

It looks more like today's cruise missile.

It flew very low.

On one occasion, he told Goebbels he couldn't do it just then because of the situation in Hungary, which prompted Goebbels to ask his diary the rhetorical question, What did events in Hungary have to do with the Fuhrer addressing his people? In private, Hitler continued to insist that the war could be won.

When the previous wonder weapons, the V-1 buzz bomb and the V-2 rocket, failed to meaningfully affect the war, he pinned his hopes on the Messerschmitt Me 262, the world's first jet-powered warplane.

The Luftwaffe had been experimenting with jet planes since before the war began, although the project was kept at a low priority and given little funding since most of the Luftwaffe leadership, up to and including Hermann Goering, believed jet planes were unnecessary.

They expected Germany could quickly win the war with its conventional aircraft.