V-2 Rocket

1. Lead

The V-2 rocket was the world’s first long-range guided ballistic missile, and the first man-made object to reach the edge of space. Developed in Germany under Wernher von Braun at the Peenemünde research station, it was a liquid-fuelled rocket 46 feet (14 metres) long, weighing 12.5 tons at launch, that carried a one-ton warhead to a range of about 200 miles (320 kilometres) at a speed of more than 3,500 miles per hour.

Between September 1944 and March 1945, more than 3,000 V-2s were launched against London and Antwerp, killing roughly 9,000 people and injuring many more, and terrorising the populations of the two cities in a way that no previous weapon had done, because the rocket arrived without warning, faster than the speed of sound, and there was no defence against it.

The V-2 was a military failure — it cost far more than the damage it caused, it consumed resources that Germany desperately needed elsewhere, and it did not change the outcome of the war — but it was a technological revolution.

Its engine, its guidance system and its structure were the direct ancestors of the rockets that launched the first satellites, the first men into space and the first men to the Moon, and the men who built it, led by von Braun, went on to build the American space programme.

The V-2’s story is therefore two stories at once: a weapon of terror that killed thousands, and the birth of the Space Age.

2. Key Facts

The table below summarises the V-2 rocket in its operational form, with the main production and operational figures.

Type	Long-range guided ballistic missile
Country of origin	Germany (Peenemünde; production at Mittelwerk, Nordhausen)
Designer	Wernher von Braun and the Peenemünde team
First successful flight	3 October 1942
Entered service	September 1944
Number built	About 6,000 (of which about 3,000 were launched operationally)
Length	46 ft (14 m) / 14 m
Diameter	5 ft 6 in (1.68 m) / 1,68 m
Launch weight	About 12,500 kg (27,500 lb)
Warhead	About 1,000 kg (2,200 lb) of explosive
Propellant	Liquid oxygen and alcohol (75% ethanol)
Range	About 200 miles (320 km)
Maximum speed	About 3,500 mph (5,600 km/h), Mach 4.5
Maximum altitude	About 55 miles (88 km)
Guidance	Inertial guidance with gyroscopes and accelerometers

3. Background

3.1. Rocketry in the 1920s and 1930s

The V-2 did not appear from nowhere. It was the product of two decades of rocket research in Germany, which had begun in the 1920s with the amateur rocket societies — the Verein für Raumschiffahrt, the Society for Space Travel — and with the theoretical work of Hermann Oberth, whose book Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (1923) had laid out the principles of liquid-fuelled rocketry.

The Treaty of Versailles, which had forbidden Germany to develop heavy artillery, had inadvertently encouraged rocket research, because rockets were not covered by the treaty’s restrictions, and the German Army had begun to fund rocket development in the early 1930s as a way of circumventing the treaty’s limits.

The Army’s rocket programme was based at Kummersdorf, near Berlin, and it was led by Walter Dornberger, an artillery officer who understood both the military potential of rockets and the need for a large, well-funded research effort. In 1932 Dornberger recruited a young engineer, Wernher von Braun, who had been a member of the amateur rocket society and who had already built and flown small liquid-fuelled rockets.

Von Braun was twenty years old, and he would lead the programme for the next thirteen years.

3.2. Peenemünde and the A-4

In 1937 the Army’s rocket programme moved to a new, purpose-built research station at Peenemünde, on the Baltic island of Usedom, where von Braun’s team could test large rockets in secrecy and in safety. The station grew into a vast complex, with test stands, wind tunnels, production facilities and housing for thousands of scientists, engineers and technicians, and it became the largest rocket research centre in the world.

The team’s goal was the A-4, the fourth in a series of experimental rockets, which was designed to carry a one-ton warhead to a range of 200 miles. The A-4 was a huge step beyond anything that had been built before: it was 46 feet long, it weighed 12.5 tons, and its engine produced 56,000 pounds of thrust, more than any rocket engine in existence.

The first three test launches, in 1942, failed, but the fourth, on 3 October 1942, was a complete success: the rocket flew 118 miles and reached an altitude of 52 miles, becoming the first man-made object to reach the edge of space.

Von Braun is reported to have said that the rocket had worked perfectly, except that it had landed on the wrong planet, and Dornberger wrote in his diary that the day marked the birth of a new era in transportation. The A-4 was renamed the V-2 — Vergeltungswaffe 2, “Vengeance Weapon 2” — when it entered production as a weapon.

3.3. The V-weapons and Hitler’s revenge

The V-2 was the second of Hitler’s “vengeance weapons”, after the V-1 flying bomb, and it was conceived as a weapon of terror rather than as a weapon of war. The V-1, which entered service in June 1944, was a cheap, pulse-jet-powered flying bomb that could be shot down or intercepted, and its attacks on London, though terrifying, were limited by the defences.

The V-2 could not be intercepted: it arrived at more than three times the speed of sound, and the first warning of its arrival was the explosion itself. Hitler hoped that the V-2 would break British morale and force the Allies to negotiate, and he ordered its production in large numbers, even though the weapon’s accuracy was poor and its military value was doubtful.

The decision to mass-produce the V-2 was one of the great misallocations of the German war effort: the programme consumed vast quantities of steel, aluminium, alcohol and liquid oxygen, and it employed tens of thousands of workers, including concentration-camp prisoners, at a time when Germany was desperately short of aircraft, tanks and fuel.

The V-2’s first operational launches, on 8 September 1944, struck London and Paris, and the campaign continued until March 1945, when the advancing Allied armies overran the launch sites.

4. Design and Development

4.1. The rocket engine

The V-2’s engine was the most powerful rocket engine in the world in 1944, and it was the heart of the whole weapon. It burned liquid oxygen and 75 per cent ethyl alcohol, which were pumped into the combustion chamber by turbopumps driven by steam, which was generated by decomposing hydrogen peroxide with potassium permanganate.

The engine produced about 56,000 pounds of thrust at sea level and about 71,000 pounds in the vacuum of high altitude, and it burned for about 65 seconds, accelerating the rocket to a speed of about 3,500 miles per hour.

The combustion chamber and the nozzle were cooled by the alcohol fuel, which was circulated through the walls of the chamber before being injected into the combustion zone, a technique known as regenerative cooling that is still used in rocket engines today.

The engine was a masterpiece of engineering, and it was the direct ancestor of the engines that powered the American Redstone, Jupiter and Saturn rockets, and the Soviet R-7 that launched Sputnik. Its development had required the solution of problems that had never been solved before — the design of turbopumps that could deliver tons of propellant per second, the cooling of a chamber that reached temperatures of more than 2,500 degrees Celsius, and the control of combustion instability that could tear an engine apart in a fraction of a second.

4.1.1. Turbopumps and regenerative cooling

The V-2’s turbopumps were one of the weapon’s most important innovations, and they solved a problem that had limited every earlier rocket: how to deliver tons of propellant to the combustion chamber in a matter of seconds. The pumps were driven by a steam turbine, which was powered by the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide, and they delivered about 76 kilograms of liquid oxygen and 59 kilograms of alcohol per second to the engine — about 135 kilograms of propellant per second, or about 8,800 kilograms over the engine’s 65-second burn — a flow rate that no pressure-fed system could have matched.

The regenerative cooling system was equally important: the alcohol fuel was pumped through a jacket around the combustion chamber and the nozzle, absorbing heat from the walls before being injected into the chamber, which kept the metal from melting and allowed the engine to burn for the full 65 seconds of its flight.

These two technologies — the turbopump and regenerative cooling — became the standard design of every large liquid-fuelled rocket engine that followed, from the American Atlas and Titan to the Soviet R-7 and the modern SpaceX Merlin, and they are the V-2’s most lasting contribution to rocket engineering.

The men who designed them at Peenemünde, many of whom later worked in the United States and the Soviet Union, carried the knowledge with them, and the V-2’s engine became the textbook from which the Space Age was built.

4.2. Guidance: gyroscopes and the inertial system

The V-2 was guided by an inertial system that was, for its time, a marvel of precision engineering, and it was the first practical inertial guidance system ever built. Two gyroscopes kept the rocket stable in flight and held it on its planned trajectory, while two accelerometers measured the rocket’s velocity and cut off the engine when the planned speed had been reached, at which point the rocket followed a ballistic trajectory to its target.

The system was entirely self-contained: the rocket carried no radio guidance, and it could not be jammed or interfered with from the ground, which made it immune to the electronic countermeasures that the Allies used against the V-1. The system’s accuracy was limited, however, and it was the V-2’s greatest weakness as a weapon: the average error was about 10 miles, which meant that the rocket could not be aimed at a specific military target, but only at a large city, and even then it might miss by miles.

The guidance system was housed in the nose of the rocket, above the warhead, and it was protected against the vibration and the acceleration of the launch, which reached about 6 g. The inertial guidance system was the direct ancestor of the guidance systems of every ballistic missile and every space rocket that followed, and its development at Peenemünde was one of the great achievements of the programme.

4.3. Production at Mittelwerk and forced labour

The V-2 was mass-produced at the Mittelwerk, a vast underground factory built into the Kohnstein mountain near Nordhausen, in central Germany, where the rockets were assembled by prisoners from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. The factory was built underground to protect it from Allied bombing, after the Royal Air Force’s raid on Peenemünde in August 1943 had killed hundreds of scientists and engineers and damaged the research station.

The conditions in the Mittelwerk were appalling: the prisoners worked in cold, damp tunnels, with inadequate food and no medical care, and they were beaten and killed by the SS guards for the smallest infractions. About 20,000 prisoners died in the construction and operation of the Mittelwerk and the Dora camp, a figure that is greater than the number of people killed by the V-2s themselves, and the V-2 programme is therefore remembered as a crime as well as a technological achievement.

About 6,000 V-2s were built at the Mittelwerk, of which about 3,000 were launched operationally, and the rest were destroyed by bombing, captured by the Allies, or left unfinished when the war ended. The factory was captured by American troops in April 1945, and its machinery, its rockets and its engineers were taken to the United States as part of Operation Paperclip.

5. Technical Specifications

5.1. Dimensions and structure

The V-2 was 46 feet (14 metres) long and 5 feet 6 inches (1.68 metres) in diameter, and it weighed about 12,500 kilograms at launch, of which about 8,800 kilograms was propellant, about 1,000 kilograms was the warhead, and the remainder was the structure, the engine and the guidance system.

The rocket’s structure was made of aluminium alloy, and it was divided into four main sections: the nose, which contained the guidance system; the warhead, which contained about 1,000 kilograms of high explosive; the propellant tanks, which held the liquid oxygen and the alcohol; and the tail, which contained the engine, the turbopumps and the four fins that stabilised the rocket in flight.

The fins were fitted with small graphite vanes that deflected the exhaust gases and steered the rocket during the powered phase of its flight, a system that was controlled by the gyroscopes and which gave the rocket its remarkable stability.

The rocket’s skin was thin, and it was designed to be as light as possible, because every kilogram of structure was a kilogram that could not be propellant or warhead, and the V-2’s designers were obsessed with weight in a way that would become familiar to every rocket engineer who followed them.

5.2. Performance: speed, range and altitude

The V-2’s performance was revolutionary, and it remains impressive even by modern standards. The rocket accelerated to a maximum speed of about 3,500 miles per hour (5,600 kilometres per hour), or Mach 4.5, and it reached a maximum altitude of about 55 miles (88 kilometres), which was below the Kármán line of 62 miles (100 kilometres) — close to the edge of space, but not above it.

The rocket’s range was about 200 miles (320 kilometres), and its flight time was about five minutes from launch to impact, of which the first 65 seconds were powered and the remainder was a ballistic coast to the target. The rocket’s accuracy was poor by modern standards: the average error was about 10 miles, and only about a third of the rockets launched against London fell within the London area, though the ones that did fall caused terrible damage.

The V-2’s warhead contained about 1,000 kilograms of high explosive, which produced a crater about 20 metres across and destroyed buildings within a radius of several hundred metres. The rocket’s speed meant that it arrived without warning, and the sound of its passage — a double crack, like a thunderclap — arrived after the explosion, a reversal of the normal order of events that added to the terror it caused.

	V-2 rocket
Length	46 ft (14.03 m) / 14,03 m
Diameter	5 ft 6 in (1.68 m) / 1,68 m
Launch weight	About 12,500 kg (27,500 lb)
Warhead	About 1,000 kg (2,200 lb) explosive
Propellant	Liquid oxygen + 75% alcohol
Thrust	About 56,000 lbf (249 kN) at sea level
Burn time	About 65 seconds
Range	About 200 miles (320 km)
Max speed	About 3,500 mph (5,600 km/h)
Max altitude	About 55 miles (88 km)
Guidance	Inertial (gyroscopes + accelerometers)
Built	About 6,000

5.3. The launch sequence

The V-2 was launched from a mobile firing table, a simple steel platform that could be set up in a field in a matter of hours, and the rocket was transported to the launch site on a trailer, erected by a crane, and fuelled from tanker trucks.

The launch sequence took about 90 minutes from the rocket’s arrival at the site to the moment of firing, and it required a crew of about 30 men, including the firing officer, the fuel handlers and the guidance technicians. The rocket was fuelled with liquid oxygen, which had to be kept at minus 183 degrees Celsius, and with alcohol, and the two propellants were loaded into the rocket’s tanks just before launch, because the liquid oxygen boiled off quickly and the rocket could not be kept fuelled for long.

The launch itself was a spectacular event: the engine ignited with a roar that could be heard for miles, the rocket rose slowly at first, then accelerated rapidly, and within a minute it had disappeared into the sky, leaving a trail of smoke and a column of steam.

The mobile launch system was one of the V-2’s most important features, because it meant that the rockets could be fired from anywhere, and the Allies could not destroy them by bombing fixed launch sites, a lesson that was learned by every missile force that followed.

5.3.1. The five-minute flight

The V-2’s flight lasted about five minutes, and it was divided into two distinct phases: the powered phase, which lasted about 65 seconds, and the ballistic phase, which lasted about four minutes. During the powered phase the rocket climbed steeply, its engine burning at full thrust, and its guidance system steered it onto the planned trajectory, tilting it gradually from the vertical towards the horizontal.

At the end of the powered phase the engine cut off, the rocket reached its maximum speed of about 3,500 miles per hour, and it coasted upwards to its maximum altitude of about 55 miles, where the sky was black and the curvature of the Earth was visible.

The rocket then fell back towards the Earth, accelerating under gravity, and it struck its target at a speed of about 2,000 miles per hour, too fast for any warning system to detect and too fast for any defence to intercept.

The five-minute flight was a journey into space and back, and it was the first time that a man-made object had followed such a trajectory, a fact that was not lost on the engineers who built it, who understood that they had created not just a weapon, but a spacecraft.

6. Variants

6.1. The A-4 and its predecessors

The V-2 was the fourth in a series of experimental rockets, the A-series, which had begun with the A-1 in 1933 and progressed through the A-2 and the A-3 to the A-4. The A-1 was a small rocket that exploded on its first test, the A-2 was a successful small rocket that flew in 1934, and the A-3 was a larger rocket that was used to test the guidance and control systems that would later be used on the A-4.

The A-4 itself was originally an experimental rocket, and it was only when the German Army decided to mass-produce it as a weapon that it was renamed the V-2. The A-4’s design was frozen in 1942, and it changed little during its production life, because the urgency of the programme left no time for major redesigns.

Minor improvements were made to the guidance system and to the engine, and a number of experimental variants were built, including a version with wings that was intended to extend the rocket’s range, but none of these variants entered operational service.

The A-4’s stability as a design was a consequence of the programme’s haste, and it was also a tribute to the soundness of von Braun’s original design, which needed little improvement to serve as both a weapon and a space launch vehicle.

6.2. Post-war derivatives: Redstone, R-7 and the space rockets

The V-2’s most important variants were the ones built after the war, by the Americans and the Soviets, from captured V-2s and from the knowledge of the men who had built them. In the United States, von Braun’s team built the Redstone rocket, which was a direct descendant of the V-2 and which launched the first American into space in 1961, and the Jupiter rocket, which was a larger descendant that served as an intermediate-range ballistic missile.

The Soviet Union’s first ballistic missiles, the R-1 and the R-2, were direct copies of the V-2, and the R-7, which launched Sputnik in 1957, used the V-2’s engine technology and its guidance principles, scaled up to a much larger rocket.

The V-2 itself was launched by both the Americans and the Soviets in the years after the war, in test programmes that taught a new generation of engineers how to build and fly large rockets, and the captured V-2s were the textbooks from which the Space Age was learned.

The V-2’s descendants include the Saturn V, which took men to the Moon, and every modern space launch vehicle, all of which use the turbopumps, the regenerative cooling and the inertial guidance that were first proven on the V-2.

7. Combat Service

7.1. The first launches: London and Paris

The V-2’s operational career began on 8 September 1944, when the first rockets were launched against London and Paris. The first V-2 to strike London fell at Chiswick, in west London, killing three people and injuring seventeen, and the explosion was so sudden and so violent that the authorities at first believed that a gas main had exploded, because there had been no air-raid warning and no sound of an approaching aircraft.

The second rocket that day fell at Epping, in Essex, and the campaign continued from there, with rockets falling on London at a rate of several per day, and with the attacks spreading to Paris, to Antwerp and to other Allied targets.

The V-2’s attacks were terrifying because they were unpredictable: the rocket arrived without warning, at more than three times the speed of sound, and there was no defence against it, no shelter that could protect against a direct hit, and no way of knowing when or where the next rocket would fall.

The British government imposed a news blackout on the V-2 attacks for several weeks, in the hope of denying the Germans information about where their rockets were falling, but the blackout could not conceal the explosions, and the Londoners soon learned to recognise the double crack of a V-2’s arrival.

7.2. London under the rockets

Between September 1944 and March 1945, about 1,400 V-2s were launched against London, of which about 500 fell within the London area, killing about 2,700 people and injuring about 6,500 more. The attacks were concentrated in the winter of 1944–1945, when the rockets fell at a rate of up to ten per day, and they caused widespread damage to housing, to schools and to hospitals, and they disrupted the life of the city in a way that the earlier Blitz had not, because the V-2’s unpredictability made it impossible to take shelter in time.

The worst single V-2 incident in London was the destruction of a Woolworths store in New Cross on 25 November 1944, when a rocket killed 168 people, many of them children who had been shopping with their mothers, and the worst incident in the whole campaign was the destruction of the Rex Cinema in Antwerp on 16 December 1944, when a V-2 killed 567 people, most of them Allied soldiers who had been watching a film.

The V-2’s attacks on London did not break British morale, as Hitler had hoped, and they did not force the Allies to negotiate, but they did kill thousands of civilians, and they left a legacy of fear that lasted long after the war.

The last V-2 to fall on London struck on 27 March 1945, killing one person, and the campaign ended when the Allied armies overran the launch sites in the Netherlands and in Germany.

7.3. Antwerp and the port war

The V-2’s other main target was Antwerp, the great Belgian port that the Allies had captured in September 1944 and that had become the main supply port for the Allied armies in north-west Europe. Between October 1944 and March 1945, about 1,600 V-2s were launched against Antwerp, of which about 600 fell within the city, killing about 1,700 people and injuring many more, and causing extensive damage to the port and to the city.

The German aim was to destroy the port and to cut off the Allied supply line, and the attacks were the most sustained V-2 campaign of the war, with rockets falling on the city at a rate of several per day for five months.

The attacks did not close the port, which continued to operate throughout the campaign, but they did kill thousands of civilians and soldiers, and they forced the Allies to devote large resources to the defence of the city, including anti-aircraft guns and fighter patrols that could do nothing against the V-2 itself.

The Rex Cinema disaster of 16 December 1944, in which 567 people were killed, was the single worst V-2 incident of the war, and it remains one of the worst single incidents of the whole conflict in western Europe. The Antwerp campaign ended in March 1945, when the Allied advance overran the launch sites, and the port’s survival was a major Allied achievement.

7.3.1. The Rex Cinema, 16 December 1944

The destruction of the Rex Cinema in Antwerp on 16 December 1944 was the single worst V-2 incident of the war, and it remains one of the most terrible single events of the conflict in western Europe. The cinema was showing a film to an audience of about 1,100 people, most of them Allied soldiers on leave, when a V-2 struck the building directly, collapsing the roof and killing 567 people, of whom 296 were Allied soldiers and the remainder were Belgian civilians.

The rescue operation lasted for days, and the dead were buried in a mass grave in the Schoonselhof cemetery, where a memorial still stands. The Rex Cinema disaster was a direct hit on a crowded public building, and it showed the V-2’s capacity for mass killing in a way that no other single incident did: a single rocket, costing a fraction of the resources of a bomber raid, had killed more people than many air raids, and it had done so without warning and without any possibility of defence.

The disaster was reported in the Allied press, and it became a symbol of the V-2’s terror, a reminder that the rocket war was not an abstraction but a reality that killed ordinary people in ordinary places, doing ordinary things.

8. Strengths and Weaknesses

8.1. Strengths

The V-2’s strengths were technological, and they were revolutionary. It was the first weapon that could strike a target 200 miles away without warning and without any possibility of interception, and its speed of more than 3,500 miles per hour made it invulnerable to every defence that existed in 1944.

Its mobile launch system meant that it could be fired from anywhere, and the Allies could not destroy it by bombing fixed sites, a quality that made it a persistent threat for as long as the launch crews survived. Its guidance system was entirely self-contained, and it could not be jammed, which made it reliable in a way that the radio-guided V-1 was not.

Its engine, its turbopumps and its regenerative cooling were the most advanced rocket technologies in the world, and they became the foundation of every large rocket that followed. The V-2’s greatest strength, however, was not military but technological: it proved that a large liquid-fuelled rocket could be built, launched and guided, and it opened the door to the Space Age, a door that has never closed.

8.2. Weaknesses

The V-2’s weaknesses were military and economic, and they were fatal to its value as a weapon. Its accuracy was poor, with an average error of about 10 miles, which meant that it could not be aimed at a military target, but only at a large city, and even then it might miss by miles.

Its warhead was small — about 1,000 kilograms of explosive, less than the bomb load of a single heavy bomber — and the damage it caused was far less than the damage caused by a single Allied bombing raid. Its cost was enormous: each V-2 cost about 100,000 Reichsmarks to build, and the programme as a whole cost more than the German aircraft industry’s entire fighter programme, yet the V-2s killed about 9,000 people, a figure that was small beside the tens of thousands killed by Allied bombing.

The programme consumed scarce resources — steel, aluminium, alcohol, liquid oxygen and skilled labour — that Germany desperately needed for aircraft and tanks, and it employed tens of thousands of concentration-camp prisoners in conditions that were a crime in themselves. The V-2 was a technological triumph and a military failure, and its weaknesses were the reason it did not change the outcome of the war.

9. Comparison with Rivals

9.1. Against the V-1 flying bomb

The V-2’s most important comparison is with its sister weapon, the V-1 flying bomb, and the comparison shows the two weapons’ different strengths and weaknesses. The V-1 was cheap — about 5,000 Reichsmarks per bomb, against about 100,000 for a V-2 — and it could be built in large numbers, with more than 10,000 launched against London, against about 3,000 V-2s.

The V-1 was slow, however, flying at about 400 miles per hour, and it could be shot down by fighters and by anti-aircraft guns, and it could be intercepted by the defences, which destroyed a large proportion of the V-1s launched.

The V-2 could not be intercepted, but it was twenty times more expensive, it could not be built in the same numbers, and its accuracy was no better than the V-1’s. The two weapons together killed about 15,000 people in Britain and Belgium, a terrible toll, but a small one beside the tens of thousands killed by Allied bombing, and the resources they consumed were far greater than the damage they caused.

The V-1 and the V-2 were both weapons of terror, and both failed in their purpose, but the V-2’s technological legacy was far greater, because its engine and its guidance system became the foundation of the Space Age, while the V-1’s pulse-jet engine became a dead end.

9.2. Against Allied bombing

Against the Allied bombing campaign, the V-2’s limitations are stark, and the comparison shows why the weapon was a military failure. A single Allied bombing raid on a German city could drop thousands of tons of bombs and kill thousands of people, while a V-2 carried one ton of explosive and killed, on average, three people per rocket launched.

The Allied bombing campaign dropped about 1.5 million tons of bombs on Germany and killed about 400,000 civilians, while the V-2 campaign dropped about 3,000 tons of explosive and killed about 9,000 people. The V-2’s cost per ton of explosive delivered was far higher than the cost of delivering the same explosive by bomber, and its accuracy was far worse, because a bomber could aim at a specific target while a V-2 could only aim at a city.

The V-2’s only advantage over the bomber was its invulnerability: it could not be shot down, and it could strike without warning, which made it a weapon of terror rather than a weapon of war. The comparison is a reminder that the V-2’s importance was not military but technological, and that its true legacy was not the damage it caused, but the rockets that followed it.

10. Legacy

10.1. The birth of the Space Age

The V-2’s legacy is the Space Age, and it is one of the most consequential legacies of any weapon in history. The V-2’s engine, its turbopumps, its regenerative cooling and its inertial guidance became the foundation of every large rocket that followed, from the American Redstone and Atlas to the Soviet R-7 and the Saturn V that took men to the Moon.

The men who built the V-2, led by Wernher von Braun, went on to build the American space programme, and the knowledge they carried with them — much of it learned at Peenemünde and at the Mittelwerk — became the textbook from which a new generation of engineers learned to build rockets.

The first satellite, Sputnik, was launched by a rocket that used the V-2’s engine technology, and the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, flew on a rocket that was a direct descendant of the V-2. The V-2’s legacy is therefore paradoxical: a weapon that was built to terrorise civilians became the ancestor of the rockets that took humanity into space, and the men who built it to serve a criminal regime went on to serve the peaceful exploration of space.

The paradox is a reminder that technology is neither good nor evil in itself, but that its uses are chosen by the men who control it.

10.2. Memory, museums and the moral question

The V-2 is remembered in museums and in memorials, and its memory is inseparable from the moral question that it raises. Surviving V-2s are displayed in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, in the Science Museum in London, in the Imperial War Museum and in the Peenemünde Historical Technical Museum, where the rocket is presented as both a technological achievement and a weapon of terror.

The Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, where the prisoners who built the V-2 died, is preserved as a memorial, and its museum tells the story of the 20,000 prisoners who died in the construction and operation of the Mittelwerk, a figure that is greater than the number of people killed by the V-2s themselves.

The moral question that the V-2 raises — whether a technological achievement can be separated from the crime that produced it, and whether the men who built it can be celebrated for their contribution to spaceflight while their victims are forgotten — has no easy answer, and it is debated by historians to this day.

The V-2’s legacy is therefore not just technological but moral, and it is a reminder that the history of technology is also the history of the men who make it and of the uses to which it is put.

11. Frequently Asked Questions

How many V-2 rockets were launched?
About 3,000 V-2s were launched operationally between September 1944 and March 1945, of which about 1,400 were aimed at London and about 1,600 at Antwerp. About 6,000 V-2s were built in total.

How many people did the V-2 kill?
Roughly 9,000 people were killed by V-2 attacks, of whom about 2,700 were killed in London and about 1,700 in Antwerp, with the remainder killed in other targets. About 20,000 concentration-camp prisoners died building the rockets, more than the number killed by the rockets themselves.

Why could the V-2 not be stopped?
Because it travelled at more than three times the speed of sound and arrived without warning. It flew to the edge of space and fell back to Earth at about 2,000 miles per hour, too fast for any fighter, anti-aircraft gun or warning system of 1944 to intercept.

Who designed the V-2?
Wernher von Braun led the design team at the Peenemünde research station, under the overall direction of Walter Dornberger of the German Army. After the war, von Braun and many of his team were taken to the United States, where they built the American space programme.

Was the V-2 the first object in space?
The V-2 was the first man-made object to reach the edge of space. On 3 October 1942, a test V-2 reached an altitude of 52 miles, and later flights reached about 55 miles, close to the Kármán line of 62 miles that is conventionally taken as the boundary of space.

What happened to the V-2 after the war?
Captured V-2s were launched by both the Americans and the Soviets in test programmes, and their technology became the foundation of the American Redstone and the Soviet R-7 rockets. The V-2’s engine, turbopumps and guidance system were the direct ancestors of the rockets that launched the first satellites and took men to the Moon.

12. Sources

1. Wikipedia, “V-2 rocket” — first flight, production total of about 6,000, operational launches and casualty figures.
2. Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, “V-2 Rocket” — specifications, the Peenemünde programme and the post-war legacy.
3. Imperial War Museum, “V-2 Rocket” — the London and Antwerp campaigns, the Rex Cinema disaster and the casualty figures.
4. Michael J. Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era (Harvard University Press, 1995) — the programme, the Mittelwerk and forced labour.
5. Walter Dornberger, V-2 (Hurst and Blackett, 1954) — the German Army’s account of the programme, the first flight and the operational campaign.
6. Frederick I. Ordway and Mitchell R. Sharpe, The Rocket Team (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1979) — von Braun, the Peenemünde team and Operation Paperclip.

Further reading

• Wernher von Braun and Frederick I. Ordway, History of Rocketry and Space Travel (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1966).
• Matthew Uttley, “The V-2 and the German War Economy” in The Journal of Strategic Studies (1994).

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