Meet Hitler's Terrifying Jet-Powered Kamikazes Killers

Warfare History Network

History, Europe

Deadly, but the war was almost over.

Key point: Berlin was getting desperate to turn the tide when it turned to the V-1 rocket and manned suicide bombers.

By early 1944, the Luftwaffe was only a shadow of what it had been at the beginning of the war. Adolf Hitler and Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring were determined to retaliate against British cities, especially London, for Allied air attacks against German cities. A few years earlier, they would have ordered a series of massive air raids against London in reprisal. However, combat losses and the switch to fighter production for the defense of the Reich had drained the strength of the Luftwaffe’s once-powerful bomber fleets. Massive air strikes were no longer an option.

German engineers had developed new and unconventional methods of striking back at the enemy. The Fieseler FZG-76 flying bomb, which would be known as the V-1, was one of the weapons designed for striking at targets in Britain without straining the Luftwaffe’s already depleted bomber reserves. The V-1 was popularly known as the “buzz bomb” to the Allies because of the distinctive noise created by its pulse-jet engine. Theoretically, the V-1 operated with a simple guidance system and was supplied with enough fuel to reach a major target in England or Allied territory on the Continent. Once above the target, the V-1 would have expended all its fuel and begun a random descent to the ground, its warhead detonating on impact.

One of the flying bomb’s many problems, however, was that it was so inaccurate. The bombs sometimes missed a target as large as Greater London, which covers hundreds of square miles, by either flying beyond the entire city or, usually, crashing far short of it. Certainly, the sheer randomness of the attacks contributed to terrorizing the enemy populace, but greater accuracy would have been beneficial from a military standpoint. One way to solve this problem would be to develop a manned V-1: to put a pilot in the unmanned flying bomb.