Americans 'reverse engineer' German V-1

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Americans 'reverse engineer' German V-1


By Michael Shinabery
Posted: 01/02/2011


The P-80 pilot's orders in June 1948 at Holloman Air Force Base were unmistakable. The errant JB-2 Loon in his sights had an unstable gyro and was on course to bomb Tularosa. Just 1,200 feet from the cruise missile, the pilot "opened fire with his six .50 (caliber) machine guns," retired U.S. Air Force Col. Wayne Mattson wrote in the New Mexico Space Journal (Summer 2007).

The Loon exploded, and "the pilot was forced to fly right into that fireball," Mattson said. The P-80 dove from 5,000-feet altitude to 300-feet where the engine flamed out; ejecting then would have been fatal.

"With an airspeed above 500 mph, I was able to zoom up to a more accommodating altitude where I could attempt an engine air start," the pilot, David Winn, recalled more than 50 years later in Air & Space magazine (December 2003/January/2004). The restart failed, though, and Winn was forced to belly land in an area he described as "your standard desert with all its bumps and bushes and lava." (Eventually, Winn would be promoted to brigadier general.)

Two-and-a-half years earlier, on Jan. 7, 1946, the Navy launched its first KVW-1 Loon, said "Evolution of the Cruise Missile" (Air University Press/1985). The engine quickly died, and the missile "glided to its destruction." The Navy's Loon was a version of the Army Air Forces' JB-2, which was reverse engineered from the German V-1 "Buzz Bomb." The website designation-systems.net said the Navy bestowed

the moniker Loon which, according to anecdotal evidence, was named after the bird of the same name. "Webster's New World Dictionary" (Third College Edition/1988) described a Loon as "any of an order of fish-eating, diving birds, with a sharp bill and webbed feet É noted for its weird cry."
The British, said Mattson, called the missile the Doodlebug after an insect that digs pits, something the V-1 created upon impact.

Germany launched the first V-1s against England on June 12, 1944, Mattson and Martyn Tagg documented in "We Develop Missiles, Not Air!" (ACC/USAF/1995). "Four crashed shortly after becoming airborne, but six of them headed for England. These attacks increased in ferocity so that by 21 June, a total of 1,000 had been launched. Just eight days later the 2,000th V-1 had been launched." By September 1944, "a total of 5,430 V-1s were fired against England, causing 6,100 deaths and 17,300 injuries, and destroying or damaging one million buildings."

Mattson and Tagg said the Germans intended "to launch up to 5,000 V-1 missiles against England every 24 hours" until the Allies began pummeling the V-1 launch sites.

Almost immediately, "underground forces in Europe who had witnessed the impact of a V-1 É were successfully able to hide the vehicle from searching German forces," as well as from the Russian army, said Mattson and Tagg. "The remains were then clandestinely airlifted out of occupied Europe by the British Royal Air Force." The wreckage ended up at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio. "In 17 days the AAF was able to reverse engineer the airframe and the engine."

The military's "intention," a document in the New Mexico Museum of Space History Archives stated, was to turn "the weapon against its inventors." NMMSH curator George House, in the monograph JB-2 Loon, said plans were to produce "a dependable missile which could carry a 2,080-pound warhead to a maximum range of 150 miles." The War Department allocated $90 million and Republic Aviation Company contracted to build the frames, subcontracting, according to Mattson and Tagg, to Willys-Overland. A document in the NMMSH archives stated Jack & Heintz Incorporated provided "modified autopilots," Ford Motor Company built the motors, and Northrup produced launch sleds.

The first Loon test took place on Oct. 12, 1944, launching from Eglin Field, Florida "over the Gulf of Mexico," aerospace historian Richard Hallion wrote in "The American Buzz Bombs." The "flight," said "Evolution of the Cruise Missile," "failed, as did many others that followed." In fact, by Dec. 3, out of "10 attempts," only two had succeeded.

"The Evolution of the Cruise Missile said "the U.S. version of the V-1 differed little from the German original, except for two features: launching and guidance." JATOs, or jet-assisted takeoff rockets, were attached for launching, and guidance was radio-controlled and included a radar beacon.

Hallion said that first JB-2 was "olive drab," with "part of its nose section (painted) white so photographers could easily track it during flight." The engine was "a long tube resembling a stovepipe" that, when in flight, "belched a long pulsating tongue of orange flame with a peculiar rasping thunder many English civilians could recognize all too well as the dreaded Buzz Bomb. "

In 2007, a British visitor to the New Mexico Museum of Space History described how, as a young boy hiding in bomb shelters, he would hear V-1s buzz overhead. When the engines suddenly quit, victims knew explosion was imminent.

The Buzz Bomb "earned its name from its unique pulse-jet engine, which produced a raucous buzzing," Winn said. "It could not aim for a specific target - after a timer terminated its flight, it simply fell to Earth in a general target area.

The sound of an approaching V-1's engine was terrifying, but even more so was the silence that followed when the engine quit. It meant the bomb would fall nearby in 10 seconds."

Designation-systems.net said that "orders for 12,000 (JB-2) missiles were placed, to be used for mass attack prior to the expected invasion of Japan. The latter never materialized, and so all remaining orders were cancelled." By decade's end, Loon testing was over.


Michael Shinabery is an education specialist and Humanities Scholar with the New Mexico Museum of Space History. E-mail him at michael.shinabery@state.nm.us.

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