

Eisenhower was really trying to disentangle all the military branches from being in competition with each other and move space exploration into a government agency dedicated to peaceful, open communication." "Eisenhower's chief problem during this period was which branch of the military would be responsible for developing a launch vehicle," according to Odom, "however, this was problematic because it put the various branches in competition with each other. It was a precursor to larger, nuclear-armed cruise missiles like the Regulus the Navy deployed in the 1950s.A NASA scientist examining the design of a rocket engine in the first year of the organization (Image credit: HUM Images / Contributor) Navy continued to use its version, called the Loon, to gain experience with firing missiles from ships and submarines. After World War II suddenly ended in August 1945, mass production was stopped, but the U.S. By the end of 1944, the first copy, which went by the AAF designation JB-2 (Jet Bomb 2) was launched from Eglin Field in Florida out over the Gulf of Mexico.

In a rare American example of outright copying, the Army Air Forces and the Navy decided to mass produce a version for the attack on Japan. The V-1 had an interesting afterlife in the United States. They were too inaccurate-barely able to hit a huge urban area part of the time-and they lacked the blockbuster warhead needed: a nuclear weapon. In fact they came too early to be in any way decisive. An old cliché about the new Nazi weapons was that they came “too late” to change the course of the war.
BUZZ RACE INTO SPACE ERROR MESSAGES HOW TO
It caused perhaps 10,000 deaths in Belgium and Britain, no small number, but the British and American air forces had learned how to burn down whole cities, causing tens of thousands of dead in a night or two. Was the V-1 a “wonder weapon”? Not at all. When Western forces broke through the Rhine barrier in late March 1945, the V-weapons offensive ended. Antwerp was also the objective of Hitler’s doomed Ardennes offensive, launched December 16, which the Allies called the Battle of the Bulge. Antwerp came under intensive attack, forcing the Allies to deploy American and British anti-aircraft artillery in large numbers to ring the city in defense against the buzz bomb (nothing could be done against the rocket). Launching areas were built up in far northwest Germany and in the Netherlands. Hitler ordered a refocusing of the V-1, and also the new V-2 ballistic missile, on the Belgian port. Clearing the Scheldt estuary and opening the large port of Antwerp became critical. The northwest European offensive had ground to a halt roughly along the Dutch-Belgian border, due in significant part to Allied logistics problems. In the fall, the Wehrmacht shifted the V-1 offensive primarily against Belgium, which the Allies had liberated. But V-1s air-launched by Heinkel He 111 bombers based in the Netherlands kept coming, if in rather smaller numbers. When the Allied armies broke out of Normandy and overran the Channel coast up to Belgium in late August and early September, they captured the catapults used to launch most of them. By late summer, British air defenses were reorganized with increasing effectiveness, resulting in most being shot down or crashing on the way to the target. Prime Minister Winston Churchill even advocated retaliating with poison-gas warfare against German cities, but cooler heads prevailed, and World War II did not turn into a chemical war. Soon, as many as a couple hundred per day were launched against London, causing anxiety in the Allied leadership and an exodus of over a million Londoners, mostly children and family members. The V-1 came in low, between 1,000 and 3,000 ft., and the effect of its one-ton high-explosive warhead was considerable, causing many deaths and injuries.

This one is on display in the Space Race exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. The German V-1 was the world's first operational cruise missile. The German V-1 "Buzz Bomb" was the world's first operational cruise missile.
