It was the sound that terrified Britain. In the pre-dawn hours of 13
June 1944, a loud buzzing was heard over the south coast. The noise, like
the sound of a powerful outboard motor at full throttle, came from a small
aircraft heading towards London. Suddenly, its engine stopped. Moments
later, the eerie silence was shattered by a thunderous explosion.
Arriving a week after the D-day invasion of Normandy, this was the first
of the engineering masterpieces Hitler called Vergeltungswaffen, or revenge
weapons. Built by Volkswagen and soon known as doodlebugs, the pilotless
V-1s looked like 25-foot cigars with wings and could carry a 1-ton warhead
for at least 140 miles. After flying a preset distance, usually towards
London, their jet-like engines shut off and the V-1s plummeted to earth.
For many British people, the attacks came as a shock. During the first
years of the Second World War, Britain had built a highly efficient network
of early warning radar posts and quick response fighter units. So effective
was this network that, after the Blitz ended in 1941, German aircraft rarely
challenged the RAF in large numbers over Britain.
But effective as it was against conventional aircraft, the system was
not designed to cope with V-1s. They cruised only a few thousand feet above
the ground, flying at speeds close to 350 miles per hour. Fighter aircraft
could get some – but they flew too low and too fast for anti-aircraft guns
to aim accurately.
Three nights after the first attacks the V-1 campaign began in earnest
as 144 V-1s hit Britain. Nearly half of them …