Cruise missile

The cruise missile emerged because Germany needed a cheap weapon to terrorize London—and created a flying bomb from plywood, sheet metal, and a buzzing engine that announced its own arrival.

The V-1 (Vergeltungswaffe Eins, Vengeance Weapon One) was the world's first operational cruise missile. The Nazi Propaganda Ministry gave it this name; the Air Ministry designation was Fi 103, after its airframe designer Fieseler Flugzeugbau. Development accelerated after the British bombed the medieval city of Lubeck in April 1942, prompting Hitler to order retaliatory 'terror attacks' on British cities.

The design by Robert Lusser at Fieseler and Fritz Gosslau at Argus Motoren was deliberately simple. The fuselage was welded sheet steel; the wings were plywood. The Argus As 109-014 pulsejet engine pulsed 50 times per second, producing a distinctive buzzing sound that gave rise to the names 'buzz bomb' and 'doodlebug.' Each V-1 carried a 1-ton warhead nearly 250 kilometers at 650 km/h.

First flight tests began in late 1942. The first ground launch at Peenemunde-West occurred on December 24, 1942, with the missile flying for 60 seconds. At 4:25 AM on June 13, 1944—one week after D-Day—Londoners heard the first buzz bomb arrive.

Between June and September 1944, Germany launched over 8,000 V-1s against London, killing 5,500 people, injuring 16,000, and forcing more than a million to evacuate. Production was vast and cheap: Germany built approximately 30,000 V-1s in 1944-1945. Each cost about 5,000 Reichsmarks ($2,000 in 1944 dollars) and required only 350 labor-hours to produce. Concentration camp inmates and slave laborers at the Fieseler factory in Kassel did most of the assembly.

The United States reverse-engineered the V-1 from salvaged British parts within months. Republic Aviation built the airframes while Ford made the engines, producing over 1,000 JB-2 missiles before the war ended. The technology lived on in cruise missile development through the Cold War to the present day.