Did the Germans use the V1 and V2 missile system on the Eastern Front in World War 2?

Upvote:-3

no actual targets to hit in Russia, it's so large they could loose armies for days without actual HQ contact, V1 and 2 need large targets , even if they knew of one they still couldn't reach it. You could fire 10,000 v2's into Russia and still not hit anything that would even matter or nothing at all. Better firing at targets that A) you know where they are and that your weapon can reach it and B) have a fair idea of its layout. They couldn't even find factories in Russia using their condor long range aircraft as they were mostly all behind the Urals. The Russians were in more danger of their own security services than from V1's or 2's. The nearest V2's got to Russia was in Poland and that was when they were testing it after Peenemünde was bombed.

Upvote:6

The Fi 103 ("V-1") and Aggregat 4 ("V-2") were not precision weapons, by any stretch of the imagination.

The Fi 103 guidance system was primitive, and target deviation was measured in kilometers.

The Aggregat 4 fared only marginally better.

From the linked WP article:

Initially, V-1s landed within a circle 19 miles (31 kilometres) in diameter, but by the end of the war, accuracy had been improved to about 7 miles, which was comparable to the V-2 rocket.

(Attributed to Kloeppel, Major Kirk M., The Military Utility of German Rocketry During World War II, Air Command and Staff College, 1997.)

So, hitting a large city -- say, London, or later, Antwerp -- was basically all those two weapon systems were good for.

(11 V-2 rockets were aimed at the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen in an attempt to destroy the bridge. Target deviation varied between one "near" miss at ~500m, and one rocket landing as far away as Cologne (40km away)...)

Launching these weapon systems required some infrastructure set up (steam catapult / Meillerwagen), fuelling, and associated setup, not to mention storage. Something that could be done with relative ease in the west (with static launch sites within range of the targets), but not so much in the east with its fluid frontline.

No, there is no record of either Fi 103 / V-1 or Aggregat 4 / V-2 use on the Eastern Front.

It just didn't make sense.

Upvote:31

The V1 and V2 were short range missiles. The V-2 had an operational range of 200 miles while the V-1 had an operational range of 160 miles. These missiles weren't available until mid-1944, at which point the Soviets had pushed the Nazis back hundreds of miles. This means that the only things that could be hit were areas that had been recently overrun by the Russians. Given the relative lack of accuracy, neither would have been useful at all for anything other than terror attacks or attacks on industry. Thus, there was just no point.

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