Spitfire vs Buzz Bomb | Hitler’s Secret Weapon
In 1944 an unknown flying object attacked London. Mysteriously, it seemed to know exactly when it reached the city and just fell out of the sky. The German V-1, so-called Buzz Bomb, was designed to terrorise Britain.
While Londoners wondered what had hit them, an American officer was busy finding out. Hap Arnold worked on the Kettering Bug, the world's first cruise missile built 26 years earlier. Tangled wreckage harboured important clues on how this amazing weapon found its target. Hap Arnold collected pieces he could find and shipped them back to America, from battered parts American engineers began to reverse engineer Hitler's vengeance weapon.
Three weeks later they cracked it. The V-1 had a simple yet powerful jet engine, which accelerated it to an incredible 640km per hour. But the most important riddle the Americans solved was how the V-1 knew when to drop. A propeller at the tip of the missile, turned as it moves through the air, each revolution counted by my mileometer in the tail section. At a preset mileage a guillotine cut the pneumatic hoses to the rudder, locking it in position. Detonators then ejected spoilers, disrupting the airflow under the elevators and sending the V-1 into a steep dive. Nicknamed the Doodlebug, the V-1 was only accurate enough to hit a city the size of London – good enough for the Germans.
The V-1 had to be stopped. Pilots only had a split second to shoot and if they got it wrong, they were in trouble. Terry Spencer tried another angle of attack, nudging the bombs with his wingtip. The papers lapped up the story and nicknamed him “Tip 'em Up Terry", the man who destroyed a V-1 with a flick of his wing!
Clip from the “Machines of War” documentary series about the evolution of three cornerstones of the modern military – the machine gun, the tank, and the cruise missile.
Watch the complete documentary here – Coming soon!
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