7. “Vengeance Weapon 2”
The V2, or “Vengeance Weapon 2”, was the world’s first ballistic missile. It carried a ton of explosives to the edge of space, then plunged at unstoppable speeds to explode over its target. It was a revolutionary technological feat. It was also one of history’s most wasteful weapons. V2s inflicted relatively little damage that did not justify the vast resources devoted to their production. Those resources would have better aided the German war effort had they gone to more effective weapons programs or other uses.
Roughly three thousand V2s were fired between September, 1944, and Germany’s surrender nine months later. They did not all reach their targets, but even if they had, at one ton of explosives per V2 warhead, that would have been 3000 tons of explosives dropped on enemy cities over nine months. During the same period, the RAF routinely dropped over 3000 tons of explosives on a German city in a bombing raid. The US Air Force also frequently exceeded that 3000 ton total in single bombing raids.
