Allied V-1

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gjs238

Tech Sergeant
1,889
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Mar 26, 2009
How soon do you think the Allies could have cloned the V-1?
Where might have the Allies made good use of it?
 
The Allies DID clone the V-1. It was called the JB-2 Loon (JB meaning "Jet Bomb") and was built by Republic-Ford. It first flew in 1944 and was to be used in the invasion of Japan, but another team developed the Atomic Bomb and they used that instead. Marquardt Aviation also built some pulse jet engines for the program.

If you Google "Chino Pulset Jet," you can see a video of one of the engines behind my pickup going down the runway, and I posted a thread on it recently. Search for pulse jet. One of the videos is looking down the throat of the pulse jet as it is running.
 
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Building 1,000 or more V1 cruise missiles per week is pointless if you already have 1,000 operational heavy bombers. If Britain and/or USA opt for mass production of cruise missiles it should be ILO heavy bombers so they need to make that decision NLT 1940.

RN and USN had naval superiority. So if decision is made to build cruise missiles ILO heavy bombers I would consider ship based launchers. Or perhaps grab an offshore island such as Heligoland for use as a launch site.
 
The guys flying the heavy bombers at a horendous loss rate might not agree it was pointless, and the US-made V-1 copies built were giong to be aimed at Japan. In the real world, they started the US cruise missle program and many were launcged from US submarines successfully.
 
The Japanese developed a nasty habit of executing flight crew captured on their home soil late in the war.

They even ate some of the body parts of a Avenger pilot shot down over Chi Chi Jima.
I don't know how many flight crew were aware of this extreme treatment, but they knew late war the Japanese was brutal in their treatment of prisoners, and nobody wanted to get shot down over Japan.
Anything that would lighten the task for the bomber crews would have been welcomed.
 
Was the Japanese air force that effective against the night time B29 raids?
 
dobbie said:
Was the Japanese air force that effective against the night time B29 raids?
Click to expand...

Neither Japanese air force was as effective on the level that the Luftwaffe was. But most US aircrew suspected that getting shot down over Japan was something you wouldn't likely survive.
 
B-29's were very likely to escape unscathed. They were sometimes faster on the bomb run than the fighters sent to intercept them. Once a pass was made, reacquiring a B-29 for a typical Japanese fighter pilot was either very iffy or not possible. If it were the iffy kind, he didn;t have enough cliosing velocity to avoid being a sitting duck for the tail gunner. If you close on a bomber from behind at 20 knots, you are a GOOD target and virtually stationary.
 
Figured the Japanese were behind somewhat in the technological race, especiallly concerning radar and such. My father spent the war in China, gearing up for the initial B-29 bombardment which didnt work so well.
I do agree...wouldnt want to be shot down over that place.
 
Well, we MUST have liked it since we put that into production also.

If you visit White Sands Missile Range, they have a park in the main part if what passes for the town. In it are examples of most of the missiles shot there and there is a very pristine example of a US-made V-2, painted in test colors. We shot them often and perfected them, turning them into our missile program with the help of people such as Werner Von Braun, who worked there too.

As you go down the grade coming from Las Cruces into the valley over the Organ Pipe Mountains, it is on the right ... can't miss it. Everyone who is a missile fan should see that park at least once. Bring a charged camera.
 
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A US V-1.
And there was me thinking the USAAF considered itself a precision bombing outfit,not wishing to use indiscriminate and inaccurate technology like the V-1,or the area methods of Bomber Command
Cheers
Steve
 
I don't think the timing is right, but if Allied V-1's were available, night day launches against Ploesti seems a logical place for deployment. May have been cost effective.
 
I expect an allied V1 (facing the Germans without proximity fuses made in the sort of quantity the allies were capable of) would
be a very frightening adjunct to the bombing campaign.

The sort of day-dreams Hitler co. had might well have been realised.....just not to the people they hoped would cop it.
 
The US-made V-1 copies were going to be used on Japan, not Europe. It was thought that the campaign would reduced US troops losses during an invasion. Another team perfected the atomic bomb and the Navy was stuck with all those JB-2 Flying Bombs. So ... they set about figuring out how to launch them from submaries since they arelady knew how to launch them from ships. This led to the first SLBMs (submarine launched ballistic missiles) in US service. Much later tghey managed to get right to vertically launched submarine missiles of the strategic type, like the Polaris. Surely the JB-2 was the start of the US program, and it was a copy of the V-1 ... albeit a bit more accurate, if you believe the information publically available today. I do since the information publically avaiable for the programs I worked on is spot on.

We also had the TDR-1, 2, and 3, which were target drones. They could be flown by radio or launched on their own, but were most effective when flown into the target from a chase plane, much as the German Mistels had been. Autonomous cruise missiles had to wait for a small but accurate INS or the GPS before they could truly be fire-and-forget. Some of the early ones used an INS (Inertial Navigation System).

Submarines still do since you can't receive satellite signals underwater. The INSs used in subs are VERY accurate and can go around the world with less than a meter of error. Surely I'm not telling anyone in here anything new ...
 
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