 |
| V-2 rocket facilities of World War II | |
|---|---|
Part of  Nazi Germany | |
| European Theatre of World War II | |
 | |
| Site history | |
| Built by | Organisation Todt and others |
| In use | -1945 |
| Battles/wars | Operation Crossbow |
V-2 rocket facilities were military installations associated with Nazi Germany's V-2 SRBM ballistic missile, including bunkers and small launch pads which were never operationally used.
V-2 research was conducted at the Peenemünde Army Research Center with most Peenemünde test launches conducted from Test Stand VII. After having moved the launch training facility named "Heimat-Artillerie-Park 11 Karlshagen/Pomerania" from Köslin near Peenemünde, [1] the Training and Testing Battery 444 (German : Lehr- und Versuchsbatterie Nr 444) conducted "live warhead trials" [2] from the Heidelager military area near Pustkow and Blizna, Poland, into the target area at the Pripet Marshes 200 miles (320 km) to the northeast. [3] With the advances by the Russian armies, the Blizna testing site was evacuated on September 8, 1944, to the Heidekraut testing-ground in the Tuchola Forest in Polish Pomerania. [4] In mid-January 1945, testing moved to the forests to the south of Wolgast, and then to the area of Rethun on the Weser river west of Hannover though no launches were conducted from either location. [5] : 173 Plans for production facilities at Demag-Fahrzeugwerke [5] : 74 in Berlin-Falkensee, Raxwerke, and the Zeppelin Works in Friedrichshafen were never completed. [6] The initial production plant at Peenemünde and the plant's forced laborers were transferred to the Mittelwerk underground plant and nearby Dora camp of KZ Dachau to produce the operational V-2 rockets. Near the Mittelwerk was a servomotor production facility in a salt mine [5] and a quality control facility at Ilfeld.
After the Operation Hydra bombing of the Peenemünde Army Research Center, the supersonic wind tunnel was moved to Kochel [7] and engine testing and calibration was moved to Lehesten. Near the end of World War II in Europe, Peenemünde scientists were evacuated to the Alpine Fortress (German : Alpenfestung) A research and test facility planned since early 1944 in the Austrian Alps (under the codename Salamander) were never implemented; the target areas would have been in the Tatra Mountains, the Arlberg range, and the area of the Ortler mountain. [2] V-2 rocket documents and drawings were hidden in a mine at Dörnten (14 tons[ clarification needed ] from Peenemünde) and buried at Bad Sachsa (260 lbs from Walter Dornberger's headquarters at Schwedt-an-der-Oder). [5]
Initial plans for large launch bunkers at Watten and Wizernes with a radar station at Prédefin [8] : 182 were abandoned due to the Allied bombing targeted against them. Additional plans for small launch bunkers such as at Thiennes on the edge of the Foret de la Nieppe , at Rauville, and at Colombières near Trévières; [8] as well as for exposed concrete pads (39 north of the Somme and 6 in Western Normandy) [9] were switched to use firings from mobile launch platforms instead. Mobile launching sites included the Haagse Bos and the Duindigt Racecourse at The Hague.
Eight main storage dumps were planned and four had been completed by July 1944. [10] These were all captured before being used. The storage depot at Mery-sur-Oise was bombed on August 2, 1944. [11] Work had been started in August 1943 and completed by February 1944; [10] and the depots (including those at Bergueneuse and Villiers-Adam) included "service buildings for testing V2 sub-assemblies in the vertical position". [8] Testing of production motors at the Southern Works was originally conducted in late 1943 at Oberraderach near Friedrichshafen, [5] : 95 but was shut down shortly after going into operation because firings were visible from Switzerland across Lake Constance. [6] : 207 Raxwerke motor testing equipment was eventually moved to the Redl-Zipf facility in central Austria, which used forced labor of the Schlier-Redl-Zipf [6] : 207 subcamp of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp.
Liquid oxygen was produced at the motor testing facilities at Oberraderach (900 tons/month), in the Redl-Zipf (2,100 tons/month) tunnel (for testing the Linke-Hofmann combustion chambers), and at Lehesten near Nordhausen [5] : 99 —two additional underground plants for 6,000 tons/month at Wittringen in the Saar (captured December 7, 1944) and near the Mittelwerk were never completed. In Belgium, an underground plant at Liège (900 tons/month) supplied launches in the Netherlands, [6] : 99 and plants at La Louviere, Torte, and Willebroeck were also targets of allied bombing. [12]
The materials and parts for the V-2 were drawn from several suppliers.
The Peenemünde Army Research Center was founded in 1937 as one of five military proving grounds under the German Army Weapons Office (Heereswaffenamt). Several German guided missiles and rockets of World War II were developed by the HVP, including the V-2 rocket. The works were attacked by the British in Operation Crossbow from August 1943, before falling to the Soviets in May 1945.
The V-2, with the technical name Aggregat 4 (A-4), was the world's first long-range guided ballistic missile. The missile, powered by a liquid-propellant rocket engine, was developed during the Second World War in Nazi Germany as a "vengeance weapon" and assigned to attack Allied cities as retaliation for the Allied bombings of German cities. The V-2 rocket also became the first artificial object to travel into space by crossing the Kármán line with the vertical launch of MW 18014 on 20 June 1944.
Arthur Louis Hugo Rudolph was a German rocket engineer who was a leader of the effort to develop the V-2 rocket for Nazi Germany. After World War II, the United States government's Office of Strategic Services (OSS) brought him to the U.S. as part of the clandestine Operation Paperclip, where he became one of the main developers of the U.S. space program. He worked within the U.S. Army and NASA, where he managed the development of several systems, including the Pershing missile and the Saturn V Moon rocket. In 1984, the U.S. government investigated him for war crimes, and he agreed to renounce his United States citizenship and leave the U.S. in return for not being prosecuted.
La Coupole, also known as the Coupole d'Helfaut-Wizernes and originally codenamed Bauvorhaben 21 or Schotterwerk Nordwest, is a Second World War bunker complex in the Pas-de-Calais department of northern France, about 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) from Saint-Omer, and some 14.4 kilometers south-southeast from the less developed Blockhaus d'Eperlecques V-2 launch installation in the same area. It was built by the forces of Nazi Germany between 1943 and 1944 to serve as a launch base for V-2 rockets directed against London and southern England and is the earliest known precursor to modern underground missile silos still in existence.
Blizna is a village in the administrative district of Gmina Ostrów, within Ropczyce-Sędziszów County, Subcarpathian Voivodeship, in south-eastern Poland. It lies approximately 12 kilometres (7 mi) north of Ostrów, 12 km (7 mi) north of Ropczyce, and 34 km (21 mi) north-west of the regional capital Rzeszów.
Test Stand VII was the principal V-2 rocket testing facility at Peenemünde Airfield and was capable of static firing of rocket motors up to 200 tons thrust. Notable events at the site include the first successful V-2 launch on 3 October 1942, visits by German military leaders, and Allied reconnaissance overflights and bombing.
Crossbow was the code name in World War II for Anglo-American operations against the German long range reprisal weapons (V-weapons) programme. The primary V-weapons were the V-1 flying bomb and V-2 rocket, which were launched against Britain from 1944 to 1945 and used against continental European targets as well.
Raxwerke or Rax-Werke was a facility of the Wiener Neustädter Lokomotivfabrik at Wiener Neustadt in Lower Austria. During World War II, the company also produced lamps for Panzer tanks and anti-aircraft guns. Two Raxwerke plants employed several thousand forced laborers from the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp.
Mittelwerk was a German World War II factory built underground in the Kohnstein to avoid Allied bombing. It used slave labor from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp to produce V-2 ballistic missiles, V-1 flying bombs, and other weapons.
Lehesten is a town in the Thuringian Forest, 20 km southeast of Saalfeld.
The Blockhaus d'Éperlecques is a Second World War bunker, now part of a museum, near Saint-Omer in the northern Pas-de-Calais département of France, and only some 14.4 kilometers north-northwest from the more developed La Coupole V-2 launch facility, in the same general area.
The Kohnstein is a hill in Thuringia, Germany, 2 kilometres southwest of the village of Niedersachswerfen and 3 kilometres northwest of the centre of the town of Nordhausen. Gypsum mining created tunnels in the hill that were later used as a fuel/chemical depot and for Nazi Germany factories, including the Mittelwerk V-2 rocket factory that used Mittelbau-Dora slave labour.
Sędziszów Małopolski is a town in Ropczyce-Sędziszów County, Subcarpathian Voivodeship, Poland, with a population of 12,226 (1 January 2019). Sędziszów is located in eastern Lesser Poland, near the historic boundary between Lesser Poland and Red Ruthenia. The name of the town probably comes from ancient Polish given name Sąd, which was popular in the noble Odrowąż family in the 13th century. In the past, Sędziszów was also known as Shendishov, Sandissów, Sandyszów, Schandzyssów, and Sandzischów. The town is home to a sports club Lechia, established in 1914.
The German city of Friedrichshafen was bombed during World War II as part of the Allied strategic bombing campaign against German war materiel industry, particularly in the targeting of German fighter aircraft production and long range missile development.
Military intelligence on the V-1 and V-2 weapons developed by the Germans for attacks on the United Kingdom during the Second World War was important to countering them. Intelligence came from a number of sources and the Anglo-American intelligence agencies used it to assess the threat of the German V-weapons.
The Redl-Zipf V-2 rocket facility located in central Austria between Vöcklabruck and Vöcklamarkt and established in September 1943 began operation for V-2 rocket motor testing after Raxwerke test equipment had been moved from Friedrichshafen.
MW 18014 was a German A-4 test rocket launched on 20 June 1944, at the Peenemünde Army Research Center in Peenemünde. It was the first human-made object to reach outer space, attaining an apogee of 176 kilometres (109 mi), well above the Kármán line that was later established as the threshold of space. It was a vertical test launch, and was not intended to reach orbital velocity, so it returned and impacted Earth, making it the first sub-orbital spaceflight.
The Blizna V-2 missile launch site was the site of a World War II German V-2 missile firing range. Today there is a small museum located in the Park Historyczny Blizna in Blizna, Poland. After the RAF strategic bombing of the V-2 rocket launch site in Peenemünde, Germany, in August 1943, some of the test and launch facilities were relocated to Blizna in November 1943. The first of 139 V-2 launches was carried out from the Blizna launch site on 5 November 1943.