Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: midnight Target on January 22, 2003, 11:30:42 AM
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I was reading Ambrose's "D-Day" (I know, what took me so long?).
Anyway he had a little info in there I found interesting. The V-1 basically was "OK'ed" for use on the afternoon of June 6th 1944. While it took a few days to get the launchers in place, the initial target, London, was possibly a fatal blunder by Hitler.
Had he turned those 1 ton warheads towards Normandy they might have made a difference. Even though the V-1 was wildly inaccurate, there were so many ships and parked vehicles at the beach heads, they couldn't miss! The V-1 was basically the only air power the Germans could have employed successfully.
Anyone else heard more on this?
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doubtful. They had trouble hitting a LARGE city, even crowded beach would have been a too small of a target.
It was crowded allright, however, "missed" space still was far larger then the "target" space.
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in terms of missed space or margin of error on the V-1, does anyone know for a fact the distance of the error?
was it within a certain diameter in miles, yards, ??? etc?
i mean if one launched towards a city that was 25 sq miles (5x5), could it get close or even hit the intended city of that size?
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of course i'm sure any kind of wind or weather would blow it off course?
it may also depend on how far away the target is from the launch.
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IIRC 3 of the 1st 12 launched actually hit London. Only 1 did any real damage though.
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well the V-1 "autopilot" was pretty simple... It used gyros to stabilize the V-1 and to keep it flying in the direction it was launched. After a preset ammount of time the fuel has been cut-off and the bomb just fell down....
From above you can for sure see for yourself how "acurate" those V-1s prolly were....
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V1's were originally launched from northern France by catapults attached to 157 foot long launch rails, but were eventually also released from airplanes. The tail section of the bombs contained rudders and elevators that were controlled automatically by an electrical compass in the nose and on-board gyros powered by spherical tanks of compressed air. Approximately the first ten percent of each day's launches would contain a small radio transmitter that emitted a signal when the missile approached within thirty kilometers of its intended target. Through triangulation, the Germans could calculate the location of each missile, make adjustments on subsequent launches for wind conditions, and therefore improve the accuracy of their aim. The range of the flight was predetermined and set inside the bomb before it was launched. Most missiles fired against London were targeted for Tower Bridge, right in the center of the city. A tiny propeller on the nose of the bomb was attached to the Veeder counter. Every 30 rotations of the propeller would count down one number on the counter. When the pre-set counter reached zero, the bomb was considered to be at its target. The air hose from the servo to the rear elevator was automatically cut, a spring mechanism would snap down the elevators, and the V1 would descend into a steep dive.
on June 15 catapults at 55 sites flew off 244 missiles against London within 24 hours. Of these, 144 crossed the coast of southeast England and 73 fell in the Greater London area, two-thirds of them exploding south of the Thames. Some 100 missiles failed to cross the Channel: 45 of them crashed soon after launching, wrecking nine sites; and in a French village where one crashed ten civilians were killed.
Not exactly a stellar CEP
For us fighter fans, the top "doodlebug ace" was Squadron Leader Joseph Berry, who flew Tempest Vs with the Fighter Interception Unit, and then No. 501 Squadron. Berry's final score was 59.5 V-1s, including a one-night record of seven on July 23.
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I think the only thing that could of stopped the invasion was if Hitler released the Panzer divisions at Calais.