Humanity has been using rockets in warfare since the Chinese discovered gunpowder late in the first millennium. During the War of 1812, the "rocket’s red glare" helped inspire the U.S. national anthem. But the lack of a guidance system in these early rockets made them inaccurate. In the 1930s, a group of German rocket enthusiasts led by Wernher von Braun began building missiles equipped with primitive guidance systems. Their efforts were eventually funded by the rearming German army, which was interested in developing missiles because they were not among the restrictions on artillery specified in the Versailles Treaty that ended World War I.

 

There are two types of military missiles. One is the cruise missile--a bomb with wings and an engine. The other, the ballistic missile, is normally a rocket carrying a bomb as its payload. It does not achieve lift from wings or any other aerodynamic feature and when the power source, or fuel, is removed or used up, it returns to Earth on a ballistic trajectory. In Germany, Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels gave its cruise and ballistic weapons the designation "v" for vergeltungswaffen (weapons of revenge). Adolf Hitler felt that the V-weapons would "be decisive against Great Britain and make the British willing to make peace."

 

The Nazi cruise missile was the V-1. It had a pulse-jet engine fueled with gasoline and compressed air and was launched from a ramp. Its engine made a loud, buzzing sound, leading to its nickname "buzz bomb." The engine was set to shut off after traveling a certain distance, which was when the bomb would fall on the target and explode. It had no navigation system, so aiming was simply a matter of launching it in the direction of the target. When the buzzing noise stopped, the bomb was about to hit.

 

Because of their limited range, the V-1s of World War II were launched from countries along the English Channel that wereoccupied by Germany, landing in southern England and London. The first one hit London on June 12, 1943. At the height of their use, 190 were launched daily. But the British quickly became expert at intercepting the slow-moving drones with Royal Air Force fighters and taking down the rest with anti-aircraft artillery. Consequently, only 25 percent of all V-1s launched ever reached their targets. The attacks ended when the Allies began to recapture land in occupied Europe, seizing launch sites as they went. Using captured V-1s as models, the United States began making its own cruise missile, the JB-2 (Jet Bomb 2), which improved upon the German guidance system, but stopped its development with the successful tests of the atomic bomb.

 

Germany’s ballistic missile, the V-2, was developed by von Braun and his colleagues at the research and testing facility the Nazis built for them at Peenemünde on the Baltic coast. Since 1937, these researchers had worked with various degrees of success on a series of rockets, each time refining the fuels and guidance systems of earlier versions. It was not until 1942 that they had developed a missile, the A4, that gained the German army’s interest. During a test on August 16, 1942, the A4 became the first vehicle to break the sound barrier when it sped into the sky. In future tests, the missile reached an altitude of 37 miles (60 kilometers), a range of 119 miles (192 kilometers), a flight time of four minutes and 55 seconds, and a final speed of 0.75 mile per second (1.2 kilometers per second). Hitler ordered full-scale production of the A4, armed with a 2,000-pound (907-kilogram) warhead of high explosives, in December 1942. The rushed production meant that many kinks remained.

 

The Germans built the weapon at a large underground facility called Mittlewerk that was staffed with slave labor transferred from the Buchenwald concentration camp. Conditions at the facility were horrific, and thousands of prisoners died due to malnutrition, disease, exhaustion, or hangings by camp guards.

 

On September 7, 1944, the first A4s, now designated the V-2, were fired at Allied targets. Soon they were raining down primarily on London and Antwerp, and continued to do so until March 27, 1945. The V-2 struck suddenly, giving its victims no time to seek shelter. The only warning was the double sonic boom as the rocket reentered the atmosphere. British morale began to drop as they realized there was no way to fight the new weapon once it was launched.

 

The Allies’ only defense was to destroy the V-2 launch sites, and their bombers destroyed as many fixed launch sites as possible. In response, the Germans began to launch their missiles from mobile launch platforms; sometimes they launched from city streets, using the buildings as screens. Aiming the missiles became extremely inaccurate, and targets were hit less often as launch sites moved from place to place.

 

Militarily, the V-2 was a disaster for the Germans. Despite the fear it engendered among civilians, it had no effect on the Allies’ ability to attack Germany. It was inaccurate and had an insignificant warhead. It killed a total of approximately 2,000 people, a small number when compared to a single bombing raid that could kill tens of thousands in one night.

 

After the war, the Americans estimated that the industrial effort and resources that Germany devoted to the program could have been used to produce 24,000 fighter aircraft. The program had drained both money and scarce materials such as steel and aluminum from more useful weapons like tanks, airplanes, and submarines, and probably helped the Allies’ cause. But although ineffective militarily, many paid a high price for V-2 production: an estimated 20,000 prisoners died in the inhumane conditions at Mittlewerk. The V-2 was one of the few weapons where more people died from producing it than died from its use as a weapon.

 

After the war ended, dozens of remaining V-2s and the scientists who designed them were captured by the United States and the Soviet Union. The rockets and rocket men formed the basis for both countries’ early rocket research. Von Braun and many of his colleagues emigrated to the United States, where they worked on the Jupiter and Redstone missiles and later the Saturn rockets. They built rockets designed to launch nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union and humans to the Moon. In return, the United States protected them from war crimes trials resulting from the use of slave labor.

 

These rockets began the arms race of the second half of the 20th century, as the United States and Soviet Union competed to produce intercontinental ballistic missiles that could deliver nuclear warheads faster than the other. Each new missile was an advance in the science: solid fuel in the Polaris, the microchip in the Minuteman, and multiple warheads. Improved guidance systems by the year 2000 meant that a missile could land a few hundred feet from a target after traveling more than a thousand miles in space. Each advance was increasingly deadly as nations built arsenals to kill not only the enemy but with the potential to annihilate the entire world several times over. Other nations added warheads with different weapons of mass destruction: chemical, biological, or radiological. Missiles represented the ultimate deterrent from war.

 

Only one ballistic missile has seen actual war combat, the Soviet-built SS-1 "Scud," based on the A4. The missile was produced for the Soviet army in the 1950s and although primitive, used in combat during the Soviet-Afghanistan War that began in the late 1970s. The Soviets also sold the missile in large numbers to other countries, most notably in the Middle East. Countries such as Iran and Iraq used the missiles and produced their own copies with minimal improvements in wars against each other as well as during the Gulf War. The Scuds have guidance and quality problems similar to the V-2, but much like the V-2, their psychological effects far exceeded the physical damage they caused. The constant fear of attack in Israel and Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War, combined with the extraordinary surveillance and defense systems needed from satellites, took up much of the coalition’s resources.

 

The United States had always favored the use of cruise missiles over ballistic missiles for tactical uses, but their development was impeded by faulty guidance systems. The U.S. Navy’s first operational cruise missile was the Harpoon. The Harpoon program began in 1969, and the missile entered operational service in 1977, with its first mission in 1986 as part of Operation El Dorado against Libya. The Harpoon was a jet-powered missile with a digital computer and on-board radar to help find the target. The navy found these systems particularly useful because they could be fired from surface ships, not just aircraft carriers, off the coast of enemy nations. Eventually, the military adapted cruise missiles for launch from submarines, airplanes, and land bases.

 

The next generation cruise missile, the Tomahawk, debuted during the Gulf War. It was much more difficult to pick up on radar, flying at a low altitude and powered in flight by a turbofan engine, which emits little heat. Early versions featured Terrain Contour Matching (TERCOM) systems, an on-board computer that compares a stored image of a target with the real target. But unfortunately, when a second missile is fired after the first strike, there is the danger that the target has been altered by the earlier strike and the TERCOM system then fails to find the new match. The computer tries to correct the course, but ends up sending the missile off course. A modified Tomahawk, the AGM-86C, featured a navigation system using Global Positioning System (GPS) technology, allowing for more accurate target hits.

 

Many supporters of cruise missiles promote them as "cheaper and safer" than crewed bomber aircraft. And they have proven useful in situations when sending in bomber aircraft is politically unacceptable or dangerous. Cruise missiles also are extremely hard to track, especially when they are close to the ground, as are their mobile launch pads. Furthermore, land-launched cruise missiles offer an opportunity for a defensive bombing ability without the cost, training, technology, or air superiority required for an aircraft-based bombing campaign. But cruise missiles are not a cheaper option, comparatively. A single Tomahawk cruise missile costs approximately $1.2 million, while a single laser-guided bomb costs $73,000. Multiple conventional bombs can also be carried by a single bomber and can penetrate "hard" targets such as bunkers.

 

As planners look to the modern battlefield, it is these weapons that will very likely dominate defensive planning. During the Cold War, the United States and Canada developed the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) as a multi-layered system to warn and defend these countries against Soviet ICBMs. The modern battlefield demands a similar system on a smaller scale to detect incoming enemy missiles.

 

--Pamela Feltus and Dwayne Day

 

References and Further Reading:

Beon, Yves. Planet Dora: A Memoir of the Holocaust and the Birth of the Space Age. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997.

Burrows, William E. This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age. New York: Random House, 1998.

Cooksley, Peter G. Flying Bomb. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1979.

Crouch, Tom. Aiming for the Stars: The Dreamers and Doers of the Space Age. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999.

DeVorkin, David. Science With a Vengeance. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1992.

Hallion, Richard P. Storm Over Iraq: Air Power and the Gulf War. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992.

Hölsken, Dieter. V-Missiles of the Third Reich, The V-1 and V-2. Hong Kong: Monogram Aviation Publications, 1994.

Neufeld, Michael. The Rocket and the Reich. New York: The Free Press, 1995.

Werrell, Kenneth P. The Evolution of the Cruise Missile. Maxwell AFB, Alabama: Air University Press, 1985.

Winter, Frank N. The First Golden Age of Rocketry: Congreve and Hale Rockets of the Nineteenth Century. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990.

 

Centre for Defence & International Security Studies: www.cdiss.org/hometemp.htm

FAS Tomahawk Page: www.fas.org/man/dod-10/sys/smart/bgm-109.htm

"How Stuff Works: Cruise Missiles." www.howstuffworks.com/cruise-missile.htm

"Rocketry Through the Ages." http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/rocketry

Space Race: Military Origins: www.nasm.si.edu/galleries/gal114/SpaceRace/sec200/sec200.htm

 

Educational Organization	Standard Designation  (where applicable)	Content of Standard
National Council for Geographic Education	Standard 1	How to use maps and other geographic representations, tools, and technologies to process information.
International Technology Education Association	Standard 7	Students will develop an understanding of the influence of technology on history.
International Technology Education Association	Standard 8	Students will develop an understanding of the attributes of design.
National Center for History in the Schools	US History Era 8 Standard 3	The causes and consequences of World War II