The German missile campaign against British and Belgian cities in 1944–45 was the first large-scale use of guided missiles in history with some 23,172 V-1 and 3,172 V-2 missiles launched. The missiles failed to have any decisive effect on the outcome of the war and in April 1945 even Hitler admitted that they had proven to be a total flop. The total tonnage of missiles impacting in London in nine months of attacks was comparable to a single Allied bombing raid of the time. In comparison, the diversion of resources was tremendous, estimated as costing about $3 billion, or about triple the cost of the US atomic bomb program. Another assessment concluded that the resources were comparable to the production of 24,000 fighter aircraft. Of the two missiles, the V-1 was clearly the more effective as it proved simpler to use under actual combat conditions. For example, about 71 percent of the V-1 missiles manufactured were actually launched while only about 49 percent of the V-2s were launched, in no small measure due to the difficulty of supplying liquid oxygen to the launch sites. Furthermore, the US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that the V-1 campaign was disproportionately costly to the Allies due to the extensive costs of the countermeasures such as the diversion of bombing missions and anti-aircraft forces to combat the threat. This may be the case, but the Allies could easily afford such costs, while it is doubtful that the missile program was a wise investment for the overstretched German military economy.
The HDP gun was set up on a hill near Lampaden for firing against Luxe mbourg City. This shows the original test configuration at Misdroy near the Baltic, but the combat site was similar. (MHI)
The missile campaign had some implications for future missile use. The use of mobile missile launchers was clearly more effective during the course of a long campaign than fixed sites, no matter how fortified. On the other hand, the German mobile missile launchers had been developed in haste and were extremely inefficient even if more survivable. For example, the original V-1 site was expected to have a maximum rate of fire of 72 missiles per day but the mobile site had a rate of fire of less than four per day when in actual service. When the US began producing a copy of the V-1 as the Loon missile, they immediately replaced the cumbersome rail catapult with a much more versatile rocket-assisted take-off (RATO) system that made the system truly mobile. The V-2 missile suffered from its use of cryogenic fuel that limited its field deployment due to the technical and logistical complications of liquid oxygen. Although several armies after the war fielded tactical ballistic missiles with cryogenic fuel, all found them to be too inefficient under field conditions until more practical hypergolic and solid fuel alternatives became available. The classic example of this was the Soviet Army, which manufactured copies of the V-2 as the R-1 and R-2 missiles, but which did not begin to field significant numbers of tactical ballistic missiles until the advent of the R-11 (Scud) missile in the late 1950s, which used the newer and more convenient hypergolic fuels.
Even if fortified sites proved impractical under prolonged combat conditions, there was a major revival of the concept in the Cold War with strategic missile systems. All early intercontinental ballistic missiles used fixed sites, if for no other reason than that the missiles were too complicated and too large to operate from mobile launchers. With the advent of nuclear weapons, these sites went underground using hardening techniques that made them far more survivable than the German missile bunkers of World War II so long as opposing intercontinental missiles were not especially accurate. However, as ICBMs became more accurate by the 1970s, fixed silo sites began to fall out of favor due to their vulnerability, and there was a return to mobile basing, including submarines, truck-mobile launchers and even rail-mobile launchers.
The most curious echo of the 1944–45 missile campaign occurred nearly a half-century later in the Middle East. The Iraqi armed forces turned to ballistic missiles and other exotic weapons due to their inability to field a competent strike aviation force, a similar reason to the Luftwaffe case in 1944. The Iraqi missile force deployed both fixed Scud launchers and mobile Scud launchers during the Operation Desert Storm air attacks in 1991, the fixed sites were destroyed almost immediately while the mobile Scud launchers proved a nettlesome if indecisive threat for the whole campaign. And strangely enough, the Iraqis also built a supergun patterned after the German Tausenfüßler, which proved to be every bit as useless. The one major difference between the German and Iraqi cases was the lack of an Iraqi cruise missile arsenal, arguably the more effective of the German vengeance weapons.