At a quarter past four in the morning on the 13th of June 1944, the world's first cruise missile fell out of the sky onto a railway bridge in the East End of London. It killed six people. One of them was 19-year-old Ellen Woodcraft. Another was her eight-month-old son. Their husband and father was a soldier in Normandy. He would not learn of their deaths for days.
In this episode, Mat McLachlan tells the story of Hitler's V-1 — the buzz bomb, the doodlebug, the first robot weapon ever used in war. From the secret laboratories at Peenemünde to the photo-interpretation tables at Medmenham, from the Guards Chapel disaster on Waterloo Sunday to the Tempest pilots tipping flying bombs out of the sky with their wingtips, this is the eighty-eight-day campaign that brought a new kind of terror to a city that thought the Blitz was over.
Through authentic voices from the summer of 1944, we hear George Orwell guiltily hoping the next bomb falls on someone else, the diarist Vere Hodgson writing that the brain of man has gone so far beyond his morals that the only thing to do is scrap him and begin again, and Field Marshal Alan Brooke recording his disgust as the Home Secretary panics in front of the War Cabinet. We meet R.V. Jones, the 28-year-old scientist who'd been hunting the V-weapons since 1939, and the Double Cross Committee that fed Berlin a brilliant lie that saved central London — at the cost of the working-class boroughs to the south. We follow Wing Commander Roland Beamont and the Belgian ace Remy Van Lierde hunting buzz bombs over Romney Marsh, and the Australian pilot Ken Collier who accidentally invented the wingtip technique that would become the defining image of the doodlebug summer.
Why did Hitler refuse to aim the V-1 at the Allied invasion ports, where it might have changed the war? Why did the British government deliberately steer bombs onto Croydon and Wandsworth instead of Westminster — and keep it secret for thirty years? How did a robot bomb costing five thousand Reichsmarks come closer to ending the war than any other weapon Germany ever built? Mat explores these questions through the words of those who were there — the scientists, the pilots, the cabinet ministers, and the Londoners who lived under the buzz.
A clear-eyed look at one of the most futuristic weapons of the Second World War, and the man who threw it away. Hitler had the world's first cruise missile. He used it to kill people in their beds. And he lost the war anyway.
“Hitler, and all of us, hoped this new weapon would sow horror, confusion and paralysis in the enemy camp. We far overestimated its effect.” — Albert Speer, Nazi Minister of Armaments
Episode Length: 40 minutes
Features: First-hand accounts from George Orwell, Vere Hodgson, Field Marshal Alan Brooke and Hans Speidel; Wing Commander Roland Beamont's recollections of hunting the V-1; the testimony of fireman Harold Chisnell from the Imperial War Museum sound archive; Hitler's confrontation with Rommel and Rundstedt at Margival on the eve of the Normandy collapse; and the story of the Double Cross deception that saved central London.
Presenter: Mat McLachlan
Producer: Jess Stebnicki
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