buzz bombs on u boats

I was wondering did the German navy ever experiment with launching a v1 rocket from a modified u boat? I don't know if it was possible but imagine 5 or 6 subs fitted out with V1's on operation drumbeat 2 !! They surface off the east coast of North America and at a pre-arranged time they all launch and dive and head for home. Imagine the panic a few of these unmanned bombs would have caused if on some predawn morning a couple fell on New york or Boston Or Halifax ? It would not have had any effect on the outcome of the war but I think the allies would of had to commit forces to protect Eastern Cities that could have been used in Europe .

 

I don't know if the Germans ever tried it, but the Americans did. It was known as the Loon, and it was a copy of the Fieseler Fi 103, know as the V-1 or "buzz bomb."

Here is USS Carbonero (SS-337, Balao-class submarine) with a Loon in launching position:



And again after ignition of the solid rocket booster:



The Loon (or more formally the Republic-Ford JB-2, for Jet-Bomb mark 2) was just slighter larger than the V-1 from which it was derived. Rumor has it that an unarmed test firing of the V-1 from the German Baltic coast landed mostly intact in Sweden. Allied intelligence agents either smuggled the missle out or got hold of Swedish intel reports about the weapon. Remains of crashed V-1s recovered in England helped, but since these were armed with almost a ton of amitol-39 they were generally mere fragments instead of intact landings.

If an invasion of Japan became necessary it was planned to use Loons to supplement conventional bomber attacks on Japanese cities.

There was a plan to launch A-4 rockets (official German designation of the V-2 ballistic missile) from submarines against targets in the USA. There were some technical experiments done toward this plan. The plan involved a V-2 packed into a watertight capsule which could be towed behind a large U-boat such as Type IX. To launch the rocket tanks located at the rear of the capsule would be flooded with seawater causing the capsule to rotate from the horizontal towing position to the vertical with the forward end protruding above the ocean surface. The forward end had a cover or hatch which would be removed to expose the V-2 rocket within. The weapon would then be fueled and launched. At least one A-4 was successfully launched from a prototype towing capsule, however the project was deemed unfeasible because of the time required to prepare and fuel the rocket and the inaccuracy of the weapon when launched from a floating container.

 

While the V-1 is technically feasible to do the V-2 isn't. The Germans might have done such a plan and it would have been annoying but little more. First, the USAAF / US Army was already launching their own JB-2 Loons in late 1944 and producing them in limited numbers (engine by Ford Motor Co., airframe by Willy's Overland). The damage such an operation would cause is minimal and its effect on events non-existant.

As an aside, the US got the V-1 simply by collecting parts of crashed ones in England. The first JB-2 flew just 60 days after the Germans made their first launch. The V-2 was a bit harder. The US got ahold of quite a few bits from launched ones (including one that crashed in Sweden). From those parts they had Convair and Rocketdyne begin design and manufacture of a US version under project MX 774. Convair's design team immediately rejected the German airframe as overweight and obsolesent in design. Charlie Bossart, the head of the team, redesigned the V-2 airframe to use the skin of the missile as the walls of the fuel tanks and keep them rigid by use of nitrogen gas that pressurized the tanks. This ingenious design has persisted right through to today in missile / rocket technology. Bossart also gave his missile a detachable payload 'warhead' that made re-entry of the whole missle unnecessary.
Rocketdyne threw out much of the German motor design as inefficent. They built their version using a swivelling nozzle that eliminated the graphite control veins the Germans uses. The overall result was a missile the size of a V-2 that had triple the payload and twice the range. The MX 774 flew in early 1947.

The V-2 is totally impractical. You have to bring a LOX plant with you to fuel the missile. The alcohol fuel could be stored easily enough for the trip but the LOX would require manufacture shortly before loading. This would mean the sub would have to surface and spend hours or likely days making enough LOX to fuel the missile. It would then have to erect and fuel it. Making LOX on a WW 2 sub is probably not a good idea. Making mass quantities is far worse. There is a very good chance the sub would simply blow itself up doing this. WW 2 and early post war era H2O2 boats had a nasty habit of doing this and high test hydrogen peroxide is alot less dangerous than LOX.

 

Thank you; I agree, sending v 1's against North America would have not affected the outcome of the war when you consider the cost which is no doubt one reason why the Germans never tried it. But in terms of a moral booster from a German viewpoint, I think it could have been significant. Imagine the residents of a bombed out German city used by now to seeing the sky full of allied planes bombing them day after day were to get up some day to learn that they had bombed North American cities !! fortunately for us east coasters they never tried ..

 

Interestingly, the US at one point actually considered mass producing the V-1 (JB-2) and using them against Germany. The plan called for Willys Overland and Ford to produce 5,000 per month (about equal to the total German production) and fire these back on German cities. The plan was cancelled as the war was obviously won and the production would have been a waste.

 

I'd like to know more about the MX-774. The information I've turned up is sketchy and occasionally contradictory. One site goes into detail and then shifts suddenly to a description of a an air-breathing cruise missile (the Navaho) such that the details of the two are co-mingled. Another has a photo of a "MX-774" on a launching gantry, but the pictured rocket looks to be a German Wasserfall AA missile.

postwarv2.com has this to say:

With best altitude of 40 miles, it would appear that the MX-774 never equaled the V-2 performance, let alone exceed it, in spite of the advanced technology. Some histories I've read over the past few hours suggest that the MX-774 experienced chronic structural failures that ended test shots prematurely, but that the engineering lessons learned led to the vastly successful Atlas family of boosters.

As to the original topic, i.e. buzz bombs on u-boats, a propaganda broadcast made by German armaments minister Albert Speer suggested strongly that U-boats were about to attack North America with V weapons. The threat prompted a major USN response. Here's the link: Operation Teardrop, a great read considering it's Wikipedia.