What+were+the+famous+V-Weapons+of+Nazi+Germany?

As Nazi Germany was starting to lose its power and its efforts in World War II started to seem futile, Adolf Hitler decided to try one last ditch effort in order to try and save Germany's chances. This last ditch effort consisted of the famous V-Weapons. The V in V-Weapons stands for vengeance, which is exactly what the Nazis goal was with these assorted weapons. The weapons had almost no military value to them and were solely used for terror attacks on civilian populations around Europe. In this attempt at scaring civilians the Nazis hoped to make the main Allied countries divert their focus from advancing towards Germany to the safety of their people. By the end of the war 15,000 people had been killed by V-Weapons and 47,000 more had been wounded from the attacks.To read about V-Weapon attacks on Britain go [|here]. BBC says about V-Weapon attacks that "The greatest single tragedy took the lives of 121 people when a V-1 landed on the Guards Chapel at Wellington Barracks during a service" (Cleary).

The first vengeance weapon that was developed was the V-1 bomb. This was a self-piloted aircraft drone that carried explosives on a timer and would detonate and cause damage to its surroundings. The drone was given the nicknames "buzz bomb" and "doodlebug" by London and were usually not given much attention. These weapons were very easy to see in the sky, making them a very easy target to shoot down before they could explode. The design for the V-1 consisted of mainly plywood and sheet steel, which was good for the Germans because it allowed them to devote their more important resources towards other parts of their military. Another of the Nazi V-Weapons was the V-2 rocket. This rocket was the first ballistic missile to ever be developed, which showed the advanced military concepts that the Nazi's had developed. Since it was a ballistic missile, it came down from the sky without warning, making it almost impossible to stop them from making impact. The launching bases for the V-2 rockets were bombed by the Allies after D-Day, so the Nazis had to use mobile launching sites to launch the missiles. The last V-Weapon was the V-3 cannon. This was never actually completed, and was bombed by the British. If it had actually been completed, the V-3 cannon would have fired up to 300 missiles per hour. The missiles would have been smaller sized but would have fired in higher quantities.

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