WI - British / Western Allied analogue of the V-1 flying bomb

Admittingly know nothing about the subject though did the British / Western Allies ever develop a pre-war / war-time analogue of the V-1 flying bomb, etc.

What caught my interest is a project for a reed-valve 2-stroke powered unmanned flying bomb developed by Dr Joe Ehrlich (of EMC Motorcycle fame - click right-pointing Green arrow for rest of PressReader article) that was rejected by the Air Ministry for being contrary to the Geneva convention, six months prior to the Nazis launching their similar V-1.

Is anything more known about this particular project (along with other similar projects)?
 
Last edited:
Admittingly know nothing about the subject though did the British / Western Allies ever develop a pre-war / war-time analogue of the V-1 flying bomb, etc.

What caught my interest is a project for a reed-valve 2-stroke powered unmanned flying bomb developed by Dr Joe Ehrlich (of EMC Motorcycle fame - click right-pointing Green arrow for rest of PressReader article) that was rejected by the Air Ministry for being contrary to the Geneva convention, six months prior to the Nazis launching their similar V-1.

Is anything more known about this particular project (along with other similar projects)?

JB 2 Loon as elsewhere mentioned. I don't know about the Brits but the US actually developed or researched a pretty impressive number of guided bombs, cruise missiles, "assault gliders", glide bombs, and the like. Project Aphrodite and it's USN counterpart (a program using old worn out B17s/B24s packed with explosives and modified with crude short range radio guidance systems) partially thanks to Joe Kennedy Jr (JFK's older brother) dying in one of it's missions.

The US planned to build 75K Loons alone in a matter of about a year. The Loon was mostly a reverse engineered and improved V1 based off of an early model V1 that crash landed on a Swedish island. After the Swedes took notes and studied it they passed it onto the Brits and then onto us. The plan was to use all 75K as part of the indescribably massive pre invasion bombardments of the Japanese home islands. I think a few were used but the war ended before mass scale usage could begin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic-Ford_JB-2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LBD_Gargoyle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_XBDR
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_TDR
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gorgon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VB-6_Felix
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GB-1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:World_War_II_guided_missiles_of_the_United_States

The Nazi's get a shitload of attention paid to their relative handful of projects while the US's literal dozens of projects (many of which while of various success did see limited combat usage) get virtually none.
 
The problem with the V-1 and analogs was that they had some use if used in very large numbers against an area target like a city. Guided bombs like the Fritz-X and Allied analogs were decent against precision targets, although warheads were small. The USA could produce lots of these without the sort of waste of resources Germany had with V-weapons. How effective these sorts of weapons would be against Japanese defense if OLYMPIC had happened is not clear.
 
The problem with the V-1 and analogs was that they had some use if used in very large numbers against an area target like a city. Guided bombs like the Fritz-X and Allied analogs were decent against precision targets, although warheads were small. The USA could produce lots of these without the sort of waste of resources Germany had with V-weapons. How effective these sorts of weapons would be against Japanese defense if OLYMPIC had happened is not clear.

The cruise missiles probably wouldn't have had that much of a effect. By that point there just wasn't that much to blow up.

I mean this was at the point where they were strapping MLRS on submarines because there weren't any ships left to sink.

Of course tens of thousands deployed in a relatively brief period would probably have some small effect. I do wonder if there would have been some psychological effect.
 

DougM

Donor
I think with the level of technology available during the war that V1 type weapons were not all that practical and if you side is winning and or has air superiority that they are in general not going to be built. It is only when you are in trouble that they truly can be justified. They are “that” close to be ready for prime time but just not quite there yet but with a pinch of added need/desperation then the balance sheet changes and you can better justify them.
So if you want the Western Alies to put them into production you have to change something. Perhaps even higher loss rates on the bombers and a delayed D-Day.
 
I think with the level of technology available during the war that V1 type weapons were not all that practical and if you side is winning and or has air superiority that they are in general not going to be built. It is only when you are in trouble that they truly can be justified. They are “that” close to be ready for prime time but just not quite there yet but with a pinch of added need/desperation then the balance sheet changes and you can better justify them.
So if you want the Western Alies to put them into production you have to change something. Perhaps even higher loss rates on the bombers and a delayed D-Day.

Or your the US where industrial capacity and resources exist to simultaneously build huge fleets of utterly massive bombers, shit loads of long range top quality escort fighters, the largest naval forces in fucking human history, an entire new field of weaponry in the form of atomic bombs, and still maintain a civilian standard of living that was probably the highest in the entire world despite fighting enemies on what three or four fronts at any given time?

Some of the more precision guided bombs also could have proved pretty useful. It's just that by the time they came into service there wasn't anything left to destroy.
 
Top