On the day in 2015 when my daughter and I visited the sites of Agincourt and Crecy (near each other, northwest of Paris south of Dunkirk, southwest of Waterloo, west of the Ardennes) we saw a well-stocked V-1 museum near Crecy.
Impressive the number of V-1 launched, and near-complete waste of money and effort spent flying them near-randomly towards London. Yes, they had a much larger warhead than a “traditional” railroad gun, but the actual effect of the V-1 and V-2 were negligible in the total war.
Much reconnaissance and Allied air force bomber effort was spent by the Allied air forces trying to stop them, so the V-weapon “distraction” did reduce the number of bombs falling on German cities.
Neat visit.
During Vietnam, I would have liked it if we had mass-produced a large number of V-1-style cheap cruise missiles (with better guidance) and sent them towards Hanoi and Haiphong instead of our B-52s. Have them expend lots of expensive surface-to-air missiles trying to down cheap air-to-surface missiles, while leaving our B-52s out of range of their SAMs.
Freeman Dyson made the same point. He was an intelligence analyst at Bletchley Park during the war and said they were more then happy to encourage Hitler to use all the V2’s he could since they were enormously expensive and did almost no damage compared to ordinary iron bombs. Most of the time they just drilled a hole in the ground.
Obviously fusing for airburts would have changed all that but they weren’t that far ahead, unlike the US...which we demonstrated in the summer of ‘45.
“but the actual effect of the V-1 and V-2 were negligible in the total war.”
The V2 is a fine example. It cost as much as the Manhattan project, literally killed more people building it than in its combat use. And it achieved roughly the effect of one 8th Air Force 1000 plane raid. By late in the war we could pull those off a few times a week.