used against london beginning september 1944, V2 attacts claimed 2,754 lives and injured around 6,000. that’s roughly two killed per missile. the vengeance project cost $3.0 billion (based on wiki, not sure if it’s in present-day terms) compared with $1.9 billion for the manhattan project.
one V2 missile required distilling ethanol from 30 tonnes of potatoes. the entire V2 project used up one third of germany’s annual potato/alcohol production.
how could a weapon this expensive be used as a weapon with strategic/tactical value?
Well, given that the accuracy of the V2 was “100% within 18km” (11.2 miles) and 50% landed within 4.5km (2.8 miles), it has to be used again large targets like London. Aiming at a military base is not going to be very effective because of the very small chance of hitting a ship in port or a barracks building.
the general area where you have the deep-water harbor in normandy would have been ok (that’s what every war book says.) damage may not have been great but it would have been enough to disrupt port operations sufficient to keep the allies from breaking out.
Actually, more V2’s were used against Antwerp than London – more than half of all rockets launched. So the Germans had the right idea of using it against a port. The accuracy just wasn’t there.
There was the “Wasserfall” surface-to-air missile, which was being tested by the end of the war. Albert Speer, for his part, notes in his memoirs that he later believed that Germany would have been much better served focusing on that missile rather than the V-2.
My own tests of a simulated Wasserfall I built myself, I should say, actually resulted in much poorer performance for the missile than the specifications indicated…but to my surprise, they matched up very well with the figures for a Soviet copy of the Wasserfall built after the war.
Back to the V-2—changing the warhead to carry chemical weapons, such as Germany’s nerve agents which were unknown to the Allies, might make it more effective, although this would probably cause the Allies retaliate with their own chemical arsenal, which could be much more devastating. Churchill, in fact, issued a memo in 1944 requesting a study on using chemical weapons against German cities, partially as retaliation for (conventional) V-weapon attacks.
And even if they managed to hold out a few months longer by “going chemical,” Germany might only succeed in making themselves available for an Allied nuclear retaliation!
Probably Hitler’s meddling. He always wanted to focus on the offense and gave only lukewarm support at best to any defensive weapons. That’s why he went with the V2’s - they let him attack England even if the cost of the attacks was ridiculously high for the small amount of damage done.
To give an idea of how bad an idea a V-2 was, the payload of a V-2 was 2200 pounds of explosives. A B-17 on a long range mission could carry a 4500 pound bomb payload. And the B-17 could fly another mission afterwards.
The V-1 and V-2 were terror weapons, so the question becomes, how effective are terror weapons strategically? Historically, I believe, not very. In most cases they just harden the resolve of the terrorized citizenry, as was the case in WWII England.
Here’s an informative SDMB thread on the subject, which includes my parent’s up close and personal experience with the rockets.
It only made sense with a nuclear payload, so the intel people reckoned. Why would the Germans be wasting all that effort just to deliver a ton of high-explosive. The sinister silo-type constructions under way at Wizernes reinforced this view.