Free Triumph and Tragedy (The Second World War) by Winston S. Churchill Page A

following day, the Chiefs of Staff wrote: “The Air Staff agree with this statement and the Chiefs of Staff consider that the War Cabinet should be warned.” The situation was discussed by the Cabinet on July 27 and we considered proposals by Mr. Herbert Morrison which would have involved evacuating about a million people from London.
    Every effort was made to complete the remaining gaps in our knowledge about the size, performance, and characteristics of the rocket. Fragmentary evidence from many sources was pieced together by our Intelligence Services and presented to the Crossbow Committee. From this, it was deduced that the rocket weighed twelve tons, with a one-ton warhead. This light weight explained many things that had puzzled us, such as the absence of elaborate launching arrangements. These calculations were Triumph and Tragedy
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    confirmed when the Royal Aircraft Establishment had the opportunity to examine the wreckage of an actual rocket. It came into our hands as the result of a lucky and freak error in the trials at Peenemünde on June 13, and according to a prisoner the explanation was as follows. For some time the Germans had been using glider bombs against our shipping. These were launched from aircraft and guided to the target by radio. It was now decided to see whether a rocket could be steered in the same way. An expert operator was obtained, and placed in a good position to watch the missile from the start. The Peenemünde experimenters were well accustomed to seeing a rocket rise, and it had not occurred to them that the glider-bomb expert would be surprised by the spectacle. But surprised he was, so much so that he forgot his own part in the procedure. In his astonishment he pushed the control lever well off to the left and held it there. The rocket obediently kept turning to the left, and by the time the operator had pulled himself together it was out of control range and heading for Sweden. There it fell. We soon heard about it, and after some negotiations the remains were brought to Farn-borough, where our experts sorted out the battered fragments with noteworthy success.
    Before the end of August we knew exactly what to expect.
    This is shown by the following tables, which compare figures given in a Scientific Intelligence report dated August 26 with those discovered after the war in German records.

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    TOTAL STOCKS AND MONTHLY PRODUCTION
    The rocket was an impressive technical achievement. Its thrust was developed in a jet from the combustion of alcohol and liquid oxygen, nearly four tons of the former and five of the latter being consumed in about a minute. To force these fuels into the jet chamber at the required rate needed a special pump of nearly a thousand horse-power.
    The pump in its turn was worked by a turbine driven by hydrogen peroxide. The rocket was controlled by gyroscopes or by radio signals operating on large graphite vanes placed behind the jet to deflect the exhaust gases and so steer the rocket. It first rose vertically for six miles or so, and automatic controls then turned it over to climb with increasing speed at about forty-five degrees. When the speed was sufficient for the desired range further controls

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    cut off the fuels from the jet, and the missile then flew in a gigantic parabola, reaching a height of about fifty miles and falling about two hundred miles away from the launching point. Its maximum speed was about four thousand miles an hour, and the whole flight took no more than three or four minutes.
    At the end of August it seemed that our armies might expel the enemy from all territory within the two-hundred-mile range of the rocket from London, but they managed to hold Walcheren and The Hague. On September 8, a week after the main VI bombardment ceased, the Germans launched their first two rockets against London. 6 The first V2 fell at Chiswick at seventeen minutes to seven in the evening, the other at Epping