Paul Hunt wrote:
>
> > Had it not been for Spitfires (one of which I am pleased to say, I have
> > flown).
>
> You lucky, lucky person.
>
> > A Spitfire is the only known aircraft to have engaged a V2 rocket in armed
> > combat. (See Raymond Baxter's
> > autobiography.
> >
> > Geoff Love, The English Connection.
> >
> >
>
> Don't have the book but are you sure it was a V2? I've always understood that
> V2's came down vertically at faster than the speed of sound. Fighter planes
> were used to shoot down V1's and tip them off course by flipping
> them over with a wing tip. Ironically, V2's are said to have caused less
> damage than the V1's even though they contained more explosive power. The V2
> exploded below ground level and the V1 above, the V2 caused total destruction
> over a small area while the V1 caused less damage but over a wider area. My
> Mother worked in the City of London during the Blitz and it was a habit to go
> to a particular Post Office at lunchtime on the same day each week, except one
> day she decided not to go. A V1 exploded in the street right outside that
>Post
> Office that lunchtime killing everyone in it and in the street.
>
> PaulH
> 73 Roadster (HD&H)
> 75 V8 (DD)
I well remember towards the end of the war watching Spitfires chasing
the V1 flying bombs (commonly called Doodle Bugs or Buzz bombs) and
either flipping them or shooting at them. Most of the time the fighter
pilot did not want to hit it as the resulting explosion made it
dangerous from a debris point of view. ( And, thinking of exhaust noise,
try listening to one of them!) Raymond Baxter was flying wing man on a
sortie over France towards the end of the war, and both of them had been
engaged in low level strafing ops. Upon pulling up and breaking left,
his flight leader saw a V2 rocket in the initial phase of launch rising
vertically from a clearing in the forest directly ahead of him. He
fired his cannon, but missed. Baxter recalls how great was his relief
that they missed the thing, because, had the leader hit it, they
probably would not have survived.
Some 18 years ago I met a man called Rudi Opitz during the course of my
aviation activities here in the States. He drove an MGB in which he
came to the airfield on occasions. He was a test pilot for
Messerschmidt during the war, and had been in charge of the development
of the Rocket plane, the Me 163 Komet (see Rocket Fighter by William
Green, Random House, 1971). I mentioned that I had read in Walter
Dornberger's history of the German rocket industry,"V2" that the
scientists thought that when the V2 went supersonic, it wobbled, and
went off course. To test the theory, Opitz told me, he strapped a cine
camera to his helmet and flew his rocket plane towards a V2 as it was
being launched. As the rocket rose, so he flew vertically alongside it,
and filmed the bloody thing as it passed Mach 1. According to him
"there vas never a vobble, und ze rocket flew straight to it's target".
When I said "I know, I was at the receiving end", he hastily changed the
subject, and talked about how he loved his British sports car!
Geoff Love, The English Connection
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