Restoring the Museum’s V-1 Missile

A little over a year ago, I recounted the restoration of our German V-2 ballistic missile. Now the Preservation and Restoration Unit at our Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center is completing its compatriot, the V-1 cruise missile. which we will display in the Jay I. Kislak World War II in the Air gallery, which opens in 2026.

Of Nazi Germany’s two “vengeance weapons,” the low-flying, pulsejet-powered V-1 was launched in much greater numbers in 1944-1945—more than 22,000 as opposed to about 3,000 V-2s. Frequently referred to as the “buzz bomb” or “doodlebug,” the V-1 was also more effective. Its noisy approach was psychologically disturbing to targeted populations and it diverted Allied anti-aircraft resources into defending against it. Like the V-2 rocket, the great majority of V-1s were fired against two cities: London and Antwerp. The cruise missile caused over 10,000 deaths in its target areas, and thousands more concentration-camp prisoners died in the production program. Yet, both weapons fell far short of the hopes of the Nazi leadership: knocking Britain out of the war, or at least preventing the Allies from using the Belgian port of Antwerp to supply their armies in northwest Europe. The two missiles were strategic failures, albeit ones that greatly influenced the Cold War nuclear arms race.

From the opening of the Museum’s building on the National Mall in July 1976 until 2021, the V-1 hung over the V-2 in Space Hall. In 1997, that gallery was redone as the Space Race exhibition, which lasted until we closed the east end as part of our renovation project to reimagine the whole building. The V-1’s inclusion in space galleries had always been a little incongruous, as it had nothing to do with space. A cruise missile is an uncrewed, one-way jet airplane carrying a warhead; it travels only in the atmosphere. But the V-1’s placement there certainly symbolized how the two “vengeance weapons” were linked in everyone’s mind. Moreover, the “buzz bomb” was a precursor to Cold War cruise missiles, one of which, the Tomahawk, also hung there for some years and is now on loan to the National Museum of the American Indian.

As the longtime curator of early rockets and missiles, I often wondered about the history of the artifact hanging from the ceiling, but it was fairly inaccessible. I was not even 100% sure it was German, as we had several examples of an American version, the U.S. Navy Loon, in our collection and there had been numbering mix-ups before. In 1976, our restorers painted the V-1 after an example in London’s Imperial War Museum, with Luftwaffe camouflage dark-green upper surfaces, sky-blue lower surfaces, and a yellow warhead section. The British example has a German practice warhead with original yellow paint. But I saw no reason why we should keep that color scheme when we restored it again. It was not how deployed V-1s looked.

Like our V-2 missile, the V-1’s artifact number (1960-0341) goes back to the U.S. Air Force’s gift of its World War II collection in 1949. Many of those aircraft and missiles appeared in an Army Air Forces airshow at Freeman Field, Indiana, in late September 1945. In the overhead view of our V-2 at Freeman, you can see a V-1 to the left and to the right a piloted V-1 prototype missing a warhead (that version was for an abortive Nazi suicide program that mirrored the Japanese kamikaze). In front is the Messerschmitt Me 163 rocket fighter now displayed at our Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. A closeup of what is probably the same V-1 shows that it was more complete than the one we eventually received. Notably, it has the small range-counting propeller device on its nose, missing from ours. Weld lines on the engine tube look similar to our missile, so it is possible that this is our V-1—minus the nose.

In spring 1946, a V-1 was shipped to the AAF’s Park Ridge, Illinois, storage facility (now on the territory of Chicago O’Hare Airport), where the collection was to be held for transfer to the Smithsonian. When the new National Air Museum had to empty that facility in the mid-1950s, the V-1 was shipped, along with many other aircraft and missiles, to a newly created storage site in Silver Hill, Maryland, now called the Paul E. Garber Facility. The “buzz bomb” was finally catalogued in 1960, along with the V-2. The scale of the Air Force gift, plus shortages in personnel and budget for a still tiny and underfunded Air Museum, meant that it took a long time to process.

In the early 1970s, Congress at last funded a dedicated building on the National Mall for the National Air and Space Museum, as we had been renamed in 1966. As our restoration team rushed to finish the artifacts for the opening in July 1976, the nation’s bicentennial, they assembled the V-1 out of the components we had in storage or perhaps recalled from loan. No records were kept, and the shop followed the then-typical air museum tradition of stripping the old paint off thoroughly, leaving almost no clues about its history.

After our V-1 was taken off display in 2021 and delivered to the Udvar-Hazy Center, restoration specialist Christopher Reddersen finally was able to take it apart. The major and unpleasant discovery is that the warhead and forward guidance section was only a wooden replica of American origin, possibly 1960s or 1970s. Was it created during the 1976 restoration? We just don’t know. The nose cap is authentically German and included the tube for the missing propeller device. Rear of the warhead, everything is also of German World War II manufacture, as is evidenced by manufacturer parts stamps and the general methods of construction. The wings are wooden, which indicate that they were probably made late in the war, when wood was widely used in the Third Reich’s aircraft industry as aluminum shortages became more and more desperate. Another of Reddersen’s intriguing findings is the pulsejet tube’s metal is scorched on the back half. It appears that the engine, which operated with a closely spaced series of fuel-air detonations that produced a deafening buzzing sound, was fired in a demonstration, possibly at the Freeman Field airshow.

One new component he integrated is an original German airlog propeller. In a well-timed stroke of luck, a donor offered us one in 2021. Colin Donovan’s grandfather, U.S. Army 1^st Lt. James J. McFague, had brought it home as a war souvenir. Since the device was still in original factory packing, it is possible that McFague picked it up during his service in the occupation of Germany. In operation, the number of times the propeller turned approximated the distance flown to the target. When a preset number was reached, the device sent a signal to cut off the engine and initiate a terminal dive.

Since we had no information as to what German paint might originally have been on the components, Chris Reddersen advocated a mismatched camouflage scheme, as is seen in some historic photos. Since the major fuselage and engine sections were often made by different manufacturers and only put together during final assembly, the Luftwaffe green and sky-blue patterns sometimes did not match up at the join lines. I was fine with this idea, as was my successor as curator of early rockets and missiles, Colleen Anderson. After painting the components in a dark red primer, he applied the blue all over the missile, as was German practice, and then added the dark green patterns on top. Finally, in December 2024, he was able to reassemble the entire missile as a test for its eventual hanging in the Jay I. Kislak World War II in the Air gallery.

When we open that exhibit in 2026, the V-1 will hang over part of the final unit—Super Weapons—about the exotic new missiles, aircraft, and bombs that appeared in the last year of the war. Sections on the German “wonder weapons,” Japanese kamikaze suicide aircraft, and American atomic bombs illustrate the search for something that would change the course of the war. Of the three, only the atomic bomb was anything close to decisive.

The German weapons were not only strategically ineffective, they were also manufactured in horrifying conditions by forced labor. An exhibit case to the right of the V-1 will show rare artifacts from the Mittelwerk underground factory near Nordhausen, Germany, and the adjacent Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. Both V-1s and V-2s were assembled there, leading to at least ten thousand deaths due to starvation, disease, and mistreatment. (Another ten thousand plus died in the Mittelbau-Dora camp system from projects and causes not related to V-weapons production.) And there were many more concentration camps and forced-labor factories producing components for those programs. So, when you contemplate the newly repainted V-1, it is well to remember the fate of so many victims, both in the target areas and in the factories that produced the world’s first operational cruise missile.

^{Michael J. Neufeld retired in 2023 as a Senior Curator in the Space History Department. He was the longtime curator of early rockets and missiles and is the author of The Rocket and the Reich (1995) and Von Braun (2007).}