Restoring the Museum’s V-2 Missile

One of the icons of the National Air and Space Museum’s location on the National Mall, before we began our massive renovation project, was the black-and-white German V-2 ballistic missile. Ever since the building opened in July 1976, it stood in Space Hall, which in 1997 was revised to become Space Race. That rocket will return in a new guise, with green camouflage paint, when the hall reopens in a few years as RTX Living in the Space Age.

When we closed Space Race in spring 2022 to make way for future construction, the V-2 was one of the large objects that had to be disassembled and removed. That provided a long-sought opportunity to investigate the artifact’s history and repaint it as a military missile. The German Army called it the A-4, but Nazi propagandists renamed it Vergeltungswaffe 2 (Vengeance Weapon 2 or V-2) in November 1944, two months after it was first fired against Western European cities, primarily London and Antwerp. The Wehrmacht and SS launched over 3,000 rockets, killing more than 5,000 people. But more than twice that many concentration camp workers for the V-2 program died as a result of disease, malnourishment, and murder. The Museum acknowledged those facts in 1990, when curator David DeVorkin put a new, much expanded exhibit around the base of the missile. But the black-and-white test scheme, modeled after the first successful flight vehicle, still obscured its history as a terror weapon produced by slave labor.

The Museum first restored our V-2 in spring 1976, just before the opening of the building on the National Mall. Following what was then standard aviation museum practice, the exterior paint was stripped and sandblasted off, removing virtually all evidence of its earlier history. The question then was, what paint to put on the vehicle? Fred Durant, the head of the Astronautics Department (now the Department of Space History) wanted to place the missile in Space Hall and emphasize its connection to spaceflight. The V-2 had been the first human object to go into space and it greatly influenced postwar missile and launch vehicle development in the United States, the Soviet Union, and France. Moreover, Durant was a close personal friend of Dr. Wernher von Braun, the technical director of the German Army liquid-fuel rocket project and then a leading rocket developer for the U.S. Army and NASA. The V-2 paint scheme that best fit Durant’s space agenda was the one carried by the rocket launched on October 3, 1942. The third launch attempt and the first to succeed, this flight figured prominently in the 1952 memoirs of Gen. Walter Dornberger, von Braun’s superior and the head of German Army rocket development. Both in 1942 and later, he labeled this launch as an epochal moment in human history, the beginning of the Space Age—an interpretation widely influential in the West during the Cold War Space Race. 

As David DeVorkin and I documented in a 2011 article, the Museum did not completely follow the black-and white scheme, which was designed to make film documentation of test launches easier to interpret. The 1976 restorers did not add the original logo—a nearly naked woman on a crescent Moon—likely because Durant and museum leadership found it too risqué. As to what else was done during that restoration, the artifact record had very little documentation. It told us that the Royal Air Force Museum in Britain had provided control system components for the tail. Other parts, it was not clear which, came from a damaged V-2 transferred by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. I guessed that our rocket was an empty shell, as we had two V-2 propellant tanks on a shelf in our Paul E. Garber Facility. I had no idea if there was anything in the guidance section under the warhead and whether the engine bell seen from the Museum floor meant that there was a full propulsion system in the tail, or just a combustion chamber and nozzle. 

Indeed, when the contractors and restoration specialists disassembled it in 2022, the main fuselage and the guidance system were empty, but there was an almost complete engine set, with the steam generator and turbopump system used to push the liquid oxygen and alcohol propellants into the combustion chamber. The propulsion system was sitting loosely in the tail, as the ring that was supposed to bolt the thrust frame to the center-section fuselage was missing. One of my early decisions was to have the tanks installed, as there was no prospect of publicly displaying them and they took up a lot of storage space. Installing them also improved the structural integrity of the rocket.

As curator of the V-2, I had already decided that the best paint scheme, if we ever got a chance to redo it, would be the end-of-war German standard: a plain “gray-green” camouflage. The V-2s and components captured by the U.S. Army in spring 1945 had almost all been produced in the Nazi regime’s final months. But the only information we had on our rocket’s earlier appearance were a couple of black-and-white images taken when the U.S. Air Force transferred it to the Smithsonian in 1949.

David and I had assumed that the spotted camouflage was German, but a couple of years after we published that article, Tracy Dungan, who runs the enthusiast website V2rocket.com, told me that it corresponded to no German scheme. It had to be an American attempt to dress the missile up in pseudo-German guise, probably for an air show, something seen on other captured German aircraft and missiles, including ones that ended up in our collection.

Museum restoration specialist Matt Voight, Tracy, and I set out to find images of the rocket before 1949. (Matt is the specialist responsible for restoring the central and forward sections of the V-2.) There was always the hope that a missile that was identifiably ours might turn up in old photos. I particularly hoped to find the rocket’s original serial number. The Army Air Forces (the U.S. Air Force’s name before it became an independent service in September 1947) had exhibited V-2s in two fall 1945 shows featuring captured German weapons: at Freeman Field, Indiana, in September and at Wright Field, Ohio, in October. Tracy Dungan had collected images from both shows for his website. It soon became clear that the one displayed at Freeman was ours—it had the paint seen in 1949 images and identifying marks and damage were identical.

The V-2 displayed at Wright Field had not been repainted, had a mostly readable serial number, and was noticeably more damaged than the Freeman one. Moreover, the Museum’s registrar files include the shipping document for our V-2 (and other objects). It went from Freeman Field to the Air Force storage area at Park Ridge, Illinois (now O’Hare Airport) in spring 1946, which confirmed that the Freeman one is the V-2 in our collection. Unfortunately, we found no identifiable picture of it before September 1945, when the spotted camouflage was likely applied for the Indiana show.

When Matt Voight, Matthew Swasta (the Museum restoration specialist responsible for the tail section and engine), and others in the Museum’s Preservation and Restoration Unit stripped the black-and-white paint, almost all earlier evidence was indeed gone, but they did find a few remnants of green consistent with late-war German camouflage.

They also removed a lot of body filler applied in 1976 to disguise the dings and dents in the fuselage. I decided that only the largest of the holes would be refilled, both to keep out dust and to improve its appearance. But the many remaining imperfections preserve the reality of an artifact that was dimpled by spot welding during manufacturing, but also roughly handled after capture by the United States. The perennial question of Museum visitors, “Why does it look so dented?”, will return in force after the rocket is reinstalled.

Disassembly revealed a couple of intriguing mysteries. We have no idea where the nearly complete propulsion system came from, as it appears there was none in the Freeman Field rocket. One possible source is the second V-2 sent up from Huntsville in 1975 to serve as a spare parts supply. Matt Voight also immediately noticed that the two center-section half shells, which enclose the tanks, are different. Their interior construction is not identical and they have different reinforcements at the forward end, a response to the “airburst” problem of missiles breaking up upon reentry during tests in 1943-44.

In a remarkable piece of research, Matt Voight used the original German drawings digitized on the Deutsches Museum Munich website to demonstrate that one half was manufactured in mid-1943 and the other half in early 1945. The Museum’s rocket is even more of a composite artifact than we previously had thought. Both halves have two air vents, even though production missiles had them only on one side, so in effect our V-2 has one “wrong” side. The Freeman Field air show photos seem to show that the 1943 half was already on the vehicle. Most likely, to create an attractive missile for the show, the Army Air Forces unit put together the best components they had and painted them. But how a half shell manufactured more than two years earlier survived the war and made it to the United States is a complete mystery. Matt Voight also found the remnants of a serial number on the 1943 half, which he believes is 10W/4148, a number consistent with a missile assembled at the Peeneműnde test facility, rather than by the Mittelwerk underground plant staffed by slave labor. The other half shell and the rest of the major components are consistent with early 1945 drawings, which is exactly what I expected for objects captured at the end of the war.

Given the traces of original paint and the manufacturing date of most of the rocket, I concluded that my original decision to paint it in all “gray-green” camouflage was still the correct one. Because the remnant serial number on one half shell did not apply to the rest of the artifact and in any case is arguable, and we had no earlier photographic evidence than September 1945, I decided that we would not put a serial number on the two halves of the center section. In order to properly bolt the propulsion-system thrust frame to the center section fuselage, the Preservation and Restoration Unit fabricated a new ring based on German drawings. This summer the shop began painting the fuselage sections. The result is something that looks authentic to missiles pushed out of the Mittelwerk in the last three months of the war.

In a parallel project, Duane Decker of the Preservation and Restoration Unit redid the V-2 launch stand, which is original German mobile launch equipment transferred by NASA Marshall in 1975. Painted black, it was used to support the missile in Space Hall/Space Race. When he stripped it, he found no original paint. I consulted with Tracy Dungan, who supplied 1944 images that showed German stands painted in “dark yellow,” the late-war Wehrmacht vehicle camouflage. Duane painted ours in that color and it will once again support the rocket when it goes back on display in RTX Living in the Space Age. 

This time the stand and rocket will be on top of a pedestal in the Missile Pit, the hole in the center of the gallery floor that allows taller rockets to fit under the roof. Lifted up to floor level, visitors will be able to see the stand and the rocket much as they would have looked during the V-2 campaign of 1944-1945. I very much look forward to the day when we again assemble and mount this important and deadly icon of the missile and space age.

Michael J. Neufeld recently retired 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).