MODERN ROCKETRY AND LESSONS LEARNED

The V–1s and V–2s fired against London and the European continent during the summer of 1944 survive today as cruise missiles and mobileplatform- launched ballistic missiles. Their range, maneuverability, accuracy, and destructive power have improved dramatically, but the offensive capabilities have been countered by improvements in defensive technology —surface-to-air missiles, electronic countermeasures, and antiballistic missile missiles.

More than five decades later, the key lessons of Operation CROSSBOW still apply. In the Gulf War of 1991, when Iraqi president Saddam Hussein ordered the launch of tactical ballistic (SCUD) missiles against Israeli cities, many people feared that the warheads might contain poison gas, biological, or perhaps even nuclear weapons. The SCUDS served a political purpose, not a military one: to draw Israel into the war and thus prompt Arab forces to withdraw, thereby undermining the United Nations coalition against the Iraqis. The vengeance weapons proved ineffective. The warheads contained conventional explosives and, to preserve the coalition, Israeli leaders chose to withhold retaliation. Like their predecessors in World War II, the allied leaders of Operation DESERT STORM suggested that the best defense against cruise and ballistic missiles was to knock them out, if possible, before they were fired. A preemptive strike against mobile targets, however, is not always possible. Even with overwhelming air superiority and top aerial priority given to the task, the World War II Allies made no significant dent in the German V–1 launch rate. The modified sites of the V–1 and the mobile launching platforms of the V–2s were too easily camouflaged and too difficult to destroy using heavy bombers or fighter-bombers. Fifty years later, SCUD mobile launching platforms proved no easier to find and destroy.

On the other hand, ground forces can overrun enemy missile sites or push the launch batteries out of range. In World War II, this strategy ultimately defeated the V-weapon threat. Seen in that light, the combination of Operations CROSSBOW and OVERLORD was grand-strategy thinking at its best. Allied leaders knew that the invasion of France could succeed only with air superiority secured, and that V-weapons could disrupt the invasion or the reinforcement of the beachheads; therefore, Operation CROSSBOW had to delay the threat of the V–1s and V–2s long enough to ensure victory on the ground.

The best defense, as it turned out, was not destruction but delay and the use of air power to achieve limited victories as part of a greater combined arms campaign. German use of V-weapons came too late to change the outcome of an overwhelming war of attrition. Although it is not clear that CROSSBOW actually delayed the Germans’ use of the weapons, one can ponder what the outcome of the war might have been if the Allies had done nothing to impede the V-weapon systems. The British and Americans 40 Gruen.qxd 3/22/99 7:10 AM Page 40 diverted enough resources—about 20 percent of their total air power— from their combined strategic bombing campaign against Germany to reduce the V-weapon threat from something that could change the course of the war to something that could only delay the inevitable Allied victory.