Back when I was in grade school, the advertisement page in the back of Sergeant Rock of Easy Company comics, in addition to the ads for body building and X-ray spectacles, would occasionally offer plans to build a pulse-jet powered bicycle.

Now how cool would that be? If I had one of those, I would have gone from a dorky geek to the coolest kid in the neighborhood. Possibly in the universe. Girls would pay attention to me instead of kicking me in the shins. Maybe I could put wings on it.

Alas, I was never able to save up enough spare change to get the pulse jet plans. Although in my mature years - well, my older years, anyway - I suspect that might have been fortunate.

Antwerp and London were not as lucky as me; the mechanism of that ill-luck was not pulse-jet bicycles (although that would have been pretty interesting) but pulse-jet cruise missiles.

Like most Osprey books, V-1 Flying Bomb 1942-52 is rather expensive for its size, extensively illustrated and mostly addressed at military modelers. It did debunk a couple of myths I had picked up here and there about the V-1:

I read somewhere that explosive charges blew the wings off the V-1 at the end of the run. As it turns out what actually happened – or, more correctly, what was intended to happen – was small detonators blew the elevators into a locked, “up” position and the missile went into a dive. The book mentions that the hammering caused by the pulse jet often caused structural damage to the airframe during the flight, so I imagine every once and a while the wings really did fall off. Someone probably saw this and concluded it was intentional. Similarly, observers reported many flights ending in “eerie silence” during the final dive; the missile was intended to power-dive so it’s probable that those were cases when the engine just hammered itself to bits.

Like a number of late-war German efforts, the V-1 program was counterproductive. In the last six months of 1944, the V-1 and V-2 programs absorbed half of the Reich’s explosive production in exchange for about 1000 English, Belgian, and Dutch civilian fatalities a month. The V-1 was much more “cost-effective” than the V-2, but that’s not really saying much. The air-launched attacks were worse than useless; the accuracy, already pretty poor, was now abysmal; the trail left by the departing missile left the launching bomber easily spotted by patrolling British night fighters, and the Germans ended up losing more than one bomber for every air-launched V-1 that actually hit London.

A piloted version was developed; I had read somewhere that this was intended to test the airframe, but it seems it really was supposed to be steered to a target with the pilot bailing out at the last minute. The cockpit was extremely cramped and it would have been a pretty difficult maneuver for a pilot to get out of the thing “at the last minute” – or even sitting on the ground. (One test pilot did manage to bail out after a wing fell off – see the note about structural failure above – but he probably wasn’t very happy about it). It was never operationally deployed, although there are persistent myths about fragments of Luftwaffe uniforms being found at V-1 and V-2 impact sites. The Japanese were developing a copy – the Kawanishi Baika (not to be confused with the rocket-powered Ohka, sometimes called Baka (“idiot”) by the Americans) – but it was never finished. It’s probably just as well; it would have had a much longer range than an Ohka and would probably have been a rather nasty weapon if available in any sort of quantity; the pilot of the Japanese version, of course, was not expected to “bail out at the last minute”.

The Americans and Russians quickly developed their own copies – the Army (later Air Force) JB-2 Thunderbug, the Navy LTV-N-2 Loon, the Soviet 10Kh, 14Kh, and 16Kh. Later models of the JB-2 incorporated radar and radio guidance. I’ve seen pictures from other sources of Soviet piston-engine fighters incorporating pulse-jet engines under the wings as a power booster, but this book doesn’t mention them. The book notes that “some thought was given to firing a few Loons at North Korea during the 1950-53 war” without the obvious continuation that “it’s probably still a good idea”. ( )