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On June 16, 1944, the Wehrmacht announced: “During the night and this morning, southern England and the London metropolitan area were hit by new explosives of the highest caliber. These areas have been under bombardment, with little interruption, since midnight. Heavy destruction is to be expected.”³⁹⁷ These few dry words seemed to announce the arrival of what tens of thousands of Germans had long been hoping for. The V1—the first of Germany’s miracle weapons—was finally being deployed. The newspaper Das Reich dubbed the occasion “the day that 80 million Germans have been passionately waiting for.” A report from the Security Service in Frankfurt read: “It was moving to hear how simple workers expressed their joy that their unshakable faith in the Führer had been rewarded. One older laborer remarked that the weapon of retribution would now bring victory.”³⁹⁸ It is interesting to note the tight connection between faith in the Führer and belief in a miracle weapon. They are two sides of one coin and manifest both the expectations for salvation Germans projected onto Hitler and the increasing distance of their perceptions from reality. In this case, though, there was no truth to the cliché that faith could move mountains.

By June 29, the Wehrmacht had fired the thousandth V1, causing not inconsiderable damage. The warhead unleashed a wave of pressure upon impact that could level parts of whole streets. And within the month of June, 1,700 British had been killed, and 10,700 wounded. The presence of the weapon of retribution also forced the RAF to maintain a defensive belt, consisting of antiaircraft gunners, barrage balloons, and fighters, south of London. But all of that was of little use to Germany, as the Allies kept bombing German cities, causing a far greater level of destruction and killing far more people. The actual military effect of the miracle weapon was much less than anyone would have thought possible.

The only real value the V weapons had was psychological. While they did not succeed in particularly frightening the enemy, their existence did boost the morale of the German populace and German soldiers. While bad news continued to rain in from the front lines, Nazi propaganda was able to maintain morale at home with euphoric reports about their weapon of retribution. The missile had been consciously named the V1 to encourage hopes that a V2 was on its way. Nonetheless the leadership elite in the Third Reich began to have doubts about the wisdom of stirring up expectations that would prove difficult to meet. In a letter to Hitler, the German armament minister Albert Speer wrote: “Ever since the populace has begun waiting for miracles from new weapons, doubts have arisen as to whether we realize we’re in a few-minutes-before-midnight situation and whether we are irresponsibly stockpiling and holding back such weapons. The question thus emerges as to whether this sort of propaganda serves its end.”³⁹⁹ Indeed, as people realized that the V1 was not having the desired effect, disappointment quickly followed.

The surveillance protocols document waves of hope and disappointment concerning the V missiles. For example, First Lieutenant Kostelezky, who was taken prisoner while defending Germany’s last foothold on the Cotentin Peninsula in Normandy, complained:

Since Nazi propagandists had no pictures of damage in London at their disposal, no one in Germany had much of an impression of the effect of the V1 missiles. While being transported to POW camps, which were all located near London, captured German soldiers all tried to get a look for themselves at their supposed retribution. Kostelezky is obviously disappointed at having seen so little destruction, and the generals who were interned at Trent Park in July and August 1944 felt the same way.⁴⁰¹