Pulse Jet engine from a V1 Flying Bomb fired up on Feb 6 2021 at the Military Aviation Museum near Virginia Beach. The sound is very low because it blew my mic out while recording.
I vividly remember seeing a V-1 as it flew by me late one afternoon about one mile away [not directly overhead]. No flames were coming out of the rear of the motor. I was about 50 miles east of London on the south side of the Thames estuary. I was about 9 or 10 years old. I was more curious than frightened. As I watched the engine stopped and the bomb started to dose-dive towards the ground. I jumped into the roadside ditch [fortunately it was dry]. I was too far away to feel any shock wave or ground tremor.
My dad en mom were almost hit by a V1. It failed running and the sound stopped. 150m from their houses ( my father and mother lived by their parent, 300m between the both houses) it hit a house and wiped out a complete family of 9 people. The V1 and V2 made a lot of innocent victim during the war. But that is always in a war, and always be. 😔 nos.nl/75jaarbevrijding/bericht/2328610-heel-tragisch-v1-treft-velp And the story of my mam and dad that night bootsmanmeurs.nl/familie/het-gezin-in-de-oorlog/de-v1-in-de-oranjestraat/
My grandmother survived being bombed as a baby in london during the war, when she came to Canada she told stories of my great grandmother sifting through rubble to find her. She was bathing her, heard the buzz and it leveled the flat, ejecting my great grandmother onto the street, the bathtub saved my grandmother from the rubble.
@@joseveintegenario-nisu1928 I don't think I want to answer your vision who began the war and who is responsible to all the deads. This is your vision and I think that you miss the reason why England did "start" the war. Every war has only losers. The thing is that the human never learn from the pass. O... and by the way. My grandfather was POW at Fukuoka 2b. Do your search work again and begin from 1900. And take anti racisme with it.
I remember an old uncle saying that sound brought mixed emotions. Hearing it meant it had passed you so you were happy to be safe but also knew someone else wasn't so it was terrifying.
WW2 had a lot of different sounds that could cause fear or dread. Some were intentional. The Stuka siren, for one. This pulsejet engine. Stalin's Organ, the Katyusha rockets. Nebelwerfer rockets... all had distinct sounds that if you heard them you knew you were in serious trouble.
What's cool about pulse jets is the sound frequency. Going from idle to full power only changes the amplitude of the sound unlike rotary engines that whine at a higher pitch.
That's because the flame propagation speed for the fuel mixture remains the same. Adding additional fuel may increase thrust, but you have to keep the mixture between UEL and LEL (Upper Explosion Limit and Lower Explosion Limit). It's kind of a cheesy design, but it doesn't create a centrifugal force like a spinning turbine that has to be countered. Plus, it's a one way trip so who cares about eventual metal fatigue.
My Dad was Royal Navy and was posted to London during the V1 onslaught. They were charged with the task of clean up after a strike. A messy business, he said. While on a train, a V1 hit a gas storage tank about half a mile away. He said it was the biggest bang he'd ever heard. That was from a man who served on battleships firing 16 inch guns in action. He was a great fella.
They say you can look at London from google earth and spot the major impacts of V weapons to this day because of the gaps in row houses and new construction amid old etc.
Yeah, oil and gas storage tank explosions are loud. Had one blow up about two miles from our house when I was a kid and it sounded like very loud thunder even at that distance.
This version of the jet was decently efficient at speed. There is a one way mesh gate on the front that allows it to suck air from the front but will close and force the exhaust out the rear. Very simple, very effective
was the first jet type in service, the Brits invented the jet turbine, Rolls Royce iirc or was is jag? one of those, it never seen service because it was deemed far too inefficient and insufficient to power even itself, but Germany proven the jet age needed to come in, and fast, resulting in an arms race to bring about new fighters, bombers and aircraft. first fighter jets may be German. but the first actual working jet fighters where British. even we toyed with pulse jets.
Colin Furze built one of these, mounted it inside a 30 foot high bum and then aimed it France across the channel. 22 mile away it was heard as a distant fart.
My dad was wounded in France shortly after the Normandy invasion. He acquired blood poisoning from the lead fragments and blinded for almost 11 months. While in the hospital, he could hear the V1’s (V2’s were so fast, he would only hear the explosion). He had nightmares for the rest of his life.
nothing much has changed in the sense that this is similar to what the Ukrainians are experiencing with the slower Iranian drones and the high speed hypersonic missiles. Terrifying to those peoples being subjected to them. The irony is that the technology has progressed ( but not much in many ways) but the anti-missile systems are very sophisticated. The method of tackling the V1 in WW2 was to fly alongside in the fastest aircraft of the time and tip them over before they reached their destinations. Fascinating but also depressing especially when you see the trench warfare of WW1 again coming to the fore in Donbas. War is horrible but at the same time fascinating.
My grandmother called them doodlebugs as well, with the same comment about if you hear them it’s ok. She said it was the opposite with the V2 - you heard them coming after they had landed.
My mum was a girl when she saw and heard a V1 over London she vividly remembered the engine stopping they all ran for cover and waited for it to explode, the sound burst her ear drum but she was lucky she said. Many perished or were wounded and windows all around smashed by the blast causing injuries. But mum as she said we had to help the wounded then return to everyday life. I miss her so much now.
@@kosovoisserbia8937 Cheaper than that - the Me262 was cheaper than the Stuka… (Turbojet engines are actually cheaper to make than piston engines of the same power).
My father was a combat engineer in one of the early waves on Omaha beach. His unit moved large amounts of supplies over open beaches in the following months since the German either held or had destroyed the French channel ports. Later in the Summer, V-1s began passing overhead on their way to London. "Sounded like trucks in low gear," he said. So they did!
The biggest problem with those engines is the ungodly loud noise and a low-pressure ratio of something like 2:1. They consume a lot of fuel for the amount of thrust they generate. Also, the valves take a hell of a beating with that cycle. This was probably the best use for them (disposable cheap engines that deliver a payload upon being obliterated).
By 1946 The Royal Navy actually had a weapon system that could deal with the V1 Flying bomb...STAAG Mark 2. Its pretty much a close in weapons system with a pair of 40mm Bofors with a Predictive fire control system and a Type 262 Radar. During the War Britain had Hazemayer Mounts with 2 Bofors (Had Type 282 radar and was manually operated) The V1s cruising Altitude was well within the Bofors capabilities. STAAG was dropped by the Navy in the early 1960s as STAAG was very heavy due to its Triaxle stabilisation system, its vacuum tube computer was not the most reliable out at sea and it was maintenance intensive but it was very accurate and performed much like a Phalanx Close In Weapons system does today.
Well, that's pretty sharp, considering that a) Germany surrendered 9 My 1945, and b) the V1 programme was rendered ineffective due to most of them destroyed in flight by American VT fuzed radar controlled guns developed by 1942.
If most of the doodle bugs were shot down by the wonder gun why did the hospital I was born in suffer a hit in July 1944. Check out official maps of V1 hits on London.
@@jimdonovan243 : Because, obviously, MOST got destroyed by US-supplied anti-aircraft guns, but NOT ALL of them. The Germans launched about 10,000 V-1's against England. It was inevitable that some got through - nothing, not even American anti-aircraft guns, is perfect with a 100% kill rate. Incidentally, "official" lists and maps from wartime of where the V-1's hit are not to be taken notice of. The Germans had a well-placed spy who was supposed to report back where and when each V-1 landed, so that the Germans had quality control. Somehow the British knew there was a spy, so they quietly doctored their lists of where they landed (while keeping the time of hit accurate), in order to destroy German confidence in the weapon's accuracy. The deception worked - the chap in command of the V-1 launches decided that the on-board robot navigation system was a heap of junk and directed that it be removed and launches rely on launch direction and the engine cut-off device (vane odometer). This caused hit points to be scattered all round for miles around. Post-war American evaluation showed that the robot navigation was actually very good.
Too little too late. Not much use anyway unless it had happened to be directly under one of them (assuming it had been available 6 years earlier). The RAF was the most effective countermeasure although AA guns had success later with improved fuses. Some RAF kills were credited to the Army "to encourage the guns'.
@Dir. T. Dichs my father was born 1936, so was 9 when ths war ended, he got bombed out twice, he just turned 86, so yeah there are people that are still alive that used to listen for the engine stopping.
My mother, now aged 94, lived in NW London during WW2. She speaks of how terrifying the moments between the sound of the engine cutting out and the eventual explosion were.
My grandmother told me that-as long as you can hear it you are safe-when the engine sound stops it’s coming down. She lived in East London and the house next door was flattened by a V1-lots of damage to her house as well.
This is down in Virginia at Jerry Yagins museum. This thing sounds ungodly ominous in the real and that silence is when you realize in 1944 that meant death was coming.
My late mum was a little girl in WW2 and she told me about ones that landed close to her house. Ive only ever imagined what they sounded like - NOW I know it must have been truly terrifying at night hearing them coming over in their hundreds in the dark. Thank you for sharing.
The BBC does have at least one recording of it from WW2. I remember hearing it played on the radio when I was a kid and my mum explaining about the gap between the engine cutting out and the explosion.
My grandma was 9y old when these started flying over. From time to time they would malfunction and wipe out half a village. One day she asked my granddad what these “buzzing things” were My granddad (who was an ex Belgian soldier) replied “as long as they make noise nothing to worry about, if they were to stop. Lie down on your belly and close your eyes and ears.”
As a boy living near an airfield we saw and heard a few of these dreadful weapons and that sound brought instant shivers. The sound following air raid warnings was frightening and fortunately only one or two fell close by. We also had two V 2 rockets come down close by that exploded in an area away from houses. The marks of the crater of one are still visible to this day.
My mother saw one V1 fly over her parents house headed north. About two minutes later the sound stopped, it landed in a farmer’s field. My maternal grandfather was at facility, one Sunday afternoon, that was preparing for postwar production. A V2 hit the facility about two hundred feet away, he was shaken up; regretfully all the cars and drivers were destroyed and gone in a flash.
@@GeneralChangFromDanang hahahahaha😐 knew someone would say that. Nah. Billy Idol wouldn't know whether to suck his thump or shit himself first if he heard a rebel yell.
I remember hearing these in London during the war.....we called them "doodlebugs".... they did a lot of damage and killed a lot of people....the world's first cruise missile....
Although it seemed to be "primitive" it was a clever design for the very first purely thrust driven and reliable cruise missile in history. Unfortunately it was developped under a cruel regime during the darkest times in Europe
That looks incredibly cool, but I must say, it sounds ominous and frightening. If I'd have heard it live 80 years ago, I'd imagine I'd still be terrified. Remarkable device.
My late mother was a little girl In WWII and lived through the Blitz. One day in the late '70s, a couple of years after we moved to NZ, she was vacuuming and pulled the plug out of the wall, which unconsciously triggered her to run out of the house screaming. Afterwards, she explained why she reacted to a couple of very puzzled kids.
As a six year old I watched a V! doodlebug flying over Banstead in July 1944. It was about 500 feet up and as we watched, the motor cut and it started falling. We rushed into the shelter. The next day we moved to Cornwall.
My Dad had one come down in his road in Worcester Park near London in 1944 he was 15 and my Grand mother was killed in that blast. They were known as Doodle Bugs or Buzz Bombs
That's right. My mother calls them "doodlebugs" to this day. I commented: "My mother wouldn't watch this. She told me stories about the V1 and how, when the drone noise stopped, the V1 would fall to earth and kill anyone unfortunate enough to be underneath. My father once showed me where he lived with his family as a boy at Chartham Road, London SE25. Two doors down was hit by a V1 and the family inside were all killed."
My grandparents had their piano tuned back in the 1970s. In the process of tuning said piano the tuner discovered a chunk of ceiling plaster that had become lodged under the some of the metal strings. It had found its way there when a V1 had half demolished the house in 1944.
My mum was at school in the war here in Essex. The air raid sirens went when she was having an art exam. The whole school filed out to the air raid shelters except for those taking the exam. They weren’t allowed to leave “because the exam is important”. The raid turned out to be a V1 and they heard the thing coming. The motor stopped and they were sitting in the school art room that had one wall of high windows. A wall of glass, and a one-ton warhead was coming. The flying bomb fell half a mile from the school to the south of the town centre. Mum passed away in 2006 but she was always angry about how they were treated by the school during that raid. In 1970 I joined that same school and had art lessons in the same room. My mum’s geography teacher during the war was still at the school and when I joined had risen to Deputy Headmaster. As an 11 year old, he frightened the living daylights out of me.
Doodlebug ... my Grandmother was struck by a V1 Rocket at Liverpool St Station in London during the Blitz ... she was an ATS member on her way home for leave and the V1 came down on the station platform! She was knocked unconscious and found among the rubble of the train tracks by a distant cousin and rescued - many people died but she survived.
No she wasn't struck as such, otherwise she would have perished. She was injured by the explosive blast. And by the way the V2 was a Rocket, the V1 was a flying bomb. 😏
...not many. And it won't be long after before Americans start saying..."it never happened",...especially when they can believe in fake things...like "pandemics".
Pretty much anyone over the age of 80 who grew up in London remembers these. My mum as well as all her brothers and sisters. She used to collect shrapnel from buzz bombs.
Why did you not throttle the engine up? I have built several pulse jet engines the largest was 100 lb thrust. For years I wanted to build a full size V1 engine but not sure I ever will, I lost interest. Fun engine, easy to start, easy to throttle, easy to build.
Truly terrifying weapons for their time. I myself have a neighbor here in Antwerp who went through the war as a little girl, she was 14 in 1944 when her friends asked her out to go watch a movie in a well known cinema at the time. She said she would be there but she came from further so she was running late and her friends were already inside, she said she was 3 blocks away when suddenly she heard a whistling sound and a big explosion and a huge cloud of smoke took off. She ran towards it fearing the worst had happened and indeed it had, a V-2 bomb landed in the cinema killing 560+ people at once including all of her friends.
Yousri Ch….I know the Germans put whistles on their airplane dropped bombs . I can find no information that the V-1 buzz bombs whistled on way down. Most accounts said the pulsing/buzzing sound just quit and the bomb dropped to earth.
My grandparents were from that generation. I'm a genx myself and think sometimes we are the last that are truly proud of our country, and respect what they had to go through. I served 22 years, fought in two wars and still can't fathom what they went through in WWII.
Thank you Tony. This is history, that terrifying sound was the last thing many Brits heard during WWII. Probably one of the most horrifying sounds of that conflict, unless you have a Stuka lying around. Thank you! Also, right down the road from my house...off Princess Ann.
My mum lived in London during WW 2, she used to tell us stories about the buzz bombs. We used to go to the planes of fame air show in Chino, California. One day they had an engine also, when they lit it up, my heart dropped to my stomach, I can't imagine the fear everyone had during that time😢
My nan was living in London alone while my grandad was in the army. He told her that when she hears a doodlebug coming, to go and sit under the stairs; which she always did. I'm not sure if it would have done any use tbh.
As far I know the Mosquito, altrough entirely capable, never chased the V-1 because of the danger to damage the wooden wings. This job was left to the Spitfire, Tempest and P-51 and normally the V-1 flew around average speed of more than 550 km/h with their average altitude of 1,000 mt. In this the Tempest was the only aircraft with the low-altitude speed to be effective against it.
I've now heard the same sound my parents lived through in 1939-45 I listened to many stories over the years about these bombs ! Apparently they would just cut out and down they fell !
My Grandmother said 'They said as long as you could hear it you'd be alright. That was fine if it was going over, but if it was coming in your direction that was another matter!'.
My father was a boy in Portsmouth during the War; one evening he left a friend's house promising to return a borrowed toy the next day and cycled home to Eastney. When he went to return it he found his friend's house was a ruin thanks to a V1, some killed and many neighbours too. Of course, we won't see an autocrat sending weapons at innocent people nowadays...
Nice job - thanks for sharing. For more details on the V-1, search on RU-vid for the title, 'German V1 Flying rocket instructional video" WW2 training video.
The crown in your icon, same as in statue of liberty, is that of emperors as Comodo, also that of the element Greek called 'Apollyon', and jews 'Abaddon the exterminator' Blessings +
My father as a young boy in London heard (but did not see) one cut out. He ran from the garden into the glass conservatory aiming for the main house. The bomb detonated at some distance, blew the door to the conservatory open, he felt a rush of air and it blew the door between the conservatory and kitchen open. Fortunately by what felt like a miracle it did not shatter the conservatory with my father in it.
I'm honestly shocked at how well this seems to work. When the technical principal behind it was explained to me it seemed so crude and also downright... unreasonable. I mean like Science-Fiction unreasonable like flying cars and casual teleportation, which would have huge practical implications. But this... seems to just work. Also i now understand why the sound that this engine makes was described as so unique and unnerving: No wonder it blew out your mic, god dayum!
ingenious technology that can still be used in modern combat drones of today. Had the Germans had a precision guidance system in WWII incorporated into the V1, then it would have had strategic importance instead being a terror weapon.
Hmmmmmmmm, " technology that can still be used in modern combat drones of today " drones are used as stealth platforms. I can't see them being powered by say four of those horrendously noisy pulse jet engines being very stealthy !!!!!!😏
@@brucepickess8097 none of the awesome Ukranian drones from Turkey are stealth, yet they have destroyed a 1000's of tanks, BMP, tankers and other vehicles and killed or wounded many1000's of Russian soldiers. This V1 rocket engine subsonic speed with a 500 pound warhead, GPS guided could hit Russian targets in Moscow and the Kremlin itself.
That's the thing. They had no guidance system as such, just the inbuilt gyro to keep the thing roughly on a set course. The British banned the press at the time from reporting V1 impacts, in case it gave the Germans information regarding their targeting accuracy.....
My father served with the 8th Air Force arming P47s and P51s. All he said about the "Doodlebug" was that as long as you hear the engine, you knew you were safe. Then, he said if they didn't go off, they'd send the bums to disarm the enemy weapon.
A dreary, monotonous sound that would sound mortifying enough going overhead but then it peremptorily stops, that sudden overpowering silence so much worse as you know this heartless robot plane is about to set about its terrible purpose, and somewhere close by, thereby alleviating many cases of constipation !!
Once these are up and running at full power there are no flames visible, the tailpipe can be almost glowing dull red but not really visible in daylight. This one demonstrated is just ticking over-noise is a big problem if near any inhabited area. Many folks have built smaller versions and powered model aircraft with them, pulse jets etc. are a fascinating subject, and many model engineers have come up with many variations-very fuel thirsty, not cheap to run.
My Granddad was convalescing at a military hospital in Kent right on the V1 flight path to London, they evacuated everyone except them! the Nurses used to wheel them out in the fresh air during the day and they would watch the V1's fly over! At night the engines would keep them awake, i would like to see them do a modern risk assessment on that! Different times, many people just accepted the risk, a very tough generation, my granddad lost a lung in the war but lived until he was 87 and was active right up to then!
I remember my late father sharing that as a child during WWII, he heard a Doodlebug approach the house where he lived at Great Missenden. He remembered the noise and the light as it lit up his bedroom. The engine quit and he dived under his bed. The engine then restarted and then went off again and continued to do so. The V1 eventually went out towards Brill/Dorton and exploded in a wood. I've actually seen that very crater and its huge. I can only guess that it had an intermittent fault which extended its run whilst losing height in the process. I wonder if any other V1 ever reached as far inland as that one?
I know the crater of an SC 1000 bomb in front of a pillbox of the Maginot Line, exactly the casemate 35/3 near Markolsheim. And yeah, that does be huge---even today *. . .*
When I worked for Qantas airways a friend brought in a 3ft long pulse jet and started it up in the hanger, it sounded like automatic weapons fire and cleared the place out in less than a minute...the bosses were not impressed! 🤣
The awesomeness of the sounds and sights in the skies over England would have been a crazy experience. My Grandad has told many stories about living around Fulham and Chelsea at the time.
For 200,000 years we walked, so it took 200,000 years to master the horse, then 10,000 years to master the steam engine, about another 100 years to master the internal combustion engine, then 40 years to master flight, 30 years to master the jet engine, then 5 years to break the speed of sound, 10 years to put an object in orbit, 4 more years to put a man in space, and then 8 years to land on the moon.
@@kilroy2517 that's amazing, right? Im 50 now. I think of stories my grandfather had of growing up, steam locomotives and the wild west. It's astonishing.
I saw the movie "Operation Crossbow" as a kid. There was a recreation of the human piloted V-1's at Penemunde where they showed the pulse jet running on a stationary airframe. I called BS because I thought the pulse jet was like a ram jet and only worked when moving. Wrong! But I guess that they didn't produce a lot of thrust when stationary, which is why they were launched by catapult.
2nd day of the doodlebug bombing of London one hit my mums street in Croydon killed a lot of people my mum grandmother and uncle were buried alive under there house for 18 hours till they were dug out. all they had left was what they stood up in house furniture etc all gone
So THAT thing is what terrified London for awhile in ww2? Fascinating! Thank you. I really dig the stories of the different methods of defeating the damn thing while in flight
This one is rebuilt for safety, but the sound is the same. It blew my mic out because it was so loud, so the sound is a little low. To put it in perspective, go to a rock concert and put your chest up to one of those large speakers.
I once met a woman from England that survived the war and she said the V-1 was terrifying due to the fact that you never knew where it would crash. Also, I could be wrong but I think some of them didn't nose dive straight down but went into a flat spin and tumbled down out of control.
The He-178 was test flown before WW2 broke out in 1939, with a conventional jet engine. The He-280, first twin jet fighter ,flew in 1941. I'm pretty sure the Me-262 was test flown before the V-1. Other types too. The pulse jet came late in the war . It was cheap and quick to produce.
@@patrickhorvath2684 neither the He-178 or the He-280 were used in WW2. The Me-262 did but it was late in the war and had a marginal effect on the war.
The Argus 'Rohrmotor' produces very little thrust while stationary. To produce maximum power they need airflow through the motor, and get much louder with the increase in thrust. Cool video though.
@@brianritchie6849 yes, you start them with compressed air, and they will run stationary without any further air through it, but as the V1 was catapulted up the ramp, the airflow through the motor increased the motor's thrust to a level high enough to push the bomb to a flying speed of about 400mph.
You must understand how different this engine performed at 400mph, as the aerodynamic pressure increased enough for it to develop real thrust. This static demo does not begin to tell the story…
There's a British war movie "Operation Crossbow" in which V1s have a prominent role. I always thought the sound of the pulse engine and the flames from the exhaust where more or less fiction by the film makers due to fact that in the production year of 1965 there were way lesser information on such topics as today. For instance just b/w footage about the V! without sound. But seeing this video the film makers were pretty close to the actual thing.
The heaviest concentration of V1 falls was roughly just south of the Thames. Knowing this, British intelligence managed to feed back false information to the Germans which made them think that most of the V1s were actually overshooting London and falling north of the city itself. In their efforts to correct this and make more fall on central London, the Germans shortened the range presumably by loading even less fuel. The effect of this was to make the V1s engines cut out even sooner than they did before so that they were much more likely to fall in country areas of Kent and Surrey well to the south of London.
It was running on less than 1/10,000th of its thrust. Near-zero instead of many Lbs. The minimum possible before ceasing operation entirely. If it were full-throttle, the operators would get deaf even with hearing protection. Even a tiny pulsejet makes an incredibly loud noise.
My father did build one of these when he was in engineering school. It is for nowadays a very primitive engine, nothing in comparison with a modern jet engine. Basicaly you explode the air fuel mixture in a chamber over and over .The exiting gases build then the thrust. However the V1 was the grand daddy of all cruise missles . BTW it was high tech for the time, with a gyrocompass and altimeter it could navigate in a primitive but for the time effective way.
