V2 Rocket Lauched From Carrier
USS Midway Fired Captured Nazi V-2 in Operation Sandy in 1947.
In 1947 the largest warship afloat, the USS Midway launched the most formidable weapon of the twentieth century, a ballistic missile, in its first naval test.
The V2 rocket was a radical weapon for its time. Designed by some of the brightest minds in a huge technological effort the weapon, the world’s first ballistic missile, flew in 1942. The 27576 lb (12508 kg) rocket, standing some 46 feet high could carry a one ton warhead at supersonic speeds some 200 miles away. In the next three years over 6000 were completed with slave labor and fueled by synthetic propellant derived from potatoes. More than 3100 were fired as psychological weapons in an unsuccessful bid by Hitler to make a separate peace with the West. The end of World War Two in Europe was one of the biggest arms races in history. The Allies and the Soviets were both frantically trying to get to Hitler's secret vengeance weapons first. The Americans managed to capture over three hundred trainloads of V2 ballistic missiles and their parts along with no less than 126 of the Nazi rocket scientists that produced them. This helped jumpstart the US nuclear missile programs as well as NASA for whom these scientists were still working as late as 2006. It even led to naval launched ballistic missiles, arguably the world's most deadly weapon for the past forty years.
The USS Midway (CV-41) was commissioned in September 1945, the last month of World War Two and was brand new. With Capt. Joseph F. Bolger in command she took to the waves and served as a test platform and flagship of Carrier Division One. At the time she was the largest and fastest aircraft carrier afloat anywhere in the world. She was 968 feet long and weighed more than 59,901 tons. Her most unusual test of this period was Operation Sandy on September 6, 1947. In the aforementioned test, she successfully test fired a captured German V-2 rocket from her flight deck. The rocket had been captured disassembled in Germany and had been remanufactured at White Sands Missile Range. The firing took place several hundred miles offshore of the Atlantic coast under the command of Captain Albert Kellogg Morehouse, and Admiral Blandy, commander of the Atlantic fleet was on hand to personally observe the launch. This was the first launching of a ballistic missile from a moving platform.
Hitler had entertained a plan to have U-boat towed V2 launch at the United States directly but no such launch actually occurred. The project codename was Prüfstand XII (Teststand 12). The idea was that the U-boat would tow the V2 in a watertight canister and then surface to assemble it and launch the weapon. At least three of the canisters were under construction when the war ended and one boat U-1053 was believed to have been lost while testing the mockup.
Operation Sandy was a limited success as the rocket broke up some six miles after the launch. In the below picture of the launch you can notice the almost immediate tilt of the rocket. Further land based tests illustrated the catastrophic consequences that ten tons of ethanol, liquid oxygen and possibly nuclear warhead could have on the deck of a wooden aircraft carrier and further tests taken in a different direction. The operation however did lead to further exploration in the field of naval ballistic missiles and by 1960 the UGM-27 Polaris Missile was fielded. The Polaris was ten feet shorter than the V2 but was 8,000 pounds heavier and carried a nuclear war head to nearly a thousand miles. Today an arsenal of even more advanced Trident missiles is carried by fourteen active US Ohio class submarines and four British Vanguard class submarines. The Midway herself was decommissioned in 1992 as the longest-serving aircraft carrier in US Navy history and after a term with the mothball fleet she was donated to a private concerned and turned into a museum in San Diego in 2004.
Sources
Sandy Newsreel at CV41.org
US Navy Historical Center DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN NAVAL FIGHTING SHIPS, Vol. IV (1969), p. 355, et al
D.M. Norrell, C.R. Browning, K. Burns, Operation Sandy, AIAA 2006-7470
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