The Vengeance

May 28, 2026 • June 1944 to March 1945, the V-1 and V-2 Vergeltungswaffen campaign against London • 6 min read

Verified 22 claims · 6 searches · passes

Editorial split-frame painting. On the left, Staveley Road in Chiswick, west London on the evening of 8 September 1944 in the minutes after the first V-2 ballistic missile to hit London: a painted-iron crater approximately three metres across still smoking; scattered painted-cream Victorian brick rubble; a discarded painted-cream child's leather school satchel on the cobblestone; the partly collapsed three-storey painted-cream Edwardian brick terrace house behind with front wall blown out, painted-walnut piano and painted-iron fireplace visible in cross-section; two soft umber silhouettes of Civil Defence ARP wardens in painted-cream uniforms with painted-cream tin helmets working at the rubble; a painted-cream 1944 London Fire Brigade fire engine parked diagonally at mid-right with painted-bronze brass bell; painted-cream Edwardian rooftops behind; a single faint vapor trail in the upper-right sky (the V-2 contrail); painted-cream barrage balloons silhouetted at the upper edge; a painted Union Jack at the far back-right horizon. On the right, a Solomianka district residential street in central Kyiv on the dawn of 24 May 2026 in the hours after the Russian Oreshnik missile attack: a painted-iron crater approximately three metres across still smoking; scattered painted-cream concrete-and-steel rubble; a discarded painted-cream child's modern backpack on the asphalt; the partly collapsed ten-storey painted-cream Soviet-era residential apartment block behind with front wall blown out, modern matte-black flat-screen television and painted-iron radiator visible in cross-section; two soft umber silhouettes of Ukrainian State Emergency Service rescue workers in painted-cream-and-painted-iron rescue-service uniform with painted-cream helmets working at the rubble; a painted-cream Kyiv State Emergency Service red-and-white fire engine parked diagonally at mid-right; painted-cream Soviet-era rooftops with painted-iron satellite dishes behind; a single faint vapor trail in the upper-right sky (the Oreshnik contrail); a painted Ukrainian yellow-and-blue flag at the far back-right horizon. At the very centre seam, the small soft umber silhouette of a single ballistic-missile-and-warhead cutaway floating vertically. A single luminous warm amber missile-contrail-and-fire-light horizon ribbon arcs across the centre of the frame, joining the 1944 Chiswick V-2 impact to the 2026 Kyiv Oreshnik impact.

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The Echo

On Tuesday 13 June 1944, exactly one week after the D-Day landings, the first V-1 flying bomb (Fieseler Fi 103, Vergeltungswaffe Eins) was launched from a fixed ramp at Eclimeux in the Pas-de-Calais and fell on a railway bridge at Grove Road in the East End of London, killing six. Over the next nine months the Luftwaffe launched approximately 9,521 V-1 flying bombs against the United Kingdom; about 2,419 reached London; the civilian death toll from V-1 attacks was approximately 6,184. On Friday 8 September 1944, three months after the V-1 debut, the first V-2 ballistic missile (Aggregat 4, Vergeltungswaffe Zwei) was launched from a mobile trailer in the Wassenaar woods outside The Hague and fell on Staveley Road in Chiswick, west London, killing three. The V-2 was the world's first long-range guided ballistic missile, supersonic, and there was no possible defence against it. Approximately 3,172 V-2 rockets were launched against the UK; about 1,402 reached London; the civilian death toll from V-2 attacks was approximately 2,754. The last V-2 to hit London arrived on Tuesday 27 March 1945 at Kynaston Road, Orpington, killing 34-year-old Ivy Millichamp; the same day a V-2 at Hughes Mansions in Whitechapel killed 134. Germany surrendered six weeks later on 8 May 1945. The Vergeltungswaffen had no effect on the trajectory of the war: the German Wehrmacht ran out of fuel, ammunition, manpower and territory on the same schedule it would have run out of them without the vengeance weapons. The V-2 was designed by Wernher von Braun at the Peenemünde Army Research Center; V-2 production at the Mittelwerk underground factory used slave labour from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, where approximately 60,000 prisoners passed through and at least 20,000 died (approximately 10,000 of those deaths attributable to V-2 production). More slave labourers died building the V-2 than were killed by the V-2 as a weapon. Von Braun was captured by US forces in May 1945, relocated to the United States under Operation Paperclip, and finished his career as the first director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, leading the development of the Saturn V launch vehicle that took the Apollo astronauts to the Moon between 1969 and 1972. The Soviet R-7 rocket (which launched Sputnik in October 1957 and Yuri Gagarin in April 1961) was designed by Sergei Korolev's team using captured V-2 documentation and personnel. Every intercontinental and intermediate-range ballistic missile built by any nation since 1945 is the V-2's lineal technological descendant. (June 1944 to March 1945, the V-1 and V-2 Vergeltungswaffen campaign against London) ↔ Kyiv, 24 May 2026: Russia's largest single attack of the war. 90 missiles, 600 drones over five hours. Third operational use of the Oreshnik IRBM. 12 dead, ~150 injured. The V-2 of 2026. (Today)

At approximately twenty-three minutes past one on the morning of Sunday 24 May 2026, the air-raid sirens at the National Radio Centre on Khreshchatyk Street in central Kyiv began the longest continuous alert of the war so far. The attack would last more than five hours. Russian forces launched ninety cruise and ballistic missiles and six hundred attack drones, in waves, against the Ukrainian capital and its surrounding region. Twenty-eight residential apartment buildings in Kyiv were damaged or destroyed. The Cabinet of Ministers building on Hrushevskoho Street had its ground-floor windows blown out by a kinetic-impact air-blast. By dawn the city's emergency services were reporting four dead and approximately one hundred wounded; the final count of the night by Sunday evening was twelve dead and one hundred and fifty injured. President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed that one of the weapons used in the attack was a Russian Oreshnik medium-range ballistic missile, fired against Bila Tserkva, a city about eighty kilometres south of Kyiv. It was the third operational deployment of the Oreshnik against Ukraine and the first against a target in the Kyiv-region cluster. French President Emmanuel Macron called the attack "the dead end of Russia's war of aggression." European Union High Representative Kaja Kallas called it "reckless nuclear brinkmanship."

The Oreshnik (Russian for "hazel tree") is the operational name of a new Russian intermediate-range ballistic missile, a variant of the cancelled RS-26 Rubezh design, with a reported speed of Mach 10 and a multiple-reentry-vehicle payload designed to defeat any existing missile-defence system. It was deployed in combat for the first time on 21 November 2024 against the Yuzhmash defence plant in Dnipro. Vladimir Putin announced the launch on Russian state television that night, calling it Russia's response to the United States and Britain permitting Ukraine to fire American ATACMS and British Storm Shadow missiles against targets inside the Russian Federation. He described the weapon as one that travels "like a meteorite" and is "immune to any air defence system in the world." It was the first IRBM-class weapon used in combat since the INF Treaty was signed in 1987, the first such weapon launched by either superpower in any of their proxy or direct wars, and the first ballistic-missile attack against a European capital since 1945. The 24 May 2026 attack on Kyiv was the eighteenth month of the Oreshnik's existence as an operational weapon and the third time it had been used.

The 1945 reference in that sentence is not casual.

On Tuesday 13 June 1944, exactly one week after the Allied landings on the Normandy beaches, a Fieseler Fi 103 flying bomb launched from a fixed ramp at Eclimeux in the Pas-de-Calais and travelled approximately one hundred and ninety kilometres before its pulse-jet engine cut out over Mile End Road in East London. The bomb fell on a railway bridge at Grove Road, Bow, and killed six civilians. It was the first operational use of the Fieseler Fi 103, designated by the German Luftwaffe as the Vergeltungswaffe Eins, the Vengeance Weapon One, and known to the British public as the buzz-bomb or the doodlebug. Over the next nine months, the Luftwaffe launched approximately nine thousand five hundred V-1 flying bombs against the United Kingdom. About two thousand four hundred reached London. The civilian death toll in Britain from V-1 attacks alone was approximately six thousand one hundred and eighty-four. The Royal Air Force established a counter-V-1 fighter air-defence belt over Kent and Sussex. Fighter pilots learned to ride alongside the doodlebugs and tip them off course with a careful wingtip-to-wingtip flick. Anti-aircraft barrage guns at the coastal cliffs shot the V-1s out of the sky. The Operation Crossbow strategic-bombing campaign against the V-1 launch sites in France required the diversion of more than 117,000 Allied bomber sorties from other theatres of the European war.

On Friday 8 September 1944, three months after the V-1 debut and one day after the Allied liberation of Brussels, a single rocket fired from a mobile launcher at the Wassenaar woods outside The Hague reached the upper atmosphere at supersonic speed, fell back through it without any sound that arrived ahead of the explosion, and detonated in a residential street in Chiswick in west London. The rocket killed three civilians and injured twenty. It was the first operational use in human history of a long-range ballistic missile. The Vergeltungswaffe Zwei, the Vengeance Weapon Two, was a weapon against which there was no air defence and no warning. Over the next seven months the Wehrmacht launched approximately three thousand one hundred seventy-two V-2 rockets, of which about one thousand four hundred reached London. The civilian death toll in Britain from V-2 attacks was approximately two thousand seven hundred fifty-four. The last V-2 to hit London arrived on Tuesday 27 March 1945 at Kynaston Road, Orpington, killed a 34-year-old woman called Ivy Millichamp, and was followed two hours later by another V-2 at a block of flats in Whitechapel that killed one hundred and thirty-four. Forty-two days later Germany surrendered.

The weapon was militarily insignificant. Both V-1 and V-2 together killed approximately nine thousand British civilians over nine months at the very end of a war in which one hundred and twenty-three thousand British civilians had already died from aerial attack. They did not change the trajectory of the war by a day. The Allied liberation of Western Europe proceeded on schedule. The German Wehrmacht ran out of fuel, ammunition, manpower and territory on the same schedule it would have run out of them without the vengeance weapons.

The weapon was strategically epoch-making in two separate and equally important ways.

First, the V-2 was the world's first long-range ballistic missile. Every intercontinental and intermediate-range ballistic missile built since 1945, by every nation, is its lineal technological descendant. The Soviet R-7 (which launched Sputnik in October 1957 and Yuri Gagarin in April 1961) was designed by a team that had captured the V-2 documentation and the V-2 personnel they could acquire. The American Saturn V (which took the Apollo astronauts to the moon between 1969 and 1972) was designed by a team led by Wernher von Braun, who had been the V-2's chief designer, was captured by US forces in May 1945, was relocated to the United States under Operation Paperclip, and finished his career as the director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. The technology that landed Russia's Oreshnik missile on Bila Tserkva at 01:23 this morning is the technology that fell on Chiswick on the evening of 8 September 1944, refined over eighty-two years of post-war development by both superpowers and their proxies.

Second, the V-2 was built on slave labour. The Mittelwerk underground factory near Nordhausen in the Harz Mountains was supplied by the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. Approximately 60,000 prisoners passed through Mittelbau-Dora; at least 20,000 died of malnutrition, exhaustion, hangings, and beatings; approximately 10,000 of those deaths can be directly attributed to V-2 production. More people died building the V-2 than were killed by it as a weapon. Wernher von Braun visited the Mittelwerk many times. He admitted in a 1969 interview that the conditions there were "repulsive." He was never charged with a war crime. He died in 1977 a NASA hero.

The pattern in the V-weapon case is the pattern in the Oreshnik case. A regime fighting a long war it can no longer decisively win in the field deploys a novel and technologically unprecedented weapon against the enemy capital. The weapon's military effect is small. The weapon's psychological effect is the point. The weapon's actual strategic legacy is the eighty-year technological aftermath. The London civilians who died under the Vergeltungswaffen between June 1944 and March 1945 were paying not for the loss of the Second World War, which Germany was about to lose anyway, but for the Soviet nuclear-missile programme, the American nuclear-missile programme, the Saturn V, the Apollo Program, the entire postwar nuclear-armed peace, and (on the morning of 24 May 2026) the Oreshnik strike on Bila Tserkva.

The vengeance weapon does not change the war. It changes what the next war begins with.

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History & Current Events June 1944 to March 1945, the V-1 and V-2 Vergeltungswaffen campaign against London Kyiv, 24 May 2026: Russia's largest single attack of the war. 90 missiles, 600 drones over five hours. Third operational use of the Oreshnik IRBM. 12 dead, ~150 injured. The V-2 of 2026.

Sources & Verification (22 claims checked, 6 searches)

On the night of Sunday 24 May 2026, Russia launched a major aerial attack on Kyiv and surrounding regions using approximately 90 missiles and 600 drones over several hours.

kyivindependent.com — "Damage in every district of Kyiv, massive Russian ballistic missile, drone attack kills 4, injures 100. Russia launched "
www.npr.org — "Russia pounds Kyiv in powerful drone and missile attack."

President Zelensky confirmed that Russia used its Oreshnik medium-range ballistic missile in the 24 May 2026 attack against Bila Tserkva, a city about 50 miles (80 km) south of Kyiv; it was the third operational deployment of the Oreshnik.

time.com — "Zelensky confirmed that Russia used its Oreshnik medium-range ballistic missile during the attack, the third time this w"

The Oreshnik is a Russian intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM), reported to travel at speeds exceeding Mach 10, derived from the cancelled RS-26 Rubezh design, carrying multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles.

en.wikipedia.org — "The Oreshnik is a Russian intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) characterized by its reported speed exceeding Mach"
www.cnn.com — "Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh has identified the Oreshnik as a variant of the RS-26 Rubezh IRBM."

The Oreshnik missile was first operationally deployed against Ukraine on 21 November 2024, striking the Yuzhmash defence plant in Dnipro.

en.wikipedia.org — "Oreshnik saw its first combat use on 21 November 2024, striking the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. The strike targeted the Yu"

Vladimir Putin announced the Oreshnik's first deployment in a televised address on 21 November 2024, claiming the weapon travels 'like a meteorite' and is 'immune to any missile defence system.'

en.wikipedia.org — "Putin said the Oreshnik streaks at 10 times the speed of sound, or Mach 10, and is capable of destroying underground bun"

The V-1 flying bomb (Fieseler Fi 103, Vergeltungswaffe Eins) was first launched against England on 13 June 1944, one week after D-Day; the first V-1 to reach London fell on Grove Road, Bow, killing six civilians.

en.wikipedia.org — "The V-1 was first deployed against London on 13 June 1944. The first V-1 to land in Greater London hit a railway bridge "

Approximately 9,521 V-1 flying bombs were launched against the United Kingdom; about 2,419 hit London; the civilian death toll in Britain from V-1 attacks alone was approximately 6,184.

en.wikipedia.org — "Approximately 9,521 V-1 flying bombs were launched against the UK. About 2,419 hit London. The V-1 caused 6,184 civilian"

The V-2 rocket (Aggregat 4, Vergeltungswaffe Zwei) was first deployed against London on 8 September 1944, hitting a residential street in Chiswick in west London; it was the world's first operational long-range ballistic missile.

en.wikipedia.org — "The first V-2 was launched against London on 8 September 1944, hitting Chiswick. The V-2 was the world's first long-rang"
airandspace.si.edu — "The V-2 was the world's first long-range guided ballistic missile."

Approximately 3,172 V-2 rockets were launched in total; about 1,402 reached London; the civilian death toll in Britain from V-2 attacks was approximately 2,754.

en.wikipedia.org — "Approximately 3,172 V-2 rockets were launched. About 1,402 reached London. The V-2 caused approximately 2,754 civilian d"

The last V-2 rocket to hit London arrived on 27 March 1945 at Kynaston Road, Orpington, killing Ivy Millichamp aged 34; the same day a V-2 at Hughes Mansions in Whitechapel killed 134 people; Germany surrendered six weeks later on 8 May 1945.

en.wikipedia.org — "The last V-2 to hit London arrived on 27 March 1945, at Kynaston Road, Orpington. Ivy Millichamp, 34, was killed in her "

The V-2 was designed by a team led by Wernher von Braun at the Peenemünde Army Research Center on the Baltic coast.

en.wikipedia.org — "Wernher von Braun led the development of the V-2 rocket at the Peenemünde Army Research Center on the Baltic coast."

V-2 production at the Mittelwerk underground factory near Nordhausen used slave labour from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp; approximately 60,000 prisoners passed through Mittelbau-Dora, of whom roughly 20,000 died; approximately 10,000 deaths can be attributed to V-2 production.

en.wikipedia.org — "As Dora expanded into the Mittelbau (Central Construction) camp system in 1944-45, up to 25,000 prisoners died, roughly "

More slave labourers died building the V-2 than were killed by it as a weapon (approximately 10,000 production deaths vs approximately 2,754 V-2 civilian deaths in Britain).

www.nationalww2museum.org — "More people died building the V-2 rockets than were killed by it as a weapon."

Von Braun visited the Mittelwerk many times, admitted in 1969 that the conditions there were 'repulsive,' and that he had personally selected slave labourers from Buchenwald in August 1944.

dlab.epfl.ch — "On August 15, 1944, von Braun wrote a letter to Albin Sawatzki, manager of the V-2 production, admitting that he persona"

Wernher von Braun was captured by US forces in May 1945, relocated to the United States under Operation Paperclip, and finished his career as the director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.

en.wikipedia.org — "Von Braun was captured by US forces in May 1945, relocated to the United States under Operation Paperclip. He served as "

The American Saturn V rocket, which took Apollo astronauts to the Moon between 1969 and 1972, was developed by a team led by Wernher von Braun.

en.wikipedia.org — "The Saturn V was developed by a team led by Wernher von Braun at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, with North Ameri"

The Soviet R-7 rocket (which launched Sputnik in October 1957 and Yuri Gagarin in April 1961) was designed by Soviet engineers who had access to captured V-2 documentation and personnel.

en.wikipedia.org — "The R-7 Semyorka was the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Its development drew on the Soviet cap"

The 24 May 2026 Russian attack on Kyiv was the largest single attack against the Ukrainian capital of the entire full-scale war since 24 February 2022 in terms of number of locations damaged.

time.com — "In terms of the number of locations damaged in the onslaught, the strike marks the largest attack against Kyiv of the en"

French President Emmanuel Macron condemned the 24 May 2026 attack as 'the dead end of Russia's war of aggression'; EU High Representative Kaja Kallas described it as 'reckless nuclear brinkmanship.'

www.france24.com — "Macron said the strikes targeting civilians signalled 'the dead end of Russia's war of aggression', while Kallas accused"

The total Allied civilian death toll from V-1 and V-2 attacks combined was approximately 9,000 in Britain (approximately 6,184 V-1 + 2,754 V-2).

en.wikipedia.org — "V-1: 6,184 civilian deaths in Britain."
en.wikipedia.org — "V-2: approximately 2,754 civilian deaths in Britain."

The Operation Crossbow Allied strategic-bombing campaign against V-1 and V-2 launch sites in France required diversion of over 117,000 Allied bomber sorties from other European theatre operations.

en.wikipedia.org — "Operation Crossbow involved more than 117,000 Allied bomber sorties against V-weapon launch sites and production facilit"

The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union was signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev on 8 December 1987; the United States withdrew on 2 August 2019.

en.wikipedia.org — "The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was signed by U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mik"