On This Day — June 13, 1944
Exactly one week after D-Day, as Allied troops fought inland from Normandy beaches, Nazi Germany unleashed a new nightmare on London: the world’s first operational cruise missile — the V-1 “buzz bomb.”
Built by concentration-camp slave laborers worked to death in underground factories, these robot planes carried a ton of high explosives. Their pulse-jet engine made a distinctive, terrifying buzzing sound that Londoners learned to dread. When the engine suddenly cut out overhead … you had roughly 12 seconds of silence before it dove and detonated with catastrophic force.
The first one struck London that morning near Grove Road in Bethnal Green. Thousands more would follow.
My grandfather, Captain Allen, was in and around London at the time. Just four days later, on June 17, 1944, he wrote in his diary:
“Have learned today that the raid was caused by a new type of bomb. It is a sort of robot plane with no pilot. When the current (whatever that is and it appears to have something to do with rocket power) is cut off the plane falls. It is filled with heavy explosives and exploded with terrific force on hitting the ground.”
Even as Germany was losing the war on every front, they diverted scarce resources — fuel, materials, manpower — into these “vengeance weapons” aimed at civilians.
At the same moment, the Holocaust reached a horrific peak. In June 1944, Auschwitz was operating at maximum killing capacity. Trains from Hungary arrived daily (sometimes multiple per day), carrying hundreds of thousands of Jews straight to the gas chambers. The Reich was collapsing, yet the Nazis still prioritized genocide over military defense.
They couldn’t win the war.
But they were determined to finish their other war — the one against the Jews.
The V-1 campaign and the death camps ran in parallel: one last spasm of hatred and revenge while the Reich burned.