V-2 Rocket Assembling And Launching 1947 US Army Film Bulletin FB-219 (Patreon)

more at http://quickfound.net/

Originally a public domain film from the US Army, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2_rocket

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The V-2 (German: Vergeltungswaffe 2, "Retribution Weapon 2"), with the technical name Aggregat 4 (A4), was the world's first long-range guided ballistic missile. The missile, powered by a liquid-propellant rocket engine, was developed during the Second World War in Germany as a "vengeance weapon", assigned to attack Allied cities as retaliation for the Allied bombings against German cities. The V-2 rocket also became the first artificial object to travel into space by crossing the Kármán line with the vertical launch of MW 18014 on 20 June 1944.

Research into military use of long-range rockets began when the studies of graduate student Wernher von Braun attracted the attention of the German Army. A series of prototypes culminated in the A-4, which went to war as the V-2. Beginning in September 1944, over 3,000 V-2s were launched by the German Wehrmacht against Allied targets, first London and later Antwerp and Liège. According to a 2011 BBC documentary, the attacks from V-2s resulted in the deaths of an estimated 9,000 civilians and military personnel, and a further 12,000 forced laborers and concentration camp prisoners died as a result of their forced participation in the production of the weapons.

The rockets travelled at supersonic speed, arrived without warning, and there was no effective defence against them. Many more would have died, but Germany was collapsing, and teams from the Allied forces—the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union—raced to capture key German manufacturing sites and technology, and the launching sites were overrun. Von Braun and over 100 key V-2 personnel surrendered to the Americans and many of the original V-2 team ended up working at the Redstone Arsenal. The US also captured enough V-2 hardware to build approximately 80 of the missiles. The Soviets gained possession of the V-2 manufacturing facilities after the war, re-established V-2 production, and moved it to the Soviet Union...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2_sounding_rocket

German V-2 rockets captured by the United States Army at the end of World War II were used as sounding rockets to carry scientific instruments into the earth's upper atmosphere at White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) for a program of atmospheric and solar investigation through the late 1940s. Rocket trajectory was intended to carry the rocket about 100 miles (160 km) high and 30 miles (48 km) horizontally from WSMR Launch Complex 33. Impact velocity of returning rockets was reduced by inducing structural failure of the rocket airframe upon atmospheric re-entry. More durable recordings and instruments might be recovered from the rockets after ground impact, but telemetry was developed to transmit and record instrument readings during flight...

The first of 300 railroad cars of V-2 rocket components began to arrive at Las Cruces, New Mexico in July 1945 for transfer to WSMR. (So much equipment was taken from Germany that the Deutsches Museum later had to obtain a V-2 for an exhibit from the US.) In November General Electric (GE) employees began to identify, sort, and reassemble V-2 rocket components in WSMR Building 1538, designated as WSMR Assembly Building 1. The Army completed a blockhouse in WSMR Launch Area 1 in September 1945. WSMR Launch Complex 33 for the captured V-2s was built around this blockhouse.

Initial V-2 assembly efforts produced 25 rockets available for launch... German rocket scientists of Operation Paperclip arrived at Fort Bliss in January 1946 to assist the V-2 rocket testing program. After a static test firing of a V-2 engine on 15 March 1946, the first V-2 rocket launch from Launch Complex 33 was on 16 April 1946. As the possibilities of the program were realized, GE personnel built new control components to replace deteriorated parts and used replacement parts with salvaged materials to make more than 75 V-2 sounding rockets available for atmospheric and solar investigation at WSMR. Approximately two V-2 launches per month were scheduled from Launch Complex 33 until the supply of V-2 sounding rockets was exhausted. A reduced frequency of V-2 sounding rocket investigations from Launch Complex 33 continued until 1952...