A pair of North American Mustangs from the 1st Scouting Force, 8th Air Force, with P-51D Chip flown by Merrill Dewey DuMont in the foreground, detects a German V-2 rocket launch site near the English Channel in the spring of 1945.
The V-2 units were mobile and could be deployed quickly in open countryside or city suburbs, they were all heavily defended and thus hazardous to attack.
The scouts would radio back information on the location, weather conditions and defences etc. in order to aid allied bombers in attacking these sites.
Happenstance other instances of Allied aircraft engaging launched V-2 rockets include the following:
- on October 29, 1944, Lieutenants Donald A. Schultz and Charles M. Crane in a P-38 Lightning attempted to photograph a launched V-2 above the trees near the River Rhine,
- on January 1, 1945, a 4th Fighter Group pilot aloft over the northern flightpath for attacking elements of five German fighter wings on Unternehmen Bodenplatte that day, observed a V-2 “act up for firing near Lochem … the rocket was immediately tilted from 85 deg. to 30 deg”,
- on February 14, 1945, a No. 602 Squadron RAF Spitfire XVI pilot, Raymond Baxter‘s colleague ‘Cupid’ Love, fired at a V-2 just after launch.