Long War 2 is a significant overhaul of XCOM 2 aimed at giving players the feel of running a worldwide guerrilla war against ADVENT and offering them a greater variety of strategic and tactical experiences. Fuelled by liquid ethanol and oxygen, it was much more sophisticated that anything built before and effectively the world’s first space rocket.By Pavonis Interactive (formerly Long War Studios) The Allies realised that the V2 was a machine, unlike anything they had developed themselves.Īt the heart of the V2 was a powerful motor capable of taking the rocket more than 80km (50 miles) above the Earth in a trajectory of some 190 km (120 miles). Eyewitness accounts describe prisoners being hanged from cranes above the rocket assembly lines.ĭespite his complicity in the conditions at Mittelwerk, the engineer who designed the V2, Wernher von Braun, came to be feted as a hero of the space age. Many were executed for attempted sabotage. They lived under appalling conditions, with no daylight, little sleep, food or proper sanitation. The prisoners – many pulled from other concentration camps for their technical skills such as welding – worked around the clock in an underground factory called Mittelwerk near the Buchenwald concentration camp in central Germany. “The V2 programme was hugely expensive in terms of lives, with the Nazis using slave labour to manufacture these rockets.”
“It’s something that’s often glossed over, but shouldn’t be,” says Doug Millard, space historian and curator of space technology at London’s Science Museum, where a V2 takes pride of place in the main exhibition hall. However, a far grimmer statistic is that many more, at least 20,000, died constructing the V2s themselves. More than 1,300 V2s were fired at England and, as allied forces advanced, hundreds more were targeted at Belgium and France.Īlthough there is no exact figure, estimates suggest that several thousand people were killed by the missile – 2,724 in Britain alone. “It was a terror weapon, you didn’t hear it arriving, it was just there… bang!” “Suddenly there was a large bang in a road nearby and a great cloud of debris was thrown up in the air, and that was a V2 rocket,” he says. Having seen a rocket launch, Dad was fortunate enough to escape a V2’s return to Earth when he was waiting for another train at Queen’s Park underground station in north London. V stood for ‘vergeltungswaffen', or 'retaliatory weapon', and were a last-ditch attempt by the Germans to reverse the course of the war. It took just five minutes from launch to landing. However, unlike aircraft or the V2’s predecessor the V1 flying bomb, this was a new type of weapon, crashing and exploding without warning in target cities, such as London, Norwich, Paris, Lille and Antwerp.
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