WWII’s Operation Aphrodite | The Strange Truth

Was this program an act of Allied desperation? Wasn't there any kind of other way to hit these islands? The Aphrodite program is the Allied version of the Japanese kamikazes. In the Japanese case, they had self-sacrificial pilots who were willing to fly the planes themselves into the target. The Allies, of course, were not willing to do that, and therefore they had to find a technological solution.

So for the Allies, we developed this system by which we were using these remotely controlled bombers. These planes were literally explosive flying coffins packed with unstable dynamite, lumbering into the air barely under control, rigged with barely functioning electronics. So it's not surprising that it proved difficult to integrate all these technologies at this early stage.

The V weapons were intended to strike back for the terrible damage that the Allied bombers were doing to Germany. Dr. Goebel, the V3 was a very long barreled gun. The projectile was fired and it would be accelerated further by other explosive charges so that the shell developed enormous speeds and was therefore able to fly over the distances required to hit London from the V weapon site at Memory, yet in German-occupied France.

The particular targets, such as Memory, the very heavily hardened targets posed difficult problems for the Allies because conventional bombs weren't able to penetrate the thick concrete carapace. The Germans would pour lots and lots of concrete, so even the Allied bombing, the massive Allied bombing, would not be heavy enough to destroy what was underneath.

Drones become a part of the super guns story because we wanted to take them out. The best explosive was determined to be the British top X, and the pilot's compartment is placed 1575 pounds. The idea was that you could pack an aircraft with explosives and fly it directly into the target.

Aphrodite included a number of elements which became standard in future drone programs, such as the camera. Not only did they use television, which was in its infancy, but they figured out how to broadcast from plane to plane and use those pictures in real time to fly the airplanes remotely. It's pretty ingenious, and all in 1944 when many people hadn't even heard the word television, let alone owned one.