Exactly one month after the first of thousands of Nazi V-1 “Buzz Bomb” cruise missiles began raining terror and death on London, a Dakota transport plane landed on July 13, 1944, at Wright-Patterson Field in Ohio bearing a sinister cargo: one ton of V-1 parts recovered from dud missiles.
The Allies had ample warning of the Nazi missile campaign and undertook massive countermeasures to defeat the V-1 threat. But the U.S. Army Air Force also wanted its own V-1s. It ordered concept work on ten different cruise missiles dubbed the JB (Jet Bomb) 1 through 10.
Northrop’s JB-1 ‘Bat’ was the only original design tested. It resembled a chubby miniature airplane (picture here), with two General Electric B1 turbojets in the fuselage and two 2,000 pound bombs stored in the wing roots. Northrop built ten JB-1s, but the first crashed on the initial test in December 1944, and later trials revealed poor turbojet performance.
The next-in-sequence JB-2 was far more successful for a simple reason: it was reverse-engineered from the Nazi weapon. The Ford Motor Company built the PJ31, a copy of the V-1’s ‘buzzing’ Argus pulsejet, while Republic Aircraft contracted Willys-Overand to duplicate the airframe.