V-1

The V-1 was developed at Peenemünde by the German Luftwaffe and was designed by Robert Lussar of the Fieseler company and Fritz Gosslau from the Argus engine works during the Second World War. The V-1 was the first guided missile used in war and the forerunner of today's cruise missile, it was an aerodynamic missile powered by a pulse jet engine. The simple Pulse jet engine pulsed 50 times per second, and the characteristic buzzing sound gave rise to the colloquial names "buzz bomb" or "doodlebug". The V-1 guidance system used a simple autopilot to regulate height and speed, a weighted pendulum system provided fore-and-aft attitude measurement to control pitch, and a countdown timer driven by a vane anemometer on the nose found when target range has been reached, accurately enough for area bombing.
The first test flight of the V-1 was in late 1941 or early 1942 at Peenemünde. On 13 June 1944, the first V-1 struck London. By the end of WWII, 2,419 V-1s had reached London killing about 6,184 people and injuring 17,981. The British took many countermeasures against the V-1s, these included Anti-aircraft guns, barrage balloons, interceptors...
But the most attention-grabbing countermeasure was the hair-raising method which consisted on using the airflow over an interceptor's wing to raise one wing of the buzz bomb, by sliding the wingtip to within six inches (15 cm) of the lower surface of the V-1's wing. If properly executed, this manoeuvre would tip the V-1's wing up, overriding the gyros and sending the V-1 into an out-of-control dive.