Maybe this sounds like complete garbage, but my history teacher's family is from Belgium. Somehow his grandfather got pictures of what look like rockets/missiles with cockpits. He took the photos towards the end of the war. I just remember him saying they could never find any other record of the missile things. I also don't have the pictures, but I was just wondering if any of you know anything about this.
Doesn't sound like garbage at all! Is this what you were thinking of? If not, disregard the rest.
Towards the end of the war, the Luftwaffe was fighting a losing battle. The aircraft production could not keep up with the Allies, the loss in experienced aircrews could not be made good, and the fuel situation became increasingly dire. Furthermore, an Allied invasion of France was becoming a likely threat.
One solution to this deteriorating situation was seen in the so-called 'Volksjäger' or people's interceptor, a simple, easy to produce interceptor that would be mass-produced and could be flown with minimal training. Hitler-Youth's were the proposed pilots who would use the interceptor in massed attacks against the streams of allied bombers. The result of the hastened development process was the wooden He-162, which only became operational in April 1945 and had no impact on the course of the war. A great example of the hypertrophy of the Nazi war economy towards the end, the plane was made of wood and disintegrated on the first test flight because they put not enough glue to keep the wing's leading edge together!^1
However, as you can see this project was too little and too late, and other proposals were made. In the end of 1943, it was Albert Speer who first proposed the idea of 'suicide attacks', or Selbstopfer-Angriffe.^2 His idea was to fly manned aircraft into a dam on the Volga near Moscow, too far beyond operational range for the pilots to return. To oppose a probable Allied invasion in France, a group of volunteer Luftwaffe pilots formed around Heinrich Lange, officer and staunch National Socialist. His idea was as follows:
Nach der genau ausgearbeiteten Theorie sollte jeweils mit einem SO-Flugzeug ein Landeschiff der Invasionsflotte versenkt werden. Der SO-Pilot hatte das als Verlustgerät gedachte SO-Flugzeug bis zum Auftreffen ins Ziel zu lenken und fand dabei den Tod.
"According to the exactly worked out theory, one SO-[self-sacrifice]plane each was to sink one landing ship of the invasion fleet. The SO-pilot was to steer the SO-plane, which was designed with its loss in mind, into the target until impact and would find his death."^3
Hanna Reitsch, the most famous of Germanys female test pilots and a close associate of Hitler himself, was immediately captivated by the idea. She relayed this idea to Hitler in February 1944, but Hitler was less enthusiastic. The Reich Air ministry didn't pick up the plan, but Hitler allowed further work on the project. Reitsch recounted in her memoirs^4 that Hitler didn't view Germany's situation yet as dire enough, and he didn't see the right moment for such a project - however, he reserved the possibility for later. At that point, Hitler put much of his hopes into 'wonder weapons' such as the Me-262 and Me-163 that were supposed to turn the tide in the air. Speer however was still in favour of suicide missions. In May 1944, he renewed his proposal to Hitler.
All this meant that Reitsch was able to continue working on this project, together with about 70 volunteer Luftwaffe pilots - 15.000(!) had volunteered, but these were kept on file until the project would be ready for action. The 'aircraft' that was picked for the realization of the project was the Me 328, but the task of conversion to a human-steered gliding bomb was complicated, and the Fieseler Fi-103, better known as the Vergeltungswaffe 1, or V1 was picked as an alternative. The first of the wonder-weapons to become operational in June 1944, the V1 was a simple mass-produced (with the death of thousands of forced laborers) cruise missile, stabilized by a gyroscope and propelled by a simple pulse-jet. However, it suffered from low accuracy (measured in kilometers) that made it useless as a weapon against individual targets.
The aim of the project was to rebuild the Fi-103 in to a manned bomb. Designed by the Fieseler Werke and the DFS gliding flight institute, the result in June 1944 was the Fieseler Fi-103 Reichenberg, named after the capital of the Sudetenland (modern Liberec). A cockpit was put into the rear part of the Fi-103. Outfitted only with very rudimentary instruments, a clock, a tachometer, altimeter, artificial horizon/variometer, a small compass and an arming switch for the payload, the cockpit was still very cramped. The pilot was equipped with a parachute, swim vest, a helmet with microphone, sunglasses and safety harness. The plane had no landing gear of any kind. Like its unmanned counterpart, it was propelled by an easy and cheap to mass-produce pulse-jet engine mounted directly above and aft of the cockpit hood. The designed operational range was 330 km at 560 km/h. All in all, the resulting craft was still very close to the unmanned V1, a small and fast craft, hard to intercept.^5
Pulse-jets can only be started at high speed, so a solution had to be found. The unmanned version was launched by catapult, the Reichenberg was to be launched by a mother-aircraft like the He-111 medium bomber. The pilot would then steer the craft towards the target and bail out at the last moment by parachute. However, pilot mortality was expected to be much above 90%, making it for all intents and purposes a suicide weapon. Speer continued to favour the program, as Goebbels notes in his diary entry from 29. August 1944, recounting Speers proposals for the use of the weapon:
The V 1-weapon is to be manned by death-fliers [Todesflieger] and steered by them onto the English fleet at Scapa Flow. One could achiever very substantial successes with this. The death-pilots, which have already volunteered in extraordinary numbers, are already being trained.
Goebbels language here makes it perfectly clear that it was nothing more than a suicide weapon as well.
In fact, Hanna Reitsch, Otto Skorzeny and other pilots were taking part in successful test-flights of the Reichenberg. 175 Fi-103 Reichenbergs had already been produced when the program was cancelled by Hitlers orders in October 1944. This was the end of this project, and the Reichenberg was never used in action.
Here are some pictures of the 'manned rocket' Fi-103 Reichenberg:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/Reichenberg_1945.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Reichenberg_Pilot.jpg
The comments by Speer and Goebbels above make clear that this project has to be seen in the wider context of the final throes of National Socialism. Suicide missions were a clear break with christian ethics, and at the time these projects were initiated, the japanese Kamikaze-programme was unknown. Stalingrad had already been interpreted as a heroic self-sacrifice of the German soldiers to protect their cause and the fatherland. To the Nazi leadership, it became ever more clear that the war was not winnable anymore. However, as we know, the result was not to sue for peace - it was further radicalization, the mobilization of all available forces up to self-annihilation. Hitler and a large part of the German leadership didn't simply lose their grip on reality - victory became a second-rate objective. Heroic sacrifice would not only enable them to kill as many enemies as possible with them and deny them the use of Germany's resources (the infamous scorched Earth policy of Hitlers 'Nero-order' has to be seen in this context as well), but it would set a powerful example for following generations, who would pick up where they had left of and continue their fight against Jews and Bolsheviks.
On a more short timeframe, heroic self-sacrifice would also provide examples for the German population and soldiers in the final fight, and Goebbels remained a fanatical proponent of suicide missions:
The self-sacrifice must now come into use in a bigger style in the fight of the German Wehrmacht. There is in the German populace a vast amount of young men who are ready to go into certain death for the Fatherland, a sign of the high and unshakable fighting spirit of the German Youth.^6
This also became apparent in the naming of the unit that was to use the Reichenberg in combat: V/KG 200 was named the 'Leonidas' squadron, after the famous Spartan King who had died in the battle of the Thermopylae. As we have seen, it never came to use the Reichenberg, but was instead equipped with the FW-190 fighter-bomber. In March 1944, Hitler finally gave in to Goebbels and allowed the use of fighters as 'Rammjäger', ramming fighters, against allied targets. One of these units was the Sonderkommando Elbe, with 300 pilots, which flew only one recorded sortie on April 7, with very mixed results. 133 fighters were lost (40 of those by ramming) for 51 bombers; the special command was subsequently dissolved. The pilots of Leonidas squadron meanwhile were flying suicide attacks on the Soviet-held bridges over the important river Oder from Jüterbog airfield near Berlin, leading to the loss of 35 pilots.^7
Other weapon designs in the same vein include a line of manned torpedoes, boats filled with explosives, the rocket-powered interceptor Ba-349 Natter -which became so unstable after launching its rockets that a loss of craft and pilot became nearly inevitable - and unpowered gliders such as the aforementioned ME 328 or the BV 40 - aptly named 'manned Flak bomb' in the official jargon. This shows to what inhumane levels the regime and its technocrats were ready to go even towards their own 'aryan' population (a common thread of the end phase), designing weapons that incorporated the likely death of the operator into the design process.
If you have further questions, I'll be glad to answer.
Some possibilities:
They had the V1 and V2 rockets, but these were unmanned.
ME-262 jet fighter, which would have certainly seemed odd at the time - aeroplanes had propellers, so the 262 could have certainly looked odd. I don't know if they were ever deployed to Belgium, maybe someone with better Luftwaffe operational knowledge can tell us.
Aside from that there was the various "flying wings" the Horten brothers made (e.g. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Horten_Ho_IV.JPG) but I don't believe they were actually ever used in combat.
There was also the Fieseler Fi 103R Reichenberg which is exactly what you describe, but again, it was never used in combat and cancelled after various test flights, all development was done in Germany.
The Bachem Ba 349 Natter would also fit the description but again it seems never to have made it to combat and was developed too late in the war for it to be in Belgium (first test flights were October 1944 and ran into 1945, by which time Belgium had been liberated).
