Venge (pronounced venj)
To avenge; to punish; to revenge (archaic).
1250–1300: From the Middle English vengen from the Old French venger & vengier (take revenge, avenge, punish) from the Latin vindicāre (assert a claim, claim as one's own; avenge, punish; vindicate). Also archaic were the related forms were vengefully, vengefulness venged & venging whereas the adjective vengeful, although rare, endured. The noun vengeance, from the same era as venge, flourished. Vengeance was from the Anglo-French vengeaunce, from twelfth century Old French vengeance & venjance (revenge, retribution). Venge & avenge are verbs, revenge is a noun & verb, vengeance & vengefulness are nouns, vengeful is an adjective and vengefully is an adverb; the most common noun plural is vengeances.
Venge long ago became archaic and is now extinct except when used in a historical context or for literary effect. Venge is the verb transitive, venges the third-person singular simple present, venging the present participle and venged the simple past and past participle. Synonyms include vindicate, avenge, chasten, punish, chastise, revenge, repay, redress, requite, square, return, get, fix, retort, reciprocate, score, defend, match, justify and payback. Venge is one of the unusual words in English which went extinct while various derived forms (vengeance; vengeful; avenge) flourished and the translations of the Bible probably encouraged use, God being vengeful, there’s much vengeance in the Bible:
Beloved,
never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written,
“Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” To the contrary, “if your
enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for
by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” Do not be overcome by
evil, but overcome evil with good.
Paul to the Romans; Romans 12:19–21
The vengeance weapons
The V-weapons deployed by Germany late in the World War II (1939-1945) all began as conventional projects of the military or the armaments industry but became known as the Vergeltungswaffen ("retaliatory weapons" or "reprisal weapons") after the label was in 1944 applied by Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945; Reich Minister of Propaganda 1933-1945) who used the word as a propaganda device, seeking to give civilians some hope there might be retaliation against (and perhaps even relief from) the area-bombing campaigns being conducted against cities all over the Reich. The Allies generally translated Vergeltungswaffen as “vengeance weapons”, the best-known of the devices the V-1 & V-2.
The terminology can be confusing, the vengeance weapons often conflated with the so-called Wunderwaffen (superweapons, or wonderweapons) of which there were literally dozens on drawing boards, in development or (occasionally) in use but the Vergeltungswaffen were just a highly-visible sub-set, although, being so well-publicized and relatively numerous, they do tend more to figure in the popular imagination. Goebbels had been talking of the Wunderwaffen since 1943 and Adolf Hitler (1889-1945; Führer (leader), German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945) had hinted at their existence since 1939 although there’s still debate about the technology to which he alluded. Confusingly, historians writing in English also use the term “miracle weapons”, perhaps because Hitler, once he realized the war was lost (and the timing of this is debated, a vague consensus being he probably understood it couldn’t be won after the strategic failure of Unternehmen Zitadelle (Operation Citadel or the Kursk offensive) in mid-1943 and that it was lost when the Ardennes Counteroffensive (Battle of the Bulge) was abandoned in early 1945) began increasingly to refer to the “Miracle of the House of Brandenburg”, a term coined by Frederick the Great (Frederick II, 1712–1786; King of Prussia 1740-1786) to describe the fortuitous series of political and military events which saved Prussia from defeat during the Seven Years' War (1756–1763).
By the latter stages of the war, German civilians were noted in the remarkably frank reports compiled by the SD (the Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS (Security Service of the Reichsführer-SS), the internal intelligence agency of the SS and Nazi Party) as being increasingly skeptical about the Wunderwaffen, using words like “wonder” and “miracle” with some degree of irony. Despite the opinion of some today, Dr Goebbels understood the limits of propaganda and had by 1945 already toned-down the emphasis on the weapons and had switched the focus to matters at least slightly less implausible. In the post-war German language, Wunderwaffe has survived as a (usually derisive) reference to any universal solution said to be something said (improbably) able to solve many or especially difficult problems.
The actual history of the Vergeltungswaffen became murky almost as soon as the war ended. What are well documented are the V-1, V-2 & V-3 and there’s some evidence to suggest the V-4 label was, at least in some documents, applied to one or more weapon before the end of hostilities. The confusion is thought to have been engendered by the normal military & industrial practice of using the "V" designation (denoting Versuchs (attempt, experimental)) plus a number to keep track of all the prototype or version numbers which had to be documented. Although not mentioned in his dairies or elsewhere, Goebbels seemed just to have hijacked Versuchs (V) and done a rebrand, the word vengeance well-suited to the time and place to which the gangster Nazi state had delivered Germany. He spoke in public only ever of the V-1 & V-2 and the V-3 is documented in the German military archive but for the V-4 and beyond, the application of the V-x nomenclature is speculative, V-4 having (after the war) been applied variously to a Nazi atomic bomb, the manned version of the V-1, a number of radiological devices and the A9/A10 rocket combination.
After the war, there was a great profusion of often duplicated records spread all over the Reich and it was almost all on paper. Project codes weren’t standardized even within industries or branches of the military but what was adhered to was the universal allocation of a system of version identifiers, usually as numbers. A "V" to designate Versuchsmuster (prototypes) was almost always used, usually in conjunction with whatever was the current model designation (eg Ta 189 v1, Me 210 v2 et al) but within project teams, a lot of working documents circulated with just a version number listed; that being all that was required by the team focusing on the one model. It’s that, at least in part, that’s thought to account for so many different things being described as V-4, V-7 etc, misinformation the expansion of the internet appears to have made more prevalent.
Ironically, the dozens of Wunderwaffen to which so many resources were allocated ultimately achieved more for the Allies than the Germans. After the war, the British, the Americans and the Russians all took whatever they could grab of the German military and scientific research establishment (equipment and personnel), carted it off, reassembled what they had and put the scientists to work. In ballistics, rocketry and advanced aviation, the victorious powers of the late 1940s essentially had in their hands what represented probably decades of peace-time research. It’s not that developments like trans-Atlantic airliners, the Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM) or the moon landing wouldn’t have been possible without the windfall of the German research but these things almost certainly would have taken longer to achieve, presumably decades such was the pace of advancement during the war.
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