The Missile Nobody Saw Coming: WWII's First Guided Weapon Sinks an American Destroyer

On November 6th, 1943, off Cape Bougaroun on the Algerian coast, German bombers used the Henschel Hs 293 — the world's first operational guided anti-ship missile — to sink the American destroyer USS Beatty and the transport Santa Elena, killing seventeen men in Convoy KMF 25A. It was one of the opening chapters of guided-weapon warfare, and a warning largely unheeded: twenty days later, the same weapon, fired from the same region, would sink HMT Rohna and kill 1,149 men in the deadliest single loss of American troops at sea in WWII. This episode tells both stories, accurately, on their own terms.