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Originally Posted by Olefin
Keep in mind I am not talking about a weapons platform (unless you want to put an explosive on it and make it a kamikaze - thats easy to do) - I am talking about a simple drone with a video system or camera that you can trigger remotely and then retreive and get back the information by having it fly home. And there was a lot of home video equipment available in that in that time frame - again we are talking about jury rigs here vs fully functional military eqiupment.
Also keep in mind that the tech to make a functional cruise missile has been around since the 1940's - i.e. the V1. And they didnt need a lot of high tech to make it a very deadly weapon. Not an accurate one - i.e. they aimed it a London and a lot of them missed - but if you even have 1940's level tech still working you can make one.
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You can make a functional cruise missile with earlier tech as long as you have enough resources to throw into testing. The United States produced 45 Kettering Aerial Torpedoes between 1918 and 1920, but they didn't see use because officials were (understandably) concerned about their reliability when launching over friendly troops. There was also the UK's Larynx in the 1920s and the USSR's GIRD-06 in the 1930s. None of them were successful in their era, but that was because of a lack of technical knowledge and development - aerodynamics were never fully worked out for the Aerial Torpedo, while the Larynx succeeded in tests in England but failed in Egypt because of vapor lock in the engine.
Even when the V-1 came around, of the first 19 launches at London, only 4 hit England, and only 1 of those in London. It took time to work the kinks out of the system. Once those kinks were worked out, 20% were immediate failures (detonating on the rail, crashing shortly after takeoff, or wandering randomly), while only 31.4% hit within 30 kilometers of the aiming point at 225 kilometer range or 15 km at 100 km range, which was the Luftwaffe's definition of success for the weapon.
With World War 2 tech, you can also get a drone with a TV camera controlled by the backseater in a multi-person aircraft, like the TDR drone torpedo bomber controlled by Avenger bombardiers. They were used against Japanese shipping with moderate success (about 2/3 success rate, with most of the failures being mechanical or TV failures, only around 6% being shot down).