What if the germans...

In article ,
says...

"Bernardz" wrote in message
news:MPG.1a6d71e35858d65d989841@news...
In article ,
says...



The range of WW2 jets wasnt that bad in comparison to most
european fighter aircraft in use at the time

The Meteor Mk III and Me262 had a range of around 1000km which
was about the same as the Spitfire and Me-109

Which is fine for an interceptor. What Hitler needed were long range
fighters such as a P-51 which had a range of 1600km and if a drop tank
was added this was more than doubled.


Only if he had long range bombers to escort, if defence of the
reich was the mission the aircraft range as built was fine.


I can think of several theatre where long range planes with drop tanks
could be a big plus eg the battle of Britain and Russia.





Certainly in hindsight Hitler could have used much earlier eg improved
submarines, better coding equipment and sub-machine guns. Similarly a
V1
would have been very useful in battle of Britain. Note the Allies did
not have them either so one cannot blame his lack of U.S. style R&D.


Certainly higher priority to submarines would have helped, as for
coding machines the problem was more to do with german
signalling practise than the technology used. As one
Bletchley Park codebreaker pointed out the tendency of
certain groups to end all messages with a Heil Hitler
made it much easier to break their codes. Lazy operators
also tended not to chose truly random start letter combinations
but would instead use their initials, girl friends names etc

In reality it almost always bad habits like this that allow codes to be
broken.


Properly applied procedural rules can largely prevent this,
one reason the Kriegsmarine codes were harder to penetrate
were they largely applied the rules. Another source of weakness
is when the same messages are transmitted in a different code
that has been broken or in clear. For example the Japanese
transmitted weather data both in the naval code JN-25
and the merchant navy code which was weak. Thus by
taking the message in the easily broken merchant code
you got a crib for JN-25

So the Germans too had their share of successes in code breaking for
similar reasons. They had cracked several high level British naval
codes, US military codes and several Soviet ones. During WW2 code
breaking technology could crack most codes.

Taking away nothing from the guys at Bletchley Park, another rotor and
some decent security and frequent changes in rotors would have made it
almost impossible to break.


Depends on the time frame, by 1944 4 rotor codes were
breakable and bby late 45/45 the much more secure
Lorenz codes were being broken regularly on the
Colossus machine. This was of course a programmable
electronic computer.


Obviously some dramatic improvements in coding technology are needed.





As for the V-1 this would hardly have helped win the BOB.
You dont win air superiority by scattering HE across most
of southern England.

I did said help not win.

I find this an absolutely fascinating weapon system. Very cheap. Nothing
the British had during the battle of Britain could deal with them. If
Hitler would have had them earlier the Germans could keep bombing
Britain till late 1944. The Allies would have to spend heaps to defend
against the V1s compared to what the Germans spent building and
launching them. Not a war winner but certainly very effective.






The critical developments that Germany failed tomake IMHO
are less obvious large scale projects. A reliable proximity
fuse could have made allied aircraft losses much heavier.
Better attention to production factors in weapons design
could have radically improved productivity in the arms
plants.

Instead of sending so much money on V2 it could have been better spent
on air to air missiles or developing SAMs.


Air to air missiles only help if you can put fighters in the air

Yep. Although the Germans did use them late in the war and they did
prove to be quite effective effective against bomber streams.

Introduced in mass in 1943 and they could have been devastating against
the bombers.

and given the scale of the task it seems unlikely that
SAM's would have been available in a timely manner or
in sufficient quantities and they would have been vulnerable
to jamming.

They actually built a few Enzian missiles but too late to have an
effect. I doubt that the Allies could have jammed them.


These are actually the sort of complex
developments the Nazis went in for. Less radical
developments such as improved gyroscopic gunsights,
prosximity fuses and predictors were pursued by the
allies to great efect.

All this would help.



Another thing that would have worked well was better German pilot
training by the end of WW2.


Trouble is they lacked the resources to do that. To train 20 pilots
you not only need instructors and planes but virtually the same
level of ground staff as an operational squadron and a
safe flying location. Britain could get its pilots trained
in South Africa, Australia, Canada and the USA, Germany had
no such luxury.

In 1944 I would agree, in 1940 I would disagree.


Keith




--
Should the government be responsible for individual's stupidity?

30th observation of Bernard

"Charles Gray" wrote in message
...

had actually put a U.S. style R&D system in place during WWII,

Then it would have taken them twenty years to commission the aircraft! :^)

Si

In article ,
Charles Gray writes:
had actually put a U.S. style R&D system in place during WWII, and
instead of coming up with (however pretty they look on paper) dozens
of designs that never made it beyond wind tunnal designs and focused
on say two or three fighter designs.
For example, if they'd pushed through the first jet fighter design
in 1940 (I forget what it was called), and focused on incremental
improvmeents instead of always running to the next design.

Would this have had a major impact on WWII, or just drawn it out by
a few months?

They may have ended up with fewer prototypes - but it wouldn't have
made much difference.
From about 1936 on, teh German arms buildup was curtailed by a lack of
raw meteriels. The Luftwaffe decision to concentrate on Medium
Bombers and Short-range fighters was much more heavily influenced by a
lack of Aluminum, Rubber, and Steel than a cocentration on Tactical
vs. Strategic airpower. The Kreigsmaraine was never able to get
U-Boat production up to the levels that they knew they needed for the
same reason. (Well, that, and their foolishness of fiddling around
with a Surface Navy that would never be more than a small Task Force,
adn which made no materiel contribution to the war effort.)
The Heer wasn't able to build the tanks it really needed, and went to
war with the Panzer Divisions equipped not with the preferred Pz IIIs,
woth a useful level of armor and firepower, but with light tanks
barely suitable for use in training.

Germany produced either none, of very little, of the raw materiels
needed for large-scale production. They needed to be able to import
materiel from Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

This situation didn't get any better in 1939. When the war broke
out, the Royal Navy interdicted all sea traffic going into Germany.
This was fairly easy - The German seaports are fairly easily
bottlenecked, and they didn't have much of a merchant fleet to begin
with. So, really, the question's an interesting one, but, in the long
run, irrelevant. They wouldn't have been able to do much with a
U.S. style R&D effort, since they couldn't back it up with a U.S
style production effort.

--
Pete Stickney
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. -- Daniel Webster

German fighter endurance was a sore spot, jet or piston-engined. I
remember seeing Guntar Rall on TV ruefully stating that the LW
fighters had ninety minutes fuel whereas the Mustangs had eight hours
worth. (At least he still had a sens of humor.) When the red light
comes on you head for home or prepare to bail out. If Mustangs or
Tbolts are camping over your home drome and you have ten minutes fuel
left - gentlemen, that is a problem. So are the 1000 fighters the
Allies could put in the air at once - a target-rich environment is not
a good thing, especially if the targets are looking for you so they
can another coup.
Walt BJ

Charles Gray wrote in message . ..
had actually put a U.S. style R&D system in place during WWII, and
instead of coming up with (however pretty they look on paper) dozens
of designs that never made it beyond wind tunnal designs and focused
on say two or three fighter designs.
For example, if they'd pushed through the first jet fighter design
in 1940 (I forget what it was called), and focused on incremental
improvmeents instead of always running to the next design.

Would this have had a major impact on WWII, or just drawn it out by
a few months?


what if the British Air Ministry had listened to Frank Whittle's
proposal for the jet engine when he presented it to them before 1932