Hitler's Stealth Fighter

The Nazis are still around, they've just evloved with the times and no longer call themselves Nazis of have a Fuehrer but they still have the same beliefs

 

I, too, am glad that you posted and launched an interesting discussion. That is what this forum is about; sharing knowledge and opinions. AND meeting on line so many interesting people. This could not have been done in my time as a young man. All that you could do is to read as much as you could and occasionally meet someone who had a story to tell. This way we can dig up unknown amounts of first hand accounts and valuable histories from those who post here. Lets keep it going.
Switches

 

From what I have read they shot their wad on combat weapons and were so certain of rapid victories little attention was paid to logistic support. Somewhere I have read that 70% of the German over the road transportation was horse drawn and that they lost something on the order of 1,500,000 horses as combat casualties, frozen or starved. While the JU52 may have been a brilliant cargo airplane they were too busy building record numbers of 109's. There was also a saying in the mechanized units "Only a Tiger can tow a Tiger". In other words, for every Tiger knocked out of action 2 Tigers were no longer available for battle. 1 was needed to get the other to a repair area or rail line.

They were so caught up in Wunder Weapons and their own invincibility they forgot about strategic planning. They also missed a lesson from a small Frenchman about Russian winters.

 

The Krummlauf Attachment ?

Nazi explosive chocolate bar grenade
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I think that you are right on. Blitzkrieg won in the early stages and they thought that they could go on that way and never thought of the strategic implications of a protracted war or neutralizing the vitality of their distant enemies. They had airplanes that could fly the distances with a bomb load but they were never developed until it was too late. The lack of strategic weapons allowed the allies, particularly the U.S., to crank up and crank out war machinery, food, and supplies without the threat or interruption of strategic bombing. This is what killed Germany. A german soldier made the statement that they could shoot up ten tanks or 20 U.S. trucks and the next day they were replaced. The Boeing plant in Seattle produced 20 B-17's in one 24 hour period and we were training crews as fast as the airplanes came off the line. Nobody now can realize the TOTAL national war effort that consumed this country and the unbelievable mass of weapons, implements, food, and well trained and dedicated people that were produced in a short period of 3 1/2 years. I saw the state of Florida become one huge airfield in a matter of one year. Then when I went in I could see that all of the southern tier of states was one big training base for either the army or the air force. The rest of the states were almost the same with Navy or Marines. I don't think that the axis powers realized the overwhelming potential of this country to produce everything that was needed INCLUDING good fighting men. It is difficult to believe the rapid transformation of men who were not bred and trained for the military as were the Germans and then to see them become as tough and resolute as the enemy in a few years is remarkable. Germany and Japan could not mount this kind of mass response and neither had a strategic capacity and material potential to counter it. Russia did and does.
Switches

 

The development of the Sherman Firefly proved itself to have ample power to stop a Tiger.

 

Any tank, including the tiny little Stuart, could stop a Tiger provided you could get close enough. And at the right angle.

However, if I had to be deployed in one, I think I would pick the Tiger.

The Tiger's 88 gun could group a five round pattern within about 18" at 1500 yards. And, at a muzzle velocity of over 3000FPS, it pretty much blew up anything it hit.

It is interesting to note that on Rifledriver's point - that of the overwhelming provisional superiority of the U.S. - in today's military we seem to have taken on the WW2 German viewpoint: Technical superiority rather than numerical superiority.

 

Well said.

Modern militaries are well aware of this, and with automated systems, a single flight op can generate 200 pages full of logistical adjustments down the line, addressing the impacts on the crew, air base, ammunitions and fuel depot, other squadrons, and a gazillion other things that can be affected or disrupted. There was a cool show on National Geographic about it.

 

Could not of said this better myself.

 

Yeah, they are called neocons now.

 

Witness Mr. Ecclestone.

 

If find that statement to border on the absurd. The distruction of the rail system was what stopped the logistic capability and that was done by destroying the rail yards. The disruption of their fuel supplies by the air raids on Polesti was also a key element of the strategic bombing campaign. These are but two areas where strategic bombing played a critical role. I am confident that there were many others. While Germany, in many ways, compensated for bombing by moving factories underground and dispersing production, the amount of war material was reduced and it played an important role in their defeat.

To ignore the impact of the strategic bombing campaign on the manufacturing and logistic capability of Germany is to simply ignore the facts. While boots on the ground took the positions, without the strategic bombing campaigh, we would still be bogged down somewhere in France..

As said earlier there were and still are plenty of shoulda, coulda and woulda's in there, but strategic bombing was a key part of the war.

Now if you said it was ineffecient, I'd agree with you 100%. The amount of lives lost and the amount of tonnage delivered to achieve the results was staggering. But remember, there wasn't a better way to do it at the time, so they used what they had and got it done.

 

7 or 800 B17's delivering near misses can destroy a lot of acerage.

 

One of the things that really killed the Germans was the lack of a long range bomber, except the ineffective and overly complicated Heinkel 177, not helped by Ernst Udet's insistence that all bombers be capable of dive bombing. This gave the Russians a sanctuary for all their factories east of the Urals and even had large areas of the UK unreachable by the Heinkel 111 and Junkers 88, even unescorted.

The allied strategic bombing campaign cannot be dismissed as completely unsuccessful because it forced the Germans to build new underground factories and completely gutted their petroleum producing capability. The night bombing of the cities completely destroyed the German populace's will to fight, the same thing that happened in WW-I and eventually ended that war because of the Royal Navy blockade of Germany. Tactical air on both the Eastern and Western fronts in WW-II prevented lines of communication movements, resupply, and troop replacement and killed many military leaders. TacAir also prevented the Germans from training and deploying new pilots.

Early on, the Germans did not take the logistics of the war seriously and were actually running single shift war materiel production until 1944. They did not take the need for the best aircraft seriously until too late. An example is the building of tens of thousands of Bf/Me-109s, when they could have had the superior He-100 as early as 1941. Just not enough advance thinking early enough in the war and a "good enough" mentality.

But what really cost them the war was attacking Russia. Without that, who knows what would have happened. Most of the battles in the West were tiny and relatively fragmented compared to what was going on in the East.

Taz
Terry Phillips

 

Just ran across this article comparing the Horton with pilot Kenneth Arnold's 1947 sighting of flying 'Boomerangs' over Washington state.
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I wonder if such planes were the 'unidentified flying objects' he saw. That would make for quite an interesting story, foreign aircraft in American airspace.
Few know about this little story with Russia;
http://englishrussia.com/?p=1722

 

Furthermore, their mechanized weapons tended to be over-engineered and too complex to maintain, resulting in poor battlefield reliability. The Panther tank, on paper, was probably the best all-around tank of the war, but its reliability was dismal, and more were probably lost due to mechanical reasons than any enemy action. This same complexity also made the vehicles expensive and difficult to build in the first place, one reason why the Germans never seemed to have enough.

And if you look at the dismal reliability ratings of the BMW 7-series in a well-regarded consumer journal, they haven't learned anything over the years.....

 

Also, what if a captured 'Horton' was what crahsed at Roswell? Could make a hell of a screenplay.
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Some more pics of the Horton brothers flying wings.
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If I recall correctly - the show on the Horton claimed that this plane actually was test-flown, but that on about the 10th or 12th flight the pilot lost control on takeoff and died in the crash.

Same issues really that came to haunt all the flying wings right up to the B1 (instability).

And the B1 itself had a takeoff crash - but nobody is saying exactly why.

 

B2?

 

B2 it is. To B or not 2B.

 

All flying wings are unstabile in the pitch axis. They, by virtue of the reflex section in the outer wing, always nibble between a stall and level flight. That's why the B2 has a strong flight computer working B4 it gets unstabiler.
Switches

 

Don't they also hunt back and forth in yaw (at least the ones without a vertical stabilizer?) - Although it would seem that losing it on takeoff like that would be pitch instability.

I read somewhere that some of the analysts think the computer system failed on the B2 crash, but of course nothing official is coming out on this semi-secret plane.

 

Yes they do have to have something to stabilize the yaw axis. Look at the B2 and notice the spoilers at the wing tips , always deployed , some more than the others. Vitold Kasper, an ex-patriot of Poland built and flew a flying wing glider here in our area and he had "rudder vanes" at the wing tips for yaw control that worked quite well. The wing also had about 4 degrees of washout at the tips.
Switches