What If Hitler Utilized Technologies
 

Ok. In continuation from the Japanese Pearl Harbor thread...

What if Hitler would've utilized his early technology even earlier? For instance, committing resources to build and deploy the Graf Zeppelin in the Atlantic, his early aircraft designs "flying wing", or finally the V rockets early in the war.

Graf Zeppelin would have helped for some time, but eventually it would have become the main target. Possibly having to suffer the same fate as Bismarck. :hmm:

The V-weapons, I think, were more of a moral weapons, sure they were lethal, but they lacked the accuracy to be used to anything more than big targets e.g. cities.

Any kind of jet fighter/bomber early in the war would have been an huge advantage for the germans. "Speed is life". If they would've have had them during BoB, it might very well be that the outcome would have been different, a more favourable one for the germans.

Bottom line is: *IMO*

Germany had to invade England. I think in the 1940s England had the balls to go tell Hitler what to do with himself.

I really dont think the Graf Zeppelin would have helped much.. still the same problem...
guess who had the biggest dam navy in the world!? The Brits would have just taken that one out too..
Now on the other hand.. if hitler had devoted the resources to expand and develop the ubootswaffe.. that could have made a big impact. Instead of starting the war with roughly 30 operational U-boats.. imagin if he had several hundred.. and then what if the Germans actually developed the Walther U-Boat?

As for the luftwaffe developments.. who knows.. the Germans had developed a jet fighter (Me262) that could have made a big difference in slowing/stopping the allied invasion.. but hitler insisted that it be a bomber instead of a fighter and thus delayed its deployment until it was "WAY" too late.

The V rockets would have made little diffreence and they would have taken around the same time to build, even with more funding.

The Graf Zeppelin would have made little difference overall, but it could have done some serios damage, and if sorted with the Bismark it may have kept the swordfish away and allow them into the south atlantic.

If they had pushed on with jet fighters, a mass produced U boat and more armed merchant cruisers earlier in the war, they may have just turned the tide.

Adopting technology earlyer might have helped, but not to a very high degree. One of the biggest reasons the nazis lost the war were bad leadership descisions and the war starting too early. Good that it ended up like this aswell.

In my opinion, all "what if's are a moot point. Nazi Germany lost the war the instant the little corporal thought he was a General.

A better question is what if he waited to invade Poland in 1945 when the Kreigsmarine and the Luftwaffe would have been way, way more prepared? Another question is what if he never turned on Stalin? Stalin liked Hitler and would have enjoyed steamrolling the Brits together.

I do love the tactical side of war. I can see many ways the Germans could have walked away with all of Europe. Then, as stated in Hitler's second book, America would come next. By the Hitler would probably have had nukes and America might not have.... Or maybe both would get nukes at about the same time...

Oh well, speculation is kind of a waste of time!

Just to clear this one up, it's a myth that Hitler's insistance the Me262 be used as a bomber being the cause of its delay. It was in fact Willi Messerschmitt who suggested to Hitler (among others) that the 262 could be a bomber, and that was because it was designed to be a multi-role aircraft from the outset. You have to look at the entire situation in the German arms industry at that time to understand the reasons behind this:

The Bayerische Flugzeugwerke (bf) factory where Messerschmitt was employed, had supplied aircraft to several Balkan countries and done collaborative development work with them too (principally Romania) against the wishes of Erhard Milch (the German Secretary of State for Aircraft). Thus Messerschmitt and bf were not popular with the Nazis and Messerschmitt himself was officially reprimanded by the Nazis for this. Couple that with the fact that several of Messerschmitt's early designs for the German aviation industry had crashed and killed several important figures and you have at least some of the reasons for Messerschmitt's unpopularity. In fact he had been offered a professorship at Danzig as a way to get rid of him and told in no uncertain terms that he should take it, as bf would never get a government contract.

When the RLM (German Air Ministry) issued the specifications for a new fighter aircraft to replace the Heinkel 59 biplane fighter, Messerschmitt and bf were in fact not sent a copy of the requirement at first, but since Messerschmitt insisted on getting a shot at it, Milch allowed bf to enter the contest, in his arrogance, Milch was convinced that Messerschmitt could only design gliders and had no experience of designing high speed aircraft. Milch was therefore happy to see the designer be the author of his own demise. Unfortunately Milch (like a lot of Nazis) was too busy playing favourites to notice that bf had just produced the bf108 Taifun four seater touring aircraft which was a masterpiece of sleek design.

When the four aircraft in the fighter contest showed up for the fly offs, Messerschmitt and bf turned up with the bf109, Heinkel with the He112, Arado with the Ar-80 and Focke-Wulf with the Fw-159. Of these, only the He112 offered any serious competition to the bf109, but it suffered from handling problems, was not optimised for mass production and had an overly complex cooling system, and so following testing of this and the bf109 in the Spanish civil war, Messerschmitt's bf109 proved the ultimate winner and eventually saw over 30,000 produced.

Against this background, Heinkel and Messerschmitt were stern rivals in the race to produce the first operational jet combat aircraft. Heinkel took first honours with the He178, the first ever jet aircraft to fly (August 27 1939), and in fact Heinkel had a prototype jet combat aircraft very similar to the Me262 in the air before the 262's first flight (the He280, first flown April 2 1941 - two weeks later, the prototype Me262 took to the air with a propeller engine installed in the nose to test its aerodynamic handling).

But, having turned things around with the bf109, Messerschmitt was now adept at playing the Nazi's own personaily culture games (notably with Hermann Goering and Ernst Udet), and he was better at this than Enrst Heinkel, who had overstretched the Heinkel company by getting a controlling interest in engine manufacture as well as airframes. Thus the promising He280 was dropped and the Nazis went with the Me262.

Now, here is the important part. Because Willi Messerschmitt knew that in Nazi Germany, winning contracts was as much about who you knew, as what you knew, he had touted the Me262 as capable of handling all three major combat roles, fighter, bomber and reconnaissance. Thus he knew that whichever camp held favour, his aircraft would still be a valid choice. In a personal audience with Hitler, Messerschmitt had said as much too, and Hitler is in fact on record as having cautioned that the aircraft should primarily be a fighter.

Later in the war, when Hitler was very much in decline health-wise (not to mention addicted to drugs), he was prone to rant about aircraft being used as bombers for reprisals, and this is where the myth of the Hitler insistence on the Me262 being a bomber stems from. But the simple truth is that it was largely problems with the Me262 Junkers Jumo 004 engines which delayed the programme.

The Jumo 004 was an axial flow engine (where the air is compressed through many stages before it reaches combustion, thus providing more thrust). British and American jet engines were of the far simpler centrifugal flow type, where no such compressor stages are utilised, thus they produce less thrust, but are also far less sophisticated and therefore more easily manufactured and less prone to go wrong (as the Jumo 004 did, a lot).

So, delays in engine manufacture and difficulties in finding skilled labour at both the bf factory and the Junkers factory to make the airframes and engines, plus the fact that the main Me262 production line was severely damaged by the USAAF, forcing the dispersal of Me262 production were the real causes of its delays. Willi Messerschmitt did some time in prison after the war for using forced labour at his factories incidentally.

The Me262 story is almost a microcosm of most of the other 'Nazi Wonder Weapons' stories, with personal fueds, greed and over-reaching technology being as much to blame as anything else, for their delayed introduction. And as cool as these things were, I think we can all be glad that this was the case. You can blame Hitler for a lot of things, but the Me262's delay aint one of them.

:D Chock

The Graf Zeppelin would be useless with out the bat6tleships to protect it. Germany had
no battleships that could compete with the British Atlantic fleet, never mind the rest of the
British fleet and the Commonwealth/American Navies.

New technologies being used earlier by the germans, so the assumption of this thread. This would in general show in many relevant aspects and fields.

Better production methods. Better prototypes earlier in regular production. due to that: modern types in greater numbers. chnages in the way of production,Better production ergonomy, different use of ressources.

It could translate into details like this:

A greater number of Type XXI, earlier in the war. the only thing churchill was really worried about was the Uboat war, it was close to strangling Britain. go figure.

The Me-212 in serial production earlier. go figure what that would mean for the intended mass bomimng of German cities and key industrial facilities, and what it would have meant for the 8th airforce.

More Focke-Wulfs, more fighters in egenral. No allied air superiority.

Eventually more than just the Bismarck on german heavy cruiser and battleship display. mind you the Bismarck is considered by many to have been the most modern battleship of it's time, technically superior to the Britsh battleships. The Brits took very heavy damage and quite some losses to sink the several German heavy ships during the war. If there were more, and operating while mutually supporting each other, maybe even under cover by an enlarged german airforce and submarine shield (Me212, Type IX, XXI), then... who knows.

More advanced types of the Tiger IV, higher numbers of Panthers.

Improvements in already superior artillery pieces, and infantry weapons.

Radar. Sonar.

German heavy bombers (there weren't any).

Better torpedoes.

Acess to new ressources, production sites, pools of employees.

Nukes.

Many german weapons showed up in the war too late and then in too small numbers as if they were able to make a real chnage anymore, too late is too late. If some of these would have shown up 3 or 5 years earlier, it could have made a very tremednous difference.

The great equalizer, the potential industrial capacity of the US, nevcertheless would have remained to be a variable hard to calculate in it's efficiency to influence events that led to the creating of hard facts by the Germans. On the other hand, the greater superiority due to earlier implementation of technology would have allowed the Germans to boost up their supplies with ressources ba capturing the according ground, and massively imporve their own industrial stand, too, while making their industry much tougher to be hit (if any vuolnarable at all) .

So on the thread's topic, I think it would have led to a massive improvements of Germany's strategic position in europe, the destruction of Britain, and would have led to a much longer war with Amercia that eventually would have been ended by mutual thermonuclear exchange. Harder than imaging all this, I find it to calculate what it would have meant for the war with Russia.

I'm not sure about that.
Strategical bombing with normal explosives does not make for fast victories.

If the invasion of England happened after a successful air war as was planned then
the bombing of British cities would not have started. The targets for the Luftwaffe
would still be airfields, bridges, stations, troop concentrations and factories. These
are all best tackled by fighter, medium and light bombers.
Heavy bomber targets such as ports, factory district, railway yards, refineries or
cities where not high on the target list and would be even less likely targets
post-invasion.

In Russia, I suspect the heavy bomber would be even less useful.

What Germany could have used is a good ground attack plane.
The stuka was limited in it's armament, slow, inaccurate with out well trained pilots
and poorly armored.
The 110 was complex, inaccurate, expensive and somewhat poorly armored.
The German fighter bombers where excellent, but not a ideal solution.

What they needed was something like the IL-2 or P-47 and advances in air-to-ground rockets.

If there was a need for heavy bombers for Germany is constantly debated in docus on TV, and apparently also in books. I take from these sources that many seem to agree that the lack of these really made a negative difference for the germans during their attack on England. while the famous StuKas due to their sirens are massively overestimated in their military efficiency and destructive potential. The 110 after some time simply had no realistic chances to survive anymore. And the medium bomber the germans used as the greatest flying callibre they had, the He111, did not deliver the massive blows like for example the American bombers. that a greater bomb load, if delivered with equal precision, translates into greater damage on the target, must not be explained i think. The cities the Germans obliterated in Poland and Russia for the main were destroyed by heavy use of artillery. The LW alone would not have been able to acchieve that, at least not in the given ammount of time, and without greater losses to AAA especially in russia, whereas Warsaw was left almost defenseless to the air raids during the Poland war.

With regard to bombers, once again, the desire to produce an overly complex technological solution to matters, which took too long to develop, was where the German bomber force was let down. The Luftwaffe's only real attempt at a heavy bomber - the He177 - was powered by four engines, these being linked in pairs to drive just two propeller rigs, in an attempt to make something aerodynamically clean, but instead making for something that was prone to fires and nicknamed 'the flaming coffin' amongst other things. Another problem being the complex DB601 engine which it used containing many more over-engineered parts than the Rolls Royce (and Packard) Merlin, its Allied counterpart, thus taking longer to build.

The Germans had gambled on a quick conclusion to the war in the west, of course Churchill threw a spanner in the works for them with that one (see the quote at the bottom of my posts). As a result, the Nazis imagined no need for a large extremely longe-range bomber. Of course another reason was that Goering and Milch sought to please Hitler by saying 'We have X amount of bombers', therefore they favoured larger numbers of twin engined medium aircraft than a lesser number of four-engined types.

In any long term war, you need to be able to churn out something which does the job and is not too complex, the Tiger versus the T-34 is a good basically analogy for this and in modern terms, the AK-47 in comparison to the M16 is a fairly decent comparison. The M16 will jam at the drop of a hat, the AK is so loose on tolerances, you can chuck it in muddy puddle and it will still fire, and you can knock it up in a basic factory.

With the only other Luftwaffe heavy bomber possibility being the Fw-200 Condor, which was originally conceived to rival the DC-3 as a European airliner, at which it was excelled, the Luftwaffe were basically screwed for a long war. It was completely unsuitable as a bomber and only barely adequate as a maritime patrol aircraft, being structurally too weak (many simply broke their backs upon landing). The Condor only having been used in the maritime role for want of any other suitably long-ranged aircraft.

Ironically enough, on the Allied strategic bombing side, the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress was originally conceived as a maritime patrol aircraft and born out of knowledge gained from making the aircraft which inspired the DC-3, i.e. the Boeing Model 247. The B-17 ended up as a strategic formation bomber of course, and even though it was vulnerable to the latecoming Me262 Schwalbe and Me163 Komet, it has to be said that (along with the B24 Liberator) it still defeated the Me262, simply by strategic means, with raids on the Me262 production lines at Regensburg and the ball-bearing factories at Schweinfurt.

:D Chock

You must excuse me if I am going over well trodden ground. I don't generally read or
take part in discussion about "what-if" scenarios.


I don't doubt that heavy bombers are better at strategical bombing than
medium/light bombers.

I just don't see where strategical bombing would be useful if England was invaded
and London was captured within a few months.

Pre-invasion the targets of LW bombing where small and/or scattered. Air bases,
stations specific factories, radar stations, etc.
Such targets can be destroyed just as well with medium bombers as heavy.
Generally the American and British AF did not use heavy bombers against such
targets.

Post-invasion the targets would be just as small and/or scattered. bridges, troop
concentrations, defenses, etc.
Again, not prime targets for heavy bombers.