Quote:
Originally Posted by tater
One, the Germans were not even close to an atomic bomb. Not remotely close, and from captured records their weak research was going the wrong direction anyway.
I say that German R&D was in fact negative, not positive. The wasted resources experimenting instead of producing. Engineering is not just building stuff, it's building stuff efficiently, and in a cost-effective way. Having limited industrial capacity, then sending it running in 100 different directions is just dumb. In addition, like their tank, their jets, etc, were not ready for operational prime time in terms of keeping them flying (not to mention having fuel to fly them). The Germans in fact had large numbers of Me262s constructed, but they never managed to fly more than a small number of sorties per day—a tiny fraction of the number of planes theoretically available.
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You are correct, the Germans had abandoned bomb development in 1942 on de-prioritized the project while the Americans made development one of the highest priorities, spent many millions, spied heavily on the german research and grabbed as many german scientists as they could lay their hands on.
By the time there were any large numbers of 262's Germany had lost the pilots to fly them, thus too late to be of any use.