Barks’, what you say makes sense. I couldn’t open the site you linked, but I did a google search and found another site that, while not going through any evidence or arguments, did say the reported flight was doubtful.
Of course, this being the Internet, I also found several sites that report it as fact.
I don’t know.
My main point, made in many ways by several posters, was that the nature of Nazi Germany’s geographic location was such that long-range strategic weapons were never a priority until it was too late to seriously think about developing or using them.
For various reasons, the German’s concept of an atomic bomb was so big that it couldn’t be carried by an aircraft or rocket of that era.
To deliver such a weapon to the US, the only practical means would have been a Uboat. So a coastal location like New York city would be targetted. Again, it wouldn’t have fit into a torpedo. They would have been lucky if it fitted into it at all, after gutting some crew space, etc. That makes “launching” problematic. Crew sneaks sub into New York area, escape from sub, go ???, sub goes boom. Perhaps the bomb could have been attached to the outside of the hull. Ah, seawater and armed nukes.
I think if Hitler had nukes he would have used them against nearby targets. Whatever allied city was in danger of being liberated next.
Just to toss some more into this discussion, the History Channel show I was watching (“Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe” I think) said that what the Germans were planning to do with the Amerika is a “dirty bomb”. They’d put radioactive sand in with a traditional explosive and airbirst it at 5-10,000 feet over New York, creating terror, chaos, so forth and so on.
I often think, when watching these shows, that Germany could’ve won the war if they hadn’t focused on one-shot Superweapons.
With respect to an aircraft carrier, I think a rather instructive lesson can be learned from what happened to Bismarck. In that case the Germans had a truly awesome, state-of-the-art battleship that proved itself worthy in combat. The result? The Royal Navy went after it like hounds on a fox and sank it with the loss of almost the whole crew.
A navy the likes of which the USA, UK and Japan were putting to sea took years and years of effort and the dedication of huge amounts of money and material. One aircraft carrier would have been nothing more than the next Bismarck, a big target that might have stayed alive for a month if it was lucky. To challenge the RN in the Atlantic with a surface navy, Germany would have had to either start building a really big surface fleet many years before the war, OR dedicate enough resources during the war to build several aircraft carriers, at least, plus several battleships and dozens and dozens of cruisers and destroyers - none of which it could do.
I often think Americans could even avoid endless wars if they didn’t constantly fantacize endless threats against hemselves (which don’t exist). Ah, me (and everyone else on earth),
If I recall correctly, that’s more or less the strategy the Kaiser was planning to use on the United States in 1903. About a year and a half back I remember reading about that on Reuters, if you want I’ll try and find the article .
I wouldn’t do Delaware, I’d hit Virginia (though I don’t know much about the coastline, to be honest). Take Newport News for the shipyard, then up to D.C.
Well, now that everybody’s gotten how to conduct a successful Nazi invasion of America out of their system! ;), addressing the OP, the answer in two words is: Hermann Goering.
The Reichsmarschall was famous well before Hitler, having been a WWI fighter ace. And, thanks to his “in” with Hitler and his air-war fame, he had total control of the Luftwaffe. And he was not about to let Raeder and the German Navy have their own planes. Even if the Graf Zeppelin (carrier, not dirigible) had been completed, its aircraft would have been under Luftwaffe, not Navy, control – and that means Goering. And, bluntly, as a strategist, most of the folks who posted invasion plans exceed his talents.
