After my previous attempt at interfering with history with an M1A2 modern main battle tank failed - consensus was that it would fail mechanically or get its treads taken out - I’ve decided to use my timey-wimey ball to send back a different piece of hardware.
It’s the evening of June 21st, 1941. Hitler is in the Wolf’s Lair. Operation Barbarossa is about to be launched. I send back a fully-loaded, fully-crewed and fully fuelled Lockheed AC-130H Spectre to England, RAF Thurleigh in Bedfordshire which has been flying B-24 Liberator missions.
I want my AC-130H to fly to the Wolf’s Lair, finish the Fuhrer and then cause as much damage to the invasion force as possible. Unfortunately loose lips sink ships, and the Germans have placed the entire Luftwaffe and ground air defences on full alert, with orders to take me down. The range of an AC-130 is 2,530 miles, so hopefully fuel won’t be an issue this time.
Will I do better in the air than I did on the ground? Will I even be able to take off (or land) on a 1940s runway?
Since it’s June 1941, German radar isn’t fully deployed yet and nightfighter tactics aren’t fully developed, so you can fly by night. Here I’m merely speculating, but I’m guessing that modern inertial navigation systems (no GPS satellites to help you) could bring you to your target.
Here’s the hard part: Your target is hiding in a bunker, and will continue to do so once you open fire, so you have only one shot at it. You might get lucky and see a large procession of people moving about in your IR cameras and blowing them away get old Adolf, but it would take some luck. You have nothing that’ll crack the bunker itself, unless your AC-130 has been modified to carry modern laser guided munitions.
You’d better skedaddle once daylight breaks though, the Luftwaffe will tear you to pieces in seconds. They have more than enough speed, ceiling and weapons, and you have nothing to defend yourself with. Runways will be no problem, the C-130 was originally constructed to take off from short strips.
I’m no expert… but I don’t think you’ll have much luck.
A quick overview of the AC-130H tells me that it’s larger and has a slower cruising/attack speed than a B-17. So I think German air defenses would pose a significant danger.
Even if you make it to the Wolf’s Lair (which was completed that very day) and Hitler is there, I don’t think that any of the AC-130H’s armaments could hurt him unless he goes out into the open (which he won’t since they know you’re coming).
Still going after him alone or with support? If you have support/decoys you will most likely slay everything in your path. If not you will likely get chewed by 88’s the closer you get to your target.
If it is seen, it can be killed. Night fighters are a threat, but WW2 AA fire was incredible. Could an AC-130 fly high enough to get to where it was going then swoop down like a fat waddling Angel o’ Death?
But Hitler himself was a darn hard target. I wonder what other target on that night might have been identifiable and hyper-critical.
why can’t your timey-wimey ball operators get the coordinates straight and have it appear mid air straight over berlin at a date Hitler is known to have been giving a public speech?
That would do the job.
Ac130’s are used for close air support once you’ve established air superiority, in 1941 Germany still had a functioning Luftwaffe. This is a poor choice, the general in charge of your timey-wall ball missions should be fired.
Although cool as all hell, the AC130 is only incrementally superior to several WW2 aircraft. It doesn’t carry any weapon capable of hurting Hitler if he stays in his bunker and one aircraft is not going to have any impact on an invasion force of millions.
(And Liberators did not become operational with Bomber Command until 1942!)
And you’ve destroyed any air defense capabilities. Germany had huge masses of AAA, and the AC-130 would be helpless against any of them.
The AC-130 is useful today because insurgents don’t have AAA emplacements. And in Iraq, all of the air defenses were destroyed in a massive bombing campaign.
The main Wolf’s Lair buiding had a reinfornced concrete ceiling and walls several feet thick.
There might be a few modern aircraft-delivered bombs which could get through that,
but is the ground support AC130-H0 capable of carrying bombs?
The WL was also in the middle of heavy forest to begin with, and was camouflaged to make
it invisible or nearly so from the air, so it might not be possible to even locate it, much less
drop a bomb with pinpoint accuracy, and even less see any target not in a bunker and vulnerable
to cannon fire.
As for the attack on German AF still on the ground, one AC could not do enough damage
to make a decisive difference.
The timey-wimey ball is a bit wibbly-wobbly. I would also have requested a B2-Spirit, but those babies run over a billion bucks a pop. I’m not made of sports almanacs.
This Hitler guy is proving tough to kill even with weaponry decades ahead of what the Reich had…no wonder von Stauffenberg came unstuck. Oh, and typo in the OP; meant the 23rd not 21st, when Adolf first arrived, for my 105 Howitzers to fire at him.
On support, I can ask the RAF for a few Supermarine Spitfires to provide a fighter escort but they wouldn’t get close to the Wolf’s Lair in Poland.
They are limited by the operating constraints of the Phased Linear Oscillating Transducer Device.
The attempt to simply and quickly end the matter by depositing a 1500 lb anvil into the space-time location 5 meters directly above Hitler’s head on June 2, 1933 failed due to the PLOT Device constraints as well.
Tell your timey-wimey ball operators to instead focus on the pacific island of Tinian on August 6, 1945 and transport a single B-29 stratofortress from there to Munich on January 27, 1923 and let her rip.
That will do more than any other single vehicle to change the course of history.
Well, there’s collateral damage and there’s using 18 kitotons to kill one bloke!
Say I get on the horn with my timey-wimey ball operators, to replace my AC-130 with a single A-10. It would save me about $100 mil, but would it be suitable for Hitler-blasting purposes against the Luftwaffe?
An A-10 can carry some more appropriate ordinance, but it’s still extremely vulnerable to AAA. It’s not that much faster or durable than WW2 ground attack planes.
Personally, I’d want something that can travel at high speed, high altitude, and carry a lot of bunker busters. I think a B-1 would do the trick, or a F-15 in a pinch. You’d still be vulnerable to AAA, but you’d be hard to spot, track, and hit.
If nuclear weapons are off the table and it has to be in the wolfs lair then you need a bomber with bunker penetrating laser guided munitions. A B-52 would fly so high (50,000 feet vs 35,000 or so for highest wwii planes) that it couldn’t be touched by anything and fully fuelled it has way more than enough range (8,000 mile, 12,000 km). It’s also only $53 million, which is considerably cheaper than an AC-130.
Really? The A-10 seems to be a fairly nippy and badass piece of kit looking at wiki; a max speed of 439 mph (compared with the Me 109’s 398 mph, or the fighter bomber HS 129’s 253 mph). It also seems pretty durable, one got badly shot up with flak in 2003 and managed to RTB. I’m assuming 2003 flak is fair deadlier than 1941 flak.
