Surprisingly, not so good against tanks it seems:-
Hmm. Sadly that cite doesn’t seem to have very much info on why it didn’t work.
Hitler was infantry in WWI, and no doubt knew firsthand what chemical weapons were like - i.e., virtually useless strategically, but good at causing lots of pain and suffering. I’ve no cite handy, but I’ve heard it said that he didn’t use chemical weapons because he knew the Allies would respond in kind if he did.
I was thinking along the same lines, minimal amounts of nukes for everybody.
During WWII, only Germany had nerve gas. Its employement would have had a devastating effect.
How about a large amount of explosives delivered very quickly on a relatively small area ? Of course accuracy was not a concern, but the psychological effect is quite well documented. And about everybody had rocket artillery, the Germans had the Nebelwerfer, the Commonwealth, the Land Mattress and the US had launchers like this little fella (scroll down for the picture) or the Calliope.
Think of them has delivery vehicles for the nerve gases previously mentioned
Yep, how about codebreaking as a use ? The British did just that in regard to the German Enigma code. If you can read the other guy’s mail, you have a huge advantage.
And Tuckerfan, thanks for the precisions regarding the Rochling shell.
Please don’t take this the wrong way, but Albert Speer agreed with you (at least, he said so in his book 
)—he said that Hitler’s support of the V2s was to try and strike back against the allies (cue the “Vengeance”) for all the bombing raids against Germany. Though I think Speer worked it out (I don’t know when—he might have been in Spandau by then) that Germany would have had to have launched some insane number of V2s (I think it was in the tens of thousands) to deliver the same amount of explosives as a single B-17 raid. And with the V2s, the CEP was crappy. Speer thought the resources could have been better spent–possibly on projects like the “Wasserfall” SAM.
On the other hand, they wouldn’t have had to carry conventional weapons—chemical, biological, or even nuclear (or at least, radiological) weapons might have been used, eventually. And even a conventional attack by an ICBM might be useful, for psychological warfare. (Like if, say, Manhattan or Washington D.C. got a blitzing.)
Oh yeah. there’s the Horten bomber, which is where Northrup cribbed a lot of their ideas for the B-2 Stealth Bomber, and then the Amerika bomber, which never made it off the drawing board.
detop, NP, it’s a great book, but it’ll give you nightmares when you think of all the things Hitler had and could have used if he hadn’t been batshit crazy.
I’d rule out the radiological payload, personally. First off, until Hiroshima, and Bikini, the public view of radiological things was that they were: new, modern, and relatively harmless. Not only had a quack sold a radioactive health drink the 20’s and 30’s, but in the 50’s shoe stores started having x-ray machines to better able people to judge what size shoe was best for them, and AIUI, a number of shoe salesmen ended up dying from cancer, presumably from the long term exposure to the sources in the x-ray devices. (My guess would be Co-60, but that’s just a guess.)
Even today, the real damage from a so-called dirty bomb isn’t the loss of life, or even the clean up costs, really - though I don’t mean to trivialize either. Rather the biggest reason such a device is feared to be the new Holy Grail of the terrorist is because modern Americans especially fear radiation with uncritical terror.
Anyways, the 'Virus House’ project being run by Heisenberg shows every indication of being able to destroy a large building, and contaminate a larger area around that. However, at over 1000 kg, it is a daunting project to get to the target. (Especially after Hitler crippled the Luftwaffe’s long range bomber programs by demanding that all planes have a dive bomb capability. :smack: )
Frankly, something like the bat bomb mentioned earlier - a large number of small, lightweight incindiery devices spread through unpredictable vectors would be far more effective as a means of disrupting large areas, and would require far less by way of engineering.
One question for the OP, I just started thinking about this last night: is it simply the technology that’s being advanced? Or, for example, does Hitler have the patience to wait til he has the 400 U-boats the original war plans called for before beginning hotilities? Likewise, what would the effect of being able to send out a Hunter-Killer group with the Bismark, Tirpitz, Scharnhorst, Gneisnau, escorting the Graf Zepplin, with her fighters providing air cover while the surface ships protected the carrier? Just those two could drastically change the outcome of the Battle of the Atlantic.
Other things to consider - while no military or government runs without personality clashes: suppose some whacko were to remove Hermann “Meyer” Goering from the stage? His intransigence towards allowing the navy to have planes other than the float planes was one of the factors that kept the Graf Zepplin from being completed in a timely manner. Likewise, had he been willing to work with the German Navy they could probably have been able to close the Murmansk run, completely - instead of just mostly.
Actually, that’s not true. One of the options the US military was looking at was dumping highly radioactive material over German cities. This was to “get the jump” on Germany, which was believed to have a nuclear weapons program.
I see. May I ask if you have a cite for that? I just have trouble thinking that it would be feasable to crap up a whole city without having access to CRUD. I’m only trained as a tech, not a nuclear scientist, so my knowledge has a number of theorhetical limits - but it would seem to me, that with radiologicals available only from natural isotopes - plus a small spicing of other isotopes, it would be a waste of zoomie-emitting stuff to just drop it on some city.
Which doesn’t mean that I’m doubting you, or that I don’t believe that the military looked into it. After hearing about the idea of the nuclear powered rocket plane, I’ll believe anything. I just want to see the details.
Like I said, my opposition is mostly based on just my gut feelings - and I know my gut has been mistaken before. 
That’ll take some digging as I don’t remember any textual (well, non-fiction, anyway, more on this later) sources for it. I’ve seen it mentioned in several history programs, and reference to it was made in the made for TV movie Day One. Robert A. Heinlein used it as a premise in a short story he wrote during WW II. Heinlein, it should be noted, was serving in the USN and headed up a research project into classified projects. I think it might be mentioned in David McCullough’s biography of Truman, but I don’t have the time to wade through the tome to find it.
No rush, like I said, just curious for the details of such a plan. And, we could both be right: It was looked into, but was squashed not for moral or technical reasons, but simply because the supply of potential radiologicals was too small.
Well, the one account I remember of it most vividly comes from Day One, and the implication in the scene where the matter was discussed and then shot down was basically the guys making the call killed it because they felt the Germans were “more human” than the Japanese. Of course, that could have been an interpretation of the events more than what actually happened. I’ll see if I can’t find a cite this weekend.
Hitler would have had the bomb…
The question is. Which target would have been first. You have to realize, now, that Hitler wasn’t necessarily a very good tactician. That would have been given to his generals. He would have most certainly been in charge of the bomb(s).
I don’t think, however, that Hitler had such hatred towards the other European powers to use the bomb on a capital. Maybe he would have used it against Moscow, but that’s the only one I could think of. Didn’t hitler want to avoid war with England because he considered them racially a kindred race to the aryans? Sure, we all know how he hated the Jews. He also considered the Slavs inferior too, that’s the only reason why I think he’d bomb the Ruskies. I think he wanted to “save” Western Europe from the jews by force, but not to destroy them.
Another long-range German bomber…and this one reached the prototype stage, in 1942.
Jesus Murphy :eek: ! I remember those machines, I thought they were so cool. Whenever we went to a shoe store I went and used them to have a look at my feet !.
Thanks for all the info Tuckerfan, sorry if it caused you any trouble.
One major problem with the German war effort was that, contrary to popular belief, the Nazis’s were totally inefficient, with little practical central authority to co-ordinate resources with needs.
Instead of deciding what they needed and concentrating resources in that area - a long range strategic bomber programme, for example: England developed the Lancaster from earlier designs {the Manchester and the Stirling}, America had the B-17, the B-24, and later the B-29. They stuck with those, to telling effect.
The Germans, in contrast had a lot of interesting blueprints - time and money was squandered on projects like the ME 163 {Komet}, a rocket-propelled so-called bomber killer that probably killed more of its pilots than inflicted any real damage. Meanwhile, their bomber programme never advanced to the stage where it could inflict any significant damage, being reliant on 1930’s short-range aircraft like the HE-111, which needed to operate out of France. Once France was lost, their assault capability {the V-1’s and V-2’s were mere nuisance value} was lost.
What they ended up researching and building often depended upon political patronage, with so many rival factions and manufacturers competing that any technical advances {which were often brilliant - someone earlier cited the ME 262, which was years ahead of its time, a twin-engine swept-wing jet fighter with a pressurised cockpit} were simply lost in the mix.
The Allies, in contrast, tended to stick with the tried and true: need a fighter? We’ve got Spitfire’s, and P-51’s - we can stick better engines in to upgrade them if needed. Need a tank-killer to secure ground advances? We’ve got Typhoons, and P-47’s. Need heavy bombers to pound their industry. We’ve got 'em.
The technology may have been less advanced, but by that stage of the war it didn’t matter: an ME 262 flown by an inexperienced 18 year old kid, for all its technical superiority, could be shot down on takeoff or landing, when it was most vulnerable, by an experienced Mustang pilot.
My Mom talks about them.
I think of how the radiation sources were probably disposed of–ie dumping it in a landfill or incinerator–and I cringe. :eek:
Sorry about the hijack.
In Minneapolis, there is a Museum of Quackery. One of these machines is on display. As I recall, the description is something like:
"The displayed device was used in the 1950s to allow customers to view the fit of shoes. The three viewers were designed to allow the salesman to view the fit of a child customer along with the child and mother.
These machines were recognized as dangerous in the late 1950s and banned in 1960. This particular machine was seized while operating in a department store in South Carolina in 1986."
No explaination as to why the idea was shot down, but info on it can be found here.
Also, this site references the RAH story I mentioned.
Tuckerfan, thanks for the cites.
As an aside, is it just me, or have I been mislead all these years? Your first cite quotes another source as saying that the major effect of DU (Depleted Uranium) is due to anti-personnel effects of radiation on the tank crews - which I have a hard time believing, since I thought the anti-personnel effect of DU rounds was from Uranium being a highly reactive metal: basically the metal of the uranium, once it passes into the crew compartment ignites everything in the compartment.
Bosda, I was about to say that, well, at least if they were Co-60 sources they’re almost harmless, now - but, if that one in the Museum of Quackery that 19ForMe mentioned had a Co-60 source it should have been nearly useless. (Cobalt 60 has a half life of approximately 5 years.) I have no idea what source they were using, then.
Actually, that’s an accusation that has more than a little weight behind it when one considers the difference in bombing policies followed by the US Army Air Corps over Europe and Japan.