Yes, had they not wasted their resources on them and concentrated on their already superior military it would have been a different war. The one exception was the V3 Cannon. That was actually an old idea easily built in large numbers. It could have been built early in the war and used effectively against the UK. Imagine a 1000 of them spread out all over France firing night and day.
I agree that taking Britain out of the war was important. Not just from a USA perspective either, but the BoB was not the key missed opportunity to do so.
If the BEF troops are taken before operation Dynamo then there is a high likelihood of Britain seeking terms with Hitler. Therefore no BoB and no second front. The German army had a great chance to do so but various objectively bad decisions taken all along the command chain prevented that.
To me that has always seemed to be a pivotal “what if” moment (amongst potentially many of course)
I think that Hitler believed that an Anglo-German alliance was so obviously logical that he never really believed he would have to invade Britain. If he had frothed at the mouth and banged the table the moment France was doomed, the Nazi war machine might have found a way to cross the channel as well.
I can’t, no, because they would have had no chance at all of surviving; Allied bombers would have blown them up. They couldn’t be spread all over because they couldn’t fire that far; at best they fired 100 miles, an amazing distance for a gun, but still requiring them all to be stationed pretty close to England. It’s a terrible idea. The ones they did build were in fact destroyed by Allied bombers, as one would expect.
Yes but they were late in the war when the Allies controlled the skies. If they were introduced earlier that would not be the case. If they had built these in reinforced structures hidden in the woods there would be little chance of finding them let alone actually hitting them. It’s not like the giant dome over the V2 facilities that was easy to spot and attack. You could easily stack a dozen V3 cannons in the foot print of a house.
Remember, Britain needed supplies from the US. A lot of that was going to the bottom of the sea because of U-boats. It took a lot o innovation in submarine defense plus airborne radar plus code decryption plus US production of bombers and fighters to get control of German skies.
No, really, they would have been found and blown up. The Allies were always able to bomb things that close. This is movie-fantasy stuff.
I’d like to imagine the Nazis having the ammunition manufacturing capacity to have 1000 V3s “firing day and night”. Not to mention the logistics capacity to get that many rounds from factory to gun each and every day. And to keep manufacturing new barrels for the things. And new rocket motors.
The planned footprint of a 50 gun installation was over half a mile long and 100 feet wide. kinda easy to spot from the air, especially since we’re talking 24 hour firing so 24 hour muzzle flashes. They’d need to build 20 of these half-mile long underground shelter thingies to get 1000 tubes into action.
The intended payload was a 300lb shell with a 50lb explosive charge. I would not want one to land on my house, but we’re not talking blockbusters here, we’re talking one-house-busters.
This wasn’t a wonder weapon, it was a military-industrial complex boondoggle.
If you magic-wanded a thousand well-aimed well-supplied tubes into existence and had them magically fire for a few days with no catastrophic malfunctions, you’d make quite the mess at the receiving end. But that’s a very powerful magic wand you’d have to wield to get there.
And, how many tanks, planes and submarines do the Nazis not get to build so they can built 1,000 of these alleged super weapons?
One of their biggest problems was this exact trade-off … we need more tanks! Okay, fewer subs. We need more subs! Okay, fewer trains, We need more trains! Okay, fewer tanks. And so on.
They had a hell of a time discovering V2’s at Peenemunde and that was out in the open. When the rockets moved on mobile launchers it was pretty much impossible to find them.
If they had built the V3 cannons earlier in forest areas they didn’t have a chance of finding them. They also would not have had control of the skies early in the war. They would have had to deal with German fighter planes. Look at the giant rail gun that was used by the Germans. It couldn’t BE a bigger target.
And after all that, we didn’t have the bombing accuracy to hit something with the footprint of a house.
These would have been mostly underground and easily concealable. Dig a trench, pour some cement, drop a long cannon in the trench and fill it back up. Space them out all over France. It’s by far a much easier weapon to design and build.
All a V3 would have above ground would be the cannon muzzle. A bomber would be lucky to come within 500 feet of hitting it and they would have to see it first.
It’s all about when they were built and how they were dispersed. Early in the war they had more resources to work with and and the fighters to back it up.
For darn sure the Nazis could not have built those things much past 1941-42. Much later and they had neither the spare resources nor the command of the air over what would have been large and obvious construction zones.
Shame they still hadn’t gotten the tech working even by late 1944.
Indeed, but they were not aimable at anything else, not easily at least. As long as the thing you are making a mess of stays where it is then great, good plan.
A supergun with steerable, guided munitions and 100 mile range? that’s a different beast but in the proposed configuration? I’m in agreement with you. A waste of time and effort.
Unguided artillery tends to fall in an ellipse with the long axis along the gun-target line about 4-5x longer than wide. At 75-100 miles range any given tube’s 50% fall ellipse might be 4 miles wide by 15+ miles long. Especially given the vagaries of a multi-stage charge gun and 1940s engineering. Plus the vagaries of firing the same settings while the weather changes over days, not just minutes. Lots of built-in range and azimuth dispersion, but IMO mostly range dispersion compared to conventional artillery of the era, much less current unguided artillery.
London is not a moving target. If Hitler could have magic-wanded the whole thousand tube installation into place, with the actual fall ellipses properly arranged for maximum collective effectiveness he could have used it a bit like we now use nukes: We hold your capital hostage, so don’t cause us any trouble while we fight elsewhere, lest we smite thee.
So a terror / deterrent weapon, not a saturation / use weapon.
But certainly not a cost-effective use of resources within a country that was resource-constrained into eventual failure the day the moved past Poland.
That works in favor of the gun. They can control distance with the amount of charge and let it shotgun laterally. If done early in the war they would have the full strength of the Luftwaffe against few Allied bombers.
It was much less technical then the railroad guns they built and would take far less resources and manpower to build and operate. The whole idea is to make a much smaller barrel and use staged charges to accelerate. They would have spent more time pouring the concrete structure housing then then anything else.
The key was to disperse and hide them early on. But Hitler just loved making a project out of all his mega-weapons. The V3 was really more of a conventional weapon than the other Bigger-is-Better patent pending terror weapons.
If you think of the weapon along the lines of the coastal guns that were faced during D-Day it’s easier to understand. They were sitting there in the open with no pretense of hiding them. They didn’t need to. They were almost impossible to destroy. And they shelled Dover with them.
if you combine the ease of hiding guns further back from the coast, ease of construction, the ability to fight off low numbers of early bombers it would have been a devastating weapon.
As Peter Hayes explained in the book Why? the Reich spent a very small amount of resources on the Holocaust to the point he described it as them using their “little finger.” Assuming the proper amount of cold bloodedness and true believers controlling and killing people en masse is easy. As two examples at their peak 50,000 guards were in control of nearly a million concentration camp inmates and only a few thousand guards (German and Jewish) were needed for the Warsaw Ghetto which contained over 350,000 Jews in a space smaller than two square miles.
Does Hayes give a value for the slave labor?
If hitler doesn’t stab Stalin in the back when he does, WW2 could have been dragged out long enough for the axis to have developed the A-bomb & perfected jet planes.
Woulda, coulda, shoulda of course but the war could have had a much different outcome.
For darn sure opening the second front against the Soviets was unhelpful to the max.
The idea that the Nazis were going to turn the tide in the West with jet planes, atomic bombs, or darn near anything else is simply fanciful. Early jets were faster, but far from wonder weapons. They were not highly effective weapons, just highly different weapons.
From early 1943 on the Germans simply lacked the productive capacity to build enough of anything to matter. Rifles, tanks, conventional airplanes, jet airplanes, doesn’t matter. They were fighting collective enemies totaling 10x their size before you add the Soviets into the equation. Nobody wins that. Nobody. They were destined from nearly the git-go to be steamrollered into oblivion.
Postwar analysis of the Nazi atomic research shows they were stuck back at basic nuclear research, far short of weapon development. And they were barking up the wrong scientific trees. The Manhattan Project was insanely expensive for an undamaged country 5x Nazi Germany’s size. And after years of effort it managed to produce two bombs with the next two coming nearly a year later. Thank goodness nobody called FDRs implicit bluff about dropping a third one on Japan.
The Nazis had no chance to create atomic weapons while also fighting WW-II. None.
But, for Hitler, that was the war. Everything else was in the category of unnecessary and unhelpful distraction.
He didn’t want to fight the French or the Brits (they declared war on him after the Poland invasion). Hitler hoped they would just sit on their hands like they did with Czechoslovakia (and, to be fair, they didsit on their hands, even with the war declaraition. There was basically zero offensive moves from the Allies during the Phoney War). But, after they declared war, the Nazis decided to knock out the French and Brits first (the Russians weren’t going to do anything, whereas the French and the Brits might have attacked from the West).
So, beat the French, chase the Brits back across the channel and then IGNORE them. Then get on with the real war (and don’t get involved with Mussolini’s stupidities in the Balkans and North Africa, which just kept dragging the Brits in).
That was only due to the production cutback when Japan surrendered. If the war and wartime production had continued, the schedule was to produce eighteen to twenty more bombs in four months.
I see no reason to change our previous readiness predictions on the first three bombs. In September, we should have three or four bombs. One of these will be made from 235 material and will have a smaller effectiveness, about two-thirds that of the test type, but by November, we should be able to bring this up to full power. There should be either four or three bombs in October, one of the lesser size. In November, there should be at least five bombs and the rate will rise to seven in December and increase decidedly in early 1946.
General Groves to Chief of Staff, “Memorandum to the Chief of Staff,” July 30, 1945 cite