Hey, I’m not just randomly banging the keyboard here. Reputable historians have commented on how cost-efficient the V-1s were. Did they win the war? No. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t do an okay job for the money.
Interestingly, we still rely on their direct descendants today.
The damage they did likely wasnt worth the cost but the measures to fight them was quite a drain, not to mention the terror effect. So, yes, they were cost effective.
More thoughts on this.
The problem with Japanese diplomacy was that the tail was wagging the dog. The generals on the ground in China were driving the war which was driving the government which was driving the foreign policy. They could have had the best diplomats in the world, and it would have just be the same confused message phrased better.
In the spirit of spifflog It’s akin to saying “If we had lost, we would have gone home.”
I don’t agree with your logic, but strategically, I think that Japan harassing Hawaii would have been counter productive to getting the US to quit. Nothing like keeping up a fight to get someone to not back down.
As I posted above, not only would the Japanese not take chances with giving back the PI for it’s strategic location, keeping it was vital to providing a buffer zone for the oil reserves in the East Indies. The army’s strategy was to force the US to fight for each square inch, and giving away the farm for an unenforceable peace would be unacceptable.
Japan still believed at this point that the US was demoralized, and there is no indication that they would have been open to a settlement which required giving up conquered territory. You have to remember, the army wanted war.
Tojo would certainly not have accepted it, and the cabinet would not. One of the quirks of the cabinet was the representation of the army and navy, and that they needed to be active duty officers. Were they to do something which the general commands didn’t like, they could be removed from active status and thus ineligible to continue serving on the cabinet.
Not to pick a fight but by stating:
while making no mention of the timing of the invasion, you are positing that they never attack Russia. How exactly do you “keep a Russian alliance” if you invade them???
My point remains - Germany doesn’t have a prayer at winning the war while keeping their war aim of eliminating Russia and fighting the rest of the allies.
The V-1 “guidance system” (if you can call it that), was a barometer and a fuel shutoff. These things were launched and went as far as the fuel lasted-one it went out, the thing went into a dive, eventually hitting something (and detonating). So it might hit something within a 6 mile radius or so, depending upon headwinds,crosswinds, accuracy of the premeasured fuel.
A precision guided cruise missile it wasn’t. Was it cost effective? Well, when your own airforce is almost non-existent (the Luftwaffe was being pounded to death in Russia), I suppose it sustained morale. But the V-2 was a real big loser for Germany-each missile consumed hundreds of man-hours of skilled labor , and used p copper, graphite, hydrogen peroxide, radio components, etc.-all stuff in short supply. What they got was a “terror” weapon that would destroy a city block (it it managed to land in London)..and it avoided exploding on the launching pad.
I guess I can expand on my point about the V-1s. Yes, they missed frequently. Yes, they were vulnerable to fighters and flak.
But if you wanted to blow up something, say, on the other side of the English channel, your other option in those days (ignoring the V-2s, which were much costlier and less efficient) was manned bombers.
Manned bombers during the war often bombed miles from their designated target. We’re not talking about missing a building, we’re talking about bombs falling miles outside city limits. Despite the damage bombing did during the war, when you see the actual final reports on bombing accuracy, it seems shockingly poor. Truth is, nobody was very accurate in those days, statistically speaking. Bombers were (somewhat) more accurate than V-1s but for a lot more money and risk.
Meanwhile, manned bombers were even more vulnerable to flak and fighters than the V-1s. And they cost a LOT more (orders of magnitude more). And when manned bombers went down, your men died.
So the question is not, “Were the V-1s especially good at destroying cities?” so much as it is “Assuming you want to try to damage something far away, and given that all methods available in that time period were flawed, were V-1s a cost-competitive, low-risk way of making that try?”
And to that, the answer is unequivocally yes.
edit: and your point about the resources consumed by V-1s is countered by actual historians, who have remarked on how inexpensive they were in terms of resources.
More of a debate question than a GQ answer, but I’d say the short answer is ‘no’…not if their war aims were the same (i.e. Germany bent on wiping out Russia and Japan on attacking the US and dragging us into the war). Both of those factors pretty much doomed the Axis to defeat, IMHO. That and Britain staying in the fight, the prevention of which wasn’t enough of a priority of either of the major Axis power.
Now, if you want to posit different war aims, then I’d say that Germany had ALREADY won in Europe, with the exception of GB, and that a focus on GB by Germany and Japan in the far eastern part of GB’s empire would probably have brought them to the table…and that would have been victory for the Axis right there.
The Germans did work on long-range artillery during the war - the V-3 Cannon - although we bombed it into oblivion long before it became operational. In any case the overall cost in money and steel would have been enormous and the Germans would have needed lots of them to make a difference, which wouldn’t have been enough anyway. There’s a good article about the V1 here, by the ever-thinking Greg Goebel. I’ll quote his conclusion:
*The effectiveness of the V-1 is debatable. Detractors point out that the V-1 was far too inaccurate to be considered a militarily effective weapon. It was a weapon of mass terror that struck almost at random.
It did prove undeniably destructive. It inflicted almost 46,000 casualties, with over 5,000 people killed outright; destroyed 130,000 homes; and damaged 750,000 more. However, it had no real effect on the outcome of the war, and absorbed resources that might have been better used in the defense of the Reich. Some point out that the weapon was cheap to build and tied up a disproportionate amount of Allied resources. That was true, but the Allies had the resources, and it is questionable that the V-1 prolonged the war by any significant length of time. *
The Germans also had enormous stocks of nerve gas, of a type far more advanced than our own, which could have inflicted horrible casualties if they had the means to saturate London with it, which they didn’t. Conversely we had enormous stocks of mustard gas, and we did have the means to saturate German cities with it, so that turned out to be a dead end.
I suspect that even if the Germans had several nuclear weapons mounted on V-2s circa April 1945 we would have kept at them. The Germans needed more than an edge, they needed a massive jump, and the frightening thing is that some of their later projects were very impressive - the jet fighters, the extended-range submarines - and yet every factory and engineering werk devoted to this super-weapons was one less factory and one less team of engineers that could be used for other purposes.
If only LSD had been invented earlier, or Ecstacy, and slipped into Hitler’s tea. Or whatever drink Hitler drank. I want to know what Hitler would have been like on LSD. He had an artistic bent, and he dug mysticism; he could have been the German Aleister Crowley. They could have corresponded with each other, vying to be the wickedest man in the world. Imagine if a LSD-fuelled mystic Hitler had joined forces with Crowley, don’t you want to read that novel?
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If only LSD had been invented earlier, or Ecstacy, and slipped into Hitler’s tea. Or whatever drink Hitler drank. I want to know what Hitler would have been like on LSD. He had an artistic bent, and he dug mysticism; he could have been the German Aleister Crowley. They could have corresponded with each other, vying to be the wickedest man in the world. Imagine if a LSD-fuelled mystic Hitler had joined forces with Crowley, don’t you want to read that novel?
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IIRC, Hitler was a heavy drug user anyway (I think cocaine or something like that…multiple drugs actually), so I don’t think slipping LSD or Ecstasy into his beer would have made that much of a difference. Hell, I was going to say it would be better to slip him something poisonous and fatal, but actually he probably did more for the defeat of the Axis than any other single individual, so was probably better overall to have him breathing until the end.
Not even close on the aim of the Japanese. They didn’t – all – particular want to get into a fight with the States, but they needed their oil, and they knew they if they just went after the East Indies, then Britain and the US would join into the war, so they jumped us first. This argument ignores geography, and the position of PI, as outlined above.
Except that Germany and Japan had radically different aims which they didn’t even bother informing each other of. Again, this wouldn’t work.
[QUOTE=TokyoBayer]
Not even close on the aim of the Japanese. They didn’t – all – particular want to get into a fight with the States, but they needed their oil, and they knew they if they just went after the East Indies, then Britain and the US would join into the war, so they jumped us first. This argument ignores geography, and the position of PI, as outlined above.
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Whoa…where do you get the idea that the Japanese didn’t want to fight the US? Their short and medium term aims absolutely could not be fulfilled without fighting the US. Unless you posit that the US would have discontinued our embargo AND allowed them free reign in the south Pacific and Asia, then there was no choice for them but to fight the US. They didn’t plan a fight to the death…they merely wanted to cripple our fleet, open up the way for them to expand rapidly in the region for 2-3 years, and put themselves in such a powerful position that the US would have to sue for peace (they might even have been willing to pay us reparations for starting the war…once their goals and aims were met).
And I never said that Germany and Japan had the same aims…in fact, I pretty much said the opposite. Perhaps there was some confusion as to what I meant though, since I’m composing this on the go. Basically, for the Axis powers to win WWII, they would have needed to have the same aims and goals…and that would have been to focus on taking GB out of the picture so Germany could consolidate Western Europe, and Japan could, in theory at least, have expanded into GBs far eastern empire. Clearly, they didn’t do this, since they had wildly divergent aims (they couldn’t even agree on fighting Russia…or not fighting the US).
Regarding the German jet fighter planes: it is true that when they were flying, they had impressive performance.Had they been available in larger numbers, they could have posed a serious threat to allied bombers. But the primitive jet engines didn’t last very long (engine fires and flameouts were constant problems). So, too late, too few, too unreliable-like most of the Nazi “wonder weapons”.
Probably one of the biggest flaws the Germans had (aside from the fact that their leader was a psychotic drug user, who was also an idiot but thought he was a genius) was their collective need for wonder weapons that could and would win them the war. They expanded vast amounts of resources in various quests for the very best weapons, weapons that would win them the war in a single stroke. Instead of building a tank that was good enough (and could be built in sufficient quantities) they build things like the Tiger I and Tiger II…great tanks, but in such small numbers that they were never going to do the job, and took huge amounts of resources (or, like the Panther…pushed into production before it was ready, overly complicated and over engineered for years of service when it’s life expectancy was measured more in days or weeks). Same with their jets. Instead of building an incrementally better 109 or 190 (made in huge quantities with a system for training and cadre that could put large numbers of well trained pilots into the cockpits), they wanted a quantum leap in air craft capabilities (and then, their idiot leader kept sticking his nose in, delaying production and attempting to make the thing a tactical bomber instead of an air superiority fighter). Like I said, Hitler (and the upper Nazi leadership) were probably as responsible for Germany going down the way they did as much as any other single factor. I think their fate was sealed when they went to war with both Russia AND the US (as well as the war they never finished with GB), but I think Hitler et al measurably decreased Germany’s war effort and the time they had.
No, I think it’s accurate. Japan would have been fine with maintaining a “cold war” type relationship with the United States - hostile but short of actual combat. The United States might have maintained diplomatic and economic sanctions against Japan but other countries have survived those for decades. Japan could have survived also by attacking just China and the European colonies. With the DEI under their control, American economic sanctions wouldn’t have been critical.
The reason why America’s contribution was so decisive was because of the enormous material production on American soil that could not be appreciably damaged with a combination of ample amounts of raw natural resources that could be turned into military equipment and arms.
When the USSR was invaded, it lost an enormous amount of territory that had many of its most important war industries. By the time Germany got close to Moscow, the USSR had lost a lot of its industrial capacity, although it still managed to salvage much of it and caught up very soon.
But since the contiguous US states could not be invaded and conquered, and were not seriously planned to for the duration of the war by either Germany or Japan, US war production could not be damaged, and would grow to its natural limits, which were extremely high.
An extreme example of this is the Messerschmitt 163 Komet: history’s only rocket-powered combat aircraft*. The Komet was capable of phenomenal speed - but it could only carry enough fuel for a maximum of seven minutes of flight.
So bizarre tactics were developed. Komets were parked on runways along the paths of expected Allied bomber missions. When the enemy bombers were in range, the Komets were launched. They’d rocket up through the Allied formation (literally) and then turn off their engines. They would then do a steep glide down through the formation shooting at planes as they went. When they got below the formation, they’d re-ignite the engine and do it again. With luck, they’d be able to do this a few times before running out of fuel.
Using up all the fuel was important because it was highly explosive. If a pilot tried to land a Komet and still had fuel left in his tank, his plane would most likely explode. Especially because Komets didn’t have wheels so they had to essentially crash land every time.
Komets actually managed to kill more German pilots than Allied pilots.
*Technically, there was also the Japanese Yokosuka MXY7 Ohka. But Japan made no pretense these were genuine combat aircraft; they openly called them “Special Attack” (ie kamikaze) planes.
The Soviet Union benefited during the war by a pre-war decision.
A factory essentially needs raw materials and workers to produce finished goods. The usual plan is you build a factory near some city where you’ll have access to workers and a market for your finished goods and then you ship in the raw materials.
But if you’re Joseph Stalin you think outside the box. When he was writing up his Five Year Plans to increase Soviet industry, he saw that it took more transportation to move raw materials than it did to move finished goods. So why not build the factories where the raw materials were and ship the finished goods to their markets?
It didn’t matter if the raw materials were out in undeveloped areas like Siberia. The regime would just build factories out in the middle of nowhere and then put a million people on trains and tell them to start working when they got there.
The unexpected bonus of this came when the Germans invaded. Rather than having all their factories in the old industrial cities like Kiev, the Soviets now had a lot of their factories a thousand miles to the east in some place like Magnitogorsk.
I’m not seeing how the Japanese could possibly fulfill their war aims of a Pacific empire without fighting the US…and, in fact, they made the exact same calculation in real life. I think that they SHOULD have maintained a ‘cold war’ type relationship with the US, in retrospect, but pretty obviously they disagreed.
It has nothing to do with this thread, but recently I’ve been playing this game and this thread and a similar one in GD brought it to mind, so figured I’d put it in as a sort of human interest story. 
I haven’t tried any of the DLCs yet, but the core game is pretty fun if you liked the old Panzer General II game.
Interesting…quite a few Komets blew up in mid-air (the mixing of the fuel and oxidider in the engine was iffy). Fueling them was also hazardous..quite a few ground crews got cremated in the process.
If Hitler had waited a year or two to start the war, there’s a good chance they could have.
But he jumped in before his military infrastructure was ready–not enough war machines, ammo, etc. Thank God he got impatient and jumped in when he did because if he’d waited for a year, the Axis might well have walked all over Europe which would have led them to link up with their Asian allies. The rest of us–the ones who were left and Hitler finished killing off the Jews and other “undersireables”–would be speaking German and eating sauerkraut, or eating rice and pickled fish and vegetables.