[QUOTE=ralph124c]
…detecting enemy bombers-by detecting the RF radiation caused by their spark plug arc emissions. Did that idea ever work? It would require a very high gain, low noise amplifier-something difficult to do in the 1920s.
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A few years ago I was driving in south London and had the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight fly over at maybe 2000 feet. 6 unsuppessed Merlin engines. Made quite a row on the radio. So I think this may have been do-able in some form.
Göring was not a stupid man - that’s true, but if we speaking about raw facts he wasn’t more than overweight junkie and kleptomaniac hedonist after 1941-1942 and still this totally incompetent guy was Luftwaffe Commander! Luftwaffe Nro. 1. That’s is something unbelievable and terrible. And yes, the war start was good like you said, but hey you can’t fight in a war and you cant win the war if you only look in a past when war starts to go wrong way. Then you have to react and fast. You can always criticize Soviet Union and their methods in war and leading the war but atleast Stalin&co. throw wrong guys out on their places before they cause too much damage. That was something what you can call dynamic and successful leading and reacting. And it didn’t always have to mean shot or even prison. Hitler kept Göring and look what happened to Germany?
Like I said earlier Göring was Luftwaffe Commander aka Luftwaffe Nro. 1 in the whole war time 1939-45. Galland, Milch and many others see very well and very early what needed to be done but there was always one thing on their way: Hermann Göring.
“There is no realistic change in strategy that would have resulted in German victory”
That’s pretty interesting argument if you look country which have the best tanks, jet fighters, modern guns like StG 44, missiles, own nuclear program etc. etc. Just for example: do you think that even allies could’ve handle unlimited loss in Germany bombing campaign?
This thread’s coming to get you, Barbara!
Last time I was in the Munich airport they called over the radio: Mr. Goring. Mr. Goring. Last call for mr. Goring to go to gate number …
Anyway it was my understanding that Hitler didn’t choose his top people for their competence. But for loyalty and for their inability to work together, since he preferred that the various departments were at strife with and competed with each other for Hitler’s favors.
There’s nothing interesting about that argument; Germany had bitten off far, far more than it could chew in going to war with the Commonwealth, the USSR, and the USA. It was doomed to be buried by its adversaries in industrial production. Regarding best tanks, the Soviet T-34 and KV series were by far better than what Germany could field from 1941-43, and by 1943 they had irrecoverably lost the strategic initiative to the USSR on the Eastern Front. Presumably by “best tanks” you mean the Panther and the Tiger. Neither was ever available in very large numbers, and they were mechanical nightmares, requiring enormous maintenance and breaking down frequently. The Panther was worse than a nightmare when first introduced; it would break down constantly and one of its teething problems was the engine had the habit of spontaneously setting itself on fire. The Panther was only ever supposed to comprise half of the tanks of a panzer division on paper, but in practice there were never enough of them for even that. The Tiger was used exclusively in independent heavy panzer battalions and companies. The real workhorses for Germany up until the end of the war were the Pz-IV and the StuG-III, both of which were no more than roughly the equals to the Sherman and the T-34. Something else to bear in mind is that supply in the Commonwealth and US was entirely motorised. Germany used 2.75 million horses for supplies and as the prime mover for artillery during the war.
Regarding jets, by the time the Me-262 became available Germany was facing severe shortages of fuel and of trained pilots. Regarding “modern guns” like the StG-44, only limited numbers were ever available and it didn’t come remotely close to becoming the standard infantry rifle in the German army. The standard German infantry rifle for the entire duration of the war was the “modern” Kar98k bolt-action rifle which was itself no more than the evolution of the Gewehr 98 bolt-action rifle used by Germany in WW1. The 98 refers to the year it was developed, 1898. Regarding Germany’s nuclear program, it was years behind the Manhattan project.
I’m unsure if you mean losses in the Allied strategic bombing campaign against Germany or losses to a German strategic bombing campaign here. If you mean the former, losses were already high; at times Bomber Command was losing more bomber crews than the number of German civilians it was killing. While it was certainly useful in ways, it was by no means vital in defeating Germany. Despite the strategic bombing campaign against Germany, German production of war materials continued to increase right up until the final months of the war when Germany was losing access to raw materials left and right entirely independent of the effects of strategic bombing. If you mean a strategic bombing campaign by Germany, the ill-fated He-177 was the closest thing Germany ever came to a strategic bomber. It too had serious mechanical problems, it was nicknamed by German aircrews the Luftwaffenfeuerzeug (Luftwaffe’s lighter) or the “Flaming Coffin”.
I fail to see why drones could be any more effective than pilot-bearing aircraft. Or do you mean, like, remote-controlled robot infantry? Never heard of any such thing outside SF, but at this stage it wouldn’t surprise me.
He even liked to duplicate functions, like, two intelligence/security agencies, two functional equivalents of foreign ministries, etc., so, again, the department heads would be competing for his favor. And his armed forces were top-heavy with officers for similar reasons. A political instinct at once shrewd and stupid – it is probably why Hitler (1) was able to hold on to absolute power for so long and (2) lost it all in the end. Of course, another reason was that Hitler’s exercise of absolute power was often incompetent; he overestimated his own military abilities, and he might have won the war if he had only trusted his generals to make the tactical decisions. (Of course, the most important reason of all that he lost was that he tried to take on the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and the United States of America all at the same time.)
Mind you’re quoting me from 2010, by the way. But yes, there’s definitely infantry drones. Here’s a list of some in various states of development/deployment:
Gladiator Tactical Unmanned Ground Vehicle
Looting.
:eek: That is all so . . . so . . . cool! Eat it, Iron Man!
Goering wasn’t all that bad, for a fat strutting dope addict who wore lots of makeup.
The German strategic air plan was a disaster, thankfully.
Of course Stalingrad was bad thing for Germany but not everything. Almost right after that Germany win the Third Battle of Kharkov and there was change for new success. And what is important to notice: in 1943 there was only one front in Europe. Panthers and Tigers were new and fresh tanks on the front in 1942-43 so of course there was problems at the start. Just like there was problems in KV and T-34 when those tanks were new in the front. And the important thing: there was heavy bombing against Germany development, production and factories. The allies would do their job on the homefront perfectly peaceful conditions almost without any fear what comes to german bombers.
Yes, because Hitler and Göring didn’t fully understand the potential and need of fighter like Me 262 and the same thing was in StG44 with Hitler.
I mean the Allied strategic bombing campaign against Germany. If country all the time lose more and more factories, production, critical materials, etc. etc. it’s just impossible to win the war. Of course you can play hide and seek (hundreds and thousands little factories here, there and everywhere etc.) for a little time but in the end it’s not enough and when you don’t have no air force in the front in battles either it’s just catastrophe. For example Operation Overlord or Operation Bagration in the summer 1944 - where was Luftwaffe? In the modern war against modern states the one side which don’t have successful air defence and succesful air force that is the country which will lose the war. And, yes the allies losses were big but not even near as big they would’ ve be.
I’ll have you know, sir, that he was a goddamn *virtuoso *at failing. And not a dab hand at morphine intake, either !
[QUOTE=RickJay]
The invasion of Crete was also a Goring campaign.
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The clusterfuck that ensured Germany never dropped another paratrooper over the entire course of the war ? For the record, that’s not a good line to have on one’s résumé. At least edit it in post- some.
[QUOTE=Rocket 100]
That’s pretty interesting argument if you look country which have the best tanks, jet fighters, modern guns like StG 44, missiles, own nuclear program etc. etc.
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That would be swell, if not for the fact that quantity has a quality all its own. If you get one (completely unbalanced in the ruleset ! :)) Tiger to the front, and I have 15 crummy Shermans, or worse for you 15 balls to the wall awesome T-34s, I’ll tend to win *most *of the time.
Besides, for all its touted (and way overstated in popular media, BTW) tech advantage, Germany pissed much of it away in most stupid fashion. Yeah, they had jet fighters, and they were REALLY cool when they didn’t blow themselves up ! And then they used them to try and hunt other nimble fighters, which they were shit at hitting because they were going so fast ; instead of wreaking havoc on heavy bomber formations.
Yeah, they had StG 44s, which they had to trick Hitler into allowing.
Yeah, they had a nuclear program, which Hitler quashed or at the very least deliberately neglected because it was “Jew science”.
Yeah, they had missiles, which they farted away at London, pretty much at random, never achieving anything with them.
And don’t get me started on Type XXI U-booten.
The Allies, for their part, might have had tedious old shit but LOTS AND LOTS of it, radar, and to top it off broke the Axis’ crypto like Chris Christie sitting on a baby chair. Oh, and they weren’t mass murdering maniacs sinking a non-negligible amount of what paltry resources they did have on further pointless mass murder, so that’s a fringe benefit.
Um, yes… and ? Is it their fault that they won the Battle of England, or that Hitler declared war on the entire world, including relatively large and prosperous bits of it he didn’t have a hint of a glint of the dream of a chance of harming directly ?
Even though he had the biggest and most modern air force in 1940, he couldn’t have destroyed Britain from the air, or launch a successful air invasion. That sort of air power didn’t appear until 1945.
As to his successes in the initial years of the blitzkrieg and defense of the reich, that’s another story.
Third Kharkov only brought the Soviet offensive which had been advancing since winter 1942 to a halt in spring 1943. It didn’t happen ‘almost right after’ Stalingrad. See map here for territorial changes on the Eastern Front between the encirclement of Stalingrad and the Soviet winter offensive finally coming to a halt (18 November 1942-March 1943). If you’ll notice the green area west of Moscow, that is the Rzhev salient which Germany abandoned in March 1943 in order to come up with some sort of reserve to squander in the failed offensive at Kursk that summer.
Only if you consider the front in Italy not to be in Europe. You’re not getting how much of mechanical nightmares the Tiger and Panther were to maintain compared to the T-34 or the Sherman. Mechanical issues weren’t limited to early production models. It’s a common misconception that since the major issues were more or less fixed in later production models of the Panther that it therefore didn’t have problems. It did, the Panther was never really ‘fixed’ in the sense of becoming mechanically reliable and not liable to breakdown with much, much greater frequency than the Sherman or T-34. Again, the major issues in early production models of the Panther were serious major issues, up to and including the Panther destroying itself when the engine decided it wanted to set itself on fire. You’ve also ignored the limited numbersthat were ever available. Peak strength in Normandy reached a grand total of 432 on July 30, 1944. Peak strength on the Western Front happened the day before the launching of the Ardennes Offensive - “A status report on December 15, 1944 listed an all-time high of 471 Panthers assigned to the Western Front, with 336 operational (71 percent).” Note the operational rate of only 71 percent the day before a surprise offensive with late model Panthers. After the offensive “A status report on January 15, 1945 showed only 97 operational Panthers left in the units involved in the operation, out of 282 still in their possession.” - a 34 percent operational rate.
What German bombers? The He-177? Even if Germany had concentrated on production of more He-177s, and the resources diverted would have to mean less of something else, Germany had lost control of the skies over its own territory by that point. It was in no position to contest control of the skies of Britain again, and could do nothing to touch the US or Soviet tank factories in the Urals.
The Me-262 wasn’t going to make Germany’s fuel problems go away. The StG44 was developed behind Hitler’s back, but he gave it his blessing when he found out about it. Even with his blessing only 425,977 were ever manufactured. For comparison the USSR produced more than 6 million PPSh-41 submachine guns during the war.
As I’ve said; 1) losses were already very high early on for both the Commonwealth at night and the USAAF during the day and 2) the strategic bombing campaign was not vital to defeating Germany. It was certainly useful, but Germany was going to lose the war whether there was a strategic bombing campaign or not.
Indeed, the supposed technological advantage of Nazi German is largely a lot of horseshit. It’s hard to claim a technological advantage when your using horse drawn carts to move by far the lion’s share of your supplies and moving most of your artillery while the Western Allies didn’t use so much as a single horse barring exceptional situations where mules were more useful than trucks such as some parts of Italy. The TO&E of a German 1943 pattern infantry division included 2,652 horses and only 256 trucks.
As you mentioned the Allies had far better radar than the Germans, better artillery and far better artillery doctrine, the Time on Target technique was pioneered by the US Army. Germany had nothing comparable to the B-17, B-24, Wellington and Lancaster, much less the B-29 and no high performance fighter with the range of the P-51. While everyone else in the world was using bolt-action rifles, the US was the only nation to abandon bolt-action for self-loading rifles with the M1 Garand. When the Germans had to plan for Operation Sealion, as impossible of a plan as it was, they planned to use Rhineferries which would have capsized in anything but the calmest sea. Planning for amphibious operations the Western Allies came up with a slew of successful landing craft and ships from the LST to the LCVP and the LVT and DUKW. In combating U-Boats the Allies came up with a range of successful weapons such as the Hedgehog, Mousetrap and Squid ASW mortars and the Mk-24 FIDO ASW Acoustic Homing Torpedo. The highly touted Panzerschreck and Panzerfaust were reverse engineered from the American Bazooka. Allied radar technology was so far ahead of Germany’s that it was developed into the proximity fuze. Germany didn’t have a monopoly on jet aircraft, the US P-80 and the British Gloster Meteor were both operational by the end of the war.
Germany of course had some things better than the Allies and did some things better than the Allies, but had no real technological edge over the Allies.
You are working against sixty years of movies and ahistorical conversations. Best of luck changing that here. 
The idea that the Germans were more technologically advanced is now so ingrained it’s nearly impossible to uproot.
To be fair, nobody really fully understood the strengths and weaknesses of air power in the early days of WWII. Both the doctrine and the machines themselves were progressing pretty rapidly at that point.
The difference was that in large part, the Allies had the manufacturing muscle and manpower to figure out what did and didn’t work without losses of pilots and planes being irreplaceable like they were for Germany.
And the technological edge issue is interesting. On paper, the Germans had better technology than the Allies did- stuff like liquid fueled rockets, jet fighters, etc… but in large part this was illusory. The Allies had these things as well to some degree, but in most cases, chose to produce the simpler and cheaper versions under the rationale that 3 P-51 fighters were superior to 1 Me-262, or 5 76mm gunned Sherman tanks were superior to 2 Panther tanks.
And for the most part this was true. In some cases, Allied technology, or the application thereof was more advanced than the Germans. For example, the “time on target” technique and extreme artillery coordination of the US forces was groundbreaking and diabolically effective, and was enabled by the widespread use of radios by US forces. It’s not as sexy as jet powered cruise missiles or rocket fighters, so it doesn’t get a lot of popular press.
The Germans did have sone technically advanced stuff; however, they suffered from what might be termed ‘fanboy syndrome’ - the focus was on developing stuff that, individually, looked really cool, at the expense of developng warmaking systems that worked. So, constantly tinker to get a small number of really awesome looking tanks, rather than tooling up to make a large number of tanks that consistently worked. Looking for the best rather than the good-enough, right now.
As the war progressed and defeat loomed, Hitler became increasingly obsessed with “super weapons” that could turn the tide.
The nature of the Nazi government ensured this outcome. Upthread, people were noting that Goring spent his time infighting and ass-kissing. This was not considered by the Nazis themselves as a bug in the Nazi system, but was, bizzarely enough, thought to be a feature: Hitler was convinced, and Nazi ideology stated, that constant infighting among the Nazi bigwigs together with centralized personal control by the great leader kept the Nazi state strong. An internalized survival of the fittest, as it were. Oddly, they actually appeared to believe this, and the result was constant turf battles - one weapon of which was to appease Hitler by turning out shiny new weapons guaranteed to make him happy, rather than objectivly looking into needed weapons and logistics systems that actually made a difference.
It may be somewhat unfair to castigate the Germans for relying so much on horsepower - they suffered throughout the war from gas shortages - but to an extent, this is a result of this phenominon: heavy trucks are simply not as sexy, fanboy-style, as heavy tanks.
Mind you, no-one at the time had anything near the manufacturing ability in the area of motor vehicles as the US - the imbalance is just absurd, and the US basically provided the lion’s share of trucks for all of the allies - but still.
Well, if you want to go that way, the Germans came up with the schnorschel, homing torpedoes, electric wake-less torpedoes, anechoic tiles and ultimately the first submarine designed to run submerged 100% of the time - a revolutionary idea at the time (whereas for example the Hedgehog is more of a “you know what, finding submarines is tedious, let’s just blow up the whole sea from here to there” solution to a problem - efficient, but not elegant nor all that novel :p).
Nitpick : the 'schreck was indeed a copy of the bazooka (and a better one, IIRC) but the 'faust was original KrauTech I believe.
Interesting thing is, of all the Nazi whizbang that would be copied by the Allies post-war and pushed even further throughout the Cold War, the Panzerfaust concept is one of the few that never was emulated, to my knowledge. I wonder why, since you’d think a cheap, lightweight handheld tank buster might come in handy, particularly in urban warfare. Maybe modern grenade launchers are just better panzerfausts ? I’m not sure how blow-stuff-uppy that thing really was.