In that case, I belive we have a winner. Tons of ordinance, capable of flying from rough fields, lots of protection for the pilot, cool main gun…the whole package.
Are those old planes going to have enough of a heat signature to allow the missile to lock onto them?
IIRC there was an old science fiction story that had this premise for a WWI setting. They had to spend weeks straining enough kerosene for the jet to burn for just a few minutes and it blew the enemy places to kindling with it’s supersonic shock wave.
Yeah, I remember that. Think I raed it in a Fantasy and Science Fiction issue from the 60’s.
Current Sidewinders…certainly.
That is so cool! 
Anyway—would issuing the RAF a coupla AIM-26es to go with their Raptors be spoiling the fun, too quickly? (Not standard equipment, sure, but I’m betting you could Frankenstein them into operation with more modern up-time equipment.)
Just a handful of Raptors used to destroy the German Air Bases would be sufficient.
Just put one big crater in the middle of their runway. Strafe the ground targets. Why let the Germans get airborne?
Hell, early in the war, just taking back some P-51’s would have done the trick. I’ve often thought…if I could take designs back to the US in the early 30’s in preparation for WWII, what would I take. For air craft I think I’d take back the design for the F-86 Sabre…and of course the P-51 (for the Navy) as well. A couple of operational squadrens of those puppies and they would have gone through the Germans (and Japanese) like a hot knife through butter.
I’d also take back the tooling and design for the AK-47, M-60 and T-55 (with some improvements :)) as well as a decent APC and landing craft design. And a decent helicopter design…probably a late model Huey and maybe a Cobra II. And perhaps some rocket models and designs as well…
-XT
Feh. Amateur. I’m planning on giving The Bomb to Roosevelt.
Teddy Roosevelt, that is. 
(Or maybe I’ll just give it to Churchill… First Lord of the Admiralty Churchill.)
A number of great designs, but remember to take back plans for the Merlin engine with them!
Thangyouverrramuch.
I attribute my putative “coolness” to my recent lack o sleep.
Modern fighters? No, not a chance, really. The A-10 wasn’t made to go up against modern jet fighters, but it’s going up against WWII planes, which are much less advanced. It would mow through them like so many blades of grass.
Also, keep in mind the A-10 is pretty much the toughest current one-man fighter the Air Force has. This thing survives multiple missle hits, and can still finish its mission and get home. It’s designed so that it can lose a whole engine and like half a wing and still fly.
Personally I’d like to take back a squadron of A-6 Intruders to help out the heavy bombers.
The biggest thing to take back would be training people…while the US military has some of the finest equipment in the world today, its really our training regiments that make us so formitable (IMHO). If you could go back to the early 30’s, and if you could convince some people in the government what was coming and to use the training people, a real professional and well equiped US military could have been built by the time the war clouds were looming.
Imagine a few well trained and drilled Army divisions equiped with AK-47’s and M-60’s, using T-55 (or even up gunned Shermans or Pershings), with say some Soviet designed APC’s (maybe BMP’s) deployed to France or England ‘on training excersizes’ sometime in the late 30’s before war formally broke out with Germany. Along with a few squadrons of P-51’s (yes, with the upgraded Merlin engines :)), and a squadron or two of F-86’s…and say some B-47 Peacemakers in an ‘air show’.
-XT
Bad experience with a London gal?
Why?
If you are going to force the Navy to fly prop jobs, why not let them use their own bird, the F8F, which would not need to be retro-fitted to fly from carriers and which already had moved up to the four cannon mode of armament?
(For that matter, why make them drive props? The F-86 actually started life as the navy’s FJ Fury, although there were changes to create the USAF’s Sabre.)
The P-51 wasn’t really much better than its competition. Yeah, at the beginning of the war it would have had a noticeable performance edge, but it wouldn’t have been overwhelming. The most significant feature of the P-51 wasn’t its speed or combat ability, but its range. It wasn’t that it could dogfight with Messerschmidts - several other allied fighters could do that just as well - it was that it could dogfight with Messerschmidts over Berlin. If you’re going back to change history, you’ll be loading up the Ardennes for an encirclement trap to cut off the head of the German panzer army, and you’ll never lose France, making the range of your fighters largely irrelevant. (The Pacific theatre is another story, of course.)
Moreover, the Navy won’t want the Mustang. During WWII they exclusively flew planes with radial air-cooled engines because of the greater reliability and damage resistance. The Merlin was a liquid-cooled inline engine.
Anything that took out the German radar that guided night bombers and searchlights would leave the RAF fairly invunerable over Germany, planes that would carry anti-radiation missiles would be best.
While the P-51 did have much better range without drop tanks, the “(First) Over Berlin” bit is, itself, hype.
The P-51 was, indeed, the first escort fighter to make it to Berlin, led by the 4th Fighter Group (which was based on the re-constructed Eagle Squadron of U.S. fliers who sneaked into the RAF before the U.S. got into the war). They arrived over Berlin for the first time on March 4, 1944.
However, the P-47 (led by elements of the 56th Fighter Group) showed up over Berlin on March 6, 1944 and the priority of the 4th’s appearance had as much to do with politics and honoring the “senior” air group as it did with selecting the right planes for the job. Nothing magical happened to the P-47 on March 6 that made it suddenly able to do what the P-51 had done two days earlier.
No, I meant the other way!
Yeah, I opened the thread thinking “Wow, these X vs. Y threads are getting really weird…”