Most likely this question has been asked before. I have been watching a BBC series about the second world war, specifically about Germany. In the series it goes on and on about German technological advances before and during the war which far exceeded that of any other western nation at the time. Rocketry, cruise missiles, jet aircraft, smart bombs… to name a few, which have all subsequently been adopted by any modern country which wishes to have a viable military option. Way before their time.
We are all aware that one of the great rivalries US-USSR at the end of the war was the kidnapping of German scientists. How in God’s name were the Germans able to be light years ahead of the other western industrialized nations, especially after decimating their Jewish scientists, either killing them or forcing them to emigrate?
Were/Are the Germans intellectually a superior race?
That whole era is shrouded in mystery for me, a nation gone haywire.
I reckon it was only the ideological stupidity of their leaders which actually kept them from world domination.
Facism is really good at getting information out of people, but not so good at inspiring people to come up with anything new.
Germany was #1 in science until the mid thirties. By far. (not the master race, but well educated, and meticulous). And this gave them an early edge. But then many of their brightest scientists (including lots of Jewish ones) were either fired or frustrated and got the hell out. And their knowledge gave the Allies the atomic bomb and lots of other neat stuff.
They weren’t that smart - the Vengeance Weapon program cost Germany about $3 billion - the Manhattan Project cost the US about $1.9 billion. They also killed more people in its production than its deployment. Freeman Dyson, working with the RAF during the war, wrote later: “We knew that German forces on the fighting fronts were in desperate need of airplanes, and that the V-2 rockets were doing us no military damage. From our point of view, the V-2 program was almost as good as if Hitler had adopted a policy of unilateral disarmament.”
The Germans were not “light years” ahead, and their intellectual and industrial prowess is overrated.
And German industry felt the pain of losing both Jewish intellectual capital but that of Jewish workers and industrial organization as well.
One of the enduring myths of WWII is that Nazi Germany was this well oiled, smooth running machine - it wasn’t. In spite of the efforts of many industrialist, Albert Speer and the like, women weren’t utilized, there was much political infighting, and slave labor isn’t all that efficient etc.
Yeah, cite? The nhattan Project took more money than the Apollo programme.
The answer to this is that, Germany had a long tradition of scientific research and engineering. The Nazis did not build it, they used it. Same with the USSR, Russia has long been at the forefront of scientific research, the Communists only inherited it.
OP here. I welcome the comments and points taken, however they really were light years ahead and a tradition of scientific research does really not explain how all of a sudden (well, not really all of a sudden) a jet plane appears in the sky to the total bewilderment of the B17 crews, how the Germans are launching ballistic missiles at the UK… etc. How the Russians and Americans were in a secret race in 1945 to capture all those German scientists and declare them all de-nazified.
We’ll have to agree to disagree then. I think some (your TV show?) cherry pick German success in rocketry, etc. and forget about the war as a whole.
They were ahead on some things, and behind on others. A state only has some many resources to throw at technical issues and science. So you have to pick your spots. You discuss the rocket program. The allies (to the best of my knowledge) didn’t put much effort into this program, so they were surpassed by Germany who did. The Germans didn’t focus on nuclear efforts (partially because Speer and others knew they could never catch up to the allies and didn’t want to waste resources) and the US blew them away.
Lets take your jet example. It’s my understanding that the United States built more jets in WWII than the Germans did (F-80 or P-80 I think), but Germany is proclaimed as “light years” ahead. Why is that? Because Germany was desperate and fielded what ever they could and the US didn’t have to.
Were they ahead in radar at the end of the war? Atomic bombs?
Yes they were highly technical and skilled. But light years? I don’t concur.
Not just radar - the Allies were parsecs ahead in the entire field of electronics. Remember, the first digital computers were invented during WW2, and not by the Germans. That’s a lot more influential than rockets.
I think its explained partly by allocation of resources etc. The Germans were reliant on new technology more than the Allied powers. Certainly by the latter stages of WW2 the Allies could rely upon numeric and economic advantages. The Germans needed super duper weaponry. You kind of have to when fighting a swarm of Russians who are willing to die fighting in their own blood(and an English Channel which prevents you fighting your enemy at all). This is not to say the Germans were/are not excellent in technological and engineering progress in their own right.
1 - Hitler and his cronies were fascinated by shiny new stuff. They were like kids in a sweet shop. If some crazy person came to them with an idea to build a bomber that would be able to reach New York, they would get wouldn’t be dismissed outright. Now, industrialists aren’t crazy, but they love making money. They realised that they could get government funding for projects they knew would never work.
2 - Roosevelt, and especially Churchill, were exactly the same in this respect. The difference is that they won the war. The crazy Allied projects were quietly forgotten, remained secret or were given enough time to become more than pipe dreams. The Nazi’s crazy stuff, however, was laid out in newsreels so we could see just how crazy the Nazis really were.
The other difference is that FDR and Churchill occasionally had people around who weren’t afraid to argue with them and tell them how stupid their ideas were.
Same thing with submarines. If the Japanese had come up with the same technologies and tactics that made the German submersibles as suddenly obsolete as they did, the US Navy would have developed something like the Type XXI (first true submarine). But they didn’t need to.
Take the jet engine. Englishman Sir Frank Whittle had one running well before the Germans; however, there was great resistance by the British government and industry to put it into production. Part of it was being well invested in piston engines. Another issue was just resistance to change. The Germans were looking for strategic and tactical advantages and not afraid to change to get there. The English had the advanced technology; but the Germans had the will to use it.
Then there were the tanks. Germany produced the most superior tanks in WWII. However they were expensive and difficult to build and maintain. Therefore there weren’t all that many of them made. On the other hand the Russian built cheap, reliable, and numerous T-34 tanks. Certainly the German tanks were superior one-on-one to the Russian tanks; however, the Russians could field 3 or 4 T-34s for each German Tiger.
Another way to look at things is that being technologically superior isn’t always a great advantage. Like the German Tiger tanks, the ME-262 was a superior aircraft in terms of speed; however, they couldn’t produce enough of them. Well actually they did produce a lot of them; but the jet fuel and experienced pilots were problems. Also the jet engines only lasted about 25 flying hours between rebuilds where as piston engines were much more durable. Possibly spending resources on less sophisticated aircraft might have been a better option.
You’re confusing TV focusing on some German technologies where they were slightly ahead of the Allies with Germans being “light years” ahead technologically.
There’s lots of things you’re missing from the complete picture:
German industry was actually primitive. In fact the entire world’s industry was primitive compared to that of the United States. Germany was still working a 2-shift system well into the war in which their factories actually were not operating 24 hours a day. The United States with industrial organizers like Sloan and Ford had already been utilizing 24-hour factories and this just grew exponentially as we moved into the war time economy.
The Germans still built things in the “shop” system, where a master craftsman would oversee a team of workers assembling and building say, a tank or a truck. It didn’t “move”, but was assembled in place. A factory would have many teams like this working, each overseen by a master craftsman type. In the United States, every war machine we built pretty much was broken down by our industrialists into very simple, repeatable steps that basically anyone with a brain could do. Then, the whole thing was put on assembly lines, workers stood in one spot and did their task over and over and over again.
The United States outproduced the entire Axis alliance by itself by a wide margin in total production and almost every major category of production as well (almost, the Germans outproduced us on a few things.) Prior to WW2 the largest item assembled on an assembly line had 15,000 parts. American car companies and such were rolling out planes on assembly lines that had over 200,000 parts in them a few years later.
There was simply nothing close to this from Germany. It wasn’t just that we were a bigger country, we were far more productive per person because we were more advanced in how we produced things.
German was vastly behind the Allies in radar. This was very decisive throughout the war, and made Britain an impossible nut to crack. For a country “light years” ahead of the rest of the world, it’s odd that they didn’t have radar. Of course, they weren’t “light years” ahead of anyone.
The Germans were vastly behind the Allies in computing, as has been mentioned. Again, odd for a country “light years” ahead of the rest of the world.
Many technologies where you believe the Germans were “light years” ahead of the world, they actually weren’t. They were actually more like “about even” and then the Germans decided to pursue production of the technology more aggressively. The Allies were much more conservative in what they put into production than the Germans were.
Some technologies the Allies were really ahead of the Germans even though we didn’t mass produce them. While the Germans actually fielded a limited number of helicopters during WW2, the Allies had several helicopters they produced small numbers of that were of better design and functionality, including things like one of the first helicopter capable of carrying cargo and the first amphibious helicopter.
One area where the Germans were genuinely far ahead of the United States and other Allies was rocketry. It had no real impact on the war, but it would prove to have a huge impact on the space race years later as von Braun and his contribution to the design of the Saturn V was certainly important to our beating the Soviets to the moon. Although the fact that the Soviets simply were not willing to spend the huge amount of money we were, and their own rocket scientists decided on a far more ambitious and ultimately impossible to correctly build design were probably the two biggest things in why we won the race to the moon.
The whole German technological superiority thing in WWII is largely hogwash. For anything the Germans did in the war, something as good or better made by the Allies can be pointed to. The Germans made the V-2? The US made the atomic bomb. The Germans made the Fritz X? The US made the VB-6 Felix. The Germans made the V-1? The Allies made the proximity fuze. Germany wasted time and resources on the Amerika Bomber to no end, while Germany’s actual best - and only - strategic bomber was the abortion that was the He-177. All the while German cities were being pummeled by Lancasters, B-17sand B-24s, while out in the Pacific the even longer ranged and more advanced B-29 was bombing Japan. The Germans managed to get a couple of Type XXI submarines to see service before the war ended? The US had been using Fido air-dropped acoustic homing anti-submarine torpedoes against the U-boats since 1943.
Haven’t you heard of Frank Whittle? He invented the turbojet in England before the war- the Luftwaffe merely saw the promise in it before the Allies did, and developed jet fighters (Me262) a year or so before the Allies did (Gloster Meteor), and by the end of the war, the Allied jet fighters (P-80, DeHavilland Vampire) were quite a bit better than the 1942-vintage Me262.
Other than that, it’s a matter of priority; von Braun and the others were mostly just building on and productionalizing Robert Goddard’s research. Again, the fundamental work was done prior to the war, and the Germans developed it into a weapon, while the Allies ignored it.
On the flip side, the possibility of atomic weapons were something that both sides were aware of before the war, but the Allies actually funded and built the things, while the Germans never really took it as seriously.
In the category of “better” production tanks and aircraft; almost all of that is due to different priorities and experience. There’s no real reason that the US troops couldn’t have had T-26 Pershing tanks much earlier (roughly comparable to a Panther or Tiger), except that Gen. McNair, among others, intentionally delayed production because large, heavy caliber gun tanks didn’t fit into their conception of how armored warfare should work, and stuck to the “tank destroyer” doctrine until almost the end of the war, when McNair got blown up.
