Question about German technology WWII

Factual Questions
121

Because its relevant to the actual discussion, being the plane that carried the V-1. The B-17 isn’t, and I still have no idea why you suddenly interjected it into the discussion.

With the important exception that unlike your He-111, they did this from 7kms out, not 2 miles, and didn’t have to fly a deathtrap to within 2 miles before launching. Your He-111 would have to do the exact same thing trying to use command wire guidance.

So in other words, none. You may have noticed I mentioned a complete lack of Fritz X’s being used to sink ships at Normandy in 1944, and that the successes it enjoyed in 1943 at Anzio, Salerno, and sinking some of the Italian fleet were due to lack of full time CAP, Salerno being at the extreme range of Allied land based fighter cover, and there being no fighter cover for the Italian fleet as it fled for Allied harbors respectively. For that matter what few Luftwaffe bomber attacks were made on Normandy were done at nighttime as daylight was suicidal and they still suffered such high attrition that they were quickly withdrawn.

3.1 miles actually. I was thinking of its brother the Hs 293 which had a range of 12kms or 7.5 miles.

:dubious:Oh really? So that’s why He-111s would use a lo-hi-lo attack profile, approaching England at wave top height, climbing to altitude and exposing themselves to radar only to drop the V-1 and then descending back to wave top height. Just like how torpedo planes make torpedo runs. Oh wait, that’s the exact opposite of how torpedo planes make their runs; they fly high altitude for better performance to the target, descend to wave top height to attack and then return to a higher altitude on the return trip. If you want some actual facts:

and this:

and this, which you seem to have ignored when I posted it last time from wiki:

Magiver, your ignorance on military matters is exceeded only by your inability to realize your ignorance on military matters, as exemplified by your repeated misuse of the acronym TOW, which is a missile, to mean wire guidance. You clearly have no idea what the difference is between a ship’s launch date and its commission date even though the intervening words should have made it perfectly clear to you: “Work was completed in August 1940 when she was commissioned”. A ship that has been launched is in no way, shape, or form completed, and this isn’t “a big nitpick on my part concerning it’s [sic] commission date”. A ship’s launch date is simply the date it has been moved off of the slipway and into the water, again it is in no way, shape or form even close to complete. He’s what the Bismarck looked like when it was launched. You might immediately notice the lack of certain major things, like oh, the entire superstructure and the turrets. Here’s a picture of it sliding down the launch way at Hamburg on February 1939. Here’s a video of good ole’ Adolf launching the Bismarck.

122

I compared it to the German medium bomber as an illustration of the use of resources. A bomber capable of directing it’s payload is more effective than a larger bomber that can’t.

No, that’s the point. It’s not tied to altitude to release the weapon nor would it have to follow it over the target.

The Fritz X was no longer viable in 1944 because it could be jammed.

well I was thinking of the Fritz. Go figure.

123

One of the innumerable shows on the History channel pointed out that the Tiger tank was powered by an aircraft engine. Being built to aircraft specs, it was hugely powerful, but did not take well to being bounced and crashed through various forms of geography. The constant change is speed was no friend either.

124

Is the History Channel ever RIGHT? The Tigers I and II were powered by Maybach HL210 and HL230 engines, which were designed to power tanks. And they were underpowered/the tanks were overweight, so the Tigers were slow.

However, most British tanks were powered by the Rolls-Royce Meteor, basically a detuned Merlin. And the American M3 (Grant/Lee) and M4 (Sherman) used the Wright R-975 Whirlwind, another aircraft engine and considerably less powerful than the Maybach. And, contrary to some HC shows I’ve seen, ALL of these engines ate gasoline/petrol–none of them were diesel so they could all light up like a Ronson, not just the Sherman.

125

And a bomber that is never going to survive long enough to actually release its payload is a complete waste of resources, which is what you are determined not to grasp. B-17s were bombing cities in the heart of Germany at will in 1944. German medium bombers could not fly missions against the Allies during daylight hours in 1944. The Allies had complete control of the skies.

There’s ignorance and then there’s blind willful ignorance. Want to take a guess which one you’re demonstrating here? I just cited for you that the V-1 was tied to altitude to release, which is why He-111s had to climb in order to launch it. Additionally, I have no idea where you get the notion that the bomber had to follow the Fritz X over the target. It didn’t.

126

Really? So the heavy losses shown in the chart on this site are what? Really poor workmanship? Bad fuel? Poor piloting skills?

from wiki: It is a common myth that the V-1’s Argus As 014 pulse jet engine needed a minimum airspeed of 150 mph (240 km/h) to operate. The Argus As 014 (also known as a resonant jet) could in fact operate at zero airspeed due to the nature of its intake shutters and its acoustically tuned resonant combustion chamber. Contemporary film footage of the V-1 always shows the distinctive pulsating exhaust of a fully running engine before the catapult system is triggered and the missile launched

From the same cite which I gave you earlier: “The operator had to keep the bomb in sight at all times (a tail flare was provided) and the control aircraft had to hold course,[7] which made evading gunfire or fighters impossible”.

127

The Bizmark was big and bad, but when building it the Germans still were using electronics and guidance systems from the last time they built battleships - around 1918. So the Bizmark didnt have the advanced anti-aircraft targeting systems and from what I’ve read, one side of the ship couldnt coordinate with the other.

128

You can’t really be this impervious to reality. This has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the ability to launch it from a He-111, which needed to climb to 1,500 feet to launch it. I’ve already cited it for you. I’ve cited that it was extremely dangerous and numerous He-111s were lost to the V-1 exploding. The ability of the pulse jet to operate at zero airspeed doesn’t mean anything. There’s this thing called gravity that will cause a V-1 dropped by a He-111 from below 1,500 feet to hit the water or ground before attaining airspeed.

Again, you can’t be this clueless. This doesn’t mean the plane had to follow the Fritz X over the target. The bombardier could hardly keep the bomb in sight if the bomber was flying at the same airspeed as the bomb. That’s why, as I just cited for you,

Your use of the color red doesn’t change this fact, just as your earlier use of the color red on the launch date of the Bismarck didn’t magically cause it to be a completed battleship rather than a floating hulk that was still missing the entire superstructure and turrets.

129

Are you sure? Red is pretty persuasive if you conflate confidence with correctness. It’s like “RAWR, HERE I AM, ASSERTING A DATUM”

Compare it to this which is fairly “meh, I guess I’m saying this. Also, have fun reading it against the pale grey background”.

You don’t want to use this color, though. Quite an infamous color on here.

130

You haven’t cited anything. The V1 could be launched from a standstill. Altitude and speed has no bearing on it’s launch.

Yes, it does. The cite clearly states that during this maneuver it’s vulnerable to attack from other aircraft and guns.

Nothing cited referenced airspeed. How you can’t understand this is mind boggling. A Fritz is a falling bomb. It has limited directional guidance because there’s no propulsion system. It operates by way of gravity. It has to be released within the narrow confines of it’s steerable trajectory. The bombardier has to track it’s descent and that means staying on target. He can’t just wander off and still be able to steer the weapon. It MUST remain in sight.

You clearly don’t understand the concept of a stand-off weapon which is what a steerable missile is. A bomb is a free-fall weapon with limited steering capacity from the tail and it must be dropped at a specific altitude for it to work. The standoff distance involved is mostly vertical versus the distance of a missile which can be completely horizontal. Thus the advantage of one over the other. This is the advantage the Ruhrstahl X-4 held. It could be fired 2 miles away from it’s target which puts it out of range. If fighter escorts went after the plane then they would leave their bombers exposed. This is the technological advantage that the thread is about. Not how successful it was in the war but the level of technical sophistication involved. In some areas the Germans were clearly ahead of the allies and missile/rocket technology was one of them.

You’re making a childish nitpick argument about it’s use in the beginning of the war when that involved a land war in Poland. It wasn’t a naval exchange it. The Bismark had been sunk 6 month’s before the United States even declared war. And it was another year after that before Americans fought in Europe and that was done with borrowed equipment from England.

If you want to nitpick something find a mirror and discuss your fantasy about bombers running freely over Germany in 1944. They still took heave casualties.

131

Going back to this post, I take it you haven’t read anything about the war in the Pacific.

The tokko (kamikaze) threat was countered by have radar pickets. Anyone with a passing familiarity of the air war in the Pacific theater will know something about this. From here.

The US controlled the air space around the combat area and kept CAP (combat air patrol, if you are not familiar with that concept, basically you have friendly fighters flying around waiting for the bad guys).

With radar pickets, you extend the range where you can detect the enemy approach, although at a cost to some destroyers, who get sacrificed so that the capital ships or transports would be protected.

Also note that the guided wire system was not operational by the end of the war, so it would not be a simple matter of small modifications.

132

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Let’s refrain from personal remarks directed at other posters. No warning issued, but dial it back.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

133

Minor historical note here: I keep seeing HMS Hood referred to as the Royal Navy’s Flagship. I’m not sure if that was true or what that concept entails (from my understanding, usually any given formation of ships will have a flagship, assuming they’re important enough to have an Admiral in command. They will have multiple flagships if more than one admiral is required (a squadron of cruisers and a flotilla of destroyers escorting a squadron of battleships would likely mean at least three flagships in the mix, depending on how you divvied up the battleships between admirals and if the destroyer flotilla rated its own flag officer or if it was under command of the cruiser admiral or the most senior destroyer captain).

In any case, Hood was a WWI era Battlecruiser, a type of ship which wasn’t demonstrably capable of standing up to Dreadnoughts even in WWI, let alone a brand new battleship. In fact, Battlecruisers were never intended to stand up to Battleships, as that ran counter to the entire concept of Battlecruisers (it is also worth noting that they never existed in great numbers in any navy outside of WWI as they proved to be rather impractical and more importantly were limited by the post-war naval treaties). Defeating a 25 year old Battlecruiser is not exactly grounds for bragging rights for a state of the art Battleship. Then again, neither is being crippled by a biplane.

134

Well, my point was that one Tiger tank is demonstrably inferior to a Sherman or T-34 for many, perhaps a majority of military uses. It’s really only clearly superior in tank-vs-tank dueling, and even then the Tiger’s advantages are degraded in close terrain; it would prefer a long-range duel in the open. But for many crucial military tasks, the Tiger was too heavy, too slow, and/or too unreliable. There were whole operational areas where Tigers could not be used because they could not cross bridges that would support other tanks. You wouldn’t want a Tiger for amphibious invasions. It would be an albatross in long-range, high-speed desert warfare such as Rommel conducted. And so on. And that’s not even counting the production number disparity. One Tiger cannot guard two separate passes through the mountains, but the thirty-six Shermans produced for each Tiger (using your figures above) certainly could.

A Tiger was only better for a narrowly-defined set of tasks.

Yes, American use artillery astonished and confounded the Germans, who assumed we had many, many more guns than we actually had. It turned out the increased effectiveness was largely doctrinal; the US military gave a wide variety of people authority to call down artillery, even artillery “belonging to” other units. Well-organized, well-supplied American artillery responded very flexibly to requests for fire support, and that system got a lot more utility out of the same number of gun barrels.

135

True, but remember Hood had been “up armored” between the wars. Insufficiently up armored, it turns out, but the fact that she was very large, very fast, very beautiful, and recently upgraded caused Hood to loom large in British national consciousness. I doubt the British public realized that she was understrength for taking on a world-class battleship.

Her destruction was a propaganda coup for the Nazis (albeit swiftly countered by Bismarck’s own demise).

136

Actually, your own cite (if you continue reading beyond the part you quoted) refutes this. I think you are confusing the statement that the V-1’s engine could operate at a standstill with the question of whether or not the V-1 could start flying unaided from a standstill.

Your own wiki cite states:

“The origin of this myth may lie in the fact that due to the low static thrust of the pulse jet engine and the very high stall speed of the small wings, the V-1 could not take off under its own power in a practically short distance, and thus required to either be launched by aircraft catapult or be airlaunched from a modified bomber aircraft such as the Heinkel He-111. Ground-launched V-1s were typically propelled up an inclined launch ramp by an apparatus known as a Dampferzeuger (“steam generator”) which used stabilized hydrogen peroxide and potassium permanganate (T-Stoff and Z-Stoff).[12][page needed] Takeoff speed was 360 mph (580 km/h).”

“Low static thrust” of the engine and “high stall speed” of the wings mean that, absent the assist of the catapult used for ground launches, the altitude and speed of the launching aircraft very much have a bearing on how the V-1 is air launched.

Also, you seem to think a launch distance of two miles is somehow significant. Two miles is nothing, even for WWII. A reference on USN AA doctrine (see page 9 of the cite below)

http://www.history.navy.mil/library/online/antiaircraft_action_summary_wwii.htm

indicates that ships were to open fire on incoming aircraft at 12,000 yards or almost 7 miles.

Of course CAP over a task force or a city would also patrol an area much larger than two miles.

If you are referring only to the Ruhrstahl missile as a standoff weapon because of its two-mile effective range, two miles would I assume put it outside of the effective range of a heavy-bomber’s guns, but starting in 1944, the U.S switched to a loose escort policy (Google “Doolittle” and “loose escort” to find cites) in which the fighters were no longer tightly leashed to the bomber group; instead, they would spread out over an area of as much as 30 miles or more, at varying altitudes. By 1945, when the Ruhrstahl may have been put into service, I imagine there were few targets left in unoccupied Germany that were outside of the range of P-51s flying escort. So 2 miles again is nothing.

137

It’s perfectly clear to everyone else reading this that it has been cited, and why He-111s climbed to 1,500 feet before releasing their V-1.

Again, it’s perfectly clear to everyone else that the bomber did not fly over the target ship, and your cite doesn’t say anything to that effect. The bomb was released, the plane decelerated by climbing sharply allowing the bombardier to actually see and guide the bomb, which was now falling through the air much faster than the bomber was. The bomb would impact the ship or miss long before the bomber reached the ship; the bomber did not then fly over the ship.

You mean of course aside from this, which I’ve now cited for you three times

You’re forgetting that your prior posts are still visible in your attempt to rewrite the history of what you wrote here. You had absolutely no idea what the launch date of a ship actually meant, and didn’t understand why it took from February 1939 when Bismarck was launched until August 1940 when it was placed in commission despite the words “work was completed” being between the two. Calling the difference between this and this a ‘nitpick’ is quite an achievement.

You aren’t fooling anyone with this strawman either. Allied air supremacy was so great by mid 1944 that it could bomb any city in Germany at will. The Luftwaffe was incapable of bombing Britain at all, even at night, which was the entire reason for using the V-1 and V-2. Over the battlefield the Luftwaffe was a complete non-factor, the few bomber attacks they attempted on the Normandy beachhead had to be conducted at night and the attrition rate was still so high that they were forced to abandon them altogether. A He-111 conducting a daylight bombing mission against the Western Allies in late 1944 was taking a one-way trip, and that’s before strapping a V-1 onto it.

You have my apologies.

138

no it doesn’t mean that. The cite stated it was capable of full thrust at launch. Did it ever occur to you that they wanted the rocket up and out of ground clutter as quickly as possible? They weren’t radio controlled so they didn’t have the luxury of flying them off the deck like a model airplane. that would have taken a lot of wide open space and that would make them easier targets.

None of this has any relation to the altitude of the plane needed to be at to launch it. The missile wouldn’t care what altitude it’s launched at and the bomber it was launched from never attained the take off speed you just cited.

2 miles is everything to a torpedo plane. It’s 8 times the distance of a Swordfish release. It’s a whole lot harder to hit something on the horizon 2 miles away than a 1/4 mile away. And the payoff is great. One plane versus a battleship is a tremendous return on investment.

You can either escort a bomber or engage other aircraft. You can’t do both. There’s a reason why the Tuskegee airmen did so well protecting the bombers. They stuck to them like glue.

But again, the thread is about German technology in WW-II not how poorly they were mis-managed. If not for Hitler it would have been a much uglier war for the Allies.

Attacking Russia and creating a 2nd front was huge mistake. Sending the Bismarck out without sufficient coverage was huge mistake. wasting money on mouse tanks and redirecting aircraft design was a huge mistake. With all the idiotic things he did he went up against England, Russia, and North America and fought for 6 years against an overwhelming resource disparity.

139

Going back over some more of the quotes on this, the premise if fatally flawed:

This has been questioned, but not answered, the proposed usage of the He-111 and V-1 by Magiver is anti-ship, and the US had abandoned attempting to bomb ships from level bombers (sometime) after Midway. This of course makes it an apples to orange comparison.

As repeatedly shown, two miles is not out of AA range. The He-111 will also have to fly by the radar pickets miles out.

Midway amply demonstrated the folly of attempting torpedo bomber attacks without fighter escorts. As noted elsewhere, by 1944 Germany didn’t have the fighters to escort missions such as this.

The Me-111 was considered obsolete by this period, and when its exterior bomb racks were utilized, it was especially slow and lacked maneuverability. As noted by Dissonance, It would have been an easy target both for the CAP and picket destroyers.

The only advantage of a wired control is that it can’t be jammed, but the same problem of needing to maintain some sort of steady flying would necessarily remain the same. Quick evasive action would not be possible.

This arrangement would actually be easier to defend against than tokko attacks. The He-111 with a V-1 aboard would be a sitting duck closer than anything the Japanese used.

140

Nobody has suggested anything was out of range. It’s the difference between flying over AA batteries and being 2 miles horizontal of them. And you seem to be arguing some kind of rationale that since something was vulnerable it couldn’t be used. The entire war was one big meat grinder of attrition. Look at D-Day.

It’s not a function of IF the V1 was going to be launched from aircraft or if aircraft would attack ships. Both scenarios occurred in the war. The farther away a deadly weapon can be deployed and the more accurate the weapon is, the greater it’s chance of success.

The United States didn’t reverse engineer the V1 because it sucked. It was a viable weapon that became the basis for cruise missiles which is nothing but combining technologies as they evolve.