The Tiger simply wasn’t a very effective weapon in the overall scheme of things, because armour alone doesn’t make an effective weapon. The Germans had to deal with the Russian KV tanks in exactly the same way at the start of the Russian campaign, having to line up entire batteries of their vaunted 88mm guns to ambush and stop one or two KVs that had broken through their lines because nothing the Germans had could penetrate its’ armour. Yet the Russians were still trounced at every turn.
One of the central tenets of armoured warfare was that one’s tanks do not venture out without either air superiority or massive AA cover. The Germans knew this better than anyone else, they invented it. And yet in 1945, when the Luftwaffe ceased to be an effective force at the front and Allied/Soviet airpower picked off German tanks with impunity, what did they do? Build bigger, slower tanks!
There wasn’t anything preventing the Allies from doing the same, the Allies were just smarter and led by people who weren’t nuts.
Did I miss something on the first read through? Nobody mentioned the V-1 Buzz Bomb that was reverse-engineered:
V-1 / JB-2 Testing
**A detachment of the Special Weapons Branch, Wright Field, Ohio, arrived at Wendover in 1944 with the mission of evaluating captured & experimental rocket systems, including the German V-1 “buzz bomb” and guided glide bombs. Numerous tests were conducted, including the JB-2, a American copy of the German V-1, which was tested at a site just south of Wendover’s Technical Site.
The JB-2 ‘Doodle Bug’ cruise missile (called the ‘Loon’ by the Navy) was an American-made copy of the German V-1 ‘Buzz Bomb’, reverse-engineered by Republic Aviation (airframe) & Ford Aerospace (pulsejet engine) based on inspections of V-1 wreckage in England. The JB-2 was flight-tested less than 4 months after the first V-1 attack on England.
Ironically, the JB-2 was built to be used in the invasion of Japan - an invasion which was prevented by the atomic bombs assembled only a few hundred feet away on the Wendover ramp. After the war, German V-1s were tested from this site to compare performance with the American copies**
Reverse engineering is something done at Wright Paterson AFB (note my location) and there is an example of an American JB-2 at the museum as well as a German V-2 rocket motor.
Was just thinking about this, and in defense of the Russians, I don’t think even the Americans had the bugs worked out until around the same time, with the B-50A Superfortress (a re-branded B-29D since Congress wasn’t willing to fund an updated version of a WWII bomber).
It was something about the MG42 being reverse engineered to become the M60 machinegun. At this point I don’t feel like writing it again so fill in the blanks.
“Leaps ahead” is misleading at best. As I’ve stated in this thread, the Gloster Meteor came into service with the RAF at the same time as the Me 262. It was inferior to the Me 262 in performance, but vastly ahead of the 262 in reliability. The P-80 would have seen action in Europe had the war lasted any longer, was close to the 262 in performance, and again vastly ahead in reliability. (To be fair, the reliability issue was due to critical shortages of the correct alloys needed for the Junkers Jumo engine. The prototypes didn’t have the same propensity to flame out that the production models did.)
The kill ratio also becomes less impressive when you note that most of the 262s that saw action were flown by JV 44, comprised exclusively of the best of the best Luftwaffe aces (or at least, the best of those still alive). They could have scored impressive kill ratios flying Bf109Ks or Fw190 D-9s too.
Actually, they were never meant to be combat tanks. They were supposed to be training vehicles. The German MBTs were supposed to be the Mk III and the Mk IV. As for the early Allied tanks being their equal. They were their superior (well, except for the one man turreted French tanks :D)
I’m not too sure about these planes, but the F8F Bearcat was directly inspired by (though not reverse-engineered from) the Focke-Wulf Fw190.
Not quite as long as that. The B-50 came after the war, the B-29 was pretty much perfected by late 1944 (although there were still some that simply blew up on take-off while heading out on missions).
I read a book by one of Rommel’s aides, he said that they were doing fine until the British got Sherman tanks and they could see the shells bouncing off the armour.
As others have said, the Tigers had problems, one of which was that they were vulnerable from the rear. When I was a kid I worked with on old ex-para who was out in Italy.
He said that they used to dig slit trenches, lie in them while the tanks rolled over, then jump up and machine gun them in the rear. Quite unbelievable. He said the real b*stards would slew the tracks and grind them in the slit trenches. He seemed pretty matter of fact about it - to do something so risky indicates that they knew of a vulnerability.
My hunch is that the Allies benefitted from uninterupted mass production in the USA (I think that the USSR tank factories were also well out of reach) without which we would probably have been stuffed.
I’ve also heard that the war in Europe took quite a lot longer than absoluetly necessary, as the Allies knew the results were inevitable and were (sensibly) reluctant to take unneccesary risks - this would have lead to consolidated supply lines - very useful.
I’ve also heard that Stalin was nervous of the Japanese (following 1905), so he kept his crack troops in Siberia - and they made a serious difference when brought West.
Incidentally, both sides were aware of each others technology, the Enigma was offered for sale to Britain in the 1930s - and there is a story of a German Airforce General (?) visiting England pre-1939 and asking ‘how is your Radar ?’
The people who mention quantity and reliability have a point, a later example is the ‘success’ of the AK47 …
I think the simplest explanation, especially for the armour, is that by 1944 the German armour was meant to fight a defensive war and the Allies needed equipment to fight an offensive war. What they did not need was a 70 ton behemoth which would use up all their already-in-short-supply fuel as they lumbered across France.
mm
Well, from what I understood, the B-50A fixed a number of problems they apparantly had with the B-29, such as increasing engine power and making the vertical stabilizer larger (while also making it foldable so it would fit in a hanger). Further reading suggests they did introduce a whole slew of technical enhancements, but a lot of that may simply have been because newer, better equipment and technology was available when they made the B-50.
Heh, that randomly reminds me… towards the end of WWII, they experimented with a variant of the B-24 Liberator that had a single vertical stabilizer instead of the twin tails. Apparantly it simplified construction and improved handling of the plane considerably. Of course, by this point, the plane had become effectively obsolete with the introduction of the B-29…
Well, the USAAF did consider a single-tailed variant, the B-24N, however, I’m not sure I would call it an experiment. The Navy PB4Y-2 Privateer was the successor to the PB4Y-1 Liberator (which was merely a Navy designation for the B-24) and they had already included the single-tail modification in their 1943 design.
