Allies Get Nukes In '43, Yet Lose The War

[BillSlim]

Some of their ideas were certainly brilliant, and they were years ahead of everybody else in rocketry. However they do seem to have overestimated the difficulty of adding stages to rockets - they thought it simply involved sticking one bit on top of another, uk, sorry Meine Herrs its rather more complicated than that, as the American German rockets scientists and their Soviet German found out a bit later (after many large BOOMs).
Their A9 (?) rocket meant for attacking the USA would probably not have worked.
It did take both the USA and the USSR a good few years to go from simple A.4 technology to multi-stage IRBM and ICBMs, with quite a few failures on the way (the Jupiter, for example).
The Nazis would never have had enough time to perfect it, certainly not before the A-bomb armed B-36s arrived over Germany.

Some of their ideas were clearly insanse, and one wonders what they were smoking (I think I'd like to try some   ). Some of those aircraft designs would have been pretty leathal machines - to the aircrew!

That said, some of their ideas were used later on when the technology was available for them to work.
However I've never subscribed to the 'uber-German weapons and Erwin Rommel win the war' school of AH, hence the fact that I tend to shoot down 'Germany wins WW2' AHs. That, and that fact that I find the thought of the Nazis wining the war somewhat tasteless, not that that is ever a personal criticism of those who propose them.

[Madoc]

Bill,

While the victory of the Reich in WWII may well have tasteless to contemplate, if it was in the cards then denying simply out of good taste doesn't do justice to the dire nature of the situation.

Personally, I don't think Nazis could've won the war once the US had gotten into it.  The balance of forces was no longer in Germany's favor.  The Allies outnumbered them in terms of population size and thus could afford to sustain higher losses of troops.  The Allies had vastly greater access to resources and thus could afford to lose far more material than the Germans.  The Allied industrial capacity was also vastly greater and we could literally build weapons faster than the Germans could destroy them.

Failing a massive collapse in political will or the advent of some truly devastating weaon - like atomic bombs _and_ the means to deliver them world wide - I really don't see the Nazis as being able to win.

At best, all those Vunder Vepons might delay the outcome of the war by some several months.  Maybe a year, if that.  Even then, I think it would also take some fantastic luck for the Germans to pull that off.  Hand in hand with that would be the requirement for the Allies to have nothing but fantastically _bad_ luck during this same time.

This is one of the main problems I have with most alternative histories where Germany is depicted as winning the war.  Namely, they give all the advantages to the Nazis and heap mounds of fantastically good luck upon their side while restricting the Allies to plod along in exactly the same manner and have nothing but bad luck in doing so.  It just doesn't work out that way.

Take the German lead in tank development over the US & UK.  The Tiger and Panther tanks were quite superior to the Sherman.  The problem for Germany was that the Tiger tank was difficult to manufacture and both tanks consumed a lot of resources to build.  Thus, the Germans never could field enough of them to truly carry the day.  The Allies countered this by flooding the battlefield with Sherman tanks and adopting some very tightly coordinated combined arms tactics to minimize the Shermans weaknesses.  Had the Germans allocated more resources to solving the production problems for those heavy tanks then they would have had fewer resources to devote elsewhere.  And so on.  Too many alt histories fail to take this sort of thing into account.

Or take the German jets as an example.  Blazingly fast and lethal once in the air.  But only while at speed.  The Allies quickly learned that the best way to shoot them down was when the jets were coming in to land.  Another limiting factor for the jets was their engines.  Germany simply didn't have access to sufficient mineral resources needed to make enough high temperature alloys for their jet engines.  The result was that those engines burnt themselves out quite rapidly.  Sure, the Me-262 designers took that into account by making the jet engines very easy to change out.  However, such short life spans for those engines placed an increased burden on the jet fighter logistical support lines.  Instead of being filled with new fighters to wage war with they had to devote far too much capacity hauling all those replacement engines around.

Then there was the fuel situation.  Germany never had enough petroleum for its needs and as the war went on this only got worse.  By the time those new jets would've gotten into production, Germany would - literally - been out of gas.  It'd be hard for some Vunder Vepon of the air to dominate the skies if it can't even get off the ground!

So, all in all, I don't think Germany could've truly changed things even with all those fantastical designs they came up with.

One thing I've long wanted to do is find some aerodynamics simulator into which I could plug all those Luft 46 designs to see how they'd fare.  My guess is that the basic aerodynamics of a good many of those designs would render them wholly unsuited for military use - if even able to maintain controlled flight to begin with.

But hey, they do look good, right?

Madoc

[royabulgaf]

And to go to the nth degree, if Hitler had been a little less sceptical of 'Jewish Science' (ie Atomic Physics) you could have had a German bomb able to be produced quite early in the piece with the end result being like Post War Germany (ie Stuck in the middle of two idiotic power-blocs willing to blast your own country into atoms, but not actually get their own stuff played with??)

Yeah, the German nuclear program never went anywhere.  Too little, too late.  In fact, back in the 90s there was some debate if the leader of the program, Werner Heisenberg, was deliberately slowing the program down.

Truth be told, a lot of the "German Super Weapon" stuff was propaganda.   To the end of the war, the average soldier used a bolt-action rifle no different than their father's WWI weapon.  They also really fell off the map with non-combat equipment, such as transport.  The only vehicle thay had as good as a Jeep were captured Jeeps.  The Ju-52 was inferior to the C-47, we just think it's cool because of its off-road appearance.  They could only dream of something like a C-54.  

Their ground transport was a production failure.  Most of the war they got by with clapped out trucks scavenged from the used car lots of occupied Europe, while they devoted scarce resources to such overbuilt vehicles like the RSO, and the Opel half-tracks.  Horse-drawn vehicles were standard equipment until the end of the war.

Kim Margosein

[jcf]

They had some brilliant ideas to be sure, swept wings, ballistic rockets, flying bombs, air to air missiles (most of which were happily pirated by the Allies, including Japanese biological warfare tech!).  It's when the designers were allowed to 'what if' that things went awry i think.

The swept wing story is more complicated than most realize...
a pair of article on the subject in Hiller Aviation Institute 'Briefings':

Swept Wing 1

Swept Wing 2

A young American aerodynamicist, R.T. Jones, was working on high speed wing designs during WWII and had independently come up with a swept wing theory.

Cheers, Jon

[proditor]

A lot of the ideas of massive German advances are sort of just that: Ideas.  Since others covered the aircraft angle, I'll just touch on Tanks.

Tanks: A decision was made when the first reports started to filter back about the Panther.  Should America switch tooling to newer tanks like the Pershing?  No, because we had them outmanned.  We could out produce the Reich every day of the week and twice on Sunday when it came to Shermans and tank crews.  Moreover, the Sherman was fast and allowed Generals like Patton to exploit a breakout tactic in theatre.  As the Tiger and Panther started showing up in greater numbers, and as they began to rack up kills, it was decided to hurry along the transition to the Pershing, though it was a case of too lilttle, too late, for the service of the Pershing.  It most definitely was not a case of superior tank tech, just manufacturing capability and timing.  In the end, as grisly as it sounds, the Sherman backers who said "Make enough and we'll win the war even if they aren't the most advanced tank on the field" were right.

[Madoc]

Proditor,

Following on with the Sherman points, the difference was combined arms tactics.  The Allies knew that they had sufficient numbers of Shermans to easily replace their loses, but they also knew they had an overwhelming number of other weapons and well honed tactics to reduce the Sherman's weaknesses.  Chief among these was absolute air superiority which allowed for extremely effective close air support.  Thus, any Tiger or Panther which poked its snout up soon was pounced on by the seemingly endless numbers of Typhoons, Jugs, Mustangs, Spits, Mitchells, Maruaders, and so on.  Our troops soon became very used to having such air power on call and made very frequent use of it.

My dad served in the US Army in Germany after the war.  He liked to relate one particular tale about this.  It seems he'd come to enjoy the affections of German country lass and, as part of this, was welcomed by her family.  Her father had served in the Wehrmacht and liked to make of point of reminding my dad of how his unit had stood up to some American troops and forced them to retreat.

He had been manning a machine gun position when an American armored unit came upon his position.  He and his men engaged the US troops and tanks with machine gun fire.  The US tanks and troops withdrew.  That's right, the tanks withdrew in the face of machine gun fire.  He was quite pleased with that and made a point of trotting the story out frequently.

His daughter told my dad the rest of the story.  And that was a part her dad never trotted out to others.

It seems that within but a few minutes of forcing the US tanks to withdraw his unit's position came under attack from Allied aircraft.  Direct, heavy and sustained attack that was also right on target and very effective.  In short order, his unit fled their position in the face of this aerial onslaught.  And then the US tanks renewed their advance.

To some, this might seem a rather lazy way of doing things.  Machine guns were no match for tanks and there was only a slight risk to the tank crews that the Germans had any anti-tank weaponry.  They could've sent their supporting infantry forward to clear out those German machine gun positions.  This would've incurred some casualties among the ground troops, no doubt, but it certainly would've been faster than calling in the airpower.  Instead, the US troops simply fell back to clear the target and let the planes take care of that particular problem.  This solved the problem with no loss of US troops.  

We had such an overwhelming material advantage over the Germans that even this profligate use of resources was something we easily could sustain.  Same same with tank on tank engagements.  Our Shermans might encounter a handful of Tigers or Panthers.  The German tanks might succeed in lighting up several of our Sherman tanks.  At which point Allied airpower would then reduce the German tanks to equally smoldering wreckage as they'd just done to the Shermans.

As the Germans had but a handful of Panthers and Tigers, and as the Allies had a seemingly endless supply of Shermans as well as all that airpower overhead, our advanced continued almost unimpeded.  Cold comfort to the Sherman crews lost along the way though...

Madoc

[Maverick]

might be a worthwhile way of winning a war, but like Madoc said, pity the Sherman crews.

There was a classic example of a lone Jagdpanther during 1944 that stopped an advance of British tanks (think they were Shermans?? or Churchills) point blank.  For whatever reason, air support wasn't quite as forthcoming and this single vehicle held up this units advance for quite some time.

I think it's fair to say that just because you have numerical superiority doesn't mean you won't have casualties if your equipment is inferior to that of your enemy.  

As for German 'ideas' being only that, well were would the AK-47 be if it weren't for the MP44?  Not a bad advertisement for an 'idea'

Regards,

Mav

[elmayerle]

I'm coming in here late, but, IMHO, Gen. Pile's idea is not that far fetched at all.  It's remarkably similar to some ASAT proposals and has some similarities to proposed ABM approaches I've seen written up.