Gentlemen,
As the OP who apparently caused a resurgence of this thread I must say I have been very impressed with the contributions you have made! Indeed, I have learned a lot from you especially regarding the complexities that my “what if” scenario entailed. And that is precisely why I entertained the question. I will go into that a little more in just a second.
You know, I came here in my old age as a retired academic, as a casual visitor, not at all a student of WW2 history, merely driven by a certain nostalgia in my retirement to revisit, first of all, something relating to my dad’s service in WW2, but, also, something of the time I spent in the Marines before I left to go into academics. Way back in the late fifties! I enjoyed recapturing a little of that provoked by what I have been able to read here on your forum.
But after my latest casual contribution I feel I need to address some of the remarks Nickdfresh made. For they left a bad taste in my mouth.
Perhaps not so important, at the personal level, is his implication regarding people who often post on Germany’s miracle weapons that they have an agenda as fanboys of the Nazis. Still, that leaves open the possibility as far as Nickdfresh is concerned that such is my agenda. At least I was not told otherwise.
The personal issue for me is not nearly as important as the truly substantial and intellectual issue involved in our ability as human beings to contemplate counterfactual assumptions or conditions, that is, the “what if” scenario.
And it is here that you, Nickdfresh, enter the discussion, right after I was wondering about the German jets and what might have happened had they been produced earlier, with your observation that such counterfactual assumptions are largely useless, indeed, you further say they are pointless. And further, you claim, such wonder weapons are often proposed by, I guess, neo-nazis.
But, Nickdfresh, besides going on yourself to expound you own version of what might have happened if we consider the counterfactual, thereby assuming there must be some point to it in spite of what you said, I must reinforce the importance of counterfactuals since they are the life blood of human understanding and imagination. We use them all the time in nearly all of our evaluations and reasonings and even our creations.
That counterfactuals infiltrate all levels of our lives can be made vivid if we suppose you are married, then perhaps your wife said this morning, “Nick, if you had been sober, you would not have gotten into all that trouble,” or, “Nick, if you hadn’t failed to use your intelligence, you wouldn’t have made that mistake.” We could give thousands of such examples.
Or imagine being told by your superior officer, “Nick, were you to have placed your machine guns properly, you could have held off the enemy.”
In all these examples, the counterfactuals bring to light a connection between events and states of affairs, such that we see that had the counterfactual been true, then the consequences may have been different.
Lastly, the counterfactual serves in the sciences to point to law-like connections between events and states in a sort of ideal way in that we can claim that had not a certain condition been met then certain other things would not have happened, and this of necessity ( a causal law-like necessity in the sciences). Imagine the implications of this if history is a science as many philosophers of history, especially during the 50s, understood it. Of course, they were shown to be wrong since nobody can come up with law-like connections at the historical level.
But, Nickdfresh, I assume you already know all this since you went on to engage in the “what if” thought experiment in spite of claiming it is largely useless. But why were you engaging in a largely futile enterprise by your own admission?
The problem I have with your opinions on the matter is this. In spite of hearing from you many interesting details of history, I asked myself if I should take your final conclusion of the “what if” scenario, ie, nothing would really have been different regarding the outcome, to be skewed and colored by your over eagerness to immediately put every Nazi fanboy in their place? Could you have selected just those facts that would lead you to your desired conclusion? Would not, then, your conclusions regarding the “what if” scenario merely reflect your eagerness to deflate lingering Nazis? Or, at least, cause that suspicion?
I can say, for my part at least, I didn’t feel those with opposing views regarding the “what if” were Nazi fanboys. In other words, their views seemed more tempered by the intellectual question at hand than say your own views animated as they were with your enthusiasm to defeat the Nazis all over again. I do grant, however, that as a moderator you have to be alert to such things.
Perhaps the little objectivity we humans can obtain in this life, if we can obtain it at all, is put in greater jeopardy by you, at least on this question? Why not let the “what if” scenario work itself out, meander around through the almost limitless knowledge all of you bring to these questions. Don’t suppress our counterfactual wonderment with your suspicions. Wouldn’t that be better?
These are opening lines from the original Spiegel article I mentioned at the beginning.
“At the very end of World War II, Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler still hoped that state-of-the-art technology could turn the tide in his favor. One of those projects, the Messerschmitt jet fighter, found a home in a remote corner of eastern Germany. But it was too late.”
So I merely pondered, what if such technology had come much earlier?