And if pigs had personal helicopters they might fly. Actually, that’s rather more likely than the scenario you suggest above.
What gives you that idea? Outside of the army (and even there the Soviet high commanders like Zhukov were substantially better) and some small sections of the navy the Germans were a bunch of clowns. The Soviets were extremely competent, had access to far greater resources and no desire to launch a suicidal war against the rest of the world. There is no way that the Nazi ideology is compatible with a long cold war - it would have turned hot in one big hurry, at which point Germany faces nuclear annihilation.
Not flaming likely. The Germans are ideologically committed to the extermination of the non-Aryan races, of which there are rather a lot. The Soviets never were. The chances of this putative cold war being friendly are close to zero, even if Joseph P Kennedy reaches a senior position in the US.
Errr… nope. They were a bunch of clowns when it came to physics, with even the Japanese and Soviet nuclear programmes being miles ahead of the German one (the Germans failed to calculate critical mass correctly, or to come up with any practical means of Uranium enrichment). As for the heavy water, the fact that the Germans managed to boil dry and then melt down their research reactor - containing what was at the time their entire supply of heavy water - suggests strongly that unlimited heavy water would not have done them very much good. Indeed, if you look out the Farm Hall transcripts*, you’ll find that the German nuclear physicists taken prisoner at the end of the war didn’t believe the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were possible when told about them - they believed them to be a hoax.
- Farm Hall was a house near Cambridge in England where those German scientists suspected of participation in nuclear weapons related research were detained at the end of the war. The place was thoroughly bugged, and the transcripts indicate that those detained there thought it probably wasn’t. It is clear from the transcripts that they had thought nuclear weapons to be impractical (due to a massive miscalculation in critical mass) although once told that they had been built worked out the basic theory fairly quickly. There is no reason to believe that given more time they would have done any better, at least until the first public test of a nuclear weapon.
Err… no. As already established, the German nuclear programme could have been run more effectively by Coco the Clown, while the Manhattan project was run with ruthless efficiency. Furthermore, the German bombers did not have the performance you claim - the “New York” flight is first mentioned in 1955, and the German records clearly show both that the aircraft was in Prague at the time the flight is claimed to have taken place, and that the maximum take off weight would have to be doubled to reach New York from France. To claim that an aircraft with such marginal (to put it charitably) performance could deliver an extremely heavy weapon* and have the performance to survive doing so - given that the B-29 only marginally survived the experience, and had much higher performance - goes beyond implausible. It goes into the range of the borderline insane.
*Fat Man, the Plutonium type bomb that Germany would have produced in the unlikely event of their Heavy Water research actually bearing fruit, weighed approximately 5 tonnes - more than 10% of the maximum take-off weight of the Ju-390. Adding even a small amount of weight to an aircraft radically increases fuel burn in the early stages of the flight - so even if the Ju-390 had achieved the impossible and actually reached New York as claimed, it could not have done so with a nuclear weapon on board.
No, America went to war when Germany declared war on them. However, it is clear that from late 1940 onwards the US was planning to fight a war with Germany with no European allies to hand. This can be seen in the release of the specification that became the B-36 in April 1941. It is for a bomber with frankly awesome payload characteristics, capable of attacking anywhere in Europe from bases in the Continental United States, and with a performance such as to make interception almost impossible*. The fact that the specification for this was drawn up more than a year before Germany declared war on the United States clearly indicates that the US was seriously considering the need to fight a war with Germany by itself, and planning to produce the tools required. When Britain demonstrated that it could hold out and the US entered the war, priorities changed - hence what was actually built - but the early orders clearly demonstrate what the US had in mind.
- The initial requirements were for 275 mph at 45,000 ft, later reduced to 300 mph at 40,000 ft. For comparison, that is right at the ragged edge of the performance of the then current Me-109F, making the B-36 virtually uninterceptable. For interception to be practical, fighters need significant range and early warning to get into approximately the right position, and a significant performance advantage to make a kill. At operating altitudes it would appear that the B-36 would have more performance and probably more manouverability (due to the lower wing loading). This makes it an extremely difficult target.
OK, seriously, are you sober here? The US had roughly 60% of the entire world’s industrial capacity in 1941, and since it had the world’s most powerful navy (and hence the capability to blockade Germany, a capability Germany could not apply to the US) also had access to just about any resources it wanted. Furthermore, the US population in 1940 was 132,000,000 while the German population in 1940 was approximately 80,000,000. By any measure you care to apply, the US was superior to Germany.
Man, we’ve got another “German uberweapons and Erwin Rommel should have won WW2” moron here. The Germans were a bit ahead of everyone else when it came to rockets during WW2, largely because everyone else had more sense than to bother. The reality of it is that during WW2 Von Braun couldn’t reliably hit London from the other side of the Channel, and that while there were a small number of prominent Germans in the US rocket programme postwar the overwhelming majority of the work was done by Americans.
Now, because I feel like a giggle, list the technology the Americans “looted” from Germany after the war, and demonstrate exactly how that pushed the US forward.
The fact is, of course, that up until Robert S MacNamara <spit> gutted the US bomber programme and missile defence systems in a misguided attempt to save money, bombers were both the most accurate and reliable way of delivering nuclear weapons to a target. The fact is that just about everyone who has tried (including recently the Indians) has come up with a working ABM system very rapidly indeed - it just isn’t very hard at all.
Ah, now we see the real reason you admire the Nazis. Consider this an informal warning for anti-semitic Nazi trolling. When you do it again in future (as I have no doubt you will, your sort always do) I’ll take great pleasure in giving you the boot.
Indeed it did. In blood and smoke, 12 years after it was proclaimed. And not a moment too soon.
