Secret German Projects of WWII

no !
same way as in a submarine ! (for not to be detected by sonar)

main engines stopped but control by electroengine for the rudders,elevators…
silent engine without flameexhaust = still stealthy :))

and to make the trip to n.y. the zep did not have to fly over britain. (see atlasmaps 1940-1945 item)

when i ever go to friedrichshafen(D) i will talk about this matter.
i hope they do show me some documents…

Originally posted by FASTPASS

-engines on stop,not running= no exhaustflames visible

also = no control

AH, but see if I were the RAF Top Brass, I’d have my spies everywhere….! 😉

Hence the Beaufighters at readiness in the UK for when the Zepp crossed overhead. Maybe a Turbinlight Havoc flying with the Beau in order to light up the Zepp upon interception.

Plus, a Zepp is bloody slow, even with high-powered engines – and all that mass floating serenely through the sky…! It’d take a Zepp a good while to fly out to America, or even cross the UK, giving my Merlin-powered Beaufighters with their Havoc escorts plenty of time to find the airship…!

All this is, of course, pure fantasy, so it’s fun to play around with! It’d make a good book, though! 😉

each operation would have to be planned as strategic as possible !
the germans were no idiots you know.

-based in germany or german controlled airspace in foreign
occupied country.
-nights without the moon in the sky and fair weather allowing
to fly over the clouds at altitude.
-instrumentlights from el.battery are so small that it impossible to
see it when standing on the ground.
-engines on stop,not running= no exhaustflames visible and
zep on glidepath without power because track goes from
higher point to lower point.
restart of engines would be overread by the explosions of the
bombs,the fires going on a.o. factors in the pandemonium on
the ground.

beaufighters stationed in the usa ?? or in the usaf ??
even if the a/c were there at the spot… where would you point them to fly ?? the zep left the spot of action already !
i don’t think the germans would make some go around circuits above the place they just bombed with a zep :))

bear in mind also the wreck of a german u-boat found near the coast of the usa ! (was on the discovery channel some time ago)
the importance for the germans to reach and hit the usa
was above imagination.

FASTPASS – how long are you thinking your Zepp will take to get to bombing altitude? And where is it based? It would be seen to cross the coast SOMEWHERE in Europe – it’d have to be in Europe in order to be closest to its resources. Radar would find it, even high up (although, admittedly, still not an expert on radar!).

Yeah, OK, fair enough, your Zepp crew COULD turn the lights off, thus be almost invisible, BUT they’d have to rely on instruments, which would need to be lit up, and the engines would emit some sort of flame/visible discharge from the exhaust.

And if the Beaufighter could get up higher (if we’d fitted it with, say, Merlin 60 series engines), I imagine your Zeppelin crew wouldn’t be coming home! 😉

only a detail but….

at night and flying high the zeppelin could turn off all the engines
so it could fly in and sneak over new york almost completly invisible and without any sound !

i doubt that the USA had the right nightfighters on the ready
to intercept such a stealthy (yes !! already in that timeperiode) bombplatform.

from the zeppelins point of observation they had a very good
overview on the target because of the citylights a.o. lightsources while the zeppelin was completly without any lights on.

after the boms were dropped the zeppelin became less heavy and therefor could also go faster after making a u turn and
getting out before the surprise attack had come in the
defensive role by the usa.

I always thought the Germans were ahead of the US in terms of the H-Bomb. I mean there was a huge project to get production of heavy water started within 2-3 years of the war starting.

As for airships, nice idea but too slow and sluggish. Sitting ducks for P-40 or P-51s. 🙂

What about radar? What about the quality of helium/hydrogen at extreme temperatures? (in other words, what happens to the gas as it gets colder??). There’d have to be some sort of reaction to the gas inside the balloon (and maybe even the balloon itself) at high altitude, or so I would have thought. Of course, I’m no expert!

Even if the airship was cruising at 40,000ft, it’d still be reachable. Lets not forget the high-altitude fighters that would be around in 1942/43. Spitfire MkVI/VII/IX, Mosquito…just to name a few. If you wanted to avoid the fighters, 50,000 might be a bit safer….! 😉

The airship would also have to use a very sophisticated bombsight, like the Norden on the B-17 in order to get its comparatively small bombload on target. Mind you, NYC is a big target…!

the ex-belgian kongo uranium was used in the alamogordo
trinity project and not in one of the ww2 atomic bombs because:

the 4 tons little boy dropped over hiroshima used uranium 235
and the second fatman dropped over nagasaki used plutonium.

i doubt very very much that the russians had an enormous stock
of uranium and the know how how to use it because they simply were not ready to construct a weapon as this.
(the proof is in the actual colourfilm of the dropping of their first atomic bomb !!)

a 1942/43 improved zeppelin could make a non-stop trip over the ocean flying much higher because they could use oxygenmasks and attack for example new york by complete surprise and drop bombs even from high altitude.
the effect in a populated already new york would have been
devastated and bad for the moral of the usa..
for the return they could make a not unusual bunkering fuel
in one of the occupied or germany friendly countries.

FASTPASS

Nice try, but the advancement of avaition pretty much killed the airship as a strategic weapon of war.

In WWI with aircraft taking up to 20 or 30 minutes to climb to 5,000 ft and the airships armed with defensive MG positions of the same calibre as the attacking aircraft it was still relatively easy for planes to shoot down airships… the airships only defence was to drop water ballast and try to out climb the airplanes.

The Germans were short of expensive Helium anyway.

Even an early WWII fighter would have plenty of oportunity to shoot down an airship that had travelled all the way from Europe.

Also Uranium on its own was not good enough, you needed the scientific genius and knowledge of what to do with it to create enough weapons grade U235 to make a bomb. The Soviet Union has plenty of Uranium… it was help from the spies that shortened development time by at least 5 years, and probably more.
Spies might want to share the knowledge with their Communist allies, but were hardly likely to hand over such information to Hitler.

I think one of the main things we’re forgetting here is the supply of raw materials to Germany’s war industry.One thing which Germany has always been short of is supplies of it’s own raw materials.In both world wars the Germans had to comprimise in various ways,even on the simplest things as wooden propellors.If you look at the LVG at Shuttleworth,you’ll see it has a beautifully crafted prop made of light and dark woods.Pretty as this looks,it’s a comprimise,the Germans having virtually no access to the hardwoods available to the Allies.They also used poorer quality synthetic oil for lubrication of their engines-the Germans would often fit captured Clerget’s,LeRhone’s etc to thier own aircraft,but these engines didn’t last long with German oil.
Possibly the most famous case of the these comprimises is the Me262 and other Nazi jets.Nazi Germnay’s war industry was cripplingly short of materials such as Nickel and Tungsten-metals which could be used at extremely high temperatures.These two materials were already in extremely high demand for the making of large calibre gun barrels,and there simply wasn’t enough to go around for the aviation industry.Although the people at Junkers and BMW were ingenious in thier design of engines like the Jumo 004,they simply couldn’t build the engine they wanted due to shortages of the necassary materials.
The bottom line is that even the most fantastic Nazi designs were doomed to remain as paper projects as long as Germany continued to suffer material shortages.

Mike,
An ejection seat would’t have been much of a luxury in both the 162 and in the 335. In the first, the pilot was sitting directly in front of the over-fuselage mounted intake. Jumping out with an engine out of control would have been a tough, if not impossible, job. A similar problem faced the pilot of a Pfeil if he wanted to bail out: the prop on the rear end of the fuselage made ejecting without any outside help quite an adventurous task.

The Germans had done quite a bit of ejector seat development anyway – by the time the Salamander and the Pfeil were being tested, production He-219s already had (primitive) ejection seats.

i think some important detail is forgotten here !

facts:
the germans did had a platform to bomb new york already
in…1929.
and they could do it in a non-stop flight.

yes ! the z e p p e l i n !

payload:
replace any 4 average passengers for 1 bomb of 250 Kilo or 2 bombs of 125 Kilo and you have a deadly load onboard.
(keep in mind max.passengers allowed on each flight and.. deduct the weight of their luggage because bombs do not need extra weight for their luggage!)

strategic weapon:
1941/1942 version would be an updated one in safety (non-explodic hull paint),gas,reliability and capable for a non-stop
return flight europa-usa-europa

and about the german a-bomb…
the usa was lucky the belgian king sold them the uranium
for their 1st atomic bomb because he “owned” the belgian kongo,and therefor also the mines.
just think what could have happened if that king had sold the uranium to the germans in return for a heavy load of german bars of gold…

Originally posted by Arthur
Problem with German nuclear weapons design was that they weren’t developing an A-bomb like the Americans (well, three quarters of the team at Los Alamos were Europeans actually, with the bulk of those Germans), but tried to go for the big cheese immediately by trying to develop an H-bomb. This project was ultimately canned because they couldn’t figure out a decent detonator (which is basically an A-bomb), and they lacked their best physicists. Which were of course at Los Alamos. Anyway, the US didn’t have the Bomb until june/july 1945, when Germany already was defeated.

A lot of the later German projects were indeed born out of desperation, but these were relatively simple projects from the end of the war like the He-162 Salamander, the pretty well-known Volksjäger which was intended as some sort of saturation defense fighter. Nevertheless, the Germans kept working on high-tech and exotic designs which were by no means born out of despair. Neither the Do-335 or the Ho-229 could really be called desperate attempts to create at least something. The latter is the pretty famous flying wing, much of the desing expertise of which later was used by Northrop to move on with their flying wing designs.

And don’t forget that the American space project began in Sperenberg and Peenemünde. NASA needed a German like Werner von Braun to turn Goddard’s feeble little rockets into something capable of lifting stuff out of the atmosphere. Never mind the other catching-up done thanks to Operation Paperclip.

But they paid enough attention to research of non essential mattaers to have a primitive ejection seat in both the He-162 and the Do-335

The V-2 was also the basis for all the rockets used in the space race, though most of the progression from the the V-2 to a space capable rocket was based on work by a Russian. (ie use of stages and liquid propellents etc).

To see how far the Germans might have developed their weapons, look at the Saturn 5, and modern fighters. I doubt they would be behind in modern technology now.

Ignore nuclear weapons or super jets or any BS like that. If germany had treated the slavic people better than the communists did imagine a german army with the manpower and natural resources of the Soviet Union. Using the correct tactics of liberator from communism and actually treating them with respect would probably have resulted in a huge supply of manpower, steel, aluminium, oil in 1941-1942 period. All of Europe taken the defences on the channel could have been very formidible. With no threat to his rear hitler could have either tried to take Britain or simply sued for peace to retain what had been taken.

The rate at which nuclear processing techniques were progressing the US might have been able to make a few bombs a year. Breeder reactors would have made plutonium bombs the most common.

I made the 6-engined thingie from Revell, it’s a Arado E.555. It looks quite good one it’s completed!

😀

That’s a fair enough comment Kenneth, there are a lot of suppsositions floating around today from authors and historians who have the benefit of hindsight.

However, the fact that so many German scientists and designers were snapped up by the allies for their own ends rather than being tried for war crimes or interned as PoW’s would tell it’s own story.

Von Braun’s A4 design formed the basis of America’s whole space programme, and the Me262 wing planform is remarkable similar in shape and proportion (if not size) to the whole Boeing 707 / 727 / 747 series. Sixty years on, they’re still shaping our world…

I can’t get very excited about paper projects which never took off. It’s easy to sit down and design a 600-seater aerobatic, amphibious, supersonic cargo/bomber/passenger/fighter aircraft which will fly from Europe to New York at Mach 8.0 on a litre of olive oil; getting it operational is another matter. The Me 262, Me 163 and Horten designs impress me though. And don’t forget there’s a lot of “artist’s creativity” in the renderings of these designs as they are presented to us today, be it in a book or as a model.

Originally posted by FASTPASS
if werner von braun had be the chief of the luftwaffe
instead of hermann goring the luftwaffe should have got
completly another inventory than the one at the end in 1944 !
werner von braun could have motivated and arranged the
money to the founders of the ME,DO,TA,HE en JU airplanecompagnies but also could have put priority for the making of the SYNTHETIC fuel by building the installations bigger
and sooner as a prime goal to reach.
without any doubt germany could have bombed new york
in 1942 or 1943 this way and… that would have had a much different impact for the war results.

Putting a scientist in charge of a military arm would have been pointless. Scientists don’t do strategy and tactics.

That said, I do take your point about what might have been. It’s very chilling to think that the world could have been a very different place to the one we know now, but ultimately, no-one really knows for sure what they were capable of. But we can all guess.

One thing that has always stood out for me, is how amazing it is that Germany managed to wage all out war for five and a half years, almost in complete isolation. Okay, so the Italians were their allies from 1940 to 1943, and the Japanese from 41 to the end in 45, but neither of these nations made any significant contribution to the Nazi war effort.

For a predominantly landlocked country to a) expand as far and wide as it did up to late 1941 (when Barbarossa almost reached Moscow), b) continue to develop potentially world beating technology despite a lack of imports from the outside world, and c) continue to fight with such commitment on all fronts during that time, shows just how advanced Germany really was.

In terms of population numbers, Germany, France and the United Kingdom were very similar in 1939. In terms of sovereign territory, the Anglo-French alliance had the edge. Yet the German strategy, strength and ability to project power, was very much more than any other nation could muster.

Yet all this was accomplished with an egotistical and tactically inept dictator at the helm. Hitler had a strategy, but insisted on micro managing the war instead of leaving the details to his military commanders. Time and again, his interference had a negative impact on existing military operations.

I shudder to think how our world would be now, had Hitlers military commanders been given the freedom to pursue their orders without the Fuhrer’s interference. 😮

if werner von braun had be the chief of the luftwaffe
instead of hermann goring the luftwaffe should have got
completly another inventory than the one at the end in 1944 !
werner von braun could have motivated and arranged the
money to the founders of the ME,DO,TA,HE en JU airplanecompagnies but also could have put priority for the making of the SYNTHETIC fuel by building the installations bigger
and sooner as a prime goal to reach.
without any doubt germany could have bombed new york
in 1942 or 1943 this way and… that would have had a much different impact for the war results.