Were the Germans better at making aircraft than the British during world war 2?

Dunno about the technicalities but the Germans certainly had pretty exclusive use of slave labour. A very economic system as all you have to worry about is the cost of a starvation diet while as the production units were a throwaway technology there was no need for costly repairs.

Mitsubishi Zero was a fast agile fighter, comparable to spitfire and ME109, but the trade off was no protection of any kind for the pilot and limited armament.

Sorry but one of my spanner in the works thread drift
How did Japanese aircraft compare to British or German Aircraft then? I am sure that most motorheads know that their automobile industry now heads the rankings but what about WW11 aircraft?

Well, the battery in the FW190 recovered from Russia was a conventional lead/acid accumulator.

I know, cos we replicated it – lead, acid and all!

Bruce

Thanks. Can’t argue with that.

http://www.cdvandt.org/exhibits_details.htm

Keep paging down , about two thirds, there you will find a NiCd battery maintenance kit.

Wikipedia – “The first production in the United States began in 1946.”

Meaning that production in the united States began in 1946, not that NiCd batteries were first manufactured in 1946.

The opening post of this thread claimed that one area where the Germans were ahead of the British was in the use of Nickel Cadmium batteries. Can anyone with knowledge comment? I have a copy of a RAE Farnborough Report ex NA Kew dated June 1943 on the battery taken from a FW 190. It describes a 24 volt 10 amp. hour alkaline accumulator which makes use of plastics in its construction including polystyrene and polyvinyl chloride. A plate attached to the case bears the legend “Nickelsammler keine Schwefelsaure einfullen.” Google translates this as “Nickelcollector do not fill with sulphuric acid.” Is this indicative of a Ni-Cad battery when the Report calls it an alkaline accumulator and does not mention Nickel Cadmium at all?
For what it’s worth Wikipedia asserts that Ni-Cad batteries invented by a Swede in 1899 first entered production in 1946 in the USA.

Its quite difficult to compare standards of manufacture, as the German aircraft changed a great deal from the beginning to the end of the war.

Having looked very closely at two specific types – the FW190 A-5, and Me262A-1a, it is noticeable how different the manufacturing techniques were. However, more telling is to compare the FW190 A-5 with a later production F-8. The early aircraft is very, very well built; far better than the Spitfires of the same period. The later aircraft has been extensively redesigned, to do away with expensive die castings and forgings, and to replace them with fabricated steel items.

The Me262 is a much poorer quality build than the early FW190, but it has many areas where you wonder ‘how did they do that?’. Use of 26 gauge armour plate to manufacture the nose section is a good example. The wing spars, which are a wonderful piece of engineering are another.

The German electrical manufacturers were also streets ahead of us; their electrical components are absolute works of art.

The other point to mention is the use of slave labour – the Germans productionised everything, so they didn’t need skilled workers to assemble the aircraft. Thus, and particularly late in the war, it is obvious that the aircraft were built by unskilled labour, by the standards of metalwork, the standards of riveting and so on.

Bruce

See 15 – German/British aircraft production.

@ Graham Boak;- ‘They had fuel injection but we had superior superchargers – and turbochargers if you include the US. Their engines were a third bigger to give the same power.’

Not wishing to be a pedant, but my understanding is that the Jerries used larger engines as they were using low-octane fuel made from coal for the most part, not really having any oil. They were however, using water-methanol injection and their Commandgerrat (Sp..?) engine management sytem was light years ahead of our fist-full of levers. HOTAS years before FADEC and HOTAS were dreampt-up.

@Snoopy7422: Spelling is: “Kommandogerät”, or, if no “ä” is available spelling would be correctly: “Kommandogeraet”. (quite usual for ä – ae, ö – oe, ü – ue)

My personal opinion is, that you can not generalise. I would not say, that Germans were generally better at making aircraft, nor the British. You just can not answer this question if you want to regard every aspect necessary. There were pros and cons. Some things were better, some not. I do not know if it would have been “better” to stay with a only a few proven types like the 109, 190 and Ju 88. But there were some quite interesting and ingenious solutions which gave input to post war aircraft.

Michael

“the build standard of German aircraft was little short of appalling.”

There was an interesting program on TV where Reg Hallam talked about the restoration of Black 6.
I seem to recall other British pilots, and people restoring them also talking about the Spitfire and 109.
Consensus of opinion was that both aircraft were comparable and had their faults. What I found interesting was comparison
of restoring these old aircraft.
The 109 was easier to restore because it was designed to be a production line aircraft where as the Spitfire was not.
This is evident in the construction of the two. Want to change the engine of the 109, just remove the front and swap it with another.
Want to check the engine just lower or raise the cowl.
The wings could be swapped with any other aircraft from the production. Try that with the Spitfire and they just wouldn’t fit.
The skins on the 109, although having some undesirable features had some very nice filleting and flush fitting seams.
While the Spitfire could be made on a production line the 109 was made to be a production line aircraft. This is something entirely different.
Hence the 109 was a lot quicker to produce than the Spitfire. The 109 also had a jettison-able hood. This feature was added later to the Spitfire.

While I’m not trying to say the Spit was inferior to the 109 the more I read about German manufacturing and engineering makes me think they were way ahead of us.
Perhaps some warbird restorers could comment.

@ Graham Boak;- ‘They had fuel injection but we had superior superchargers – and turbochargers if you include the US. Their engines were a third bigger to give the same power.’

Not wishing to be a pedant, but my understanding is that the Jerries used larger engines as they were using low-octane fuel made from coal for the most part, not really having any oil.

Nope, this is nonsense based on a very common misunderstanding about wartime fuel octane numbers. There are two octane numbers for each fuel, one for lean mix and one for rich mix, rich being always greater. So, for example, a common British aviation fuel of the later part of the war was 100/125. The misunderstanding that German fuels have a lower octane number (and thus a poorer quality) arises because the Germans quoted the lean mix octane number for their fuels while the Allies quoted the rich mix number for their fuels. Standard German high-grade aviation fuel used in the later part of the war (given the designation C3) had lean/rich octane numbers of 100/130. The Germans would list this as a 100 octane fuel while the Allies would list it as 130 octane.

After the war the US Navy sent a Technical Mission to Germany to interview German petrochemists and examine German fuel quality, their report entitled “Technical Report 145-45 Manufacture of Aviation Gasoline in Germany” chemically analyzed the different fuels and concluded “Toward the end of the war the quality of fuel being used by the German fighter planes was quite similar to that being used by the Allies”.

Depends what you mean by ‘better’…….???

‘Better’…in what way…??? Were their designs better..? Mostly yes. The Germans had the only supersonic wind-tunnels in the world at that time……. Was their production more efficient..? Yes, absolutely. They could probably build several Fw190’s whilst we were piddling around with our pretty Spitfires.
Were they able to get what was needed, to the right place at the right time…? No. The Germans oversight of what was needed was abysmal. That can largely be put-down to inflexible pre-war attitudes and the concept that the Luftwaffe was a purely tactical arm of the Army – and the interference of a funny little bloke with a silly moustache. Good job too, or the war might have gone on for another few years – and involved nuclear weapons, and since the Jerries were the only people with a ballistic missile system, that could have been very nasty….. Think ‘Things To Come’, only with nukes.

@ Graham Boak;- ‘They had fuel injection but we had superior superchargers – and turbochargers if you include the US. Their engines were a third bigger to give the same power.’

Not wishing to be a pedant, but my understanding is that the Jerries used larger engines as they were using low-octane fuel made from coal for the most part, not really having any oil. They were however, using water-methanol injection and their Commandgerrat (Sp..?) engine management sytem was light years ahead of our fist-full of levers. HOTAS years before FADEC and HOTAS were dreampt-up.

alertken- Are you sure on the Zero being a fine carrier aircraft?? It was rapidly outclassed by U.S Naval types and a lack of armour for the pilot meant that loss of the aircraft often meant the pilot too!

Must agree with a lot that has been said here, maybe one big difference was the Jerries willingness to try out new ideas, giving them a jolly good run up the flag pole to see how they fly (or not in a lot of cases) possibly this interest in technology, whilst in one way commendable, no doubt took valuable resources from their ‘bread & butter’ programs, 109’s 190’s etc, whereas the allies, particularly seemed to a rather more reserved approach to the new cutting edge & liked to explore it a little more before committing to a costly project.

Just my take on things.

the build standard of German aircraft was little short of appalling.

Take a portion of a population, kill part of their family, starve them, beat them, make the work until they drop dead or you shoot / beat / torture to them death….. Put them to work as slaves building your aircraft

And you wonder why the quality was lacking

Best must be USSR, who relocated much munitions over the Volga on the backs of the workforce. Next best, Japan, next next Germany, because of Allied interdiction of materials: wondrous they were building anything by 1944. So, ersatz rubber, fuel. Next best, UK, trading sailors for materials. US, by this logic was worst, cos bauxite-railcar-plane, easy-peasy. USSR Quantity ultimately outdid German nominal performance Quality: they did a remarkable job in production engineering – skills dilution: building complex kit off hands fresh from the farm and kitchen.

If OP means: who was best innovator, giving our boys pole position, then each industry took lead, turn and turn about. A Dream Team inventory would include products from Japan (Zero was a fine carrier-borne type), USSR (Il.2, ruggedly maintainable), USA (anything on a carrier), Germany (Ju.88 multi-role combat aircraft), UK (Mosquito, ditto). Each of those industries also had its full share of turkeys.

The simple and straighforward answer is that the British consistently throughout WW2 produced more aircraft than the Germans: “Britains War Machine”, David Edgerton, Penguin History, £9.99.

Germany started and lost two world wars and yet many of them continued to believe they were super-humans. This belief is sometimes supported by historians that corrupt history into fiction. Of course they must do this because it is impossible for anyone to explain to others what they do not personally understand themselves?

One such idiot wrote that German rocket scientists were “twenty years ahead” of everyone else. This is hilarious on two counts.

The first is that Dr. Robert Goddard had discovered and published all of the important principles of liquid fueled rocketry before the war. The, so called, German “Rocket Scientists” were simply competent engineers scaling up Goddard’s designs.

The second is that Goddard’s developments ended in 1941 and the Germans were sending V-2s to London by ’44 so they were only three years ahead, if that much. Had the Allies chosen to invest vast sums of money developing something as wasteful as guided missiles there is no reason that western companies could not have produced similar devices at about the same time.

Armchair discussions based on fictional “history” are filled with errors and omissions. How good was the ME-262? Today we read it was fantastic but this comes mainly from non-technical historians. It was slightly faster than British jets which were in turn slightly faster than the best propeller designs but all the jets in those days had very low thrust compared to their weight. It was almost impossible for the German jets to climb high enough fast enough to have an advantage over propeller driven aircraft before they were engaged so they were shot down in droves. With regards to winning the war the jets on both sides were another waste of money that would have been better spent elsewhere.

One of the best aircraft of the period was the Mosquito which performed well and created fewer logiistical problems. It was made largely of plywood which was readily available but the aircraft performed as well as some of the best metal designs. It was a beautiful thing logistically and good logistics help to win wars. Germany tried to make wooden planes but they did not seem to have much success. [Here is a trick question on logistics. What is the muzzle velocity of a Browning 0.303 inch caliber machine gun that is out of ammunition?]

Effective weapons that are easy to make help win wars. Expensive super-weapons like Tiger and Panther tanks, jet and rocket fighters, and guided missiles all helped Germany lose the war.

So, yes, they were “better” by some measures but this put them behind enough to lose.