Originally posted by TTP
Dazdaman,
One often reads about how far advanced the Germans were regarding their aircraft technology, and no doubt they were far ahead in some areas, but alot of the push to develope these breakthroughs was initiated by desperation and the quest to find a “silver bullet” in order to turn the tide of the war.
The Germans lacked quality research into other areas that the Allies excelled in, notably advanced radar systems. Also the British were relatively on parity with the Germans in regards to jet aircraft, It seemed that they did not emphisize it as much because at that point in the war they were winning and were’nt as desperate. The US P-80 shooting Star was flying by 1945 and would have given the Germans a run. BUT THE BIG PICTURE that many forget is that WE HAD NUKES!!!!!!!!Germany was nowhere near the US in this technology and it really renders the debate MOOT!!!!
Regards TTP
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.
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