(ArtKramr) wrote in message ...
Nuff said.


Arthur Kramer
344th BG 494th BS
England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany
Visit my WW II B-26 website at:
http://www.coastcomp.com/artkramer

The Me 262 seems to have shot down 150 aircraft for the loss of 100 of
their own. Mostly shot up on landing or takeoff when they were even
more vulnerable to this problem than piston enginer aircraft due to
their slow throttle response. (A problem partially solved by the
better control systems on latter engines like the Jumo 004D as opposed
to jumo 004B4.)

This loss rate is a dismal record; it wasn't that the 262 wasn't a
good weapons system: it was simply outnumbered and heavily targeted by
the allies and also and quite a few losses were experienced on the
first missions due to the tactic of slowing down to take aim. It
wasn't untill tactics were worked out to solve this that effectiveness
improved.

In technolgy the Germans and allies were closely matched. Both sides
produced major breakthroughs and both sides had areas where they fell
embarrasingly far behined.

The Germans were perhaps forced to focus on Break throughs because
resources were massively against them after 42 but in the end the odds
were against them. I do suspect that the breakthroughs would have
broken up the superiority of the allies in some areas. Jet aircraft
gave them a fresh start that would have equalised them where the
allies ahd piston engined superiority in quantity and quality. Sure
the allies would also have had jets but their existing technolgy would
have had its value wiped out and would have made useless almost all
piston engined aircraft: B26,A26,P47, B17,B24,B25 etc but they never
got enough of their jets going in time.

I don't like the "Allies Invented Everyting" nor do I like the
"Germans Invented Everyting" attitude. Anyone who knows how
technology advances should realise what one man can do another will
replicate almost immediatly. One of the mistakes of the Germans in
the Radar war was to put so much secrecy on their radar vulnerability
that they failed to develop effective countermeasurews to windows
jamming becuase the requise people weren't involved.
It should have been obvious that the British, who were behined in
Radar at the time would soon catch up.


Alexander the Great however with 50,000 men once defeated Darius's
army of 2-3 million with boldness and clever tactics.