Germany invented it. We shot it down

Japan also had a version of the V1 it was piloted though, sorry cant
remember the name they gave it.
"David E. Powell" wrote in message
s.com...
"steve gallacci" wrote in message
...

Or laughed at it after the war. They really should have mass produced
the
piloted version of the V-1. Just think, we could have killed more
pilots
that
way, the Nazis would have wasted money and material and, most
imporantly, put
them in the air flying a straight line and making an easy target.

Actually they did build a bunch (some estimates say as many as 250) but
it seems that Nazi ideology got in the way of implementing operations,
as they could not decide on targets sufficiently valuable to sacrifice
Aryan blood for.

Between planes like Mistel, commandos like Skorzeny, and sheer number of
targets, perhaps there were other reasons. And they didn't institute
direck
Kamikaze style attacks as a policy. One of the amazing things to me about
German aircraft projects in WW2 was how fragmented things often were,
multiple teams and such, and so many projects competing for resources.
Then
they often had problems with leadership interfering with use of weapons (A
la the Me-262.) In the end, it was not just allied productivity but the
organization of their companies, labor and project bureaus that helped
their
airmen at the front. Examples like Ford converting to aircraft production
and improving things on some planes, etc. Plus the sharing of the Merlin
engine by the British and high-test gas by the USA. Russia also got stuff
like the DC-3 design. And of course the US/UK Manharttan Project. The
Allied
organization helped immensely to get scientists, designers and workers the
stuff they needed and prioritise things.

One of the things applicapable to this thread was the US taking the
conventional V-1 design and producing weapons with the idea of using them
against Japan, but they never did, the war ending before they could be
used.

DEP

They may not have used pure aryan blood for these missions, but they did
have many fanatics from the western U.S.S.R. i'm sure they would have been
willing!
"Eunometic" wrote in message
om...
(B2431) wrote in message
...
From: "Keith Willshaw"
Date: 2/19/2004 10:21 AM Central Standard Time
Message-id:


"ArtKramr" wrote in message
...
Nuff said.



Or bombed it

Keith


Or laughed at it after the war. They really should have mass produced
the
piloted version of the V-1. Just think, we could have killed more pilots
that
way, the Nazis would have wasted money and material and, most
imporantly, put
them in the air flying a straight line and making an easy target.

Dan, U.S. Air Force, retired


The Reichenberg was a effectively a near suicide weapon but the
Germans did take care that it wasn't a forgone conclusion. Unlike the
Japanese Baka in which the pilot was sealed in his cockpit it did have
an escape system: parachute, terminal autopilot and a two seat two
cockit versions were made to train pilots presumably with a simulated
escape.

The As 014 pulse jet was continiously tweeked to improve its speed.
With a slightly lightend warload (like the latter buzz bombs) and the
tweeked engines which had shown themselves to work at 495mph I expect
a speed of 495mph would have been possible or at least necessary for
the Reichberg to work. Enough to evade interception. Dodging radar
directed guns with proximity fuses might have been more difficult but
even there the weapon would have been capable of some degree of
weaving. Still such a weapon if it can be made survivable enough for
say a 33% or more hit rate and the targets are chosen carefully IT is
a mathematically sensible use of resources if it destroys and kills
more than it costs. Me 109s in the last stages of the war had an
attrition rate of 30%. It takes balls to get in the air in that
situation and in some ways their missions would have been almost more
pointless than a suicide mission.

If it ever got down to the wire do you think the allies would be
capable of producing the men for this kind of mission? Sure WWII
aircrew had around the 50% chance of completing a tour of duty (about
the same as Ed Rasimus had flying thuds over Vietnam). but to face
odds like that or like 95% on a single mission? Today I don't you
could find such people.

Another factor in the Me 262 was hitlers intervention; he wanted it to be a
bomber, NOT a fighter! which caused many aproblem, and even willy
Messerschmitt had to be summoned.
Hitler did that to many projects, he did it to the Fi103 (the doodlebug,
V1), he also had reservations about the A4 (the V2) and it was only in the
later stages of the war that he let it go into production because he knew he
was losing the war and wanted revenge weapons (vergeltungswaffe), as a form
of payback to the allies.




"Peter Stickney" wrote in message
...
In article ,
(Eunometic) writes:
(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.)

It has little to do with throttle responce, and a lot to do with the
Thrust/Power relationship. It's a bit too late for me to type it all
in again tonight - but please do some googling in r.a.m. on the
subject.


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.

And placed into service long before it should have been. Some
problems, like poor asymmetric handling at low speeds (One Engine out)
were endemic to the design. But there were other problems - high
speed snaking, and some rather ugly transonic behavior that should
have been resolved before service pilots were turned loose in it.
The Me 262 Pilot's Handbook has about 3 pages of handling
limitations. The F-80A Pilot's handbook has 2 flight limit entries.

You know, it's rather interesting that for all the work on high-speed
aerodynamics that the Germans actually did perform, they never seemed
to be able to translate it into the aircraft they built. The German
Aviation Military/Industrial Complex's solution to
compressibility/controllability problems in their airplanes was to put
a Big Red "Thou Shalt Not..." notice in the Pilot's Handbook. Compare
this to the work done in the U.S and Britain to sort out the
transonic problems that were occurring - the developmetn of the DIve
Recovery Flap (Which isn't a Speed Brake), improved control surface
geometries, and, for that matter, the inclusion of Speed
Brakes.

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.

It's not that simple. There were a lot of factors - the most telling
of which were evident in 1936, when the Luftwaffe, and the other
German Armed Forces, cut back on armament production because they
didn't have enough raw materiels to use the factory capacity they
already had.
One of the other things they should have done was build up a better
training organization. A big limit was the lack of properly skilled
pilots. By late 1944, there weren't enough fully capable pilots to
make a differece, even if they were flying Mr. Arndt's Disks and
herding around Reptilicus. There's no point in making jet airplanes
if you have nobody who can fly them.

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.

That is a rather good example of the German's arrogance about their
own technology, and their "Mirror-Imaging" of how a particular
technology would be used. In 1939, and 1940 the Germans had the best
high-frequency radar around. Their main thrust for it, however, was
to use it to bulwark existing systems, specifically Antiaircraft and
Naval Fire Control. And they did this well.Once they'd figured out
that the long-wave pulsed signals that they were receiving was some
sort of radar, they absolutely knew that they were far ahead of teh
British, and didn't need to worry about it. What they missed,
however, was that those primitive, inaccurate long-wave radars were
part of an integrated Cammand and Control system that allowed RAF
Fighter Command to concentrate their forces with an efficency not seen
in aerial warfare before that time.
That same blindness - that belief that the German stuff was superior
because it was German, effected them in all areas.

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

Uhm, I don't think that ther were 2-3 million people in the entire
Persian Empire. Subsistance farming doesn't give you that sort of a
reserve.

--
Pete Stickney
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. -- Daniel Webster

"M. H. Greaves" wrote in message
...
Another factor in the Me 262 was hitlers intervention; he wanted it to be
a
bomber, NOT a fighter! which caused many aproblem, and even willy
Messerschmitt had to be summoned.


This is an urban legend. The fact is that the Me-262 was delayed because
of aerodynamic problems and engine production issues. Hanging
a bomb rack and release mechanism on a fighter is just not
that big a problem.

Hitler did that to many projects, he did it to the Fi103 (the doodlebug,
V1), he also had reservations about the A4 (the V2) and it was only in the
later stages of the war that he let it go into production because he knew
he
was losing the war and wanted revenge weapons (vergeltungswaffe), as a
form
of payback to the allies.

No sir he did not, the Fi-103 and V-2 were delayed from entering into
production by technical problems. Neither were ready for mass production
until Summer 1943 and production was authorised immediately but in
August 1943 the RAF destroyed the planned production facility at
Peenemunde with a massive air raid

Both projects had a priority close to that enjoyed by the Manhattan
Project in the USA. Vast amounts of slave labour and resources
were poured into their production in the underground Nordhausen
concentration camp.

Keith

"Keith Willshaw" wrote in message
...

"M. H. Greaves" wrote in message
...
Another factor in the Me 262 was hitlers intervention; he wanted it to
be
a
bomber, NOT a fighter! which caused many aproblem, and even willy
Messerschmitt had to be summoned.


This is an urban legend. The fact is that the Me-262 was delayed because
of aerodynamic problems and engine production issues. Hanging
a bomb rack and release mechanism on a fighter is just not
that big a problem.

Hitler did that to many projects, he did it to the Fi103 (the doodlebug,
V1), he also had reservations about the A4 (the V2) and it was only in
the
later stages of the war that he let it go into production because he
knew
he
was losing the war and wanted revenge weapons (vergeltungswaffe), as a
form
of payback to the allies.

No sir he did not,
YES HE DID! I have read the book by General Walter Dornberger, and although
technical issues did have a major part to play in it, Hitlaer did not
initially back it!
the Fi-103 and V-2 were delayed from entering into
production by technical problems. Neither were ready for mass production
until Summer 1943 and production was authorised immediately but in
August 1943 the RAF destroyed the planned production facility at
Peenemunde with a massive air raid

Both projects had a priority close to that enjoyed by the Manhattan

ONLY because hitler gave them that status and only later in the war after
peenemunde had been bombed!
Project in the USA. Vast amounts of slave labour and resources
were poured into their production in the underground Nordhausen
concentration camp.

Keith

In article ,
"M. H. Greaves" writes:
Another factor in the Me 262 was hitlers intervention; he wanted it to be a
bomber, NOT a fighter! which caused many aproblem, and even willy
Messerschmitt had to be summoned.

A common legend, but there's no truth to it. The only difference
between a Fighter Me 262, and a Bomber 262 (Actually, a Jagdbomber -
Fighter-Bomber) was the addition of the removable pylons. Withoug the
bombs on board, there was no difference in the performance of the
airplane. Since that was the case, it made plenty of sense to add the
pylons & the release wiring on the production line. It didn't
actually delay the service introduction of the jet one bit. What did
delay its introduction was the poor reliability and low production
numbers for the engines. The 262 was suppoed to go into service in
very early 1944. The powerplant problems delayed that by a half a
year. Note that in early 1944, everybody in the German command loop
knew that the Western Allies were going to be invading, and invading
as soon as it was practicable. They also knew that theere would be a
massive blanket of air cover, and that they stood no realistic chance
of successfully attacking the invasion beaches, and more importantly,
the ships supplying them, with the airplane types they had in 1943.
GIven that set of conditions, having an airplane that could make
strikes that couldn't be easily countered on the invasion beaches and
the invasion fleet would have the effect of drawing a significant
amount of those resources into protecting the beaches, rather than
interdicting the Heer as is moved to counter the invasion. In fact,
it really didn't matter if they were able to bomb accurately or not -
the threat itself would have been sufficient. The delays in being
able to supply adequate engines, however, made the whole concept
irrelevant.

So, what we have is what was actually a rather sound decision that was
negated by the technical problems causing the in-service date to slip.

Hitler did that to many projects, he did it to the Fi103 (the doodlebug,
V1), he also had reservations about the A4 (the V2) and it was only in the
later stages of the war that he let it go into production because he knew he
was losing the war and wanted revenge weapons (vergeltungswaffe), as a form
of payback to the allies.

The A4 had problems with Guidance and Control, and, as was dicovered
fairly late into the program, with the airframe of teh rocket breaking
up on descent. These problems, and the need to set up the proper
infrastructure to produce and transport massive quantities of Liquid
Oxygen had much more to do with delaying its use.

The F1 103 (V-1) also had problems with launching and inflight
stability. Those had to be sorted out, and the launching sites in
France had to be prepared. Germany, for reasons unkown, took a rather
luxurious path with the launching sites, with large amounts of
permanent construction and massive fixed facilities.

--
Pete Stickney
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. -- Daniel Webster

"eunometic" wrote in message ...

An Integrated air defense system makes sense for the British on their
island. For the landlocked Germans, who had no channel, a philosophy of
avoiding a war of attrition and winning the frist battles so as to avoid
fighting on German soil prevailed. Very little was devoted to defense it
was thought best to devote it to attack and support of the Army and this
probably starved the development of such systems eg IFF.

The German IFF systems (FuG 25 and FuG 25a were the aircraft
transponders) were actually pretty good. Their coding system was
extremely flexible, and it did not use a wide swept-band system like
the Allied Mk III IFF kludge. So technically, they were on the ball,
as far as IFF systems are concerned.

William Donzelli

(Eunometic) wrote in message . com...

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.

Effective countermeasures simply were not possible with 1945
technology. Even in 1950, Window was a hard jam to get around. The
Germans had some success with Windows ECCM, but it was not too much
fun (apparently it took much practice to get the system working
properly).

Frankly, if the tables were reversed, and the Germans used Window on
Allied systems, we would be in a lot of trouble. Allied radars had no
effective Window anti-jam systems.

William Donzelli

Subject: Germany invented it. We shot it down
From: (William Donzelli)
Date: 2/22/04 8:36 PM Pacific Standard Time
Message-id:

Frankly, if the tables were reversed, and the Germans used Window on
Allied systems, we would be in a lot of trouble. Allied radars had no
effective Window anti-jam systems.

William Donzelli

In my experience I never saw German flak penetrate the window streams. From
that I can only conclude that the Germans had no such sytem either.


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

"ArtKramr" wrote in message
...
Subject: Germany invented it. We shot it down
From: "David E. Powell"
Date: 2/19/04 6:24 PM Pacific Standard Time
Message-id:

Between planes like Mistel, commandos like Skorzeny,

You might be interested in visiting my website and reading about the day I
had
lunch with Skorzeny. Just click on:

Lunch With SS STURMGRUPENNFUHRER OTTO SKORZENY

Dear sir: I had checked out your site, and that was one of the reasons that
I mentioned the fellow. It is a very well written account (As they all are)
and my best to you regarding it.

DEP

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