B-36 in 1944

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Part of my point was that the Nazis scattered their efforts into a lot of technologies that didn't benefit them, where they could have altered the course of the war had they made those choices more intelligently, (Of course, if they had had that kind of foresight, they never would have started the war at all.)
 

...and the other part is this:

 

The V-1 was apparently not an expensive program and did a lot for what was was spent on it. The V-2, on other hand, was a huge technology, resource, and money sink.
 
ClayO said:
You got me started wondering why the Germans didn't invent the surface to air missile instead of wasting all that effort on the V-1 and V-2.
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There were several programs which could be considered the progenitors to SAMs. The problem was the technology of the time just wasn't quite up to the challenge.

Note, as mentioned previously, the V-1 was actually a fairly efficient program run by the Luftwaffe and didn't cost much. The V-2, however, consumed a huge amount of effort for little return.
 

If the resources used on the V-2 were spent getting one, or more, of the several anti-aircraft missile systems in development, the Germans may have been able to field such weapons in enough quantity that would concern the Allies' bombing efforts.
 
wuzak said:
If the resources used on the V-2 were spent getting one, or more, of the several anti-aircraft missile systems in development, the Germans may have been able to field such weapons in enough quantity that would concern the Allies' bombing efforts.
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That's a big "if". The technology just wasn't up to the task. It wouldn't have been cost-effective for the Germans --- producing more bombers would have been cheaper for the Allies than producing new missiles would be for the Germans.

And there are always countermeasures. Just as with the Hs 293 and Fritz-X guided bombs, the Allies would have responded by developing countermeasures in the form of electronic jamming to foul the guidance system of the missiles. (The Allies were the leaders in this particular field, if the aerial bombing campaigns are any indication.) And there's other ways as well, such as dedicating fighter-bombers to act as flak suppression (or in this case missile suppression). Liquid-fueled missiles would be quite vulnerable to attack.
 

Not all of Germany's anti-aircraft rockets were guided.

And there were wire-guided missiles developed - but not used - during the war. This included the Hs 293B, the X-4 air-to-air missile and the X-7 anti-tank missile. These were resistant to jamming.
 

There are always countermeasures, even if the countermeasure is something as basic as, "shell and bomb the hell out of every square inch of ground ahead of us".

The Allies could afford to be profligate in their use of ordnance; the Germans, not so much.


GrauGeist said:
Don't forget the flak alleys the Germans deployed around strategic installations - carefully groomed killing zones.
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True. But if the choice is between losing an expensive bomber with a large crew or a single-seat fighter, I'd presume the latter is the path chosen. Or bomb where there are no missile defences. The Germans can't defend everywhere.



The general problem with such "what if" scenarios as Germany developing missile weapons sooner is that the Allied side isn't offered the same chance to develop its own technologies or tactics as well. If we grant Germany earlier jets or SAMs, then let's grant the Combined Bomber Offensive works more cooperatively than it did historically, or that the Oil and Transportation Plans are started a year earlier than historically, etc.

Changing one item necessarily means a lot of other changes in many other things happen too.
 
It took the allies quite a while after WW II to get AA missiles that actually worked, most of the time.

That means the missile got off the launch pad/ramp flew to about the area of the sky it was supposed and the warhead detonated in the way it was supposed to. Doesn't mean every target drone was destroyed.

The Nike Ajax was a response to a 1944 request, it first intercepted a target in 1951 and went into service in 1953.
The Russians first test of an atomic bomb was 29 August 1949

The British didn't get an AA missile into service until 1958?

Russians didn't get the SA-1 into service until 1955/56.

While development may have been rather slow in 1946-47, the cold war was defiantly taking shape in 1948.

Idea that the Germans were months or even a couple of years away from working missiles that were deployable on a large scale against even the low, slow bombers of the day needs some serious rethinking.
 
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33k in the air said:
Note, as mentioned previously, the V-1 was actually a fairly efficient program run by the Luftwaffe and didn't cost much.
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It was indeed, the technology was also quite simple and any nation with an aviation industry could have come up with an equivalent weapon. Although advanced in concept, technologically it was not.

The one thing I always remember when considering German advances during WW2 is that while they might have done well in developing these guided missiles and specifically the A4 rocket was a marvellous technological achievement, but they got some of the simple stuff wrong and that hampered them throughout the war. They didn't develop an effective worthy replacement for the He 111 in the He 177 - that was a money-sucking disaster of a programme that should have been brought to a quick conclusion. The Bomber B specification, again, nothing worthwhile came out of it. Complex aircraft designed to be powered by engines that the manufacturers couldn't get right and incorporating technologies that were beyond the designers at the time. And how about the failure of German torpedoes for the first half of the war? The Germans could design a jet fighter and a ballistic missile, but couldn't get a torpedo or a heavy bomber right?

The problem, thankfully for the rest of us, was that Germans had their priorities wrong and didn't realise it until too late, when, of course, they believed these wonder weapons could actually help them. If they spent less time fussing over the wonder stuff and more time focussing on what was going on outside they would have realised this. Their leadership didn't help either, which invited opportunities to screw things up in the way the whole thing was run.

The Germans made the most spectacularly interesting museum exhibits...

Europe 281
 
Surface to air missiles need a guidance mechanism to reach their targets. I don't think manual command, line-of-sight systems available at the time were good enough to hit a high flying (>9000m) small target; they are also susceptible to jamming. TV guidance is good for the air to ground role, but not the other way around (and, again it's even easier to jam than MCLOS). Beam riding? Could be feasible, although it get less precise as the target is further away from the command platform. This leaves us with semi active radar homing and IR guidance, the second being a technology in which the Germans were far ahead. In fact they built a prototype conical scanning IR system which closely resembled that used by the Sidewinder 10 years after. The problem is that first generation IR sensors were poor, barely able to lock onto the exhaust of a jet and easily confused by the sun, strong sunlight reflections and flares. Due to their poor sensitivity IR systems of the era where developed first and foremost for anti ship missiles, not for the anti aircraft role.

In the end, the scenario of the Allies fielding a 'super bomber' like the B-36 in 1944 is as likely as the Germans having a workable, mass produced advanced AA system using guided munitions instead of flak barrage.
 
GrauGeist said:
I would imagine that the nature of the mission would dictate the type/quantity of ordnance.
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According to the Standard Aircraft Characteristics publication for the B-36A:

Basic mission: 3,370 nautical mile combat radius with 10,000 lbs of bombs
High altitude: 2,485 nautical mile combat radius with 10,000 lbs of bombs
Max. bombs: 1,830 nautical mile combat radius with 72,000 lbs of bombs

Note that the basic and high altitude missions involve the use of bomb bay fuel tanks to achieve the maximum combat radius.

Standard Aircraft Characteristics Archive
 
GrauGeist said:
And in a 1944 setting (as proposed by the OP), the B-36 would be operating from England, which was roughly 1,100 miles to Berlin and back...
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Yes, except for one thing: there'd be no airfield capable of operating the bomber given its basic and max. take-off weights (~142,000 lbs and ~310,000 lbs, respectively). The airfields in the U.K. weren't designed to handle the lighter B-29 (~74,000 lbs basic and ~140,000 lbs max.take-off).

Plans to upgrade some airfields were in hand, but when the USAAF decided not to base B-29s in the U.K., these were put on the back burner.

So, for a B-36 to operate in the U.K., one or more airfields would need to be significantly upgraded to handle an aircraft as big and heavy as the B-36. And that would take some time. (The logistics alone of fueling a squadron of B-36s with 14,000+ gallons of gas each along with 132 x 500-lb or 72 x 1,000-lb bombs each seem daunting.)
 
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