Deleted member 68059
Staff Sergeant
- 1,058
- Dec 28, 2015
My info is from the RLM stenographic record of discussions between Erhard Milch and people like Galland and Göring. Goebells didnt write many essays on engine failures.
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The problem with the stories/myths around the deaths of many Luftwaffe experten is that they were written (or at least polished) by Goebbels's propagandists. Try finding one example of an official account of an experten's demise where they admit he did something stupid or made a mistake, and you will find it a fruitless endeavour. This problem is exacerbated by the post-War indulgence of Western experts that rushed to pronounce the experten as next to godly, despite them having been soundly thrashed by the Allies.
You claim to know a lot but I see zero info from your side. So what caused the high failure rate of the early DB 605A besides the temporary interruption of lubrication caused by foaming oil?Lets have a forum poll about that one shall we?
I would rather have more info on Marseille's plane.Lets have a forum poll about that one shall we?
You claim to know a lot but I see zero info from your side. So what caused the high failure rate of the early DB 605A besides the temporary interruption of lubrication caused by foaming oil?
Milch and Goring were both career Nazis and spent a lot of time pushing their own political agendas rather than telling the truth. Whilst Galland wasn't quite as bad, he has since done a good job of polishing his own wartime story. Milch was appointed by Goering as his yes man, and he was tasked with growing aircraft production after the "unfortunate death whilst flight testing a new weapon" (Goebbel's propaganda description of the suicide) of Ernst Udet. Milch had out-maneuvered and out-politicked his onetime friend, Udet, and took political advantage of his death. When Milch got his position of power he then tried to undermine Goering. Any conversation between Milch and Goering, whilst interesting for the political viewpoint, is unlikely to have painted a realistic picture of the Luftwaffe at war as both were secretly plotting against the other and trying to avoid admitting any weakness in their own performance.My info is from the RLM stenographic record of discussions between Erhard Milch and people like Galland and Göring. Goebells didnt write many essays on engine failures.
Ooh, freebie! Post the link again, please, it sounds like a good read......I gave a free webinar last month, and posted the link on this forum; which covered "what caussed the high failure rate of the early DB 605A besides the temporary interruprion of lubrication caused by foaming oil" in reasonable depth. I`m guessing you missed it. Cobalt and Nickel were central-stars in the story......
Milch and Goring were both career Nazis and spent a lot of time pushing their own political agendas rather than telling the truth. Whilst Galland wasn't quite as bad, he has since done a good job of polishing his own wartime story. Milch was appointed by Goering as his yes man, and he was tasked with growing aircraft production after the "unfortunate death whilst flight testing a new weapon" (Goebbel's propaganda description of the suicide) of Ernst Udet. Milch had out-maneuvered and out-politicked his onetime friend, Udet, and took political advantage of his death. When Milch got his position of power he then tried to undermine Goering. Any conversation between Milch and Goering, whilst interesting for the political viewpoint, is unlikely to have painted a realistic picture of the Luftwaffe at war as both were secretly plotting against the other and trying to avoid admitting any weakness in their own performance.
Well, I wouldn't call it lovely, more of an indication of the drivers for people like Milch in such conversations.Thats lovely, but meaningless.....
I don't doubt it is, but it's a bit like Chinese Whispers, what got back to Milch, and later Goering, and later still Hitler, was filtered through the desires of the people reporting to them not to take the blame for any issues......The fact is that this is the spoken word record of Milch in argument with Wolfram Einsenlohr (RLM head of engine dev.) - Milch had been visiting the front to speak to the pilots, to try to find out what was happening to the planes. The pilots told him... engine failures....
The war was over for the Luftwaffe when Hitler realised he couldn't invade and subdue Britain and therefore couldn't defeat the British Empire. Everything after that was just the slow and inevitable death of the Fourth Reich, sped up by the invasion of Soviet Russia and declaring war on the USA. Milch needed to make sure he didn't take the blame from Hitler as that was certain death for a Jew, hence his desperation to get the DB605 issue sorted. That doesn't mean it was the actual root cause of the issue, which went back to the pre-War economic situation in Germany, its unpreparedness to fight a war, and the lack of strategic materials. Economics defeated the Nazis, not engine lubrication, and the DB605 could have been the German Merlin 66 and it still wouldn't have saved the Nazis.....The reason this was a problem for Milch was that it was his job as secretary of state for air to provide effective fighters, these are the actual RLM meeting spoken word records not press releases, or letters to Hitler. Milch NEEDED Eisenlohr to fix the engines, otherwise the entire war was over for the Luftwaffe......
I am very tempted to say no just to see if you'll bite..........Do you know what a stenographic record is ?....
It's an incontrovertible record of what was said in those meetings (provided no-one went back and edited the records, which did happen in Nazi Germany). That doesn't mean it was the reality of the situation at the front. The DB605 could have been perfect from the word go and the Bf109G was still going to get shot down in droves by superior Spitfire IXs, P-51Bs and P-47Ds.......Its utterly incontravertable.
So, whilst the frontline pilots might have been saying "It's the engines" as the biggest issue, the reality might have been factors like bad tactics and improving Allied opposition that the Jadgwaffe just didn't want to admit to.
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So.. the stenographic record is wrong, the pilots are wrong, ... and the complete development records of Daimler-Benz are wrong.
In fact the reliability of engines was so bad that the pilots gave the DB605 and the BMW801 engines nicknames. (not complimentary)....
While I know nothing about the issue at hand, I think you are exaggerating there. Nazi racism was of course EXTREMLY real, but AFAIK, their reaction to encountering better enemy equipment was not denial but rather to improve their own. To my knowledge, the T-34 tank kickstarted a lot of new development in German tank engineering and the US bazooka soon found itself copied by the Germans. Decrying better allied equipment as heresy would have flown into facts on the battlefield, the one place where you cannot afford to, and the bulk of the Wehrmacht was still too professional for that, sadly.no-one in the Luftwaffe or the Reichsluftfahrtministerium wanted to face up to what the real problems were. Part of the problem was that the whole Nazi ethos was based on the idea of Aryan racial superiority, therefore German fighters had to be the best or it undermined their whole raison d'etre. For example, it was heresy to suggest that the untermenschen Slavic Russians could make a better fighter than the Nazis, even after the La-5 and Yak-3 appeared.
You claim to know a lot but I see zero info from your side. So what caused the high failure rate of the early DB 605A besides the temporary interruption of lubrication caused by foaming oil?
Milch HATED Messerschmitt because one of his friends had died in a crash (in a Messerschmitt) and he there-after never forgave him)
Actually, no. The Luftwaffe's strategic presumption was that superiority of equipment meant they would be able to defeat more numerous enemies. That presumption was based on the idea that German scientists and designers were superior to every other nation in the World. It's one of the reasons that Hitler deluded himself into the idea that the versuchs "revenge" weapons would save the Aryan peoples. For the Luftwaffe or Hitler to believe otherwise was to accept that defeat for Germany was inevitable because they were not superior to other races......I think you are exaggerating there.......
Churchill was half American, his view was based on the size of the British Empire and the Royal Navy.Churchill and co refused to countenance surrender to Germany in 1940 because they couldn't accept the idea that the British Empire could be defeated. Why? Because the English, dear boy, were superior! Yes, call it nationalism, but it boils down to belief of innate racial superiority.
I forgot to point out that the Tiger tank was in development before the Germans met the T-34, and sloped armour was around long before the T-34, even going back to the sloped front of the French Saint-Charmond of 1917, or the more recent FCM 36 of 1936:While I know nothing about the issue at hand, I think you are exaggerating there. Nazi racism was of course EXTREMLY real, but AFAIK, their reaction to encountering better enemy equipment was not denial but rather to improve their own. To my knowledge, the T-34 tank kickstarted a lot of new development in German tank engineering and the US bazooka soon found itself copied by the Germans. Decrying better allied equipment as heresy would have flown into facts on the battlefield, the one place where you cannot afford to, and the bulk of the Wehrmacht was still too professional for that, sadly.
Also forgot to add that Hitler actually used the example of the T-34 to say he was right and his staff was wrong. We know from Speer's autobiography Inside The Third Reich that Hitler had proposed putting the long 75mm into the Panzer IV long before June 1941, but the Heer persisted with the 50mm in the Panzer III because they could make more of them faster, because they had already set on a tactical plan of the Panzer IV a a support tank, and because they were convinced their enemies just could not match the Panzer III (because Aryan supremacy, bla-bla-bla). The T-34 may have been a shock for Hitler's staff, but for Hitler it was another example of why he was right and everyone else was wrong. Quoting Speer: "When the Russian T-34 appeared, Hitler was triumphant, for he could then point out that he had earlier demanded the kind of long-barreled gun it had. Even before my appointment as Minister of Armaments, I had heard Hitler in the Chancellery garden - after a demonstration of the Panzer IV - inveighing against the obstinacy of the Army Ordnance Office which had turned down his idea for increasing the velocity of the missile by lengthening the barrel.".....To my knowledge, the T-34 tank kickstarted a lot of new development in German tank engineering......
Yes, which was why it was inconceivable in 1942 that the British could be kicked out of Singapore by the "little yellow men" of Imperial Japan. Prior to 1942, the natives in the countries of the British Empire had accepted the notion that the British were racially superior. The defeat of the British in Malaysia spurred Indian nationalism as Indians now saw that The Great British Empire could be beaten by non-white people. Post-War, the British Empire gradually crumbled partially because the British had lost that mysticism that allowed them to dominate a massive empire with a relatively tiny standing army. Britain was actually the only European imperial nation not to have conscription between the Wars simply because the British only needed a small, professional army and air force to control the Empire. The Royal Navy was impressively large but it was largely equipped with outdated ships, and in many ways was a lot less impressive under close examination. But the British public thought the would always win. Even after Dunkirk, the predominant thought amongst the public was it was a setback (mainly due to those cowardly and incompetent Frogs), but that the Empire would prevail, and for no other real reason than "because we're British".Churchill was half American, his view was based on the size of the British Empire and the Royal Navy.
I thought that the greatest property of the T-34 was that it wasnt bad and there were thousands of them, over 60,000 during the war.Also forgot to add that Hitler actually used the example of the T-34 to say he was right and his staff was wrong. We know from Speer's autobiography Inside The Third Reich that Hitler had proposed putting the long 75mm into the Panzer IV long before June 1941, but the Heer persisted with the 50mm in the Panzer III because they could make more of them faster, because they had already set on a tactical plan of the Panzer IV a a support tank, and because they were convinced their enemies just could not match the Panzer III (because Aryan supremacy, bla-bla-bla). The T-34 may have been a shock for Hitler's staff, but for Hitler it was another example of why he was right and everyone else was wrong. Quoting Speer: "When the Russian T-34 appeared, Hitler was triumphant, for he could then point out that he had earlier demanded the kind of long-barreled gun it had. Even before my appointment as Minister of Armaments, I had heard Hitler in the Chancellery garden - after a demonstration of the Panzer IV - inveighing against the obstinacy of the Army Ordnance Office which had turned down his idea for increasing the velocity of the missile by lengthening the barrel."
The Germans already had a potentially better solution in the Panzer IV F, and a superior solution in the Tiger tank, so the T-34 was not the great technical shock often presented as fact.
Revisionist tripe and way off topic.Yes, which was why it was inconceivable in 1942 that the British could be kicked out of Singapore by the "little yellow men" of Imperial Japan. Prior to 1942, the natives in the countries of the British Empire had accepted the notion that the British were racially superior. The defeat of the British in Malaysia spurred Indian nationalism as Indians now saw that The Great British Empire could be beaten by non-white people. Post-War, the British Empire gradually crumbled partially because the British had lost that mysticism that allowed them to dominate a massive empire with a relatively tiny standing army. Britain was actually the only European imperial nation not to have conscription between the Wars simply because the British only needed a small, professional army and air force to control the Empire. The Royal Navy was impressively large but it was largely equipped with outdated ships, and in many ways was a lot less impressive under close examination. But the British public thought the would always win. Even after Dunkirk, the predominant thought amongst the public was it was a setback (mainly due to those cowardly and incompetent Frogs), but that the Empire would prevail, and for no other real reason than "because we're British".