Defence of the Reich

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That just sounds like a slight modification of the Nazi's excuse of how Germany lost WW1.
 
If you waited until 1943 after making most of the world angry with you, Id say its time to bag it. Should have waited until 1943 before you decided to invade anyone. The world was still trying to recover from the Great Depression in the 30's and nobody really had the money to gear up for another world war.

Having Italy as your major ally was such a nothing in comparison to what you really needed.

Starting a fight with the Soviets and Americans was a bone head move. The bone head move the Allies didnt do but should have was to kick their butt when Germany occupied the Sudatenland.

No Navy to speak of to take the fight to North America except for the U boats and they were becoming less effective. America proved that it had the manufacturing capacity to sustain itself plus supply the Allies while operating unmolested.

No quantity of bombers or the necessary fighter escorts to bomb the war making assets of their enemies.

Not enough of a military force left, after occupying most of Europe to invade anyone past England, and that particular opportunity was blown when it turned from a battle to a political hissyfit. Should have stuck to bombing the factories, airfields and radar sites instead of trying to knock down the cities.
 

The evidence is that the HWA report got the super-critical mass for an atomic bomb correct. Further evidence is that the Canadian researchers who built the Canadian/US Heavy water reactor examined the German subcritical reactor at Haigerloch and German calculation methodologies and said that the Germans knew how to dimension a reactor correctly and calculate criticality. The Germans were the first to achieve positive neutron production using the concentric leipzig subcritical reactors in early 1942.

There never was an industrialised German bomb program due to its expense and limited chances for success in time, it remained funded at a scientific level presumably hoping for a cheaper breakthrough.

However, with the benefit of hindsight there should have been a program and what there was could have been better co-ordinated by better motivated scientists or leaders. Heisenberg was not the man to do the job, clever as he was. To be fair when Speer claims he had in mind offering 500 million Reichs Marks to Heisenberg/Weiszacker he may have expected too quick a result (6 months or 2 years). Would anyone honest have said, yes I can have a fieldable atomic weapon within 2 years? Someone like von Braun might have but it still would have been late.

I merely make the point, in the context of this thread, that building more and better fighters to shoot down more allied bombers makes no difference. You need to be agressive and put the allies on the backfoot and that means conducted raids against the continental US when the US starts conducting raids against Germany. It probably means at least demonstrating aerial mine laying against the US east coast before then so that they know the politicians know their population will not be impune from consequences.

In terms of technology the German engine program needs to advance at least 1 year in order that the German pilots had high perfofrmance aircraft up to saving their own lives in the 1943 period when the core of experienced pilots was eaten away by attrition.

That means
Me 109K in October 1943 not 44. You need well homolgated 440mph fighter to deal with the P-51, Griffon Spitifre and Tempest V.
Me 109G ASM and or AM in March/April 43 instead of 44 or at least the AS version or AM version alone.
Me 109G rated at 1.42 ata in October 1942 not Otober 43.
Fw 190D9 in November 43 not November 44

Thats a very tall order but possibly doable by ditching certain hyper engine programs.

Having the Jets ready earlier would a bonus but even harder.

Mostly it would be essential to have a way of succesfully attacking the UK and USA. Waiting for someone to come and bomb you, no matter how good your defense, is ultimatly doomed since they will ultimatly find away around your 'passivity'

Better fighters/nightfighters and radar might protect the German factories and population a little longer and keep the Luftwaffe pilots alive and the 8th and Bomber Command away and combined with earlier V1 missiles it might be able to put of Overlord from the summer of 44 to the summer of 45.

But then what, inevitably unless there was a Soviet defeat, allied material superiority would lead to technical superiority and win out and of course an atomic bomb is a game changer. So defeating the bomber streams on its own is at best a delay.

Ultimatly sometime around late 45 the allies will be ready with a weapon. The likely presence of SAM missiles over Reich airspace by late 1945 will make the B-29 a vulnerable target that would be easily pricked of if they attacked in anthing but a massed formation and that might buy the Germans a few months as the allies prepare an attack by several hundred B-29 within which will be a dozen atomic bombers. The Germans would need to demonstrate an bomb by then.

Of course the most important thing would be to be finnicky about cypher security. The Luftwaffe was the most sloppy of the 3 services in cyper practice.
 
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Most logic post here

anyway,if above not possible: start the harassement of bomber's formation above the channel when they are not fully regroupped yet and where the escort is still fuel-overloaded. Set a tremendous FLAK-Wall in north France/belgium/holland with a good radar control. Devlop SAM's more rapidely (higher budget)...but still the numbers start to be against the germans from the second half of 43 and the allies would certainly adapt quickly sending more short ranged fighters in front of the bomber formations (i see spitfires in this scenario), what means the LW would have to send even more of their own fighters to counter the Raf Fighters
 
Jumo 004A engine could have been mass produced during 1943 but it will cost more then Jumo 004B. It's up to RLM to decide whether that's a worthwhile trade off for having Me-262 Jagdgeschwader operational by the end of 1943. IMO it's a better deal then the expensive V2 missile program.
 
By mid 1942 most of the changes suggested on this thread would have been a.) strategically unsound unless Germany could make peace with USSR and re-allocate resources and R&D to focus on the threat from the West, and b.) impossible given Hitler's insistance that Defense was second priority.

To beat Commonwealth and US after 1942, Germany had to neutralize airpower from the UK, harness the natural resources necessary to develop nuclear weapons, channel resources to protect the development and production, and develop the delivery systems - all ahead of the Manhattan Project.

Having said that - given that there was a unified recognition that combined US/RAF airpower was a very bad thing for Germany - then given prescient knowledge of Africa campaign:
Extract Afrika Corp and LW from Africa.
Shift large portion of LW fighter and bomber resources to Italy and LufFlotte 3 to contest the French/Dutch airspace with not only strong defensive capability but also significant night bombing capability.
Meet influx of American airpower by attacking UK RAF and US airfields, and ports at night. RAF night fighters will extract high toll but attempts to develop strategic footprint in East Anglia will be severly curtailed. RAF ops will be severly impacted as long as LW continues to pour resources into the campaign.
(this is all about buying time)
Re-Allocate existing fighter aircraft production and engine development to focust on In-Line version of Fw 190/Ta 152, reduce 109 production accordingly and continue buildup of Fw 190A series. Focus night fighter dev on Ju 88 versions.
Re-allocate bomber resources to Me 410, He 277 (with at least one version modified for very large weapon), Ju 88, Ju 390 and maybe Do 217
Accelerate dev of Me 262, kill the Ju 87, wind down the 109, continue V-2 and surface to air/proximity fusing R&D
If and when US daylight strength increases to overwhelm (much longer timeframe) France, Holland, West German defenses - shift squadrons from East and South to build up the core of LuftFlotte Reich and put all of German air defenses (flak, day/night fighter, radar sites, etc) under central command - including deployment.
Kill Hitler so that rational thinking may surface regarding Defense of Germany.
 

The other factor is the convey supply routes for the allies.
If Germany was to win then these would have to be dealt with.
No conveys...no D Day
No conveys no strategic bombing campaign.
No conveys no supplies for the Soviets.
and so on....

Germany's ultimate failure on the high seas was instrumental in its defeat.

Cheers
John
 
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a lot of the supplies to the soviets from the US were coming into vladivostoc by us freighters flying the soviet flag. the first lend lease shipment was destroyed in an eastern port while it was still on the docks. so if you want to stop russian supply you will need u-boats and/or raiders in the pacific. you need to also step up u-boat activity in the atlantic with the mining of ports and waterways. weather will ground a lot of airborne attack. I would step up the wire guided missle to not only be deployed via aircraft but experiment with it on small fast attack water craft...like a PT boat or smaller. but beyond all thing you have to stockpile as much fuel as you can in underground facilities.
 

Givin how much advanced aircraft and weapons Germany did developed and had designed on paper, I wonder how close they really where to developing a nuclear weapon?
I know the Allies said Germany was not very far along in development, but maybe?
 
How many atomic/nuclear bombs did the US have for field use prior to VJ day?
Even if Germany was successful in developing such a weapon, how many would they have been able to produce?
Where would they have been deployed?

If Germany built one bomb and dropped it in the West, would that have stopped the Soviet advance?
If they dropped it in the East, would the Allies have sued for peace?

How about two bombs?
It seems that Germany needed several (many) bombs to come out of this alive, and that just wasn't going to happen.
 
The Nazi's had the delivery systems with the rocket V1 / V2.
By the time the Germans realised an A bomb could have make a difference to the defence of the Reich it was too late to make one as the raw materials were unavailable.
Lets face it making an A bomb was hard enough for the American's with no restrictions on resources or finance.
Allied Intelligence was on the case and the allies would have never let the Nazi's get into the position of being able to call the shots.
As I have said earlier the Nazi's made some fundermental errors that ensured defeat.
Cheers
John
 
gjs238 said:
How many atomic/nuclear bombs did the US have for field use prior to VJ day?
Click to expand...

They built 5 Hiroshima type bomb assemblies,and these were all made into bombs (Little Boy) eventually before being decommisioned around 1950. These are known as "gun assembly highly enriched Uranium" devices. The name comes from the way they work,essentially firing one lump of Uranium at another (or others) to create the super critical mass. The problem is that such devices require a surprisingly large mass of the enriched Uranium,typically around 50 Kg, and I don't know how much of this they had available. Having the aseemblies and having the "fuel" are two different things.

The US also eventually built 120 Nagasaki type bombs (Fat Man),mostly between 1947 and 1949. These were Plutonium implosion devices in which a sub critical mass of Plutonium 239 is compressed by high explosive,increasing its density until it becomes super critical.

I can't emphasise enough how far away the Germans were from developing either of these basic devices. They had effectively zero highly enriched Uranium at the end of the war,remember you need about 50Kg for a gun assembly HEU. They had no weapons grade Plutonium either,nor had they started the research programme to make an implosion device work.You could write a book about the problems encountered by the Manhattan scientists trying to get an implosion device to function,modelling explosions is tricky today and very difficult in the 1940s. It sounds easy to compress a sphere of material to super criticality but it proved anything but.

The atom spy Klaus Fuchs allegedly told his Soviet controllers that in 1947/8 the US was produced 100Kg of Uranium 235 and 20 Kg of Plutonium 239,which is a lot of fissile material!
This of course allowed the Soviets to calculate exactly how many devices the US could produce.

Cheers

Steve
 
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The V1 payload was 850 kg
The V2 payload was 1000 kg

The Little Boy weighed 4400 kg
The Fat Man weighed 4633 kg

The Germans had a way to go to develop a rocket that could match a B29 payload.

Cheers
John
 
Build all of the Nazi Vunder Veapons (with what? no nazi fanboi ever bothers with the cost in money and materials) delay the inevitable by a year or two and all of Germany is a pile of radioactive rubble with a red flag on top. Germany lost the war in 1938 it was just a matter of how long till the noise stopped.
 
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The V1 or V2 for delivery of a nuclear weapon? I don't think the V2 was even close to being reliable enough for the delivery of a nuke was it? What was the failure rate of V2 rockets? If you upscaled the V1 to be big enough to carry a nuke, bigger wing, multiple engines etc, how would you get it through the fighter defenses? Launch at night? Give it a night fighter escort up to the edge of London and then tell the escorts to run like mad?
 
Readie said:
The V1 payload was 850 kg
The V2 payload was 1000 kg

The Little Boy weighed 4400 kg
The Fat Man weighed 4633 kg

The Germans had a way to go to develop a rocket that could match a B29 payload.

Cheers
John
Click to expand...

A good point John.
Of course according to some the Germans were not only capable of developing a nuclear device,whereas infact they were only just at the experimental stage of reactor building,let alone producing fissile material in meaningful quantities,but would have produced one weighing less than a quarter of the allied effort
Never let the facts get in the way of a good conspiracy theory!
Steve
 
Exactly Steve,
The Reich was not defendable. The best was an occasional allied bloodied nose....sheer allied mass would always win.
The Germans could not fight Russia, Britain, the Commonwealth and America and hope to survive virgo intacto.
John
 
Readie said:
The Reich was not defendable.
John
Click to expand...

Not on the terms of the original proposition. By 1943 the damage had been caused by nazi government policies over the preceding years,stertching all the way back to the immiediate pre war years.
The idea that in the period 1943-45 the Germans could produce a war winning wonder weapon (or weapons),like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat is ridiculous.
Cheers
Steve
 
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