The airplane that did the most to turn the tide of the war.

michael rauls said:

I've read that in some areas at first the Russian civilians saw the Germans as liberators and were happy when they showed up...........which of course changed in short order. If the Germans had played there cards right and embraced the " libaratior" role and been mr nice guy to the Russians they captured/ occupied they could have met with substantially less resistance and probably have taken Russia. Speculation on my part of course but IMHO .

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It's called the EU.

XBe02Drvr said:

Nice fantasy. No way that would have ever come to pass under Nazi ideology. To much historical baggage vis a vis Slavic peoples and the hordes from the east.
Cheers,
Wes

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Not a fantasy of mine. That's for sure. I have NO sympathy for Nazi -ism.
It simply shows that there own hate of others eventually sank them. Or at least played a large part in doing so.
And also shows just how oppressive the Soviet state was that invaders looked good to there countrymen, at least to some.

pbehn said:

Any idea when these started XB? The UK didn't really start to address air sea rescue until around 1942/3 Ive no idea whether they did ditching training during the war.

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"Parachute Drag Trainer (PDT)
The PDT is used for aircrews to practice righting, self-stabilization and parachute release skills when dragged by a wind-blown parachute upon water entry. ETC's PDT consists of a tower, cable run, and a wall support. The PDT provides realistic, variable drag speed for different wind conditions."

This is the modern and far more elaborate version of the WWII antique we had at our base. Our unit was, I believe, installed in 1943, but primary training bases such as Pensacola, Corpus Christi, Olathe, etc, had already had them for years.
Cheers,
Wes

michael rauls said:

I've read that in some areas at first the Russian civilians saw the Germans as liberators and were happy when they showed up...........

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They did, especially the Ukranians who were still reeling from Uncle Joe's famine.

The German troops were showered with flowers, there were celebrations and Russian soldiers wanting to defect to help fight the Red Army.

As it was just mentioned, the Germans would maintain their agenda of oppression in the occupied areas, which of course ruined any chance of public capitulation to the German's cause.

XBe02Drvr said:

Nice fantasy. No way that would have ever come to pass under Nazi ideology. To much historical baggage vis a vis Slavic peoples and the hordes from the east.
Cheers,
Wes

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This whole "Slavic hordes of the East" thing was a particularly grotesque aspect of Nazi ideology because historically, the Germans were very closely linked to at least the Latinized Slavs for centuries.

Germans used to have literally an industry of founding and organizing towns in the middle ages. A large percentage of the towns in what are now Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Baltic and Scandinavia were founded or reorganized ("located") by German speaking settlers some time between the years 1000 and 1300. Places like Krakow, Danzig / Gdansk, Stockholm, Buda and Pesht, Wroclaw / Breslau, Riga, Talinn / Reval and so on, were all "located" by Germans and had substantial German-speaking populations for Centuries. German scholars call this the Ostiedlung. For the most part they got along well with the local populations.

If you have ever wondered why Prussia was sort of floating out there in Northern Poland away from the rest of Germany, the reason is that it was originally a cluster of German-settled towns which had come under the control of the monastic State of the Teutonic Knights, for a long time one of the largest and best administered proto-States in Europe, created by and dedicated to fighting the nearly endless Northern Crusades in that region. After the Crusades bogged down due to the military prowess of the Lithuanians and the knights started making enemies all around them, the German towns, led by Danzig, got fed up and switched allegience to Poland. They formed a league called the Prussian Confederation and fought a major war against the Teutonic Order so as to become part of the Polish Kingdom!, because the Poles agreed to grant them near total autonomy. In the end they won the war and became a special autonomous region of Poland from the 1400's until the late 1700's. Many famous people like Nicholas Copernicus and his uncle and patron Bishop Lucas von Watzenrode grew up in German-speaking towns in Polish "Royal Prussia" but were strong political allies of Poland and against the Teutonic Order.

Poland was for a long time a major success story as a multi-ethnic, multi-religion commonwealth with a mix of Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox Christian, Jewish, and some Muslim citizens all allowed by law to practice their religion freely, with ethnic Poles, Germans, Scandinavians, Dutch, Lithuanians, Ukranians, Czechs, and others, becoming one of the largest and most powerful proto-States in Europe for the better part of three Centuries, as a Constitutional monarchy or kind of nobles Republic with roughly 20% of the population having a strong say in how the government was run in the Polish parliament or Sejm (including veto power over taxes and declarations of war).

Within Germany itself, a good proportion of the land and the people are formerly Slavic . Mecklenburg, Brandenburg and Pomerania (roughly the north-eastern quadrant of modern Germany) were Slavic Wendish / Orebite kingdoms which were conquered by Saxon warlords and converted to Christianity between the time of Charlemagne and the 12th Century, and the people just started speaking German dialects after a while.

For all the above reasons, you will find many people with German names in the "Slavic" countries and many Slavic names in the "German" countries (like Friedrich Nietzsche, and quite a few top German experten fighter aces like Walter Krupinski, Eberhard von Boremski, Hans-Joachim Kroschinski, Gerhard Michalski and so on) . To this day 13% of Germans have Slavic names. The existence of German-speaking enclaves in various East European States actually helped cause both WW I and WW II with the spread of new ethnic-nationalist ideologies and the rise of ethnic tensions in the 19th and 20th Centuries - places like Prussia in Poland, the Saxon zone of Transylvania, and the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia.




But prior to the 19th Century, the real split historically was not truly ethnic but rather mainly religious, between the zone of Latinized people (who mostly became Catholic or Protestant) and the Greek Orthodox zone. Poles and Czechs for example were on the Latin side of the fence. Russians, whose Cyrillic alphabet is based on the Greek alphabet, were in the Greek Orthodox zone. This divide was bitter, and sharpened when the Mongols took over most of the Rus, the Slavic - Swedish zone of small principalities in what is now Western Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. There were truly vicious religious wars already in the 16th Century like the Livonian War. There was certainly a cultural border between the Latin and Greek influenced zones. But also cross-border fertilization, with many Russian (and Serbian etc.) nobles attending the Sorbonne in Paris going back to the 14th Century, Veliky Novgorod, Pskov and Tver maintaining links with the German Hanseatic League through the 15th Century, and St. Petersburg was essentially created for commerce with the West and partly founded in the 17th by Swedish POWs so as to have a more Latinized / Western friendly character as a West facing trading entrepot and cultural zone.

The Ukranians and Belorussians had been conquered by the Mongols, and endured their very harsh rule, subject to their slave raids etc., until the (then Pagan) Lithuanians recaptured most of that territory from the Mongol Golden Horde in the 14th and 15th Century. Things were a lot better for the Ruthenians (Ukranians) for a while. Lithuania then merged with Poland to form the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Ukranians had a little better deal under the religious freedom law, though many were second-class citizens so to speak due to their Greek Orthodox religion, they had far more rights than they had under the Mongols and Russians.

That all broke down in the mid 17th Century in the wake of the vicious religious wars which swept Europe at that time (especially the apocalyptic 30 Years War). The mostly Ruthenian / Ukranian Cossacks, who were very tough rebels that had been allied with the Poles in wars against the Ottomans and Mongols, felt that they were being betrayed and gradually forced into serfdom under counter-reformation sectarianism, so they rebelled. Then the Swedes invaded which caused a major disaster the Poles call The Deluge, in which ultimately Poland recovered from but it kind of broke their back. The Cossacks went into the Russian orbit for a while, and were used with success by the Russians to take back nearly all the land formerly controlled by Mongol and Turkic warlords (this is how Russia grew to be so wide!). But were ultimately betrayed again, losing their autonomy under Catherine the Great in the 18th Century.

So the Ukranians had a history of being allied with the Latin powers, but also a memory of deep betrayals both from them and the Russians. This resurfaced in the Russian revolution and subsequent regional wars, when the Ukranians kind of went their own way refusing to ally with the Soviet Bolsheviks or Whites or the Polish Catholics. Instead they formed this entity called the Black Army which was anarchist in political orientation (like the Kurds in Syria) and proved to be an extremely adept at defeating both the "Whites" and the Bolsheviks with new innovative tactics and weapons.

Ultimately after several failed military campaigns the Bolsheviks defeated them by inviting their leaders to a peace conference and killing them all. Ten years later was the Holodomor, the great famine instigated by "Uncle Joe" which killed somewhere between 3 and 12 million Ukranians mostly by starvation. After that they were definitely ready for just about any new leadership that was even remotely reasonable, but instead the Nazis brought in the Einsatzgruppen.

GrauGeist said:

If the German high-command decided to enter the Soviet Union as benefactors instead of conquerors, they could have taken the Soviet Union with nearly a struggle - treating them as "unter mensch" just steeled their resolve...

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This idea is quite popular among some historians. The question is who would act as a benefactor. The political leadership of Reich was probably too indoctrinated and military leadership (who was more sympathetic to ROA, etc.) was either not influential enough or have chosen to stay away.
Kirill Alexandrov (one of the best experts of the anti-Communist movements in the USSR) has described how Henning von Treskow had organised the visit of General Vlasov to Army Group Centre in Smolensk in March 1943. Just before Hitler's visit to the same place and that Cointreau bottle taken on board of the fuhrer's airplane. Could it be part of a plan, Hitler is dead and Vlasov is installed as the head of anti-Stalin government in Smolensk? Food for thought... at least for fans of älternative history.

It's also good to remember just the years before the invasion there was also not a vacuum, Germany and Russia were pretty entangled in the Weimar years and not always in a good way. One (to me) pretty shocking thing was that the Luftwaffe kind of came together in Russia.

Lipetsk fighter-pilot school - Wikipedia

There was a good show on Netflix for a while called Babylon Berlin, which gives you a pretty eye-opening perception of the time period.

Schweik said:

The Ukranians and Belorussians had been conquered by the Mongols

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Sorry for my "nit-picking" but there were no Ukrainians or Belorussians/Belarusians or Russians (in modern meaning) during the Mongol invasion.

Dimlee said:

Sorry for my "nit-picking" but there were no Ukrainians or Belorussians/Belarusians or Russians (in modern meaning) during the Mongol invasion.

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I used the modern terms for the Anlgophone readers to have a point of reference, but I did mention the term "Ruthenian" and "Rus" i.e. "the Mongols took over most of the Rus, the Slavic - Swedish zone of small principalities in what is now Western Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. " which are probably closer to correct terms, albeit still too broad.

But point taken

GrauGeist said:

They did, especially the Ukranians who were still reeling from Uncle Joe's famine.

The German troops were showered with flowers, there were celebrations and Russian soldiers wanting to defect to help fight the Red Army.

As it was just mentioned, the Germans would maintain their agenda of oppression in the occupied areas, which of course ruined any chance of public capitulation to the German's cause.

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True. If your cruel to the population you occupy more often than not your just shooting yourself in the foot as you guarantee bitter resistance.
On the Ukraine don't know if youve ever read about the Holodomor but it's quite disturbing.

The Ukranian resistance was indeed pretty tough and pretty mean too. After the Nazis were defeated some of the Ukranian groups continued fighting the Soviets into the 50's.

Schweik said:

The Ukranian resistance was indeed pretty tough and pretty mean too. After the Nazis were defeated some of the Ukranian groups continued fighting the Soviets into the 50's.

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Ive never heard that before. The part about them fighting the Soviets into the 50s I mean. Kinda wierd how everything that went on in the Ukraine has had so little attention paid to it all these years.
Perhaps because the Soviets were our allies in the war.

So....did the Belorussians, the Ukrainians, or the Lithuanians develop any aircraft that might have changed the course of WWII?
Cheers,
Wes

The Hungarians resisted the Soviets after the war and it turned into a full-blown revolution in the 50's, which was put down by the Soviets.

In regards to the aircraft question, Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria were the only Eastern European countries that had indigenous aircraft manufacturing, the others did not have a manufacturing base capable of large scale aircraft production/development.

What about Poland and Czech? Poland had the PZL P-11 which was used (in a more advanced export version, the P-24) fairly widely by Greece, Romania etc., and then (allegedly) became the basis for the quite more modern looking and successful IAR-80 series from Romania.

The Czechs didn't have any modern fighters in large scale service but they certainly had the capacity - something like 1/3 of the tanks in the German army at the time of their invasion of France were Czech made Pz 35 (T) and Pz 38 (T). One assumes the French were regretting throwing the Czechs under the bus as a sacrifice for peace at that point...

The Czech aircraft companies, notably Avia, were able to produce decent number of older generation aircraft and came up with some very promising designs before the war that they didn't have time to develop.

The B-534 was a decent fighter for it's time (early to mid-30's) with some advanced design features. And they made 500 of them.



Avia B-534 - Wikipedia

They also had some far more sophisticated designs. For example the B-35 / 135





Avia B.35 - Wikipedia

Avia B-135 - Wikipedia

The 135 managed ~330 mph with an 860 hp Hispano-Suiza engine and had a 20mm cannon in the nose spinner. 12 were made for export to Bulgaria. Bulgaria was supposed to make some of their own but proved incapable of manufacturing them in their own factory. I think if the Czechs had been able to build say 500 of those it could have made a difference.


Even the Latvians came up with a fairly promising fighter design though their design bureau was snuffed out with the Soviet invasion.





Of course none of these changed the course of the war. The Czech fighters, along with their very capable tanks, might have changed the early trajectory had they gotten support against the Germans early on and not been forced to give up their easily defended mountainous border via diplomacy... but that is a different topic and one of histories great "What-Ifs"

The Yugoslavians also had the Rogožarski IK-3

Rogožarski IK-3 - Wikipedia



Yet another interesting baby strangled in the crib.

pbehn said:

t the outbreak of the war the UK had about 130 Spitfires in service. At the fall of France there were approximately equal numbers of Spitfires and Hurricanes 250 each.

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On the evening of 17th August 1940, generally considered the start of the Battle of Britain, the RAF had a total of 276 Spitfires and 549 Hurricanes registered as serviceable. If you look at 11 Group and 12 Group where the majority of the action took place, 11 Group had 81 Spitfires and 245 Hurricanes while 12 Group had respectively 100 and 85, totalling 181 Spitfires and 330 Hurricanes. It's not that 10 Group and 13 Group didn't see action, just that they didn't see nearly as much. 11 Group carried most of the burden, so on that basis the Hurricane was a hugely important aircraft. I can't locate the actual kill numbers but I'm pretty sure that the Hurricane outdid the Spitfire handsomely - having said that the general tactics were for the heavier, slower Hurricanes to go after the LW bombers while the faster and more nimble Spitfires took on the escort fighters, so you'd expect a difference in kill performance anyway.

All in all I agree that a lot of people underestimate the contribution of the Hurricane during this pivotal time