Venomstick121
Airman 1st Class
- 287
- Dec 21, 2023
How would it affect the outcome? I know there is no way to perfectly gauge the destruction.
What if the Luftwaffe gained air superiority during d-day?
- Thread starter Venomstick121
- Start date
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lots of sailors and soldiers get very wet !
Thumpalumpacus
Major
Yeah, Allied air superiority was considered a vital condition by SHAEF for Overlord's success. That's why both Bomber Command and 8th AF spent a couple of months bombing between Calais-Paris-Avranches, to suck the Luftwaffe into battle where possible while isolating the battlefield.
If that hadn't worked, the attack may have gone in anyway; Overlord had already been delayed a month by bottlenecks in landing craft, and Stalin was getting real pissy by now over the "lack of a second front." Had it gone in with air superiority contested, it would have been bloody, but still successful, I believe.
If that hadn't worked, the attack may have gone in anyway; Overlord had already been delayed a month by bottlenecks in landing craft, and Stalin was getting real pissy by now over the "lack of a second front." Had it gone in with air superiority contested, it would have been bloody, but still successful, I believe.
SaparotRob
Unter Gemeine Geschwader Murmeltier XIII
View: https://youtu.be/42y0IoV3ZV0?t=28
I was going to use a "Binkov's Battlegrounds" vid. He at least uses a Leclerc but I went for max foolishness.
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Snautzer01
Honourably banned
- 41,785
- Mar 26, 2007
Air to air supriority was as the previous posters say not going to happen. Lots of reasons for that.
But for sake of what if: what about attacking the mulbery's with v-1 or v-2. And the camouflaged fuel pumping stations established at Sandown on the Isle of Wight, and at Dungeness on the Kent coast, which were connected to the Avonmouth-Thames pipeline.
Target Bletchley Park in a massive raid like the one on Peenemünde.
You see that supriority is possible if the Germans had a system like Ultra had many rockets
Never forget the Allies were no dummies and only went ahead if they were convinced of victory.
J.A.W.
Banned
To be fair, the Luftwaffe also sucked the Allied airforces into attacking defunct V1 sites that were 'flak traps', albeit Hitler's impatience at
the tardy start to the V1 assault on London meant that he ordered General Peltz to bomb it the 'old fashioned way' (I recall seeing an interview
with an ol' cockney darl' who complained about the V1, stating she didn't "...like being bombed by robots, I want it done properly, by men!".
Peltz acting on Hitler's order, effectively squandered the core of the bomber force, (production of larger bombers having ceased) which
would've been available to hammer an invasion fleet, had the fighters wrested air control, as the thread starter imagines...
V1 were launched in the direction of the target. Time required to set up new sites targeting Normandy. V1 & V2 were not that accurate. A port consists largely of water.
First V2 fell on London on 8 Sept 1944 by which time other ports were falling into Allied hands (Cherbourg by the end of June). Over 1,600 V2 were launched at the port of Antwerp in 1944/45 without ever coming close to putting it out of action.
"Antwerp, Belgium was a target for a large number of V-weapon attacks from October 1944 through to the virtual end of the war in March 1945, leaving 1,736 dead and 4,500 injured in greater Antwerp. Thousands of buildings were damaged or destroyed as the city was struck by 590 direct hits. The largest loss of life by a single rocket attack during the war came on 16 December 1944, when the roof of the crowded Cine Rex was struck, leaving 567 dead and 291 injured."
Which the Germans didn't know about. Pin point target for a not very accurate weapon.
And PLUTO wasn't very important in the overall scheme of things. It played no part in the Normandy campaign. It was late Sept before the first pipeline to Cherbourg delivered any fuel and it failed after a couple of weeks having delivered about 3,000 tons of fuel. That delivery route wss then abandoned. The later pipelines from Dungeness to Boulogne didn't start pumping until late Oct 1944. Overall PLUTO delivered about 8% of the fuel needed by the allied armies on the Continent in 1944/45.
Again, the German intelligence have to learn about one of the most secret sites in Britain.
Deleted member 68059
Staff Sergeant
- 1,058
- Dec 28, 2015
It would have cheered up Leigh Mallory who was bored >
Snautzer01
Honourably banned
- 41,785
- Mar 26, 2007
But not al is. That why it is a prize target for every side. Besides that 1 hit will to an awful lot of destruction
No kidding? V-1 could have been launched and were from the air. Remember its a what if.
Again Remember its a what if.
RAF and USAAF did mind to much about that. All it takes is 1 lucky hit
Again Remember its a what if. Untill the 1970 and later none was in the public realm about ULTRA. And ULTRA gave an awfull lot of intel. It is not that weird to think the Germans could have done something the same.
yulzari
Staff Sergeant
Dover was shelled by German artillery from September 1940 to September 1944 yet remained a viable port.
V-1 & V-2 aimed at the Normandy beaches might have killed more Germans than Allies. A German infantry unit that arrived in the Hurtgen Forest in 1944 was hit by an errant V-1. They said that V-1 stood for Versager-1 (Failure Number 1).
That's right. The Americans were keen to get into occupied France as soon as possible once they joined the war effort in 1942 and it was Churchill who was reluctant until operational conditions were just so. Allied intelligence, not just Ultra, but the entire intel apparatus was quite sophisticated, including double agents, spies, aerial photographic reconnaissance and so forth and would have easily detected any build up of aerial forces. It was after the invasion that the Allies got complacent, ie before Bodenplatte, which they did not anticipate despite Ultra decrypts that hinted at something about to happen. These were ignored.
The other thing worth remembering is that Operation Fortitude was a big part of why the Germans did not initially believe that Normandy was the site of the Allied landings. Even if the Germans had enough aircraft in the area to provide a degree of resistance greater than they did, the belief was that Calais was going to be the invasion port. Fortitude was a deception of massive scale and it did work.
Operation Fortitude - Wikipedia
More on the overall deception strategy here:
Operation Bodyguard - Wikipedia
The premise of this thread ignores a shed ton of things that happened and were happening that ensured that such a thing couldn't happen. It's a bit like that whole scenario that the Germans could have provided wave after wave of Me 262s to intercept Allied bombers in a Goterdammerung style defeat of the bombing campaign. For such a thing to have happened, a lot needed to happen differently or not happen at all for it to have been possible.
The British first became aware of German jet fighter development as early as 1940, gaining aerial photographic evidence in 1942 of Me 163s as the first German aircraft actually identified by British Intelligence in photographs as a "jet". The existence of the Me 262 was known about in 1943 as images were taken of the prototypes at Rechlin. In late 1943 the Air Ministry was so concerned about the German jet threat, a paper was written that stated that by mid to late 1944 the Germans could easily have 1,000 jet fighters in service, which would have been devastating, obviously. Measures were taken to ensure such a thing didn't happen, air raids against the aircraft and support factories, acceleration of Allied jet programmes and so forth. Ultimately the threat of German jet numbers was never to the degree the Allies predicted and a part of that was because of both the Germans themselves and their weakening infrastructure and material supply and the Allied measures taken to counter it.
The Allied intelligence effort was anticipating a much greater resistance effort to Overlord than what actually transpired. That the German response was not greater was largely because of the intelligence via Ultra and photographic intelligence and the deception effort through Bodyguard. Regarding the V weapons, V 2s were simply not ready for operations at the time of Overlord. Once the V 1 campaign began the week after Overlord, the Allies launched air attacks against the launch sites in Calais, which caused a big delay in further launches owing to the withdrawal from the area by the Germans. It wasn't until later in the year before the campaign could begin again.
The British first became aware of German jet fighter development as early as 1940, gaining aerial photographic evidence in 1942 of Me 163s as the first German aircraft actually identified by British Intelligence in photographs as a "jet". The existence of the Me 262 was known about in 1943 as images were taken of the prototypes at Rechlin. In late 1943 the Air Ministry was so concerned about the German jet threat, a paper was written that stated that by mid to late 1944 the Germans could easily have 1,000 jet fighters in service, which would have been devastating, obviously. Measures were taken to ensure such a thing didn't happen, air raids against the aircraft and support factories, acceleration of Allied jet programmes and so forth. Ultimately the threat of German jet numbers was never to the degree the Allies predicted and a part of that was because of both the Germans themselves and their weakening infrastructure and material supply and the Allied measures taken to counter it.
The Allied intelligence effort was anticipating a much greater resistance effort to Overlord than what actually transpired. That the German response was not greater was largely because of the intelligence via Ultra and photographic intelligence and the deception effort through Bodyguard. Regarding the V weapons, V 2s were simply not ready for operations at the time of Overlord. Once the V 1 campaign began the week after Overlord, the Allies launched air attacks against the launch sites in Calais, which caused a big delay in further launches owing to the withdrawal from the area by the Germans. It wasn't until later in the year before the campaign could begin again.
Well, since the V-1 had the Circular Error Probable calibrated in Area Codes (Basically a major portion of a U.S. State, and the V-2 CEP was at best a ZIP Code (Postal Code for you Europeans) hitting anything like a point target was Right Out - Consider the attempts to used V-2s to take out the Ludendorf Bridge at Remagen - the only time a Vp2 was fired from a surveyed (And thus precisely known) Launch Point to a Surveyed target. They missed by over 1 km.
IN order to hit the camouflaged pumping stations, you have to know that they';re there. German Aerial Reconnaissance, was, shall we say,. absent. It wasn't until Late July p August 1944 that the Luftwaffe was able to get a pair of prototype Ar234s forward, and fly some recon covers over Britain and the French Coast. By that time, the Germans had no trouble knowing where the Allies were.
The same goes for Bletchley Park. Can't hit it if you don't know about it.
J.A.W.
Banned
Jeeze, 1km, that'd make ol' 'Moon Unit' Von Braun happy, that,s another feat for the 1st complex machine to smash the sound barrier, on its
way into space on a ballistic trajectory, & deliver its Amazon package, ah, sorry, I meant warhead, to that level of accuracy very nearly 80 y/o!
Tell that to dumb-arse Generation Z types who think the Apollo Program was a fake... because computers were y'know, like stone age.. then..
If you ever get the chance to compare an A-4/V-2 with Robert Goddard's later rockets you'll find, well, no difference (Except, on some, the locations of the fuel and oxidizer tanks were reversed. Streamlined hull, gyroscopic stabilization/navigation, jet vanes for steering under power, turbopumps - they're all there.
Goddard just wasn't building them as big - for one thing, he didn't want to go chasing the bloody things 100 miles across the desert.
von Braun himself acknowledged this when he was being interviewed before going to Ft. Bliss.
V-2 wasn't teh first "complex machine" to go supersonic - that's Goddard, too.
J.A.W.
Banned
Goddard's was surely a mere 'nickel rocket' by comparison; what Mach # did it make; did it get in to space, straight up?
If he had navigation as good, why would he have to chase it more than say - a mile away - across the desert.
I recall reading that Von Braun got Hitler's attention, due to the Nazi '1000 year Reich' plan, but during 1937 a German astronomer
tracked an Asteroid - 'Hermes' - as it approached, then swept-by Earth's orbit. Hitler was informed it might hit Earth in the not too
distant future, so Mr Moon-shot was summoned, & duly reckoned he could take it out, given funding for development, so it goes...
- Thread starter
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Venomstick121
Airman 1st Class
- 287
- Dec 21, 2023
I seemed to have poked the bear with this one
