What if Herr Speer...

More....

" Not only was Albert Speer, the head of the new armaments drive, an eminently political actor in his own right, but the conditions for his " armamments miracle " were created by some of the most ruthless exponents of nazi ideology : Gauleiter Sauckel as the impresario of the labour programme, and Herbert Backe and Heinrich Himmler as the fixers of the food crisis.

The 280,000 workers drained from the armaments factories in the twelve months that followed the 1941 Moscov crisis were more than offset by an influx of 970,000 foreign workers provided by Sauckel.

1942....

Of the increase of 513,000 workers that could be attributed spesifically to one of the three branches of the Wehrmacht, Speer´s area of responsibility claimed no less than 400,000.

Until the summer of 1943 his ( Speer ) writ extended to about 45% of the armaments effort, consuming perhaps one sixth of industrial output.

Only when Milch surrendered and agreed to share control of the Luftwaffe sector was Speer willing to allow aircraft production to benefit from the full authority of the Reich´s Armament Ministry and the practical benefits that conferred."

 

"In 1943 Willy Messerschmitt was still recovering from the disaster he had experienced with the over-hasty series production of the Me 210. Instead of forcing the Me 262 into mass production, Messerschmitt therefore offered the Air Ministry an entire portfolio of designs, including a conventional piston-engined replacement for the Me 109-fighter. Indeed, Messerschmitt intrigued with Speer throughout the 1943 to obstruct Milch´s efforts to concentrate all available resources on the mass-production of the jet."

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From " wages of destruction".

The author later on says that it would take at least until summer 1944 to make the jet engine enough stable for mass-production. However it is interesting to see what Speer was doing in 1943 instead of pushing the me-262 development....

 

Imagine that Messerschmitt and Speer coming together in say 1942 and agreeing to cancel all Me-109, 110, 210 programmes and solely concentrate on the Me-262 programme and after retooling Messerchmitt could produce up to 2,000 Me-262 per month and maintaining say 3,000 Me-262's at any given time, the loss of the Me-109 and others would be offset by Focke-Wulf ramping up production of the Fw-190.

 

I wonder how they would have got around the lack of alloy metals for the engines?

 

We've been through this sort of "what-if the Me 262...." scenarios extensively. The problem always comes back to capacity and logistics. The Jumo 004 engine has a service life of about 10 hours, or three sorties at most. Messerschmitt could produce at most a few hundred 262 airframes per month; let's say just 500. This requires 1000 engines. To keep these 500 flying you need another 10,000 engines per month or 11,000 engines (assuming one sortie per day per aircraft..... 30 days x 2 engines per plane (500) / 3 sorties until engine change)! Junkers was producing less than 500 per month at their peak.
Basically, between the loss rate (operational and combat) and the poor servicability of the engine the most the Germans might have realistically gotten in terms of a sustainable Me 262 force was 100 to 200 aircraft, if that.

 

This is difficult to answer but i'll attempt it with my limited knowledge of engineering, The Germans could have developed a re-manufacture industry, where by engines that have come to the end of their effective lives are brought back to a central factory to be completely stripped down and rebuilt and if anything is defective then it gets replaced, this would prevent an engine that otherwise say is 99% good being put on the scrap heap, yes building the initail batch of engines would be expensive and difficult but maintaining them wouldn't. I would have if it was possible would have had pool of say at least 15,000 engines. And yes I know this ain't perfect.

 

The problem with the Jumo 004 is that about half the engine (the turbine section, the combustion chamber section, and the exhaust section) are all highly succecptable to failure due to the use of low carbon steel / sheet metal with a aluminum flame spray coating for some heat resistance. Usually, all of this would need replacing (about 2/3rds of the engine plus a new casing) in a rebuild. It would be cheaper and easier just to toss the old engine and make a new one (about 900 manhours to do).

 

See i told you i was a shocker at engineering, thank you for the insight. Gotta admit though it was a nice thought. Thanks friend.