What if the Germans Introduced the Me-262 and others listed below in 1943

Hi there, i was wondering what would happen if the Germans introduced the following in 1943:
> Me 262


> Arado Ar E.381


> Me-262 Schwalbe


> Maus


> Koningstiger (Tiger 2)


> Horten Ho 229


> StG 44


> Rheinmetall Firelily (" Would have been REALLY NASTY")


> Henschel Hs P.75


take a good look on each of these and then reply, P_twinlugers:P_twinlugers:P_twinlugers:

 

The Me 262, Go 229 / HO IX, and SG 44 have been discussed at length here before. The general conclusion is that they provide no significant impact on the outcome of the war.

The Tiger II was introduced in early 1944 and a bit over 450 were produced. Introducing it say, 6 months to a year earlier would change little. The production was too low and slow to provide any significant number to the military. The vehicle was also less reliable than the Tiger I and Panther making it a significant maintenance problem. Add to that its weight that would have been an issue in the retreats that the Germans were making in 1943. Many would likely have to be abandoned or, extreme measures taken to extract these vehicles often at the expense of alot of other equipment.

The Ar 381 is one of several glider / small manned bomber attack aircraft using a parasite or towed vehicle. None of these saw actual operational use although a couple like the BV 40 were tested. The problem with all of the aircraft in this concept is that they require some large, slow airplane to tow or carry them to altitude. This makes the carrying aircraft very vulnerable to interception and destruction before it can launch.
This was the problem for the Japanese with the Oka suicide rocket. Once launched it was virtually unstoppable. But, up to that point the G4M carrying it was incredibly vulnerable. US fighters simply caught the G4Ms before launching and shot them down.
The Ar 381 would have suffered the same fate.

The problem with the Firelily, Wasserfall and, other German would-be SAMs is that their guidance systems were all pathetically bad or non-existant. For the Firelily etc., to work you need:
1. A decent search radar to find the target. A Freya or such would have worked here.
2. A precision target tracking radar. Würtzburg would work, if it was not jammed. But, the likelyhood is that jamming would be present making tracking difficult or impossible.
3. A missile tracking radar. This would track the missile in flight from launch to target destruction. Again, Würtzburg would work but only if not jammed.
4. A fire control system that allows the above radars to find, track and, then guide the missile to its target. Wasserfall was to be visually guided and radio controlled. The Soviets added a TV camera with substancial magnification to the SAM 2 system in Vietnam as a last ditch resort to overcome US jamming. The Vietnamese, very experianced in this missile's use, got less than 2% hits with it using optical guidance and radio control far superior to what the Germans proposed.
The Germans also lack a fire control computer system capable of performing the above functions fast enough to guide a supersonic missile in flight to a target. This will be a major problem.
5. A missile guidance system. This will have to be fairly jam proof too. While the Germans do have some such systems they are crude and probably could not work with a radar system sending corrections to the missile or using beam riding or semi-active conical scan modes of guidance.
6. Lack of a proxmity fuze means either needing command detonation and / or contact detonation. Again, this works against the missile's success.

Then there is the Henschel P 75. Given the US, Japanese and, Italians all had similar designs and no end of problems with them I doubt the Germans would somehow do much better. Also, the DB 613 enigne is the one in the He 177 that gave so many problems and frequently caught fire.....

 

It is not a matter of when but how these were used, specifically any of the aircraft. The ground weapons would have had more of an impact than the aircraft. Hitler had demanded too much from the aircraft. He wanted the Me262 to be multi-role. Not only as a fighter but as a bomber as well. By the time 1943 rolled around, Germany was on the defensive and should have focused on fighters and ground attack aircraft but Hitler was still thinking offensively. Here is an example of gross misuse. Take the V-2 rocket. It would have had a greater impact had it been targeting the Normandy beach head versus bombing London.

 

How would the V-2 have had greater impact on Normandy? It wasn't fully servicable at that time. Operational launches started in late August 1944 about the time of the Allied breakout.
Even if they were fired at the beachhead, their accuracy was such that most would likely hit little or nothing. It would be like randomly scattering a few 2000 lb bombs a day around the entire beachhead area. Worse yet, it is fully possible one or more could fall short and hit German lines.

 

The V-2 was a breakthrough in weapons tech, but it was too rudimentary to be used in a tactical situation. It was a terror weapon.

Of the German advanced weaponry, the ME 262 had the most potential to affect the course of the war, but could not be introduced in enough numbers to make a difference before the war was already lost. Still, it is a fine example of German weapons technology.

Tiger II was simply too bulky and slow to have been a determinative factor in the fluid tank battles of WWII (not to mention the maintenance problems). One wonders at the reasoning behind the expenditure here. Best that could be said is that it represented what Hitler thought a tank should be....big and indestructible! A conflict in terms that proves Hitler's childlike fascination with weapons had no basis in theory (at least as to tanks).

I still don't understand why the Germans did not invest in heavy long range high altitude bombers as a Luftwaffe staple. Clearly, that could have been used effectively against the allies (especially the Russians).

The last tactically effective German weapon system developed was the FW 190. The German counter to the P-51, this was a great fighter.

 

It was a failure on a number of levels. First, it was horribly expensive to launch one. It required a huge expenditure of resources. The best estimate I've seen is that a V2 cost about the same to launch as an Me 110 fighter bomber. Now, that means you get to throw a single 1000 kg warhead about 300 km one time with a V2 and have about a 50 - 50 chance of hitting a major city several miles in diameter with it.
That is next to useless. Terror, to a minor degree. Militarilary? It is useless.

But, given that the British had the Meteor in squadron service, the US has the P-59 in squardon service and the P-80 entering service how does that make the Me 262 something that is technologically expotential compared to its opponets? That is, the Me 262 is nothing special. If anything, it is really a pretty marginal interceptor given the pathetically bad engines it is straddled with. But, this has been discussed on this board in some detail already.

The Allies too developed heavy tanks but took more care and a greater degree of rational thought into deploying them than the Germans did. Also, at least in the case of the US, the Germans were at a significant advantage in deploying such vehicles as they didn't have to ship them half way around the planet to get them into battle....

In a word: Gasoline. A He 177 took about 7 metric tons of fuel for a long range bombing mission. That is the equivalent of about 20 Me 109 missions or 3 Ju 88 missions. The Germans simply didn't have the fuel to support a massive heavy bomber fleet in operational service.
The second reason has to do with the German aircraft industry. By early 1944 the Germans could produce about 1 or 2 large heavy bombers per day with their entire aircraft industry at best. The US was producing about 3 heavy bombers per hour and the British about 10 per day. This makes it pretty clear that the Germans couldn't even produce sufficent replacements in aircraft and crews to maintain a heavy bomber fleet of any significant size for any useful period of time. The best they could do is husband their aircraft and resources until they had sufficent to launch a few strikes against critical targets.

The A model was good to about 20,000 feet. The Mustang topped that. Altitude is important here. The D model rectified most of that problem but appeared too late to make any significant difference.

 

Well, in this thread, what about this:

Dornier Do 335

It was said that it faster than the P-51 even the Tempest. An It might been available in 1943 if Göring didn´t stopped the development of the p 59 project in 1940.
Obviously the Nazi Germany would have lost the war, but it would have been harder for the Bomber Command and the Eighth air Force.

Nice plane.

 

I like it a lot, too (just check out my siggy); the Do 335 COULD'VE been operational almost a year earlier if the DB 603's had been available. From what I've read, it's performance was phenomenal, especially for a piston-engined plane. However, the Do 335 was essentially a dead-end; the jets were just becoming operational at that time, and promised even better performance than the 335. The best thing that can be said about the Do 335 was that it was a mature, proven technology that still offered almost jet-like performance; any pilot who could fly a piston-engined aircraft could've flown the 335, unlike the new jets which required special training and technologies. IF the 335 could've been flying a year earlier, it would've given the Germans a slight edge toward the end of the War, and also provided a good stepping stone to the jet era. The B-2 version of the 335 would've been perhaps the most successful bomber-destroyer of the War until tactics for the Me 262 could be perfected.

 

The problem with the Do 335 is that it is really a huge airplane. It is more in the light bomber / attack aircraft category than being strictly a fighter. As such it would have made a good night fighter and attack aircraft but likely would have been a failure as a pure fighter-type aircraft.
It might have had a niche as a bomber buster if, and it a big if, it could maintain high enough speeds to avoid most interceptions. That is a really difficult thing to make happen however.

 

Speed wasn't really a problem with the 335, not with almost 4,000 HP on tap, but maneuverability certainly was; it's best tactic would've been to go in after the bombers fast and get out of range of their guns fast. It was, in fact, originally designed as a fighter-bomber, complete with an internal bomb bay capable of carrying a 1000 kg bomb load; IMO, that space would've been better used for an additional (internal) fuel tank if utilized as a Zerstörer, especially in it's B-2 incarnation.

 

Heinkel Uhu, Me 410, Do 217, all this waste of effort could have gone to this plane.

I guess his Jet proposed version P 256 could have been better than the Arado Bomber even the Me 262 night fighter. But this is a Luft´46 boutade.

 

Two Jumo 004 pushing 20,000 lbs + of airplane with an airframe designed for 400 or so knots would have resulted in a relatively fast for prop aircraft bomber say, 375 - 400 knots but relatively slow for a jet. Add the payload and max fuel and you have a typical bomber of the late war period in terms of speed.

 

If you wanna talk jets, the one that probably held the most promise was the Go 229, assuming the Germans could've solved the lateral stability issues; almost 4,000 lbs. of thrust in a very efficient 15,000 lbs. airframe, top speed was over 600 mph. Stated armament was two (2) Mk 108 30mm cannons, but the drawings I've seen show two (2) Mk 103's.

 

Well it only was a drawn on a paper. Wasn´t it? Any prototipes?

This other one actually flown before the end of the war.

Heinkel 162

An other nice plane, too late, too few.





Probably the Luftwafe should have asked for something like it before, and invest the resources spent on the Me 163 in a similar aircraft. In fact I think there was a proposal for Me 163 with Jet Engine.
It had many faults, but was developed in only three months...

As I wrote before:
Obviously the Nazi Germany still would have lost the war, but it would have been harder for the Bomber Command and the Eighth air Force.

 

Not true; several examples flew, but without armament. One example crashed with the Gotha test pilot at the controls after one of the Jumo 004's flamed out; repeated attemps to restart the engine in the air failed, and he ended up crashing. The last surviving Go 229 is currently in storage at the Garber Restoration Facility of the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum awaiting restoration (which they might've begun by now).

 

The problem with all "flying wings" of the era was one not overcome until high-speed computers and fly by wire were perfected. No matter how "cool" the Go-229 or the Horten designs look, they would always become unstable and likely crash under speed. Even Northrop's beautiful wings had major stability problems in smaller sizes, and his huge B-35 and XB-49 were far from stable. They were big enough to survive many of the problems of the smaller craft, but eventually they too were just a bit ahead of their "time".

 

That is true of the jet ones. The piston engined "flying wing" bomber flew very well. The props gave it stability through torque cancellation with engines alternating in their rotation. Without the propellers though, the YB 49 became badly unstable in all three axies, particularly the horizontal. It tended to yaw left and right lacking lateral stability. Small vertical stabilizers were tried unsuccessfully. Part of the problem was that at that point in aerodynamic engineering it was impossible to fully model airflow over a large wing surface.
The MiG 17 and 19 are excellent examples of a cheap, crude fix to this problem that was applied in the late 40's through the 70's to aircraft that had wing airflow problems: Fences. These are small vertical surfaces that run front to back on the wing at problem locations. They force the airflow to move over the surface and prevent it breaking up laterally. It is sort of an admission on the designer's part that they can't get the airflow problems under control.
Computers fixed most of that through much better modelling.

 

The important point to note here is that had the Me-262 been an operational fighter in early 1943 and that was feasible had Hitler not meddled, then air superiority over German skies would have prevented daylight raids by US bombers.

That alone would have significantly protected German industry and perhaps allowed germany the time and breathing space it needed to beat the Russians.

It might also have permitted reconquest of the skies over Britain and could have perhaps made massed raids by He-177 viable.

 

Welcome to the forum Peisander. That said, I suggest you read this entire thread:

http://www.ww2f.com/what-if-europea...tic/20325-what-if-me-262-created-earlier.html

 

I just found this video. I didn´t know the Horten was made in wood.

National geografic Horten 2-29

Northrop Grumman replica.