Why did they get rid of them?

I guess that all depends on where that Auto Parts store is.
Finland and Yugoslavia flew Me/Bf-109's untill the mid '50's and Spain was flying them until 1965.

El Salvador and Honduras flew Mustangs, Corsairs and C-47's through the 100 hour 'Soccer War' in 1969.

So, in all actuality the key players of the air war of WW2 lasted for several years in at least some capacity.

 

The Me 262 was designed from the start for the Jumo 004 engine. There was never any intention of putting the HeS 001 (He 280 used this) engine on it. Nor was there any intent on using the BMW 003. The Jumo 004 was horribly unreliable. It had an average service life of about 10 to 12 hours, often less. Its major shortcoming was due to a lack of both high temperature metals and alloys that the Allies had access to. As a design it was no better than what the British and US had by 1944 in jet engine technology and by 1945 was quite a way behind it.

Other than the F-86 having incorporated German reserach into high speed flight and swept wings it owed exactly ZERO to any German aircraft design. The original F-86 design, the "Jet Mustang," was still developed by the US Navy into the highly successful FJ series of fighter-bombers.

No, the Allies were far more concerned with putting the best extant technologies into mass production and ensuring that they had sufficent equipment to fight and win the war rather than continually tinkering with cutting edge technology that might take years or decades to get into production. The Germans showed far more ineptitude in this sense by insisting on pushing the envelope every chance they got. Their Bomber A and B programs were unmitigated disasters that left them with no second generation bomber aircraft to replace the pre-war designs in serivce. So, the Luftwaffe was flying obsolesent bombers in 1944 instead of better designs like the Allies were bringing into service in large numbers. Aircraft like the US A-26 or B-29, the British Lincoln, or the Russian Tu 2.
The same can be said of their fighters. They were saddled with the pre-war Me 109 having forgone Henkel's He 100D as a replacement. Messerschmitt's own designs the Me 209II and 309 proved disasterously bad. Focke Wulf got the one wartime fighter into production the Fw 190 and managed to get alot out of it; a bright spot in an overall bleak picture.

 

Also consider that the Germans didn't adopt swept wings for their aerodynamic properties. I believe it was a matter of balance due to the wing location and the engines.

 

Volga made me think of the German Luger, a wonderful engineering achievement made up of many finely machined parts that functioned wonderfully and has since been copied and reproductions continued. However, manufacturing has made other designs requiring less machining and very dependable functioning. Hence there is not the demand for the high cost of this extensive machining to end up with a good functioning gun at a cheaper price. It may be why those items of "old" are in so high demand by collectors today. I will point out that few of our war production planes are made today so our products may have been abandoned along with the German products from the same era. Nevertheless I would accept the gift of one of these from any one who wants theirs to end up in appreciative hands!! (how is that for cheap shot begging)

 

Well, I would sort of say "yes and no" to some of G.P.'s positions. Don’t ignore the fact that an American named Robert Thomas Jones had come up with the theory of swept wings adding to the speed which could be attained by aircraft independently of any German research; the aforementioned Busermann included. However, when he (Jones) first proposed it in conjunction with other wing concepts, he was rebuffed by NACA and it wasn’t until later when the German research documents were discovered that NACA dusted off "Bobby" Jones work and applied it to American aircraft. Max Munk, whom Jones studied with had moved to America in 1920, and was working at Langley when Jones started there. The captured German research added to the American’s own studies, and cut-down the amount of time that might have been needed for practical application.

In trying to understand physically why the slender wing should show such Mach-number independence, R.T. wondered whether it might have to do with the large sweepback of the wing’s leading edge. Again he remembered another paper by Max Munk, this one dealing with the effect of dihedral and sweepback on the performance of wings at low speeds. In it Munk assumed that the air forces on a swept wing of large span and constant chord depend only on the component of flight velocity perpendicular to the leading edge and are independent of the component parallel to it. R.T. wondered whether this independence principle might not apply also to the components of the flight Mach number (i.e., in high-speed flight) and decided that it did. Thus the effective Mach number, on which the air forces depend, decreases continuously with increasing sweep; it follows that even at supersonic flight speeds, the air forces can be made to have the advantageous properties found at low subsonic Mach numbers simply by introducing sufficient sweepback, in particular, that the enormously increased drag of conventional unswept wings at supersonic speeds can be reduced to subsonic levels. R.T. thus discovered the theory of high-speed sweepback, which William Sears described as "certainly one of the most important discoveries in the history of aerodynamics."

With his new insights R.T. quickly resurrected his incompressible slender-wing analysis, modified it to start from the compressible-flow equations, and added his reasoning about sweepback. The resulting report was then submitted in early 1945 to the customary editorial committee, chaired in this case by Langley’s top senior theoretician. To R.T.’s surprise the committee accepted his special slender-wing theory––which was published as a separate unrestricted NACA Report dated May 1945 at Langley Field (1946,1)––but rejected his general finding about sweep. Subsonic and supersonic flow were conceived at that time as of entirely different nature, and the committee chairman could not accept that an essentially subsonic result could be obtained in a supersonic free stream. NACA management therefore held up publication of the sweep theory until transonic experiments, conducted at R.T.’s suggestion, showed 45-degree swept wings to have much less drag than straight wings. The sweep analysis appeared in circulation-restricted reports later in 1945 and as an unrestricted report in 1946 (1946,2). R.T.’s reports on slender wings and sweep are among the most consequential in the history of aerodynamics.

At the time of R.T.’s work no one in the United States appears to have been aware that the eminent German aerodynamicist Adolf Busemann had used the independence principle to examine the theoretical high-speed possibilities of sweep as one of a number of topics in his lecture to the Volta Congress in Rome in 1935. His idea received little notice perhaps because Busemann’s thinking considered only supersonic flight speeds and sweep angles for which the effective Mach number remained supersonic––speeds that seemed far beyond practical attainment at that time. In early May 1945 while the events at Langley were taking place, a group of U.S. engineers investigating German wartime research came upon a large collection of unpublished swept-wing data from high-subsonic-speed wind tunnels at Busemann’s institute at Braunschweig. R.T.’s idea of high-speed sweepback occurred independently of German thinking, and he and Busemann are credited jointly with the concept.

Goto:

Robert Thomas Jones, May 28, 1910–August 11, 1999 | By Walter G. Vincenti | Biographical Memoirs

This is an interesting "bio" on the man, and like many other independent "thinkers" Jones didn’t have a college degree and his work was largely ignored by his more "educated" contemporaries. He got his appointment to NACA in 1936 as a scientific "aide" in the Public Works programs of FDR.

 

It was natural that the Germans had produced most of the cutting edge advances of military applications of technology during the 1930's. Since during this era the bulk of the investments into defense were made by the Germans. Today the bulk of the advances in military technology are made by the US, as the US is by far the largest military expender in the world.

 

Let’s not forget that a number of the best minds in theoretical sciences were either of Jewish extraction, or married to Jews and decided to leave Hitler’s Greater Germany. Two of these in the field of aerodynamics were Theodore von Karman, and Michael "Max" Munk. Of course Munk moved to the US and was naturalized an American citizen in 1920, long before Hitler came to power. Funding or no, loss of the leading minds in the sciences was of no help to Germany.

 

Is it? If this weren't modern politics I'd ask for some support on this. Note that the Soviets "hid" a lot of their military expenditures and that the Chinese have done so as well.

 

I don't wish this to end up in the Stump either, but I believe we (Americans) spend a greater share of our GDP on defense/military than any other nation these days. Even though this is Wiki, and from 2009 in 2008 dollars it seems to support that contention, both percentage and total dollars.

Goto:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures

 

Like the man says, why bother overly with this:


When you're already working on this:


Or well on your way towards this:



Though this, may be more interesting:


Or perhaps more accurately, this:


When you're considering visiting this:


Or getting some decent range with this:


The premise of the original question is dodgy.
Postwar states were not heritage organisations. They didn't have any sentimentality for the machines of war, but they were hardly backwards in having an objective look at everything that was worth looking at.
If the war had continued somehow; in the world of Jet aircraft it seems most likely that the Germans would be looking at allied progress with a fair amount of "Whoah Goering dude, we gotta get some of zose uber-cool allied jets, they're making ours look so last year."

~A

 

The USSR didn't hid their military expenditures, in a sense they hid their entire country from the outside world.

Today China's military expenditures have been estimated to be of 150 billion dollars, far less than the american military expenditures, of 600 billion dollars. Also, China's military might will certainly increase in the next years, so today they don't compete directly with the US in leadership in military technology, but in 5-10 years, they will. So, from 1990 to 2015 we have a period of American military supremacy, especially in terms of military technology.

 

German technology innovated in the following areas:

Submarines: first modern submarines. Like the type XXI submarine.

Tanks: The Panther consisted in the most advanced tank fielded in WW2 (that assertion is contested, of course). But in 1943 it was the most modern tank.

Missiles: first air to ground missiles, operated in 1943. Sank some allied ships (see: Fritz X). Also, there is the V1 and V2 weapons.

Aircraft: first jet aircraft, flew in 1939.

Other: Remote controlled Goliaths.

 

Innovation is great for brownie points, but perfecting the innovation or the countermeasure to the innovation usually wins the war.

 

Where did I say it didn't?

The first post referred to aeroplanes.
In that territory, by wars end technology of the kind that was captured, they were outclassed and beaten.

Or even, to an extent, ignoring/controlling/directing your scientists wilder ideas while concentrating on the more serious business of producing & improving what assets you already have.

The initial suggestion in post #1 that all German technology was discarded is a false one, but it's equally dubious to overassess too much German technology as somehow... 'cool'.

Different angle:

How many examples of a given machine do you need to work out it's function?

If the suggestion is that they might have used the captured stuff: again, why bother when your own gear is improving so markedly anyway, and the postwar populations of the victorious countries hardly want to see any reliance on the kit of a previous enemy... not good for the national prestige really.
Most countries had too much war machinery left over anyway - surplus aircraft of their own being pushed off aircraft carriers and tanks being rolled into the sea (for the Israelis to pick up later ).
Some states were stretched and had to employ what they could when The US or UN couldn't service vehicular needs - The French used Panthers postwar, but they seem to have been somewhat embarrassed about the whole stop-gap business and got their own indigenous machines sorted asap (try finding more than a handful of pictures of 'em - De Gaulle was not sending his propaganda chaps to trumpet them far and wide).

On the whole, once it's been evaluated, what's an Axis weapon in 1946? It's a lump of material ripe for reclaiming to help kickstart the economies it had tried so hard to destroy. To the scrapyard with it.

~A