One of those tired debates that turned into a thread hijack in the aircraft section after I dismissed the usual contention of absolute German technological superority with the suggestion that the Allies were not broadly behind Germany in WW2 technology.It can continue here is anyone is interested.
Here's a link to the initial post:
Initial PostNiklas, don’t tell me what I do or don’t know about German technology during the Nazi era until you can come up with some more convincing arguments to support you opinions.
At the end of the war the Germans already had projects for radar guided missiles.
23May45. PB4Y's launched two Bat glide bombs against the enemy shipping in Balikpapan Harbor, Borneo, in the first combat employment of the only automatic homing bomb to be used in World War II.
Codebraking was done by computers. Guess who build the first computer.
Konrad Zuse, 1941
So what? “Konrad Zuse: Born June 22, 1910, Berlin-Wilmersdorf; German inventor of pre-war electromechanical binary computer designated Z1 which was destroyed without trace by wartime bombing; developed two more machines before the end of the war but was unable to convince the Nazi government to support his work.”
That darned Nazi government again. They seem more like the Moron race than the master race at times. The governments of the United States and Great Britain seemed to have had a bit more imagination. ENIAC only missed the war by a year and quickly went to work afterwards at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds. As for code breaking, there was such absolute, blind faith in the superiority of German technology that those who looked into a variety of setbacks in the Nazi war effort never accepted even the possibility that Enigma could be broken.
And do you know who did receive the nobel price for chemistry in ī44?
Otto Hahn. "for his discovery of the fission of heavy nuclei"
(nuclear physics belonged to chemistry in that time)
It was simply luck for the world that nazi-germany didnīt have the recources to build an A-bomb. The knowledge did exist.
Who was sitting on the Nobel committee in 1944 by the way? Apparently, the scientists at the Manhattan project were a bit closed mouthed about their research at the time.
For more on the Nazi atomic program try:
The Nazi BombThere is also a book by Paul Lawrence Rose, Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project, 1939-1945, that takes a close look at the Nazi Bomb. Here is a synopsis: "Rose shows convincingly that Heisenberg made a serious but simple conceptual mistake about the limiting condition of an explosive chain reaction and that the strength of Heisenberg's confidence in his analysis kept him from undertaking the more detailed calculations that might have corrected it."--J. L. Heilbron, American Historical Review
Frankly, the Nazi's weren't all that interested in nuclear weapons development. Nuclear research was "tainted" by the pre-war Jewish associations and never received any real consideration as a practical budget item in Nazi Germany. It probably helped that its own scientists said the A-bomb was impractical. If the program lacked resources, it was because the Nazi bureaucrats lacked imagination and couldn't get past deep-rooted prejudices.
This is not a dig on Germans, I’m just tired of the “we had the technology but were so overwhelmed by numbers" argument. The allies had technology too, and were light years ahead of the Axis in many areas – centimetric radar for example. Germany has a great reputation for engineering, which is richly deserved, but apparently the rigid ideology of the Nazi regime lacked the imagination to do much of anything with all that talent and skill. At the same time, a personal sense of absolute technological mastery seems to have limited research and prevented the acceptance of allied advances. Of course, the fact that the United States had crappy deathbox tanks for the drive on Germany was also more a failure of imagination (by G.S. Patton, no less) than some ingrained technological inferiority in armor development.
Except for building an unbelievably complex and expensive means to lob a 2,000-pound warhead somewhere near London, German technology under the Nazi regime was generally comparable. Jets -- the Allies had them too and while the aerodynamic research was ahead in Germany engine technology was moving ahead in England. Lets look post war. There was a reason that both the F-86 and Mig-15 were both powered by RR Nenes, instead of some variation of the Jumo or BMW powerplants. They both had swept wings too. I would call that a functional draw, with some extra credit points going to the allies for the movable horizontal stabilizer to enhance trans-sonic performance.
Charon
[ 10-11-2001: Message edited by: Charon ]
