Didn't the Germans cancel their heavy bomber program in the late 1930s just prior to the start of the war and cancelled an order for 400 heavy bombers? At least prior to and at the beginning of the war, the Germans didn't really put too much stock in strategic bombing and heavy bombers.
ack-ack
The replaced the 1934 Ural bomber requirement by the 1936 Bomber A requirement, that included dive-bombing capabilities. No contract was signed for serial production either Do-19s or Ju-89s, ever.
The Germans never put the value in it, correctly or not, that the British and Americans did. It is extremely simplistic and misleading to equate the 1936 order for the He177 program and the 1936 specification that resulted in the Lancaster and Halifax while ignoring the actual resources and priority given to the respective projects are not at all similar. The resulting 13,555 Lancasters and Halifaxes against the 1169 He177s is a good measure of that and that is ignoring the unsuccessful Manchesters and Stirlings that were also built.
This is what you said earlier:
The Manchester/Lancaster and Halifax were both developed per Air Ministry Specification P.13/36 for a twin engined heavy bomber using the Rolls Royce Vulture or or Napier Saber engines and issued in 1936. The RAF's decision to go to Heavy Bombers well predates the war.
Basically you were trying to imply that the British started earlier and therefore had attached greater importance to heavy bombers, that was not the case since both projects were simultaneous. The Germans did prioritize the Ju-88 development over the He-177 and were right about that given the circumstances at the time (level bombing was quite inaccurate until the 1941 fielding of the Loft 7), but the reasons for the difference in numbers are several, among those is that heavy bombers were pretty much the only weapon available for the British to attack the Germans so obviously they would concentrate on making them, but that does not reflect the importance attributed pre-war to a particular project.
The number of He-177s is low for similar reasons, the Germans relevant enemy were the Russians and therefore they would focus on tanks and tactical equipment plus, the Germans insisted on trying to make the coupled engines work instead of bypassing the source of most of the problems by using individual engines. Since the aircraft wasnt reliable production was slow and obsolete He-111s were still being built.
In any case the point was and still is, the Germans did not constrict themselves or attribute importance to medium bombers only as someone was saying, they preferred mediums but understood the need for a heavy bomber, it just happens that they were incredibly stubborn and made a mess out of it by issuing an immature aircraft to half-trained crews with inadequate support, and they did it so because they understood the need for a heavy bomber and they needed it fast!
And the other important difference to the Allied strategic bombers is that the HE 177 only left the drawing board because of the ability to dive bomb (even if they soon stopped to use it that way). That was the requirement. So it's not a stretch to say the 177 was intended to be a heavy strategic bomber, but more or less a super-heavy Stuka (which is actually a generic term for divebomber in german).
The one true heavy bomber program was stopped with the cancellation of the Do 19 and the ju 89, both being true contemporaries of the B-17.
Not quite, they wanted a heavy bomber that could dive bomb, not a heavy dive bomber, which is why the 1936 request meant the cancellation of the 1934 projects, why the initial models carried aiming mechanisms for both level and dive bombing and why the He-177 was kept when the dive-bombing requirement was dropped. Had it been a mere heavy dive bomber the Greif would have died once the concept proved impractical.
Had two of the prototypes had been built with individual engines as requested by Heinkel, well, the aircraft story would likely be very different.
I did some research a while back on the DO 19 and Ju89, while interesting aircrafts I believe they would of been plagued with the same problem He-111s and Do-17's had: Weakness in defensive positions.
He-177 is the closest to the B-17 as I can see from toughness to gun positions - Boeing did an amazing job defending the B-17 by upgrading its defensive armaments and protection, I don't see the Germans being able to make change to such a design as the B-17 had.
Nope, not at all, the German projects were far better armed than the contemporary versions of the B-17 from the start, they had dorsal and ventral turrets with 2 x 20mm MGFF each in one of the Ju-89 prototypes, for example. Being large aircraft and also having tail position from the start then upgunning should not have been a problem.
Eric Brown seemed to think the He177 to be fragile for an aircraft its size.
The aircraft's structure was reinforced for inclined flight/dive bombing, it was an sturdy aircraft but the engines were its Achilles hell.
