<< In 1942 the Germans tested a six engine trans-atlantic bomber they called
the "Amerika Bomber" that came within 12 miles of NYC harbor before
successfully returning to Germany undetected. >> A correction. This was the
Ju-390, the story appeared in Green's book Warplanes of the Third Reich, and it
has pretty much been discredited. It never happened. (Except for this error,
Warplanes of the Third Reich is a great book.) In the book Luftwaffe Over
Amerika this story is pretty much debunked. (Luftwaffe Over Amerika is about
the various Amerika Bomber projects, there were several.) You have to be
careful referencing Wikipedia, but the discrediting of this story is covered on
the Wikipedia Ju-390 page here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junkers_Ju_390 I ;
remember reading a military effectiveness study (I can't remember the
reference) that concluded that the V-1 was a much more effective weapon than
the V-2. It wasn't just the damage caused by the weapon, it was all of the
effort the British had to put into barrage balloons, flack guns, fighters to
shoot down the V-1's, etc. All of the effort and cost that went into trying to
bring down the V-1's wasn't available for offensive operations against Germany.
Not sure if that made the V-1 a net positive (whatever that means in this
context) relative to the cost of the weapon versus the cost in damage and cost
to combat the weapon inflicted on the other side, but from this standpoint the
V-1 was a much more effective weapon than the V-2. With the V-2 you didn't
spend the cost to try to stop it, because you couldn't, and you just absorbed
the damage, which wasn't large in the context of other bomber offensives. One
note though relative to this analysis is that for either the V-1 or V-2, you
would attempt to bomb the launching sites. The modern version of this was The
Great Scud Hunt during the first Persian Gulf War. Charles E. (Chuck) Rogers
-----Original Message-----
From: Elliot Robert <elliotr@xxxxxxxxx>
To: arocket <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Mon, May 13, 2019 10:48 am
Subject: [AR] Re: video of V-2 launch procedures
Roxannna I think you're just failing to realize how ineffective a weapon the
Vengeance Weapons were. Given that the entire V-2 factory was staffed by 12,000
Jewish slaves, you can imagine how well motivated they were to produce a
quality product. I've heard numbers around 1/3rd of V-2s didn't even make it
much past the launch site and another 1/3rd didn't even kill anyone. The
average kill rate of a V-2 rocket on the English was two people per rocket and
with every rocket the UK Government were able to use it as a galvanizing
propaganda event. The V Missiles couldn't target war specific industries, they
simply didn't have the guidance. You could have sent 10x the V-2's and the
English would have only resisted harder. The majority of V-1's were shot down
by English Spitfires.
The really interesting thing about the V-2 is that it likely shortened the war
substantially. In 1942 the Germans tested a six engine trans-atlantic bomber
they called the "Amerika Bomber" that came within 12 miles of NYC harbor before
successfully returning to Germany undetected. I've read in Neal Tyson's newest
book what Henery's already mentioned. The vengence weapons program cost roughly
the same as the Manhattan project. Imagine how 1943 would have looked vastly
different had that money been spent turning New York and Boston into giant
structure fires or a Me 262 jet fighter in full production.
On Mon, May 13, 2019 at 1:44 AM Uwe Klein <uwe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Am 13.05.2019 um 05:55 schrieb Henry Spencer:
On Sun, 12 May 2019, Ken wrote:insane leader and the lamp shade thing are hard connected.
...Very quaint but informative. Good thing they had an insane leader
or we would be speaking German or be a lamp shade.
In fairness, the V-2 was a product of the insanity: Germany spent
nearly as much on it as the US spent on the Manhattan Project, and the
V-2's military value was zero. The same amount of money and effort
spent on almost anything else -- e.g., faster development and higher
production volume of the much-cheaper V-1 -- would have accomplished
much more.
One consequence of the political insanity was that Nazi Germany had no
systematic process for deciding whether a new idea was worth pursuing.
If you could catch the attention of somebody big -- ideally Hitler --
you were golden even if your idea was garbage, and there was way too
much of that.
