A review of what appears to be a new insightful book.
Yes, the resources poured by Hitler into the V weapons would have been of more use strategically if they’d gone instead into long-range bombers. And clearly, the Final Solution was an overall part of the plan, not just collateral damage from the war.
I greatly enjoyed VDH’s book (and have no idea why Ed Driscoll bumped it yet again at Instapundit), but recently ran across an interesting piece of information that apparently wasn’t known when VDH wrote it, when he said that the arrival of the P-51 for long-range escort duty changed the equation in Europe.
Greg, of Greg’s airplanes, posted a very in-depth series of videos on the performance of the P-47. Part 6 is on the P-47’s range, and what seems to be one of the greatest deceptions that went undiscovered until, well, Greg figured it out. The target of that deception was the US public, and it was carried out to protect some careers.
The P-47 could’ve provided long-range high-altitude bomber escort deep into Germany from at least early 1943 on. Throughout the war, the P-51 never had much of a range advantage over the P-47 because the P-47 had big drop tanks available and in use.
But the Army Air Corps never used the P-47 for long range bomber escort. The likely reason they didn’t is that they’d sent all the early daylight bombing missions into Germany unescorted, and the bombers got cut to pieces with horrendous losses, month after month. All the while, during these fiascos, long-range P-47’s, with their drop tanks stacked up next the runway, were unused for bomber escort, because the bomber dogma was that the packed formations of Flying Fortresses wouldn’t need fighter escort. Once it was obvious that the bombers couldn’t succeed without escort, those long-range P-47’s were a problem because everybody would say “Well why didn’t you use the P-47’s to escort the earlier missions?”
Not using them was a glaring, career-ending mistake that cost a horrendous number of US lives, but one easily hidden because the P-51 was just arriving in theatre. So the bomber mafia heralded the P-51 as the plane that would save the day, and spend the rest of the war making sure P-47’s never ever flew long-range escort duty, hoping that nobody caught on.
Even worse, they assigned the P-47 to ground attack missions, for which it was ill-suited because most of the aircraft’s volume and much of its weight is ducting and equipment for high-altitude superchargers and intercoolers which don’t do much of anything at low altitudes. The P-47 just doesn’t perform very well down low compared to other fighters.
If found it rather eye-opening. In part 8 of his series he concludes that the P-47 did more to establish air superiority than the P-51, even though the P-51 scored somewhat more aerial victories, because the P-47’s victories came much earlier, against an intact and fully operational Luftwaffe with experienced pilots, and thus started the death-spiral of German pilots and equipment, which greatly benefited the later P-51’s.
Another not often mentioned fact is that the first allied fighter over Berlin was the P-38, as it also had the required range capability before the P-51 showed up. But, in the pre P-38J-25 models at least, due to a variety of issues it was ill suited for the high altitudes commonly flown in the ETO.
The pilot feature in the short documentary Spitfire 944 said his P-38 had problems with its supercharger controls freezing at high altitude, so he preferred flying a Spitfire to Berlin and back (his recon version got the range by having extra tanks and no armor or guns). Of course another problem with the P-38 at high altitude was that the pilots froze in the unheated cockpit.
Yeah, a lot of the “I bet you didn’t knows” are old news to aviation and aerospace nerds.
On the other hand, I bet there is a bunch Professor Hanson could tell me about the order-of-battle in the Peloponnesian War?
Peloponnesian infantry had a surprisingly low top speed, limited range, and poor high-altitude performance.
You mean the Spartan infantry, because Sparta was on the Peloponnese? Only the actual Spartans called the place Lacedaemon.
Hoplite soldiers may have had a low top speed, but if they ran faster than you, well, you get the idea.
As to dissing infantry, Jerry Pournelle famously always said that you can have all the artillery and air power you want, but unless you have some 19-year-old standing there with an infantry weapon, you don’t really control a piece of territory.
This book from 1994 detailed the drop tanks. The generals in charge were concerned about the drop tanks use in hostile territory, a drop tank laden fighter is much easier target. They feared early in the war the Germans could harass the escort fighters as soon as they reached the continent and force the dropping of the tank before they were of much use.
Narrator: The P-47s were used for escort missions.
Up to their limitations of range with out tanks. They were even used for escort with drop tanks when the air combat dogma had changed.
Yes it a lousy dog fighter down low, but it was a very rugged plane and could take a beating from ground fire unlike the P-51. It was better suited to the ground attack role. As the disaster of using the P-51 in ground attack role in Korea showed. Besides a modified P-51 the closest aircraft to a dedicated ground attack plane the US Army Air force had was the P-40 which had a terrible range.
But the fact that they’d use P-47 without drop tanks for the first leg of bomber escort is very telling. Its bomber escort radius without drop tanks was 150 miles. The P-51’s escort range at the time, without drop tanks, was about 175 miles. Both have the same range problems, and they’d have the same problems using drop tanks for combat during an escort mission.
Yet in November of ’43, with three drop tanks, The P-47’s bomber escort range was 550 miles. Berlin is less than 500 miles from the coastal bases in Britain.
Why only let the P-47 handle the first leg into Europe, turning back early, then they could’ve used drop tanks and flown the entire escort mission? Probably just to make sure everybody gets sold on the notion that P-47’s don’t have much range, even though they did. They were creating and maintaining a myth, which they backed up with very slanted and misleading reports.
I doubt that a transcontinental bomber was possible with the technology. The Germans had a lot of problems with big aviation engines. The B-36 wasn’t really very practical and would have made a really good target. We developed aerial refueling instead of monster 10.000 mile aircraft. but those work best with advanced bases for the tankers.
A transcontinental ballistic missile wouldn’t have been that much of a stretch from from the V-2. What the V-2 gave them was a way to attack England. Not a decisive capability but given their resources, they were going to lose any war that lasted longer than two years or involved the U.S. anyway.
Well, FAS says the B-36 had a 4,300 mile combat radius with a 10,000 lb payload, far below it’s maximum payload of 72,000 or 86,000 lbs.
I could go into some cost and fleet payload comparisons of the B-36, B-29, and B-24, but I agree that they just couldn’t deliver a significant conventional payload across transcontinental distances, which would come to about 4% of what B-24’s could deliver out to 800 miles.
But more importantly, they would be virtually impossible to escort, and over Europe unescorted bombers had about a 1 to 1 kill ratio. So the whole fleet of B-36’s might sacrifice themselves while only knocking down about 400 German fighters, which is pretty insignificant if the goal was the attrition of the Luftwaffe.
Yes, the resources poured by Hitler into the V weapons would have been of more use strategically if they’d gone instead into long-range bombers.
We should make a distinction between th V-1 and V-2 programs, though. Postwar analysis of the costs and damage done have generally concluded that th V-1, at least, *was* a cost effective weapon system. (See Alan Levine, The Strategic Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945, Ch. 8.) At a cost of only 4% of a V-2 rocket, a V-1 cruise missile forced the diversion of a disproportionate amount of Allied resources to counter. All in all, it was a surprisingly effective weapon system from this point of view (no matter how inaccurate it was).
The V-2 on the other hand, cost more than the entire Manhattan Project. Marvelous as it was as a technical achievement, and critical as it later turned out to be for the U.S. space program, it’s just not possible to say it was worth the investment of resources.
I’m not sure a heavy bomber program would have been the best alternative use of those resources, though. Radar, on the other hand…
I’m not sure a heavy bomber would’ve done much for Germany unless they had them, in quantity, in ’39 and ’40, or maybe ’41. The Allies lost huge numbers of airmen over Europe, mostly from bombers, whereas the German fighter pilots shot down over Europe most often just parachuted down and were back in the air a few days later.
I think offensive strategic air power would’ve just bled Germany of aircrews even faster than what occurred, because all their bombers crews and escort fighters would’ve been getting downed over enemy territory.
I make the exceptions for the very early part of the war because long range bombing was the only way Germany might have succeeded quickly, before it became a global war of attrition that Germany could not win.
Of course, as rocket and missile people, we all know that virtually every combatant could, from a technical standpoint, have produced Sidewinders. But nobody had been thinking enough along those lines, in an environment with more ubiquitous missile knowledge, so there wasn’t the basic groundwork and serendipitous and ingenious insights into the problem that occurred much later at China Lake.
The German’s were working on early ideas for SAMs, but truly viable weapons along those lines seems to be the result of Allies looking over all the German ideas, and programs like the radio-guided Wasserfall, and stewing over them for a while. Of course an effective anti-aircraft missile would also need an effective proximity fuse, which is something Germany lacked.
Perhaps a more interesting question, if some time-traveler explained a Sidewinder to the British and Americans, is whether they’d have dared to use it anywhere except over the Pacific (as was done with the proximity fuse). They’d have been smart enough to realize that if they ever used them over Europe, the German’s would have a copy six months later, and then there wouldn’t be any more daytime or nighttime Allied bombing raids.
I think offensive strategic air power would’ve just bled Germany of aircrews even faster than what occurred, because all their bombers crews and escort fighters would’ve been getting downed over enemy territory.
That’s my sense as well.
Even if it’d possessed them, Germany didn’t have the fuel to use long range bombers. They were chronically short of POL after 1942.
There are more consequential decisions made by the Germans that doomed their ability to achieve victory in Europe.