Bombing raids on the Soviet power grid and their large factories beyond the Urals could conceivably have had a reasonable impact, but it is hard to predict with certainty the extent of it.
Heinkel He 177 Germany's succesful longrange bomber
- Thread starter Parma
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Garrison
Donor
They can try, I doubt they will succeed given the limited numbers there would still be available and the difficulties of navigation. Unless you are also giving the Luftwaffe H2S airborne radar they are going to be limited to 1941 levels of bombing accuracy.An early Operation Eisenhammer with the floating mines
Would be great if the Germans got a plane that could reach the ports in Kamchatka, but bombed Tokyo instead (ASB, but still).
Garrison
Donor
"Wow another Doolittle raid, and this time the fiendish Americans painted Swastikas on their planes..."
About bombing the Ural factories. I didn't measure the exact distance, but it's a lot further than London-Berlin, which is about 600-700 miles. I'd say from the German airfield you'd be looking at over 1,000 miles and probably closer to 1,400 than to 1,000. So with a cruising speed of 258 mph (according to Wiki) that's a round trip of about 8-12 hours. You're going to need long nights for nightbombing. Which means it's only possible between september-march, or even less. And it'll be chilly up there. And lots of bad weather. So much fun for the crew, especially if they crash.
Garrison
Donor
And that distance limits the number of sorties as well and if they are trying to do this in the autumn or winter bad weather substantially reduces the number of days they can fly to begin with. It seems like a really good way to waste a very expensive bomber force without achieving much.
I imagine that they'll have trouble getting a good weather forecast for the targetarea, so there'll be a significant number of raids in where they can't find the target at all due to cloudcover, rain or snow. It won't be so bad that they'll bomb Tokyo, but there'll be a lot of trees that will bombed. Although that may cause some forest fires, I guess in the winter they'd be less dangerous than in the summer.
Riain
Banned
The He177 already had 4 engines, its just that they were laid out poorly, layig them out in a conventional manner should see OTL production numbers without the problems.
The concept of operations I envisage is I suppose how the RAF used the Wellingtons in the Med in 1941-43. They didn't try to bust factories in Turin, de-house people in Rome, sink ships at sea, bomb trucks on the via Balbia or Rommel's field HQ, instead they attacked what I'd consider theatre-strategic targets such as ports and logistic hubs of Tripoli and Benghazi and their counterparts in Italy and Sicily.
In Germany's case they might heavily bomb Stalingrad as they approached it, or whatever the deep support area behind Kursk was in 1943. What they wouldn't do is try to bomb the factories in the Urals, or plaster the front line, the former will be too light to be effective and the latter is the job of tactical aircraft.
Riain
Banned
Nothing is going to make a strategic difference in the long run, eventually a Silverplate B29 sqn is on the menu for Germany.
However separating out the engines into individual nacelles is an improvement that will have some effect as it will reduce non combat losses and increase availability. As for cost of converting factories, that has to be weighed against the opportunity cost of building ~2000 ineffective medium bombers instead of maybe 1000 effective heavy bombers.
Garrison
Donor
But the means to make the bombers effective has less to do with four versus two engines and more to do with the other technologies for navigation and bomb aiming.
ETA: Also the two engine bombers might have been ineffective for strategic bombing but they were well suited to tasks the He 177 can't fulfil.
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Riain
Banned
True, but the Ju88 is in production and a great plane, the He177 can't come at the expense of that gem.
The US wasn't impressed with the V2 at all since by the point they got examples flying, (and a lot still didn't due to missed sabotage and poor quality construction) the US had already developed better technology (pressure supported tanks and vectoring engines) anyway. (It didn't help that the V2 could not really 'hit' anything the US felt it might want to target and couldn't do so with the accuracy or payload of a long range bomber. The entire reason the Navy played with launching a V2 from an aircraft carrier was to try and find a plausible reason to get back some of the budget that was being directed to the Air Force for long range bombers and it didn't work)
The post-war budget crunch ended up ending most US missile development and when the budget came back (in the form of the Korean War and ensuing panic) von Braun essentially designed and built his teams "advanced" V2 in the Redstone because the rest of the US rocket industry had to rebuild itself from square one.
Randy
You're nose gear is going to require moving/deleting the fwd bomb-aimer/gunner position but it might be plausible. You still have to be careful due to take off angle and it might extend the take off run.
Randy
I know Wiking made various threads about this very subject.An early Operation Eisenhammer with the floating mines
At least with the push-pull arrangement, you could get by with a smaller radius propeller, rather than the massive 4-bladers that the DB 606 required....
Right but you are talking about making more of them and sacrificing 2 the engine bombers in order to do so. So as I said you lose the 2 engine bombers that were heavily used.
Well Ok but as per other posts that did it with far greater air superiority than the LW will have here (as you say later about long range LW fighter support 'bugger'
).Also the LW were running missions just they were doing so with their two engine bombers
They did bomb Stalingrad, they pretty much bombed it flat? I'm just not seeing teh extra benefit
On the Kursk idea, first of all the LW did run missions but also see my post comparing whet would be possible vs. wallie stuff like Operation Strangle and Clarion, the LW with an extra few hundred* 4 engine bombers in theatre is not going to be able to do this. (and that's just the numbers that not even getting int the issue the LW had in operating in teh area which will only get worse with more 4 engine bombers)
On top of that the wallies had got themselves way more experience of this kind of mission, and that along with other advantages in recon, navigation weather forecasting did not come over night. The LW is a close support air force (that occasionally targeted known cities) this is trying to change their role to long range pinpoint accurate air force just by adding bigger planes.
*if they are lucky there are many pinch points between the theoretical number of planes that can be spewed out of production lines 1941-44 and the number actually in place in airfield in occupied USSR, in working order, with fuel and crew to actually run sorties,
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Right but given the Ju88 made up approx. half the German bomber output you really limiting the resources you have to make changes and so any changes you make will inherently have a small scope when it comes to effect.
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