built the Wasserfall in great numbers for AA and IIRC it used what were considered waste chemicals from German industry.
not sure how many bombers it would have destroyed but assume it would have been "distracting" for Allied pilots! allowing other flak or aircraft to hit them?
wondering if it might have had a secondary role and launch from u-boats, they had tried the smaller rocket artillery and it worked, just no range.
They wasted their chemicals on V1 and V2s. If they had cut back or eliminated either of those programs, I would argue that they had the resources.
Honestly it really just jump starts the production of high altitude bombers. Unless the Nazis can get around some of the shortfalls of Wasserfall then they are just being bombed from higher up.
They could not have flown higher than the Wasserfall’s range of 16 miles. In addition it could have been increased I’m sure. They experimented on making a guided V2 which had a range of 200 miles.
Bombing from higher up means much, much less useful ordnance landing anywhere close to the target. Most reports are scathing at how inaccurate and how useless most bombing operations were. The only two targets that seemed to be effected to any degree by high altitude bombing were oil production facilities and large transportation hubs. I’m thinking I’d put the SAMs there.
The fuel production facilities took multiple raids over sometimes years to finally put them out of service. The transport hubs were hard to hit as well and almost all were successfully damaged only after the Luftwaffe ceased to exist. You can’t carpet bomb a nation that still has a substantial AA defense.
I love advanced weapon what-ifs.
But given what was actually possible in 1943-45, particularly in terms of rocket motors and guidance systems, I'd have to say that an earlier, more-effective employment of Wasserfall or other SAM designs, amounts to nothing more than a further source of attrition for the Allies to overcome. We're not talking about a sudden and profound game-changer, the early SAMs just aren't that capable, and the Germans weren't going to be able to kick off the SAM effort with thousands of them already positioned around the country. They'll come online incrementally, a launch site here and there, followed by more. The effect will be a gradual rise in bomber losses.
You start by defending the fuel production facilities.
The Allies would overcome the SAMs by designing and fielding higher-altitude bombers, replacing the older bombers gradually as losses rise. They'll also start hitting the launch sites with Mosquitos and fighter bombers, when FBs with the required range become available. I'm not sure how easy it'll be to hide SAM sites (Wasserfall is a pretty big missile), and once located it seems like they'd be pretty vulnerable.
Once again bombing from high altitude is virtually useless and no bomber contemplated was out of the range of the Wasserfall and or a Guided V2.
And SAMs would be point-defense systems -- unlike night fighters, they can't loiter and be directed to targets halfway across Germany. So if you want to protect lots of targets, you'll have to build and distribute many thousands of them. That will pose a challenge.
They made thousands of V1 and V2s. The V2s were 3 times larger and had mobile launchers. The Wasserfall could have easily been made mobile and produced in large enough numbers considering how many V1 and V2s were made. 5200 V2 translates to around I would estimate 12000 Wasserfalls at a 10% hit rate you have 1200 bombers minimum shot down in a years’ time. The Wasserfall was designed to damage at least 4 bombers per hit assuming normal density of formation, in addition to totally destroying one of those four and at lease crippling another 3.
V1s were being launched at a rate of 100 a day or a possible 36,500 a year. They cost 50% of the cost of a Wasserfall so theoretically you could have launched 18000 Wasserfalls a year. 10% hit rate gives you another 1800 bombers hit in addition to the numbers shot down by fighters and AA guns. If you add in the number of bombers crippled at 3 for every on actually hit, you’re talking some scary numbers.
Okay assuming that the tech exists etc
First off all when does Germany wake up to the possibility that allied bombers will cause so much damage and a 'SAM' is required to stop them.
Speer and others woke up early.
Secondly - how much resource is required for a single Missile vs a night fighter and which would be more effective (not that this would stop them from going ahead)?
I have no idea.
Thirdly - how long before the British do something cunning and stops them from working?
I don’t except the premise that the Brits were anymore “cunning” than any other nationality. Luck, as most know, has so much to do with success in war. What if the Brits had not been lucky enough to capture the very few technicians who knew about the technical aspects of the beam riding system the Luftwaffe was using to bomb at night? What if they had captured another guy who didn't like talking so much? They figured it out only after they learned about it by bugging POWs. The whole story about the battle of the beams is mainly a myth. By the time they might really have figured out how the Germans were guiding their bombers, BOB might have been over with a different outcome.
TBH I wouldn't believe anything Albert Speer said. He was a Nazi slimeball who avoided hanging because he could speak English well and licked butt.
How about Carl Krauch?
He told people what they wanted to hear and like all Reich fan boys he liked to indulge in What ifs for the entertainment of British and American listeners. SAMs just another to add to the list of speculative garbage.
SAM technology was still in its infancy and wouldn't have been ready soon enough to make a difference. OTL it took more than a decade for the rest of the world to make anything workable. Of course the Germans weren't confined to the same rules of reality as others
.
TBH even if it worked it might have been better for the Allies as they could switch to using Mosquitoes and other strike aircraft that could hit targets with fewer aircrew losses.
That’s what happened in Vietnam. The SA-2 scared the B52 crowd so bad that they sent in the fighter bombers to take out the launch sites which had the effect of bring in many more planes within range of good old Bofers, 20 mm and other small caliber guns and the old fashioned mark one eyeball. This had the result of many more losses of pilots and planes then would have ever fallen to the SA-2. No effective electronic spoofing method has been found to dissuade a 40 mm round when you are low and slow boring straight in.
It would have been a huge victory for the Germans to have the Allies from early on going after flack traps. That is the purpose of a flack trap.
Excellent write up on this subject here…
http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-SAM-Effectiveness.html
Another little discussed effect of a Wasserfall barrage would be to break up the bomber formations. This was one of the main goals of the later battles in the air over Europe by the Luftwaffe. Specially designed rocket banks etc. were all designed to punch holes in the formations that could be exploited by the conventional fighters. Image what a barrage of semi-guided missiles would do.
Finally the Wasserfall or any other SAM isn't going to stop the Red Army rolling into Berlin in April 1945.
Very, very true.
Problem with that - the Germans (like everybody else) were moving to SAMs because aircraft were flying higher and higher, meaning that they were generally only in the range of the heavy flak and indeed that the heavy flak was pretty ineffective at higher altitudes. So Wasserfall is only going to be used at 25,000 ft+ or so - add in any sort of slant range, and you're trying to control something manoeuvring at three times the speed of sound at ranges of up to 20 miles using wires!!! That simply is not going to work - radio command guidance has been used for all long-range and high-speed missiles, simply because getting the wires to hold together is beyond the possible. Draping 10 mile lengths of conductive wire all over Germany will also have major side-effects - it'll be fun whenever that comes down over some power cables
The other problem with it is MCLOS guidance - that has been successfully used on SAMs (Sea Cat, for instance), but not long range/high altitude ones such as Wasserfall. The practical limit for getting kills seems to be 2-3 miles - beyond that the chances of actually hitting anything fall right off, and it's essentially unguided (well, with a proximity fuse you might get it to explode in a big formation, on a good day). To make it effective, you need to build a whole new guidance system and make it either beam riding or semi-active homing (i.e. pretty much copy the British
Brakemine system).
If they did have a proximity fuse then all they had to do was guide it to the bomber stream and the fuse would take care of the rest. This would effectively break up the formations one way or the other allowing the conventional fighters to do their thing.
If a bit of historical change allows SAMs to be developed, then the effect on the war itself is very small. The SAMs shoot down some Allied aircraft, but not nearly enough to have any kind of effect, and if there's a resource tradeoff, then the Germans will suffer that much. However, this will speed up postwar SAM development in very interesting ways.
Very interesting ways.
